In the summer of 1937, Nantucket’s newspaper of record, The Inquirer and Mirror, reported that a local fisherman had spotted a sea monster off the coast. A day later, the paper published a follow-up story, this time with photographic evidence, about two other fishermen who had stumbled across unidentifiable, impossibly large tracks—about five and a half feet long by four feet wide—in the sands of Madaket Beach. The news went out on the wires and was printed in papers from Massachusetts to California.
Locally, the news items were met with a mix of terror and disbelief—terror by those steeped in the menacing folklore of their seafaring ancestors, tales of sea creatures that had bedeviled coastal New Englanders since the days of whaleboats and harpoons; disbelief by those who knew that fishermen (and ancestors) tend to fable their way through boredom.
