Passing south of the Canary Islands on Dec. 4, 1893, the S.S. Umfuli passed “a monster fish of the serpentine shape, about 80 feet long, with shining skin, and short fins, about 20 feet apart, on the back; in circumference, about the dimensions of a full-sized whale.”

Neither captain R.J. Cringle nor his crew had ever seen anything like it, but they were certain of what they saw. The sea was like a mirror, “and this thing, whatever it was, was in sight for over half an hour.”

Cringle said it was rushing through the water at great speed, throwing water from its breast, and he saw fully 15 feet of its head and neck on three separate occasions. The body, which was not scaly, showed three distinct humps and was much thicker than the neck: “I should not, therefore, call it a serpent.” The Umfuli’s log shows that the chief officer observed the creature through his glass and saw an enormous mouth with great rows of teeth.

“I have been so ridiculed about the thing that I have many times wished that anybody else had seen that sea-monster rather than me,” Cringle said. “I have been told that it was a string of porpoises, that it was an island of seaweed, and I do not know what besides. But if an island of seaweed can travel at the rate of fourteen knots an hour, or if a string of porpoises can stand 15 feet out of the water, then I give in, and confess myself deceived. Such, however, could not be.”

On March 19, 1886, over Oshkosh, Wis., the sun went out.

“The day was light, though cloudy, when suddenly darkness commenced settling down, and in five minutes it was as dark as midnight,” reported the Monthly Weather Review. “General consternation prevailed; people on the streets rushed to and fro; teams dashed along, and women and children ran in cellars; all business operations ceased until lights could be lighted. Not a breath of air was stirring on the surface of the earth. The darkness lasted from eight to ten minutes, when it passed off, seemingly from west to east, and brightness followed. … It seemed to be a wave of total darkness passing along without wind.”

No one knows the cause, but essentially the same thing had happened a century earlier.

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was keeper of the Vatican library and later a cardinal, but he’s best remembered for being a hyperpolyglot, a speaker of many languages.

How many? Estimates range from 24 (in 1805) to 114 (judged after his death). The true number probably lies somewhere in between, but it’s considerable–Byron called Mezzofanti “a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech.”

A Russian traveler once asked Mezzofanti for a list of the dialects he had mastered, and the cardinal sent him the name of God in 56 languages. And Gregory XVI once arranged to have a polyglot group of students waylay him in the Vatican gardens: “[O]n a sudden, at a given signal, these youths grouped themselves for a moment on their knees before his Holiness, and then, quickly rising, addressed themselves to Mezzofanti, each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand, them. But Mezzofanti did not shrink from the conflict. With the promptness and address which were peculiar to him, he took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language, with such spirit and elegance as to amaze them all.”

For another prodigious librarian, see Book Lover.

There are four occasions on which remarkable masses of ice, of many hundred pounds in weight, are believed to have fallen in India. One near Seringapatam, in the end of last century, said to have been the size of an elephant. It took three days to melt. We have no further particulars, but there is no reason whatever for our doubting the fact.

— George Buist, “Remarkable Hailstorms in India, From March 1851 to May 1855,” in Report of the Twenty-Fifth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1856

Crouching in a Flanders trench in November 1917, 21-year-old Walter Butler addressed a field service card to his fiancee Amy to let her know he was safe.

She never received it. After the war Butler returned to England and the pair married, moved to London, and had a daughter. Eventually they divorced; Amy returned to her family home while Walter remarried and led a career as a builder. She died in 1974 at age 81, he four years later at 82.

In February 2007, the card arrived. Their daughter, now an 86-year-old grandmother, received it.

“I am quite well,” it said. “Letter follows at first opportunity. I have received no letter from you for a long time.”

Excavating a cave near the sacred Galilean catacomb of Beth She’Arim in 1956, a bulldozer unearthed an enormous rectangular slab, 11 × 6.5 × 1.5 feet. Rather than try to move the 9-ton mass, workers at first paved over it. Seven years would pass before anyone thought to examine it closely.

It was one gigantic piece of glass.

No one knows who made it or precisely how. Evidently an ancient furnace had produced great batches of molten glass that could be cooled and broken into reworkable pieces. This batch had been abandoned, perhaps because contamination had ruined its clarity.

Whatever its origins, it’s an amazing achievement. On its discovery, the Beth She’Arim slab was the third largest piece of glass ever made; even today, only large telescope mirrors rival its size. And it was produced 1600 years ago.

In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.

Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.

He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.

There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.

(Thanks, Brendan.)

Line items in a bill received by an English lord from an artist in 1865, for repairs and retouchings to a gallery of paintings:

• To filling up the chink in the Red Sea and repairing the damages of Pharaoh’s host.
• To cleaning six of the Apostles and adding an entirely new Judas Iscariot.
• To a pair of new hands for Daniel in the lions’ den and a set of teeth for the lioness.
• To an alteration in the Belief, mending the Commandments, and making a new Lord’s Prayer.
• To new varnishing Moses’s rod.
• To repairing Nebuchadnezzar’s beard.
• To mending the pitcher of Rebecca.
• To a pair of ears for Balaam and a new tongue for the ass.
• To planting a new city in the land of Nod.

From William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892.