The Fishy Smiths

by Mike Bruton

  Soon after leaving Pamanzi with the precious booty, the Dakota crew played a trick on Smith:

  ‘Suddenly Captain Letley stiffened and began to write down a message which he passed to the Commandant who read it, glanced at the Professor, and then read it again and passed it over to him. With dismay the Professor read that a squadron of French fighters had left Diego Suarez even before the South Africans had taken off from Dzaoudzi. They intended to intercept the Dakota and force it to land on Madagascar. “How fast are they?” he wanted to know. “Much faster than we are”, said the Captain. “Think they’ll catch up before we get to Lumbo?” He nodded. “Any hope of escaping in a cloud?” “Radar”, said the Captain. “Well”, said the Professor, “I’m not giving up my Coelacanth. I don’t believe they’d shoot us down if we refused to turn back. I don’t know how you chaps feel, but I’m not going back”’ (Smith, 1956).

  Grins split the men’s faces and their chuckles told him that he was having his leg pulled (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969). Playing jokes on one another is an effective way of relieving tension on a long flight but this was a brave hoax to play on Smith, an intensely serious man on a deadly earnest mission.

  At one stage during the return flight one of the crew happened to visit Smith in the back of the plane where he found him huddled over his portable primus stove, trying to light it so that he could make the crew some hot coffee. It took the intervention of the Captain and the Commandant – who told him that the fish would be blown to bits if he continued – to stop him (Bergh et al., 1992).

  During the return flight, Smith asked the crew to record their thoughts when they had first been informed about the mission. Commandant JPD Blaauw (pilot) said: ‘It must be a pretty important fish if the Prime Minister is prepared to give an aircraft and a crew to some hare-brained scientist to fetch it’. Captain P Letley (co-pilot) commented: ‘My reply (as you requested) cannot be written down. Anyway I enjoyed the trip’. Lieutenant WJ Bergh (navigator) complained: ‘I was all set to go on a special visit (my girlfriend) for the week-end, I did not like the idea very much at first. I had to cancel all arrangements by phone and said, “Somebody caught a fish that should long since have been dead!” The trip was, however, so enjoyable that I was all for staying at Dzaoudzi.’ And Lieutenant Ralston summed up all their feelings with: ‘Not very impressed at first and was doubtful whether it was the correct fish. Professor Smith’s enthusiasm is infectious, and I have found this an extremely enlightening trip.’

  For all their scepticism, when JLB wept on seeing the coelacanth, the six crewmen could sense the historic significance of the occasion and wept with him in sympathy and relief. They had become a team (Bergh et al., 1992).

  On their return to Durban with the fish on Monday, 29th December 1952, Smith gave an epic radio interview at 22h00 on the tarmac at Durban Airport with George Moore of the SABC, wherein he recounted the dramatic moment when he first saw the fish:

  ‘I could not bring myself to touch it and I asked them to open it, and they did and I knelt down to look, and I’m not ashamed to say that after all that long strain, I wept … for it was true … it was a coelacanth – and what was more wonderful, a species different from that of 1938 – another coelacanth. It was more than worth while all that long strain’ (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969).

  This now famous interview is etched in the memories of those who heard it. His speeches on the coelacanth were always charged with passion and emotion and left little doubt in the audience’s minds that the study of fishes, and science in general, is a vital ingredient of human endeavour and essential for the progress of society, but this one surpassed all the others. He was later told that all SABC programmes had been rescheduled that evening to accommodate his interviews. Having given the English interview in a state of near collapse, Smith then repeated the interview in Afrikaans. It was clear to listeners that he was totally exhausted, almost shell shocked, which made them even more appreciative of his effort.

  Smith received hundreds of messages in response to this broadcast. One such letter from an anonymous fan read:

  ‘Dear Dr Smith, Thank you for one of the most moving broadcasts it has ever been my privilege to hear, and for not pleading exhaustion as an excuse at a time when you might well have done so. Thank you indeed for sharing with us, the listeners, your hour of triumph. With you we were, each one of us for a few moments, hare-brained scientists in quest of a dead fish; with you we wept on the deck of a boat at the islands which we shall probably never see. Thank you, and God bless you. From one of the many’ (Smith, 1956).

  It’s doubtful that any scientific event in South African history can have had such an emotional impact on people until, perhaps, the drama of the first human heart transplant by Christiaan Barnard and his team at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town on 3rd December 1967.

  On their first night back in Durban, Smith insisted that the coelacanth in its coffin should sleep next to his bed in the Snell Parade Barracks, with a special detail of Zulu guards on duty outside.

  In order to thank the Prime Minister for his support, Smith flew with the coelacanth from Durban to Grahamstown and then straight on to Cape Town. Although he had already broken nearly every rule in the Air Force’s books, including perhaps an unwritten one about lighting a primus stove while airborne, he chanced his arm again and asked Commandant Blaauw if his wife, Margaret, and son, William, could accompany them on the flight from Grahamstown to Cape Town and back. ‘It would be highly irregular, of course, highly irregular, and I don’t think it has ever been done before, but then everything about this flight has been highly irregular’ (Smith, 1956; Bell, 1969). The crew and the Smith family duly departed for the Cape of Good Hope. On the way they swooped low over the ‘Blue House’ in Knysna and dropped a plank (attached to a small parachute) on which was inscribed a message to JLB’s eldest son, Bob, that they were taking the coelacanth to show to the Prime Minister!

  The crew of the Dakota, despite their fatigue, still had a further mischievous prank to play on the Professor. As they were flying over Bredasdorp, Captain Letley suddenly pointed to his earphones and jotted down an incoming radio message. He passed it to Commander Blaauw, who solemnly read it to Smith. ‘Message from Dr Malan’, he said, ‘He thanks you very much for having taken the trouble to come so far, but he does not wish to see the fish and wishes you a safe return to Grahamstown’. Although Smith was extremely disappointed, he showed no sign of it and put the message into his pocket. ‘Well, we’ve come so far that we might as well lunch in Cape Town and go back early in the afternoon.’ Then he saw their wide grins and realised that they were teasing him again, knowing full well that the only thing that would have turned him back would have been an order from the Prime Minister himself! (Bell, 1969).

  They landed at Ysterplaat Airforce Base in Cape Town where they were met by the Cape Commander-in-Chief, Colonel Louis du Toit, who told them that Dr Malan had invited them to lunch and to spend the day with him and his wife in Strand. JLB Smith, as always, wore a flannel suit with open-toed sandals. At the function, the Malans’ daughter, Marietjie, followed the Professor around, much interested in all the fuss, and called him ‘Oom Vis’ (‘Uncle Fish’) (Bell, 1969). The coffin containing the fish was placed in the shade of a tree and opened. Mr and Mrs Malan, and Margaret Smith, who was also seeing it for the first time, looked on curiously. Then, with a twinkle in his eye, Malan said, ‘My, it is ugly. Do you mean to say that we once looked like that?’, to which Smith, to whom the coelacanth was a thing of great beauty, replied, ‘H’m! I have seen people that are uglier.’

  Commandant Jan Blaauw (centre) flanked by Margaret and JLB Smith, with William on the far right, with the coelacantha and the crew of the ‘Flying Fishcart’ at Ysterplaat Air Force Base in Cape Town on 30th December 1952.

  Smith gave Malan a scale from the beast, which was promptly placed in the family archives, and later in the afternoon gave a short talk to the hundreds of people who had gathered to see the famous fish.
William Smith (2017) commented many years later, ‘While Dad was showing the fish to the Prime Minister, I got a much better deal by being taken to the Air Force base – to a teenage boy, fighter planes were much more exciting than an “old fish”’. William was even caught giving an impromptu press conference on the coelacanth at the military airport (Richards, 1987).

  JLB Smith showing the second coelacanth to the Prime Minister, Dr DF Malan, at the Strand on 30th December 1952.

  Like George Cory before him (Shell, 2017), JLB Smith was often subjected to actions or comments that were intended to ‘pop his bubble’ and mock his achievements. In his account of this event Professor John Day (1977) couldn’t resist the temptation for a little humour:

  ‘… then on to Cape Town and the Strand where he laid his find at the feet of Dr Malan. When the box was opened there were tears in his eyes and those of the guardian policeman as he named the second coelacanth Malania anjouanae. Maybe the formalin was too strong for the policeman but there can be no doubt of Smith’s great emotion. Later discoveries of many more coelacanths by Professor Millot, who organized a panel of experts to describe the complete anatomy of the coelacanth, showed that the differences between Latimeria chalumnae and Malania anjouanae were due to mutilations but to Smith must go the credit of finding the home of the coelacanths. The native fishermen of the Comoros are indifferent. “Oh, yes”, they say, “we catch quite a few on long lines set on deep rocky slopes around the islands but they are too oily and not good eating”’ (Day, 1977).

  According to Jenny Day (pers. comm., 2017), John Day

  ‘was never very complimentary about JLB. I think John was a bit derogatory about the fact that JLB was really a chemist, and something of an amateur ichthyologist in JHD’s opinion, and also a publicity seeker. I seem to remember that JHD considered JLB to be a splitter – certainly with regard to the coelacanths.’5

  Map published by JLB Smith in Old Fourlegs, showing the route flown by Dakota 6832 from Durban to the Comoros, back to Durban, then to Grahamstown, Cape Town and back to Grahamstown.

  After they took off from Ysterplaat on their return to Grahamstown they swooped low over the Dunottar Castle in the Cape Town Docks and then made a slight detour over Dr Malan’s house to drop copies of the morning newspapers, which had banner headlines on the coelacanth coup, and waved to the Prime Minister standing on the lawn. When they arrived in Grahamstown they were met by a group of VIPs, including the mayor, Councillor McGahey, and Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. ‘She kissed me before them all, and nobody was embarrassed, not even myself’ (Smith (1956). Then the exhausted crew were finally able to fly back to Swartkops Air Force Base near Centurion, just in time to attend the SAAF’s New Year’s Eve Ball (Bergh et al., 1992).6

  John Rennie recalls the arrival of the second coelacanth in Grahamstown on 31st December 1952:

  ‘Margaret [John Rennie’s wife] and I were … at the Grahamstown airstrip to witness the Dakota arrival and Margaret recalls the almost theatrical appearance of JLB alone first and then with Margaret and then perhaps with William, the pilot and the crew and so on at the cabin door and the steps to be photographed thoroughly and suitably for publicity’ (J Rennie, pers. comm., 2016).

  Sadly, about two weeks after these stirring events, another drama unfolded in the unforgiving seas around the Comoros – Hunt’s schooner, N’duwaro, sank during a cyclone in mid-January 1953. The cyclone also devastated the island of Dzaoudzi; if the coelacanth had been caught two weeks later, the Dakota would not have been able to land. Hunt survived this sinking but died at sea 39 months later on 3rd May 1956 when his next vessel, Hiariako, an elderly, two-masted, 120-ton schooner (Thomson, 1991), sank after striking the shallow Geyser Bank midway between Mayotte and Madagascar.7

  Smith heard from Hunt several times between the two shipwrecks. In a letter dated 1st June 1955, written from Majunga, Hunt reported on the latest coelacanth finds:

  ‘By the way the last one [coelacanth] caught i.e. the large female about three months ago, was caught by one of my crew, and only about a couple of hundred yards from the schooner. … The eggs were rather like those in a chicken, being in a cluster of varying sizes and three large well formed ones presumably ready for dispatch. A young fellow there broke one open and sucked it, the colour was yellow as a chicken’s, and he described the flavour to be the same. Next morning the fish left for Paris.’

  The media frenzy after the capture of the second coelacanth exceeded that after the first. The New York Herald Tribune screamed ‘Air Race to Save Dead Fish Stirs Scientists Here’, the Times of Malta announced ‘Malan Sends Plane to Collect Reputedly Extinct Fish’, and the Karachi Dawn proclaimed ‘Missing Link Found!’. The coelacanth and the Comoros had entered the global lexicon.

  Smith ended this episode with a salutary warning. In a report published in the The Times of London on 2nd January 1953, he wrote:

  ‘It is a stern warning to scientists not to be too dogmatic. We have in the past assumed that we have mastery not only of the land but of the sea. We have not. Life goes on there just as it did from the beginning. Man’s influence is as yet but a passing shadow. This discovery means that we may find other fishlike creatures supposedly extinct still living in the sea.’

  1The beautiful Union Castle liners, called ‘mailships’ as they carried the international mail bags, had lavender-coloured hulls and scarlet, black-topped funnels, and plied the seas between South Africa and Britain between 1900 and 1977. The smaller Union Castle liners, including the Dunottar Castle, which could sail through the Suez Canal, were known as ‘intermediate ships’ and provided a round-Africa service. It helped that the Smiths had developed a very good rapport with the manager, agents and captains of the various Union Castle liners on which they travelled. As a result, they received a hefty discount on their tickets as well as special services, including access to cold storage facilities (for their large fish collections) and to the communications room, from which they could make phone calls and send telegrams.

  2This author can confirm that it is very mountainous and densely forested terrain, having travelled this route with two Canadian ichthyologists, Eugene and Christine Balon, and Robin Stobbs, while they were studying a migratory goby, in between coelacanth researches on the island. En route they passed through Bambao, where coconut husks were used as fuel to heat water in an ancient perfume processing plant; the delightful aroma of ylang-ylang permeated the air. Indiana Jones-style, they clambered down vine-strewn cliffs and ancient ladders to reach the fishes deep down in the valley of the Tatinga River.

  3Dakotas were first produced by the Douglas Aircraft Company in December 1935 and are regarded as some of the most versatile transport aircraft ever made. About 400 DC-3s (and their military counterparts, the C-47s), many of them over 70 years old, are still flying today as a testament to the durability of the design. The plane that took Smith to the Comoros, Dakota 6832 KOD (‘King Oboe Dog’ to early air controllers), was commissioned in 1944 and was still doing maritime and general transport work for 35 Squadron in the 1990s, 40 years after the coelacanth flight and well into her 50th year. She was eventually ‘retired’ to the Ysterplaat Air Force Base in Cape Town as a living display.

  4Other crew members also had distinguished careers. Lieutenant Duncan Ralston achieved the rank of Major-General and Peter Letley (Captain) became a Brigadier. Commandant Jan Blaauw flew American P5 1D Mustang fighter-bombers during the Korean War (1950–1953) and was awarded the American Silver Star for rescuing a comrade, Vernon Kruger, who had been shot down.

  5In taxonomic circles ‘splitters’ are scientists who tend to describe new species that are later found to have already been described, or who (sometimes unnecessarily) split existing species into two or more new species.

  6The return flight took 34 hours and 5 minutes (22 hours in the air) and covered more than 7,400 kilometres across three countries! At £40 per hour in the air, the flight cost over £1,360 at a time when a new car cost £500 (Bergh et al., 19
92). Further details on the historic flight are provided by Smith (1956), Bell (1969), Bergh et al. (1992), Stobbs (1993, 2002) and Bruton (2015, 2017, 2018a, b).

  7Hiariako was carrying 14 crew, 11 passengers, and 30 tons of cargo (article by JLB Smith in Grocott’s Mail 28.5.1956; Weinberg, 1999; Stobbs, 1996c; Bruton, 2015). Two members of his crew and three female passengers eventually reached Grande Comore safely, after drifting for 17 days in a rowing boat, but Hunt was lost at sea, along with all the other passengers and crew, just 10 months after his marriage to his young wife, Jean Fowler. After the Hiariako ran aground Hunt had apparently tried to tow both the rowing boat and a raft using a small, outboard-powered dinghy, but this was unsuccessful. He then left in the dinghy, Shackleton-style, with a French passenger and the cook, to seek help in Mayotte.

  Before Hunt left on his last voyage he had told a colleague that he was planning to collect some freshwater fish in the Comoros. He had also said that this was probably his last voyage as he would be selling his schooner, retiring to Majunga on the north-west coast of Madagascar with his young wife, and starting a business there collecting and trading in freshwater and marine fishes and aquarium plants (Stobbs, 1996c). Sadly, these exciting plans never came to fruition.

  CHAPTER 17

  Mending bridges

  International collaboration on the coelacanth

  WITH THE completion of his self-appointed tasks of describing the first and second coelacanths and finding their true home, Smith had bridges to mend. He knew the French were upset about the fact that he had snaffled a valuable biological specimen from under their noses, an act that precipitated what Hubbs (1968) later called ‘a period of active non-cooperation’. As Margaret wrote in 1969, ‘He always maintained that the first Coelacanth had given him more than any one man could hope for in a lifetime, and that it would have been incredibly selfish to have kept the second to himself’. Before he left Pamanzi, Smith promised Coudert, the French Governor of the Comoros, and Hunt that he would offer a further reward of £100 for a third specimen and that this specimen would be ‘donated’ to the French. Although this offer pleased the French, it was rather cheeky considering that the specimen he would be offering would, just like the second one, be landed in French territory (Nulens et al., 2011).