Two boys found more than they bargained for on a Cornish beach at the time. A ‘huge’ creature with a hard shell on its back and a human-like head is said to have once washed up on a Cornish beach.
The unknown beast, described as 48ft long and having green eyes, is said to have washed up on Porthleven beach during a severe storm. Two boys were playing on the beach and looking for wreckage when they came across it, CornwallLive reports.
The hair-raising event happened on September 14, 1786, and was shared in the former weekly Hereford Journal in October of the same year. This was reported by a Cornish man who told how the villagers killed the unknown beast.
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Called ‘Sea Monster’, the article reads: “A fair and particular description of a very curious and most surprising sea monster led ashore in Portleaven Bay (sic), on the Cornish coast, the September 14, 1786, by strong westerly winds and stormy weather, which continued in a violent degree for several days in succession, and did much damage at this place and in the vicinity.
“This monster was first discovered by two boys who (according to the custom of this place) went in search of wreckage shortly after daybreak; and while standing on the cliff which commanded a prospect of a small sandy cove, they, at a distance of about a mile, discovered something of an enormous carcass near the shore, and which after a short time they apprehended to be the side or part of an unfortunate vessel which had been broken the previous night by the ends of the shore.
“They immediately headed for the spot with optimistic expectation of great success, and as they approached the spot (the crashing waves leaving it dry at times) they were both struck with the most great consternation to perceive such movements because it was something that had life.”
Terrified, the boys ran to a group of men they knew and told them what they had witnessed. The men didn’t believe them at first, but eventually decided to follow them and see the monster for themselves.
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“A large number of people soon assembled into a body and decided to go armed, some with big sticks and pokers, others with hatchets, brooches, etc., which was, after some deliberation , executed,” the article reports. “When they approached the place, they saw that it was something alive, as it was represented, and it raised its head, which had not been seen before, and seemed to direct its course towards them. others possessed with greater fear turned around, they could not see his legs, but he seemed to be crawling on his stomach, sometimes lifting his body a little from the sand.”
No one knew what the animal was. “Various were the opinions of this creature; some said it was a mermaid, others a whale – but the greater number not believing in the existence of the first and adhering to the improbability of the second, they were all equally distraught,” the story reports.
“When it was agreed to examine what it was, they all went to him, and after an hour of beatings, stabbings, etc., he expired with a groan. His length proved being from the top of its head to the end of its tail, 48 feet to inches, and its circumference in the widest part of the body 24 feet and a half.His head was large, and prickly in the posterior part, and was not very different from that of a man; his eyes were greenish; his mouth wide; his nose flat, and from his neck to the navel, most resembling the human race; his back was hard and more difficult to penetrate than the shell of ‘a tortoise; it had two short forelegs, shaped like the paw of a monkey, and its shaped hindparts measured seven feet in breadth in extent, and only five feet long.”
It is unknown what was done with the creature’s body, or if anyone studied it. “It is supposed that a great quantity of oil will be produced from it, which, together with the carapace of its back and its fins, is judged, if properly managed, to be of great value, and will be of considerable benefit to this neighborhood,” added the Cornish man who sent the article. “No one who saw him knows his name, and no monster like this has ever been described in records, nor come to the knowledge of this realm.”
Over the years, dozens of people have claimed to have seen a 20-foot-long, dark-skinned snake-like creature with bumps on its back and a long neck, slithering its way through the sea. Strange sightings in the waters off the coast of Cornwall have people wondering if the plesiosaurs, giant marine reptiles that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs and were thought to have died out 65 million years ago, could still be alive.
Sightings date back around 140 years, when a long-necked beast was reportedly caught by fishermen in Gerrans Bay. And there are so many that sightings have become legend, with the mysterious creature being named Morgawr, Cornish for sea giant.
There’s no scientific explanation as to what people actually saw – but people have suggested there could be more than one strange creature stalking the Cornish waters. The first time anyone speculated that it might be a surviving prehistoric animal was in July 1949.
Harold T. Wilkins and a friend said they were in a tidal stream in Cornwall when they saw “two remarkable saurians, 15 to 20 feet long, much like a pair of Mesozoic plesiosaurs”.
In 2002, a former employee of the Natural History Museum claimed to have captured the reptile on camera. John Holmes has posted eerie footage he filmed three years prior at Gerrans Bay off the Roseland Peninsula.
Mr Holmes, who lived in Sticker near St Austell, said at the time: “My pet theory is that it was a living fossil. I think there is a group of plesiosaurs that roam the world’s oceans. All around Britain there have been sightings of sea snakes.”
To this day, many people around the world agree with Mr. Holmes that plesiosaurs defied death and still exist. The most famous example of a “current plesiosaur” is the legendary Loch Ness Monster. But when New Zealand researchers extracted DNA from water samples from the loch in 2019, in a bid to catalog its living species, they found no evidence of large animals or a plesiosaur. You can read all about the plesiosaur theory here.
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Source: www.somersetlive.co.uk
This notice was published: 2022-06-05 20:20:45
