The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplained and inexplicable occurrence that doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Without mentioning the rumours which agitated the denizens of the ports and whipped up the public's imagination on every continent, seafaring men felt particularly alarmed. The businessmen, shipowners, sea-captains, skippers, and master-mariners of Europe and America, the naval officers from every country, and finally the various national governments on both continents—all became extremely worried about this matter.
For some time already, sea-going ships had been encountering an 'enormous thing': a long spindle-shaped object, sometimes phosphorescent, but infinitely larger and quicker than a whale.
The facts concerning this apparition, as noted in the respective logbooks, agreed quite closely as to the structure of the said object or creature, its extraordinary speed, its surprising ability to get from place to place, and the peculiar vitality it seemed to possess. If it was a cetacean, then it surpassed the size of every whale classified by science until then. Neither Cuvier, nor Lacépède, nor M. Duméril, nor M. de Quatrefages* would have accepted that such a monster existed, unless they had seen it—really seen it, that is, with their own scientific eyes.
Taking the average of the observations made at the various junctures—rejecting both the timid evaluations assigning the object a length of 200 feet and the exaggerated opinions making it three miles long and a mile wide—it could be declared that this phenomenal being greatly exceeded any dimensions the ichthyologists had acknowledged until then—if indeed it existed at all.
But it did exist, there was now no denying it; and given the inclination of the human mind to seek the fantastic, it is easy to understand the worldwide sensation this supernatural apparition created. As for dismissing it as a myth, such a position was no longer tenable.
The reason was that on 20 July 1866 the steamship the Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burmah Steam Navigation Company, had encountered this thing, moving five miles east of the Australian coastline.* At first Captain Baker thought he was facing an unknown reef; and he was even getting ready to calculate its precise position, when two columns of water,* projected from the baffling object, shot 150 feet into the air, whistling. Hence, unless the reef was subject to the intermittent jet of a geyser, the Governor Higginson was well and truly dealing with some hitherto unknown aquatic mammal, whose blowholes were blowing columns of water mixed with air and vapour.
A similar phenomenon was observed in the Pacific on 23 July of the same year by the Cristóbal Colon of the West India and Pacific Steamship Company.* This extraordinary cetacean was thus able to move from place to place at surprising speed, for within three days the Governor Higginson and Cristóbal Colon had observed it on two charted spots at more than 700 leagues’ distance.
A fortnight later and 2,000 leagues away, the Helvetia of the French Line and the Shannon of the Royal Mail,* sailing on opposite tacks of the Atlantic between the United States and Europe, signalled to each other their sightings of the monster at 42° 15′ N and 60° 35′ W of the Greenwich meridian. From these simultaneous observations, it was claimed that the mammal could be evaluated as at least 350 British feet long,¹ since the Shannon and the Helvetia were both smaller, although measuring 100 metres from stem to stern. Now the biggest whales, the culammak and the umgullick* frequenting the waters around the Aleutians, have never exceeded 56 metres—if indeed they have ever reached that.
These reports arriving hot on the heels of one another, fresh observations made on board the transatlantic liner the Pereire, a collision between the monster and the Etna of the Inman Line, an official memorandum drawn up by officers of the French frigate the Normandie, a very solemn statement by Commodore Fitzjames’s senior staff on board the Lord Clyde*—all this greatly thrilled public opinion. In countries of a light-hearted mentality the phenomenon was joked about; in the serious, practical countries of Britain, America, and Germany, it became a matter for grave concern.