At last — the sea monsters are on show!
I’m very pleased to announce that a major museum exhibition which I – and others – have been putting together over the past few years is now open and available for public viewing. I refer of course to Monsters of the Deep, a sea monster-themed exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth, Cornwall. This is the NMMC’s most ambitious exhibition, and probably the most technically sophisticated, lavish and exhibit-heavy sea monster-themed exhibition ever produced.
Caption: Monsters of the Deep is on show at the National Maritime Museum at Discovery Quay, Falmouth. It’s there until January 2022, so you have a while to visit.
Monsters of the Deep centres around European beliefs, myths and imagery pertaining to sea monsters, but couches it within the broader context of our ideas about what the seas are like. Our views of centuries past were based on lack of information, on hearsay and superstition, but have more recently improved thanks to scientific discovery and exploration.
Monsters of the Deep occupies one of the NMMC’s largest exhibit spaces, and pulling together the many strands of the exhibition was a huge undertaking, years in the making. As guest curator, I worked closely with the museum’s co-curator and Head of Public Programming Stuart Slade and with fellow guest curator Dr Tammy Horton of the National Oceanography Centre’s, Southampton in designing the vision, producing the text and graphics, and organising what we needed to borrow or create. My thanks to Paolo Viscardi for putting my name forward for this project in the first place.
Caption: a few behind-the-scenes glimpses. At left, a prototype map of the exhibition as imagined by Stuart and I in 2018. Top right: the Killer whale skeleton arrives! Lower right: my son Will gets a close look at the creatures from the Discovery Collections. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
Medieval sea monsters, the Carta Marina, mermaids and more. Right from the start (my work on the exhibition started in July 2018), our plan was to feature a grand section on Medieval views about marine life, the centrepiece being an enlarged version of Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina of 1539. By borrowing specimens from the Booth Museum in Brighton, the Science Museum, British Museum and Royal Museums Greenwich in London, and Cambridge University Library, we were able to bring this part of the exhibition to life, and it looks amazing. The fantastic marine beasts depicted on the Carta Marina all have their own fascinating backstories – they’re all connected in some way to particular ideas or stories prevalent in the literature of the Middle Ages – and we explore these with sections on Medieval beliefs about whales, sea unicorns, decapods and more.
Caption: Olaus Magnus’ Carta Marina, the world’s most famous Medieval depiction of sea monsters. Creatures shown here include a sea unicorn, prister, sea pig, ziphius, sea cow, great serpent and others.
It’s important to note that part of the justification for the ‘existence’ of sea monsters in the Medieval world wasn’t just that people claimed to have seen such things; it was also that people regarded the life of the seas as ‘mirroring’ the life of the land (Van Duzer 2013). Ideas about marine, fish-tailed humanoids – merfolk and the like – were not, then, inspired directly and entirely on alleged observations, but were in part based on the idea that such creatures simply must exist. An aside here is that… if you believed in the existence of animals like unicorns and snakes big enough to kill elephants, you also had to believe in the existence of marine counterparts of these creatures too. On that note, we also have on display the Hortus Sanitatis of 1491, a beautifully illustrated encyclopedia which collates zoological and botanical knowledge of its time. Sea monsters of various sorts appear on some of its pages. Having the Hortus on show in our exhibition is a big deal.
Caption: we have an actual copy of the Hortus Sanitatis on show, loaned from Cambridge University Library. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
Our section on mermaids explores the fact that persistent beliefs about them were exploited via the ‘sideshow’ tradition that arose in circuses and travelling exhibitions during the 1800s. And we have our very own mermaid, a ‘feejee mermaid’ of the sort made in Japan. The story behind these objects is fascinating and the conventional interpretation of what they are and how they were made is not accurate (Viscardi et al. 2014).
Caption: at left, the mermaid-themed sideshow section appears behind an area dominated by Medieval views on sea monsters. At right: an actual real mermaid (loaned by The Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust, Brighton and Hove). Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
Heuvelmans and the Nine Sea-Serpents. After the ‘Medieval’ section, the exhibition is deliberately constructed to give the impression of diverging into two, this symbolically being a reference to the idea that the bulk of writings on sea monsters became ever more divorced from the scientific ‘mainstream’ from the late 1800s onwards.
After all, the idea that sea monsters might be real and out there in the vastness of the oceans didn’t die when the Middle Ages came to an end. On the contrary, the possibility that sea monsters might very much be real and able to be confirmed and studied using science was promoted by quite a few authors and investigators, several of whom were qualified scientists. They included French naturalist and proponent of giant cephalopods Pierre Denys de Montfort, Dutch biologist Antoon Cornelius Oudemans, and of course qualified mammalogist Bernard Heuvelmans, whose 1968 book In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (first published in French in 1965 as Le Grand Serpent de Mer) remains the great primary source on the subject.
Caption: our cryptozoology section covers the life and work of Bernard Heuvelmans (a copy of his In the Wake is visible at far left, open at the pages on the bogus von Forstner U28 encounter), and the (mostly) ‘post-Heuvelmans’ cryptozoological literature. Image: NMMC/Darren Naish.
As regular readers of my writings may know, Heuvelmans argued that ‘sea serpent’* accounts couldn’t be interpreted as observations of a single unknown species, but were surely evidence of at least nine such creatures, all of which he described and named in his writings (Heuvelmans 1968; for responses see Magin 1996, Naish 2000, 2001, 2017, France 2019). The Heuvelmans scheme is so foundational for the ‘para-science’ of cryptozoology that it simply had to be the focus of attention in the exhibition, and my plan was that we include a large section on Heuvelmans and his works, and on the nine sea monsters he endorsed, hopefully accompanied by great artwork.
* His term ‘sea serpents’ refers to sea monsters in general, not serpentine creatures specifically.
Images: thanks to the good graces of my friend Tim Morris, we were able to create this giant display panel on the nine sea monsters of Bernard Heuvelmans. Visitors can learn more about the relevant specific sightings (or alleged sightings) via the touchscreen visible at lower right… though, in the age of COVID, special precautions are required. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
Coelacanths and the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm. Thanks to Heuvelmans (and his colleague and sometime co-author Ivan Sanderson), a cryptozoological community became established during the latter decades of the 20th century, the efforts of its advocates being realised in a great many books and even the creation of a society (the International Society of Cryptozoology, or ISC). Common in these works is the idea that the sea monsters and other creatures endorsed by cryptozoology are animals belonging to lineages otherwise known only as fossils. I’ve called this the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm (or PSP), and while it’s not taken seriously by many (any?) working biologists and is not obviously or necessarily endorsed by those cryptozoologists who’ve otherwise promoted it*, I’d argue that it remains highly visible as the primary explanation for what sea monsters are. Look at any piece of text where sea monsters are discussed as if they’re real animals, and you’ll soon see reference to the idea that they might be modern-day basilosaurid whales or plesiosaurs, and how the 1938 discovery of living coelacanths provides verification for this view. The Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm is dead; long live the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm.
* Yeah, there’s a paradox here. At least some of the cryptozoologists who’ve been most responsible for promoting the PSP in their popular works (e.g., Shuker 1995) actually don’t ‘support’ the idea in reality.
Caption: there are something like five coelacanth specimens in the UK, so having one on display is a big deal. You might be surprised how large it is. At right, I’ve rotated the image so you can better see the animal in profile. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
I’m thrilled to say that all of this receives coverage in the exhibition. A large panel on Heuvelmans’ nine sea monsters features blown-up versions of illustrations produced and kindly provided by Tim Morris; we feature abundant information on the cryptozoological community and its literature, and our coverage of the PSP led to our borrowing of an actual preserved coelacanth. Yes, a real Latimeria, specifically a specimen captured in the Comoros Islands in 1973, purchased from the Comoros Department of Fisheries by palaeontologist Thomas S. Westoll, and loaned to NMMC by The Great North Museum: Hancock (Natural History Society of Northumbria Collection). It’s amazing to get up close and personal to this surprisingly large, fantastic lobe-finned fish.
Caption: Rhedosaurus remains among the most charismatic of monstrous mega-beasts bought to the big screen.
Monsters at the Movies. However sea monsters have fared in the scientific and para-scientific literature, the fact remains that they’re such an embedded component of culture that they’ve perpetually raised their metaphorical heads, tentacles, fins, whatever in popular culture. So appealing is the idea of the hideous marine behemoth and the danger it poses that sea monsters have never disappeared from stories, comics, movies and other forms of entertainment.
Some of the creatures involved have their direct inspiration in ancient and Medieval belief – witness the Kraken of 1981’s Clash of the Titans – while others have links to the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm (like the Rhedosaurus of 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and the Reptilicus animal of 1961), or merely to our general fear that such a massive, alien environment must be home to something big, scary and dangerous.
Caption: at left, part of our ‘monsters at the movies’ area. At right; a toy version of the Harryhausen Kraken, prior to its being built into the special diorama we’ve had made. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
On that note, you might consider the modern sea monsters of popular media – the newest of which is Meg the giant shark – as the modern incarnations of what people from ancient and Medieval times thought about the sea and their relationship with it. For all these reasons and more, we also have a section exploring sea monsters in popular culture, a personal highlight for me being the diorama which features a toy version of Harryhausen’s anthropoid Kraken of 1981.
Caption: at left, part of our section on the history of deepsea exploration. At right, you can explore a life-sized replica of the laboratory on board the HMS Challenger. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
HMS Challenger and the ‘Real’ Monsters of the Deep. Running in parallel to the cryptozoological part of our exhibition is a rather more prosaic (but no less innovative) section which charts the scientific study of the sea. Again, we have a lot of new and amazing stuff here. Proper, scientific exploration of the oceans began in 1872 with the voyages of HMS Challenger which we explore via a replica of the ship’s laboratory, and from here onwards we look at the history of marine exploration and at the vehicles and robots which have been involved… yes, we have a model of the National Oceanography Centre’s autosub Boaty McBoatface.
Caption: just two of the many real deepsea animals we have on show. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
This section culminates with another exclusive: a spectacular display of deep-sea animals... yes, real specimens, including anglerfishes, a viperfish, fangtooth, vampire squid and more. A nearby display feature houses hundreds of additional deepsea specimens. These specimens are all under the care of my colleague Tammy Horton and come to us from the Discovery Collections which Tammy is in charge of.
Caption: scenes from Viktor Wynd’s UnNatural History Museum… the skeleton of a unicorn, and a taxiderm mount of a British big cat. Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
That more or less wraps things up. As an extra treat, visitors can ascend the long ramp that surrounds the exhibition and enter a different section: Viktor Wynd’s UnNatural History Museum, where the remains of mermaids, unicorns, British big cats and other curiosities augment and build on several themes explored in Monsters of the Deep. I should also add that we have an outstanding shop, stocked with numerous books, toys, souvenirs and other things relevant to our monstrous, maritime theme.
Caption: our shop is amazing! Yes, I may have been involved in the choice of objects… Images: NMMC/Darren Naish.
Monsters of the Deep has been well received in reviews. 2020 being what it is, it hasn’t been visited or reviewed as much as would be the case in a normal year, but the articles I’ve seen so far – like Simon Ings’ piece in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine (Ings 2020) – are suitably positive and effusive. It was a huge thrill and privilege to be involved in the creation of this exhibition, I’m enormously proud of it and happy with it, and I hope you like it too, should you get to see it. It was a pleasure and an honour to work with Stuart, Tammy, the many other curators, designers, scientists and artists involved in this grand project, and I look forward to similar events in the future.
Monsters of the Deep is on show until January 2022. For more information on the museum, please visit the website. Needless to say, it’s necessary at the moment to check in advance and book a visit time.
For previous TetZoo articles on sea monsters and related topics, see…
Book Review: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, November 2014
My New Book Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, February 2016
Usborne’s All About Monsters, April 2019
Sea Monster Sightings and the ‘Plesiosaur Effect’, April 2019
A Review of Robert L. France’s Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent, November 2019
Support my writing, research, and the persistence of this blog here at patreon. Thanks!
Refs - -
Heuvelmans, B. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. Hill and Wang, New York.
Magin, U. 1996. St George without a dragon: Bernard Heuvelmans and the sea serpent. In Moore, S. (ed) Fortean Studies Volume 3. John Brown Publishing (London), pp. 223-234.
Naish, D. 2000. Where be monsters? Fortean Times 132, 40-44.
Naish, D. 2001. Sea serpents, seals and coelacanths: an attempt at a holistic approach to the identity of large aquatic cryptids. In Simmons, I. & Quin, M. (eds) Fortean Studies Volume 7. John Brown Publishing (London), pp. 75-94.
Naish, D. 2017. Hunting Monsters. Arcturus, London.
Shuker, K. P. N. 1995. In Search of Prehistoric Survivors. Blandford, London.
Van Duzer, C. 2013. Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps. The British Library, London.
Viscardi, P., Hollinshead, A., MacFarlane, R. & Moffatt, J.2014. Mermaids uncovered. Journal of Museum Ethnography 27, 98-116.
