From the Squamish of Howe Sound to the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands, native peoples throughout Canada’s West Coast have traditional stories featuring a huge double-headed sea serpent with mystical powers, known to the Kwakwaka’wakw of Vancouver Island as Sisiutl. This creature was both respected and feared by the Indians, who often painted its fearsome image on their war canoes in the hope of gaining its favour.
Since at least the late 1800s, white sailors have reported seeing a sea serpent eerily evocative of this monster of native legend in the Pacific Ocean off British Columbia. In the summer of 1890, for example, a lumberjack named J.M. Stewart, who had been working out of a logging camp in Sea-to-Sky Country north of Vancouver, pulled into town with his monthly earnings and a hair-raising tale. An account of his strange adventure appeared in the July 23rd, 1890 issue of a Vancouver newspaper.
According to the article, Stewart and one of his fellow lumberjacks left their logging camp on a regular furlough and paddled down the coast in a canoe, bound for Vancouver. On the night of Tuesday, July 22nd, 1890, while crossing the mouth of Howe Sound at a leisurely pace, Stewart spotted a strange-looking log about two hundred feet ahead, on the right-hand side of the canoe, and directed his companion’s attention to it. The log was jet black, straight as an arrow, and about 75 feet from end to end. The lumberjacks had an intimate knowledge of every timber-worthy tree in the Pacific Northwest, but could not determine what sort of wood this particular log was made of. After staring at the mysterious object for some, time they paddled over to investigate.
When they had narrowed the gap between themselves and the object of their interest to a distance of about thirty feet, the log suddenly sank like a stone without making the slightest noise, completely disappearing from sight. Alarmed, Stewart and his companion ceased their paddling, half expecting the mysterious object to resurface, perhaps beneath their canoe. After three trepidatious minutes of bobbing idly with the waves, the pair decided to resume their journey.
No sooner had they made a handful of paddle strokes than the log resurfaced, this time to their left, and closer than before. Determined to solve the mystery of the object’s identity, Stewart and his companion paddled directly toward it. The log sank again, only to burst from the blackness of the ocean with alarming violence and blast the canoeists with a directed torrent of seawater, completely drenching them.
“This at once,” the article claimed, “convinced the men that it was not a log they had encountered, and when the animal began lashing the water with its tail, which it did in such a manner as almost to swamp the boat, each man came to the conclusion that it was the sea serpent they had run across. They turned their boat and made off as rapidly as possible, but the animal seemed to think it was its turn to assume the offensive, and it pursued them, keeping at about ten yards distance, and lashing the water unremittingly.”
After a frantic hour of playing aquatic cat and mouse, the mysterious creature abandoned its pursuit and slipped quietly under the waves.
“Mr. Stewart,” the article concluded, “avers that the animal, whatever it was, was not a whale, and while he does not claim that it was the traditional sea serpent on a cruise in northern waters he contends that it was an inhabitant of the sea not very often met with, and a very undesirable companion on a voyage in a small boat.”
Seven years after Stewart’s encounter, a prospector named Osmond Fergusson and his partner, Mr. Walker, had a run-in with a similar creature off Haida Gwaii, or the Queen Charlotte Islands – a remote archipelago north of Vancouver Island famed for its Haida people, unique fauna, and haunting natural beauty, and the site of British Columbia’s first gold rush. Their sighting became public knowledge when Fergusson, at the request of those who had heard the story, described the event at a weekly meeting of the Victoria Natural History Society, held on the evening of January 12th, 1897, in the provincial library.
While boating with Walker off the Queen Charlotte Islands, Fergusson spotted what he first took to be a piece of driftwood about two hundred yards away, moving towards them. When the object had reached a point about fifty yards away, Fergusson noticed that a portion of it, semi-oval in shape, was arched about two feet out of the water. When they were only a few feet away, the end of the object uncoiled, raising a long neck five feet out of the water, atop which sat a small snakelike head.
The strange animal glided past the boat with its periscopic head and neck erect and alert. Although it appeared to be looking directly at them, Fergusson and Walker could discern no eyes. The witnesses estimated the creature to be about twenty five feet long, and a foot and a half in diameter at its thickest point. Its long tapered tail, which Fergusson likened to that of a dogfish, undulated vertically. Its skin was dark, without any apparent fins or scales. After it had glided past them, the creature arched its back again and resumed its former posture.
Years after the sighting, in October 1925, when the legendary Ogopogo of Okanagan Lake was gaining national celebrity, British Columbia’s Deputy Commissioner of Fisheries, John P. Babcock, declared that the mystery of the sea monster of Haida Gwaii had been solved. Babcock, a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic who waged perpetual war against the notion that sea monsters might inhabit the waters over which he held charge, acquired this intelligence from a monster hunter named John J. Van Valkenburg. Valkenburg, in turn, claimed have learned from the Haida Indians that the sea serpents spotted off the shores of their ancestral homeland were really giant eels which lived in a dark, slimy cave at the northern end of the Queen Charlottes. Long ago, a Haida warrior had allegedly battled one of the monsters outside this very cave. The brave slew the creature and dragged its carcass onto the beach, where it proved to measure nearly forty feet in length.
Two years after Fergusson and Walker’s encounter, five Australian prospectors spotted a supposed sea serpent off of China Hat, a small cone-shaped island in the Inside Passage near the Tsimshian village of Klemtu, about 150 miles west of Haida Gwaii’s Moresby Island. The prospectors had spent the previous winter searching for gold and copper on northerly Princess Royal Island, and had just begun the long voyage down the Inside Passage with the fruit of their labours when they spotted something unusual in the water. One of their number, named Robert Nowell, described the experience to a reporter, who published his account in the May 9th, 1899 issue of a Vancouver newspaper.
“We had just left the island in a small boat,” Nowell said, “and were nearing China Hat when a loud splashing attracted our attention. Not 100 feet away from us, what at first appeared to be a very large fish was lying almost on the surface of the water.
“We managed to get a little nearer to it, when one of my mates yelled out that it was a sea serpent. We then clearly saw that [our] queer looking fish was nearly ten feet in length and that it had a body about as thick through as my thigh. Its head resembled a seal’s to a certain extent.
“While we were watching it the serpent skimmed along the surface of the water at quite a fast rate. One of my mates raised his gun to his shoulder with the intention of shooting the serpent, but before he could pull the trigger, it reared up out of the water and in a second vanished. We saw no further trace of it. The men who were with me at the time have travelled up the coast for some time, but they never saw anything like the fish we discovered. We told our story at the various places up the coast, but people thought that we were romancing. I feel confident that we ran across a real sea serpent, and a very large one at that.”
The turn of the 20th Century did little to quell the surge of sightings that had characterized the previous decade, sea monsters being reported with casual frequency in the Pacific Northwest throughout the early 1900s. One Sunday in September 1905, for example, a Canadian named Philip Welch witnessed something unusual in the waters off northeastern Vancouver Island. That day, Welch was fishing with a friend at the mouth of the Adam River, a waterway which empties into the Johnstone Strait, which in turn separates Vancouver Island from the islands of the Northwest Coast. At that time, the river was the scene of a massive salmon run – an annual event in which thousands of Pacific salmon leave their ocean homes to swim up a freshwater river for the purpose of spawning eggs. As Welch and his partner were hoping to catch trout, the salmon run destroyed any prospect of a successful fishing trip. The late Canadian oceanographer and cryptozoologist Paul LeBlond described what happened next in a 1993 article for the Western history magazine Montana.
“Although it was only 9 A.M.,. the disappointed fishermen were resigned to returning home when they saw a long neck appear some two hundred yards astern their boat. The animal submerged. Alarmed, they rowed for shore as quickly as they could, hitting salmon with their oars at every stroke. The creature reappeared about one hundred feet astern. It was gaining on them when once more it submerged, and they did not see it again. The animal… had a long neck, six to eight feet of which protruded above the water. The neck, about the size of a stove pipe, tapered from a twenty-inch diameter to about ten inches at the head, which looked somewhat like the head of a giraffe. The creature looked up and down the Johnstone Strait, turning its head this way and that, giving the men a good view of it. Welch noticed two bumps on the head, about five inches high and rounded on top. Nostrils were plainly visible but eyes were hard to detect. No mane or hair of any sort were visible. The animal was brown in color.”
Readers may observe that Welch’s difficulty in making out the creature’s eyes corresponds with Fergusson’s description of the monster off Howe Sound. Even more intriguing are the two bumps which Welch noticed atop the creature’s head, which evoke the so-called “horns of power” that invariably adorn the crania of the Sisiutl in indigenous artwork.
The last Pacific Canadian sea serpent sighting surrounding the turn of the 20th Century is both the most exciting and the most disappointing. According to an article in the March 25th, 1908 issue of the Winnipeg Weekly Free Press and Prairie Farmer, a small sea serpent was captured in the Yaculta Rapids north of Sonora Island, roughly twenty miles northwest of Campbell River, Vancouver Island, not far from a static whirlpool called the Devil’s Hole. A crew of fishermen came upon the creature basking in the sun near the surface of the water. They caught it with a net, and killed it with a knife.
The creature was described as measuring 5’8” in length, and eight inches in diameter, with a tapered whip-like tail. “The body is marked with purple and black spots,” the article contended, “and the skin of the back overlaps at each side. The serpent has a venomous head and there are four sharp teeth on the upper and lower jaws and the inside of the mouth is very bony. The animal put up a vicious fight and made several attempt to bite its captors before it was killed.” The corpse was promptly brought to Vancouver and put on display on the waterfront at the northern end of Gore Avenue.
An article in the Vancouver Daily Province elaborated on the waterfront exhibition. “Billinsgate, the little fishmarket on Cook’s Slip,” the piece began, “was thronged with visitors this morning, for on exhibition there was a genuine specimen of the sea-serpent. Notorious waterfront characters looked in, saw the serpent and threw several fits, fishermen took the pledge, and curio-collectors attempted to steal sections of the marine monster.
“The animal is something like an eel… It has… the head of a snake… Altogether the creature presents a startling appearance…
“There is considerable speculation along the waterfront as to what the animal really is, and the general view is that it is a wolf fish of which very few specimens have been captured.”
Although the monster of the Yaculta Rapids may indeed have been a Bering wolffish, an aquatic animal of hideous countenance which occasionally leaves its subarctic haunts for the Pacific Northwest, the same cannot be said of the 25-foot monster seen off Haida Gwaii, the 75-foot colossus spotted in Howe Sound, or the frightening creatures of the Inside Passage and the Johnstone Strait. Mysterious aquatic snakes similar to these continued to be reported throughout the 20th Century in the frigid waters off the West Coast of British Columbia, spawning the legend of the sea serpent that would come to be known as Cadborosaurus.
“An Adventure in the Gulf,” in the July 23rd, 1890 issue of the Weekly News-Advertiser (Vancouver, British Columbia)
“Sea Serpents of the Pacific Northwest,” by Paul H. LeBlond in Volume 43, Number 4 (Autumn 1933) of Montana: The Magazine of Western History
“A Sea Monster: Mr. Fergus and Mr. Walker Tell of Seeing the Sea Serpent,” in the January 13th, 1897 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“Sea Serpent Tracked to Lair at Last: Terrifying Creatures of Queen Charlotte Islands Found to be Huge Eels: Indians Solve Mystery, Telling Whites of Creatures Forty Feet Long,” in the October 10th, 1925 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“Saw a Sea Serpent: West Coast Prospectors Had a Queer Experience: When Near China Hat They Almost Ran Over a 10-Foot Sea Serpent – Are Positive That They Were Not Deceived – R. Nowell Tells of Mining Prospects on Princess Royal Island,” in the May 9th, 1899 issue of the Province (Vancouver, British Columbia)
“Caught at Last,” in the March 25th, 1908 issue of the Weekly Free Press and Prairie Farmer (Winnipeg, Manitoba)
“Sea Serpent at Gore Avenue Slip: Marine Monster Killed at Euclataw and Shipped to Vancouver Yesterday – Nearly Six Feet Long,” in the March 6th, 1908 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province