by Mike Bruton
A trawlerman in Durban reported that six large fishes resembling the coelacanth had been netted off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal many years ago but the specimens had not been kept or photographed. Another man reported to JLB Smith that he had once seen a coelacanth washed up on the beach near Gonubie, and Leonard Thesen (of the Knysna ship-building family) claimed that, in 1925, he had done a painting of a coelacanth on a curtain that had hung in his seaside cottage in Plettenberg Bay in the 1920s based on a fish washed up near Knysna. He claimed that severe arthritis would have prevented him from doing this painting after the mid-1930s, but later research by Robin Stobbs (1996a) revealed that it had been painted after 1938. As the Thesens and the Smiths knew each other in Knysna, one wonders why the painting was not brought to Smith’s attention earlier. Rumour has it that Leonard Thesen could not understand what all the fuss was about and sought to deflate the importance of the coelacanth’s discovery.
A more credible claim of a coelacanth sighting, off Malindi in Kenya, was made by GF Cartwright of Zimbabwe. In a letter dated 3rd August 1953, he wrote to Smith:
‘One day I had swum out and had my harpoon gun. I looked down into the water and just below my sandshoed foot I saw a large fish. It was heavily built and probably weighed from 100 to 150 lbs and I thought how just too comfortably my foot would fit into its mouth. It was totally unlike any other fish I had seen or saw afterwards. It looked wholly evil and a thousand years old. It had a large eye and the most distinguishing feature was the armourplated effect of its heavy scales … It had a baleful and ancient appearance. I decided that I should attempt a head shot and with luck might secure the fish. My gun was not quite as powerful as it might have been as it had only two rubbers. … the harpoon struck the fish but did not penetrate.’
In his reply to Cartwright dated 10th August 1953, Smith wrote,
‘I have read your letter many times and weighed up carefully what you have said, and at the moment I can see no reason at all why it should not have been a Coelacanth. A great deal of what you say would certainly fit a large Rock Cod, but then a part makes it extremely unlikely. I have never believed that the Coelacanths live only at the Comoros, indeed I have quite a fair amount of evidence from other parts, and it should not be forgotten that after all the first one came from South Africa. If ever you see another I do sincerely hope that you will have a chance of getting it, though I should imagine that even a bullet would have quite a job to penetrate his thick scale armour. You would probably have more chance of the harpoon penetrating if you shot at him from behind, but even then you would have to be close-by.’
Smith later met Cartwright in Harare (Salisbury) and, after hearing his story again, concluded that he ‘… could think of no other fish, apart from the Coelacanth, that looked like the one that Mr Cartwright had described’ (Bell, 1969).
Perhaps the most unusual report was the remarkable case of the ‘silver coelacanth’. In 1964 a chemist, Dr Ladislao Reti, bought a 10-centimetre long silver ornament from a priest who had it hanging in his church in Bilbao, Spain. It was apparently an ex voto, an offering given in fulfilment of a vow. The ornament is an accurate depiction of the coelacanth, with large scales, a big, bony head and lobed paired fins, yet a silversmith estimated that it had been made about 100 years earlier. Two explanations have been offered for this mystery: it was modelled on a coelacanth caught near Spain, perhaps in the Mediterranean Sea or Atlantic Ocean, or it was copied from a coelacanth seen in the Comoros (Fricke, 1987; Thomson, 1991; Weinberg, 1999).
JLB Smith favoured the latter explanation:
‘If the silver coelacanth is genuine, as it could be, then it could easily have arisen from someone who had voyaged in early times to the East and seen the fish at the Comores – for in those days, over a long period, all the ships called at Anjouan Island (then known as Joanna). …. Eastern races are famous for their skill as silversmiths. All along East Africa they have plied this art for centuries, and the model could have been made by one of these men in that area. The Portuguese were the first white voyagers in those parts, and odd Spaniards often went with them. One of them might well have acquired this model and taken it to Europe. At any rate, I firmly believe that some of those early voyagers had at least seen a Coelacanth. I think this very much more likely than that the ornament was based on [a] specimen from the Mediterranean’ (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969).
The ‘silver coelacanth’.
JLB Smith was also inundated with weird queries and requests for information from laypeople who believed they suddenly had access to an expert on ‘old things’. One woman wrote to say that she had an old violin, could he please tell her how valuable it was? A man with a pirate’s map offered to share the profits with Smith if he could help him find the buried treasure marked on the map! (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969). Smith was also asked to identify unusual shells and a ‘fish-monstrosity’ with ‘a face of a monkey, short legs, and an eye in the top of its head’ (Smith, 1956), probably a josef, Callorhinchus capensis. He was also, of course, accosted by ultra-religious people who ‘roundly reproved me for ignoring the Bible in my preposterous statements about millions of years, and did I not know that the theory of evolution was evil’ (Smith, 1956). Sadly, Margaret disposed of the contents of the ‘Crackpot files’ before she died.
The capture of the 1938 coelacanth was a classic example, in the field of science, of a ‘black swan’ event: an unforeseen circumstance that came as a total surprise and then had major ‘downstream’ consequences; a geopolitical equivalent is the ‘Arab Spring’. If the cold-water upwelling had not caused the coelacanth to venture into unusually shallow water, and Captain Hendrik Goosen had not shot one last trawl off the Chalumna River mouth on that fateful day in December 1938, JLB Smith would probably have remained an amateur ichthyologist, the Ichthyology Department and Institute in Grahamstown would probably not have been established there, and ichthyology would have followed a very different course in South Africa, almost certainly based in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth or Durban.
1Interestingly, Thomas Huxley launched his celebrated scientific career with a study on the Portuguese man-of-war or blue-bottle, based on specimens that he collected in the sea off Simonstown [Simon’s Town] in South Africa (Siegfried, 2007). Although Huxley was one of Darwin’s strongest supporters, and was nicknamed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, he also revealed a tinge of jealousy that he had not thought of evolution by natural selection, ‘How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that’ (Huxley & Huxley, 1947).
2A very small percentage of dead animals become fossilised as many conditions have to be met simultaneously in order for a dead animal to become a fossil. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of those forms that are fossilised are ever discovered by humans, usually in the surface layers of the earth’s crust on land, rarely under the oceans. As Richard Dawkins (2017) remarked, ‘I personally would consider it an honour to be fossilised, but I don’t have much hope of it’.
3Dr James Bruce-Bays was a local medical doctor who was the Chairman of the Board of the East London Museum at the time.
4Modern lungfish were known for over a century before the first living coelacanth was discovered and they initially filled the ‘missing link’ gap in evolution between fishes in the sea and the tetrapods (four-legged animals) on land. The first Australian lungfishes were collected from the Burnett River through the initiative of a bushwhacker, William Forster, and were sent to the curator of the Sydney Museum, Gerard Krefft. The mysterious beast was known colloquially as the ‘Burnett salmon’, but no-one was even certain that it was a fish. It was initially named Ceratodus forsteri but is now called Neoceratodus forsteri. The genus Ceratodus was erected by Louis Agassiz, the same scientist who described the first coelacanth fossils.
5JLB Smith was a staunch supporter of the Royal Society of South Africa and was elected a Fellow early in his career, in 1935, at the age of 38 years, mainly in recognition of his work in chemistry.
6This was not the only time that pol
itics was to intrude into the coelacanth story. Many years later, when American marine biologist Mark Erdmann and his wife, Arnaz, on honeymoon in Indonesia in September 1998, encountered a coelacanth in a market in Manado, they didn’t immediately realise the significance of their discovery and allowed a friend to post information about it on Facebook. Mark stated that he was subsequently caught up ‘in a web of politics and turf battles which basically committed me to secrecy’ for the year following the discovery. While Erdmann’s formal description of the Indonesian coelacanth was in press in Nature, the formal naming of the new species was rudely pre-empted in March 1999 by a French catfish specialist, Laurent Pouyard (1999), who published a description of the new coelacanth’s DNA and its general anatomy, and also gave it a name, Latimeria menadoensis. As Pouyard’s description fulfilled (although barely) the requirements of the International Rules of Zoological Nomenclature, his pirated name stands. And so the intrigue of the coelacanth continues.
7Bob van Hille was still lecturing in the Zoology Department at Rhodes University 26 years later when this author was an undergraduate there (1966–1968), and went on to serve that department for over 50 years. He was yet another example, with Billy Barker, Edgar Mountain, JLB Smith and many others, of the longevity of Rhodes’ academics.
8Drury (1942) wrote an interesting report on his mounting of the coelacanth but his most famous, if controversial, work had been done earlier, between 1906 and 1924, when he had made plaster-of-Paris moulds of 68 living San people (Bushmen). His first cast was made from a living subject, a seated boy playing a musical instrument. The casts were displayed in a diorama at the South African Museum until 2001, when the display was dismantled following protests from the Khoisan community and others who said that it represented a time when Bushmen were treated like specimens in a museum.
CHAPTER 9
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer
Pioneering museum director
MARJORIE EILEEN Doris Courtenay-Latimer led an extraordinary life that is related in full elsewhere (Bruton, 2019) – only a rough sketch is provided here. She was born two months prematurely on 24th February 1907 in East London and weighed a mere 680 grams at birth. This impossibly tiny baby grew into a frail but lively child with a deep interest in the natural world. She survived early encounters with a tiger (escaped from the local circus), a cobra, and a full panoply of childhood diseases, all the while developing into a precocious little naturalist with a special interest in flowers and birds.
Her father observed of her, ‘She is naturally gifted with a flare of finding things and knowing by instinct what is wanted or where to look for what she wants’. Despite her family’s frequently moving from one small inland town to another at the behest of her father’s employers, the South African Railways, Marjorie had by the age of nine amassed collections of bird’s eggs, beads, butterflies, succulents and stone implements. She sent these treasures to an expert, Dr J Brownlee, in King William’s Town, who was mentoring her in nature studies. ‘Latimer be patient’, he said to Marjorie’s father, ‘this child will go far in her natural gift of the beautiful. God grant her the health.’
In Marge’s 16th year, after the family had moved back to East London, Dr George Rattray, then Headmaster of Selborne College, visited the Latimers to talk about their daughter, whose brilliance in natural history was now well known. ‘He says they are striving to get a Museum established in East London and feels that Margie would be a wonderful person to work for it’, wrote her father. Later he would add, ‘She has one great wish and that is to work in a Museum’.
On 4th May 1931 she was interviewed by the museum committee for the job of Curator at the East London Museum. Marjorie wore a straw bonnet and a dress decorated with the bluebells of Scotland, ‘looking like a country bumpkin compared with the beautiful, nicely dressed other women who were applying for the job’ (Jewett, 2004). One of the committee asked her if she knew anything about the platanna, and she gave him ‘chapter and verses’ (Anon, 2004b).
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer at the age of 24 years during her first year as Director of the East London Museum in 1931, wearing her nurse’s tunic.
Marjorie was always destined to make her mark in biology and, despite her lack of formal training in ichthyology, fulfilled her early promise by playing a key role in the discovery of the first coelacanth.
The East London Museum can trace its origins back to 1921 when a group of interested people met with the Mayor, Captain J Neale, and Deputy Mayor, the medical doctor Dr James Bruce-Bays, to suggest the building of a museum for East London and to form a museum society. The first purpose-built museum was opened on 23rd September 1931 at the top of Oxford Street. A new museum building was officially opened on 25th November 1950, with JLB and Margaret Smith among the official guests, and was expanded in 1983 and again in 2006 (Morcom, pers. comm., 2017)
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer started work as Curator of the East London Museum in mid-1931 for the princely sum of £2 per month. The museum had recently acquired its first permanent premises and she worked furiously laying out the new museum’s displays in time for the official opening on 23rd September 1931. At this event the founder, Dr Bruce-Bays, said ‘… the museum was going far with such a charming and able girl and that the arduous task before her would be swept along in her enthusiasm and charming personality’.
Montage of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the original East London Museum (1931–1950), with the first coelacanth and the Nerine.
Marjorie was keen to ensure that the museum’s displays reflected topics that were important to East London, including the ethnography of the local indigenous people and the marine biodiversity along the adjacent coastline (Courtenay-Latimer, pers. comm., 1984; Bell, 1969). The displays that she inherited included a bottled piglet with six legs, 12 photographs of East London, six stuffed birds (largely eaten by dermestid beetles) and prints of Xhosa war scenes. On her second day at work she apparently arrived with an axe and hacked up the ‘terrible, terrible’ display cases and started to gather new natural and cultural history material for the museum (Anon, 2004a and b).
The new East London Museum, opened in 1950.
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (far left) with five of her sisters in the 1940s. From left: Marjorie, Elsie (behind), Patricia, Lorna, Norah and Joan.
Marjorie later (1996) commented, ‘The Museum collection was very sad: all kinds of odd specimens … I interviewed fishing clubs and the manager of the fishing trawlers to save material for me, and in no time beautiful marine material was brought in.’ She also added to the museum’s collection some old dresses, china and jewellery, beadwork dating back to 1858 collected by her mother, and her own bird eggs and stone implements. On weekends and holidays she collected flowers, shells, butterflies, moths and further ethnological material, and in 1935 her great-aunt, Lavinia Bean of Port Elizabeth, donated to the museum what is reputed to be the only intact dodo egg in the world. This precious egg was given to Miss Bean by descendants of a sailor who had been shipwrecked on Mauritius. A replica of the egg is still on display in the museum, with the original safely stowed away under lock and key. Its identity has never been authenticated using DNA or surface ultrastructure techniques as the museum does not want it to leave the premises.
On 6th December 1933, while collecting shells and seaweeds on the beach near Igoda Mouth, Marjorie met JLB Smith for the first time. ‘A spry man, almost drowned by his baggy shorts, with startling blue eyes and a thick bristle of sandy hair, had come up to her and asked what she was doing’ (Weinberg, 1999). Eric Latimer recorded in his diary that day, ‘She was charmed with him, said [they] had a long chat, he was camping at Igoda. He is very interested in fish, but unfortunately the Museum only has a few bad specimens, but he has offered to help her with any she may care to have classified, which she is very excited about, because she has no books on fish at all.’ She later wrote, ‘JLB Smith … of all the scientists I met as a young girl struggling with meagre funds in a small Museum, alway
s gave encouragement and never criticism’ (Courtenay-Latimer, 1969).
Marjorie stated in an article, ‘My story of the first coelacanth’ (1969), that her involvement in the coelacanth drama began in 1911 when, at the age of four years, she gazed out across Algoa Bay from her grandmother’s house in Port Elizabeth and developed a fascination for Bird Island and its lighthouse out in the bay. She had to wait 25 years before she could eventually visit the island at the age of 29 years, with her mother and father, spending six weeks there collecting birds’ eggs, fishes, sponges, seaweeds and seashells for display in the East London Museum. It was there that she met Captain Hendrik Goosen, skipper of the Nerine, who came ashore to inspect her collections, and agreed to take them back to East London for her. Thereafter Goosen regularly set aside material that he caught while trawling, and notified Marjorie of his catches when he returned to port in East London.
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer in 1952.
Marjorie was briefly engaged to a certain Alfred Hill, but it didn’t last long; as he said, ‘no wife of his [was] going to be climbing trees and chasing birds’ (E Latimer diary, 30th April 1929). She was also once engaged to Eric Wilson, son of Robert Wilson, founder/manager of the Wilson’s Sweet Factory in East London, where ‘Wilson’s XXX Mints’ were produced. Robert Wilson was on the Board of the East London Museum, and sponsored a field trip to Tarkastad where the 170-million-year-old fossil of a mammal-like reptile was excavated. Robert Broom named it Kannemeyeria wilsoni after Wilson in 1937 (it is now synonymised with K. simocephalus), and it was this fossil that Marjorie was busy mounting when she received the historic phone call from Goosen in December 1938. Eric Wilson died of pneumonia before he could marry Marjorie (not in a military skirmish, as previously reported; Bruton, 2017). After Eric’s death, Marjorie decided that she would not marry, but would devote the rest of her life to ‘her’ museum, of which she was Director for 42 years until 1973. Marjorie’s involvement in the discovery of the first coelacanth is related in detail elsewhere in this book.