River Monsters (37 page)

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 become 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 into 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.

18

CALLED TO THE ROSTRUM

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 nearly 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 at
rilby-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 colourful 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 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 (2 metres/60 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.