It happened in 1915 on the sea off the Atlantic coast of France, while the Germans were looking for ways to break the blockade that threatened to cut off their country from the rest of the world.
The incident became known to us when the case of the Loch Ness monster broke out, according to a belated report from the commander of the submarine U-28 (German Navy), corvette captain Georg Gunther Freiherr von Forstner.
“On July 30, 1915,” says this gentleman, “our U-28 torpedoed the British steamer Iberia (5223 tons) in the North Atlantic, loaded with valuable goods. The steamer, which was 133 meters in length, began to sink quickly, the bow lifted up almost perpendicular to the surface, and the bottom was many thousands of meters under it.
When after about twenty-five minutes the steamer disappeared, a strong explosion was heard from the depths, the cause of which we, of course, could not understand, but which, according to various estimates, came from a depth of one thousand meters. A little later, debris appeared from the water, and a giant sea animal raged among them, which then, together with them, jumped into the air about twenty to thirty meters!
According to the descriptions, the creature resembled a long-extinct Mesosaur. But the mesosaurs were small, a maximum of a meter in length.
At that moment, with me on the tower were the officers of the watch, the chief engineer, the navigator and the helmsman. We all simultaneously began to point out to each other this sea miracle. Since neither Brockhaus nor even Brem had anything like this, alas, we could not identify him in any way!
We did not have enough time to photograph the animal, as it disappeared into the water after ten to fifteen seconds. It reached about twenty meters in length and resembled a crocodile in shape, had four limbs, equipped with powerful swimming membranes, and a long head, pointed at the end.
The expulsion of an animal from a great depth seemed to me quite understandable. Due to the explosion, which was the cause of everything, the "submarine crocodile", as we called it, was thrown upwards by the action of incredible pressure, and even raised above the water, gasping and frightened.
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Let's say right away: the fact that the steamboat explosion occurred at a depth of a thousand meters does not at all prove that this animal lived somewhere on the edge of the abyss. In the water, shock waves have violent force and are softened only at a very great distance, which, by the way, allows you to kill a huge number of fish with a single grenade or small dynamite stick.
The "submarine crocodile" sailed, perhaps, very close to the surface and, perhaps, it was there that he sought shelter from the blast wave, or, better to say, it was under its influence, still perceptible within one kilometer, was thrown out of the water.
We have little chance of seeing the whole and with such clarity the unknown sea monster again. That is why this evidence is of significant value to us: the fact that it describes this animal to us as a creature that irresistibly evokes the image of a certain saltwater crocodile or, perhaps, a mososaur (rather than a plesiosaur) should not be discounted.
It is noteworthy that Captain George Hope of the British warship Polet, one of the few witnesses who also had the opportunity to see the entire sea monster (through the transparent waters of the Gulf of California), describes it in a rather similar way, as an alligator with swimming blades of a sea turtle. But he insists on the beast's unusually elongated neck. A detail that cannot be neglected.
Target for a British cruiser
On August 22, 1917, the British Navy cruiser Hillary, which took part in the blockade of Germany, swam into the waters of the North Sea, a hundred kilometers southeast of Iceland. The weather was sunny, the sea calm, and the only peak of Mount Oraefayokull to the north was clear on the horizon.
At nine in the morning, the captain of the ship, Captain F. U. Dean was sitting at his work desk in his cabin when a shout came to his ears: "Object behind to starboard!"
In several jumps, the commander burst onto the bridge: “Is this a periscope? Where?" “No, this is not a periscope,” the officer of the watch replied. "Rather, it is something alive, but not a whale."
And he pointed with his finger at an object that vaguely resembled the trunk of a floating tree, with only branches and roots sticking out from both ends. But, aiming at him with binoculars, the commander noticed that the object was indeed alive and that what he took for the front of the barrel was in fact the head and dorsal fin.
"At that time, we never missed an opportunity to practice shooting at submarines," Captain Dean later reported, "and it immediately occurred to me that this is an ideal target."
So he asked his second mate, Captain Charles M. Ray, to call immediately to the bridge three gunners' crews, who had two cannons at six points on each side from aft to the main bridge.
Before starting shooting, the commander nevertheless thought it would be nice to have a little look at this live target.
“Heading for this beast,” he threw to the navigator, Lieutenant Frederick S. P. Harris.
When the ship was one cable from the animal, it calmly deviated from its route, and Captain Dean was able to see enough of him, on the starboard side, from a distance of barely thirty meters.
“The head was the same shape - only much larger - as that of the cow, and besides, no bulges like horns or ears could be seen on it. It was black except for the area in front of the muzzle where a strip of whitish flesh between the nostrils could be seen very clearly, just like a cow's. As we passed by, the animal got up two or three times to get a better look at our ship.
Behind the head, up to the very dorsal fin, not a single part of the body was visible anymore, and from the neck only that which was above its ridge, which was exactly at the same level with the surface, and its serpentine movements were still clearly observed. (It coiled almost in a semicircle, turning its head as if to follow us with its eyes, Captain Dean later specified.)
The dorsal fin seemed to be in the shape of a black triangle, and when the creature was perpendicular to us, you could see that it was very thin and definitely soft, since its upper part sometimes bent, like the tip of a raised ear of a fox terrier. The height of this fin was about twenty meters at the moment when the animal stretched it as much as possible above the water.
Wishing to determine with the greatest accuracy the length of the animal's neck, that is, the distance separating the head from the dorsal fin, Captain Dean asked each of the witnesses to write on a piece of paper, without discussing it with others, their personal assessment. This brought the following results:
Second mate: "The length of one of our boats."
Navigator: "Not less than four and a half meters."
Officer of the watch: "The length of one of our boats."
Commander: "Six meters."
Considering the usual length of a lifeboat, it can be concluded that the neck was no doubt about five to six meters. Assuming that the dorsal fin should have been located immediately behind the neck-to-torso junction, Captain Dean estimated the total length to be about eighteen meters.
This assessment is obviously not so valuable, due to the fact that it arose due to a preconceived opinion about the shape of the animal: in order to triple the size of the visible part so confidently, it was necessary to assume the presence of a long tail.
The animal did not seem to be in any way disturbed by the ship's presence. It continued to wriggle quietly on the surface, from time to time diving so that only the edge of the muzzle and the tip of the fin remained above the water, and sometimes emerging to the point that the latter became fully visible.
The peaceful behavior of the "monster" who sincerely radiated cheerfulness did not prevent the commander from starting to fulfill his plan. When the animal retired to a distance of one thousand two hundred meters, three volleys of five charges were fired at it.
The second charge of the third volley overtook the unfortunate animal. For several seconds it beat furiously, scattering cascades of water in different directions, and then froze and disappeared forever.
This brutal and useless carnage did not bring Hilary any happiness. Two or three days later, the cruiser was torpedoed by a German submarine and went to the bottom. Captain Dean and his crew embarked on lifeboats and escaped death, and this is what allowed us, after the war, to see published the story of this curious adventure.
The fact that Captain Dean's report first appeared in an almanac for youth certainly did not inspire much confidence in him. What, however, convinces? The whole story has been carefully verified and confirmed by Captain Rupert T. Good. He exchanged a whole series of letters on the matter with the captain of the Hilary.
To clear his conscience, he even asked his correspondent, realizing that, in his opinion, this was complete nonsense: did he take some well-known animal for a monster, for example, a whale shark?
To do this, he even suggested to Captain Dean, in order to enlighten him in this matter, a drawing comparing the appearance of an animal, such as the captain himself had previously depicted, with the image of this shark, as it is visible on the surface when it barely protrudes out of the water.
To which Captain Dean replied categorically: "It is absolutely certain that it was not a shark."
This did not stop in 1955 one avid whale shark hunter, Major Gavin Maxwell, the author of several books of memoirs, from asserting exactly the opposite. He mocked, however with good reason, the absolutely fantastic image that Goode gave to this type of shark, and showed how it is necessary to correct - and very easily - the silhouette of the monster "Hillary" so that it coincides with the real silhouette of this cartilaginous fish, which usually barely visible above the surface.
The head of Captain Dean's sea serpent was actually, according to the hunter, the edge of the upper lobe of a whale shark's tail, and in general, as he states, "in this long message, I can't see a portrait of anyone other than my old friend, the whale shark."
However, it remains completely unclear where the brave major met a shark of whatever species it was, whose tail would be in the shape of a cow's head and even with "a strip of whitish flesh between the nostrils." After all, in the end, it is not silhouettes that are compared here, but three-dimensional objects.
And Major Maxwell seems to have completely lost sight of the fact that Captain Dean and his men had been following the movement of the animal for a long time and they, of course, were able to discern whether it was moving backward or forward.
The animal, which was observed from the warship "Hillary", clearly had nothing to do with the one that made its somersault in front of the German sailors from the "U-28". With its cow's head, devoid of both ears and horns, its moderately long neck and triangular dorsal fin, it really does not resemble a crocodile in any way.