Massachusetts History

Nahant (Lynn) Massachusetts Sea Monster

Nahant was part of Lynn until the mid-1800′s.   Following is from an 1886 Lynn History.

This strange wanderer of the seas can scarcely be classed as an exclusively Lynn institution, but in the early part of the present century he created a tremendous sensation here and hereabouts. That there was such a visitor to our shores and bay in the early summer of 1819 and several seasons after, is true past question ; it was through attempts to describe him, and worse still, to estimate his length, that many reputations well established as to truth and veracity received a wrench from which they have never recovered.

 When Col, T. H. Perkins, a well-known resident of Boston, was asked by an English friend whether he had heard of the sea serpent, he replied : ” Unfortunately I have seen it.” He felt that a shadow had somehow closed in upon him from which he was unable to emerge.

His snakeship’s comings were as unannounced as his departures were unceremonious, and he was frequently seen taking his morning swim along the shores, his head elevated at a good sight-seeing distance above the waves.

 
Whether the people he saw were too inquisitive, or the country not to his liking, is not known, but he declined to fix his residence here, though no doubt he could have made very advantageous terms as a permanent summer attraction.
A recently published letter by a fellow townsman gives as good a description of him as any we have seen.

Lynn, Mass., June 26, 1881.
Mr. C. F. Holder.

Dear Sir: — Yours of the 34th inst. came duly to hand, and, in reply
to that part of it relating to the account given by myself of a strange fish, serpent, or some other marine animal called a sea serpent, I have to say that I saw him on a pleasant, calm summer morning of August, 1S19, from Long Beach, Lynn, now Nahant. At this time he was about a quarter of a mile away ; but the water was so smooththat I could plainly see his head and the motion of his body, but not distinctly enough to give a good description of him. Later in the day I saw him again off ‘ Red Rock.’ He then passed along about one hundred feet from where I stood, withhead about two feet out of the water, and his speed was about the ordinary of a common steamer. What I saw of his length was from fifty to sixty feet.

It was very difficult to count the bunches or humps (not fins) upon his back, as, by the undulating motion, they did not all appear at once. This accounts, in part, for the varied descriptions given of him by different parties.

His appearance upon the surface of the water was occasional and but for a short time. The color of his skin was dark, differing but little from the water, or the back of any common fish.

This is the best description I can give of him from my own observation, and I saw the monster just as truly, although not quite so clearly, as I ever saw anything.

This matter has been treated by many as a hoax, fish story, or a seaside phenomenon to bring trade and profit to the watering-places ; but, nothwithstanding all this, there is no doubt in my mind that some kind of an uncommon or strange rover in the form of a snake or a serpent, called an ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, or some other long-named marine animal, has been seen by hundreds of men and boys in our own, if not in other waters. And five jDersons beside myself — Amos Lawrence, Samuel Cabot and James Prince, of Boston, Benjamin F. Newhall, of Saugus, and John Marston, of Swampscott — bore public testimony of having seen him at the time.

Yours Truly,

Nathan D. Chase.”

The gentlemen named were all interviewed at the time, and their testimony, to make it, if possible, more conclusive, was sworn to before a magistrate, and differed only in detail from that of JSIr. Chase, except that Mr. Marston thought he might have been a hundred feet long. At various times and in various places, from Nahant to Nova Scotia, his serpentine majesty has suddenly raised his head above the waves, carrying wonder and affright to the hearts of all beholders.

All tell about the same story of him with the exception of the crew of the bark “Pauline,” of London. Their testimony, taken before a magistrate at Liverpool, was :

“Borough of Liverpool, in the County Palatine of Lancaster, to wit:
We, the undersigned, captain, officers and crew of the bark Pauline of Liverpool, in the County of Lancaster, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, do solemnly and sincerely declare that on July 8th, 1S75, in latitute5 deg. S. and longitude 35 deg. W., we observed three large sperm whales, and one of them was gripped round the body withtwo turns of what appeared to be a huge serpent. The head and tail appeared to have a lengthbeyond the coils of about thirty feet, and its girth eight or nine feet. The serpent whirled its victim round and round for about fifteen minutes, and then suddenly dragged the whale to the bottom head first. George Drevar, Master; Horatio Thompson, John Henderson Landells, Owen Baker, William Lewarn.”

That was quite a fish story, but it by no means measured their capacity in that line, for five days later three of the same ship’s crew made affidavit that they had seen the serpent, his head “elevated some sixty feet in the air.” What length of body and tail would be required to enable the serpent to elevate his head sixty feet in the air, we leave for others to figure out ; but it seems a pitv that they could not have been contented to let a good enough storv alone. At intervals during these later years this strange wanderer of the seas has put in an appearance now here, now there ; but those across whose path he has swum ha\e l)e- come verv guarded in their references to him, owing, possibly, to sundrv unkind references to the unaqueous condition of their ship stores. But the local descriptions given of this king of the serpents have attracted wide attention in scientific circles, and even inspired one poet’s muse :

” Welter upon the waters, mighty one,

And stretch thee in the ocean’s trough of brine;
Turn thy wet scales up to the wind and sun.

And toss the billows from thy flashing fin;

Heave thy deep breathings to the ocean’s din,
And bound upon its ridges in thy pride;

Or dive down to its lowest depths, and in
The caverns where its unknown monsters hide.
Measure thy length beneath the gulf stream tide;

Dr rest thee on the navel of that sea
Where, floating on the maelstrom, abide

The Krakens, sheltering under Norway’s lee —
But go not to Nahant, lest men should swear
You are a great deal bigger than you are.”

— J. G. Brainerd

Mary Pitcher of Nahant, Massachusetts

Nahant was originally part of Lynn, Massachusetts.  This is from an 1886 Lynn History.

Moll Pitcher was no witch, though doubtless if she had lived in the days of the witchcraft frenzy, she would have been hanged as such with little ceremony. But it was less than three quarters of a century ago that she lived in her little cottage, opposite the head of Pearl street, on the north side of Essex, where for fifty years she solved the doubts and mysteries which troubled her contemporaries.

Her father, Capt. John Dimond, commanded a small vessel sailing out of Marblehead. She was born in 1738, and early married Robert Pitcher, a Lynn shoemaker — a man of no force of character — and the chief burden of the support of the little family, one son and three daughters, early fell on her. Her ancestors had borne a reputation as wizards of greater or less attainment, a favorite accomplishment of her grandfather having been to pace up and down among the graves in the churchyard during the most furious storms, and direct the course of vessels attempting to make the harbor, his voice plainly audible to the sailors, no matter how loudly the storm might roar, or how far out the vessel might be.

With such a reputation ready-made in the family, it is, perhaps, little wonder that young Mistress Pitcher sought to lighten the pressure of poverty by the exercise of her inherited  gifts. But whatever was the motive that first impelled her to practice the art of soothsaying, her early success was great, and her fame spread until her musical name became a household word not only throughout this land and England, but in every port where the Yankee sailor spun his yarns, were related stories of the Lynn pythoness, which doubtless suffered no loss of embellishment or detail because of the inborn credulity of the sailor boys.  Her powers lay in no special direction, but she was sought alike by the swain in doubt as to the feelings of his fair one ; by the maiden anxious to know of the safety of her sailor lover ; by the sailor, to know if he should have a safe return ; by the merchant, solicitous of the success of his ventures ; and by the noble, to learn the future course of the affairs of state.

Mary Pitcher's Cottage, Nahant, Massachusetts

The well-worn path to her cottage was trodden by rich and poor, high and low, alike. No matter what their station in the outside world, within the brown cottage beneath the shadow of High Rock, in the presence of the renowned fortune-teller, they stood on a common level, and for a consideration could learn the whereabouts of lost property or friends, or get the merest peep behind the curtain of the future.

Lewis, who was familiar with her appearance, having known her, leaves a picture very different from the fancy sketch of the Quaker bard : ” She was of medium height and size for a woman, with a good form and agreeable manners.  Her head, phrenologically considered, was somewhat capacious, her forehead broad and full, her hair dark brown, her nose inclining to be long, and her face pale and thin. Her cormtenance was intellectual, and she had the contour of face and expression which, without being positively beautiful, is nevertheless decidedly interesting, — a thoughtful, pensive, sometimes downcast look, almost approaching to melancholy, — an eye, when she looked at you, of calm and keen penetration, — and an expression of intelligent discernment half mingled with a glance of shrewdness.”

What was the secret of the remarkable power of Moll Pitcher? Here she dwelt all the years of a long life, going in and out before the people, her life open before them ; reputable, charitable, and given to no occult or mysterious rites other than scanning the bottom of a tea-cup or musing over the cards, and it is most likely that she had little regard for these ceremonies, but used them to gain time while cautiously watching her visitors for a clue to their history or desires ; but more often she calmly looked her customers over and talked with them face to face.

Her fame increased with her years. The stories that are told of her achievements, not only in piercing the secrets of the future, but in solving the mysteries of the curreat happenings, would rouse the smile of incredulity were they not recorded by persons of undoubted veracity and reliability. Possibly to great native shrewdness and tact in divining the hidden thoughts and desires of her visitors was added in a high degree the clairvoyant faculty ; but probably most of her revelations could be accounted for without resort to this intangible quality. According to the proverb, “it is the unexpected that happens ;” not that the occurences of every day are not the natural outcome of antecedent acts, but because men, in forming their expectations, ordinarily think along the line of their desires, rather than according to the logic of the events of their past lives. If, therefore, the sibyl, having gained from the unsuspecting guest the main facts of his life to the time of their meeting, has the logical force to deduce from them their natural outcome in his after years, the ” fortune ” which she may tell him will very likely be vastly different from his anticipations, but will probably be the things which must inevitably result from his course of life.

To a mind on the alert and trained by long experience the slightest admission may be a sufficient clew to the secret of a life. Doubtless Moll Pitcher made a great many mistakes. These would be little heard of and soon forgotten, but a prediction verified under extraordinary circunstances was sure to be talked of as a wonder, and to lose nothing in each repetition ; and among the thousands who sought her counsel, there could hardly fail of being many who would unconsciously furnish her with the data for a wonderfully accurate “fortune.” But even this supposition will not satisfactorily account for many of her achievements in her peculiar line, and it is easier to lay the secret of them at the door of clairvoyance than to trace them to their actual origin.

Whatever was the secret of her power, she was the most successful fortune-teller of her day ; she had no equals among her predecessors, and since she died there has been none like her.

The home she lived in still stands near its old foundation, on Essex, at the head of Pearl street. If only its walls could be induced to tell the many strange things they have heard in their day, and the names of all the persons who crossed the sibyl’s palm with the magic key to her
knowledge of the future, what a wondrously interesting story could be written !

She was married on the 2nd of October, 1760, and died April 9th, 1813.

One of the earliest known works of poet John Greenleaf Whitter was about her. Titled “Moll Pitcher”