For the first time, an aquatic biologist and ethnozoologist presents the definitive history of the phenomena and carefully examines the evidence behind the Gloucester Sea Serpent. It is early ...evidence for what is today recognized as being one of the most serious threats to marine biodiversity: entanglement in fishing gear and maritime debris.
This article examines the dog-like aspects and associations of two marine monsters of Graeco-Roman antiquity: Scylla and the κῆτος. Both harbour recognizably canine features in their depictions in ...ancient art, as well as being referenced as dogs or possessing dog-like attributes in ancient texts. The article argues that such distinctly canine elements are related to, and probably an extension of, the conceptualization of certain marine animals, most prominently sharks, as ‘sea dogs’. Accordingly, we should understand these two sea monsters and the sea dogs as being interrelated in the ancient imagination. Such a canine resonance to certain sea creatures offers a valuable insight into the Graeco-Roman imagination of the marine element as being the abode of creatures reminiscent of terrestrial dogs.
In 1881 George Drevar, a merchant captain who had survived a shipwreck in the Cape Verde Islands, was tried at the Old Bailey for libel and threatening the life of the Commissioner of Wreck, Henry ...Cadogan Rothery, in part because of a disagreement over the existence of the great sea serpent. This article explains the background to the trial, including Drevar's own sea serpent sightings, the trial's eventual outcome and some later related events in Drevar's life. Drevar's actions seem to have been driven by mental illness caused by the stress of shipwreck coupled with a fervent religiosity with regard to the sea serpent.
The article revisits the collaborative project of two early missionaries to China, Robert Morrison and William Milne, who overcame the ‘practical impossibility’ of translating the Protestant Bible ...into Chinese in 1823. The issues of the doctrinal constraints, the influence of the contemporary English translations, faithfulness to the Hebrew text and cultural sensitivity to the target language will be raised with reference to concrete examples cited from their joint translation version. The creation account of Genesis and passages on the rendering of the biblical ‘sea monsters’ into Chinese will be selected for focused study in order to show how Morrison and Milne were influenced by the KJV but at times departed from it in their reading of the original Hebrew text. Furthermore, it is also noted that they have shown a certain degree of sensitivity to the Chinese cultural context in their choice of terminology in translating the biblical text into Chinese.
Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture offers its readers an in-depth and interdisciplinary engagement with the sea and its monstrous inhabitants; through critical readings of ...folklore, weird fiction, film, music, radio and digital games. Within the text there are a multitude of convergent critical perspectives used to engage and explore fictional and real monsters of the sea in media and folklore. The collection features chapters from a variety of academic perspectives; post- modernism, psychoanalysis, industrial-organisational analysis, fandom studies, sociology and philosophy are featured. Under examination are a wide range of narratives and media forms that represent, reimagine and create the Kraken, mermaids, giant sharks, sea draugrs and even the weird creatures of H.P. Lovecraft. Beasts of the Deep offers an expansive study of our sea-born fears and anxieties, that are crystallised in a variety of monstrous forms. Repeatedly the chapters in the collection encounter the contemporary relevance of our fears of the sea and its inhabitants – through the dehumanising media depictions of refugees in the Mediterranean to the encroaching ecological disasters of global warming, pollution and the threat of mass marine extinction.
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