When Summer Meant Sea Serpents

From the 1860s, late July through to mid-September became known as the ‘silly season’. With Parliament and law courts in summer recess, and with little in the way of major political news to report, a burgeoning story-hungry newspaper industry had to seek out other content. Often credited with coining the phrase ‘silly season’, a July 1861 article in the Saturday Review claimed that in late summer The Times would ‘sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing’.

Silly season was marked by unusual or sensational stories, and one such late summer favourite that helped fill blank column inches was sea serpent sightings. The phrase ‘sea serpent season’ had preceded ‘silly season’ into journalistic parlance from the mid-1850s. It was the title of an October 1871 article in the Pall Mall Gazette telling of a sea monster sighting at Diamond Rocks, Kilkee, County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland the previous month. A group of respectable ladies and gentlemen had been enjoying a coastal walk when a ‘sea monster’ suddenly loomed out of the water 70 yards away. The creature was described as having a ‘dreadful appearance’, with an enormous head, a mane of seaweed-like hair behind, large eyes, and ‘a vast body … beneath the waves’. The encounter caused one woman to nearly faint and left all in the party shaken. The sighting, first reported in the Limerick Chronicle, was illustrative of the tendency of the British press, needing to fill space, to accumulate sea serpent stories from around the Atlantic.

Sea serpent sightings did not occur every year, but Bernard Heuvelmans’ comprehensive study, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (1968), indicated the ongoing appeal of the phenomenon. Heuvelmans identified 166 recorded international sightings at sea and ashore between 1801-50, 152 between 1851-1900, and 190 between 1901-50. Most of these sightings (53 per cent) occurred in summer, although most of the newspaper reports came in autumn.

The tone of later reports was often humorous and knowing. The willingness to entertain the idea of sea serpents rarely extended to a sense of genuine threat, but nor was it explicitly dismissed as a hoax. When a 20-metre serpent was sighted in a Norwegian fjord on 6 September 1878 holidaymakers, the Daily Telegraph reported, spent several days chasing it in boats. The article debated how best to capture or kill the creature; having outlined the drawbacks of trying to use a cannon on a small boat, it eventually recommended using a torpedo, suggesting the serpent would think it a relative and welcome it with open mouth. Likewise, in a snippet in the Western Gazette in 1906, entitled ‘The Sea Serpent Season’, a tourist asked a sailor if he had ever seen a sea serpent in his travels, to which the sailor replied that he had not since he had given up drinking.   

As early as September 1863 it was noted that the silly season saw ‘all who can afford the relaxation, gravitate towards the seaside’. Even if increasing numbers of coastal visitors never saw one, newspaper accounts of sea serpents helped prime them with the idea that the coast was where they might. At the seaside resort of Cushendall, Ballymena, in June 1899, visitors and locals saw ‘what appeared to be a huge sea monster floating leisurely about’, roughly a mile from shore. A visitor named Andrew Ross proposed that it should be captured using rifles and knives but local ‘salts’, claiming they had never seen anything as large, dismissed the idea. This account preceded the late summer silly season. Sea serpent reports typically started to appear from July onwards, although this gradually shifted to June in the early 20th century. So early in the summer, one suspects the story may have been intended to help attract visitors with the prospect of catching sight of something marvellous. A prolonged sighting, witnessed by a large crowd, generated the air of a sensational novelty.

Sea serpent sightings continued well into the 20th century, although Heuvelmans’ study suggests a decline from the 1930s onwards. The start of that decline coincides with the emergence of an alternative cryptid, the Loch Ness Monster. Building on supposed sightings in 1933, the famous hoax photograph of ‘Nessie’, published in the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934, gained some credibility by being shot by a medical doctor, but also by being published outside the silly season. Subsequent reports made direct reference to ‘Nessie’, rather than to generic sea serpents. A piece in the Evening Telegraph in October 1936 reported on a ‘Signorita Nessie’ that had been seen in the River Po near Ferrara and asked whether the Loch Ness Monster was holidaying in Italy. Another from August 1939 asked if Nessie had migrated to Canada, based on several recent sightings of ‘an enormous marine monster’ around the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. ‘Nessie’ also turned attention from the open seas to inland waterways. From the point of view of scientific investigators, searching for an aquatic ‘monster’ in a Scottish loch (or its equivalent in North American lakes) may have seemed a slightly more feasible prospect than trying to grapple with the possibilities of proving whether sea serpents existed somewhere in the vast oceans of the world.

Today, silly season coastal stories have lost much of the whimsy that surrounded reports of Victorian sea serpents. Summer news stories now talk of dangerous sea creatures being sighted off the south coast. In October 2000 and August 2008 The Argus reported on the danger of Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish in Sussex coastal waters. In September 2024 the Brighton Journal ran a piece on why sharks are washing up on Brighton beach. No longer flirting with the marvellous or a willingness to suspend disbelief, such stories have become a commentary on how warming seas are attracting the northerly migration of marine creatures previously unknown to British shores. Compared to the playfulness of our Victorian ancestors, our silly season risks becoming serious. 
 

Karl Bell is the author of The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic (Reaktion Books, 2025).