Finally, it’s the follow-up to our first sea monsters episode that sounds so terrible now that I know how to put a podcast together! Here’s the published drawings of a strange animal seen from the HMS Daedalus: Here’s Drummond’s sketch of what he saw: Here’s a sketch of the HMS Plumper animal sighted: And here's a sei whale rostrum sticking up out of the water while it's skim feeding: Sei whales are neat and have gigantic mouths: The rotten "sea serpent" that's actually a decomposing baleen whale: The Naden Harbour Carcass. It's the black thing on the table with a white backdrop. It doesn't look like much, but you probably wouldn't look like much either after being eaten by a sperm whale: Unexpected seal says "Hello, I am not a sea serpent, I am a stock photo": Hagelund's sketch of the little animal he caught: A pipefish with a lollipop tail and some drawings of pipefish: The strange animal seen from the Valhalla: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Recently I listened to episode six, about sea monsters. It’s climbed to our third most popular episode and when I heard it again, oh man, I winced. I was still really new to podcasting then and that episode sounds like someone reading a book report out loud to the class. So it’s time to do a new sea monsters episode and explore more mysteries of the world’s oceans, hopefully with a lot more vocal expression. On August 6, 1848, about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, the captain and some of the crew of HMS Daedalus saw something really big in the water. The ship was sailing between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena on the way back to England from the East Indies. It was an overcast day with a fresh wind, but nothing unusual. The midshipman noticed something in the water he couldn’t identify and told the officer of the watch, who happened to be walking the deck at the time with the captain. Most of the crew was at supper. This is what the captain, Peter M’Quhae, described in his report when the ship arrived at Plymouth a few months later. “On our attention being called to the object, it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and, as nearly as we could approximate, by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animal à fleur d’eau [that means at the water’s surface], no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily have recognized his features with the naked eye; and it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed in our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the S.W., which it held on at the pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. “The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake; and it was never, during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses, once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown, with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like a mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed, washed about its back.” The original Times article also mentioned large jagged teeth in a jaw so large that a man could have stood up inside the mouth, but this seems to be an addition by the article’s writer, not the captain or crew. The officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, also published an excerpt from his own journal about the sighting, which appeared in a journal called the Zoologist in December 1848. It reads, “In the 4 to 6 watch, at about five o’clock,