The Fishy Smiths

by Mike Bruton

  Eric Hunt immediately preserved the fish as best he could and sent a telegram to Smith, ‘HAVE FIVE FOOT SPECIMEN COELACANTH INJECTED FORMALIN HERE KILLED 20TH ADVISE REPLY HUNT DZAOUDZI’. The telegram took four days to reach Smith, finding him still on board the Dunottar Castle, newly docked in Durban.

  Smith was thrilled by the news but very anxious. How certain could he be that Hunt had identified the fish correctly? Did Hunt have enough preservative to save the soft parts? He didn’t even know where Dzaoudzi was until one of the ship’s officers looked it up and told him that it is on the small island of Petite-Terre (or Pamanzi) off the main island of Grande-Terre (or Maore) in Mayotte, Comoros. It was also the location of the French colonial administration of the islands, and had an airstrip.

  Smith then received another telegram from Hunt that increased his anxiety: ‘CHARTER PLANE IMMEDIATELY AUTHORITIES TRYING CLAIM SPECIMEN BUT WILLING LET YOU HAVE IT IF IN PERSON STOP PAID FISHERMAN REWARD TO STRENGHTEN POSITION STOP INJCETED FIVE KILO FORMALIN NO REFROGERATOR STOP SPECIMEN DIFEFERNT TOURS NO FRONT DORSAL OR TAIL RENMANANT BUT DEFINITE IDENTIFICATION HUNT’.

  Not only were the French authorities threatening to seize the fish, but it was different from the first specimen, which fuelled his doubts as to whether it was a coelacanth at all.

  Most people, after an exhausting expedition to the tropics, would have settled for a delayed trip back to the Comoros to retrieve the second coelacanth, but Smith’s sense of ownership of the specimen after his extensive reward campaign, and his determination to be the one to describe it, dictated that he must go back and retrieve it immediately. Even before disembarking at Durban, he started preparing to fly to the Comoros. Captain Smythe placed the ship’s telephone on the bridge at his disposal and helped in every way he could, even providing snacks – cheese, dried figs, Brazil nuts – for Smith to take on board whichever aeroplane could be secured to fly him to fetch the fish. The hastily devised plan was now for JLB Smith alone to fly back north, with Margaret continuing her journey on the Dunottar Castle to Port Elizabeth, and then by road to Grahamstown with the fish collections.

  Margaret tried to persuade JLB to allow a French scientist, Jacques Millot, from Madagascar to examine the second coelacanth in the Comoros. JLB had previously met Millot, head of the French Scientific Research Institute in Tananarive, at a conference in Johannesburg, but he would have none of it. It was his fish and he would be the first to identify and describe it.

  Smith was exhausted after his long expedition but he now had to find the energy to face up to this new challenge. After 14 long years he finally had another coelacanth – but how could he get to the Comoros over the Christmas holidays in time to save the fish? Later he wrote, ‘It was an awful time. I can stand a good deal, but find suspense wearing, for while my imagination helps my work it clouds my life’ (Smith, 1956).

  While JLB was trying to arrange an aeroplane (there were, of course, no commercial flights from South Africa to the Comoros at the time), he and Margaret were invited to a series of teas and meals in Durban. He wrote of one such outing:

  ‘We were probably deadly guests at that luncheon, but our charming hosts were old friends, considerate and expert at making even corpses feel at home. Even so their tasty food almost nauseated me. There was fish, but I could see only Coelacanth. It was a hot day, and there was a specially delicious cold drink; but I could think only of formalin’ (Smith, 1956).

  The week of Christmas 1952 was one of the most frustrating times in Smith’s life. Initially he tried to obtain permission to use a Sunderland flying boat from 35 Squadron at Durban Bayhead, or even the more ponderous Catalina, which would have resulted in a slow journey, but nothing came of this (Bergh et al., 1992). He then spent hours on the telephone trying to persuade various decision-makers to provide an aeroplane ‘to take a mad scientist to a foreign country to fetch a dead fish’, as one journalist later wrote. At one stage he had an angry exchange with a senior military officer, who, quite reasonably, asked him what a fish had to do with the armed forces. Smith replied that it was of national importance. ‘“What! A fish! Of national importance?” “Yes! A fish”, I barked back, so firmly that he listened again … He concluded by assuring me that I had as much hope as trying to get a plane to the moon’ (Smith, 1956).

  Has such an extraordinary series of phone calls ever been made by a scientist to a parade of senior politicians, all in the pursuit of a single, dead fish? He phoned the President of the CSIR, senior government officials, Members of Parliament, the Ministers of Economic Affairs, Internal Affairs, Transport and Defence, all during the Christmas holidays! Only a remarkably determined man who was totally convinced of the importance of science would have dared to follow this course. Most people thought that he was crazy to attach such importance to a fish.

  Margaret advised him to go for broke and phone the Prime Minister, Dr Daniel François (‘DF’) Malan, but Smith was loath to do so. He had had a bitter experience with the previous South African Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, who had a keen interest in science, had served as the President of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1925 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930. Smuts was a towering figure in international politics but had a reputation for putting the needs of foreigners ahead of those of his own people. In 1945 Smith had asked him to provide a military aeroplane to collect fishes killed by a submarine disturbance off Walvis Bay in South West Africa (now Namibia) but Smuts refused even to meet him (Smith, 1956).

  Malan and his National Party had defeated Smuts in the 1948 general election on the platform of apartheid. Malan himself was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, devout and sternly Calvinistic, and seemed unlikely to hold enlightened views on science. Smith was aware that leaders of this same church held the view that the theory of evolution was in direct conflict with the teaching of the Bible and that it should not be taught in schools. He doubted that Malan would be sympathetic to his cause.

  Eventually, after exhausting all other possibilities, and with the mediation of Dr Vernon Shearer, Member of Parliament for Durban, Smith phoned the Prime Minister at his holiday retreat in Strand, near Cape Town to ask him to supply a military aircraft to fetch the fish in the Comoros. After initially talking to Malan’s wife, Maria, Smith received a call back from Malan at 23h00 on the evening of Friday, 26th December 1952. Smith later learned that Malan had returned his call because he realised that the author of The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa, which he had at his bedside, was the self-same scientist now so desperately in need of help.

  Smith set about persuading Malan that the collection of the second coelacanth was an issue of ‘national prestige’, a phrase which seems rather quaint today; but he was right. As long afterwards as 1998, the discovery of the coelacanth was judged to be of sufficient national importance to justify the issue, by the South African Mint, of a gold coin depicting ‘Old Fourlegs’, and in 1989 the South African Post Office issued four postage stamps commemorating the discovery. This was only the second set of South African postage stamps to honour science, the first being the stamp issued in February 1979 that celebrated Antarctic research and depicted Trevor Wadley’s Radio Tellurometer.

  The Prime Minister listened patiently to Smith’s plea, which he made in perfect Afrikaans, and then said:

  ‘Your story is remarkable, and I can see at once that this is a matter of great importance. It is too late to try to do anything tonight, but first thing in the morning I shall get through to my Minister of Defence to ask him to allocate a suitable aeroplane to take you where you need to go.’

  Smith (1956) later recalled,

  ‘As I put down the receiver, I felt dazed, like a man reprieved on the very scaffold, like somebody suddenly jerked from the hollows of hell to a high hill-top in heaven.’

  Early the next morning Malan instructed the Chief of the South African Defence Force, Lieutenant-General CL de Wet du Toit, to provide a suitable military aircraft to fly Smith to the Como
ros to collect the coelacanth.

  Many years later there was an amusing sequel to this dramatic saga. After the publication of the new edition of Smiths’ Sea Fishes in 1986, Margaret Smith and this author formally presented a copy to the then Minister of National Education (later State President of South Africa), FW de Klerk, at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. He thanked us for the gift and laughingly said, ‘I will keep it next to my bed in case I receive an urgent call from you’. He clearly knew about the incident with Malan 34 years earlier, such is the power of the coelacanth story (Bruton, 2015, 2017)!

  The aeroplane chosen to take Smith to the Comoros was a Douglas C-47 Dakota, a reliable propeller-driven plane with Pratt & Whitney engines, a cruise speed of 333 kilometres/hour, and a range of 2,400 kilometres.3 The ‘Flying Fishcart’, as she was nicknamed by the Pretoria News, is now the only Dakota in its class that can still fly.

  The navigator on the historic flight, Willem Bergh, was another example of a chemist who had changed tack and became accomplished in another field. He had originally obtained his MSc from the University of Pretoria and taught chemistry at the Military Academy at Saldanha Bay before becoming a navigator in the Air Force and eventually retiring in 1983 with the rank of Lieutenant-General.4

  Lieutenant Duncan Ralston, a crew member on the historic flight of the ‘Flying Fishcart’ in December 1952.

  Dakota 6832 with a crew of six flew to Durban from Swartkops Air Force Base in Pretoria early on the morning of Sunday, 28th December 1952. Smith (1956) described his first meeting with the crew at Stamford Hill Aerodrome in Durban: ‘When the door was opened three huge Air Force officers emerged and came over towards us. … They were all covertly scanning me closely; what was in this skinny little fellow to get a Prime Minister to send a special plane to look for a fish?’ After a breakfast of coffee and litchis, Smith boarded the plane. When the crew were ready for take-off the pilot, Commandant Jan Blaauw, asked Smith if he was ready, to which he replied that yes, he was, but were they? The contrast between Smith’s scrawny frame and his assertive manner was a surprise to the burly Air Force stalwarts, but they soon learned that there was more to him than met the eye. When Smith learned that they had only 11 litres of drinking water on board, he delayed the flight and insisted that they take another seven litres ‘in case they were forced down in the tropical wilderness of Africa’ (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969).

  At 05h00 they were finally on their way to the Comoros (Smith, 1956; Bergh et al., 1992). After refuelling in Lourenço Marques and overnighting in Lumbo in northern Mozambique, they flew out over the Indian Ocean in the direction of Dzaoudzi. During the flight, to the amazement of the crew, Smith suddenly appeared in the cockpit with a bowl of freshly-made fruit salad of pineapples, paw-paws and bananas (filched from the hotel pantry in Lumbo) sprinkled with sugar and dried milk, followed by cheese and biscuits.

  They approached the small, primitive airstrip at Pamanzi in trepidation, not knowing whether they would be able to land. The strip had been built about 10 years earlier, during the Second World War, by South Africa’s Union Defence Force when they occupied the island (Bergh et al., 1992). They buzzed the airstrip and realised that they would have to land uphill, towards a small volcano, with no chance of going round again. But a Dakota with a competent crew is a highly versatile aircraft and they landed without mishap.

  Smith commented at the time:

  ‘The situation was typical of most of my life, either heaven or hell, seldom anywhere between. When I asked my wife to marry me, I said I did not know if I could bring her happiness, but I could at least promise that she would never be bored; and she has eased many a tight corner by reminding me of this with a smile, often a very grim one. Here it was again. Could anything be more ridiculous? In my maturity I had staked virtually my whole life on the identity of a fish I had not seen. … I wanted only one thing, and that was to see the fish, to know if I was a fool or a prophet’ (Smith, 1956).

  Eric Hunt had rushed to the airstrip. ‘Where’s the fish?’ demanded Smith. ‘On my boat … It’s true, don’t worry’, Hunt replied. But Smith was in agony. What if it wasn’t a coelacanth? What an embarrassment that would be to him and the Prime Minister who had supported him! Soon they were on Hunt’s schooner and a coffin-like box was shoved in front of them. They all stared at ‘Doc’ Smith.

  The historic photograph of JLB Smith shortly after he had identified the second coelacanth on Eric Hunt’s schooner at Pamanzi, Mayotte, on 29th December 1952. Eric Hunt is on the far left and Pierre Coudert on the right in front.

  Later, on his arrival at Durban airport, Smith would relate – in a speech that has claimed its place in the annals of South African history – what transpired: that after the box had been opened and he had knelt down to look at its contents, he could confirm that this was a coelacanth, albeit a different species from the specimen found in 1938.

  When Smith realised that the specimen was indeed a coelacanth, his first thought was that Dr Malan would not be embarrassed by his generosity. Then he knelt down to examine the fish carefully. Fourteen of the best years of his life had gone into the search for this second coelacanth and here beneath his hands his dream had come true at last (Bell, 1969). What’s more, he had proved his critics wrong. The coelacanth is not a fish that lives ‘in the inaccessible depths of the ocean’, as White, Millot and others had forecast, but an inhabitant of relatively shallow, rocky reefs in the tropics in a place where trawl nets would be difficult to use and baited hand lines would be more efficient, as he (and JR Norman) had predicted (Norman, 1939; Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969).

  Although Smith was elated with the catch, he was disappointed to find that the specimen had been badly mutilated during the salting process. While Hunt had been away searching for formalin in Mutsamudu, his deckhands had hacked the fish open lengthwise like a kipper and had destroyed parts of the brain and other organs, but they had fortunately followed Hunt’s instructions and not discarded the rest of the internal organs.

  As he took a closer look at the fish in the box, Smith noticed that the second coelacanth was missing its first dorsal fin as well as the ‘puppy-dog’ tail in the middle of the tail fin, and decided that it must be a different species from the first. He told Eric Hunt that he planned to name it Malania hunti but Hunt demurred and told him that he was honoured by the suggestion but would prefer that it should be named in honour of the French territory where it had been caught; Smith then settled on the name, Malania anjouanae. This initial hunch that the second coelacanth was a different species from the first specimen would later prove to have been wrong: research revealed that the dorsal fin had probably been bitten off by a predator, and that it was, in fact, the same species as the first specimen, Latimeria chalumnae.

  The second coelacanth, showing the missing first dorsal fin and missing middle lobe of the tail fin.

  Smith was later to discover some fascinating features about this coelacanth. The gill arches looked like jaw bones, which indicated that these structures have a common origin, and the notochord along the back, as in sharks and rays, proved to be a hollow tube made of cartilage, the forerunner to a bony backbone. He confirmed that the limb-like fins had their own bony internal skeletons and that the fish had no lungs, but a swim bladder filled with fat. In the intestines he found the remains of prey fishes that he estimated to be at least 15 pounds (6.8 kilograms) in weight, confirming that the coelacanth was a powerful predator.

  JLB Smith photographing the second coelacanth in 1953, with the assistance of Margaret.

  Before they departed from Dzaoudzi, Smith fired off telegrams to Malan and the CSIR, and they took a few photographs, one of which, showing Smith with the second coelacanth, Hunt, the crew of the Dakota, Governor Pierre Coudert, the fisherman Achmed Hussein Bourou and some local inhabitants, has become an iconic image in the history of ichthyology. Another rarer photograph shows the crew, Captain Hunt, one French official and JLB Smith standing next to the Dakota, with Smith in typical field g
ear – khaki shirt and shorts, rain coat and shoes without socks! Before they were allowed to escape, Governor Coudert invited them to join him for a sumptuous banquet ‘… with toasts of wine, vintage brandy and glorious chocolate cake’ (Bergh et al., 1992), but Smith would have none of it as he wanted to finalise the ultimate ‘fish-jacking’. They quickly hustled the fish on board the Dakota and began the long return journey to Durban.

  Coudert was later rapped over the knuckles by the French authorities for allowing Smith to escape with the precious scientific specimen (Weinberg, 1999), which was really the property of France. But as Smith said to him, ‘If this one had been found on the steps of your Residency, sir, I would have come for it, for it is mine’. As was the case with the first coelacanth, Smith had no hesitation in claiming the second fish. ‘In my own mind I felt no ethical uneasiness about going for this fish, rather the reverse, for even though this Coelacanth had been found in French waters, it was mine by every right’ (Smith, 1956). He had spent 14 years searching for it and, at that time, he knew more about the importance of the coelacanth than anyone else.