The Loch Ness Legacy

by Boyd Morrison

  John Edmonstone, a freed Guyana slave who lived in Edinburgh, was a friend of Charles Darwin during his time in medical college at the University of Edinburgh and may indeed have trained him in taxidermy.

  While Darwin did visit Glen Roy in the Scottish Highlands, there’s no record of him ever visiting Loch Ness. I prefer to think he kept that trip a secret.

  The interiors of Holyroodhouse Palace and Edinburgh Castle are as I’ve described them, including the castle’s Great Hall lined with hundreds of old weapons.

  Urquhart Castle is also described faithfully, down to the glass door in the gatehouse. The Grant Tower really is the bastion’s name, and I was lucky to view the loch from its top floor platform (on the coldest May day I’ve ever experienced).

  I was surprised to learn that hunting of minke whales continues to this day in Norway, and the whalers use explosive-tipped harpoons to kill their prey.

  The GhostManta sub, designed by Caan Yaylali, hasn’t put to sea, but you can find renderings of it on the internet. I would love to fly under the ocean in such a submarine if anyone ever constructs one.

  Many theories have been put forth about the Loch Ness monster, first and foremost that it’s nothing more than a hoax or wishful thinking. However, coelacanths, axolotls, sturgeons, and Chinese giant salamanders are all real creatures that have characteristics in common with Nessie’s alleged behavior.

  While I was at Loch Ness, I took a boat tour of the loch guided by George Edwards, captain of the Nessie Hunter IV. Although we didn’t spot Nessie that day, several months later Mr Edwards snapped a photo of a mysterious shape in the water, and it made worldwide headlines. Few people consider the photograph to be definitive proof of the creature’s existence, but it certainly adds more intrigue to the legend. Now that more people than ever are armed with cell-phone cameras, maybe one day we’ll get irrefutable evidence that something lives in the depths of Loch Ness.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks are due to the many people who helped make this book a reality:

  To Jade Chandler, my editor, for being such a big fan and champion of my work and for helping me polish the story to the best of my abilities;

  To Irene Goodman, my literary agent, for standing by me when the chips were down;

  To Danny Baror and Heather Baror-Shapiro, my foreign rights agents, for bringing my books to places I barely knew existed;

  To George Edwards, skipper of the Nessie Hunter IV, for his expertise on Loch Ness;

  To Shelley Innes and Elizabeth Smith of the Darwin Correspondence Project, for providing the solid foundation over which all my wild speculation about Charles Darwin is built;

  To Erik Van Eaton, friend and trauma surgeon, for helping me kill people in creative ways;

  To Susan Tunis, for all her hard work in pointing out my dumb mistakes;

  To Frank Moretti, my father-in-law, for late nights going through the manuscript;

  To Beth Morrison, my sister, for suffering through my first drafts;

  And to Randi, for being the best wife a guy could ever hope to marry.