Cadborosaurus

The late Paul LeBlond and the late Ed Bousfield were two credible scientists with impeccable academic pedigrees (both were Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada) who had an unusual hobby – they were investigators of a marine anomaly which inhabits the waters of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest which has been dubbed Cadborosaurus or Caddy for short. It was also known by the odd moniker of Hiaschuckaluck, but no one has been able to find the origins of this name.

Why two eminent scientists would have been advocates for the existence of what can only be described as the quintessential sea serpent is a real curiosity to many people, but LeBlond and Bousfield only became Caddy’s spokesmen as a result of over 20 years of research into the creature’s existence and habits. In the late 1990s they joined forces with BCSCC president, Jason Walton, in Operation CaddyScan which employs electronic imaging devices to try and obtain a clear image of a living specimen of the Cadborosaurus tribe. Present BCSCC Chairman, John Kirk, is also a member of the team.

Through the respective Cadborosaurus.ca and BCSCC websites, Walton, Leblond, Bousfield and Kirk have made known their investigative work to those who have an interest in Cadborosaurus. On several occasions a $500 reward has been offered for a specimen and at one stage the B.C. Experience exhibit in Victoria was considering a $10,000 reward along the lines of that offered by the city of Oak Bay in 2004. In researching the mystery that is Cadborosaurus, LeBlond and Bousfield have also uncovered what are clearly the only genuine photographs of a sea serpent ever obtained.

In 1937 the Naden Harbour whaling station in Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) was abuzz with the news that some flensers had discovered a strange animal in the stomach of a recently harvested whale. The creature was about ten feet long and had odd characteristics such as a camel-like head, a long elongated body of serpentine proportions and curiously shaped fins (left) and tail. News leaked to the media after engineer C. H. Rhodes wrote to his wife of the remains of the unknown creature being extracted from the whale. The images to the left are colourized versions of the original black and white photographs and are Copyright of John Kirk 2023, all rights reserved and no use without specific written permission by the creator.

The station manager, Thomas Cyril Huband, and George Victor Boorman, the acting medical officer, took photographs taken of the animal and despatched tissue samples taken from the remains to the Fisheries station in Nanaimo and to the Provincial Museum in Victoria for analysis. Tragically, the tissue samples sent to Nanaimo vanished and the samples sent to Victoria were wrongly identified by curator Francis Kermode as belonging to a fetal baleen whale and no one knows what happened to them after Kermode examined them. So the only tangible proof of the existence of heretofore previously legendary animals was lost forever. However two sets of the photographs were discovered by Captain William Hagelund, who published a selection in his book “Whalers No More”, and also by Paul LeBlond who included them in his book “Cadborosaurus: Survivor of the Deep”.

The samples and photographs which were sent to the Provincial Museum in Victoria and erroneously identified by Kermode bothered a living witness to the Naden Harbour creature still alive into the 2000s. James Wakelen, told the BCSCC that there is no way that the creature he and other removed from the flensed whale was a fetal baleen whale. He was adamant to his passing that what he saw was an unknown creature the likes of which he has not seen before of since in any book or film.

Sightings of this creature or creatures – as is more appropriate in view of the fact that there appear to be several varieties of animal – continue unabated to the present time. One sighting was obtained by BCSCC president and noted artist, Jason Walton, in April, 1998. The creature was also seen by Tim and Laurice Mock and family, who had previously sighted it in 1996, This allowed the Mocks to be counted as some of the few who have had more than one sighting of Cadborosaurus along with the late Cyril Andrews.

Captain William Hagelund also has the distinction of being one of only four persons to have actually apprehended a live purported “Cadborosaurus”. While taking his family on a yachting journey around the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, Captain Hagelund anchored for the night at the exotically-named Pirate’s Cove off Decourcey Island. The calm of the evening was shattered by the noise of something making splashing sounds just off the starboard side of the yacht. When Capt. Hagelund strode over to take a look at what was causing the noise, he was sharply taken aback by the sight of a totally unknown creature gazing up at him as it swam near the yacht. Lowering a dinghy, the Hagelunds decided to pursue the creature and bring it aboard for closer scrutiny and did not feel in any particular danger as the creature was only about 16 inches in length.

Using a small net the Hagelunds managed to snare the creature and promptly placed it in a large bucket of seawater. The small aquatic cryptid was like nothing any of the Hagelund clan had ever seen with its armoured plates, strange elongated snout, odd forward flippers, yellow downy fuzz and bilobate tail which may in fact have been rear flippers similar in shape to those of seals and sea lions. The creature was agitated for most of the evening and Hagelund ultimately had abandon plans to take the animal to a Fisheries Department Station at Nanaimo, B.C. to have it identified. Capt. Hagelund realized that there was the distinct possibility that animal might not survive the night in the confined spaces of a bucket and so reluctantly released it to the sea from whence it came. The animal sped off into the distance and was never seen again.

Phyllis Harsh, a resident of John’s Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington state, helped return a stranded baby “dinosaur” specimen to the water in the summer of 1991. The baby had become beached and using a tree branch, Mrs Harsh lifted the animal back into the sea where it was able to make its way back into deeper water. Mrs Harsh has also stated for the record that she found what appeared to be a “dinosaur” skeleton beneath an eagle’s nest also on John’s Island as well as having seen a full-size Caddy specimen in John’s Island Passage in 1990.

In 1998, fishermen aboard a fishing vessel at anchor in Ganges Harbour, Saltspring Island, British Columbia came across a strange catch in their catch of the day. For fearing of contaminating the rest of the catch, the men quickly dispatched the creature over the side. However, the mystery animal simply would not leave the minds of the two fishermen and they made it their quest to find out just exactly what it was they had seen and discarded. They consulted volumes on the various types of marine creatures which inhabit British Columbia coastal waters, but none of the books depicted any animal remotely like the one they had seen. It was only when they discovered Capt. Hagelund’s drawing of the juvenile Cadborosaurus he had snagged in 1967, and also after they had seen photos of the Naden Harbour carcass of 1937 that they realized that a Cadborosaurus had actually been in their possession.

Operation CaddyScan had set up video cameras at a location in Saanich Inlet following a Cadborosaurus sighting days earlier and on July 26th, 1999 an unusual creature with an undulating locomotion swam into view of the camera and stayed in view for over two minutes. No animal known to inhabit British Columbia waters locomotes like the creature in the video except for Cadborosaurus and its freshwater counterpart, Ogopogo of Okanagan Lake. This is possibly the second piece of footage obtained of Cadborosaurus following the capturing of a large reptilian head on film in the 1970s. Gary Liimatta of Vancouver Island filmed the creature (left) during a spell on the water at some point during a calm evening. It is hard to tell exactly what Gary captured but the head bears a cursory resemblance to a giant turtle.

The most recent sightings of this creature have taken place at Qualicum Beach and Victoria respectively in November and December of 2006, and on August 16, 2010 in Richmond, BC. The Victoria sighting took place just 40 metres offshore while the Qualicum event saw the animal raise its tail out of the water, exposing a rear appendage like that seen in the Naden Harbour carcass photos. The Richmond sighting was by BCSCC Chairman, John Kirk, who sighted the creature on the Fraser River just two kilometres from its mouth where it empties into the Salish sea.

Purported footage of the creature (lfet) was obtained by American Kelly Nash in Nushagak Bay, Bristol Bay, Alaska in 2007. He and his sons used two cameras to video the creatures which were being pursued by a pod of Beluga whales. Nash sold some of his footage to the producers of the TV show deadliest Catch, but it was only footage from one camera. The footage from the second camera is even better because not only does it have better shots of the animals, but one of them looks at the camera and both John Kirk and the late Paul LeBlond both attested to it being the spitting image of the Naden Harbour carcass of 1937. Nash died suddenly in 2010 and the footage containing the head of the creature which looked at the camera was inadvertently recorded over. The footage is now lost forever.

It is the belief of the BCSCC that Cadborosaurus (known by the coastal some of the First Nations peoples of B.C. as Hiyitlik, also known locally as Tzarta-saurus, Sisiutl, Penda, Amy, Sayn Uisk, Saya-Ustih, Sarah the Sea Hag, Kaegyhil-Depgu’esk, Say Noth-kai and Klematosaurus, ) is not limited to the waters of British Columbia alone and is to be found from Alaska (where it is known as Pal-Rai-Yuk) to the Gulf Of Monterey in California. It is a distinct possibility that the Stinson Beach, California sea serpent seen by Marlee Matlin and others in 1983 and the San Francisco Bay serpent seen and photographed by Bill and Bob Clark may well be members of the Cadborosaurus brood. This also applies to a number similar aquatic cryptids seen off the Oregon and Washington coast known variously as Colossal Claude and the Yachats serpent.

Although it is thought that this creature has tended to remain in the deeper oceanic waters off the coast of British Columbia it has been seen in and around Vancouver at Siwash Point, Stanley Park, Burrard Inlet, Indian Arm off North Vancouver; False Creek; Kitsilano Beach: at the mouth of the Fraser River off UBC and in the river at the foot of Main Street. Sightings around Victoria have taken place at the Inner Harbour; Cadboro Bay: Oak Bay; Cordova Bay; off Dallas Road; Race Rocks Chatham Island; Witty’s Lagoon; Willow Beach; Sooke and Ross Point.

There have been a number of misidentifications of decomposed basking shark carcasses that have been mistaken for Cadborosaurus and these include remains found at Effingham, Prince Rupert, Henry Island, Fircom and Kitsilano Beach. Other carcasses and bones found have not been properly identified and these include those found at Barkley Sound and Ucluelet.

Feeding habits of the creatures have been difficult to determine but they have been seen swimming after schools of fish. However, on seven occasions, eyewitnesses have reported seeing the creature attack seagulls and ducks and several of these attacks, the marine megaserpent was seen swallowing whole the waterfowl.

Bousfield and LeBlond had recommended that the Caddy animals be properly classified as Caborosaurus willsi in accordance with the rules of International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), but in the absence of a type specimen this was not proper convention. Some like John Kirk have argued that Bousfield’s insistence that Cadborosaurus is a single animal of the reptilian kind flies in the face of the numerous animals that have been reported by a variety of witnesses and all these have conveniently been dumped under the umbrella of Cadborosaurus. The creature seen by Major William Henry Langley and Mrs. Langley was serpentine in aspect, but it was not the same as the Naden Harbour Carcass which was clearly a mammal that was covered in brown fur. There are close to a dozen different types of unknown animals seen in BC and adjacent coastal waters and although some are similar in appearance they are clearly all not the same species.

It was the intention of LeBlond and Bousfield that the creature be named in honour of Archie Wills, editor of a Victoria, B.C. newspaper who devoted many column inches to the creature and vigorously amassed a myriad sighting reports of the creature’s activities. It is a pity that the name has never become official.

For more information and the latest news on Cadborosaurus animals, please visit Cadborosaurus.ca.