Failing that, I did the next best thing and on the white dodger board in front of me I made sketches of the animal, full face and profile, for the thing was turning its head from side to side for all the world as a bird will on a lawn between its pecks. So strange an animal was it that I remember crying out: ‘It's alive!’ One has heard such yarns about these monsters and cocked a speculative eye at the teller, that I wished as never before that I had a camera in my hands. It was a sea monster! It was no more than fifty feet from the ship’s side when we passed it, and so both I and the junior officer had a good sight of it. Five years before he commanded the Carpathia to rescue the survivors of Titanic, Arthur Rostron - as an officer on Cunard Line’s RMS Campania, saw a sea serpent - an event he details in his memoirs 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. DID YOU KNOW: Captain Arthur Rostron of the Carpathia believed that he had seen a sea monster during his career at sea? Sea monsters, not confined to the lore of Ancient Greece or Columbus, have been used by sailors for centuries to explain unfamiliar animals spotted while on a voyage.
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