24 



enthusiasm, so that they watched for unusual specimens of all 

 kinds from the trawl, many of which were kept and brought to 

 port. It became the custom to pile up the 'rubbish' so that she 

 could scratch through it, and indeed she found many treasures 

 that way. 



It was therefore with no sense of anything unusual that Miss 

 Latimer received a telephone message from the manager of Irvin 

 and Johnson at East London in the late morning of the 22nd 

 December 1938, to say that a trawler had brought in a pile of 

 fish for her to examine. She called a taxi and with Enoch the native 

 assistant of the Museum went down to the wharf some miles off. 

 When she got there the captain had already left the ship, but 

 one of the deck-hands took her to the pile of fish they had put 

 aside, mostly sharks. Those she already knew^ and had got pre- 

 viously, but then, almost hidden, she noticed a large heavily 

 scaled blue fish, and as a peculiar fin and the colour attracted her 

 attention, she had the fish pulled out. It was a peculiar creature, 

 like nothing she had ever seen before, and she stared at it in 

 puzzlement for some time and examined its mouth and fins. 

 She asked the old trawlerman if he had ever seen one before, but 

 he replied that in his thirty years at sea in that work he had 

 certainly never seen any fish of that type, and he pointed out that 

 the fins were like arms, it looked almost like a big lizard. Miss 

 Latimer thought it looked something like a Lung-fish, but in any 

 case decided that it was obviously something rare which it would 

 certainly be advisable to keep. The trawlerman said it was a lovely 

 blue when taken from the water, but was a vicious brute, snapping 

 its jaws fiercely. They had all been struck by its unusual appear- 

 ance, for none of them had seen anything like it before, so they 

 had called Captain Goosen to look at it, and when he touched the 

 body, it heaved itself up suddenly, snapping its jaws viciously 

 and had nearly caught his hand in its formidable fang-lined 

 mouth. The captain ordered the crew to put it on one side so that 

 Miss Latimer could see it, for by then he had decided to go straight 

 in to port. 



The fish was 5 feet long and heavy. As a matter of interest 

 Miss Latimer got them to weigh it; 127 lb. It was a scorching hot 

 day and the fish had a smell — all fish have on hot days — but the 

 Coelacanth has one all its own, as we came to know only too well. 



