Yes, these hot summer days put us here at The Seattle Otterman in the mood for a long, cool dip in one of the many lakes and streams of our fair city! It is in the spirit of summertime, and in the public interest moreover, that we bring you the following, culled from the vast archives of our Cryptozoological Section.
Now this fellow we’re about to introduce you to has been somewhat quiet of late, but there was a time when he was quite the mover and shaker in the waters of north Puget Sound. As with so many things, he really began to lie low when the white people started showing up. Is he gone for good, or just biding his time? Well, we here at The Seattle Otterman never wager against the unusual, and as our report shows, we’re not alone.
Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, may we present to you….the cadborasaur!
Cadborasaurus
Thousands of years before the white man came to these parts, the Native Americans and First Nations of the area told tales of a long-necked sea-serpent with a horse-like head and powerful front flippers, a split tail, and a serrated back. It was called “hiyitl’iik”, “t’chain-ko”, or “numske le kwala” by some of the peoples who spoke of it. (Respectively, the Manhouset, Sechelt, and Comox names for what science terms the cadborasaur. Bousfield, Edward L. & Leblond Paul H. (2000).Cadborosaurus: Survivor from the Deep. Heritage House Publishing)
Most notable in the tales and legends of Cadborasaur is the horse-ish head, with many accounts even granting the creature a long reddish mane. Generally, the sea-monster is described as being anywhere from 15 to 60 feet in length, although in 1956 in Alaska, a 100-foot long carcass washed up matching descriptions of cadborasaur. Evidence suggests that cadborasaur is not a fish, but a reptile: it needs to surface to breathe.
Numerous sightings have been reported in the years since Europeans arrived. One of the most notorious comes from 1937. A whaling ship put into a small harbor on Vancouver Island and unloaded its cargo. The whale’s stomach was cut open, and a strange creature was found inside: a long, slender body, a horse-like head, flippers. The description fit all the marks of the cadborasaur, and so the carcass was sent off to the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo. The carcass, however, subsequently disappeared and no report was made.
Of course, for thousands of years, the first inhabitants of the area had known of cadborasaur, and tales of it appear from amongst the tribes of Southeast Alaska to the northern coasts of California. It featured in the legends of the Chinook tribes for hundreds of years before outsiders arrived, where it was called “Hyachuckaluk”.
In 1790, the Spanish explorer Manuel Quimper sailed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and made first contact with the S’Klallam tribe, who told him and his men of “a great Fearsom Serpent that thrashes Mightily in the waves of the Sea, long of Neck and Abysmal.” In the decades that followed, when European ships began appearing more frequently, ship’s journals were peppered here and there with the odd sighting, but as the white man became a dominant presence here, the sightings grew fewer and fewer, although there have been some recent reports.
In 1933, a Major W. Langley, the clerk of the Provincial Legislature of British Columbia and a Mr. F. Kemp, of the Provincial Archives, were on holiday with their families on Chatham Sound when they saw a creature “the size of a large whale,” “greenish brown with serrated marks along its back and sides.” Mr. Kemp related that he had seen, the summer previous, something very similar, a body appearing out of the water “serrated like a saw”, its movements “like those of a crocodile.” A newspaper contest in Victoria dubbed the creature “Caddy”. There were dozens of sightings throughout the nineteenth century.
Throughout the 1930’s to the 1960’s, reports of the creature were steady, then fell off again. In July 1991, a woman in the San Juan Islands claimed to have caught a baby cadborasaur, 2 feet in length, and returned it to the water.
There have been no reports of cadborasaurs attacking humans or ships, at least in the European records, leading one to assume it is a gentle giant, akin to Nessie or Ogopogo, which it is said to somewhat resemble. Over the past few years, brave and curious sailors from Anacortes, Seattle, Whidbey Island and other ports on the Sound have gone out in search of cadborasaurs, but sadly, none have reported any success. Still, the intrepidly curious still think Caddy is out there somewhere, and as long as they have a star to sail by, they will be looking for him.