The Mostly True Tale of Cadborosaurus

Cadboro Bay

Cadboro Bay sits at the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island, just outside Victoria, British Columbia. It is a gentle, sheltered bay with sailboats and herons and the kind of scenery that makes people from other provinces quietly furious. The water is cold and green and very deep in places, which is relevant context for what follows.

In October 1933, Major W.H. Langley, a lawyer and retired military officer, was sailing in the bay with his wife. They saw something. Long. Very long. They estimated sixty feet. It moved through the water with a vertical undulation, the way a sea serpent moves in every book ever written about sea serpents, as if whatever they saw had read the literature and was performing to spec. Langley reported the sighting to the Victoria Daily Times. The newspaper covered it.

The story got a name: Cadborosaurus, after the bay. The creature got a nickname almost immediately: Caddy. This is a Canadian thing. You can be a sixty-foot primordial sea monster terrorizing the Pacific coast, and if you do it in British Columbia, you get a friendly diminutive. The Americans would have named it something much more threatening and made a documentary.

The 1930s Were a Big Decade

After Langley's sighting, Caddy became busy. The 1930s produced a remarkable volume of reports from up and down the Pacific coast, from Cadboro Bay to Alaska, from Alaska back down to California. Fishermen reported it. Lighthouse keepers reported it. Passengers on ferries reported it. People standing on beaches watching the water reported it.

The descriptions were consistent in the ways that mattered and wildly inconsistent in the ways that didn't. Everyone agreed it was large, somewhere between thirty and one hundred feet. Everyone agreed it had a long neck and a small head. Some said it had a horse-like face. Some said the face was more like a camel. Some said it had teeth. Some said it had fur. Some said the back had humps. One witness said it moved like an inchworm doing its best impression of a dolphin, which is not a direct quote but is the general energy of several reports.

The Victoria Daily Times collected sightings the way a fisherman collects hooks: obsessively and with professional optimism. A reporter named Archie Willis followed the story for years. The paper published a total of over two hundred Caddy-related items over the following decades, which was either dedicated journalism or a slow news problem or possibly both.

The Scientific Name

In 1992, two researchers named Paul LeBlond and Edward Bousfield published a paper in the journal Amphipacifica formally describing Cadborosaurus willsi as a new species. They gave it a binomial name. They drew up a physical description based on the accumulated witness reports. They published it in a peer-reviewed journal.

The scientific community received this with the warmth typically reserved for someone bringing a casserole to a dinner party where nobody asked for a casserole. Cadborosaurus willsi was not accepted into the formal catalog of recognized species. Other scientists pointed out that describing a species requires physical evidence, specifically a body, or at minimum a confirmed specimen. Witness reports, even consistent and numerous ones, are not the same thing as a specimen.

LeBlond and Bousfield argued that the consistency of the descriptions, gathered independently over sixty years across a wide geographic range, constituted meaningful evidence. This is a reasonable argument. It is also not how taxonomy works. The name exists. The species does not, officially. Caddy sits in the unusual position of having a Latin name and no confirmed address.

The Naden Harbour Photograph

In 1937, a sperm whale was brought into a whaling station at Naden Harbour on Haida Gwaii, a string of islands off the northern coast of British Columbia. When the whale was processed, workers found something unexpected in its stomach. A carcass. Long, pale, and strange looking, with a small head, a long neck, and a tail section that did not resemble any fish anyone at the station could identify.

Photographs were taken. The photographs survived. The carcass did not, because this is how all the best cryptid evidence goes: documented briefly, then lost, eaten by a whale, left in a field, or put in a box that nobody can find.

The Naden Harbour photographs have been analyzed repeatedly. The creature in them is real, in the sense that it is an actual physical object that existed at the time of the photograph. What it was is the question. Proposed candidates include a misidentified basking shark, a fetal baleen whale, an oarfish, and a ribbonfish. None of these explanations has satisfied everyone, because the object in the photograph has features that are slightly inconvenient for each of them. The whale's stomach had an opinion and it is the most credible Caddy evidence anyone has ever produced.

The Plesiosaur Problem

Every large sea creature of the serpentine variety gets compared to plesiosaurs eventually. It is the sea serpent equivalent of "have you tried yoga?" Someone will bring it up. Nobody can stop it.

Plesiosaurs were marine reptiles. They had long necks, small heads, and flippers. They went extinct approximately sixty-six million years ago along with most of the other large things that had been running or swimming the planet for millions of years. The argument that one might have survived is seductive and implausible in roughly equal measure. The ocean is large. It is deep. The Mariana Trench is almost seven miles down and we have explored perhaps twenty percent of the ocean floor. Something could theoretically be down there.

What marine biologists say is that a population large enough to sustain itself over sixty-six million years would have to be large enough to produce corpses. Bodies wash up. Evidence accumulates. We find whale bones on beaches. We find shark teeth in sediment. A breeding population of large animals in the Pacific Ocean would leave a trail. It would show up in fishing nets. It would collide with boats. The ocean is less forgiving of privacy than the Bodmin Moor. For Caddy to be a plesiosaur, it would need to be even better at disappearing than plesiosaurs were at surviving, and plesiosaurs were not particularly good at surviving.

Still in the Bay

Victoria, British Columbia continues to be a pleasant city by a pleasant bay with excellent coffee and a mild climate by Canadian standards. Caddy sightings still trickle in. A 2009 video shot near Nushagak Bay in Alaska shows something undulating through the water in a way that got attention. The video was analyzed. The conclusion was: unclear. Which is the conclusion for almost everything in this file.

The Pacific coast is a serious environment. It produces enormous things. Giant Pacific octopuses. Oarfish that reach thirty feet. Whale sharks. Sperm whales that eat things from their stomachs that generate minor scientific controversies. The ocean's imagination for generating large, unusual animals is well documented and ongoing. The fact that Caddy hasn't been confirmed doesn't mean the Pacific isn't capable of producing it.

Major Langley sailed out of Cadboro Bay in 1933 and came back with a story that the Pacific coast is still talking about. Whatever he saw, he saw it. His wife saw it too. They were both, by all accounts, sober, experienced, and not the kind of people who reported sea monsters for attention. The bay is still there. The water is still cold. Something is always moving below the surface, and most of it has been named and catalogued and isn't particularly interesting.

Most of it.