River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  And the Ebro has lots of them. This method brings me another five over 100 pounds, with the biggest weighing 163. Bringing them in is hard work. Apparently some visiting anglers stop fishing because they are exhausted. After a while, there’s also a kind of mental exhaustion. I find myself wishing for a 200-pounder, but size is largely a lottery. And success is largely down to the guides, who have the fishing down to a fine art. Although there’s no doubt that having a guide gets results, you don’t get the same satisfaction as you would if you worked it out for yourself. But we need a big fish for the film, and we can’t complain with the size we’ve got.

  We also hear some fascinating stories—not from a dusty historical tome but bang up to date. Jason tells me of a catfish some four and a half feet long that was coming in on an angler’s line when a very big fish grabbed it. The would-be cannibal, well over 200 pounds, only let go several minutes later, just as it was about to be gloved. Another time a big wels, later weighed at 155 pounds, regurgitated something just as it was about to be landed. The object turned out to be the skeleton of a 40- to 50-pound wels, but the big one had still been hungry enough to take a bait. And the stories don’t stop there. Wels have also bitten anglers, a few on the leg and one on the side of the chest, when they were back in the water after capture. This tends to happen when the fish has been kept out of the water a little too long—for one photograph too many. Although generally attributing human feelings to animals is wrong, large wels do sometimes seem to get pissed off. And in fact one wels I was releasing, after a long piece to camera about its anatomy, did appear to double round and go for my calf. But I’ll never know for sure what its intention was because, having heard the guides’ stories, I reflexively pulled my leg away.

  The same fish, a 140-pounder, had fading bite marks on its back from a fish of similar size. These, according to Jason, would have been inflicted during spawning, which, with wels, is not a delicate affair. Seeing this, I remembered what Katharina Saxe told me at Schlachtensee about something snakelike brushing her legs before she was bitten. Maybe this fish hadn’t been defending a nest after all but had instead been looking for a mate and, in its blind lust, had mistaken a human leg for another wels.

  At any rate, the picture that emerges from the Ebro is of a fish with serious attitude. And the prospect of these seven- and eight-footers reaching sixteen feet, at which size they could swallow an adult human being, is quite terrifying. However, after looking at these present-day wels, clearly those historical reports of such dimensions are unreliable. Why? Because the numbers don’t add up. Based on a known eight-foot wels weighing 250 pounds, a sixteen-footer would weigh in the region of 1,500 to 2,000 pounds. (If a fish keeps the same body shape, a doubling in length comes with an eightfold increase in weight.) This is far more than the quoted 673 pounds—a sixteen-footer with this weight would be impossibly thin, more like an eel, so we have to rule it out. Other heavy fish were possibly misidentified sturgeon, also scaleless with tentacles, which do grow (or did anyway) to sixteen feet and whose range overlaps that of the wels. Based on present-day wels, a more realistic maximum length would be ten feet with a weight possibly approaching 500 pounds.

  But this is still a huge fish, nearly the length of two people. It could easily pull any person under, and given the reports of wels attacks on dogs and swans, including some recently from Poland and Germany, it’s not inconceivable that such a fish could attack and swallow a small child. As those old accounts have indicated, the wels is a potential childeater.

  That it is a man-eater, however, is less likely. All verified “attacks” on adults have been reactions to provocation, of one sort or another, including in the case of the Hungarian angler who was nearly pulled under in 2009 by a large fish that grabbed his right leg when he was releasing it. Normally, too, a predator’s eyes are looking for something no bigger than its stomach, not to mention that a large prey animal is normally likely to fight back, so is best left alone. But that doesn’t mean that Gesner’s report of a human head and hand being found inside a wels is untrue: the fish could have easily fed on a drowned corpse, very likely decapitating and dismembering it by spin-feeding. And even a six-foot wels would have the capability of causing the drowning in the first place, if it were ever so inclined. So whether Gesner’s wels was a man-eater or just a scavenger remains in doubt, as does the size to which they used to grow back in the sixteenth century.

  But that’s not quite the end. Although such a distant past is normally unknowable, with a fishing line, anything is possible. Whereas time goes forward above the surface of the water, beneath it, time can spin backward, and one day somebody standing on the banks of the Rio Ebro will bring in a monster from the middle ages, brought back to life in the shadow of the power lines.

  It’s powerful stuff, this underwater time travel. Sometimes a fishing line can even reveal the future, or at least one possible version of it. And it is a vision more frightening than anything in the medieval manuscripts and bestiaries.

  CHAPTER 3

  GOLIATH TIGERFISH

  Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO I READ, open mouthed, about a fish with a difference: a sumo-sized monster with inch-long teeth that was capable of cutting clean, six-pound mouthfuls of meat from its prey, usually with fatal results. This was the mid-1980s, when the tsunami of terror sent around the world by Jaws still swirled in the collective psyche. Even after you’d checked under your bed, you couldn’t be certain that a great white shark wouldn’t surface in your nightmares. The only consolation was that great whites don’t swim in rivers. But this other fish is found in rivers, where, according to the pages that trembled in my hand, it bites pieces out of anything that comes its way, including people. One favorite snack, the author said, is the dangling genitals of passing male swimmers.

  This wasn’t Pliny the Elder writing in the first century nor some monkish medieval tome but rather a Belgian doctor, Dr. Henry Gillet, writing in the 1940s in a book entitled Game Fish of the World. The fish he described is the goliath tigerfish (Hydrocynus goliath, which translates to “giant water dog”), and it lives in equatorial Africa in the Congo River. In thirty-six years as a traveling medical inspector, Gillet had caught a number of them, weighing up to 87½ pounds, but lost many more—including one, he said, that was at least twice that weight. So why, forty years later, with the world opened up by cheap, easy travel, couldn’t I find a single published photograph of this monster or any natural-history programs featuring it?

  The book says that reaching the waters where they swim is not hard, recommending a ship to Matadi, a plane to Leopoldville, or a train from Johannesburg or Nairobi. It talks of good hotels and small boats that are easily hired along with a network of roads into the interior. There’s even a list of accessible locations (Lake Matshi, Lusambo on the Sankuru River, Makanga on the Kasai, Port Francqui ...), complete with details of who to contact for assistance once you’re there as well as the assurance that “a stay of a few months here will offer no dangers.” But a little research revealed a very changed picture.

  The first Europeans to see the mouth of the Congo River were Portuguese sailors under the command of Diogo Cão in 1482. Here, at last, they believed, was a back door to the riches of Africa, principally the gold and ivory trade, which, at the time, Arab caravans crossing the Sahara monopolized. But a hundred miles inland a series of rapids blocked the fast-flowing channel that the people on its banks called nzadi, “the river that swallows all rivers.” A few years later, in 1492, Columbus landed in the Bahamas, leading to the European conquest and colonization of the “New World.” Meanwhile, the Congo’s natural defenses kept outsiders at bay for another four centuries.

  The river was eventually mapped by John Rowlands, the Welshborn illegitimate workhouse boy who, after migrating to America a
nd changing his name, worked as a journalist for the New York Herald, where his big scoop was finding the missing Scottish missionary Dr. David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Now known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley, he returned to Africa for another expedition, to a river called the Lualaba, which flows north up the middle of the continent and that Livingstone believed to be the headwaters of the Nile. But when it started to veer counter-clockwise, crossing the equator twice, Stanley knew it could only be the Congo. He described his epic 999-day voyage, which fewer than a third of the 356 people who set out with him survived, in Through the Dark Continent . But his embellished gung-ho accounts of shoot-outs with natives, although very much in the style of the day, have done him no favors. Many in the establishment saw him as a lower-class upstart, and his achievements were singled out for negative spin.

  What really tarnished his reputation was what happened next. Stanley had a vision of opening the Congo for trade, based on a road to bypass the rapids and a fleet of boats above. However, unable to find any government to back the idea, he ended up in the pay of King Leopold II of Belgium, who claimed the Congo—an area one-third the size of the United States’ forty-eight contiguous states—as his personal colony. Leopold’s excesses are now well documented, but for a long time they were hidden from the outside world. After the invention of the pneumatic tire, there was a fortune to be made from rubber, which Leopold’s agents collected from wild vines in the Congo rainforests using forced labor. In pursuit of this commerce, and hidden from any scrutiny, the colonists instituted a reign of terror, using massacre and starvation to subdue the population. Workers who failed to reach their quota had their hands cut off. Recent estimates put the death toll during this period between ten and thirteen million, roughly the same number of Jews and others that the Nazi Holocaust killed.

  Eventually, the truth started to seep out, thanks to travelers such as the Irishman Roger Casement and the Polish-born writer Joseph Conrad, whose novel Heart of Darkness, since retold for a modern audience in the contemporary setting of Apocalypse Now, is a chilling vision of the evils that inevitably accompany absolute power. In 1908 the Belgian government took control from their monarch and started to clean up the colonial act—building roads, schools, and hospitals. This was the period when Dr. Gillet, during his time off, cast his line into the Kasai, Sankuru, and Lubi rivers in the southeastern corner of the vast Congo basin and urged readers of Game Fish of the World to come and try their luck.

  So what happened since then? In June 1960, when I was four years old, the Congo was granted independence. But days later, secretly backed by the Belgians, the mineral-rich Katanga province declared itself a separate state and a military coup deposed the elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who was then murdered. The coup’s leader, Joseph Mobutu, went on to declare himself president in 1965, making much of African authenticité by eradicating colonial-era names, which included rechristening both country and river Zaire (ironically a Portuguese corruption of the African nzadi). Meanwhile, propped up by foreign powers because of his spurious anticommunist credentials, Mobutu set about amassing one of the biggest personal fortunes in the world while the country around him crumbled into ruin.

  By the mid-1980s the roads, railways, helpful officials, and guest houses in the interior were no more. Under Mobutu’s dictatorship, time had run backward, creating a remoteness that was more than mere geographical distance. Like a medieval despot, he ruled his vast kingdom through fear, chaos, murder, and bribery. Although some ex-pats were in the capital, now called Kinshasa, the country was effectively closed to outsiders. Certainly nobody went there as a tourist.

  There are many who say that recreational fishing is a form of escapism, and I would agree with them. I do it to clear my mind of everyday concerns. But now my interest in a fish had taken me to a dark place and alerted me to some realities that might have been best left unknown. All this strife occurred while I climbed trees in a vicarage garden, stared out of classroom windows, and sat by willow-shrouded carp ponds in the timeless tranquility of an English summer night. Lumumba’s body hacked to pieces and dissolved in sulphuric acid; a quarter-million dead; an unpaid army ruling by extortion; and dissidence kept in check by rival secret police services—all so copper and uranium would continue to flow out of Africa to the right countries. I surfaced as if from a bad dream. To be concerned about the fate of a mere fish in the face of all this human misery seemed extremely trivial. But then I found myself looking at it a different way. In a world where rivers are increasingly overfished, poisoned, dynamited, and left high and dry by dams and drainage, the Congo could be the one system in the world where fish populations have remained at historical levels thanks to the sheer size of the river, the low human density, and the dictatorial disorder.

  This was also, I reminded myself, why no outsiders went there—certainly none with fishing rods. But my thoughts had a certain momentum. I discovered there were flights to Kinshasa, but these catered only to expense-account businessmen and diplomats, costing three or four times the “bucket shop” prices to India or anywhere else. On top of that, I heard I would need pocketfuls of $50 bills to buy back my passport from immigration and bid for my luggage, item by item, from customs. The whole idea was a nonstarter. Then I found a French charter company, now defunct, that flew an aged 707 from Marseilles to Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic (CAR). From here I could cross the Ubangui River to the small town of Zongo in the northwest corner of Zaire. But neither embassy knew if the border was open. If it was, the CAR staff in Paris informed me, I would need to get a visa in Zaire to allow me back into CAR, but they couldn’t tell me where I could get this. The only way to find out was to go. After crossing by bus to France, I took off in April 1985.

  When I’d come back from India three years before, emaciated and exhausted but with some fish stories under my belt and pocket change from the laughably small amount of cash I had taken with me, I considered, along with the few other backpackers I’d met along the way, that if I could survive that—the squalid doss-houses, seething trains, days of diarrhea—I could survive anywhere. There was also the knowledge that, with a little more money, India could be quite comfortable. But nothing had prepared me for the Congo. From the moment I set foot in Africa and first inhaled the hot, semiliquid, smoke- and woodflavored air, I felt out of my depth: the stampede at the airport, the long night drive followed by threats from the taxi driver’s sidekick when I refused to hand over more than the agreed fare, and the hour-plus search at the border (“Nice bag.... Nice shoes. ...”), after which I was told, “If you go anywhere you are not authorized, monsieur le professeur, you are in big trouble.”

  The next evening I was one of thirty-three people huddled under a plastic sheet on the back of a truck as we came to a boggy halt in a thunderstorm. We lurched into the next town the following night, where I found a hot concrete cubicle of a room that stank of urine and had no water or light. In the corridor a man I couldn’t see asked me the purpose of my journey. I couldn’t imagine two months like this, so I was tempted to turn back. But the view behind me was equally bleak. From time to time I sold a magazine article, but this was a long way from making a living. And, thanks to record levels of unemployment, there wasn’t much else on the horizon. I was back living with my parents, for God’s sake, at twenty-nine years old. Should I go back to being a motorcycle messenger in London, which I’d quit while I was still alive? Or leave the country like Martin, bumming around Europe as an itinerant English teacher? Even in my dreams, the future back home was a wilderness. So I decided not to think too far ahead but instead just get through each day.

  I reached the river after two weeks—waiting for trucks that never came and sleeping in rat- and bedbug-infested brothels, the only places with spare rooms. I forced myself to eat the acrid manioc paste that’s the country’s staple source of carbs as well as blackened fish corpses sold from market stalls, fish that reminded me why I was here.


  The sight of the river both lifted and overwhelmed me. What appeared to be the far bank was only an island. The true bank was a hazy band of gray-green on the distant horizon. I’ve always found big waters intimidating: how do you find the fish in all that water? This is one reason I’ve stuck to rivers. But this was like an inland sea. Three days later I was steaming downstream on a raft of barges pushed by the towering Colonel Ebeya, a floating city housing two thousand human passengers and a population of animals that grew by the hour, as dugout canoes intercepted us to sell smoked monkeys and trussed crocodiles.

  As a non-African, keeping a low profile was impossible, and men in plain clothes who were clearly not ordinary civilians constantly asked what I was doing there. My reply, that I wanted to catch an mbenga, never left them convinced. After two days I joined several other people in a large dugout that peeled off from the moving riverboat and headed for a village on the shore. Here the chief put me up, as is traditional, and his brother took me fishing. One day we crossed to the large central island, where something hit the silver spoon I was casting, breaking the surface in an explosion of spray as it spat out the hook. It was the only take I had in the whole time I was there, partly because the dugout and brother were rarely available and partly because, even though the rains had long stopped, the river was still in flood and the fish were dispersed in the forest. Even the netsmen were catching next to nothing, so there was very little to eat. They told me that if I stayed another couple of months I would catch goliath, but if I was to make it back to Bangui in time for my flight home, I needed to get going.