Eric Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, celebrated in his days as a naturalist, though he never actually saw it or met any one who _had_ seen it, believed implicitly in the great sea-serpent existing somewhere; and in his writings has a good deal to tell us about its ways and habits; and it is upon record that Sir Lawrence de Ferry, commander of the old castle of Bergen, not only saw the monster, but shot at it on the high seas, wounded it, was pursued by it, in its pain and fury, so closely that he narrowly escaped with his life.
In 1801 there was cast ashore on the coast of Dorsetshire a snake twenty-eight feet in length and twenty feet in circumference; but this has since been alleged to have been a Basking-shark; and the same has been said of a great snake-like carcaso that was beaten to pieces by a tempest, and cast ashore on one of the Orkney Isles in the autumn of 1809, and some fragments of which, the _Scots Magazine_ for that year states, were lodged in the Museum of the Edinburgh University.
A very distinct description of the sea-serpent occurs in Dr. Hooker's _Testimony_ respecting it, and communicated to Dr. Brewster's _Journal of Science_. About half-past six o'clock on a cloudless evening at sea, the doctor heard suddenly a rushing noise ahead of the ship, which at first he supposed to be a whale spouting, but soon found to be a colossal serpent, of which he made a sketch as it passed the vessel at fifty yards' distance, slowly, neither turning to the right nor left. "As soon as his head had reached the stern, he gradually laid it down in a horizontal position with his body, and floated along like the mast of a vessel. That there was upwards of sixty feet visible, is shown by the circumstance that the length of the ship was a hundred and twenty feet, and that at the time his head was off the stern, the other end had not passed the main-mast.... His motion in the water was meandering, like that of an eel; and the wake he left behind him, was like that occasioned by a small craft passing through the water.... The humps on his back resembled in size and shape those of a dromedary."
Dr. Hooker states further, that the description precisely accorded with that of a serpent seen five years before by Captain Bennett of Boston. At a later period, three officers in Her Majesty's service--namely, Captain Sullivan, Lieutenant Maclachlan, and Ensign Malcolm of the Rifle Brigade--beheld a similar creature gambolling in the sea near Halifax; but they asserted that it was at least one hundred and eighty feet in length, and thicker than the trunk of a moderately sized tree. Nor must we forget the official account which was transmitted in 1848 to the Lords of the Admiralty, by Captain Peter M'Quhae of Her Majesty's ship _Dædalus_, past which, he and his crew saw the great sea-serpent swimming merrily--a document which produced, or provoked, a learned paper in the _Westminster Review_; while Professor Owen asserted that what was seen from the deck of the _Dædalus_, would be nothing more than a large seal borne rapidly southward on a floe or iceberg.