In the mid-Eighties, about four coelacanths were caught each year by the fishermen of Grand Comoro. These catches occurred purely by accident during the fishermen's nightly outings for another species, the oilfish. The average chance of a "coelie" being caught in any given month was 33.3%, and for a two week visit, 15.4%. In fact, the catches evidently were lumped together over the monsoon period, a month away. So we had no serious expectations of a catch occurring during our visit.

          We had come for a look-see. We wanted to assess the chances for catching coelacanths intentionally with improved techniques. We wanted to figure out how a coelacanth could be kept alive when caught. We wanted to see what the technical and political requirements might be for returning one to the States on a future expedition. We were surprised, to say the least, by what happened.

At the start of our first full day in the Comoros, Michael, Peter, and I were having an early breakfast on the grounds of our aptly named L'Hotel Coelacanthe. The name alone had drawn us to stay there, out of the four hotels then open on Grand Comoro. The Coelacanthe, just north of Moroni, was a Fifties concoction of lodge-restaurant with good French cuisine, a huge cement salt water swimming pool, and a double row of tin-roofed white stucco bungalows. Chinese businessmen and Italian engineers conferred in small groups along palm-strewn malls between the bungalows. The Comoran waiter bringing tea had a startling message for us: "Gombessa! Gombessa!" he announced urgently. "My God!" my mind jumped. "'Gombessa', that's the local name for coelacanth!"

          Michael got the details in French. A man had hitched a ride up the coast from the southwestern village of Itsounzou to report that a coelacanth, known locally as Gombessa, had been caught there the night before. The fish was brought ashore by the fisherman early in the morning. A flood of endorphins warmed my brain. Michael went into manic mode. Peter lit a cigarette, grinned, and looked at us expectantly. A coelacanth expedition that had actually encountered a coelacanth, and on the first day! I tried to remain calm, finishing my tea in restrained gulps as Michael vaulted into Abbas Said's car.

          We deputized Abbas "expedition expediter", negotiated the maze of Moroni and zipped down the snaking coast road to Itsounzou, a collection of concrete buildings surrounded by huts flanking the road. There was much excitement in the tiny village. No coelacanths had been caught off Grand Comoro since the previous March. A small crowd gathered round the corrugated tin hut of an elderly fisherman, Ahmed Insulla. We found the fish outside, under burlap.

          Ahmed peeled away the covering, revealing the obscure object of our desires. The four foot fish rested on its stomach, mouth agape, golden eyes glistening in the morning light. The color was a deep gray-blue with white flecks dotting it's sides. The skin felt like slimy sandpaper. When the head was lifted, the scales of the upper body hinged on each other like plates of armor. The creature was fresh, maybe one or two hours out of the water. It had been caught about 3:00 a.m., only 150 feet from shore. I nicknamed "our" prize "Ahmed" after the fisherman.

  

  

    

          Following a round of negotiations, Michael and Abbas purchased the fish for roughly $500 in Comoran Francs. We planned to preserve the creature, then bring it back to the U.S. for research. In no time we were back at the Coelacanthe Hotel where the fish caused an even greater sensation. None of the employes of the Coelacanthe had ever seen a coelacanth. We examined "Ahmed" more closely. The hotel cook offered to make room for him in his freezer. We wrapped "Ahmed" in two Hefty Steel Sak plastic bags from my expedition kit, then froze him. At lunch I was careful to avoid "fish of the day."

          Jean Louis Gerod operated A SCUBA dive school at the Coelacanthe Hotel. A rugged, good looking Frenchman in his mid-forties, Jean Louis oozed an engaging Gallic charm that seduced some but seemed smarmy to the jaded and cynical. He had left France, and a job with IBM, a few years before with his classically beautiful French girl friend, Celeste, and their young daughter to live in the Comoros. Celeste worked at the French Embassy, while Jean Louis organized dives for the handful of European residents in Moroni, the few tourists who happened upon the Comoros, and the white mercenary officers of the Presidential Guard.

          Living in the Comoros as a diver, Jean Louis had become fascinated with local marine life. In particular, he had fallen under the spell of the coelacanth. He kept a dried one under his bed. More important, the previous July, he had intercepted a Comoran catch, placed the fish in a chicken wire cage he had constructed and submerged the cage to a depth of eighty meters. For a few days while the fish remained alive, Jean Louis filmed it with an Elmo super 8 movie camera. He had made an arrangement with a Japanese coelacanth group to distribute the film on video. And this was the video Father George had heard about. That mystery was now cleared up, and the cage approach seemed the best the answer to our need for a holding pen to observe a coelacanth's life signs after capture.

          Jean Louis had a further connection with the Japanese Coelacanth Research Mission, a group that had made several visits to the Comoros in the last few years. He participated in a Japanese film about the Comoros and the coelacanth in which he manipulated a long dead, frozen specimen, under water so it looked as if it was being caught by a fisherman in a dugout canoe. A "chilling" dramatic reenactment, but passed off as fact in the movie. However, Jean Louis' relations with the Japanese had soured over finances, and he was reluctant to talk about them. He was now a free agent, someone who might be invaluable to us in setting up our project. We enlisted as trainees in his Gombessa Plonge SCUBA school.

          Much of our information about coelacanth goings-on came from the Governor of Grand Comoro, Salim Ben Ali, whose name was first on our contact sheet from New York. Salim Ben Ali must have been in his late seventies, coffee-skinned, slow moving, like an old chameleon, and worldly wise--at least in the ways of the French. He spoke carefully, betraying a scant sense of humor, but with a genuinely endearing paternal warmth. The "Gov," as Peter called him, soon befriended French-fluent Michael, sometimes sending his car to fetch him for tea. They had amiable conferences together where Michael was at his charming best over ginger tea and samosas--meat filled rolled crepes. The Governor held what seemed to me to be an honorary position reserved for a retired politician and former president, which he had once been under the French. Michael fell under his sway, and perhaps credited him with more influence in Comoran affairs than he now bore.

          The Governor told us that the Japanese were quite involved in the Comoros. In addition to the Coelacanth Research Mission, the group loosely affiliated with Tokyo University, the Japanese government was supplying foreign aid and assistance on a significant scale. They were operating a commercial fishing school on the island of Anjouan. They were supplying the islands with Yamaha motorized fiberglass outrigger fishing boats, which the islanders called "Japawas." They were negotiating at the highest levels of the Comoran government to provide new communications facilities. The Japanese had an attentive ear in the Comoran high command. They were penetrating the economy at every level. What's more, the Coelacanth Research Mission would be back next month.

          We spent our days absorbing the Comoros, learning everything we could, always in relation to the coelacanth. We drove round the rim of the island, interviewing villagers, inquiring whether or not coelacanths had been caught off this or that fishing village, watching for inlets that might be closed off as holding areas. It was soon clear that on Grand Comoro all catches were off the steep lava slopes of the west and southwest shores.

          At the village of Iconi, we talked to an elderly fisherman who had caught three coelacanths. He showed us the traditional spun fiber hand-line and large shanked hook he had used, and described the slow struggle of bringing a coelacanth up to his canoe. He then demanded payment for the interview. Clearly he had been through this performance before.

          We climbed Karthala volcano, which at 2,355 meters was the high point of the island, enclosing the world's largest active crater. We overnighted in the crater, collecting ultramafic lava samples for the professor who now possessed the "hot rock" back at Columbia University in New York. We dined in villages with headmen, gagging on rice mixed with sour yogurt and molasses, and in fishermen's huts on more rice and sad little strips of smoked fish from their paltry catches. We made outings in fishermen's canoes, getting a sense of what their simple, almost biblical, lives were like. They told of how dolphins would sometimes appear, driving off the huge sharks that cruised the shores at night. I took depth readings from canoes with gear we brought from New York. We met the very agreeable U.S. Consulate personnel and supped at the Embassy Residence. We SCUBA'd.

          Peter was in "Paradise Mode". This tough Canadian sports fan who normally spent his days as a CEO taking meetings, scarfing up rounds at bars, flying to Vegas for the latest fight, or watching hour after hour of Maple Leafs and Blue Jays games off a satellite dish, found himself in an alien world. The friendliness of Comorans, particularly the gaggles of children surrounding him wherever we went, seemed to reduced Peter to a state of original joy.

    

          At the social end, Michael was totally in his element: diplomatic rendezvous, receptions, dinners, arranging this that and the other, darting hither and yon. I have to admit that Peter and I couldn't see the point of many of Michael's initiatives, but he always had a facile--if not convincing--answer as to why this or that obscure functionary need be cultivated. Michael was a man of quick action, a quality that I--passive and almost ponderously deliberative was lacking in. At that time I felt it was in the interests of the project to follow his leads. Even if many led nowhere, the few that paid off were worth it. The thing was that for those leads that didn't go anywhere, Michael was equally facile in extricating himself. He left you holding the bag of consequences as it were, and that could be an uncomfortable annoying sensation.

          For myself, in those middle days of our brief visit, I was a happy man. Not only was that frozen coelacanth at the hotel worth the trip in itself, but in our assessment of the situation, things were looking up for the project as a whole.

         In the north coast town of Mitsomuli, we looked up the man from Chicago, Dr. Barnett. He ran the hospital there and, indeed, with his wife Laura had spent much of his life working in missionary hospitals throughout Africa.

          A few years before, Dr. Barnett had sent two coelacanth specimens to Shed Aquarium in Chicago, where he said one was on display. They were shipped frozen in sleeping bags to Johannesburg S.A. and there re-packed for the flight to North America. On arrival in the U.S., the specimens were accidentally diverted to Washington D.C., but were still frozen solid on reaching Chicago.

          Dr. Barnett was one of those Reader's Digest "most remarkable people" one meets very few of in a lifetime. A modern day Schweitzer, Barnet had operated clinics in East Africa as well as the Comoros. He had, in fact, been profiled in several magazine pieces back in the states. He gave Peter pills for back pains. I felt pangs of conscience that because of the need for secrecy we could not openly discuss our plans with him. He was such an open and honest man. But Dr.Barnett reassured us with his belief that a caught coelacanth is a dead coelacanth. That put the Shed "threat" to rest for the time being.

          Michael learned that two other iced coelacanths were available in a government freezer at $1,500 apiece. Michael wanted both. I was for leaving one behind for the Japanese--so they'd put less pressure on the local fishermen to turn over a specimen that our strategy might otherwise be able to keep alive for us. But Michael won out. We planned to buy both frozen fish if we could arrange a line of credit from the U.S. The phones operated by radio through Paris. Sometimes you'd get through, sometimes not. Michael got through.

          I measured a line I had marked off and lowered to the bottom where "Ahmed" was caught, to determine the depth of his capture. Of necessity my measuring technique was a bit odd. First, I took the distance between the legs of a chair in our bungalow, then wrapped the line around the legs, counting the number of wraps until I reached the depth mark I'd made from the canoe. Multiplying the leg's separation by the number of wraps and allowing for the build up of line on the chair legs, I came up with a depth for "Ahmed's" capture of 500 feet, or 152 meters. Coelacanths lived deep, but not as deep as commonly imagined. Ahmed had been swimming within what marine biologists call the "twilight zone", far short of the pelagic depths the coelacanth was once supposed to inhabit.

          I analyzed a surface water sample with an aquarium test kit:

          Nothing mysterious about the seawater in "coelieland." But none of what we were learning prepared us for what happened next.

          When Michael and Abbas left for the village of Itsounzou to camp and test fish for coelacanth overnight, Moroni was in the midsts of a torrential downpour. Never did two people seem less enthusiastic for a project. But Michael had made the arrangements and couldn't let the fishermen down. Peter and I dined that night at the home of the U.S. Embassy's Operations Officer, Bill Carlson.  Carlson was an example of the amazingly high caliber of the Embassy staff assigned to such a remote outpost--with a staff of five, the smallest U.S. Embassy in the world! In his early forties, Bill held an advanced degree from Yale in French literature and spent many off duty hours translating esoteric French classics for English publication. After a pleasant evening, we turned in early.

          The very next morning, on the thirteenth day of our visit, while Michael and Abbas were still at Itsounzou, my day began with a delicate rapping on my bungalow door at the Hotel Coelacanthe. It was 5:45 a.m. One of the Comoran hotel staff was waking me, but for what possible reason? He was communicating in something between a whisper and a scream: "Gombessa! Gombessa! Gombessa!"

          I woke up fast. It was the same man who had served us tea on that fateful first day. "Une coelacanthe vivant!" he continued. I translated to myself, cursing my high school French. Alive!? He was telling me that a fisherman in a canoe was coming to me with a live coelacanth! This seemed so incredible I repeated it several times, my French rapidly improving, to be sure we understood each other. I dressed in an instant, then rushed outside with my Leica R4, the max-mini thermometer from my equipment kit, and another Hefty Steel Sak plastic bag. The gods were indeed smiling on our expedition. Peter barely responded to my knock at his door--thinking I was making a joke about Michael catching a coelacanth at Itsounzou. I checked the shore line. Two canoes were visible in the distance.

          From the hotel's office phone I called Jean Louis Gerod, waking him. With SCUBA gear he would be able to take the coelacanth down into deep water once the fisherman arrived. The only other option was to try to put it in the hotel's saltwater pool--something once proposed years before by the Anglo-French expedition. But this solution would not protect the animal from light, a stimulus Jean Louis considered a prime cause of death in earlier catches. After a jumble of bilingual communications, Jean Louis said he'd be right over.

          I went to the shore. One of the two canoes was approaching. I took pictures with the R4. There were two men on board, both paddling. It was difficult to see if they were pulling a fish along with them. I took a surface temperature reading in the pool- 80 degrees, as usual. The Comoran newsbearer was with me as the canoe approached. There was too much wave action to bring the boat in by the lava rocks in front of the hotel. The tide was up. We motioned them farther along the shore while shouting to the men in the boat. They shouted back. There was something in the water on one side of the hull being towed on a tether. I took more photos. We waved the canoe further to the side, beyond the hotel property. I ran along the shore to intercept it. They tried another unsuccessful landing. The wave action was too strong there too. We motioned them still further along the coast. My heart was pounding, but my mind was calm. It was as if I had expected this to happen all along. Didn't I always have good luck on expeditions? I put the max-mini thermometer down somewhere, never to be found again. The fishermen attempted to land once more.

          Because of the waves, the fisherman paddling from the stern, could not keep his canoe from crashing against the lava with the fish alongside heaving in the swell. To have any control over its fate, I would have to go on board. I climbed down the rocks into the swell. At this point the Leica R4, slung over my shoulder, dipped in the water, shorting out its electronics. I switched to the manual setting. The fisherman moved us off shore to await the arrival of Jean Louis. It's the last of that moment that I remember clearly, because what followed was something mystical, an event that even dimmed the ardor of Sangay Volcano's belching furnace. Next to me, fastened by the lower jaw to a three foot section of the canoe's anchor line, swam a living coelacanth. It was during that interval of waiting for Jean Louis that the feeling overcame me. Was it a threshold effect? I'm sure that, like the moon, coelacanths would lose their mystery when observed up close for long periods. They might even appear comical. But during that wait, when I reached into the water to hold the creature clear of the bottom of the boat, when I saw the clear glowing eyes, the gash on its head, when my hand sank into the slime of mucous coating the scales, when I saw the rounded gills moving on their own, and the slow seemingly indifferent action of the lobed fins, a shudder of awe ran through me. This creature was the Devonian survivor I had dreamt of, the living presence of all those sketches, mangy pickled bodies, the skeletons I had pored over in research journals and trudged through museum back rooms to observe, lifeless as the fossils that preceded them. This one was alive and so, in this rare moment of life's excellence, was I.

          Peter by now was scrambling down the rocks taking flash snapshots with his automatic camera. The pictures would show a golden eye beneath the boat as the reflecting tapita cells of the fish's retina collected and bounced back his flash. We backed the canoe away from shore, pulling the fish from the rocks. Then the fisherman paddled slowly, skillfully, upwind toward the Coelacanthe Hotel property. The man closest to me was not the fisherman, but his friend advisor and fellow paddler, whom I would later call his "agent." This man referred to the fisherman as his "patron." The fisherman did not speak French, so I asked questions and made comments through the agent. I asked the fisherman to paddle more slowly--so the fish would not drown.

          On a "lifescale" of 1-10, I gave our fish--soon to be called "Ruggi" after Father George Ruggieri--a 1.5. In twenty years of running a home marine aquarium, I had seen many dying fish, and this one fit the description. The only hope was to get it back down where it could recover in Jean Louis' cage.
Jean Louis scrambled into his SCUBA gear, then swam out to the canoe. The anchor line was somehow knotted about a hole punched in the fish's lower jaw. To hand the fish and line over to Jean Louis, I had to toss the anchor and line overboard. He took the line and gently led the fish down. We watched the bubbles from his regulator become finer and finer as they descended.

          Twenty five minutes later Jean Louis surfaced near the shore by the hotel. We paddled in. He returned the anchor and most of the anchor line to the fisherman. Jean Louis hadn't been able to find his cage, so he had instead tethered the fish to a rock outcrop at what he said was 80 meters. He'd put the line through the fish's gills. I didn't like the sound of that.

          Once we were ashore the agent and the fisherman seemed very pleased about the whole business. The agent said, as far as I could translate, that the fish had been brought up about 3:30 a.m. from 300 meters after a two hour fight. They were afraid to wake anyone at that time and so they kept the fish tethered after cutting the line and hook free from inside the mouth. Between 4:45 and 5:00 they woke the hotel man who lived in their village of Itsandra. He dressed and came to me. Apparently it took a few minutes of knocking to wake me. We all agreed to wait for Michael to return before settling the "cadeau," the money for the fisherman.

          A man from Radio Comore, the state-run station, arrived to interview the fisherman. I was also interviewed, and did my best in French. I said that we had come to study the "habits" of the coelacanth--meaning the habitat and behavior. But in French slang, "habits" apparently means something else. Jean Louis informed me that I had said we came from New York to study the coelacanth's genitals! Sheepishly, I asked the journalist if many people listened to Radio Comore. His answer was as odd as my gaffe, "No, no one. The signal is not clear beyond two kilometers." But the interview played several times and to my embarrassment was heard by everyone at the U.S. Embassy--apparently located within broadcast range of Radio Comore.

          Michael arrived soaking from Itsounsou. Abbas had fallen asleep in one canoe while Michael had capsized in the other. Michael and his fisherman swam their boat to shore. The fisherman was terrified of a shark attack. At every stroke the water exploded with phosphorescence. But they made it ashore uneaten. Michael showed little overt surprise at our news, but I could tell from the darting and twitching of his eyes that his mind was switching into overdrive. In fact, a cerebral melt-down was not out of the question.

          Michael and I went to the U.S. Embassy to send an alert telegram to New York Aquarium. The text and timing of our telex had generated some heated discussion among the three of us. Michael wanted to cable that we had a living coelacanth at such and such a depth off the hotel so the Aquarium had better take some action.I wanted to wait to see how the fish was the next day, before getting the aquarium fired up that we had a living coelacanth at our disposal. From the life and death traumas of years of hobby aquarium keeping I sensed that this fish was a goner. Peter also felt Michael's telex was falsely optimistic. The compromise was that our telex stated we had a living coelacanth and would report again on the fish's condition the following day.

          When our telex was received in New York, the Aquarium went into full crisis mode. A transporter was readied, and flight arrangements set up. A full mobilization. They were ecstatic: a living coelacanth for their 90th Anniversary festivities!

          At the embassy we learned that the line of credit had been arranged. We each now had $2000 extra to put toward purchases of the various coelacanth specimens, including the living fish.

          By 12:00 we were back at the hotel. The fisherman and his agent--the passenger in his canoe--had returned in their finest Muslim attire: the white gowns called kandzou, and round white caps or kofia. The catcher of the fish was a handsome, strong young man with Afro-Arabic features. He smiled often and had an extreme gentleness and humility about him. He was my idea of what Jesus Christ must have been like. The "agent," in contrast, was a hard bitten, suspicious, colonial survivor, with plenty of negative "vibes". Negotiations were resumed on the terrace of our bungalow. Michael, a negotiator by trade, presided, while I tried to salvage my salt water damaged Leica R4.

          The negotiations consisted of Michael offering tea and bananas, while proposing all kinds of conditions with perks attached in exchange for this or any other living coelacanth. A New York City venture capitalist vs a Third World native fisherman and his agent. But the agent held his own and began to earn my respect. The agent pointed out to my embarrassment, that we were offering them less than we paid for the dead fish at Itsounzou! We accepted their first offer of 200,000 Comoran francs, roughly $600. Michael tried to establish different prices in the future for fish with different longevities after capture. I had reported the disturbing gash on the side of our new fish's head. We wanted to encourage special handling.

          It was 3:00 p.m. There was no news on the fish until, Justin Brinn, the U.S.Charge D'Affair's ten-year-old son, came by after a SCUBA lesson announcing casually that he had just pulled a living coelacanth on a rope. What the hell was going on? Had their instructor brought the fish up to an observable depth for novice divers? Justin said that the fish was very much alive. Then Jean Louis, returning from an inspection dive, announced that the fish was sick and would be dead by the next day.

         Michael was in a full-blown frenzy. Why were other people seeing the fish and not him? Why wasn't the fish being filmed? Michael became fanatical about getting a photograph of himself and the fish with the Explorers Club Flag. This struck me as ridiculously corny under the circumstances. (Was the coelacanth supposed to hold a corner of the Flag up with a lobed fin while Michael held the other and they both smiled at the camera?) He arranged a dive, only his second or third ocean dive, to see the fish with Jean Louis's assistant, Mohamed. Mohamed was arguing that because the fish was near death it should be brought to the surface to be observed and photographed. I could certainly understand why Michael wanted to see the fish--he had missed out on the excitement in the morning-- but I countered that photos had already been taken of living coelacanths--these pictures would neither be unique nor scientifically useful. What would be a significant major first in coelacanth research was the recovery of the fish from its near death condition. And the only possible chance for the fish to recover was to remain at depth. "Good call," Michael said, heading for the dive shop. I left for Itsounzou to collect his camping gear. Now there was no point in Peter and I going there to fish that night as originaly planned.

     When I returned to the hotel an hour and a half later, Michael claimed that he had blocked attempts by Mohamed to bring the fish to the surface. Michael said he had "worked with the fish," removing the line from the gills, hooking it through the lower jaw and tethering the fish to a rocky crevice where it "showed signs of recovery." I was dubious. If Michael was "working" with the fish it had to be no more than 10 or so meters deep. Not 80 as Jean Louis had stated.

         The next morning was a very sad affair. Michael was up before 7:00 a.m., stomping around importantly in a wet suit. "I need someone to watch me while I swim to look at the fish," he said. What was Michael up to? I was not in the mood to service his agenda. When I declined, he got Mohamed again.
Soon Michael was back. "The fish is just barely alive. We must photograph it with the Explorers Club flag," he said. I resisted, but he insisted. "You must go along with my judgement in this," he declared. I seriously doubted that the fish was still alive. But Michael would have to be pacified or the whole expedition might come apart at the seams. The idea of this photo op was embarrassing to me: Michael, The Explorers Club Flag, and a mutilated, dying or dead coelacanth being used as a trophy. This was not the "eco-sensitive" approach I had in mind for the project. What was driving Michael? Publicity back at the E.C.? Michael was going nuts, but perhaps as time would tell, he understood something about the value of publicity that I was being naieve about. I had him load his Nikon with high speed ASA 400 film as my Leica was out of action. Michael went out and came back a third time saying that fishermen were about to steal the fish. This seemed odd. The fish was supposedly tethered to a rock crevice deep underwater.

         I stuffed Michael's camera into a plastic underwater photo bag, then went to the end of the long deteriorating cement jetty where divers entered the ocean from the SCUBA school. Snorkeling, I approached the coelacanth. It was floating near the surface tied on a twelve foot line to a lava outcrop a foot above the water line. The fish drifted with the wave action only a few feet underwater. So much for a coelacanth recovering at depth! I could see from the cloudy disks on its eyes that it must have been dead for several hours. Wave action caused a slight movement of the gills--creating, perhaps, an illusion of breathing. The rope was tied at the lower jaw through a puncture at the juncture of the gills- a sad sight. Mohamed was towing the rope. Michael was positioning himself for photographs near the fish. He unfurled the Explorers Club flag under the water. I clicked off several shots.

         The animal was dragged out of the water, by the crowd gathering on shore, then put back in and pulled out again--I guess for more photo ops. I took some pictures from the water, floating in my B.C. vest. Michael was posing next to the dead fish on the jetty, making a dramatic thumbs down gesture evidently to indicate that the fish was dead. Then he unfurled the flag again for more shots, draping the flag over the dead fish as if it were a military casket. Next, while grimly mourning the death of the fish, he feverishly collected scales that had come off on the rocks. Michael was snapping, melting down. Not the first and not the last. I call it "coelamania."

         The fish, dragged out of the water a second time, was carried up to the hotel in a funerary procession of about fifteen whites in colorful bathing suits. Michael stubbed a toe on the lava, tearing a nail badly. He went with a doctor from the crowd to the Moroni hospital, giving Peter and me a brief respite from his "attack."

         The U.S. Consulate gave an O.K. for this fish to go into the Embassy Residence freezer, where, a few months before, an American infant, dead of malaria, had been stored. In the meantime, I now had to block the attempt of a South African entrepreneur to hustle the fish off to another hotel for pictures. He was instructing Abbas to put the fish in the trunk of his car. Disappointed, the poor man desperately scoured the ground on all fours for scales. He was also having an "attack."

         In human terms, what had happened to "our" fish? Why had it gotten so totally out of control. It was evident that Jean Louis or at least his dive assistant had exploited the fish for the SCUBA school. But what about Michael? I encountered Jean Louis that afternoon. He said that the day before he had told his assistant to bring the coelacanth up for Michael to see and it had not been taken down again. Jean Louis seemed genuinely disappointed. Why had Michael left the fish near the surface, thus sealing its fate, after saying it was a "good call" to leave it on the bottom? The most obvious explanation is that he wanted photographs of himself with the fish and the E.C. flag for publicity.

         Michael had been willing to sacrifice the slight chance the fish might have had to recover in order to get some publicity. This was a sorry affair. If we could, we must grant him the benefit of the doubt by supposing that he felt these pictures would be critical to raising future funding for the project. If that were his motive, in hindsight, he might have been right. Nonetheless, in the awkwardness of unspoken questions the answers to which seemed all too obvious, a grim pall descended on our expedition. Michael sank into a funk, staring blankly at the sea from the hotel terrace, while Peter, quite innocent of the whole business, ordered stiff drinks at the bar.

         Then there was another potential setback. As I was updating my journal in our bungalow at the Coelacanthe Hotel, Michael, back in action, burst in, exclaiming, "We're f****d!" I looked up, skeptically. It seemed a Mr. Fournier, an old French colonialist with some sort of government connection, had shown him a letter about a German/French expedition arriving with a submersible later in the month. The expedition was affiliated with the Max-Plank-Institute. The letter was from another Frenchman, Raphael Plante. Earlier, Michael had seen another letter at the Moroni Science Museum library from the Max Plank Institute requesting a coelacanth specimen. Were they coming to capture a coelacanth? The letter which I saw assured otherwise. They just wanted to observe and film them at depth. No capture was planned. That sounded o.k. to me.  I thought Michael was overreacting to the submarine visit. The fish had been filmmed before by the Anglo-French expedition, by Peter Scoones for Attenborough's Life on Earth series, and more recently by Jean Louis Gerod. But was he?

    

          One of the key objectives of our expedition was to leave behind an infrastructure to sustain the project over the next year before we could return. That meant finding someone local who could represent us. Abbas had been a possibility, but Jean Louis Gerod, with his interest in coelacanths, was the most logical choice. To this end Michael had been developing a rapport with Jean Louis, but the SCUBA diver often failed to show up for Michael's paid diving lessons. I was uncertain that Jean Louis would be the one to help us.

         Michael had arranged a dinner which he announced would be the closing of a deal with Jean Louis to act as our proxy in the Comoros. But the dinner turned into a madhatter's tea party, which led nowhere. In one instance, primed by Michael that I would be meeting a man of letters, I asked Monsieur Fournier--the man who had shown us the letter from Max-Planck--if he had read the French philosopher Descartes. "Of course," he replied. "I always have Decaf at dinner. Otherwise I can't sleep!" Later Jean Louis announced that he had no intention of ever sending a coelacanth out of the Comoros. So much for the "closing." Now we were running out of time. Abbas seemed more interested in schmoozing with Michael than doing anything about the coelacanth. Then suddenly, right in our own backyard, we had a new candidate, Charly Hortoland, the husband of Elka, the American secretary at the US Embassy.

         Charly Hortoland, a burly Frenchman and an ex French Foreign Legionnaire, headed up a Comoran work crew that maintained the U.S. Embassy and residence compounds. With a shop at his disposal, as well as the Embassy telex, he was perfectly positioned to assist us. What's more, he agreed right off the bat, and swung into action, modifying coffin crates from the Embassy warehouse to ship our frozen coelacanths home in. Another key element of our program had been instantly solved.

         
         The plan was for Charly to construct a proper coelacanth cage at his shop. He or Abbas would alert the fishing villages. If a coelacanth was caught over the next year, Charly would be contacted and Jean Louis or another diver would put the fish in the cage and lower it to at least the depth it was caught at. I felt that would guarantee minimum natural conditions for the fish to recover in. We would be telexed in New York and mobilize immediately for a return with the personnel and equipment necessary to bring the fish back. In the meantime, the fish would be checked by divers after three days. If it was still healthy, we would be on our way. If no intercepts occurred over the next year we would be back with high tech fishing gear the following November. We thought we had all bases covered. Things were going well again. We had an infrastructure, and we had a plan.

         The countdown for departure began. Suddenly, Michael was virtually immobilized by fever. He thought he had either malaria or hepatitis. Besides that he was pissed. He had done a hell of a lot of organizing for Peter and me and we were not showing him proper respect. I now felt the sooner we got away the better.

         Peter and I left for the airport to pick up the dry ice coming in on the flight from France. This was the same flight we would be leaving on in the evening. When the ice didn't appear with the baggage, we were permitted onto the taxiway to search the freight containers. In this way I got a good idea of how the Air France Airbus loaded freight--for future reference. Our dry ice turned up in a "cold house," where bottles of imported French wine and other luxury perishables were stored for the Comoran "aristocracy".

         We met Charly and his men at the Embassy and drove with them on a freezer round up, loading fish from the Comoran Government freezer, the Coelacanthe Hotel freezer and the U.S. Embassy residence freezer. The two government fish were brown, dried and ragged like the mummies I'd once seen in the Cairo Museum.

            

         That done Peter and I left Michael crawling around on the paqcked luggage like a giant sloth assuring us he would be ok for departure. Awaiting departure time, we went with Abbas Said for a final feast in a remote village. Abbas's sister was there. She applied dashes of the women's traditional powdered root makeup on my face. I had been intrigued by the elaborate pixel patterns of yellow dots that we saw on women's faces in the markets. It could be quite stunning, but not on me. We drank our last round of Comoran fruit juices as a torrential rain crashed down around the house.

          

         Michael announced, perhaps in a delirium, that he had arranged V.I.P. treatment for us at the airport. This was hard to appreciate. I have never seen such mayhem. There were thousands. Half a dozen kids wanted to carry our bags. I positioned Peter inside the terminal, then one by one carried pieces in to where he stood and deposited them. Finally, I allowed one boy to help me move our luggage through the crowds. Michael and Charly dealt with the fish crates in another section. Slowly we edged through the check in. Michael finally collapsed on the concrete floor by the flight gate until we were let through. We were the first on board, suddenly back in that neutral zone of general civilization--the cabin of a commercial jetliner. Never did a plane feel so good.

          On the flight back, Michael's "hepatitis" or "malaria" vanished somewhere over East Africa with the first glass of complimentary champagne. We were soon back to our old selves, joking and pleased with what we'd accomplished in so short a time. Peter moved to first class at Dar-Es-Salam, and I saw him only at the Jiddah stopover. At Paris, Peter left us for his Air Canada flight to Toronto. Michael checked to make sure the coelacanth crates were being transferred to our U.S. flight. We were met by Abbas's brother, Dr. Ibin Said, and once again he drove enthusiastically around Paris while I slumped in the back seat lost in a time-warp. From Dr. Said's apartment I called Dr. Ernie Ernst of New York Aquarium in N.Y., waking him at 5:00 a.m. to gave him details of the specimens' arrival. "Are they all Latimeria?" he asked sleepily, as if we might have discovered a new species of coelacanth.

         At JFK we learned that the fish were not on board, but were being stored in Paris for a flight the next day. There had been a mess-up. I took this crisis in stride, remembering the Shed Aquarium experience. The fish were well packed. And they would arrive still frozen solid.

         All told the reconnaissance expedition had been a phenomenal success. From the Kartala crater we had gathered ultramafic crystals, pure specimens of the earth's mantle beneath the Indian Ocean. In only fourteen days our questions about coelacanth logistics and politics had been answered. We left an infrastructure in place that could act in our absence. Our project looked feasible. We had the Governor on our side. We had four frozen specimens, two in exceptional condition--including one live capture experience as a bonus. The Japanese, Vancouver Aquarium, the McKosker groups, even Cousteau's Calypso had spent months in the field without encountering a living coelacanth. It would be hard to imagine that their frozen specimens matched the condition of our two fresh catches. I would still have to worry about the next Japanese visit and the Max-Planck submersible. Our success would lure us into the next phase of the project: fund raising for a full scale capture expedition.

          Unknown to me, Michael apparently when he was lolling feverishly on the luggage, had rifled through my film bag removing all exposed ASA 400 rolls. This would assure that all photos of the "living" coelacanth would be under his control when we got back.