It all began in September 1975, when two ladies from Falmouth, Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Riley, spotted a long-necked, hunchbacked (creature with short horns and stubble on its back, which was trying to calm a large conger eel by trapping it in the sea off Pendennis Point) But it wasn't until two years later that Morgaur gained real popularity In January 1977, a dentist named Duncan Wiener saw a long-necked creature, with a total body length of what he said was forty feet, sailing on the sea off Rosemallion Head. a similar creature was observed by fishermen at the mouth of the Helford River.
Four months later, two London bankers on a cliff-fishing trip near Parsons Beach saw a humpback emerge a hundred feet away. Then in June 1977, Morgaur stuck out his neck and struck fear at the crew of a small boat at the Lizard Point cliff, the southern tip of Britain proper.
One of the witnesses, George Winnecombe, who had fished in Cornish waters for forty years and knew all the local marine life in every detail, could not identify the unexpected guest. The one with its leathery, black body, with three humps on its back, together with which it reached twenty feet in length, was clearly visible on the surface, suggesting a total mass of several tons. But the creation's neck, which had risen a meter out of the water, was slender and. carried a head that was not at all coarse seal-looking, although with huge eyes in proportion to the body.
Encounters like this, including detailed descriptions of experienced sailors, were far more convincing than the vague, goofy, and often far-fetched tales of the old days.
In the middle of summer, when all the gossip on the Cornish coast was about the same thing and dozens of new messages from city-dwellers celebrating their weekends every week, Cornish Life publisher Dave Clark decided to personally investigate the whole case. One of the most suspicious witnesses he had interviewed, a local self-taught sage named Anthony "Doc" Shales, told him that he could summon Morgaura from the depths by casting an ancient magic spell on him.
Clark, though highly skeptical of Shales' claim, was intrigued enough to travel with him to the mouth of the Helford River, to the site of his recent encounter with the monster. Here Shales uttered several incantations and began waving his arms while the journalist took photographs. While the whole ceremony lasted, nothing unusual happened, but as soon as they were about to leave, they both noticed a small head sticking out of the water ninety meters from the shore. Clarke at first thought it was a seal, but the creature swam closer, and he noticed that its neck was much longer than it seemed at first glance, and the body that appeared was completely huge, according to his estimates - about eighteen meters long. Both filmed the creature multiple times before it dived again,although the unlucky journalist damaged the rewind mechanism of his apparatus with excitement.
Shales' Doc's Rolleiflex proved to be a more reliable device, and some of the shots, later enlarged, showed Morgauer's neck and head quite clearly.
But these were not the only photos of the monster from 1977. In the early fall, another local newspaper with the amusing title, The Falmouth Kulek, published remarkable images of the sea giant pursuing a trawler on the Penryn River.
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This incident - unfortunately for witnesses who honestly wanted to be believed - happened a little earlier, on April 1st. But it seems that something really unusual was that day at sea, for exactly the same humpbacked creature was noticed by sailors from a tanker a few miles from Coast Lines Wharf.
With the increasing number of reports, more and more different natural explanations have been put forward, including floating tree trunks, bunches of kelp, inverted boats, small whales, dolphins, flocks of low-flying birds and giant jellyfish. His favorite, however, as in all similar cases, was the assumption of a forgery made by shameless swindlers who lured various gullible simpletons into their bait. But Morgauer's descriptions, obtained in 1977, aroused interest in other, equally significant, albeit rarer, occurrences of earlier times in Cornish waters.
In 1876, for example, a sea serpent was literally caught alive in Guerrance Bay east of Falmouth and dragged ashore for a demonstration and then released back. Fifty years later, two fishermen, stretching out a net three miles south of Falmouth, found a similar strange beast in it, which eventually escaped from them, and in 1933 the carcass of an unidentified animal was seen at Praa Sands in Mount Bay. Since all witnesses to these events observed the animal at close range, dead or alive, it is difficult not to understand that something really mysterious lives in the coastal waters of Cornwall.
During the 80s, there were at least two more meetings with Morgaur. On February 20, 1981, a student from London named Jeff Watson saw something floating on the sea off Helford Passage, and he even managed to photograph it using a telephoto lens. Watson, who, I must say, was an enthusiast in the search for monsters, assured that this something was a living, hunchbacked creature, but when his films were developed, nothing distinct was found on them.
Five years later, Morgaur showed up again, this time to Sheila Bird, a writer and ethnographer, and her brother, the scientist Eric Bird, who had arrived briefly from Australia.
The couple were resting on a clifftop west of Portscarto on July 10, 1985, when suddenly in the water below them, close to the shore, a gray creature with a distinctly long neck and a huge hump emerged from the waves. Estimating the total length of the body at twenty feet, both witnesses watched as fascinated as the creature glided slowly and majestically through the water and dived back.
For Sheila Bird, a local writer who was always suspicious of the stories of Morgaur, this meeting was a turning point in life. Never again did she doubt 6 the ancient legend of the Cornish sea giant.