Thank you for visiting SNEWPapers!
Sign up free
The New Hampshire Gazette Foreign News February 6, 1761
Portsmouth, Rockingham, New Hampshire
What is this article about?
A letter from Lisbon reports a strange sea monster with a human head and cow-like face that appeared on shore at Porto Port; its skin was so thick a musket ball could not penetrate it, and attempts to kill it failed, leaving the people uneasy.
Quality green show the numbers
Measured from the scan
— how cleanly the OCR engine read the characters
- Mean ink quality
- 98.0% The length-weighted average confidence across the OCR lines — the mean of exactly the per-line scores whose tails the two figures below report. Typical is 99%.
- Illegible ink
- 2.9% Text sitting in OCR-detected lines that scored below 80% confidence — very shaky reads. Weighted by line length, so one long bad line counts for more than a short one.
- Uncertain ink
- 0.0% Text in lines that scored 80–90% — somewhat shaky reads.
- Matches source
- 96.32% How closely the served text matches the raw OCR of the same boxes, letter by letter, after collapsing spacing and case. This measures agreement, not correctness: the OCR is often wrong and the extractor corrects it, so 100% does not mean perfect, and a low figure usually means poor scan text was rewritten rather than that text was lost (length vs source shows loss).
- Length vs source
- 99.81% Below 100% means text was dropped from the OCR; above means text was added to make it read.
Assembled by the extraction model
— whether the stitched-together text holds up; catches layout and segmentation errors, which the scores above cannot see
- Transcription confidence
- 93.0% (typical 96%) How cleanly the extractor could assemble what it was given. Low here with clean ink scores points at layout analysis — the characters were read correctly but grouped or ordered wrongly.
- Comprehension
- 95.0% Whether the piece reads coherently start to finish. Can stay high while transcription confidence drops, when only part of the component is affected.
Clipping
Full Text
LONDON, Nov. 10. By a Letter from Lisbon we are informed, that there lately appeared on Shore at Porto Port, supposed to have come out of the Sea, a surprizing MONSTER, with a human Head, the Face like that of a Cow, the Fins three Yards long, and across each other, with five Feet, Eyes that blazed like Fire, and the Body as large as a middling Horse; and that his Skin is so very thick, that a Musket Ball could not penetrate it: Several Persons attempted to kill it, but in vain, which occasions the People to be very uneasy.
What sub-type of article is it?
Human Interest
What keywords are associated?
Sea Monster
Porto Port
Lisbon Letter
Curiosity
Where did it happen?
Porto Port, Portugal
Foreign News Details
Primary Location
Porto Port, Portugal
Event Date
Reported Nov. 10
Outcome
attempts to kill the monster failed; local people left uneasy.