HMS Daedalus

On March 18th, the Princess came on board the Jupiter, the flagship of the squadron, and arrived in England on April 5th after a fair passage, but a voyage about as long as that to the Cape of Good Hope nowadays.

Francis notes in the log of the Glory that while cruising, the Rattler cutter joined company and informed us she yesterday spoke HMS Daedalus, a matter of some interest to him as Charles was then on board the Daedalus as midshipman under Captain Thomas Williams.

Captain Williams had married Jane Cooper, a cousin of Jane Austen, who was inclined to tease him about his having no taste in names.

The following extract from one of her letters to Cassandra touches on nearly all these facts.

The Victorian sea serpent craze was almost literally the mass media reflection of Mary Enning's fossils.

In 1848, the crew of HMS Daedalus even swore they had seen a sea serpent nearly 20 meters long in the Mid-Atlantic headlines ran across London.

the royal society was obliged to respond and the idea of great prehistoric creatures still living sank deep into the victorian public mind fifty years before spicer saw neck by the lake shore road the western world already carried the image of the ancient creature still alive in its head waiting only for a concrete setting to pour it into but this is where the numbers begin to speak and each number punches a hole in the theory the first hole is called the ice age as told in stage i lochness has existed in its present shape only since the ice withdrew some ten thousand years ago before that all of scotland lay buried under sheet of ice hundreds of metres thick so heavy it even bowed the crust of the earth which is still rising a few millimeters a year like a mattress regaining its spring sixty-six million years and ten thousand years are separated by a gap no creature can swim across The Plesosaurs went extinct before Loch Ness existed, by a factor of 66,000.

To keep the theory standing, one is forced to imagine a population of Plesosaurs surviving somewhere, see, then swimming up into the loch through the river system after the ice melted, in which case the barrier merely changes its name.

It's actually a document filed with the British Admiraly-- Admiralty.

So on August sixth, 1848, a Royal Navy, uh, boat called the HMS, uh, Daedalus is sailing home from East India, somewhere in the South Atlantic s-- you know, sea between the Cape, uh, of Good Hope and Saint Helena.

So open waters, calm afternoon, uh, calm sea, late afternoon, around five o'clock.

This is a real account.

HMS Dedalus, South Atlantic, 6th of August 1848.

HMS Daedalus was an old ship by 1848.

She'd been built as a 46-gun frigate in 1826 and never used as one.

The Navy cut her down to a 20-gun corvette in the 1840s and sent her out to the East Indies and China.

It didn't turn for the ship.

It was going somewhere southwest at about 15 miles an hour, and the ship simply happened to be in the way.

However, the Daedalus has a second witness who wrote it down, and he doesn't quite agree with his captain.

Lieutenant Drummond, the officer of the watch, kept a journal, and he published his entry that December.

On March 18th, the Princess came on board the Jupiter, the flagship of the squadron, and arrived in England on April 5th after a fair passage, but a voyage about as long as that to the Cape of Good Hope nowadays.

Francis notes in the log of the Glory that while cruising, the Rattler cutter joined company and informed us she yesterday spoke HMS Daedalus, a matter of some interest to him, as Charles was then on board the Daedalus as midshipman under Captain Thomas Williams.

Captain Williams had married Jane Cooper, a cousin of Jane Austen, who was inclined to tease him about his having no taste in names.

The following extract from one of her letters to Cassandra touches on nearly all these facts.