Captain M’Quhæ, who commanded the _Dædalus_, in an official report to the Admiralty, gave the date of the ‘monster’s’ appearance as August 6, 1848, and its exact locality in the afternoon of that day as lat. 24° 44’ S., and long. 9° 22’ E., which would be somewhere between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena. In his own mind the captain had no doubt whatever as to the nature of the animal, which he simply reported as an ‘enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea; and as nearly as we could approximate, by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail yard would show in the water, there was, at the very least, sixty feet of the animal _à fleur d’eau_, no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulations. There seemed to be as much as thirty to forty feet of tail as well.’ The animal passed the ship ‘rapidly, but so close under our lee-quarter, that, had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily have recognised his features with the naked eye.’ The size of the creature is given as about fifteen or sixteen inches diameter in the neck ‘behind the head, which was, without doubt, that of a snake.’ No fins were seen, but ‘something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed washing about its back.’ Its progress was about fifteen miles an hour, and it remained twenty minutes in sight. Lieutenant Drummond, also of the _Dædalus_, reported what he saw, and from his log-book, while the captain’s was from memory. The lieutenant thought he saw ‘a back fin ten feet long, and also a tail fin.’ The head was ‘rather raised, and occasionally dipping, and gave him the idea of that of a large eel.’ Without being an ophiologist, Captain M’Quhæ also unintentionally describes a creature of ophidian habits and proportions. He inadvertently says ‘shoulders,’ when, as my readers know, a snake has anatomically no shoulders, any more than ‘neck.’ But for all that, the raised head, and the absence of any striking movements in the part visible, are the manners of a serpent in the water, when propelled by its tail, which would be out of sight; and the captain simply describing what he saw, but giving no name, those acquainted with herpetology would at once decide that he described a long-necked and slender reptile of some sort, perhaps some enormous saurian, whose feet were under water, if not a serpent.