By Pauline Murphy

Arthur Henry Rostron was the captain of RMS Carpathia which rescued the survivors of the Titanic from the icy waters of the north Atlantic in April 1912. Five years before he found fame following his Titanic exploits, Captain Rostron was a witness to a strange sea creature in the waters off the coast of Cork.

It was early on Friday evening, the 26th of April 1907, when Rostron was acting as chief officer on board the Cunard passenger ship RMS Campania. While sailing off Cork’s Galley Head, Rostron noticed something sticking out of the water. He called out to the junior officer H.C. Birnie on the bridge to keep clear of the snag up ahead.

Rostron recalled the incident in his 1931 memoir ‘Home from the Sea’: “We swung away a point but gradually drew nearer so that we were able to make out what the unusual thing was. It was a sea monster! It was no more than fifty feet from the ship’s side when we passed it, and both I and the junior officer had a good sight of it.”

Rostron did not have a camera but he did have a piece of chalk and immediately sketched an image of the strange creature on a wooden panel of the ship. In his memoir he described it’s appearance: “We were close enough to realise it’s head rose eight or nine feet out of the water, while the trunk of the neck was fully twelve inches thick.”

Rostron told how his ship’s captain did not believe him when he informed him of what he saw: “The captain had just gone below for dinner. The last order he gave me before descending was to keep a good look out for Galley Head and the first question he asked me when he came onto the bridge was ‘Have you seen anything, Rostron?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, “a sea serpent!”

Rostron gave an interview to the Daily Mail newspaper when the Campania docked at Liverpool. He described the strange creature he saw off the Cork coast to the newspaper thus: “There were two protuberances where eyes might have been, but I could see no eyes. It had very small ears in comparison with it’s enormous bulk.”

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