In the year 1715, a great calamity befell the residents of Barking village, Essex. A young woman named Sarah Smith went into labour and, to the shock of the midwife, gave birth to: “A monster that had a body like to a dolphin with scales thereon, it had no legs but a pair of great claws, tallon’d like two hands. It had six heads and but one neck; one was like the face of a man with eyes, nose and mouth to it, the second like the face of a cammell, and its ears crop’d, two other faces like dragons with spiked tongues hanging out of their mouths, another like an eagle’s head with a beak and the last seeming to be like a calves head.” 1 The ‘monster’ didn’t survive and nor did its mother.