In 1938, 32-year-old Marjorie Courtnay-Latimer was the curator of a tiny museum in the port town of East London, 300 (chk) miles north of Cape Town, on South Africa's east coast. She had befriended a local seaman, Captain Hendrick Goosen, of the trawler Nerine, which fished the nearby coastal waters of the Indian Ocean. When he put into port at East London, the captain made a frequent practice of having the dockman call Miss Latimer to come look over the Nerine's catch. She was welcome to take any unusual specimens she might want for her museum.

          On December 22nd 1938, the Nerine entered port after a stint trawling off the mouth of the Chalumna River, not far from East London. The dockman called Marjorie, who was busy mounting a reptile collection, but felt she ought to at least go down to the docks to wish the crew of the Nerine a happy Christmas. She took a taxi, delivered her greetings and was about to leave when she noticed a blue fin protruding beneath a pile of rays and sharks on the deck. Pushing the overlaying fish aside revealed, as she would later write, "the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, five feet long, and a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings." Marjorie had no idea what the fish was, but knew it must go back to the museum at once. At first the taxi driver refused to have the reeking, five foot fish in his cab, but after a heated discussion, he drove Marjorie and her specimen back to the museum.

          Raking through the few reference books on hand, Marjorie found a picture that led her to a seemingly impossible conclusion. Her specimen bore similarities to a prehistoric fish, particularly in the structure of the head and the tri-lobed shape of the tail. She made a rather poor sketch of the creature, which she mailed, along with a description, to Professor J.L.B. Smith, a forty one year old persnickety chemistry teacher with a locally well known passion for fish, at Rhodes University, Grahamstown some 50 miles south of East London. Smith, however, was off for Christmas holidays, correcting exams at his seaside getaway. Meanwhile, Courtnay's museum director in East London was not impressed with the find. He dismissed the fish as a common rock cod, a species of grouper.

              

           But on January 3, 1939, Miss Latimer heard back from Smith in a now famous cable: "MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS = FISH DESCRIBED". However, in an attempt to preserve the fish by mounting it, the innards had been discarded. A search for them in the museum and town trash bins proved fruitless. Even photographs taken of the preparation had somehow been spoiled.

          Smith, anxiously biding his time, wondering how he could incorporate the possibility of such a discovery into an already overloaded dual career, did not arrive at the East London museum until February 16. The professor, a thin man of about 5'7", sporting, as was his custom, a close-cropped crew cut, khaki bush shorts and sandals, viewed the mounted specimen, exclaiming, according to one account, "I always knew somewhere or somehow, a primitive fish of this nature would appear." Smith identified the fish immediately as a coelacanth, that is as a member of what must be a still living coelacanth species. The fish would soon be called the "most important biological find of the century." A living dinosaur, it was said, would be no more amazing than this incredible discovery.

          After a local newspaper reporter was allowed to take a single photograph of the mounted coelacanth, the picture soon appeared around the world. Smith, Courtnay-Latimer, and the coelacanth became overnight celebrities. When a public viewing for one day only was arranged, 20,000 visitors are said to have shown up.

          J.L.B. Smith took the specimen back to the university at Grahamstown. But some of his envious colleagues, at home and abroad, were skeptical. Was it possible that these remains were really those of a coelacanth? This was hard to prove without the fishes primitive internal organs. His professional reputation as a naturalist was challenged.

          Smith was soon obsessed with finding a second intact specimen. Speculating that the fish had drifted down from the north on the Mozambique Current, he had a reward notice with a picture of the first specimen posted along the East African coast up as far as Kenya. A decade went by with no response. Smith continued his project of cataloging the fishes of the Indian Ocean, always proselytizing about the coelacanth wherever he went. It was during this period that the myth of the coelacanth as a deep ocean fish took hold in the popular and scientific imagination. Oceanographic expeditions from Europe scoured the ocean depths in search of coelacanths. But Smith was convinced that the fish's physiognomy and blue color made it a lower reef predator and not a true deep water fish.

          Captain Eric Hunt, a dapper 38 year old Briton who owned and helmed a vessel, the "Nduwaro" trading among Zanzibar, Madagascar, and the Comoros, a group of small islands in the Mozambique Channel belonging to France, attended one of Smith's lectures in Zanzibar. An intelligent curious fellow, he quickly became fascinated with the whereabouts of the coelacanth. Hunt offered to post Smith's reward notices among the Comoro islands, which are located midway between what was then Tanganyika and Madagascar. Smith was eager to oblige Hunt, and with the help of local authorities, the Comoros were soon plastered with coelacanth reward notices.

        

          On December 21, 1952, fourteen years after the discovery of the first living coelacanth, Captain Hunt, returning to the port of Mutsamudu on the Comoran island of Anjouan, was approached by two Comorans carrying a hefty bundle. One, Ahamadi Abdallah, had caught by hand-line what the locals called a "mame" or "Gombessa," a heavy grouper-like fish that turned up on their lines from time to time. The fisherman was accompanied by an astute school teacher, Affane Mohamed, who had noticed that this was the same fish pictured on the reward notices Hunt had posted. Hunt was ecstatic and arranged for Smith's award of one hundred British Pounds to be paid them. As there was no better preservative available at Mutsamudu, Hunt and his crew salted the fish, then sailed with it along the coast to Dzaoudzi where he bought Formalin from the Director of Medical Services. Carefully, already aware of the scientific importance of the internal organs, Hunt injected the specimen with Formalin preservative. From Dzaoudzi Hunt cabled Smith in South Africa, then sailed the "Nduwaro" with the fish still on board further along the coast to Pamanzi to await Smith's response.

          The French authorities at Pamanzi were not sure that this creature was indeed the fabled coelacanth. Nevertheless, concerned that they might be missing out on something important, cables were dispatched to French scientific authorities in Madagascar. But no message came back. Hearing nothing, the Pamanzi authorities decided to take possession of the fish anyway, if Smith did not come for it personally. Hunt sent a frantic second cable to Smith urging Smith to fly to the Comoros immediately.

          For J.L.B. Smith this find, if indeed it were a coelacanth, would consummate a fourteen year obsession. Worried all the time that Hunt's specimen might not be what he claimed, Smith negotiated with Prime Minister Malan of South Africa, for a plane to fly him to the Comoros. Malan, out of the capital on yet another Christmas holiday consented. By now Smith was a nervous wreck.

          A Dakota with a flight crew of six was put at his disposal for the trip. On the flight out to the islands the pilot faked a radio message that French fighters had scrambled to intercept them. Smith was not amused. It was a quick trip from the airstrip down to the harbor at Pamanzi where the "Nduwaro" was moored. When Smith saw the dead fish he wept. It was indeed a coelacanth. He now had his second specimen, organs intact, and the familiarity of the natives with this creature meant that at least one location of the coelacanth's habitat had been discovered. The Dakota left the same afternoon, flying Smith and "his" prize back to Grahamstown. Smith and the coelacanth hit the world's front pages again. Even Hunt had his fleeting fifteen minutes of fame.

          French officials in Paris and Madagascar were furious that the coelacanth had escaped their grasp through a bungle of communications. Alternate versions of the discovery were cooked up by French bureaucrats in order to give the French more credit. In these accounts Smith appears to have virtually stolen the fish from the Anjouan authorities. This line of attack was even supported by a prominent member of the Royal Society in London who later attacked Smith in the English press. But Smith knew what was "ethically his", and defended himself defiantly.

          Nonetheless, J.L.B's attempts to return to the Comoros for more research and hopefully to capture a live coelacanth for an aquarium were frustrated. First, a major expedition he was organizing fell through when the backer wouldn't meet his terms. Then, the French Government, determined to capitalize on a scientific bonanza, declared the coelacanth a "poisson nationale," barring J.L.B. and other non-nationals from further involvement in the Comoros.

          Embittered by the French response, Smith, in several published articles, turned on their "senseless slaughter" of coelacanths after some ten more had been caught by natives. In his view, science had no more need for dead coelacanths. Supposing the coelacanth population to number in the low hundreds, Smith wrote: "The only excuse for further hunting of coelacanths at the Comores is that mankind may be able to see one alive in an aquarium." (E.P. Herald 14/6/56)

          J.L.B. wrote his account of the two discoveries in the book "Old Fourlegs," first published in 1956. He continued his fish studies and many publications until, seriously ailing from cancer, he took his own life in January, 1968. Smith's "Sea Fishes of the Indian Ocean," meticulously illustrated and co-authored by his wife Margaret, remains the standard ichthyological reference for the region.

          Marjorie Courtnay-Latimer remained as curator of the East London Museum, never visiting the Comoros until 1989, fifty one years after her "discovery" of the first living coelacanth. On her brief stay there, she heard an odd variation of the Comoran part of the coelacanth story. A Comoran remembered his parents telling him that Captain Hunt had simply purchased the world famous "Second Coelacanth" at the fish market.

          Four years after his "rediscovery" of the coelacanth, Captain Eric Hunt disappeared at sea when his schooner ran aground on the reefs of the Geyser Bank between the Comoros and Madagascar. Five of his twenty-six crew and passengers reached Grand Comoro Island alive, after drifting for 17 days in a row boat. They admitted having to cut loose a makeshift raft with eighteen others aboard to keep them from trying to climb into the row boat. Hunt had tried, unsuccessfully, to tow both the row boat and the raft from a small outboard dingy, then left with two others in the outboard to seek help. The eighteen on the raft were never seen again. Hunt's outboard dingy was sited and recovered by a Dutch frigate. The overturned dinghy still contained three hundred Pounds in cash, Hunt's personal papers and those of his African cook and a French passenger. Near the dinghy were three shredded life-vests. All aboard were apparent victims of shark attack.

          While Hunt had probably been carried off course on a typical passenger/freight run, one rumor claimed that he had been looking for more coelacanths outside of French controlled territory. Hunt had told an acquaintance that an unidentified museum had offered him $5,000 for a specimen.

          In 1954, non other than Captain Jacques Cousteau explored the Comoros with a submersible, yet had no luck finding coelacanths.

          For ten years, from 1953-63, French scientists led by Dr. Jacques Millot and Dr. Jean Anthony, exploiting their French-Comoran connection, took over coelacanth research. Of the several annual catches, most were sent back to France in Formalin for research, where they were given a listing at the National Museum of Natural History. Others were sold through the museum to institutions elsewhere in Europe and North America.

         During these years, research was carried out on the gross anatomy of the coelacanth. Its parts, including sense organs, nervous system, digestive tract, reproductive organs, muscles, and skeleton were described in painstaking detail. Capping this pursuit, in March of '55, a female was caught which on dissection was found to contain sixty eggs of varying sizes, three large and well formed like chicken's.

          It was the lure of a living specimen, however, and a chance to observe its behavior that brought scientists, photographers and aquarium representatives to the Comoros during the late Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties. By then the French had lost their grip on the Comoros and their prehistoric legend.

          The new wave of international expeditions were a mixed and largely frustrated lot. In 1966, a French photojournalist, Jacques Stevens, filmed and photographed a coelacanth at night in its natural habitat, 130 feet down. Stills were published in Life magazine, but their authenticity was called into question by scientists who determined the fish was a dying specimen, probably caught by local fishermen in the usual manner, then released for the photographer.

          The same year, the first frozen coelacanth made a long sea voyage from the Comoros to New York, and into the custody of American researcher Keith Thomson at Yale. Work on this fish established that its blood was like that of sharks, and that the jointed sections of the upper skull undoubtedly hinged in feeding.

          Cousteau's Calypso visited the islands again for three months in 1968 without finding a coelacanth, although, according to ichthyologist E.K. Balon of the University of Guelph, a shot of one was faked.

          In 1972, a joint Anglo-American-French expedition fished unsuccessfully for coelacanths in the Comoros. However, this group did succeed in taking film of a dying specimen caught by natives and placed in a tank while they were there. From this specimen and another also caught and killed by a Comoran during the expedition, they returned tissues for study. The English members of the group established a coelacanth research organization within Britain's Royal Society, which continues to the present day. That same year, the Vancouver Aquarium made an unsuccessful bid to capture a live specimen for exhibition. The Vancouver group also returned with a purchased specimen.

          Peter Scoones, a photographer/cinematographer for David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" BBC series, succeeded in filming a dying specimen caught and released underwater in 1979, providing the world with its first really good look at a living coelacanth.

          Then, in 1975-6, the Steinhart Aquarium of San Francisco sent two expeditions led by its Director, John McCosker. Both were unsuccessful in catching a coelacanth, but purchased specimens and published through the California Academy of Sciences a detailed monograph on the fish's history, habits, and anatomy. This work remained the definitive word on the coelacanth for over a decade.

          In the early '80's, a group called The Coelacanth Research Mission, loosely associated with Tokyo University, began visiting the Comoros. These Japanese expeditions recovered only dead fish for research in Japan. They also helped lay the foundations for significant economic "cooperation" between Japan and the Comoros.

          The living coelacanth remained a frustrating enigma. Where exactly did it live? How did it swim, feed, and reproduce? Why had it changed so little in 300 million years. How had it survived for so long? And could it survive in captivity? All these questions beckoned yet a new generation of the fascinated and the foolhardy into another round of coelacanth mania. I was one of those people. What would happen next?