A sea serpent in the Neuse River? That’s what the New Berne Times reported a century-and-a-half ago, while adding that stalwart men were attempting to capture the horrible creature before it ate more livestock.
Into the 1900s, tales of sea monsters were reliable fodder for sensationalist editors. Newspaper reports of sea monsters or sea serpents number in the thousands. Apparently, the entire Atlantic coast was imperiled. For example, a “horned sea monster” over eighty feet long was reported off New England in 1891. In an earlier era, a pirate captain was said to have had to serve a “double dose of grog to infuse courage into his men” after they began falling to their knees and running in panic during an encounter with a seaborne leviathan “like the dragons of old; vomiting fire and smoke.” And as late as 1896 eminent scientists were still conceding that big sea monsters “may not be entirely extinct.” But, of all these reports over 200 years, only a single beast appears to have threatened the environs of New Bern.
In September 1871, both The Times and the Newbern Sentinel professed: “Considerable excitement prevails in a locality on the Neuse River, at what seems to be a sea serpent which has made its way up from the Atlantic. It has been seen by several reliable gentlemen, with small lambs and little pigs in its jaws, having seized them at the water’s edge drinking. Various attempts to capture this serpent have proved fruitless; should they succeed, he will be on display at the state fair.”
Herbert H. Brimley was the founder and curator of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science and collected many of its specimens in Craven County woodlands and swamps. Upon returning from a 1905 trip to Cape Hatteras, he disappointed Raleigh reporters by telling them that there was no truth to their recently-reported story of a boy having been eaten by an enormous shark at Davis Shore. To cheer them up a little, Brimley added that he had seen a sea serpent during his sojourn. Questioned by the newsmen, Brimley told them it was so long he had to climb the lighthouse to see the head and tail at the same time. He estimated it was a mile long but admitted he was “much chagrined” when a recognized sea monster expert declared a sighting didn’t count unless it was “considerably over a mile in length with whiskers and a fine show of teeth.”
Brimley’s tall tale was reported verbatim, of course, by newspapers across the state.
by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent