66 



likely. This one, caught near East London, could easily have come 

 rambling down the coast in the warm Mozambique current, as 

 quite a number of tropical fishes constantly do. 



The peoples of East Africa have from the earliest known times 

 been ardent fishermen ; but save for an Arab, Forskal, who lived 

 in the Red Sea area in the eighteenth century, none have been 

 ichthyologists or had any pretensions to scientific knowledge. 

 The vast majority, especially those of Bantu origin, are even to- 

 day of a low order of intelligence, and restrained from a more 

 brutish existence only by the threat of force. As I wrote in 1946 

 in a report to the South African Council for Scientific and In- 

 dustrial Research : 'There may well be places in East Africa where 

 Coelacanths are commonly caught and used as food, and nobody 

 would be any the wiser.' What applied to East Africa applied with 

 equal force to the 3,000-mile-long coast-line of Madagascar. 

 Numerous Coelacanth fossils had been found on Madagascar. 

 There must be stretches of coast there that no enlightened 

 scientific eye has ever seen, and the tantalising vision of savages 

 feasting unsuspected on succulent Coelacanth steaks on a 

 Madagascan shore did not seem too fantastic. 



And so my eyes were turned to East Africa, but not with any 

 joy. To search every reef in that vast area would take many years 

 of effort. It would need time and money, plenty of money. I 

 was no longer young, and as for money, I was a scientist, not a 

 wool farmer, not even a millionaire. 



