When Summer Meant Sea Serpents

From the 1860s, late July through to mid-September became known as the ‘silly season’. With Parliament and law courts in summer recess, and with little in the way of major political news to report, a burgeoning story-hungry newspaper industry had to seek out other content. Often credited with coining the phrase ‘silly season’, a July 1861 article in the Saturday Review claimed that in late summer The Times would ‘sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing’.

Silly season was marked by unusual or sensational stories, and one such late summer favourite that helped fill blank column inches was sea serpent sightings. The phrase ‘sea serpent season’ had preceded ‘silly season’ into journalistic parlance from the mid-1850s. It was the title of an October 1871 article in the Pall Mall Gazette telling of a sea monster sighting at Diamond Rocks, Kilkee, County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland the previous month. A group of respectable ladies and gentlemen had been enjoying a coastal walk when a ‘sea monster’ suddenly loomed out of the water 70 yards away. The creature was described as having a ‘dreadful appearance’, with an enormous head, a mane of seaweed-like hair behind, large eyes, and ‘a vast body … beneath the waves’. The encounter caused one woman to nearly faint and left all in the party shaken. The sighting, first reported in the Limerick Chronicle, was illustrative of the tendency of the British press, needing to fill space, to accumulate sea serpent stories from around the Atlantic.

Sea serpent sightings did not occur every year, but Bernard Heuvelmans’ comprehensive study, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (1968), indicated the ongoing appeal of the phenomenon. Heuvelmans identified 166 recorded international sightings at sea and ashore between 1801-50, 152 between 1851-1900, and 190 between 1901-50. Most of these sightings (53 per cent) occurred in summer, although most of the newspaper reports came in autumn.