Trunko, the Margate "polar bear" sea monster

Margate sits on the coast of what was then Natal, in the Union of South Africa. According to the South Coast Herald, the town grew from a farm called "Margate," owned by Hugh Ballance and later split into half-acre plots. Wikipedia credits English surveyor Henry Richardson with laying out the town in 1908.

Even the date is unsettled. Ballance's own account begins "On the morning of November 1," with no year. Some sources give 1922, others 25 October 1924. One point is fixed. The London Daily Mail ran the story on 27 December 1924, under the headline "Fish Like A Polar Bear."

"On the morning of November 1," wrote Mr Ballance, "I saw what I took to be two whales fighting with some sea monster about 1 300 yards from the shore." He watched through binoculars. "I was amazed to see what I took to be a polar bear, but of truly mammoth proportions."

The creature reared fully 20 feet out of the water. It struck the whales again and again with what Ballance took to be its tail, apparently without effect. The fight went on for about three hours. Then the whales moved off. The creature floated lifelessly at the surface.

That night it washed ashore, and the next morning Ballance inspected it as a growing crowd joined him. No head could be seen. The carcass was "47 feet long, 10 feet in breadth and five feet high." "At one end it had a trunk about 14 inches in diameter and five feet long." "The horror was clothed in snow-white hair and seemed to be devoid of blood."

According to Shuker, a team of 32 oxen failed to drag it back to the sea. It lay on the sand for about ten days. No scientist examined it. Then the tide carried it out, and it was gone.

A. C. Jones of Johannesburg photographed the carcass, and his pictures appeared in Wide World Magazine in 1925. In 2010 Markus Hemmler found one on a Margate Business Association page, and Karl Shuker published it. In March 2011 artist Bianca Baldi found another in the Margate Museum archives. A fifth surfaced in a Facebook nostalgia group, and Shuker published it in 2022. None of them shows the fight.

The images changed the debate. Darren Naish saw "the rotting carcass of a large vertebrate, most likely a whale," its "fur" the frayed, decayed collagen of a globster. Shuker and Hemmler suggested the trunk may be a rib wrapped in fibrous tissue. Shuker was still not wholly convinced this explained a white coat on a living animal. Lance Bradshaw wondered if the whales were tossing a carcass that was already dead. Hemmler noted that Ballance founded the township, and may have had reason to promote a sensational tale.

American newspapers in 1925 went further. The Charleroi Mail had the creature kill the whales, collapse ashore, then wake and return to the sea. Loren Coleman called that version "fanciful."

Shuker gave the creature its name, Trunko, in his 1996 book The Unexplained. It now sits among the classic globsters. One named witness, a handful of photographs, a white shape on a Natal beach. The rest went out with the tide.