10/16/2026
Time for a wee swim …
The Sea Serpent of Arisaig - 1844
In October of 1844, a Pictou County millwright stood near the pier at Arisaig and watched something enormous swim slowly past him. His name was Mr. Barry. He was close enough that he later estimated the distance between himself and the animal at only 120 feet.
And what he described would eventually attract the attention of one of the most famous scientists of the nineteenth century. According to geologist Sir Charles Lyell, the creature was approximately 60 feet long, three feet thick, black and covered along its back with a series of small humps.
This wasn't written down generations later as an old ghost story. Barry described what he had seen to J. William Dawson of Pictou, the young Nova Scotian geologist who would later become one of Canada's most prominent scientists. Dawson passed the evidence to Lyell, and Lyell published it.
The encounter happened at Arisaig, on the Northumberland Strait. There was only a slight breeze and the animal apparently wasn't racing through the water or appearing briefly between waves. Lyell says it “swam slowly past the pier.”
Barry watched it carefully. The creature's head was rounded and blunt. It never raised its head more than about a foot above the water. At the opposite end, Barry saw a pointed tail that reminded him of half of a mackerel's tail. The visible animal was black, but the strangest feature was its back. Barry saw a number of small humps, and he didn't think they were simply enormous loops of a snake-like body breaking the surface. They were, he believed, too small and too close together for that. Instead, the entire creature seemed to move in long waves or undulations while those smaller humps moved with it. At times the motion carried both the head and tail beneath the surface. Then both would appear again.
Lyell was sufficiently interested that his book included an actual illustration labelled “Drawing from memory of a sea serpent seen at Arisaig, Nova Scotia, Oct. 1844.” But here is where this story becomes particularly interesting. Dawson did not simply hear “sea serpent” and accept it. He challenged Barry. Dawson suggested that the swell of the sea might have created an illusion. A long object sitting partly at the surface can appear to undulate as waves move across it. Perhaps Barry had been watching something comparatively ordinary distorted by the water. Barry said no. He told Dawson that he had observed the animal very attentively. And there was a reason. Barry had already read accounts of sea serpents. He knew exactly what sort of mistake Dawson was suggesting and remained convinced that the undulations belonged to the animal, not the waves. Then, less than a year later, something extraordinary happened only a short distance farther west.
In August 1845, another enormous unidentified marine animal was reported at Merigomish.
This time there were multiple observers. It was reportedly nearly aground in calm water, within about 200 feet of shore, and remained visible for approximately half an hour. Those witnesses estimated that animal at roughly 100 feet long. It too was black. It too had humps or protuberances along its back. One witness thought its head resembled that of a seal. And after disappearing into deeper water, it reportedly left a wake behind it.
There were even reports from fishermen on the eastern shore of Prince Edward Island during the same period. Suddenly the Arisaig creature wasn't an isolated story. Something fitting broadly the same description was being reported around the Northumberland Strait and Gulf of St. Lawrence. And that attracted Sir Charles Lyell.
Lyell was one of the most influential geologists alive. Charles Darwin knew his work intimately. Lyell was not a folklorist collecting monster tales. He was trying to determine what people were actually seeing.bAfter examining the Nova Scotia evidence alongside reports from New England, Norway and elsewhere, Lyell wrote that it was impossible not to notice the similarities between many of the accounts.
Dark animals, long bodies, repeated humps, undulating motion, large wakes and witnesses sometimes observing them at surprisingly close range. In fact, Lyell made a wonderfully cautious confession. After leaving America in 1846, he wrote that he found himself in the unfortunate position of believing in the sea serpent without ever having seen it.
This one is interesting as the scientific argument was never simply “Did monsters exist?” It was “What are these people actually seeing?” And in Arisaig in October 1844, Mr. Barry believed he had gotten close enough to know that it wasn't merely a trick of the waves.
