This immediately called out a statement from Captain F. Smith, of the ship _Pekin_, that on December 28, not far from the place where the _Dædalus_ had encountered the supposed sea-serpent, he had seen, at a distance of about half a mile, a creature which was declared by all hands to be the great sea-serpent, but proved eventually to be a piece of gigantic sea-weed. “I have no doubt,” he says, that the great sea-serpent seen from the _Dædalus_ “was a piece of the same weed.” It will have been noticed that the sea-weed sea-serpents, seen by Captain F. Smith and by Captain Herriman, were both at a distance of half a mile, at which distance one can readily understand that a piece of sea-weed might be mistaken for a living creature. This is rather different from the case of the _Dædalus_ sea-serpent, which passed so near that had it been a man of the captain’s acquaintance he could have recognized that man’s features with the naked eye. The case, too, of Captain Harrington’s sea-serpent, seen within 20 yards of the _Castilian_, can hardly be compared to those cases in which sea-weed, more than 800 yards from the ship, was mistaken for a living animal. An officer of the _Dædalus_ thus disposed of Captain Smith’s imputation:—“The object seen from the ship was beyond all question a living animal, moving rapidly through the water against a cross sea, and within five points of a fresh breeze, with such velocity that the water was surging against its chest as it passed along at a rate probably of ten miles per hour. Captain M’Quhæ’s first impulse was to tack in pursuit, but he reflected that we could neither lay up for it nor overhaul it in speed. There was nothing to be done, therefore, but to observe it as accurately as we could with our glasses as it came up under our lee quarter and passed away to windward, being at its nearest position not more than 200 yards from us; _the eye, the mouth, the nostril, the colour, and the form, all being most distinctly visible to us_.... My impression was that it was rather of a lizard than a serpentine character, as its movement was steady and uniform, _as if propelled by fins_, not by any undulatory power.”