77 

 In all this time I was still the only scientist in the world to 

 believe that the Coelacanth came from somewhere about tropical 

 East Africa. My views were looked on as obsession rather than as 

 logical deduction. I was plainly crazy even though this was leading 

 to the discovery of marvellous scientific wealth in modern fishes. 

 Constantly very conscious of all this incredulity, at the time now 

 described I became increasingly puzzled and worried, because 

 just north of Mozambique the great westerly current of the 

 Indian Ocean divides, part going north and part south, the latter 

 our powerful Mozambique current. If the true home of the 

 Coelacanth lay anywhere south of that division of the current, it 

 was easy to understand how one at least had wandered down to our 

 waters, as many other tropical fishes constantly do; but despite 

 all our searching we had so far failed to find that home. 



The fact that the Coelacanth did get to East London made it 

 far less likely that its home lay anywhere north of the level of Cape 

 Delgado, opposite which the current divides. As we had so far 

 failed to find that home in the area of the southern branch along 

 East Africa itself, while it increased my uneasiness it also focused 

 my attention on Madagascar, which was also washed by that 

 same branch. 



All along that part of the East African coast, and exactly 

 opposite, lay the thousand-mile long stretch of Madagascar, not 

 so far away. Even if my mind had not constantly been drawn across 

 that channel by the Coelacanth, there were always vivid reminders 

 of our nearness to Madagascar. In that wild part we found ruins 

 that puzzled us at first, extensive ruins of forts that faced the best 

 landing-points on the shore. Eventually we came to learn that they 

 were the sole remains of an extensive colonisation of this northern 

 area of Mozambique by the Portuguese of earlier times. Those 

 hardy pioneers had scarcely become established when fleets of 

 sailing canoes drifting silently ashore in the dead of night dis- 

 charged hordes of raiding natives, who killed, ravaged, and pil- 

 laged, then sailed away as silently as they had come. They were 

 the Saccalaves, hardy seafaring natives from Madagascar. So near 

 was Madagascar, where the seas and reefs could not be very differ- 

 ent from those of Mozambique, and I was comforted by the feel- 

 ing that even though Madagascar lay beyond my present reach, 

 my leaflet had gone there, and I hoped, that as in Portuguese 



