The Monster of Ragusa

Heaven and Earth marked its departure

It emerged from the sea at noon, three days in a row. The locals claimed it was 15ft tall, shaped like human with a fat head, and could yell so loud that people six miles away heard it.

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The Republic of Ragusa (current day Dubrovnik, Croatia)

Related from the Newcastle Courant, published April 9, 1716.

Fascinating story, but what was the creature really? I can’t say for sure, but I have my suspicions.

Around this time diving technology moved towards more form fitting units. Less than a year prior in 1715, Pierre Remy De Beauve debuted his diving suit.

The 18th and late 17th centuries were host to a few of these early SCUBA suits. Could the creature observed on the beaches north of Ragusa have been a person in one of these early prototypes? I find it the most likely option. Combine the fallibility of the human senses with a deeply held world view and voila, a regular sized human in a diving suit viewed from afar is transformed into a 15 foot sea monster.

What about the people who reported hearing the creature’s howls six miles inland? The furthest a human voice was recorded as traveling was 10 miles over water. Over land with ideal conditions, the unaided human voice might be detected at 5 miles distance. So, if the creature was 15 foot tall with proportionate lung capacity, I suppose it would be possible.

But the terrain is not ideal. The surrounding landscape is nothing but hills. The best way to test this in my opinion would be to kidnap a Scotsman with his bagpipe, and force him under threat of sobriety to blow as loud as possible to test the range of the noise.

Having done 0 research, I believe the lungs of a sea monster and a bagpipe to be roughly equivalent in capacity.