by Mike Bruton
With his new-found research assistant, Smith immediately sprang into action and, within a few months of their wedding, mounted an expedition to Mozambique in 1938. During this trip they examined the fish collection in the Museu Alvarez da Castro in Lourenço Marques (now the Natural History Museum, Maputo) and then collected fishes off Beira, Delagoa Bay and Inhaca Island. Smith also described several new species and created a new fish family (Pentapodidae, butterflybreams, since synonymised with the Nemipteridae) based on their collections (Gon, 1996). He soon realised that many of the fishes found off the east coast of South Africa originated from tropical East Africa and that, to understand the classification and distribution of South African fishes, he needed to have a good knowledge of East African fishes as well. This realisation changed the course of his career.
Margaret described her relationship with JLB Smith to Glynis Horning (1979):
‘Playing alternatively Mother and First Mate made for what she describes as a Dr. [Jekyll] and Mr. Hyde situation. “On shore and mixing with people I was The Lady – my husband would hold doors open for me and walk on the outside of the pavement. But at sea he’d duck under the hatch before me without a thought. The Liberationists would have loved him.”’
In 1946 the Smiths went on a second expedition to Mozambique and then, shortly after returning to Grahamstown, embarked on an Irvin & Johnson trawler from Port Elizabeth to collect deep-sea fishes. These two expeditions contributed over 1,000 specimens, including 17 species new to science, to the Albany Museum collection, which had now become one of the best collections of East African fishes in the world. The year 1946 also marked the end of JLB’s formal research connection to the Albany Museum, but not before he had prepared a draft document motivating to the CSIR for the establishment of a fish research institute at the museum (Gon, 2002). He remained the Honorary Curator of Fishes there until 1967.
In spite of Margaret’s active participation in their expeditions, on which she dived and caught many new specimens, her childhood had not prepared her for the aquatic existence that she would pursue as an adult:
‘I grew up in the small town of Indwe, that lies near the foot of the Stormberg range just before it merges into the Drakensberg. There were no swimming baths or dams near the town, and the only river was either a raging flood or a dry donga. Although I could ride anything with four legs by the time I was ten, had been brought up “tough” by my older brother, had superb health and a fine physique, my only knowledge of water was that from a tap’ (MM Smith, 1959).
In an interview with Glynis Horning published in the Natal Mercury on 20th February 1979, Margaret stated, ‘My dear, I knew nothing about fish when I met my husband – I’d been brought up at Indwe far away from the sea and sometimes even the taps ran dry. I had a positive fear of water!’ (Oceanographic Research Institute archives).
Margaret was not a natural diver and only learned to swim at the age of 11 years.
‘I learnt to swim at Port Elizabeth by floating out of my depth and being too proud (or too stubborn) to call for help, so I swam. … And so as an adult and an Ichthyologist I could swim but I lacked the porpoise-like love of the water that characterises children brought up near the sea’ (Fargher, 2003).
Margaret would go on to become an accomplished scuba diver and for many years would dive at every opportunity in order to observe and catch fishes.
JLB did not initially approve of Margaret’s diving but the many valuable specimens that she collected soon changed his mind. William also developed into ‘an experienced diver and underwater hunter of fishes’, according to an article by JLB Smith published in The Times of London on 22nd January 1955.
JLB Smith often paid tribute to his wife’s work. In the acknowledgements for The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa (1949), he states:
‘My wife has been my full-time partner from the beginning and has been artist, adviser, buffer, critic and secretary, and is one of the most skilful collectors of fishes with many devices of her own. She has shared with me many hardships and sustained me when my courage has failed. But for her spirit, energy and unflagging enthusiasm this work could hardly have reached completion in any reasonable time.’
In contrast to this fulsome praise for Margaret, what JLB fails to mention is the contribution of his first wife, Henriette, who had sustained him during his formative years as an ichthyologist. Although Henriette had considerable artistic talent and was well known for her creativity, there is no evidence that she illustrated any of his scientific papers during his marriage to her between 1931, when he first published on fishes, and their divorce in 1937.
According to one of the artists on the 1946 Mozambique expedition, Denys Davis (1986), Margaret ‘was always cheerful, meeting needs, coping with crises, foreseeing difficulties, explaining arrangements, smoothing ruffles, never ruffled herself, her special charm pervading all’.
The excellent illustrations of Mozambique fishes produced by Margaret Smith and her co-artists made it possible for Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) to issue, in 1951, the first set of postage stamps in the world that depicted marine fishes in their natural colours. The set of 24 stamps, ranging in value up to 50 escudos, depicts a range of tropical Western Indian Ocean fishes including butterflyfish, puffers, lionfishes and wrasses (Eshmeyer & Bearse, 1974).
During her travels Margaret became fluent in Portuguese and, in addition, learned to read French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. She gave radio talks in English and Afrikaans in South Africa and in Portuguese in Mozambique, Brazil and Portugal. Margaret also appeared on television in Portugal, the USA, New Zealand and Réunion, and in several television films in South Africa, including the famous documentary, They called him Doc, broadcast by the SABC in 1976. According to Maylam (2017), JLB Smith was equally adept at languages4 and, while in Mozambique, he learned Portuguese and subsequently delivered a lecture in the language in less than four weeks (although Margaret confided to this author that it took them 10 years to master the language). During the 1940s and 1950s JLB regularly corresponded with his Mozambican friends in Portuguese (letters in the Rhodes University Archive).
The legendary charm and vivacity of Margaret, teamed with her lively intelligence and gung-ho approach to life, was to serve as a lifelong foil to the taciturn and introverted JLB, and both were to shine more brightly as a result.
1Chisholm attended Rondebosch Boys High School and then become an attorney in Cape Town, but died tragically in a car accident in 1947, at the age of 39.
2Margaret’s class apparently included some other stellar performers, as 12 of her classmates went on to become cabinet ministers, judges or other luminaries (I Sholto-Douglas, pers. comm., 2016).
3JLB’s lighter side is revealed by his regular use of an expression of surprise to Margaret: ‘By Hades, Ma, diddly da and little fishes’.
4Samantha Weinberg (1999) claimed that JLB Smith could read 16 languages and speak eight but I think that this is an exaggeration. Other sources suggest he could ‘only’ read seven languages (English, Afrikaans, Dutch, Portuguese, German, French and Italian) and speak four fluently (English, Afrikaans, Portuguese, German), with a smattering of Italian. He also had an excellent grasp of Latin.
CHAPTER 8
Agony and ecstasy
Dramatic discovery of the first coelacanth
EIGHT MONTHS after their wedding, and while Margaret was pregnant with William, they landed their biggest catch: the first coelacanth. This event changed their lives forever. On 3rd January 1939 the Smiths were reading their Christmas mail at their lagoon-side cottage, the Blue House, in Knysna when Margaret said that she felt shock waves coming from her husband. She looked up and could see a drawing of a fish on the letter that he was reading. He had received a letter from Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, Director of the East London Museum, that read:
‘Dear Dr Smith, I had the most queer-looking specimen brought to notice yesterday … . It is coated with heavy scales, almost armour like, the fins resemble limbs.�
�
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer’s famous sketch of the first coelacanth.
He stared at a sketch that came with the letter,
‘… at first in puzzlement, for I did not know any fish of our own or indeed any seas like that; it looked more like a lizard. And then a bomb seemed to burst in my brain, and beyond that sketch and the paper of the letter I was looking at a series of fishy creatures that flashed up as on a screen, fishes no longer here, fishes that had lived in dim past ages gone, and of which only often fragmentary remains in rocks are known’ (Smith, 1956).
The image resembled drawings of fossils in books that he had read on palaeontology. He soon realised he was looking at a coelacanth, a prehistoric fish that scientists believed had gone extinct millions of years ago.
JLB whispered to Margaret, ‘This is from Miss Latimer, and unless I am quite off the rails she has got something that is really startling. Don’t think me mad, but I believe there is a good chance that it is a type of fish generally thought to have been extinct for many millions of years’ (Smith 1956). Margaret did wonder about her husband. Had he perhaps had too much sun? He was a man who seldom spoke without thinking first, and this was quite the most extraordinary thing she had ever heard him say (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969).
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the mount of the first coelacanth by Robert Center.
Smith (1956) later wrote:
‘It was as if the stage had been set for the coelacanth. I was in contact with the various museums, had by constant visits and voyages established cordial personal relations with trawler crews and the firms that ran them, had widespread contact with anglers, partly because I was one myself, and my brain held not only a rapidly increasing and almost comprehensive knowledge of the fishes living in our waters, but also a sketchy panorama of the long line … of fascinating fishy creatures … from remote ages past. … My peculiar photographic memory had recorded that the fossil Crossopterygii were described in Volume II of the Catalogue of the Fossil Fishes of the British Museum, published in 1891.’
His instinct told him this was a ‘living fossil’, a member of an ancient group of fishes that was thought to have gone extinct over 65 million years ago. Every detail that Marjorie had sent him seemed to confirm its identity, but he was also aware that finding a living coelacanth was utterly fantastic and highly unlikely.
Even though his main interest was in living fishes, he had read widely on fossil fishes, and now he wanted to know more. He sent a telegram to Keppel Barnard, Director at the South African Museum in Cape Town, asking him to urgently send him a copy of volume 2 of Arthur Smith Woodward’s authoritative Catalogue of the Fossil Fishes in the British Museum, which Barnard promptly did (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969); the book arrived on 6th January 1939 (Thomson, 1991). After studying this book, Smith was more convinced than ever. ‘If this fish was not a coelacanth, it was something very much like it’ (Smith, 1956).
He was in a difficult situation. As an ‘amateur’ ichthyologist, he was afraid that he would make an embarrassing mistake; a wrong identification would ruin his reputation. He sent a telegram to Miss Courtenay-Latimer, ‘Most important preserve skeleton and gills fish described’. The reason why he wanted these organs is that they are soft and decompose when an animal dies, and are therefore not preserved in the fossil record. He realised that, if he had the soft organs, he could study aspects of this ancient fish that had never been studied before. But it was too late. Despite her best efforts, Marjorie had been unable to preserve the internal organs of the fish because the museum did not have enough preservative for such a large specimen. The soft parts had all rotted and been thrown away (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969; Weinberg, 1999; Bruton, 2015).
Though he was almost convinced by Miss Courtenay-Latimer’s description and her sketch, JLB couldn’t risk announcing the find without seeing the fish itself. He resolved to travel as soon as possible to East London, about 580 kilometres away over rough roads, to see for himself what remained of the fish and to satisfy his curiosity. But he first had to finish marking examination papers for the University of South Africa. He wrote to Miss Courtenay-Latimer again:
‘Your fish is occasioning me much worry and sleepless nights. It is most aggravating being so far away. I cannot help but mourn that the soft parts of the fish were not preserved even had they been almost putrid. I am sorry to say that I think their loss represents one of the greatest tragedies of zoology, since I am more than ever convinced on reflection that your fish is a more primitive form than has yet been discovered. … Your fish has the general external features of a Coelacanthid, fishes common in early times in northern Europe and America. Whether or not it is a new genus or family I can determine only on examination, but I feel sure that it will make a great sensation in the Zoological world’ (Smith, 1956).
The next day he received another letter from Marjorie:
‘I strove to do all I could to preserve it. As I found the work too much for me, I had it taken to Mr. Center and got him to do all the heavy work … There was no skeleton. The backbone was a column of soft white gristle-like material, running from skull to tail – this an inch across and filled with oil’ (Smith, 1956).
The reference to a soft backbone made of gristle intrigued Smith and he became still more convinced that the fish, impossible as it might seem, was a living representative of a group of extinct fishes. He wrote again:
‘Many thanks for your letter and for the parcel of three scales. They leave little doubt in my mind about the nature of the fish, but even so my mind still refuses to grasp this tremendous impossibility. The discovery is going to be a real zoological sensation.’
He had long felt a premonition that he would one day discover a remarkable sea creature, and it appeared to be coming true! But he remained very cautious:
‘Those were awful days, and the nights were even worse. I was tortured by doubts and fears. What was the use of that infernal premonition of mine if it was just going to lead me to make a scientific fool of myself?’ (Smith, 1956).
Smith later learned that the first coelacanth fossils had been found by a Swiss-American palaeontologist, Louis Agassiz, who described a new species of extinct fish, Coelacanthus granulatus, from a fossil of Permian age found in a road cutting in England in 1836. Agassiz coined the name, Coelacanthus (Greek for ‘hollow spine’) as he had noticed that the tail fin was supported by hollow spines; granulatus refers to the rough ornamentation on the scales. Agassiz was a well-respected palaeontologist who later established the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in the USA. Despite his stature as a scientist Agassiz, like many scientists of his day, did not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and believed that species were created by ‘ideas in the mind of God’. He also wrongly proposed that coelacanths were closely related to the armour-plated placoderm fishes that lived over 300 million years ago, but the British palaeontologist Sir Thomas Huxley1 correctly placed them with the lobe-finned fishes.
Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-American palaeontologist who discovered the first coelacanth fossils in England in 1836.
Over the next 150 years many more coelacanth fossils were found, all dating from 420 million to about 65 million years ago, when the coelacanth fossil record ends2. It therefore made sense to assume that the coelacanth lineage had died out with the dinosaurs (and many other creatures) after the great Cretaceous extinction about 65 million years ago. Three species of extinct coelacanth have been found in southern Africa. Robert Broom found fragments of Whiteia africanus (160 million years old) in 1905 in the Free State, and Brian Gardner found scales of Coelacanthus dendrites (175 million years old) in 1973 in Namibia. In 2015, Rob Gess from the Albany Museum and Michael Coates from Wits University described a new species of estuarine coelacanth, Serenichthys kowiensis (360 million years old), based on over 30 specimens found on Waterloo Farm near Grahamstown (Gess & Coates, 2015), close to where JLB had regularly walked. But no fossils of the modern coelacanth in the genus Latime
ria have been found.
Serenichthys kowiensis, the extinct, estuarine coelacanth found by Robert Gess near Grahamstown.
The respected South African fishing company Irvin & Johnson (I&J) played an important role in the discovery of the first coelacanth. Like many long-established fishing companies, Irvin & Johnson started out as a sealing and whaling company. The two founders, George D Irvin and Charles Ocean Johnson, were both experienced seamen who participated actively in sealing and whaling. According to the veteran marine journalist Lawrence Green (1958), Johnson was known for his foul temper and rough justice. Once the skippers of two of his whale catchers decided to have a last drink before leaving Cape Town for the Antarctic. As a result, their ships collided in Table Bay and had to put back to port for repairs. Johnson hit one of the men with his fists and was fined five pounds for assault. ‘I’d like to pay another five and give the other fellow a hiding’, he told the magistrate, who then fined him again for contempt of court!
Interestingly, from 1936 onwards Keppel Barnard had arranged for I&J fishing boats in Cape Town to collect unusual fishes for the South African Museum (Gon, 2002, 2007). For several years the enthusiasm and co-operation of the fishermen increased the annual number of accessions into the museum’s collection to thousands. JLB Smith himself went out on I&J trawlers from Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in the 1940s to examine their catches while doing research for his book, The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa (Bell, 1969; Gon, 2004).