73
The earliest description of a Killer Whale is of a Roman being scared shitless of them
(lemmy.world)
Explanation: Well… just look at this description of Orcas from the Roman writer Pliny the Elder…
This fact, however, is known to the orca, an animal which is peculiarly hostile to the balæna, and the form of which cannot be in any way adequately described, but as an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth. This animal attacks the balænain its places of retirement, and with its teeth tears its young, or else attacks the females which have just brought forth, and, indeed, while they are still pregnant: and as they rush upon them, it pierces them just as though they had been attacked by the beak of a Liburnian galley.… the orcæ… do all in their power to meet them in their flight, throw themselves in their way, and kill them either cooped up in a narrow passage, or else drive them on a shoal, or dash them to pieces against the rocks. When these battles are witnessed, it appears just as though the sea were infuriate against itself; not a breath of wind is there to be felt in the bay, and yet the waves by their pantings and their repeated blows are heaved aloft in a way which no whirlwind could effect.
An orca has been seen even in the port of Ostia, where it was attacked by the Emperor Claudius. It was while he was constructing the harbour there that this orca came… [U]pon this, Cæsar ordered a great number of nets to be extended at the mouth of the harbour, from shore to shore, while he himself went there with the prætorian cohorts, and so afforded a spectacle to the Roman people; for boats assailed the monster, while the soldiers on board showered lances upon it. I myself saw one of the boats sunk by the water which the animal, as it respired, showered down upon it.
tl;dr “Orcas scary, and I once watched the Emperor Claudius take a bunch of ships and javelin one to death and it sank one of the boats”