The Longest Snake in the World June 16, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
British newspapers gave a couple of acres of space between 1800 and 2000 to ‘monster snakes’ discovered in this or that corner of the Green & Pleasant land. Typically a vicar in Devon had found an adder that measured two and a half feet long… However, leaving the shores of Britain behind there were better and more dramatic examples from around the globe: ones that beat ‘a snake measuring thirty nine inches in length… at Chaffacombe’ [1860] . Going from medium to almost unbelievable a seven and a half foot snake was captured in Belfast, Ireland in March 1892, something that only appears here because Ireland by rights should not have any snakes! In 1950 a French hunter shot a thirteen foot snake at St Jean D’Angely: this seems to be well documented. In 1849 the American newspapers celebrated the arrival in New York of a thirty foot showman’s snake: this was before it got off the ship so the chances are it was just over ten when measured. ‘It took 126 negroes seven hours to secure this monster’. There is a monster snake recorded for Tennessee in 1868 that was reckoned to measure about thirty feet: it reared, in any case, twenty feet into the air! It was never killed though. In Travels in the Interior of Brazil (1846), we learn of a 37 foot boa that the author, Gardner, had not, though, personally witnessed, but that had been killed some months before he arrived in the area. The Buffalo Daily Republic recorded in 1855 the capture of a snake that measured over a hundred feet in length and that may have been aquatic: it came out of Silver Lake. This sounds like American fantasy journalism. Percy Fawcett killed, on the Rio Albuna in Brazil a sixty-foot anaconda in an expedition that began in 1907. In 1948 a snake was killed in Guaporé with five hundred machine gun bullets: ah cryptozoology is wonderful. It measured some 130 feet in length: mmmm…
Three facts to take away though from this little history. (i) snakes are extremely difficult to measure because curves are difficult to measure (ideally long snakes need to be straightened out, which often involves killing them); (ii) we have previously averted to the ‘atavistic fireworks’ that snakes set off in the head, it is frightening to be in their presence and errors of calculation are only natural; (iii) and the present world record for a snake is 25 ft in captivity, and almost 33 ft in the wild (Sulawesi, Indonesia). There are forty foot fossil snakes from South America, which are suggestive. Can anyone better or add to these measurements of monster snakes, credibility is not an issue, credulousness (one of our most human traits), of course, is? Drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
29 June 2015, Bruce T writes: You’ve probably been bombed with this one, but there is the case of 50 foot snake a Belgian helicopter pilot took a photo of in the Katanga province of the Congo in 1959. I think it’s a phony, but Google “Giant Congo Snake”. The photo and the tale are covered several times.
