River Monsters
Authors: Jeremy Wade
To Matthew, Dominic, Joshua, Tamsin,
Ivo and Luca
CONTENTS
1. Why some fishermen’s tales are true
6. The riddle of the empty canoe
12. The wish you were dead fish
19. Captain Cook’s devourer of men
1
WHY SOME FISHERMEN’S TALES ARE TRUE
But I will lay aside my Discourse of Rivers, and tell you some things of the Monsters, or Fish, call them what you will, that they breed and feed in them.
. . .
Izaak Walton,
The Compleat Angler
, 1653
It’s a disturbing experience – seeing something that doesn’t exist.
In July 1993 I was floating in a leaky wooden canoe on a muddy Amazon lake, known simply as Lago Grande (big lake), looking for arapaima. Unusually for a fish,
Arapaima gigas
is an
air-breather. Despite having gills, it has to surface at half-hour intervals to burp stale air from its swim bladder and gulp a fresh mouthful down. It’s a quirk that allows these
super-predators to stay active in stagnant water, when other fish are going belly-up. And without doubt it’s one of the reasons they grow so huge. Just how huge is not known for sure, but
they are commonly said to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world, with some supposedly reliable sources quoting a maximum length of fifteen feet. So they shouldn’t be too hard to spot,
particularly as they’re also not exactly camouflaged, being decorated all over with vivid red markings. So why hadn’t I seen a single one?
Perhaps they had all been harpooned or netted – the one drawback to being so large and visible. But local fishermen assured me that there were still arapaima in the lake, mainly because
there’s a very deep hole, over seventy-five feet deep, off the southern end of the central island where their encircling nets can’t reach the bottom. A few days before, José had
even pointed some out to me:
‘There! The size of this canoe! . . .’
But the distant ripples looked no different from any of the others that he had pointed out earlier, made by river turtles, caimans at periscope depth, and other fish. Or so he said. As far as I
was concerned, he was seeing things that were invisible. I recalled how other fishermen had told me that the lake was
encantado
– enchanted – how an invisible force sometimes
held canoes out in the middle, and how the fishermen had strange dreams when they camped here, dreams about ghost ships from an underwater kingdom whose occupants silently beckoned. No wonder
fishermen have such a reputation for invention and exaggeration and for being all-round unreliable witnesses. Perhaps the arapaima wasn’t a real fish at all but rather a spirit living in
another dimension, a spirit you can only see once you’ve lost your grip on reality after too much time staring at the water.
Or maybe I needed to look harder. Back home, beside an English pond I could locate a feeding carp from the tiniest whorl on the surface, spun by its tail as it rooted head-down in the silt. But
this water spoke a different language that I couldn’t yet decipher. Where José saw a clear signature I saw a meaningless scribble.
But foreign languages can be learned. In time I started to recognise the subtly different ripple patterns. My eyes began to enhance detail and eliminate noise, to sharpen edges and slow down
time, so that I too could tell not just the species but also the size and direction of travel – even, sometimes, whether or not the ripple-maker knew it was being watched. But back then, my
first time in the Amazon, it felt as if the lake’s inhabitants were mocking me. Dejected, I stared at the water and pondered the strange mechanics of perception – the perplexing fact
that you can only see something properly if you already know what you’re looking for.
Such was my state of mind when, thirty yards from the boat, the surface opened and something huge heaved into the air. The size was right for a very big arapaima, but the shape was all wrong.
What I’d seen – if the blurred after-image wasn’t deceiving me – was an arched back, bright pink in colour and bearing a row of large triangular points. It was like some
huge gear wheel in the lake’s workings, briefly cutting into the air before spinning back into the depths.
What it was not like was any living creature in the real world.
Back at the hut that night I described it to José, who knew the lake better than anyone. He regarded me over his ragged moustache and then asked where I was keeping my secret bottle of
cachaça – and why I wasn’t sharing it with him.
‘Nothing like that lives here,’ he said.
All the other fishermen I told about it said the same thing.
So what do you do with an experience like that? Do you keep talking about it in the face of disbelief or even ridicule? Or, like a puzzled spectator at a magic show, do you admit that your eyes
must have been tricked – or, rather, your brain has misinterpreted the signals from your eyes? For the sake of my sanity, I allowed the outlandish vision – which had once screamed for
attention – to fade from my memory.
And that’s how things would have stayed if I hadn’t gone back the next year. I was still looking for arapaima, but I also cast lures into the lake margins for smaller species –
tucunaré (more widely known as peacock bass), surubim, and aruana – usually to return to the water but sometimes for the pot. On one particular day, when these fish were proving more
elusive than usual, there were several pink river dolphins breaching in the area of the deep hole. These (the scientific name is
Inia geoffrensis
, but they are known locally as
botos
)
are among the Amazon’s strangest looking animals – humpbacked with a bulging head that contains an echo-location organ and sports a narrow, toothy beak. I decided to pack up fishing for
the day and try to photograph dolphins instead.
With my 135mm medium-telephoto lens, I had to be pointing right at them to get them in the frame. But they appeared through the surface without warning, in random positions, for just a fraction
of a second . . . and by the time I’d reacted they were gone. However, with the bright sunlight and fast film, I could set both a fast shutter speed, to freeze the action, and a small enough
aperture to give a good depth of field so I didn’t have to fiddle with fine focus. I then waited with the camera raised, ready to react to the loud exhaling puff that signalled a breach.
The next couple of hours saw me almost dislocate my neck several times, as I snapped round and pushed the shutter, as well as nearly tipping myself out of the boat, which was wobbly enough even
when I was keeping still. I had an idea that I’d clicked on a dolphin or two, but there was no way to know until I had the slides processed.
Several weeks later, when I got back to the UK, most of the frames were much as I had expected – shots of the sky and skewed horizons, some with anonymous splashes or spreading rings
– but I did have a couple showing a dolphin’s humped back.
Then I held another slide up to the light – and there it was: the shape that had been transient and blurred on my retina, now clear and sharp on film. But what on earth was it? The picture
was published in
BBC Wildlife
magazine, sparking speculation that it might even be an unknown species. I returned to the lake the next year with a video camera provided by the BBC Natural
History Unit, and after a six-week stake-out I captured it on videotape in just three grainy frames – but it was unmistakable.
I also looked into the mystery of its identity, and a long time later, after talking to countless people, pieced together the shocking story. It’s one that, in some ways, I would rather
not know. But even so, there is a happy ending, for both the creature and me. The creature is exuberantly alive, almost flaunting its strangeness, and I am not losing my marbles. My
fisherman’s tale was true.
And in a strange way this discovery gave me a broader validation. Although a few friends saw my shoestring travels as unusual and interesting, in the eyes of most I had lost my way. After
attending primary school in southeast England, I had won a full-fees scholarship to an exclusive public school, where, at the age of sixteen, I scored the best exam results in the school’s
history. But then my trajectory flattened and nose-dived. I emerged from university with a degree in zoology, vaguely prompted by my interest in fish, but no idea of anything I wanted to do. So
instead of crushing knuckles underfoot on the career ladder, here I was, in my late thirties with a trail of abandoned jobs behind me, making less than the minimum wage from selling occasional
magazine articles.
Part of the problem was my father, who in his youth had been a farmer but who’d been disinherited after he’d abandoned the family trade to become a priest. As a teenager,
predictably, I’d rejected organised religion, but I seemed to have absorbed other, more profound things from him that I couldn’t shake. One of these was an indifference to the trappings
of worldly success. Or perhaps I was just saying this because, with my threadbare employment record, and something else that nobody knew about, those things were never going to be mine anyway. And
this wasn’t quite true either. On very special occasions, Dad would wear a gold watch on a chain. It had belonged to his father before him, one of the last farmers in England to work the land
with heavy horses, and one day, Dad always reminded me, it would be mine, in the unimaginable future when he would no longer be here. Meanwhile, as I squandered time, he did a good job of
concealing his disappointment, even when it was compounded by my youngest brother Martin following my erratic footsteps, dropping out of university to become a wandering English teacher in Spain,
France, and Italy. Occasionally a letter from a girl in Brazil would turn up at my parents’ house and I’d see the looks next time I talked about my ‘research trips’. I felt
that if I could only magically transport my father to an Amazon lakeside then he would understand. Because this was where, for whatever reason, despite all the blood-sucking insects and mud like a
First World War battlefield, I became properly alive. It was hardly the Garden of Eden, but it was the gateway to a state of mind that he would recognise. Because, despite our differences, we
shared one fundamental belief: that there is more to this world than what’s visible on the surface.