The Critters Seen Were Enormous Sea Turtles

To The Editor:
While the alleged monsters in Loch Ness, Nessie, and the Chesapeake Bay, Chessie, are world famous, a reported monster in the Delaware Bay, who should have surely been dubbed Delsea, has faded into obscurity. An article entitled “Queer Monster Caught” appeared in the April 30, 1896 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer. According to this item, on April 29, 1896 sturgeon fishermen killed a strange creature off Pennsgrove, and towed it to shore. The beast seemed “to be a cross between a monster turtle and a sea serpent,” measured “15 feet in length” and “weighs about 600 pounds.” The creature was “supposed to be the same monster that has been seen in the Delaware Bay every spring for the last 10 or 12 years, making trips up the river as far as Fort Delaware.”
According to an Aug. 17, 1896 article entitled “King of Turtles” in The Boston Daily Globe, Boston, Mass., a similar incident occurred shortly afterwards off Provincetown, Mass., on Aug. 16, 1896. The wheelman and lookout of the fishing schooner Minnehaha shouted, “The sea serpent!” The thought of capturing “the sea serpent that has kept the North Shore in a state bordering on nervous prostration all summer” filled skipper “Dick” Horton with dreams “of imperishable renown.” That monster was “12 feet from the tip of his nose to his tail” and the “wiseacres about the wharf estimated his weight at very nearly a ton.” The article also noted that the beast turned out to be “what is known as a loggerhead.”
Roger Conant and Joseph T. Collins in “A Field Guide to Reptiles & Amphibians: Eastern and Central North America (1991)” noted that loggerhead sea turtles reach 31 to 45 inches long, (record over 48 inches,) and can weigh 170 to 350 pounds, (record over 500 pounds.) Hence, fishermen apparently did think that they saw sea monsters off Cape Cod and in the Delaware Bay in the late 19th century but the critters seen were evidently just enormous loggerhead sea turtles.
DON NIGRONI
Glenolden, Pa.