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Monday, September 5, 2022









Boat with no eyes on 9-5-22--Vung Tau copy






Vietnamese boats and ships are supposed to have eyes at the prow, to scare away sea monsters, but nowadays, many eyes are merely circles, really half-assed, and this guy can't even be bothered. So insolent, he has no respect for sea serpents, giant squids and mosasaurs, etc.

Just in case you doubt their existence, here's a 1904 French sighting off the coast of Vietnam, as quoted in Peter D. Jeans' Seafaring Lore and Legend:
I was standing on the bridge when my attention was directed to a round dark mass in the water about three hundred yards to port. I took it to be a rock, but on seeing it move, presumed it was an enormous turtle four or five yards in diameter. Soon afterward it rose out of the water, and by the undulatory movement that followed, I saw that I was in the presence of an enormous sea monster shaped like a flat-bodied serpent about one hundred feet in length. It appeared to have a soft black skin covered with marbled spots, and the head, which rose about sixteen feet out of the water, closely resembled that of an enormous turtle with huge scales. It blew up two jets of water to a height of about fifty feet. It moved slowly through the water at a speed of about eight knots, and when one hundred and fifty yards from the gunboat, plunged beneath it like a submarine, reappearing on the surface about four hundred yards away. A number of the officers and crew watched the monster, which gradually disappeared from view. After it had gone Lieutenant Lagresville, one of the officers of the gunboat, said that when cruising off this part of the coast in 1898 in the gunboat Avalanche he had seen a similar—possibly the same—creature.



1 comment:

lyle said...

Rudyard Kipling wrote about two huge sea creatures he and other passengers witnessed on voyage to England off the west coast of Africa. For myself I have worked on ships a' sea, once I saw something very large partially surface, it was moving very fast, my impression was of a serpent, this was off the east coast of Australia in 1973.