It is probably not surprising that the British are more likely to encounter sea monsters than others. Researcher Bernard Evelmans, who collected details of the monsters from newspaper articles around the world, found that two-thirds of the reports about them before 1900 came from the United Kingdom. Similar meetings in the coastal waters washing the British Isles continued into the 20th century. And although these places have a lot to tell about this topic, nevertheless, most of the stories happen in the south-west of England, and even more often in the most extreme of the counties of the country, Cornwall. For a long time, these messages were attributed to the bizarre imaginations of local folklore lovers, whose maritime stories have always been extremely colorful.
However, in the past two decades, persistent references to a monster known as morgaur (a name derived from an old Celtic word meaning "sea giant") have led some scholars to believe that the legends of a strange creature living off the west coast of England may have a foundation.
It all began in September 1975, when two ladies from Falmouth, Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Riley, spotted a long-necked, humpbacked creature with short horns and stubble on its back in the sea off Pendennis Point, which was trying to calm a large conger eel by holding it in its jaws. But Morgaur gained real popularity two years later. In January 1977, dentist Duncan Wiener saw a creature with a long neck and a total body length of what he said was 40 feet, floating on the sea off Rosemallion Head. On the same morning a similar creature was observed by fishermen at the mouth of the Halford River. Four months later, two London bankers, who came to fish on the rocks near Parsons Beach, saw a humpbacked animal emerge a hundred feet away. Then, in June of that year, the morgaur stuck out his neck and struck fear at the crew of a small boat at the Lizard Point rock outcropping.
One of the witnesses, George Winnecombe, who had fished in Cornish waters for 40 years and knew all the local marine life in every way, could not identify the unexpected guest. A leathery black body with three humps on its back reached 20 feet in length and was clearly visible on the surface, suggesting a total mass of several tons. The slender neck of the creature, rising a meter out of the water, easily carried the head of a not at all rough seal-looking, albeit with huge eyes relative to the body.
Meetings like this, including detailed descriptions of experienced sailors, were far more compelling than the vague and often far-fetched tales of the past. In the middle of the summer, with dozens of new messages from weekend out-of-town townspeople every week, Cornish Life publisher Dave Clarke decided to investigate the case personally. One of the eyewitnesses with whom he had a chance to talk, a local connoisseur named Anthony Shales, immediately told him that he could summon the morgaura from the depths by casting an ancient magic spell on him.
Clark, although very skeptical of Shales' statement, was nevertheless intrigued and went with a guide to the mouth of the Halford River, to the place of the recent meeting 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 a hundred meters from the shore. Clarke at first decided that it was a seal, but the creature swam closer, and he noticed that his neck was much longer than it seemed at first glance, and the body that appeared was completely huge: according to his estimates, it was about 18 m long. Journalists repeatedly filmed the creature before it dived again, although the hapless photographer damaged the rewind mechanism of his apparatus out of excitement. Shales' Rolleiflex proved to be a more reliable device, and some of the shots, later enlarged, showed quite clearly the appearance of the Morgauer's neck and head.
Such pictures were not the only ones in 1977. In early autumn, another local newspaper published remarkable images of the sea giant chasing a trawler on the Penryn River. As the reports multiplied, more and more different explanations were put forward, including floating tree trunks, bundles of seaweed, overturned boats, small whales, dolphins, flocks of low-flying birds and giant jellyfish, etc. Favorite, however, as in all similar cases, there has been speculation of a forgery made by clever crooks playing gullible simpletons. But these descriptions of the morgaur have awakened 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 off Praa Sands in Mount Bay. Since all witnesses of these events watched the creature point-blank, it is hard not to believe that something really mysterious lives in the coastal waters of Cornwall.
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In the 1980s, there were at least two more meetings with Morgaur. London student Jeff Watson saw something float across the sea off Halford Passage on February 20, 1981, and even managed to photograph it using a good telephoto lens. Watson, an enthusiast for finding monsters, claimed that this "something" was a living humpbacked creature, but when his films were developed, nothing distinct was found on them.
After 5 years, Morgaur appeared again, this time to Sheila Byrd, a writer, local lore specialist, and her brother, scientist Eric Byrd, who had arrived briefly from Australia: on July 10, 1985, they were resting on the top of a cliff west of Portscarto, 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 20 feet, both witnesses watched in fascination as the creature glided slowly and majestically through the water and dived back. For Sheila Byrd, a local writer who was always suspicious of morgaur stories, this meeting was a turning point in life. Never again did she question the ancient legend of the Cornish sea giant.
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