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Sea Monsters Unmasked, and Sea Fables Explained
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Free material for Henry Lee's two 1883 handbooks, in which the kraken turns out to be a giant squid, the mermaid a dugong, the hydra an octopus, and the sea serpent stays unsolved: the casebook of named sightings, an index to all sixty-eight plates, a scorecard of which of his explanations survived, and the kraken's timeline from Olaus Magnus to the first film of a living giant squid.
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The Casebook
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Every named sighting the two handbooks discuss — Egede's monster off Greenland in 1734, the Gloucester serpent, H.M.S. Dædalus in 1848, the Alecton's squid, the Pauline, the Osborne, the City of Baltimore — with what was reported and what Lee makes of it. The sea-serpent chapter moves between eight cases in forty pages and assumes you are holding all of them at once.
Open PDF60 KBThe Sixty-Eight Plates
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Every figure in both books, numbered as Lee numbers them — which means there are two figure 1s and two figure 24s, because the second handbook starts its sequence again. Each is marked as evidence of an animal, evidence of a belief, or decoration, which is the question worth asking of every picture in the book.
Open PDF64 KBRight, Wrong, Still Open
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Lee's eight chapters, what each concludes, and how it has lasted — with the three places a modern reader should hold him to account: the surviving marine reptile he reports without endorsing, the fish-god plates that rest on a reading no longer accepted, and the dugong that does not live in the seas most of the mermaid sightings come from.
Open PDF60 KBThe Kraken, 1555 to now
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The one argument in the book that was fully vindicated, in order: Olaus Magnus, Pontoppidan's ridiculed bishopric, Steenstrup naming Architeuthis in 1857, the Alecton, the Newfoundland strandings Lee had only just heard about — and then nothing at all for a hundred and nineteen years, until a living giant squid was photographed in 2002 and finally filmed in its own water in 2012.
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About this material
Henry Lee lived 1826–1888 and both handbooks were published in London in 1883, so the text is in the public domain on two independent grounds. The figures are a separate layer and each was assessed: the 1883 cuts lent by the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, the Leisure Hour and Land and Water are corporate publications of 1883 whose term expired at the end of 1953; the second frontispiece is after a painting by Otto Sinding, 1842–1909; and the facsimiles of Olaus Magnus, Aldrovandus, Gerard and Pontoppidan were never in question. All sixty-eight are reproduced.