From the Collection of Catherine Armitage comes this book of arcane memoirs.

In Search of the Unknown
By: Mr. Gilland
Language: English
Cthulhu Mythos: +1d
Zoology: +1d

Published in 1904, 'In Search of the Unknown' is a memoir of sorts of Mr. Gilland, a zoologist working for the Zoological Gardens of the Bronx Park, New York. It details various adventures and anecdotes Gilland encountered during his work, including encounters with a creature he calls a “harbor-master” that greatly resembles a Deep One off the coast of Maine, as well as more mundane creatures such as four great auks, a dingue, and a transparent woman. The book achieved mild popularity, but was utterly discredited by the scientific community before it was even published. Although Gilland makes no mention of the fact in the text, he had been widely repudiated as a charlatan and scoundrel, was accused of stalking several women, and allegedly wrote the book to pay off gambling debts after being fired from the Zoological Gardens for falsifying data. At any rate, the text is composed of at least ten parts fiction to each part truth.

The story of having encountered four extinct great auks in Maine-a story that predated the book-was widely laughed at, and almost cost him his job when he first made the claim in 1899. There is no evidence that Gilland ever visited northern Canada, which is where he claimed to have encountered the dingue; although the director of the Gardens, Prof. Smawl, did vanish as claimed in the book in 1901, she is widely believed to have eloped to Europe. Although Gilland was dispatched to the Everglades as an assistant to Prof. Farrago, it has been conclusively shown that he spent his entire stay there in a hotel room at False Cape, and never so much as set foot in the swamps. As for the anecdote regarding the Thermosaurus, the creature is flatly fabulous. Finally, the similarly anecdotal tale of the Pythagoreans, although it presents some tantilizing hints-hypnotism, astral projection, reincarnation-is, in all likelihood, simply the creation of Gilland's overactive imagination.

However, elements of the text do present intriguing possibilities. In Armitage’s commentary, after discussing the many problems with the text outlined above, she notes that a Deep One colony /is/ believed to exist off the coast of New England, and that the account of the harbor-master is almost a perfect description of an encounter with such an alien.

Whether Gilland actually encountered such a creature or merely chanced across a description of it in another work, it certainly presents fascinating possibilities, if very little new information.

After publishing 'In Search of the Unknown', Gilland wrote a second anthology of zoological anecdotes, this one wholly fictional, before dying of lung cancer in 1911. His second work, dubbed 'Police!!!' for unknown reasons (although it may have had something to do with being arrested for fraud in 1908), was published posthumously in 1915.