River Monsters (42 page)

Our camp was in a small clearing, next to a fallen tree with its head in the lake. Above us an irregular window opened on to clear, still sky. The only sound was the whine of mosquitoes,
crowding the gauze of my net. Then Zé Carlos spoke: ‘Jeremy, do you think that after all that black up there, if you go right to the very end, it’s light again?’ From
someone whose normal topics of conversation were turtle fishing and village girls, this was a strange question, and I wasn’t sure how to reply. I said I didn’t know, that some things
are beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand.

After a silence he spoke again: ‘Jeremy, is it possible that somebody where you come from, one of your family perhaps, is thinking about you now, right at this moment?’ I looked at
my watch and then tried to explain about time zones, the fact that it would be 1 a.m. in England and that everybody would be asleep.

In the morning we set off early. I estimated we would be back at the river by 8 a.m. ‘Impossible,’ said Zé Carlos. ‘More like nine.’ He looked at my watch and told
me it was wrong. Back at the village I discovered that, at some point during the night, it had stopped for exactly one hour.

Five nights later I arrived back at the town to find two figures on the waterfront: my friend Louro, who had been with me in the plane crash, and his wife. Louro told me that someone had been
trying to reach me, on the town’s radio-phone. Only Martin had this number, so I stayed up until 2 a.m. in order to call him before he went to work. Out of the speaker came the echo of a
familiar voice. While I had been with Zé Carlos at the lake, our father had died.

Tick tock. Ten years later all that squelching in Amazon mud has at last borne fruit. Some people say I have the best job in the world. But with this come new challenges. A few
people have accused the
River Monsters
TV programmes, with their dramatised reconstructions of fishermen’s tales – of people being pulled under and mutilated by assorted
underwater creatures – of sensationalism. There has even been the charge that they stir up hatred and fear of wild animals, even though anyone looking through my mail from viewers would find
little evidence of it there, quite the opposite in fact. But, as the public face of the production team, it falls to me to answer these critics.

In doing so, I am the first to admit that a dramatised reconstruction of, say, a man screaming as something pulls him under the water does indeed bypass the viewer’s higher intelligence
and does evoke a visceral reaction: an awkward shifting in one’s seat, a slight sweating and raising of the pulse. The sounds and images (because this is television after all) grab the
viewer’s attention. But this is not gratuitous on the programme’s part, nor prurience on the viewer’s. Each one of us is hard-wired from birth with a fascination for predators,
for blood and guts. Even those who deny this are descended from ancestors who paid attention to things in the environment that could harm or kill. Those who didn’t pay attention ended up as
lunch for sabre-tooth tigers and tended not to leave descendants.

Those who properly pay attention see what the programmes are really about. They show, among other things, that fear can be diminished or overcome by understanding. Most viewers, including
children of a surprisingly young age, instinctively get this. What’s more, it’s a lesson that applies just as much to other fears as it does to scary underwater creatures. But, the
motivation behind some human behaviour is harder to fathom than a wels catfish grabbing a swimmer’s leg or a candiru penetrating a human orifice. And the blindness of a few, which in some
cases seems to be wilful and agenda-serving, continues.

Then there are some nice things. Recently I was offered an eye-popping sum, about equal to what I’m paid for a whole year’s filming, to go into a studio for a day. It was my
invitation to join the army of grinning sports people, actors, and the like who brandish stuff at the public in the commercial breaks. I turned it down, honestly wondering what these people spend
it on and even more agog (now that I know what it pays to be a mouth for hire) at the depths of human insecurity. So although some others might disagree, I think I’ve managed, at least
partially, to hang on to my soul.

Meanwhile, the other thing that has been trying to pull me down – the monster inside that now has a name – is still there: which makes it thirty-five years now. But although it
hasn’t surrendered, its weight has diminished to a point at which I scarcely notice it. I owe this in large part to the flesh-and-blood monsters in these pages. I think we’ve worn the
fucker out. It feels like a victory of sorts.

There’s one thing that bothers me though. In one respect the
River Monsters
television programmes give a false impression. Many viewers tell me they would now think twice before
getting into a river or lake – and so they should. But this is only part of the reality.

In north India, on the River Saryu, a mountain tributary of the Kali, there’s a deep, swirling pool that has been excavated over the ages by monsoon floods colliding with a cliff. In my
mind’s eye I could see the leathery, sluglike shapes of huge goonch, wedged in holes between tumbled boulders and in the trench at the base of the rock. But for hours my lines hung limp and
my anticipation drained away. Something was wrong.

Because this is a spring-fed river, the water, when not in flood, is clear. So I put on my diving mask and, having floated over the remains of a funeral shroud in the shallows, drifted through
with the current. The water was much deeper than I expected; even a little way out I couldn’t dive to the bottom. Then I had an idea. This being a film trip, I had a waterproof camera with
me: a metal cylinder on the end of a cable that is plugged into a tape deck with a screen. I paddled across to the cliff in our miniature rubber dinghy and dangled this down, watching the aerial
view it revealed of the underwater landscape. This confirmed what I now suspected: there were no fish down there. The pool was dead apart from some cavorting tiddlers, only six inches long. So much
for the Hindu belief that rivers are sacred, the way to new life. Those cremated remains had not been consigned to a living river but rather to a degraded ecosystem where the predominant life forms
are mats of algae.

Meanwhile, in the Congo, at the village of Bonga, fishermen each put out one hundred baited hooks every night and pull them up in the morning empty. And in much of the Amazon, you’d be
lucky to bring up anything other than tiny scavenging catfish. In fact, if you go to most rivers in the world, however remote, you won’t find big fish. But if we made a TV programme about
fish in which we didn’t actually show any, we wouldn’t have any viewers. So we search out the few places where monsters still exist.

The reason for this sorry state, for the most part, is overfishing. In parts of India they fish with dynamite that has been acquired from road-maintenance teams. Fish concentrate in pools where
only a couple of sticks, in a small river, can kill everything. Then there’s the electro-fishing, using wires hooked up to power lines and run down to the water – an insanely dangerous
method and indicative of a level of desperation that I, for one, can scarcely comprehend. Four thousand miles away in the Congo, catfish have been removed beyond immediate needs to be kept alive on
ropes through their jaws and shipped downriver to buyers in Brazzaville. And in the Amazon, fishing boats will ditch the fish in their holds to make space for a catch of a more valuable
species.

Add to this the effects of pollution, water removal, and damming, which blocks migration routes and alters age-old flow patterns, and river fish populations worldwide are in a very bad way
– far worse than in the sea, if such a thing is possible, where some estimate we’ll have no wild seafood by 2048.

The trouble is, though, that a river can look much the same whether it’s alive or dead. Only by looking below the surface can you tell the difference. Casting a line, therefore, is like
taking a sample of the planet’s bloodstream – and the prognosis is not good.

In the Yangtze River they say there’s a fish the length of four men that weighs over a thousand pounds, with a mouth that could easily engulf a human. Spending no part of its life in the
sea, it could be the world’s largest freshwater fish. But although monstrous in size, the Chinese paddlefish (
Psephurus gladius
) is not dangerous to people because it’s a
filter-feeder. The other reason we have no need to fear it is because it appears to be extinct. No adults have been seen since 2003, and no young since 1995.

The trajectory for other monsters is going steeply in the same direction. Alligator gar – wiped out from most of their ancestral range; freshwater sawfish – listed by the IUCN as
critically endangered, next stop extinct in the wild; Mekong giant catfish – also critically endangered; freshwater whipray – ‘vulnerable’. Recent research even suggests
that
Arapaima gigas
may be extinct – all arapaima caught today appear to belong to closely related species. And the goonch, which Major A. St. J. Macdonald described in 1948 as
‘the vermin of the water’, has become an underwater yeti.

When I finally caught a giant goonch for the cameras, some viewers asked why I put a potential man-eater back alive. But a growing number see things a different way: the continued presence of
apex predators is a sign of the river’s health. Man Singh, who saw a goonch drag his buffalo into the Kali, told me, ‘If it’s your time it’s your time, and if it’s not
your time it’s not your time.’ Killing what you fear will achieve nothing. In fact, this can even rebound on us – as it is likely to if they ever try to wipe out the Breede River
bull sharks. And the same goes for the casual killing of our fellow creatures that we are doing all the time through our now-untenable belief that our security is assured through ever-increasing
consumption. Now, more than at any time in the past, the challenge facing every one of us is to learn to coexist with other life. Because the day the last monster dies is the day the river dies
too.

And when that happens, we’re not far behind.

REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

Boote, Paul, and Jeremy Wade.
Somewhere Down the Crazy River: Journeys in Search of Giant Fish
. Swindon, UK: Sangha Books, 1992.

Buffler, Rob, and Tom Dickson.
Fishing for Buffalo: A Guide to the Pursuit, Lore & Cuisine of Buffalo, Carp, Mooneye, Gar and Other ‘Rough’ Fish
.
Minneapolis, MN: Culpepper Press, 1990.

Butcher, Tim.
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart
. London: Vintage, 2008.

Conrad, Joseph.
Heart of Darkness
. 1902; reprint London: Penguin Books, 1973.

Corbett, Jim.
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944.

Ellis, Richard.
Big Fish
. New York: Abrams, 2009.

Fort, Tom.
The Book of Eels
. London: HarperCollins, 2002.

Goulding, Michael.
Amazon: The Flooded Forest
. London: BBC Books, 1989.

Grescoe, Taras.
Dead Seas: How the Fish on Our Plates Is Killing Our Planet
. London: Macmillan, 2008.

Hochschild, Adam.
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Jeal, Tim.
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
. London: Faber and Faber, 2007.

Maisey, John.
Discovering Fossil Fishes
. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.

Marriott, Edward.
Wild Shore: Life and Death with Nicaragua’s Last Shark Hunters
. London: Picador, 2000.

O’Hanlon, Redmond.
Congo Journey
. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996.

Santos, Eurico.
Peixes da Água Doce: Vida e Costumes dos Peixes do Brasil
. 4th ed. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Editora Itatiaia, 1987.

Spitzer, Mark.
Season of the Gar: Adventures in Pursuit of America’s Most Misunderstood Fish
. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010.

Spotte, Stephen.
Candiru: Life and Legend of the Bloodsucking Catfishes
. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company, 2002.

Thorson, T., ed.
Investigations of the Ichthyofauna of Nicaraguan Lakes
. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.

Vesey-Fitzgerald, Brian, and Francesca Lamonte, eds.
Game Fish of the World
. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949.

von Humboldt, Alexander.
Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 1814–25
. Translated by Jason Wilson. London: Penguin, 1995.

elasmo-research.org
Biology of elasmobranchs (sharks and rays).

fishbase.org
Comprehensive information on fish identification and names.

fishonline.org
More information from the MSC (
see below
) on sustainable fish stocks.