Part 1 · Chapter 1A Shifting Reef

A Shifting Reef. The year eighteen sixty-six saw something crazy happen - a really weird and puzzling event that most people haven’t forgotten. Rumors were flying around, stirring up everyone involved with the ocean, even people far inland.

Ship owners, regular sailors, ship captains, both European and American, naval officers from every country, and even governments on both continents were totally caught up in it.

For a while now, ships had been running into "this huge thing," a long, spindle-shaped object that sometimes glowed, and was way bigger and faster than any whale.

The stories about this sighting (recorded in ship logs) mostly agreed on what the object or creature looked like, how incredibly fast it moved, how surprisingly well it could get around, and how full of life it seemed to be.

If it was a whale, it was bigger than anything scientists had ever classified.

Considering all the reports, ignoring the cautious guesses that put its length at two hundred feet, and dismissing the wild claims that said it was a mile wide and three miles long - we could pretty confidently say that this mysterious being was way bigger than anything scientists believed existed.

And the fact that it did exist was undeniable. Plus, people tend to get excited about the unbelievable, so this worldwide buzz was totally understandable. Classing it as just a myth was completely off the table.

On July twenty, eighteen sixty-six, the steamer Governor Higginson, from the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, spotted this moving mass five miles off the coast of Australia. Captain Baker initially thought he’s stumbled upon an unknown sandbar, and even planned to map its exact location.

Then, two columns of water, blasted up by the strange object, shot a hundred and fifty feet into the air with a hissing sound.

Unless that sandbar was randomly erupting like a geyser, the Governor Higginson was dealing with a totally new kind of aquatic mammal, shooting columns of water, air, and vapor from its blowholes.

Similar sightings happened on July twenty-three of the same year in the Pacific Ocean, reported by the Columbus, of the West India and Pacific Steam Navigation Company.

But this incredible whale could zoom from place to place with crazy speed; in just three days, the Governor Higginson and the Columbus had seen it in two completely different spots, separated by over seven hundred nautical miles.

Fifteen days later, two thousand miles further out, the Helvetia, from the Compagnie-Nationale, and the Shannon, from the Royal Mail Steamship Company, both sailing between the United States and Europe, signaled the monster to each other in forty-two° fifteen' N. lat. and sixty° thirty-five' W. long.

They were both pretty sure the mammal was at least three hundred and fifty feet long, since both ships were smaller than it, even though they each measured three hundred feet long.

Now, the biggest whales, the ones that hang out near the Aleutian, Kulammak, and Umgullich islands, have never been longer than sixty yards, if they even reach that.

These reports kept coming, one after another, with fresh observations from the transatlantic ship Pereire, a collision between the Etna of the Inman line and... well, it.

A formal report from the officers of the French frigate Normandie, a super-accurate survey by Commodore Fitz-James’s crew on board the Lord Clyde - it all really influenced what people thought.

Some people joked about it, but serious countries like England, America, and Germany took it way more seriously.

Everywhere people were hanging out, everyone was talking about it. They sang about it in cafés, made fun of it in the newspapers, and even put it on stage. Crazy stories started spreading.

Newspapers were full of cartoons of huge, imaginary creatures - everything from the white whale, that terrifying "Moby Dick" from way up north, to the massive kraken whose tentacles could trap a ship of five hundred tons and drag it down into the ocean depths.

Even old legends came back, and people started quoting Aristotle and Pliny, who believed these monsters existed, plus the Norwegian tales of Bishop Pontoppidan, the stories of Paul Heggede, and then there was Mr .

Harrington (who nobody suspected of making things up), who swore he’d seen this enormous serpent back in eighteen fifty-seven while on board the Castillan.

Apparently, it had never been seen in those waters before, only in the seas of the "Constitutionnel."

Then came the endless arguing between the believers and the skeptics in scientific societies and journals.

"The monster question" got everyone fired up.

Editors of scientific journals, clashing with those who believed in the supernatural, spilled tons of ink during this huge debate - some even got personal.

For six months, it was all-out war, with mixed results, in the leading articles of the Geographical Institution of Brazil, the Royal Academy of Science of Berlin, the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in discussions about the "Indian Archipelago," in the Cosmos of the Abbé Moigno, in the Mittheilungen of Petermann, and in the scientific news of major journals across Europe and beyond.

The cheaper papers jumped in with sharp, witty replies. These satirical writers poked fun at a remark by Linnæus, used by those who doubted the monster's existence, and told their readers not to lie to themselves by believing in krakens, sea-serpents, "Moby Dicks," and the wild stories of sailors.

Finally, an article in a well-known satirical magazine by a popular writer, the chief of the staff, pretty much ended the whole thing, like killing Hippolytus, causing everyone to burst out laughing. Wit had won over science.

For the first few months of eighteen sixty-seven, the question seemed buried for good, but then new information came out. It wasn’t just a scientific puzzle anymore; it was a real danger that needed to be avoided. The whole situation took a completely different turn.

The monster became a small island, a rock, a reef - but a reef of unpredictable and shifting size.

On March five, eighteen sixty-seven, the Moravian, from the Montreal Ocean Company, hit something during the night at twenty-seven° thirty' latitude and seventy-two° fifteen' longitude. It was a rock that wasn't on any charts for that area. With the wind pushing it and four hundred horsepower, it was going thirteen knots.

If it hadn’t been for the Moravian’s strong hull, it would have been smashed and sunk, taking the two hundred and thirty-seven passengers it was bringing home from Canada with it.

The accident happened around five in the morning, as the sun was just starting to come up. The officers on the deck rushed to the back of the ship. They scanned the water carefully. They saw nothing but a strong swirl, about three lengths away, like something had stirred things up really hard.

They got the exact location, and the Moravian kept going, seemingly fine. Had it crashed into a hidden rock or a massive shipwreck? They couldn’t tell. But when they repaired the ship, they found part of the keel was cracked.

This was a big deal, but it might have been forgotten like so many other things if, three weeks later, something similar didn't happen again. But, thanks to who the ship hit, and thanks to the company it belonged to, the story blew up everywhere.

On April thirteenth, eighteen sixty-seven, the sea was gorgeous, the wind was perfect, and the Scotia, from the Cunard line, was at fifteen° twelve' longitude and forty-five° thirty-seven' latitude. She was cruising along at almost fourteen miles per hour.

At four seventeen in the afternoon, while everyone was having lunch in the main dining room, a little bump was felt on the back of the Scotia, a bit behind the left paddlewheel.

"The Scotia hadn’t crashed into something, but something had crashed into her - and it seemed pretty sharp, not blunt. The bump was so slight that nobody panicked, except for the carpenter’s crew, who ran to the bridge shouting, "We’re sinking! We’re sinking!

"At first, the passengers were freaked out, but Captain Anderson quickly calmed them down. The danger wasn’t immediate. The Scotia, divided into seven compartments by strong walls, could handle any leak without a problem. Captain Anderson went down into the hold."

He found seawater pouring into the fifth compartment, and it was coming in fast, showing a lot of force. Luckily, this compartment didn’t hold the engines, or the fires would have been put out immediately.

Captain Anderson ordered the engines to be stopped right away, and a crew member went down to check the damage. A few minutes later, they found a huge hole, about six feet across, in the ship’s bottom.

A leak like that couldn’t be fixed, and the Scotia, with her paddles half underwater, had to keep going. She was about three hundred miles from Cape Clear, and after a three-day delay that caused a lot of worry in Liverpool, she finally made it back to the company’s harbor.

The engineers checked out the Scotia, which was put in dry dock. They could hardly believe their eyes; almost nine feet below the waterline was a perfect tear, shaped like an isosceles triangle. The broken plates were so cleanly cut that it looked like they’d been punched out.

It was clear that whatever made the hole wasn’t something ordinary; after being driven with incredible force and piercing an iron plate over an inch thick, it had somehow pulled itself back out in a way that didn’t make sense.

That was the last piece of information that set off another wave of public opinion. From that moment on, any bad luck that couldn't be explained was blamed on a monster. This imaginary creature was responsible for all these shipwrecks, which were unfortunately quite numerous.

Lloyd’s recorded the loss of three thousand ships each year, and the number of sailing and steamships completely lost, with no news at all, amounted to over two hundred!

Now, everyone was blaming the "monster" - fair or not - for all the missing people. Because of it, traveling between continents was getting seriously risky. People were straight-up demanding that the oceans had to be cleared of this huge whale, no matter the cost.