HMS Daedalus — the sea serpent of 6 August 1848

OVERVIEW

HMS Daedalus was a Royal Navy corvette. On 6 August 1848, sailing for St Helena, Captain M'Quhae and several officers and crew saw what they called an enormous serpent, at the position the captain gave as 24°44′S 9°22′E, off the coast of modern Namibia. The pin marks that position.

HISTORY

The crew said the creature was in sight for twenty minutes and passed under the ship's quarter; its head stood about four feet out of the water, the visible length was about sixty feet with perhaps thirty or forty more below, and its jaws were full of large jagged teeth. M'Quhae described it as dark brown with yellowish white about the throat, with something like a horse's mane or a bunch of seaweed on its back, moving at 12 to 15 miles an hour, and wrote that its head 'was, without any doubt, that of a snake'. The report was published and debated in The Times.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

DISPUTED. In 2015 the evolutionary biologist Gary J. Galbreath argued it was a sei whale; in 2023 Karl Brandt suggested a harpooned sperm whale fast to an overturned whaleboat, trailing debris.

VISITING

Open ocean; nothing to visit.