Creature record / 1887
Newark Bay, Orkney. Summer, 1890. Off the southeast coast of Deerness, something was swimming in the bay. It had a little black head and a snow white body. It had two arms. And in the water, the locals said, it swam like a human being. It came back every summer for more than a decade. Hundreds of people came to watch. In June 1892 a crowd arrived with guns, and a Mr Reid fired. Three days later the creature was back in its usual place. Simon Young, who has written a book on the case, calls it the best attested cryptid of the nineteenth century.
Orkney in the late 1880s was a seafaring community. Crofters on shore and fishermen out in the bay knew the sea intimately. Deerness sits on the East Mainland, joined to the rest of the Mainland by the sandy isthmus at Dingieshowe. On its southeast coast lies Newark Bay. Around 1887, a local farmer noticed something in that bay. For a few years, only the farmer seemed to notice.