River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  There seemed little point using a bait, as our aim was simply to see it out of the water. João suggested capturing it cowboy-style—by lasso—which seemed fitting. I found a forked stick and rigged an open noose to its Y-shaped end. João then prodded the monster’s tail with another stick and it started swimming straight toward me. I’d been expecting to chase it round the pond for half an hour but, on dropping the noose right in front of it, managed to snare it on the first attempt.

  With it safely clear of the water, we slid it into a shallow groove I’d made in the damp mud, in the shade of the tree, and then donned gloves and boots. Even in bright daylight, we could see it firing the LED panel, and each time it did so, its body tensed like a muscular contraction. We then connected the voltmeter to measure the strength of the discharge—finally, the moment of truth. But the damn thing, which had worked fine back in the UK, must have gotten damaged in transit. With difficulty, keeping our knees clear of the damp ground, we then lifted the fish for the camera—a confirmed killer measuring 5 feet, 10½ inches and living in six inches of water.

  Only after we’d returned it did we make a discovery that was even harder to take in. Underneath the tree, hard against the bank, was a knot of about twenty more, all between two and three feet long. From time to time the knot would flex and a mud-coated head would push into the air. One fish, off to one side, was in mud that had almost solidified. Although I told myself that these were simply fish waiting quietly for rain, at a reflexive level I found the sight repulsive. And it graphically underlined what I already knew even before I had seen them here: that if anyone had happened to walk into this puddle, to try and scoop up the small catfish perhaps, they could have suffered the same fate as Francisco.

  And I’m not surprised that Reginaldo, the cowboy, doesn’t have the courage to get in the water any more, even though the chances of falling foul of this fish are normally very small. He thinks his three companions encountered a shoal of them that were running up the swelling river. If the men had arrived five minutes later, they would still be alive today.

  CHAPTER 17

  SAWFISH

  The Saw Fish is also a beast of the Sea; the body is huge great; the head hath a crest, and is hard and dented like to a Saw.

  It will swim under ships and cut them, that the Water may come in, and he may feed on the men when the ship is drowned.

  Olaus Magnus, History of the Northern Peoples, 1555

  THIS IS ANOTHER STORY with its origins in the Amazon but its conclusion far from there, on another continent. That day in 1993 when I saw the stuffed seven-foot bull shark hanging in Casa Dragão, the fishing tackle and hardware store in Manaus, there was something even more unreal there. It was about a yard in length with a profile like a chainsaw, except that each saw point was nearly three inches long. This was the rostrum of a peixe-serra, a sawfish, an animal I had been vaguely aware of from my youth from drawings in encyclopedias and comic books, where its other-worldly bulk usually menaced knife-brandishing skin divers. I remember looking at its bizarre outline and wondering if this was a real fish at all or whether the illustrator had misheard swordfish and made this creature up. Then, more recently, I saw it was the conningtower symbol on U-96, the German submarine featured in the movie Das Boot. This cartoon sawfish had a big cheerful smile, which was disturbingly at odds with the fact that this real-life U-boat sent twentyeight allied ships to the bottom of the sea in World War II. So the real-life animal was clearly stealthy and lethal. But I’d still never seen a picture of a real one, and until now I’d had no idea that this giant swam up rivers.

  As with most large species, the knowledge about its maximum size shades into an area of doubt. Oviedo, who chronicled the Spanish conquest of Central America, wrote, “And they are huge fish, and I have seen them so big, that a pair of oxen with a cart had a full load with one fish.” Much more recently, on November 25, 1922, the New York Times reported the capture of a sawfish from the Bay of Panama measuring twenty-nine feet and weighing more than two tons (4,301 pounds). Its captor was the adventurer Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges, whose book Battles with Giant Fish reports an even more monstrous beast, measuring thirty-one feet and weighing 5,700 pounds. Unlike other fabled captures, however, these are accompanied by photographs. One shows a trilby-wearing Mitchell-Hedges, pipe clamped in mouth and “companion” Lady Brown at his side in a full-length dress and immaculate hairdo, standing by the tail of the fish and hauling on a rope that is attached to the tip of its rostrum so that it rears up in the picture’s foreground to an apparent height greater than that of the couple. It’s certainly a huge fish, but from this end-on perspective, with its dramatic foreshortening and low viewpoint (the horizon cuts Mitchell-Hedges at below waist level), getting a clear measure of its length is not possible. Furthermore, the modern consensus is that this colorful man was not a totally reliable witness. His autobiography, Danger My Ally, has him tearing around like an Edwardian Austin Powers, being kidnapped by Pancho Villa in Mexico (with whose gang he later held up trains), hanging out with Trotsky in New York, being invited to spy for the British Secret Service, and discovering a crystal “skull of doom” in a Mayan ruin. His finding of this artifact has established him, for many, as the real-life inspiration behind the Indiana Jones stories, but later evidence suggests that the skull came from nineteenth-century Europe and that he bought it from Sotheby’s, the London auction house. So although the weights alongside his photographs of stingrays, sharks, and jacks appear realistic, perhaps the dimensions of these saltwater-caught sawfish need to be taken with a pinch of the stuff.

  Descending from these mind-boggling figures, though, we appear to reach an area of agreement. The FishBase website has the green sawfish (Pristis zijsron, pristis being Greek for saw), which has the longest rostrum of any living sawfish, growing to twenty-four feet, and the large-tooth sawfish (P. perotteti) growing to twenty-one feet and 1,300 pounds. This latter species was the one in the Mitchell-Hedges photograph and in the Manaus shop.

  And this brings me back to that fearsome weapon that, in the flesh—if that’s how you can refer to an ancient desiccated assemblage of cartilage and teeth—exerted the same gruesome fascination as the spiked crushing mass of a medieval mace. I remembered seeing these in my childhood on family visits to English castles, and now this heavy, toothed prototype from the animal kingdom stopped me in my tracks—and, as before, I found myself not wanting to imagine in too much detail the damage it could inflict. Certainly its potential has not been lost on others. In the Pacific islands of Kiribati, tribesmen used these ready-made weapons to slice open up the abdomens of their enemies and to puncture the brachial artery inside the elbow joint, thus causing fatal bleeding. They also used them against supernatural enemies: they believed that concealing one in the thatch above the entrance of a hut would guard against evil spirits. More recently, intruders broke into a caravan in Queensland, Australia, and hacked the occupant’s arms and back with a sawfish rostrum.

  Already forming in my mind, inevitably, back in that shop was the unvoiced question: what would it be like to see one of these fish, perhaps the most fearsome and massive beast to inhabit any river, not dead and dismembered, but alive? But even in the light of my other harebrained fishing schemes, this was surely off the scale, evidence that I’d finally lost the plot. Even handling goliath tigerfish would seem like child’s play next to this flesh-ripping animal. But even so, there could be no harm in opening a mental file ...

  I looked in Game Fish of the World, the last word on large, exotic species, published in 1949, whose contributors included Ernest Hemingway. Alongside the chapters on arapaima and goliath tigerfish, there was not a single mention of sawfish. But other sources were more forthcoming. Paul Le Cointe, director of the museum at Belém, at the Amazon’s mouth, wrote in 1922 that to catch sawfish “of good size” around Óbidos, 500 miles upstream and well beyond the 250-mile tidal zone, was not rare. Around the same time, the Manaus newspaper Jornal do Comércio reported a
fish measuring six and a half feet and weighing 132 pounds (two meters/sixty kilograms, possibly excluding rostrum/ entrails) that was caught on a line off the town of Manacapuru, fully 900 miles up the main river. As I got to know Amazon fishermen, I quizzed them about the peixe-serra. A few had seen or caught bull sharks, and some had heard of sawfish, but nobody I spoke to had ever seen one. They apparently had vanished in just a couple of human generations.

  It was a similar story in Central America. Thomas Thorson, the noted bull shark researcher, wrote in the mid-1970s that largetooth sawfish were “plentiful” in Lake Nicaragua, reaching fourteen feet in length and over five hundred pounds. He estimated that commercial fishermen were removing between 1,500 and 2,000 fish a month, a truly staggering quantity of fish. But between 1970 and 1975 the average size had noticeably declined, so that few fish were now reaching breeding size. “Action to protect the sawfish of Lake Nicaragua is overdue, if not already too late,” he wrote. Three decades later some friends of mine came back from a tarpon fishing trip to the Rio San Juan, which drains the lake, to report that the sawfish have disappeared without trace, just like the once-plentiful bull shark of this unique freshwater habitat. (The river’s giant freshwater tarpon are still there though, growing to over two hundred pounds. Perhaps their reluctance to feed on anything containing a hook has saved them.)

  Mainly living in bays and estuaries—although all species can survive in fresh water—sawfish also used to be caught in US coastal waters, ranging from New York to Texas. But the rostrum is easily tangled in fishing nets. Thanks to this, and the loss of habitat to development, the days of commercial fishermen considering sawfish a pest are long gone. George Burgess, the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida, is fighting a rearguard action to save the ones that are left, mainly around the state’s southern tip. But over one hundred attempts to catch sawfish for study in the first half of 2009 using nets and trotlines yielded no fish. Killing or removing sawfish is now illegal here, but this may be too little too late.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, off the coast of West Africa, overfishing has driven sawfish to local extinction. This was not done by African fishermen but by European vessels whose governments cut deals with local politicians.

  Worldwide, the International Union for Nature Conservation (IUCN) lists all sawfish species as critically endangered (CR), the last category before extinct in the wild (EW) and extinct (E). So I thought this was a fish I was never going to see—that is, until I got the chance to join a research team in Australia, using my line alongside their nets to try to capture sawfish for tagging and tracking.

  Dr. David Morgan of Murdoch University in Perth was originally doing species surveys of Western Australian rivers when he came across the freshwater sawfish (P. microdon) in the Fitzroy River, which runs for 455 miles between the Kimberley Plateau and the Great Sandy Desert. In July the landscape is baked, and I arrived to find this waterway scarcely resembling a river at all. With no discernible flow, it was a shrunken, fragmented thing hiding between great beaches of heaped sand. Even our shallow-draught “tinny” had to be dragged between some of the pools. But above my head I could see great loose branches wedged in the trees, evidence of the river’s Jekyll-and-Hyde character. Nonetheless, I still found it hard to picture it raging, nine miles wide with monsoon rain under cyclone-lashed skies. As we drove the straight roads over scorched plains, past bulbous boab trees and the odd thundering road train, our veteran Aussie cameraman Rory McGuinness recalled helicoptering into Fitzroy Crossing with relief workers in 2002, when the river rose more than forty feet.

  Along with this annual cycle, the river also experiences, at its mouth, some of the largest tidal movements in the world: great inhalations of sea water that raise and lower the level here by as much as thirty-nine feet twice daily. An unwary fisherman who beaches his boat in King Sound to go throw-netting for the popeye mullet that swarm the margins on the rising tide may turn to find his uncrewed vessel receding from view. With twenty-foot saltwater crocs in the water, swimming after it is not a sensible option, but the crocs might find you anyway when the water covers the mangroves. By the same token, the falling tides and shifting mudbars can leave even experienced skippers stranded. Twice a day a twisted metal structure rears above the water south of Derby and reveals itself as the remains of the SS Colac, a 1,479-ton steamship whose engines failed on September 17, 1910. After sitting for a few hours on a huge sandflat, this temporary landmark then vanishes once more as the rising waters rip and eddy.

  Dave reckons these extreme conditions could be instrumental in sawfish survival here. Biologists think that the gravid females drop their live young (thirty inches long, with sheathed saws) in the estuary, whereupon these are pushed into the river on the tide. Then, in the wet season, they just keep on going, away from the estuarine predators. As well as salties and bull sharks, these include the northern river shark (Glyphis garricki), a fish superficially similar to the bull shark but with some distinct differences, in particular its smaller eyes, larger second dorsal fin, and more acute-pointed teeth. Although fearsome looking and growing to possibly ten feet, this, like the sawfish, is a rarity. Only twenty have been recorded from here in the last ten years. Nevertheless, while the science team put out nets in the shallows, in the brief window of slack water, I put out an eight-inch mullet for a Glyphis, surely the ultimate in forlorn hope, even for an angler. All was quiet while the tide turned, and then a run in the shallows led to a big swirl on the surface when I tightened up. This turned out to be a threadfin salmon (Eleutheronema tetradactylum), which is not a salmon at all but actually an elongated perch with a deeply forked tail, a mouth that opens to the diameter of its body, and bizarre finger-length tendrils trailing between its pectoral fins, as if it has somehow incorporated a gene or two from an insect. Although prized for their taste, mine was too small to keep, so back it went, followed by a recast into the deeper water of the basin where we were anchored.

  The next time the ratchet whined, I connected to a much heavier fish, which plunged powerfully next to the boat once I had managed to shorten the line. I couldn’t see anything through the opaque water, but a gray body and high dorsal fin breaking the surface told me it was a shark. Then I saw that the hook was just nicked into its left pectoral fin. I was using a circle hook, so its hold was probably very tenuous. Luckily, I was using a light-action rod that gave gently to the fish’s lunges rather than resisting stiffly, but even so, we had some nervous moments before Andrew, the boat’s skipper, managed to get both hands firmly around its tail. The hook fell out as we boated it, just as graduate student Jeff Whitty declared a positive ID for a Glyphis. We measured it at fifty-two inches, quickly put a numbered plastic tag in its dorsal fin—in case it should ever turn up again—and then released it. Before I knew it, the needle was back in the haystack.

  Once up the river, away from the estuarine predators, the sawfish pups’ safety is only relative. Ninety miles upstream at Camballin barrage, an abandoned irrigation dam that completely blocks the passage of fish in the dry season, I caught some small catfish on camp supper leftovers and swung one out on a handline into the pool below the barrier. Like many catfish, you have to handle these ones very carefully because of the three multibarbed spikes sticking out of their bodies—one on each pectoral fin and one on the dorsal fin. In the Congo the one-inch pectoral spine of a small dead catfish impaled the end of my right-hand ring finger, and the pain was almost unbearable. So the thought of putting one of these fish in a human mouth doesn’t bear thinking about. But fish have different notions, and our aboriginal rangers assured me that these spiky catfish are a good bait. Sawfish tend to be more active at night, so we’d unrolled our waterproof canvas swags on a low beach, staying well back from the water as a token precaution against the saltwater crocs that have been seen here. Before zipping myself inside, I loosely fixed an empty drink can on the line, and within minutes it went scuttling across the sand, catapultin
g me to my feet. On tightening my grip around the line, I felt a fast-moving fish, swimming first this way and then that. In the light of my headlamp, a dorsal fin cut the water, but I could see no toothed rostrum. After a couple of minutes I slid a bull shark onto the sand, a stocky but disconcertingly flexible yard-plus in length, and I caught two more in quick succession. No matter how familiar I am now with the bull shark’s osmotic control, to see them in such abundance in completely fresh water still doesn’t quite compute.

  There was also something about this place that was both disturbing and reassuring, something about a saw-snouted monster from the dawn of the Cenozoic and sharks from the far Jurassic swimming under the reflection of a concrete dam. Underwater was not just another world; it was another time. And at night by this river you can feel the closeness of that other time, restrained by such a flimsy rippling skin, and almost imagine that time and this time dissolving into each other to form something else that’s outside of it all. And indeed they do, in a way, when the drink can rasps its message across the millennia and I pick up the line to feel the weight of time itself.

  At nearby Myroodah, the scientists deployed their net in some shelving shallows, and shortly after dark something swam into it, pulling a couple of net floats under. I went out to investigate with them, in a hurry because a croc had been checking out the net earlier. Lifting the top cord, I felt a sudden strong kicking and, in the light of my headlamp, saw a flailing rostrum. The body behind it looked over six feet long—too big to bring into the boat, so we gathered both ends of the net and towed the fish to shore. Grounded in the shallows, I could finally see the whole fish. The rear half was just like a shark: sleek and elongated with an asymmetric, long-upper-lobed tail, and two high dorsal fins, although the body on which they were mounted was more flat-bellied and triangular in cross section than cylindrical, as befits a bottom-hugging lifestyle. But forward of the first dorsal fin is where things got interesting—and strange—as the body flattened and widened, merging smoothly with winglike pectoral fins. Two holes near the front of the head opened and closed, like black eyes blinking, and in front of them the real eyes, unblinking, regarded us, their horseshoe-shaped irises edged with gold like tiny jewels. Forward from there was just a tangled mass of thick monofilament: graphic evidence of how vulnerable these fish are to any kind of net. Normally, gill nets are selective, to a certain extent. Only fish of a certain size get stuck, whereas smaller fish pass straight through and bigger ones bump into the meshes without their heads getting caught. But sawfish will get their rostrum teeth tangled in anything trailing near the bottom, and their thrashing only entangles them more. Seeing this fish so comprehensively trapped, the global decline of sawfish became all too understandable. Even if they aren’t targeting sawfish (their fins are in demand for the disgraceful Asian “shark fin” market), most commercial fishermen aren’t going to waste time and risk injury disentangling a live fish, only for it to swim back into their nets at a later date. The use of a wooden club is a matter of simple economics.