If you think strange creatures and things that go bump in the night are inventions of the twentieth century, you are sorely mistaken. The Victorians loved their Gothic literature, spearheaded their own Spiritualist movement, and even encountered a mythological creature or two. Victorians even had their own cryptozoological creatures swimming about their waters and creeping about their forests. In fact, most of the cryptozoological creatures people encounter today were the same ones encountered in the times of our ancestors.

Scotland has the Loch Ness Monster and New England has the Great New England Sea Serpent. Sightings of the sea serpent around the New England coast began in 1638 and have continued being told by boaters and fishermen since then. The creature resembles a large ocean snake, the major difference being its massive size described between 30 and 80 feet long in my brief research. No real specimen of this creature has been caught, although people in 1817 believed they caught a baby sea serpent, which was most likely a deformed terrestrial snake.

The sightings of the sea serpent were not limited to lower class fishermen, sailors and boaters, however. About a year ago, I came across a copy of the Brunswick Telegraph from the 1880s with an odd article in it about yet another sighting of the slithery creature. The article reported peripherally that General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the great Civil War hero and former governor of Maine, had actually seen the great sea serpent with his own two eyes. He was on his schooner, the Pinafore, off one of the peninsulas south of Brunswick (I believe it was Casco Bay) and he saw what he described as a serpentine creature that he had never seen before and was quite large. I want to say he estimated that it was 40 feet long. I don't have the article in front of me as it is in storage but it appeared to me that the reporter, of course, did not take the story very seriously. A joke was cracked in the article about General Chamberlain charging the great serpent as he had charged the rebels on Little Round Top.

Even so, Chamberlain was not prone to lying and I find him to be a credible source. If he said he saw the Great New England Sea Serpent, then he saw it.