River Monsters (8 page)

The thing weighs a massive 153 pounds, but my guide, Jason Toye, has seen many fish this size. He says the fish just keep getting bigger and bigger, possibly by as much as 5 to 10 pounds a year
with no signs yet of any slowing down, although being precise is difficult when you’ve got fish that can ‘put on’ 20 pounds in a few moments simply by inhaling a carp. (In the two
years since I fished there, the record for the river went up by over 30 pounds. At the time of writing, it stands at 246 pounds, 14 ounces – an 8-foot, 2½-inch fish caught in September
2009. Meanwhile the biggest authenticated wels from anywhere was from Italy’s River Po in June 2010, weighing 250 pounds and measuring 8 feet, 2 inches.)

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.

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 wels 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 it’s generally a mistake to attribute human feelings to animals, 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, it’s clear that those historical 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 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 child-eater.

That it is a man-eater, however, is less likely. All verified ‘attacks’ on human adults have been reactions to provocation, of one sort or another, including 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, a predator that swallows prey whole won’t target anything bigger than its stomach. Large animals are also likely to fight back so they’re 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.

As for what caused the drowning in the first place, even a six-foot wels could have done that. What we don’t know is whether such a fish would ever do so intentionally. 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 forwards above the surface of the water,
beneath it, time can spin backwards, 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.

4

CONSUMER OF YEARS

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 travelling medical inspector, Gillet had caught a number of them, weighing up to 87½ pounds, but had 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
programmes 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 monopolised. 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
colonisation of the ‘New World’. Meanwhile, the Congo’s natural defences kept outsiders at bay for another four centuries.

The river was eventually mapped by John Rowlands, the Welsh-born illegitimate workhouse boy who, after migrating to America and 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 favours.
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
tyre, there was a fortune to be made from rubber, which Leopold’s agents collected from wild vines in the Congo rainforests using forced labour. 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 at 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 travellers 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 the country and the 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.