Alongside a manatee statue at Sea World in San
Diego, California (©
Dr Karl Shuker)
Those highly-modified aquatic mammals known
as the sirenians or sea-cows, represented today by the manatees and dugongs,
are already well known in cryptozoological circles by virtue of the extensively
documented (yet incompletely verified) claim that they are responsible for many
mermaid or siren sightings reported from around the world (hence the sea-cows'
zoological name - 'sirenian').
Other sirenian claims upon the cryptozoologist's attention
include: the possibility that the largest of all modern-day species, the
supposedly extinct Steller's sea-cow Hydrodamalis gigas, still survives;
the unmasking in 1985 of the ri (an aquatic mystery beast from New
Guinea) as the dugong Dugong dugon; the one-time disputed existence of
the dugong in Chinese waters; and the likelihood that an unidentified creature
reported from various West African lakes and another such animal from eastern
South America's Lake Titicaca may constitute unknown species of sirenian. In
addition, there is the case presented here, one that had not been previously documented
by cryptozoologists until my own writings on this subject were published.
There are three known species of present-day manatee. The Amazon
manatee Trichechus inunguis inhabits the estuaries of the Orinoco and the Amazon;
the Caribbean manatee T. manatus is distributed
from the coasts of Virginia in the
southeastern United States to the West Indies and the
northern coasts of Brazil; and the
African manatee T. senegalensis frequents the coasts and rivers of West Africa from Senegal to Angola. At one time,
moreover, there were also persistent reports of putative manatees around the
coasts of St Helena, a small south Atlantic island, almost
equidistant from South America and Africa.
In view of the fact that there is a region on the southwestern
coast of St Helena that is actually named Manatee Bay (sometimes
spelt 'Manati'), one could be forgiven for assuming that there was never any
uncertainty about these creatures' identity. In reality, however, this entire
matter has never been unequivocally resolved, as evinced by the following
selection of reports and the highly contradictory opinions that they have elicited.
A melange of manatees exhibiting their varied poses
and movements in a vintage engraving (public domain)
As documented in a Proceedings of the Linnean Society of
London article from 1935, Cornish traveller Peter Mundy journeyed in 1655
to India on the Aleppo
Merchant, and during his return voyage the following year on the same
vessel he paid a brief visit to St Helena. While walking
along the beach near Chappell Valley, he saw a
strange creature lying ashore and apparently severely injured. Mundy went
nearer to examine it:
However, when I touched
it, [it] raised his forepart, gaping on mee with his wide and terrible jawes.
It had the coullor (yellowish) and terrible countenance of a lion, with four
greatt teeth, besides smalle, long, bigge smelling hairs or mustaches.
The creature attempted to make its way back to the sea, but
Mundy dispatched it with stones. It was evidently very large:
...in length aboutt ten
foote and five foote aboutt the middle. Some say it was a seale, others notte.
I terme itt a sealionesse, beeing a femall.
In his journal, Mundy included a sketch of this animal
(reproduced in Fraser's account), which leaves no doubt that it was indeed a
species of pinniped (seals, sea-lions, walruses).
Peter Mundy: Merchant Adventurer –
a modern-day history of Mundy, edited by R.E. Pritchard (© Bodleian
Library/R.E. Pritchard, reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use
basis for educational/review purposes only)
As uncovered by St Helena resident G.C. Kitching, the Public
Records of Jamestown (this island's capital) contain many allusions to alleged
manatees or sea-cows (including what appears to be the first usage of the name
'Manatee Bay', which occurred on 27 January 1679). For example, one such
record, for 28 August 1682, listed the
capture of "several sea-cows"; and on 20
March 1690, another record noted the following incident:
Tuesday, Goodwin and
Coales brought up for killing a Sea-Cow, and not paying the Company's Royalty. They
desire pardon, and say the Sea-Cow was very small; the oyle would not amount to
above four or five gallons.
On 11 May 1691, a record
mentioned that a sea-cow had appeared on shore at Windward, just a month before
traveller William Dampier visited St Helena. Dampier became
most intrigued by the alleged existence of manatees around the island's coasts:
I was also informed that
they get Manatee or Sea Cows here, which seemed very strange to me. Therefore
inquiring more strictly into the matter, I found the Santa Hellena Manatee to
be, by their shapes, and manner of lying ashore on the Rocks, those Creatures
called Sea-lyons: for the Manatee never come ashore, neither are they found
near any rocky Shores, as this Island is, there being no feeding for them in such places. Besides, in
this Island there is no River for them to drink at, tho' there is a small
Brook runs into the Sea, out of the Valley by the Fort.
Returning to the records, on 29
August 1716 they reported that 400
lb of ambergris was found in Manatee Bay, and on 11 September 1739 "A Sea-Cow [was] killed upon
Old Woman's Valley beach, as it was lying asleep, by Warrall and
Greentree".
Steller's sea-lion bull, exhibiting its
characteristically leonine mane (© Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife/Wikipedia
– CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)
John Barnes's A Tour Through the Island of St. Helena
(1817) contains a detailed account of these supposed sirenians as described by
reliable observer and St Helena resident
Lieutenant Thomas Leech, who identified them as sea-lions. Yet in complete
contrast, another equally proficient observer, Dr Walter Henry, just as
confidently identified them as manatees, stating in the second volume of his Events
of a Military Life (1843):
We had sea-cows at St. Helena, the
Trichechus Dugong, but they were not common. When shooting near Buttermilk
Point with another officer one calm evening, we stumbled on one lying on a low
rock close to the water's edge, and a hideous ugly brute it was, shaped like a
large calf, with bright green eyes as big as saucers. We only caught a glimpse
of it for a few seconds, for as soon as it noticed us, it jumped into the sea,
in the most awkward and sprawling manner.
Note that Henry couched his references to these creatures'
existence around St Helena in the past tense. This is because the
last recorded appearance of such animals here took place in 1810, when one came
ashore at Stone Top Valley beach, and was
duly shot by a Mr Burnham. It measured 7
ft long, and 10 gallons of oil were
obtained from it. Another of these creatures was also reported in 1810, this
time from Manatee Bay.
Since then, St Helena's purported
manatee appears to have been extinct, and as is so often the case it was only
then that science began to take an interest in it. After reading an account of
this creature in J.C. Melliss's St. Helena: A Physical, Historical, and
Topographical Description of the Island (1875), in which Melliss claimed
that it belonged either to the African or to the Caribbean species of manatee,
on 20 June 1899 English zoologist Dr Richard Lydekker published a short review
of the subject in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London,
which contained a number of the accounts given above in this present
ShukerNature article. Although stating categorically that he did not wish to
express a definite opinion concerning whether or not the animal could truly be
some form of sirenian, Lydekker nonetheless ventured to speculate that if this
were indeed its identity, it probably constituted a distinct species (perhaps
even requiring a separate genus), as he felt unable to believe that it belonged
to either of the manatee species nominated by Melliss.
In 1933, the entire matter was the subject of an extensive
examination by Dr Theodor Mortensen of Copenhagen's Zoological Museum, as published
in the journal Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra Dansk Naturhistorisk Forening.
After careful consideration of the varied and often conflicting reports that he
had succeeded in gathering, Mortensen came out in support of the views of Mundy
and Leech - that the St Helena manatee was in
reality a sea-lion.
Moreover, Mortensen even boldly identified its species - the
Cape (brown) fur seal Arctocephalus pusillus (=antarcticus) - and
believed the matter to be closed, reviving it briefly on 17 March 1934
in Nature merely to include mention of Dampier's account,
which he had not seen when preparing his detailed paper. Certain other records,
given in this present article of mine but again not seen by Mortensen, were
presented as a response to his Nature note in Kitching's own Nature
report, published on 4 July 1936, but Kitching
did not express any opinion regarding the creature's identity.
By way of contrast, as outlined within his report of Mundy's
sighting, in 1935 F.C. Fraser had
leaned very heavily in favour of one specific identity - once again involving a
pinniped, but not a sea-lion this time. Instead, Fraser nominated a true (i.e.
earless) seal - namely, a young male specimen of the southern elephant seal Mirounga
leonina. As its scientific name suggests, this creature does bear a fancied
resemblance to a lion-like beast, and is therefore more reminiscent of a
sea-lion (albeit one of massive proportions) than are most other true seals.
Even so, it bears rather less resemblance to the beast depicted in Mundy's
illustration. Moreover, as revealed in 2005 via a Latin American Journal of
Aquatic Mammals paper jointly authored by Juan José Alava and Raúl
Carvajal, this species did historically breed on St Helena, but equally
they were readily recognised for what they were.
Since the 1930s, the St Helena manatee - or
sea-lion, or elephant seal - seems to have been forgotten, like so many other
'inconvenient' animals, but could it really have been a sirenian? Sadly, the
reports on file are not sufficient in themselves to provide an unequivocal
answer - all that they can do is offer certain important clues.
For instance, as manatees measure up to 15
ft long the St Helena beasts were
evidently large enough, and their description as calf-shaped by Henry also
conforms with that identity. Conversely, the saucer-shaped eyes of Henry's
beast conflict markedly with the small, relatively insignificant versions
sported by the generally myopic manatees. Large eyes are characteristic of
pinnipeds, as are the fearsome jaws and teeth of Mundy's animal. The same can
also be said of the latter's moustaches - but as manatees have a bristly upper
lip too, this feature is less discriminatory.
If the St Helena beasts were
sirenians, their presence around this island indicates that they may truly have
constituted a species in their own right. After all, as Lydekker pointed out in
defence of his belief that they belonged neither to the African nor to the Caribbean species of
manatee, although it is conceivable that a specimen or two may occasionally be
carried from Africa or America to St Helena this surely could
not occur regularly.
As it happens, there is one notable feature mentioned in a
number of the reports cited in this chapter and elsewhere that on first sight
greatly decreases the likelihood that these animals belonged to any
species of manatee - known or unknown. Although they will rest on the surface
of the water in shallow stretches when not feeding, manatees do not generally
come ashore. Yet according to several independent accounts, the St Helena beasts have
frequently been seen resting (even sleeping) on the sands or on rocks,
completely out of the water, after the fashion of pinnipeds. Also, the large
amount of oil obtained from their carcases is more suggestive of seals than of
sirenians.
So are we to conclude that they were not sirenians after all,
instead merely large seals or sea-lions? Yet if this is indeed all that they
were, why did the islanders refer to them so deliberately as manatees or
sea-cows? It is extremely rare for pinnipeds to be referred to anywhere by such
names. In addition, as Lydekker judiciously pointed out, just because known
sirenians do not normally come ashore voluntarily, this does not mean that
there could not be an unknown distinctive species of sirenian that does (or
did) come ashore under certain circumstances.
An early and very charming but thoroughly inaccurate, seal-like portrayal of manatees, from De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld - of
Beschryving van America en 't zuid-land, by Arnoldus Montanus, 1671, clearly showing a definite confusion back then between sirenians and pinnipeds (public
domain)
And this is where we must leave the mystery of St Helena's
sirenians-that-might-be-seals - still unsolved, and quite likely to remain that
way indefinitely, due to the tragic probability that its subject is extinct,
lost to science before its identity had even been established.
Finally, there is at least one case on record that constitutes
the exact reverse of this one, because it involves some supposed seals that
were ultimately revealed to be sirenians. Sea mammals assumed to be seals had
been reported from the Red Sea island of Shadwan - but as
recorded in 1939 by Paul Budker, when the animals featured in these reports
were finally investigated they proved to be dugongs, which are indeed native to
the Red Sea.
