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The Phoenix Line steamship St Andrew was the centre of considerable excitement in 1906, having reported both a sea serpent and a ‘saucer’ entering the sea during the same summer, both events being seen – possibly – by a man called Spicer, or Spencer.

In fact, the St Andrew had already made the headlines that year. In May, during a strong gale, a number of animals being transported (“80 lions, 45 bears, a herd of elephants, 13 hyenas, five chimpanzees, a dozen mongoose, a drove of camels, 25 pumas, performing horses and ponies, a sacred white bull, dogs, kangaroos, and deer”) freed themselves from their cages and ran amok on the ship:

During a storm on May 3rd a wolf escaped, and got on the main deck. Matt Johnson… who had charge of the animals, and a dozen keepers went after the brute. He was chased round the deck several times, and then evaded capture by leaping into the sea. Almost at the same moment two lions, Victor and Madame, began a fight. Keepers with steel-tipped prods tried to force them apart, and in the process keeper Kennor had a piece bitten out of his leg. Victor killed Madame, and the lioness was thrown into the sea. Then a puma got loose, and attacked a little elephant. The elephant, however, looped its trunk round the puma and hammered it on the deck, afterwards trampling it to death. [1]

Four months later, the ship was in for a different treat, also concerning animals – known and unknown, this time. On 11 August 1906, a Saturday, the New York Times (p12) had this to say:

Sailors Think They Saw a Sea Serpent – Horses Loose in a Gale. When the Phoenix liner St Andrew, in yesterday from Antwerp, tied up at her pier in Hoboken, Bill Nagle, a sailor on the ship, announced that one week ago last Wednesday [8 Aug], when the vessel was in mid-ocean, he had sighted (with his own eyes) a bona fide, up-to-date sea serpent. The serpent, he declared, was at least 100ft long, was slick in spots, hairy in others, and had a hump amidships that looked as if it had swallowed a camel.

While the sea serpent yarn was a matter of great doubt on the part of many of the St Andrew’s officers, there was no doubt but that the story of the ruptions caused by a herd of Percheron horses that the St Andrew brought over was true. There were 280 of these horses, and when the St Andrew was nearing the Grand Banks several of them broke from their stalls in a gale. The animals ran about the deck, and it was the hardest [job] to calm them. Two of the animals got into the hold, while several others succeeded in visiting places where a horse never had been before. It took two hours to quiet the animals and get them back to their stalls. Fortunately, both animals and men escaped unhurt. [2]

Other New York newspapers reported the sea serpent story, and from one of these a New Zealand paper copied the story a few months later:

NEW YORK, August 11 — The “New York American” says that the chief officer, Mr Spicer, and the third officer, Mr Cuming, of the steamer St Andrew, belonging to the Phoenix Line, on their arrival here yester­day, made affidavits to the effect that while off Land’s End during their voyage to America, they and a wealthy cattle man named Peter Hupley, who was standing with them, distinctly saw a sea serpent. It was of enormous size, and about 18ft of its body was reared out of the water. The jaws were armed with great teeth, and the body would probably be about 5ft in circumference. For a minute it remained in full view, and then it plunged under the waves and was seen no more. [3]

If the ship’s chief officer and third officer had sworn affidavits that they and Mr Hupley had seen the creature, we wonder why the “yarn was a matter of great doubt on the part of many of the St. Andrew’s officers”.

We meet Spicer again, or someone with almost the same name, Spencer, in a sensational story that was told of the ship’s next crossing from Antwerp to Hoboken. One of the first reports on aerial anomalies to use the word “saucer”, this has become almost a classic. [4]

On Monday, 5 November 1906, the New York Times reported, this time on its first page:

A SHOWER OF METEORS AROUND THE ST ANDREW; One, Weighing Tons, Hit the Sea a Mile Away. A GREAT SHOW, EVEN BY DAY. Chief Officer Thinks Such Messengers from the Blue Have Sent Many a Ship Down.
When the Phoenix Line steamship St Andrew arrived from Antwerp yesterday Capt. Fitzgerald reported that the steamer had passed through a meteoric shower at 4:30 o’clock on Tuesday [29 October] about 600 miles northeast of Cape Race. The largest meteor observed fell into the sea less than a mile away. Had it struck the St Andrew, all hands would have perished.

Yesterday afternoon, Chief Officer VE Spencer, who was on the bridge when the meteors appeared, told what he saw there.

“On Tuesday afternoon,” said Mr. Spencer, “the weather was clear and bright, although there was little sunshine. Just after one bell, 4:30 o’clock, I saw three meteors fall into the water dead ahead of the ship one after another at a distance of about five miles. Although it was daylight, they left a red streak in the air from zenith to the horizon.

“Simultaneously, the third engineer shouted to me. I then saw a huge meteor on the port beam falling in a zigzag manner less than a mile away to the southward.

“We could distinctly hear the hissing of the water as it touched. It fell with a rocking motion, leaving a broad red streak in its wake. The meteor must have weighed several tons, and appeared to be from 10 to 15 feet in dia­meter. It was saucer shaped, which probably accounted for the peculiar rocking motion.

“When the mass of metal struck the water, the spray and steam rose to a height of at least 40ft, and for a few moments looked like the mouth of a crater. If it had been night, the meteor would have illumin­ated the sea for 50 or 60 miles. The hissing sound, like escaping steam, when it struck the water, was so loud that the chief engineer turned out of his berth and came on deck, thinking the sound came from the engine room. I have seen meteors all over the world, but never such a large one as this.”

Asked what would have happ­ened if the meteor tumbled on the St Andrew, Mr Spencer said:

“The ship would have been burned out immediately and every soul on board destroyed. I have no doubt that many of the vessels which have been lost at sea in apparently fine weather have been destroyed by falling meteors.”

Capt. Russ of the Hamburg-American steamer Brazilia, which arrived yesterday, about the same time as the St Andrew, reported having seen a large meteor at 7PM on Tuesday, Oct. 30, in latitude 47 degrees north and longitude 48 degrees west. This is believed to have been a part of the intermittent meteoric shower observed by the St Andrew earlier in the evening.

I have little doubt that the “chief officer, Mr Spicer” who saw the sea serpent, is identical to the “Chief Officer VE Spencer” who observed the meteors. This sighting was soon spread all over the globe, and made the antipodean newspapers some months later. [5] A slightly different version is told in other papers, when the awakened engineer is the one who draws Spicer’s attention to the spectacle:

METEORS AT SEA.
Recently the SS St Andrew (a Phoenix liner) from Antwerp to New York, had a narrow escape 60 miles from Cape Race, to the eastward. The first officer, V Spencer, who was on the bridge at the time, told how a big meteor with a flaming tail “a mile long” came zig-zagging out of the southern sky a half hour before sunset and disapp­eared in the sea with a roar and a sizzle that terrorised the crew, who saw the awful spectacle.

“I was standing on the bridge at half-past five,” said first officer Spencer yesterday, “when I saw three meteors ahead, about three miles away, flash as they fell, although it was before sundown. The sky was clouded, and I had hardly noticed the fall of the meteors when the chief engineer cried out from below deck ‘Look at that!’

“There, off to the south on our port beam, was a big meteor falling plainly less than a mile away, it appeared to be saucer shaped, and showed like a white-hot coal, full 15ft in diameter. Behind it streamed a shower of reddish fire, fully a mile long. While we were looking, the meteor was zig-zagging, I suppose on account of its shape, and plunged into the sea. Up rose clouds of steam, and the sea boiled for a space fully 500ft or 600ft in diameter for several minutes.

“While the flight lasted only a few seconds, it seemed an hour, we saw it so plainly, and had it struck our ship, it would have melted its way down through the steel hull and sent us without a moment’s warning to the bottom. Since I have thought of it, I believe that the phenomenon may explain the loss of ships never accounted for. It is not impossible for a ship to be caught in such a meteoric shower, which would mean instant destruction. [6]

From this, it appears that a man almost named Spicer saw a sea serpent on 8 August and a flying saucer, before the term was invented, on 29 October 1906, that is, within three months of one another. Or a man called Spencer or Spicer became accustomed to telling tall stories to the press because he enjoyed the limelight (remember, he was not even named as witness in the first report about the sea serpent). Did the excitement caused by the episode of the wild animals running riot on the ship in May encourage the telling of further sensational stories to the press? But then, perhaps, Spencer/Spicer was just one of those happy people who seem to always be on hand when fortean phenomena take place.

When the Los Angeles Times, on 7 July 1907, had a news report about the St Andrew docking in New York practically a year after these events, it was headlined “Captain sees Things”.

The text on my copy is almost illegible, and much is missing, but I gather from it that Spicer told a wild tale involving a menagerie, a hoop snake that can hypnotise birds, and possibly a cat. Small wonder, then, that the paper asked: “Whether First Mate Spicer of the Phoenix liner St Andrews [sic], in today from Antwerp, is eligible for membership in the Nature Fakers’ Club remains to be seen.” [7]

A google search for “Nature Faker” reveals that, around 1906–07, the reporting of invented nature stories (like yarns about giant octopuses) was a common pastime. Whether Spicer/Spencer delighted in telling such tales, and if that says something about his sea serpent and meteor reports, cannot be decided after all these years – but it’s evident that he was the person to ask when the press needed interesting copy.

It would be fascinating to learn whether, on docking in Antwerp at the other end of its journeys, the St Andrew had more strange stor­ies to tell, which still lie buried in Belgian newspapers of the period.

And, as a final twist, the person who first saw the Loch Ness monster on land in 1933 (or at least says he did) was one Mr George Spicer. Lexilinkers, crypto­zoologists, ufologists, collect­ors of strange falls, and possibly psychologists can have fun with this one.



Notes
1 “Wild Beasts in A Storm”, Fielding Star, Vol I, No 6, 7 July 1906, p3; “A Lively Cargo”, Hawera & Normanby Star, 17 July 1906.
2 The case is also in Bernard Heuvelmans: In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968, p358.
3 “THE SEA SERPENT ON TOUR. SEEN OFF CORNWALL AND SCOTLAND”, Star (NZ), 5 Oct 1906, p2.
4 Ivan T Sanderson: Invisible Residents, Avon, New York, 1973, 26f; Gary Mangia­copra: “Sky Anomal­ies – Oceanic Mysteries”, Pursuit 82, pp67–71. The observ­ation even made its way into the academic literat­ure, see: MCL Rocca: “Two Puzzling Superbolides”, Meteoritics & Planetary Science, vol. 36, 2001, Supple­ment, p.A175.
5 See Chicago Tribune; Los Angeles Times, 5 Nov; Reading Eagle; St John Sun; Mont­real Gazette, 6 Nov; New York Times, 11 Nov; Evening News (Cal), 12 Nov; Poverty Bay Herald, NZ, 29 Dec 1906; Colonist, NZ, 4 Jan; Poverty Bay Herald, 5 Jan; Hawera & Normanby Star, NZ, 14 Jan; Evening Post, NZ, 26 Jan, 1907; and Boston Daily Globe, 22 May 1921.
6 Colonist, 4 Jan 1907, p4.
7 Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1907, p14. For what it’s worth, here is my rendering of the text, about half of which is missing: “CAPTAIN SEES THINGS. Portion of Shipload Menagerie Material Cuts up Some Wonderful Antics. DIRECT WIRE TO THE TIMES. NEW YORK, July 6.--[Exclusive Dispatch.] Whether First Mate Spicer of the Phoenix liner St Andrews, in today from Antwerp, is eligible for membership in the Nature Fakers’ Club remains to be seen. [..] to the parrots’ cages. Then he danced for the parrots’ benefit and took? his tail in? his mouth and rolled about a hoop. The parrots delighted. The snake, however, [..] and stood up and began to stare at the parrots, whereupon one by one, fifty-eight parr­ots fell from their [..] to the bottom of their cages. [..] There he was, smiling and stoking his whiskers “just like a bloody man”, avers V Spicer. After a fierce fight he was boxed in…”