Praise for Adventures of a Young Naturalist

‘A marvellous book . . . unputdownable’

Sunday Telegraph

‘An elegant and gently funny writer’

The Times

‘As impressive and as enjoyable as his TV programmes and there can be no higher praise’

Daily Express

‘Full of Attenborough’s trademark enthusiasm, wit and intelligence’

Sunday Express

‘Immensely colourful and dramatic’

Daily Mail

About the Author

Sir David Attenborough is a broadcaster and naturalist, whose television career is now in its seventh decade. After studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge and a brief stint in publishing, he joined the BBC. Since the launch of the famous Zoo Quest series in 1954 he has surveyed almost every aspect of life on earth and brought it to the viewing public. His latest programme, Planet Earth II, was the most-watched nature documentary of all time.

Also by David Attenborough

Zoo Quest to Guiana (1956)

Zoo Quest for a Dragon (1957)

Zoo Quest to Paraguay (1959)

Quest in Paradise (1960)

Zoo Quest to Madagascar (1961)

Quest Under Capricorn (1963)

Life Stories (2009)

New Life Stories (2011)

Life on Air (2014)

The Tribal Eye (1976)

The First Eden (1987)

Life on Earth (1979)

The Living Planet (1984)

The Trials of Life (1990)

The Private Life of Plants (1995)

The Life of Birds (1998)

The Life of Mammals (2002)

Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

Life in Cold Blood (2008)

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www.tworoadsbooks.com

First published in Great Britain in 1980 by Lutterworth Press as The Zoo Quest Expeditions: Travels in Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2017 by Two Roads

An imprint of John Murray Press

An Hachette UK company

Original publications © David Attenborough 1956, 1957, 1959

This abridged combined volume © David Attenborough 1980

Introduction © David Attenborough 2017

Photographs © David Attenborough

This edition of The Zoo Quest Expeditions is published by arrangement with The Lutterworth Press.

The right of David Attenborough to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-47366-441-8

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

Introduction

These days zoos don’t send out animal collectors on quests to bring ’em back alive. And quite right too. The natural world is under more than enough pressure as it is, without being robbed of its most beautiful, charismatic and rarest inhabitants. Now most of a zoo’s crowd-attracting species – lions, tigers, giraffes and rhinoceros, even lemurs and gorillas – have been born in zoos and kept track of in stud books, so that individuals can be exchanged internationally without incurring problems of in-breeding. They can then play a valuable part in familiarising visitors with the splendours of the natural world and in explaining the importance and complexities of conservation.

But it was not always so. London Zoo was founded in 1828 by men of science who were, at that time, still concerned with the important but almost impossible task of compiling a catalogue of all the species of animals alive today. Some were sent to it from distant parts of the world as dead specimens. Others arrived alive and were put on display in the Society’s gardens in Regent’s Park. But both kinds ended up as well-studied anatomical specimens and carefully preserved. Needless to say, special attention was paid to finding species that no other zoo had ever possessed, and that ambition, to some extent, still lingered on even in the 1950s when I visited one of the Zoo’s curators with an idea for a new kind of television programme.

Television then was also very different from what it is today. There was only one network, produced by the BBC, which could only be seen in London and Birmingham. All its programmes came from two small studios in Alexandra Palace, in north London. They were the same studios and indeed the same cameras that in 1936 had provided the first regular television service in the world. Transmissions were suspended in 1939 on the outbreak of the Second World War, but then resumed as soon as peace was declared in 1945. So when, in 1952, I got a job as a trainee producer, British television had only ten years of practical production experience.

The programmes were almost entirely live. Electronic recording was still decades away, so the only way we producers had of supplementing the pictures from the studio was with film. That cost money and we were seldom given enough to enable us to do so. This was not regarded as much of a limitation. On the contrary, both viewers and producers thought that the ‘immediacy’ was the medium’s main attraction. The events appearing on the screen were actually happening as viewers watched them. If an actor forgot his lines, then the prompt was audible. If a politician lost his temper, then all saw him do so and there was no chance for him to have second thoughts and insist that his incautious words were edited out.

Animal programmes were already established in the schedules when I first started. They were presented by George Cansdale, the Superintendent of the London Zoo. Week after week, he transported some of the more reasonably-sized and amenable of his charges from Regent’s Park to Alexandra Palace and put them on a table covered with a doormat, where they sat blinking in the intense lights of the studio, while Mr Cansdale demonstrated their anatomy, their bravery and their party tricks. He was an expert naturalist, marvellously adept at handling animals and persuading them to do what he wanted. Even so things did not always go as he might have wished. That was part of his popularity. They regularly relieved themselves on the doormat or, with luck, over his trousers. Occasionally they escaped and had to be fielded by one of the uniformed zoo keepers lurking in the wings ready for such an eventuality. Once a small African squirrel leapt from the demonstration table on to the microphone, hanging on a boom directly above. From there it scampered across the studio and found refuge in the ventilation system. It lived there for days, making occasional appearances in the dramas, variety shows and epilogues that continued to come from its studio. On a few memorable occasions an animal even managed to give Mr Cansdale a nip. Such a moment was not to be missed and when he produced a particularly dangerous creature, like a snake, the nation held its breath.

Then, in 1953, a new kind of animal programme appeared. A Belgian explorer and film-maker called Armand Denis, together with his glamorous British-born wife Michaela, came to London from Kenya to publicise a feature-length documentary they had made for the cinema called Below the Sahara. They had put some of the footage they had not used in the film into a half-hour programme for television. It showed elephants, lions, giraffe and much of the rest of the famous and spectacular big game of the east African plains. It was a huge success. For many viewers it was the first time they had seen moving pictures of such creatures. Although the images did not have the live, titillating unpredictability of those produced by Mr Cansdale, people could see how marvellous and majestic the animals were in their proper setting.

Viewers responded with such enthusiasm to this new kind of animal programme that the television planners immediately asked the Denises for more. Why not a whole series that could run week after week? The Denises, who had been filming in Africa for years and had a vast library of animal footage, saw the possibilities and needed little persuasion. So the first On Safari series began.

For me, a twenty-six-year-old novice television producer with two years’ broadcasting experience and an unused zoology degree, anxious to make animal programmes myself, it seemed that each of these formats had its own particular attractions – and its own limitations. Mr Cansdale’s had the undeniable thrill of watching living unpredictable animals, but since the animals were always in an alien studio environment, they looked, more often than not, bizarre oddities. The Denises’ animals, on the other hand, appeared in the natural surroundings to which they were perfectly adapted, but they lacked the spice of live unpredictability. Surely, I argued to myself, it should be possible to combine the two styles in one programme and get the benefits of both. I had already, as a jobbing producer, directed music recitals, archaeological quizzes, political discussions and ballet performances. Most recently, I had devised a series of three programmes about the meaning and purpose of animal shapes and patterns. They had been narrated by one of the great scientific figures of the times, Sir Julian Huxley, and, to illustrate his words, I had borrowed some of the animals from Mr Cansdale’s London Zoo. And in doing that I had met the Zoo’s Curator of Reptiles, Jack Lester.

Jack, from his earliest days, had had a passion for animals, but lacking any formal training, he had first taken a job in a bank. However, he soon persuaded his employers to send him to a branch in West Africa, and there he was able to indulge his enthusiasm for collecting and keeping reptiles. When the war came he joined the Royal Air Force, but after it was over he got a job in a private zoo in the west of England. From there he had come to Regent’s Park to care for the Zoo’s large collection of reptiles. His office was a small room in the Reptile House, heated, like all the showcases, to a suffocating tropical temperature and filled with all kinds of cages containing his particular favourite creatures that were not needed for public exhibition – dwarf bush babies, giant spiders, chameleons and burrowing snakes. He had been a great help in selecting animals for the Huxley series, and I went there to discuss what more programmes we might do together. I thought I had an idea that might interest him, because it would get him back to his beloved West Africa – and I with him.

My plan was simple. The BBC and the London Zoo should mount a joint animal-collecting expedition on which we should both go. I would direct film sequences showing Jack searching for and finally capturing a creature of particular interest. The sequence would end with a close-up of the animal in his hands. The picture would then dissolve into a similar shot of the same creature, but this time live in the studio. Jack would then demonstrate, in the Cansdale manner, the particularly interesting aspects of its anatomy and behaviour. If there were a few unavoidable incidents, such as an escape or a bite, then so much the better. Viewers would then be returned, by way of film, to Africa and another search and capture.

Jack agreed that the idea was a good one. The only problem was that the Zoo at the time had no intention of sending out a collecting expedition. Nor had the BBC any intention of embarking on the highly specialised and certainly expensive business of making natural history films. That minor difficulty, however, might be overcome with a single properly stage-managed lunch at which bosses from both the Zoo and the BBC would meet, under the impression that the other already had such a scheme in mind.

The lunch duly took place in the Zoo’s restaurant. Jack and I were there to prompt and steer our seniors. Both bosses left after coffee, each convinced that his organisation had a lot to gain from joining in the other’s plans, and to our incredulous delight the very next day we were both told separately to go ahead.

We agreed on the jungle without any difficulty. Jack’s bank had been in Sierra Leone. He knew the country and he knew the fauna. He still had a lot of friends there who could give us help. I was convinced, however, that if the television programmes were to be a success, the expedition should have one particular objective – a rare creature that, since the Zoo was excited by such things, had never been seen in any zoo anywhere else in the world; an animal so romantic, rare and exciting that the quest for it would keep viewers watching programme after programme until in the last the animal was finally found. We could call the series ‘Quest for …’ something … But what?

It was a difficult bill to fill. The only animal that Jack could think of in Sierra Leone that might remotely qualify was a bird called Picathartes gymnocephalus. It seemed to me that rousing the British public into a frenzy of excited anticipation to see a creature with such a name might be difficult. Had it not got another, more romantic one? ‘Yes, indeed,’ Jack said helpfully, ‘its English name is Bare-headed Rock Fowl.’ Even that, I thought, would scarcely do the job. But Jack could think of no other. So Picathartes became our ultimate target and I decided to call the series simply Zoo Quest.

There was a further issue to be settled. The film used by television at that time was 35 mm wide, the same as that used by the feature-film industry. A single roll was about the size of a flattened football, and the camera that used it was as big as a small suitcase. In normal circumstances it needed to be mounted on a tripod with two people to handle it. Armand and Michaela Denis had used a much smaller piece of equipment that used 16 mm film, and I wanted to do the same.

The head of the television film department was outraged: 16 mm, he said, was for amateurs. Professionals despised it. Its pictures were unacceptably fuzzy. He would rather resign than agree to such lowering of standards. A meeting was called by the head of television programmes. I put my case. I could not get the shots I needed, I explained (with the confidence of having never done anything of the kind), unless I used the much smaller, more easily handleable equipment.

Eventually the argument went my way. But in accepting the decision, the head of films had a proviso. Television at that time was black and white. The 16 mm film we should use, however, should not be black-and-white negative from which positive prints could be taken, but colour negative. This was not as sensitive as some black-and-white stocks, but black-and-white prints taken from it had much better resolution. I accepted and agreed that we would only use black-and-white negative in very exceptional circumstances where the light was extremely dim.

None of the BBC’s staff cameramen, however, would agree to use 16 mm equipment. I would have to find a cameraman for myself. I made a few enquiries and discovered that a man of my own age had just returned from the Himalayas where he had been the assistant cameraman filming an expedition looking (unsuccessfully) for the Abominable Snowman. His name was Charles Lagus. We arranged to meet in a pub close to the studios where television people habitually met. We drank a little beer. We laughed at the same jokes. He thought the trip sounded fun and after a second drink, he agreed to come. Jack too enlisted a recruit, Alf Woods, a wily and sagacious head keeper who was then in charge of the Zoo’s Bird House. He would have the job of caring for the animals as they were caught. So, in September 1954, the four of us departed for Sierra Leone.

After a few days in Freetown, the country’s capital, we set off for the rainforest. Neither Charles nor I had ever been in such a place before. It was extraordinarily dim. Charles gloomily took out his light meter. ‘The only way we can get enough light to shoot colour neg. here,’ he said bitterly, ‘is to cut down a couple of trees.’ It was a serious blow. If we were going to work in the forest, we would have to use the black-and-white stock and we had a very little of it.

Could we perhaps persuade Jack, once he had caught something in the forest, to release it in a suitably sunny clearing and then catch it a second time? Jack gallantly agreed to do so. And Charles and I, instead of trying to film troops of monkeys gambolling through the branches or waiting in hides for a shy forest antelope to appear out of the gloom, would limit ourselves to those small creatures which we too could take out into the light – chameleons, scorpions, mantises and millipedes.

Alf Woods (right) and Jack Lester feeding the Picathartes chick

Picathartes would remain our main target. Jack had brought with him a small watercolour drawing of it that an artist had made from a museum specimen, and wherever we went he showed it to people asking if they had ever seen anything like it. People looked at it in bafflement, but eventually we found a villager who recognised it. The bird, he said, built mud nests, rather like those of swallows only very much larger, which it attached to the flanks of great stone boulders buried in the forest. They could hardly be moved into the light. Nor did we try to improve our chances by felling a few nearby trees. Instead we used our precious hypersensitive black-and-white film and at last succeeded in getting the first pictures ever taken of a living Picathartes gymnocephalus.

The first programme reached television screens in December 1954. Jack showed the animals in the studio and I directed the cameras and cued the film sequences from the control gallery. But there was a great sadness. The day after the transmission, Jack collapsed and was taken to hospital. The series was, of course, live. So the following week, someone else had to take his place. The head of television instructed me to do so. ‘You are on the staff,’ he said, ‘so there will be no extra fee.’ The following week I did my best to take Jack’s place, handling the animals, while one of my director friends sat in the control gallery directing the cameras.

The Africa we showed was very different from the one presented by the Denises. Potter wasps building their astonishing cup-shaped nests and columns of army ants attacking a scorpion were much smaller than the big game of east Africa, but Charles, with his skilful photography, had made them look extremely dramatic and the series attracted a remarkably big audience. My bosses were delighted.

A month or so after the series finished, Jack had recovered sufficiently to be discharged from hospital. He and I got together again and decided that we should propose another series while our respective bosses still remembered that the first had been a success.

So we did and – rather to our surprise – in March 1955, a mere eight weeks after the last West African programme had been transmitted, we set off again, this time for South America and what was then called British Guiana.

But soon after we had arrived there Jack’s illness returned, and he had to fly back to hospital in London. So, once again, I had to take on his role, this time as an animal collector, and another head keeper from the Zoo came out to look after the animals as the collection grew.

Jack had still not properly recovered by the time we got back and I once again presented the series. It, too, was a success so we proposed a third trip. This time we decided on Indonesia where our main target would be the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard in the world, that then had never been seen on television. Jack would plainly not be fit enough to travel, but he urged us to go without him. So we did. He died while we were away at the tragically early age of forty-seven.

After the Guiana trip I wrote an account of our experiences and I did so after each of the others that followed annually for the next few years. This book contains the first three, slightly abbreviated and updated from the originals.

The world has changed a great deal since they were written. British Guiana has become independent and taken the name of Guyana. The Rupununi savannahs where we went to look for giant anteaters that then seemed so wild and remote to us are now served by a regular air service and have easy communications with the coast. In Indonesia, the great Javanese monument of Borobudur, which then was romantically falling into ruin, has now been completely dismantled and reconstructed; Bali, which we could only reach by sea and where we only saw one other European face, today has an airfield where giant jets daily bring thousands of holidaymakers on their journeys between Australia and Europe; and Komodo which we reached with such difficulty in 1956 is today on the tourist route and parties of visitors are taken daily to view the dragons. And television itself since those days at last transmits its images in colour.

In 2016, however, an archivist, sorting through the contents of one of the BBC’s film vaults, discovered a few rusting cans labelled ‘Zoo Quest – Colour’. Puzzled, she opened them and discovered rolls of the original colour negative which, until then no one, including myself, had ever viewed in colour. So they were at last printed in colour. Those that viewed them decided that, after their sixty-year hiccup, they had such vividness that they should be shown on air. I hope the pages that follow may achieve a similar sort of thing.

David Attenborough, May 2017

BOOK ONE

Zoo Quest to Guyana

1

To Guyana

South America is the home of some of the strangest, some of the loveliest and some of the most horrifying animals in the world. There can be few creatures more improbable than the sloth which spends its life in a permanent state of mute slow motion, hanging upside down in the tall forest trees; few more bizarre than the giant anteater of the savannahs with its absurdly disproportionate anatomy, its tail enlarged into a shaggy banner and its jaws elongated into a curved and toothless tube. On the other hand, beautiful birds are so common as to become almost unremarkable: gaudy macaws flap through the forest, their splendid plumage contrasting incongruously with their harsh maniac cries; and hummingbirds, like tiny jewels, flit from flower to flower sipping nectar, their iridescent feathers flashing the colours of the rainbow as they fly.

Many of the South American animals inspire the fascination which comes from revulsion. Shoals of cannibal fish infest the rivers waiting to rip the flesh from any animal which tumbles among them, and vampire bats, a legend in Europe but a grim reality in South America, fly out at night from their roosts in the forest to suck blood from cows and men.

I had no doubt that, since we had visited Africa for our first Zoo Quest expedition, South America was the obvious choice for our second. But which area in such a vast and varied continent should we visit? Eventually we selected Guyana (then known as British Guiana), the only Commonwealth country in the whole of the South American continent. Jack Lester, Charles Lagus and I, who had been together in Africa were to go again, and we were to be joined by Tim Vinall, one of the overseers in the London Zoo. His current responsibility was the care of the hoofed animals, but during his long career in the Zoo he had looked after many other types of creature. His was to be the back-breaking and thankless task of remaining at our base at the coast and looking after the animals as we caught them and brought them to him.

So in March 1955, we landed in Georgetown, the capital. After three days of obtaining permits, clearing our cameras and recording apparatus through customs, and buying pots and pans, food and hammocks, we were itching to begin our collecting in the interior. We had already decided on an approximate plan of action. From the map we had seen that most of Guyana is covered by tropical rain forest which extends northwards to the Orinoco and southwards to the Amazon Basin. In the south-west, however, the forest dwindles and gives way to rolling grass-covered savannahs, and lining the coast is a strip of cultivated land where rice fields and sugar plantations alternate with swamps and creeks. If we were to assemble a representative collection of the animals of Guyana, we should have to visit each of these areas, for each harbours creatures which are not to be found elsewhere. We had little idea, however, where we should go in each of the districts and in what order to visit them, until on our third evening we were invited to dinner with three people who could give us expert advice: Bill Seggar, a District Officer in charge of a remote territory in the forests near the far western frontier, Tiny McTurk, a rancher from the Rupununi savannahs, and Cennydd Jones, whose work as doctor to the Amerindians took him to every corner of the colony. We sat up until early in the morning looking at photographs and films, poring over maps and excitedly scribbling notes. When we finally broke up, we had decided upon a detailed campaign, visiting first the savannahs, next the forest, and finally the coastal swamps.

The following morning, we walked into the Airways office to inquire about transport.

‘The Rupununi for four, sir?’ said the clerk. ‘Certainly. A plane is leaving tomorrow.’

Charles Lagus with a matamata turtle

It was with a sense of great excitement that Jack, Tim, Charles and I clambered into the plane which was to take us there. Nevertheless, we did not expect to find our hearts in our mouths as soon as we did. Our pilot, Colonel Williams, had pioneered bush flying in Guyana and it was largely through his daring and imagination that many of the remoter parts of the country had become accessible at all. As we took off, however, we discovered that the Colonel’s flying technique was very different from that of the pilot who had brought us from London to Georgetown. Our Dakota thundered down the airstrip; the palm trees at the end loomed nearer and nearer, until I thought that something was wrong with the machine and that we were unable to leave the ground. At the very last moment we surged into the air in a steep climb, missing the tops of the palm trees by feet. We all exchanged ashen looks, and after shouting our doubts and worries to one another, I went forward to ask Colonel Williams what had happened.

‘In bush flying,’ he yelled, out of the corner of his mouth, tapping his cigarette into the tin ashtray tacked on to the control panel, ‘in bush flying, I reckon the most dangerous time is at take-off. If one engine fails then, when you are needing it most, you land with a crash in the forest and there’s no one there to help you. I always reckon to get up so much speed on the ground that my momentum is enough to take me up on no engines at all. Why, boy, are y’all scared?’

I hastily reassured Colonel Williams that none of us had been in the least bit worried; we were merely interested in the technique of handling aircraft. Colonel Williams grunted, changed the short-focus spectacles that he had worn for the take-off for a long-focus pair, and we settled down for the flight.

Beneath us stretched the forest, a green, velvet blanket spreading as far as we could see in all directions. Slowly it began to rise towards us as we approached a great escarpment. Colonel Williams flew on without altering height until the forest came so close to us that we could see parrots flying above the trees. Then as the escarpment fell away, the forest began to change character. Small islands of grassland appeared and soon we were flying over wide open plains veined with silver creeks and freckled with tiny, white termite hills. We lost height, circled over a small cluster of white buildings and shaped up for a landing on the airstrip – a euphemism for a stretch of the savannah which seemed to differ from its surroundings only in that it was clear of termite hills. The Colonel brought the plane down gracefully, and bumpily taxied towards a little knot of people awaiting the plane’s arrival. We clambered over the piles of freight lying lashed on the floor of the Dakota and jumped out, blinking in the brilliant sun.

A cheerful, bronzed man in shirt sleeves and sombrero detached himself from the onlookers and came over to meet us. It was Teddy Melville, who was to be our host. He came from a famous family. His father was one of the first Europeans to settle on the Rupununi and begin ranching the cattle that were now thinly spread throughout the district. He arrived at the turn of the century and married two Wapishana girls who each presented him with five children. These ten men and women now occupied nearly all the important positions in the district; they were ranchers, store keepers, government rangers and hunters. We soon discovered that, no matter where we went in the northern savannahs, if the man we met was not a Melville, then as like as not he was married to one.

Lethem, where we had landed, consisted of a few white concrete buildings, untidily scattered round two sides of the airstrip. The largest of them, and the only one to have an upper storey, was Teddy’s guest-house – a plain rectangular building with a veranda and gaping glassless windows, which was graced by the title of Lethem Hotel. Half a mile away to the right, on the crest of a low rise, stood the District Commissioner’s house, the post office, a store and a small hospital. A dusty red-earth road ran from them to the hotel and continued past a group of ramshackle outhouses into a parched wilderness of termite hills and stunted bushes. Twenty miles beyond, jutting abruptly from the plains, rose a line of jagged mountains, reduced by the heat-haze to a smoky-blue silhouette against the dazzling sky.

Everyone for miles around had come to Lethem to meet the plane, for it brought with it long-awaited stores and the regular weekly mail. Plane days therefore were always great social occasions, and the hotel was crowded with ranchers and their wives who had driven in from outlying districts and who remained after the plane had left to exchange news and gossip.

After the evening meal was over, the bare deal tables were cleared from the dining-room and long wooden benches set in their place. Harold, Teddy’s son, began setting up a film projector and a screen. Gradually the bar emptied and the benches were filled. Wapishana cowboys, known as vaqueros, bronzed with straight blue-black hair and bare feet, trooped in and paid at the door. The air was filled with rank tobacco smoke and expectant chatter as the lights were put out.

The entertainment began with some sensibly undated newsreels. These were followed by a Hollywood cowboy film about pioneering the wild west, during which virtuous white Americans convincingly slaughtered great numbers of villainous Red Indians. Hardly tactful one would have thought, but the Wapishana sat watching their North American cousins being exterminated without any emotion on their impassive faces. The story was a little difficult to follow for not only had lengthy sequences been excised during the copy’s long life, but it seemed doubtful whether the reels were projected in their correct order, for a tragic and beautiful American girl who was savagely murdered by the Indians in the third reel, reappeared in the fifth to make love to the hero. But the Wapishana were an accommodating audience, and a pedantic detail of this kind did not spoil their obvious enjoyment of the big fight scenes, which provoked rounds of enthusiastic applause. I suggested to Harold Melville that the film was perhaps an odd choice, but he assured me that cowboy films were by far the most popular type of any they showed. Certainly one could believe that Hollywood bedroom comedies would seem even greater nonsense to the Wapishana out here.

After the show, we went upstairs to our room. In it were two beds equipped with mosquito nets. Two of us obviously had to sleep in hammocks, and Charles and I claimed the privilege. It was an opportunity which both of us had been thirsting to seize ever since we had bought our hammocks in Georgetown. With a highly professional air we slung them from hooks fastened in the walls. The results however, as we realized after a few weeks of experience, were hopelessly amateur. We had hitched them far too high and had tied them with enormously elaborate knots that were going to take a considerable time to loosen in the morning. Jack and Tim stolidly climbed into their beds.

The next morning there was little doubt as to which pair of us had spent the more comfortable night. Charles and I both swore that we had slept like logs and that sleeping in hammocks was second nature to us. But it was hardly true, for neither of us had then learnt the simple technique of lying diagonally across the stretcherless South American hammock. I had spent most of the night trying to lie along the length of it, with the result that my feet were higher than my head and my body was slumped in a great curve. I had been unable to turn without breaking my back, and I got up that morning feeling that I should be afflicted with a permanent curvature of the spine.

After breakfast, Teddy Melville came in with the news that a large party of Wapishana had started fishing in a nearby lake by the traditional method of poisoning its waters. There was a chance that in the process they would come across other animals which might be of interest to us, and Teddy suggested we should go over to have a look. We got into his truck and set off across the savannahs. There was little to prevent us from driving wherever we wished. Here and there were tortuously weaving creeks, but they were easily avoided; we could see them from a considerable distance away, their banks being fringed by bushes and palm trees. Otherwise the only obstacles in our way were clumps of stunted sandpaper bushes and termite hills – tall, crazily spired towers, sometimes standing singly and sometimes concentrated in groups so dense that at times it seemed we were driving through a giant graveyard. A few well beaten tracks across the savannahs linked one ranch to the next, but the lake we were to visit was isolated and before long Teddy branched off the main trail and began threading bumpily between the bushes and the termite hills, following no track but simply relying on his sense of direction. Soon we saw a belt of trees on the horizon marking the site of the lake we were to visit.

When we arrived, we found that a long arm of the lake had been dammed with a barricade of stakes. Into it the Wapishana had crushed special lianas which they had gathered many miles away in the Kanuku mountains. All around were fishermen with bows and arrows at the ready, waiting for the fish to become stupefied by the poisonous sap of the lianas and float to the surface. The Wapishana clung to branches of trees overhanging the lake’s margin; they perched on specially built platforms in the middle of the water; some stood on small improvised rafts and others patrolled up and down in dugout canoes. In a clearing on the bank the women had lit fires and slung hammocks and now sat waiting to clean and cure the fish as soon as the men brought them in; but nothing so far had been caught and the women were getting impatient. Their menfolk had been foolish, they said scornfully: too big a section of the lake had been dammed and too few lianas had been gathered in the forest, so that the poison was too weak to affect the fish. Three days of hard work in damming and platform building had been wasted. Teddy talked to them in Wapishana and gathered all this information as well as the news that one of the women had seen a hole in the bank on the other side of the lake, which she said was occupied by a large animal. What kind of animal it was, she was not sure; it might be either an anaconda or a caiman.

The caiman belongs to the same group of reptiles as the crocodile and alligator, and to the layman all three animals look very much alike. To Jack, however, they were very different, and though all three are found in the Americas, they each have distinctive habitats. Here on the Rupununi, Jack said, we could expect to find the black caiman, the largest species in its own group, which is reputed to grow up to twenty feet long. Jack admitted that he would rather like a ‘nice big caiman’ and, come to that, he would also be quite glad to catch a sizeable anaconda. As the animal in the hole might turn out to be one or the other, he felt we really should try to catch it. We all climbed into dugout canoes and paddled across the lake with one of the women to guide us.

Shooting fish

On investigation, we found that there were two holes – a small one and a large one, and that they were connected with each other, for a stick pushed down the smaller one provoked splashes from the other. We barricaded the smaller hole with stakes. To prevent the unknown creature from escaping through the larger one and, at the same time, to allow it enough space to emerge and be caught, we cut saplings from the bank and drove them deep into the mud of the lake bottom in a semicircular palisade around the entrance. We had not yet seen our quarry and no amount of prodding through the smaller hole would drive it out, so we decided to enlarge the big hole by cutting through the turfy bank. Slowly we hacked away the roof of the tunnel, and as we did so the bank shook with a subterranean bellow that could hardly have been produced by a snake.

Cautiously peering through the stakes of the palisade into a gloomy tunnel, I just distinguished, half submerged in the muddy water, a large yellow canine tooth. We had cornered a caiman, and judging from the size of the tooth, a very large one.

Digging out the caiman

A caiman has two offensive weapons. First and obviously, its enormous jaws; and second, its immensely powerful tail. With either it can inflict very serious injuries, but fortunately the one we were tackling was so placed in its hole that we only had to pay attention to one end at a time. Having had that momentary glimpse of its teeth, I knew which end was uppermost in my mind. Jack was paddling about in the muddy water inside the stakes trying to work out how the caiman was lying and how best to tackle the job of catching it. It seemed to me that if the beast elected to come out in a hurry, Jack would have to jump very quickly to avoid losing a leg. For my part, I felt I was quite near enough to danger wading thigh-deep farther out in the lake, manoeuvring Charles in a canoe at a sufficient distance to get good film shots of the proceedings. In the event of the caiman making a lunge at Jack, I was quite sure that it would come with such a rush that it would knock our flimsy palisade flat, and whereas Jack could leap for the bank, I should have to wade several yards before I reached safety. I was in no doubt that the caiman, in such a depth of water, would be able to move faster than me. For some reason or other – perhaps my nervousness showed itself more than I imagined – I seemed unable to keep the canoe steady enough to make it practicable for Charles to work, and after I had given it a particularly violent lurch, which nearly threw him and his camera into the water, he decided that his apparatus would stand less chance of getting wet if he joined me wading in the lake.

Meanwhile, Teddy had borrowed a rawhide lasso from one of the Wapishana, and he and Jack, kneeling on the bank, were dangling it in front of the caiman’s nose in the hope that it might lunge forward towards Charles and me and, in doing so, thrust its head through the noose. It roared and thrashed the sides of its tunnel so violently that the whole bank quivered, but very sensibly it refused to come out any further. Jack cut more of the bank away.

By now there were some twenty locals watching the proceedings and offering suggestions. To them it seemed incomprehensible that we should wish to catch the creature alive and unharmed. They were in favour of despatching it there and then with their knives.

At last, with the aid of two forked sticks to hold the noose wide open, Jack and Teddy coaxed the lasso round the caiman’s black snout. This plainly infuriated the beast and with a twist and a roar it shook the noose off. Three times the rope was on and three times it was shaken off. It went round a fourth time. Slowly, with the sticks, Jack eased it up towards the caiman’s head. Then suddenly, before the reptile realized what was happening, he drew the noose tight and the dangerous jaws were secured.

Now we had to guard against a blow from its huge tail. The situation began to look more alarming from where Charles and I were standing, for, having tied another noose round the caiman’s jaws for safety, Teddy told the Wapishana to uproot the palisade. There was nothing now but open water between Charles and me and the caiman which lay with its long head projecting out of the hole, glaring at us malevolently with yellow unblinking eyes. Jack, however, jumped down from the bank into the water immediately in front of the hole, taking with him a long pole he had cut from a sapling. Bending down, he pushed the pole into the tunnel so that it lay along the reptile’s scaly back, and reaching inside he secured it by tying a half-hitch round the pole and under the animal’s clammy armpits. Teddy joined him and, inch by inch, they drew the caiman out of its hole, tying half-hitches around its body and on to the sapling as it emerged. The back legs, the base of the tail, and finally the tail itself were securely tied and the animal lay safely trussed at our feet, the muddy water lapping round its jaws. It was just ten feet long.

It now had to be ferried across the lake to the trucks. We hitched the front end of the pole to the stern of a dugout canoe, and towing the caiman behind us we paddled back to the women’s encampment.

Jack supervised the Wapishana as they helped us to load the caiman on to the truck and then he methodically inspected its bonds one by one to see that none was chafing. The women, having no fish to cure, gathered round the truck, examining our capture and trying to decide why on earth anybody should value such a dangerous pest.

We drove off back across the savannahs. Charles and I sat on each side of the caiman with our feet within six inches of its jaws, trusting that the rawhide lassoes were as strong as they were reputed to be. We were both jubilant at having caught such an impressive creature so early. Jack was less demonstrative.

‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘for a start.’