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In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents
Second Printing April 1969
645 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1958
6 people are currently reading
374 people want to read
About the author
Bernard Heuvelmans
19 books18 followersBelgian-French scientist, explorer, researcher, and a considered to be the father of cryptozoology. Heuvelmans held an degree in zoology.
His 1958 work "On the track of unknown animals" is considered to be an standard work in cryptozoology. Later he also published books on more specific topics like sea serpents.
In 1975 he founded the "International Society of Cryptozoology" and served as its first president. He also served as the first president of the Centre for Fortean Zoology. In 1999 he donated about 50.000 documents and photos to the zoology museum in Switzerland.
His 1958 work "On the track of unknown animals" is considered to be an standard work in cryptozoology. Later he also published books on more specific topics like sea serpents.
In 1975 he founded the "International Society of Cryptozoology" and served as its first president. He also served as the first president of the Centre for Fortean Zoology. In 1999 he donated about 50.000 documents and photos to the zoology museum in Switzerland.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 24, 2020
This is the definitive guide to all of the known sightings of sea serpents.
Long as it is I would be quite happy if it were twice as long.
The author did try to objectively analyze most of the sightings.
I remember reading this book when I was 20 years old and practically having a peak experience.
I just love these types of books.
I will also just comment. Nobody could read this entire book and not be honestly convinced that there isn't a lot of substance to this whole topic.
For anybody who is interested in marine cryptozoology, this is the definitive book. It is also quite interesting IMHO.
Long as it is I would be quite happy if it were twice as long.
The author did try to objectively analyze most of the sightings.
I remember reading this book when I was 20 years old and practically having a peak experience.
I just love these types of books.
I will also just comment. Nobody could read this entire book and not be honestly convinced that there isn't a lot of substance to this whole topic.
For anybody who is interested in marine cryptozoology, this is the definitive book. It is also quite interesting IMHO.
August 25, 2011
GREAT fun. I can't believe it, but the author's won me over. I can see that in future I shall bore my neighbors at parties on the topic of sea serpents.
Highly recommend this book! Very detailed, very heavily researched, very well-organized - and very readable. Unusually so. I bogged down about midway through under the sheer weight of the research, but even so, it was a fun and interesting read. From time to time I thought Heuvelmans guilty of the kind of assuming/generalizing that he accused other scientists of, but only from time to time. For the most part he let the evidence speak for itself.
And the evidence definitely speaks for the existence of sea serpents.
I'll be looking out his other book, On the Track of Unknown Animals. It's a pity it seems near impossible to get hold of in English.
Highly recommend this book! Very detailed, very heavily researched, very well-organized - and very readable. Unusually so. I bogged down about midway through under the sheer weight of the research, but even so, it was a fun and interesting read. From time to time I thought Heuvelmans guilty of the kind of assuming/generalizing that he accused other scientists of, but only from time to time. For the most part he let the evidence speak for itself.
And the evidence definitely speaks for the existence of sea serpents.
I'll be looking out his other book, On the Track of Unknown Animals. It's a pity it seems near impossible to get hold of in English.
October 27, 2023
Mixed thoughts here. This has always been (circa when I was like 13-16 ish) the one book I've wanted to find a copy of, and the price of, what, £40 or so, has gone from "Mayber if I win the lottery when I'm an adult" to "I'm now an adult I have more than £40 I can buy this". But it's perhaps not as fun to read as I'd hoped.
Obviously, for its premise, "fun" isn't really what it's going for. It's a relatively practical analysis of as many accounts of sea serpent sightings that the author (field-leading-expert-albeit-of-this-field Bernard Heuvelmans) could find (a total of about 570 or something).
Heuvelmans' goal here was to put across the argument that there ARE sea serpents out there, and also to identify their true nature. He goes about both of these in a slightly odd way.
A great deal is constantly made of the characters of each witness. He says that certain people, such as a former mayor etc., could not possibly lie. This is all emphasised relatively strongly at the start of their introduction. This goes a few ways, in that those who are not former mayors are the honest and hardworking type who would not lie about seeing such things equally.
However, when he doesn't like what someone says, or thinks it's a hoax (not that these cases aren't), he really does go off so hard on them it's so funny lol. It's not really formally written most of the time, and there is a friendly tone throughout, but the occasional moment where he seems absolutely furious is sort of really really funny (the moha moha in particular).
The conclusion is a bit weird. I remember it being the case in Unknown Animals too, but although he's a bit overly believing in the things that are like clearly not real, he does maintain a kind of distance and caution in his wording that you only really notice when it comes time for him to say what his thoughts are, and they're no less unreasonable than whatever it was he was saying couldn't be the case.
Also when he's reaching the modern day (I don't think I mentioned this, but there's like 400 pages of roughly chronological sea serpent encounters composing most of the book) he mentions renowned cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson and he keeps bringing his name up afterwards like "Ivan Sanderson told me that maybe..." and it's sort of nice? A nice friendship?
The biggest detail I've learned is that true snakes undulate horizontally. This is repeated on each page, and compared and contrasted with whether or not other animals undulate horizontally or maybe vertically. If a nice person sees a sea serpent that agrees with Heuvelmans and it undulates the wrong way then they were probably mistaken, if someone sees a sea serpent that undulates the wrong way but makes a few too many other changes from the Heuvelplan, then they are a fucking monster who deserve to be mocked by the presss maybe they've been drinking too much??
BREAKING: Fool claims to see sea serpent: Clearly they are wrong.
Oh,also, the big, most major reveal comes at page 491:
Obviously, for its premise, "fun" isn't really what it's going for. It's a relatively practical analysis of as many accounts of sea serpent sightings that the author (field-leading-expert-albeit-of-this-field Bernard Heuvelmans) could find (a total of about 570 or something).
Heuvelmans' goal here was to put across the argument that there ARE sea serpents out there, and also to identify their true nature. He goes about both of these in a slightly odd way.
A great deal is constantly made of the characters of each witness. He says that certain people, such as a former mayor etc., could not possibly lie. This is all emphasised relatively strongly at the start of their introduction. This goes a few ways, in that those who are not former mayors are the honest and hardworking type who would not lie about seeing such things equally.
However, when he doesn't like what someone says, or thinks it's a hoax (not that these cases aren't), he really does go off so hard on them it's so funny lol. It's not really formally written most of the time, and there is a friendly tone throughout, but the occasional moment where he seems absolutely furious is sort of really really funny (the moha moha in particular).
The conclusion is a bit weird. I remember it being the case in Unknown Animals too, but although he's a bit overly believing in the things that are like clearly not real, he does maintain a kind of distance and caution in his wording that you only really notice when it comes time for him to say what his thoughts are, and they're no less unreasonable than whatever it was he was saying couldn't be the case.
Also when he's reaching the modern day (I don't think I mentioned this, but there's like 400 pages of roughly chronological sea serpent encounters composing most of the book) he mentions renowned cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson and he keeps bringing his name up afterwards like "Ivan Sanderson told me that maybe..." and it's sort of nice? A nice friendship?
The biggest detail I've learned is that true snakes undulate horizontally. This is repeated on each page, and compared and contrasted with whether or not other animals undulate horizontally or maybe vertically. If a nice person sees a sea serpent that agrees with Heuvelmans and it undulates the wrong way then they were probably mistaken, if someone sees a sea serpent that undulates the wrong way but makes a few too many other changes from the Heuvelplan, then they are a fucking monster who deserve to be mocked by the presss maybe they've been drinking too much??
BREAKING: Fool claims to see sea serpent: Clearly they are wrong.
Oh,also, the big, most major reveal comes at page 491:
February 13, 2020
I checked this book out of Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, Ida Williams Branch, a lot in early 1970s; I remember nothing, except what fun these subjects are to learn about. For some reason, I remember it shelved in the Children's section, but I also went to this Dewey Decimal section upstairs in Adult stacks, so I could be remembering wrong. I would check out every book I could find on Sea monsters, Loch Ness, UFO/flying saucers, unseen and occult subjects, until about 1974-5, when I started to '"mature." But, yow! More things than are dreamt of in our philosophies...
July 24, 2022
I have a small koi pond – approximately 10’ x 10’ – in my backyard, currently overgrown with lilies, parrot’s feather, and other plants. To my knowledge there are no koi currently living there; the only inhabitant, maybe, is a water snake of unknown species about as long as my forearm. I’ve been looking for the snake since springtime and his elusive nature has been much on my mind as I reread Bernard Heuvelmans’ cryptozoology masterpiece.
Heuvelmans was a French zoologist and one of the fathers of the science of unknown animals. This collection of sea serpent lore covers sightings going back centuries, with a strong focus on the 19th and early 20th centuries. The weight of the evidence is stunning – so many accounts by people in positions of responsibility and so many that are completely undramatic save for the strangeness and size of the observed creature. Heuvelmans compiles his data and concludes that the sea serpent isn’t one creature but possibly as many as nine different species with habitats and habits that can be determined from the eyewitness accounts, a scientific approach to a sensational subject. The bottom line is that almost none of these animals are serpents, but rather unknown cetaceans or other mammals, though evidence exists for giant eels too.
I was struck by the way the sightings reflect their ages – older accounts are serpentine; stories following the discovery of prehistoric aquatic “reptiles” describe plesiosaurs; and accounts from the middle of the 20th Century sometimes mirror movies. The saddest story in the book is the tale of HMS Hilary, a warship in the Great War, that encountered a huge, unknown animal and, after verifying that it was indeed unknown, used it for fatal target practice. Indeed, many of these encounters end badly for the “monsters” under observation. Hard not to think that the reason we don’t hear more about big, mysterious sea creatures today is that they have gone the way of Steller’s Sea Cow and the Quagga, or perhaps the blankness of the sea reflects a modern skepticism about the world.
In any case, the book is excellent, not just as a work of cryptozoology but as an index to human societies and their relationship to the oceans over the past four centuries. It hasn’t done a thing though to help me catch and relocate that water snake.
Heuvelmans was a French zoologist and one of the fathers of the science of unknown animals. This collection of sea serpent lore covers sightings going back centuries, with a strong focus on the 19th and early 20th centuries. The weight of the evidence is stunning – so many accounts by people in positions of responsibility and so many that are completely undramatic save for the strangeness and size of the observed creature. Heuvelmans compiles his data and concludes that the sea serpent isn’t one creature but possibly as many as nine different species with habitats and habits that can be determined from the eyewitness accounts, a scientific approach to a sensational subject. The bottom line is that almost none of these animals are serpents, but rather unknown cetaceans or other mammals, though evidence exists for giant eels too.
I was struck by the way the sightings reflect their ages – older accounts are serpentine; stories following the discovery of prehistoric aquatic “reptiles” describe plesiosaurs; and accounts from the middle of the 20th Century sometimes mirror movies. The saddest story in the book is the tale of HMS Hilary, a warship in the Great War, that encountered a huge, unknown animal and, after verifying that it was indeed unknown, used it for fatal target practice. Indeed, many of these encounters end badly for the “monsters” under observation. Hard not to think that the reason we don’t hear more about big, mysterious sea creatures today is that they have gone the way of Steller’s Sea Cow and the Quagga, or perhaps the blankness of the sea reflects a modern skepticism about the world.
In any case, the book is excellent, not just as a work of cryptozoology but as an index to human societies and their relationship to the oceans over the past four centuries. It hasn’t done a thing though to help me catch and relocate that water snake.
October 7, 2021
Does 600 pages of meticulously researched reporting on the phenomenon of Sea Serpents sound like a good time to you? It does? Then there's no better book that this, one of the founding texts of modern cryptozoology. Heuvelmans spent 10 years pouring through old letters, newspaper articles, ships logs and first hand testimonies to bring we, the lucky public, story after story of unwary sailors bumping into very strange beasties on the open sea. What might the nature of these creatures be? Are they surviving dinosaurs? Gigantic otters? Monstrous eels? Or something even WEIRDER?
So this was a deep dive (hee) but I loved every minute spent in this tome of scaled tales and sincere speculation. Whether or not you follow Heuvelmans musings (and not even all of his fellow cryptozoologists did) there's no denying the man loved his subject matter. And, like the very best of these kinds of books, it almost makes you wonder if, just maybe...
NOTE: It turns out the English edition has some bonuses over the original French, with a (heavily abridged) version of Heuvelmans' book on the Giant Squid and Octopus included, along with a good number of new Sea Serpent sightings.
So this was a deep dive (hee) but I loved every minute spent in this tome of scaled tales and sincere speculation. Whether or not you follow Heuvelmans musings (and not even all of his fellow cryptozoologists did) there's no denying the man loved his subject matter. And, like the very best of these kinds of books, it almost makes you wonder if, just maybe...
NOTE: It turns out the English edition has some bonuses over the original French, with a (heavily abridged) version of Heuvelmans' book on the Giant Squid and Octopus included, along with a good number of new Sea Serpent sightings.
September 2, 2018
A classic of cryptozoology, this English-translation of Heuvelman's major reference work on all things relating to Sea-Serpents, jam-packed with accounts of over 200 historical sightings, a speculative biology and taxonomy, and numerous illustrations, is a wonderful read regardless of whatever you think about its subject matter. As a bonus this US edition also includes chapters of his notes on the giant squid, as it was then understood in the 1960s, not reprinted in English anywhere else. Sadly this amazing work has been out of print for over 50 years : I got my rather worn copy by post from a rare-book dealer in New York for about £50 (exc. postage), but hunting a copy down is well worth your time.
October 28, 2019
Most books are rated related to their usefulness and contributions to my research.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
February 24, 2017
Academic & detailed; enlightening if you're interested in the subject.
November 9, 2024
You don't have to believe it to enjoy it
April 24, 2023
Absorbing and exhaustive look into a centuries-old mystery by a relatively clear-headed zoologist. No overly fantastical claims are made, but a strong case is put forth for large, undiscovered megafauna in our oceans.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews