The Gloucester Sea Serpent

On August 10, 1817, Amos Story, a Gloucester mariner, sat on the shore for an hour and a half watching something swim southeast of Ten Pound Island. "His head appeared shaped much like the head of the sea turtle," he swore, and "His head at that distance appeared larger than the head of any dog that I ever saw." He put its speed at a mile in 2 or 3 minutes. On the morning of August 23, the day he gave his deposition, Story watched it again through a spyglass as it lay still on the water, and judged that he could see at least 50 feet of it.

The committee

At a meeting in Boston on August 18, the Linnaean Society of New England appointed Judge John Davis, the physician Jacob Bigelow, and Francis C. Gray to collect evidence. The next day they wrote to Lonson Nash, a justice of the peace in Gloucester, with rules for taking it. Witnesses had to claim to have seen the animal themselves. Each was to be examined separately and not told what the others had said, and every statement was written down, read back, signed, and sworn before a magistrate. The letter carried 25 questions, including "When did you first see this animal?" "Did it utter any sound?" and "How many persons saw it?"

Nash sent back eight depositions on August 28. Three more were sworn in Boston by the master and two crewmen of the schooner Laura, who had watched the animal pass about 40 feet from their becalmed vessel off the eastern point of Cape Ann on the morning of August 28. "I have been to sea many years," Captain Sewell Toppan declared, "and never saw any fish that had the least resemblance to this animal."

Nash wrote that the witnesses "differ in some few particulars" but "for the most part, they agree." One of the particulars was size. Solomon Allen, a ship master, put the animal at 80 to 90 feet, with a head like a rattlesnake's nearly as large as a horse's, and counted 50 distinct portions above the water. Nash, who had watched it himself for nearly half an hour on August 14, wrote that he never saw more than eight.

Matthew Gaffney, a ship carpenter, was in a boat within 30 feet of it on the afternoon of August 14 and fired at its head. "I had a good gun, and took good aim," he swore. The animal sank "like a rock," passed under the boat, came up about 100 yards away, and "continued playing as before."

At least one newspaper and a broadside said the animal had been seen by hundreds of people. The committee's case rested on 11 sworn statements about the 1817 sightings. Allen, asked how many people saw it, answered, "Twenty or thirty persons were in view of me."

Scoliophis atlanticus

On Saturday, September 27, Gorham Norwood was working in a field near Loblolly Cove, about 4.5 miles from the harbor, when a boy called out that a snake did not move like other snakes. Norwood ran it through with a pitchfork. The snake was about 3 feet long with a row of bumps down its back, and it was taken to Boston and exhibited as "the progeny of the great serpent."

The committee examined it, gave it a new genus, Scoliophis atlanticus, and argued that the small serpent might be the offspring of the large one, since the bumps matched the humps the Gloucester witnesses had described. "It was rather bold to come out with a new Genus, in the present advanced state of Natural History," Davis wrote to his son-in-law, "but we thought the characteristics of the creature required it."

Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, a French naturalist living in Boston in 1818, dissected the specimen and reported that it was a diseased and deformed snake closely allied to the common black snake. The Boston Society of Natural History reexamined the preserved specimen in the 1860s and reached the same verdict.

The 1818 hunt

The next August, Captain Richard Rich sailed from Gloucester with a whaleboat and two smaller boats to catch the animal. On August 20, 1818, he wrote from the Annisquam River that he had hove the harpoon into it "as fairly as ever a whale was struck" before the iron drew out.

Later that season, the Boston Daily Advertiser announced that the serpent had been taken and was 120 feet long. The Harvard professor Andrews Norton rode into Boston to see it, with Judge Davis already at the wharf. The catch was dragged into a store wrapped in sail, and Norton wrote that it was "pronounced by all who knew any thing on the subject to be nothing but a Thunny, or Horse Mackerel, of a common size." A letter printed in London in January 1819 put the tuna at 9 or 10 feet long.

Pavilion Beach, at the head of the outer harbor, looks straight out at Ten Pound Island, the view Fitz Henry Lane painted in 1862. Stage Fort Park faces the same water from the west, and its visitor center is open Memorial Day through Columbus Day, 9am to 6pm. In summer, non-residents reserve parking at Stage Fort Park in advance.

The Cape Ann Museum at 27 Pleasant Street reopened at the end of June 2026 after a renovation. It is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10am to 5pm. General admission is $20 for adults, $15 for seniors, and free for 18 and under, with free admission for everyone on the 2nd Saturday of each month. The museum recommends buying tickets in advance. The museum holds the largest collection of Lane's work, and its Library & Archives, open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 4:30pm, holds an engraving made from a drawing of the serpent "taken from life" in the harbor on August 23, 1817. In 2019, the museum put a 9-foot bronze serpent by the Essex sculptor Chris Williams at its entrance.

The museum has no parking of its own. The public lot across the street and the surrounding streets use pay kiosks with a 2-hour limit.