There is no limit to human curiosity. It was not enough for Professor J. W. Hopkins (Yale), the greatest living authority on reptiles, to declare those mysterious creatures to be an unscientific hoax and pure fantasy; an increasing number of reports began to appear both in specialised publications and in the daily press of the discovery of hitherto unknown animals, resembling giant salamanders, in the most various parts of the Pacific. Relatively reliable data referred to such discoveries in the Solomon Islands, on Schouten Island, on Kapingamarangi, Butarita and Tapeteuea, as well as on a whole group of lesser islands: Nukufetau, Funafuti, Nukonono and Fukaofu, and finally on Hiau, Uahuka, Uapu and Pukapuka. There were the legends of Captain van Toch’s devils (mainly in the Melanesian region) and of Miss Lily’s Tritons (more usually in Polynesia); so the papers concluded that these were probably different kinds of submarine and antediluvian monsters, especially as the silly season had begun and there was nothing else to write about. Submarine monsters are a sure-fire success with the reading public. In the United States, in particular, Tritons became fashionable; in New York the lavish review featuring Poseidon, with 300 of the prettiest girl Tritons, Nereids and Sirens ran to 300 performances; in Miami and on the Californian beaches young people wore Triton and Nereid swimsuits (i.e. three strings of pearls and nothing else), while in the Midwestern states and the Bible Belt the Movement for the Suppression of Immorality (MSI) recorded an extraordinary increase in support; in this connection mass demonstrations took place and a number of negroes were either hanged or burnt to death.
Finally there appeared in The National Geographic Magazine a report by the Columbia University Scientific Expedition (mounted at the expense of J. S. Tincker, known as the Tinned Food King); that report was signed by P. L. Smith, W. Kleinschmidt, Charles Kovar, Louis Forgeron and D. Herrero, internationally renowned experts especially in the fields of fish parasites, ringworms, plant biology, infusorians and mites. We quote from their voluminous report:
On Rakahanga Island the expedition for the first time encountered the imprints of the hind-feet of an unknown giant salamander. The imprints show five digits with a toe length of 3 to 4 cm. Judging by the number of tracks the coast of Rakahanga Island would seem to be literally swarming with those salamanders. Because of the absence of fore-feet imprints (except for one four-digit print, apparently of a young specimen) the expedition concluded that these salamanders evidently move on their hindlegs.
It should be pointed out that there are no rivers or swamps on Rakahanga Island, so that these salamanders must live in the sea and are probably the only representatives of their order with a pelagic habitat. It is, of course, known that the Mexican axolotl (Amblystoma mexicanum) inhabits brackish lakes; however, there is no reference to any pelagic (sea-inhabiting) salamanders even in the classic work of W. Korngold Caudate Amphibians (Urodela), Berlin 1913.
… We waited until the afternoon in order to capture or a least to catch sight of a living specimen, but in vain. Regretfully we left the charming little island of Rakahanga, where D. Herrero succeeded in discovering a beautiful new species of Tingidae …
We were much more fortunate on the island of Tongarewa. We were waiting on the beach with our rifles in our hands. After sunset the heads of salamanders emerged from the water: relatively large and slightly flattened. After a while the salamanders crawled up on the sand, walking on their hindlegs with a swaying gait but quite nimbly. When seated they were a little over a metre high. They sat down in a wide circle and with a strange motion began to twist their upper bodies; it looked as if they were dancing. W. Kleinschmidt stood up in order to get a better view. The salamanders turned their heads towards him and for a brief moment remained rigid; then they approached him at remarkable speed, uttering hissing and barking sounds. When they were about seven feet away from him we fired our rifles at them. They fled very quickly and flung themselves into the sea; they did not reappear that evening. Left on the beach were two dead salamanders and one with a broken spine, which uttered a strange sound like ‘ogod, ogod, ogod’. He subsequently died when W. Kleinschmidt opened his pleural cavity with a knife … (This is followed by anatomical details which would be incomprehensible to the lay reader; we refer the expert reader to the above-mentioned report.)
It is clear, therefore, from the characteristics listed above, that we are concerned with a typical member of the order of caudate reptiles (Urodela), to which, as is well known, belongs the family of real salamanders (Salamandrida), which in turn comprises the genera of newts (Tritones) and salamanders (Salamandrae), as well as the family of perinnibranchs (Ichthyoidea), which in turn comprises the cryptobranchiate (Cryptobranchiata) and branchiate (Phanerobranchiata) forms. The salamander recorded on the island of Tangarewa would seem to be most closely related to the perinnibranch cryptobranchiates; in many respects, such as size, it resembles the Japanese Giant Salamander (Megalobranchus Sieboldii) and the American hellbender, known as the ‘swamp devil’, though it differs from these by its well-developed sensory organs and its longer and more powerful extremities, which enable it to move with marked agility both in the water and on dry land. (This is followed by further comparative anatomical details.)
Following the preparation of the slain animals’ skeletons we made a most interesting discovery: the skeletons of these salamanders are an almost perfect match of a fossil imprint of a salamander skeleton found on a stone slab from the Oeningen quarry by Dr Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer and illustrated in his Homo diluvii testis published in 1726. For the benefit’ of less informed readers it should be explained that the above-mentioned Dr Scheuchzer regarded that fossil as the remains of antediluvian man. ‘The figure here presented,’ he writes, ‘which I hereby submit to the world of learning, is beyond any doubt the image of Man who witnessed the Great Flood. These are not lines from which but a lively imagination must needs construe something that would resemble Man, but everywhere there is complete conformity and perfect concordance with the several parts of the human skeleton. Petrified Man is here counterfeited from the front: behold a memorial to an extinct human race older than all Roman, Greek, and even Egyptian and other oriental tombs.’ Subsequently Cuvier identified the Oeningen imprint as the skeleton of a fossilised salamander, which was named Cryptobranchus primaevus or Andrias Scheuchzeri Tschudi and considered to be a long-extinct species. Osteological comparison now enabled us to identify our salamanders as the prehistoric Andrias salamander which had been presumed extinct. The mystery proto-lizard, as the newspapers have dubbed it, is nothing other than the fossil crypto branchiate salamander Andrias Scheuchzeri; or, should a new name be needed, Cryptobranchus Tinckeri erectus or the Polynesian Giant Salamander.
… It remains a mystery why this interesting giant salamander should, until now, have eluded scientific attention, even though it occurs in large numbers at least on the islands of Rakahanga and Tongarewa in the Manihiki archipelago. It is not mentioned by Randolph and Montgomery in their work Two Years on the Islands of Manihiki (1885). The local population maintains that this animal - which incidentally they believe to be venomous - only began to show itself during the past six or eight years. They claim that the ‘sea devils’ can talk (sic) and that they build entire systems of barriers and dams in the bays they inhabit, in the nature of submarine cities; they say the water in these bays is as smooth as a millpond all the year round; they also state that they dig out, under the water, burrows and passages many metres long and that they stay in these during the day; at night they are said to steal sweet potatoes and yams from the fields, and even carry off hoes and other tools. Altogether the people do not like them and are even afraid of them; in a number of instances they have actually preferred to move away to other places. Obviously this is just a case of primitive legends and superstitions based presumably on the repulsive appearance and the erect quasi-human walk of these harmless giant salamanders.
… Travellers’ accounts according to which these salamanders are found also on islands other than the Manihiki archipelago should be received with a good deal of reserve. On the other hand, there cannot be the least doubt about identifying a recent imprint of a hind-foot, found on the beach of Tongatabu Island and published by Capt. Croisset in La Nature, as belonging to Andrias Scheuchzeri. This find is of especial significance in that it links the animals’ occurrence in the Manihiki Islands with the Australian-New Zealand zone, where so many survivors of an ancient fauna have been preserved: we need only think of the ‘antediluvian’ lizard Hatterii or Tuaturu, still living on Stephen Island. On these remote and for the most part sparsely populated little islands, almost untouched by civilisation, individual relics of animal types extinct elsewhere have succeeded in surviving. Thanks to Mr J. S. Tincker the fossil lizard Hatterii is now joined by an antediluvian salamander. The good Dr Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer would now have witnessed the resurrection of his Oeningen Adam …
This learned account should surely have been sufficient to illuminate scientifically the question of those mysterious marine monsters of which we have already spoken at length. Unfortunately, simultaneously with it, there appeared a report by the Dutch researcher van Hogenhouck, who classified these cryptobranchiate giant salamanders as belonging to the family of true salamanders or Tritons, naming them Megatriton moluccanus and establishing their occurrence on the Dutch Sunda Islands Dgilolo, Morotai and Ceram; there was also a report by the French scientist Dr Mignard, who classified them as typical salamanders, placed their original occurrence on the French islands of Takaroa, Rangiroa and Raroira, and named them quite simply Cryptobranchus salamandroides; then there was a report by H. W. Spence, who saw them as a new family, Pelagidae, native to the Gilbert Islands and capable of acquiring zoological existence under the generic name of Pelagotriton Spencei. Mr Spence succeeded in transporting a live specimen all the way to the London Zoo; there it became the object of further research, from which it emerged under the names of Pelagobatrachus Hookeri, Salamandrops maritimus, Abranchus giganteus, Amphiuma gigas, and a great number of others. Some scientists argued that Pelagotriton Spencei was identical with Cryptobranchus Tinckeri and that Mignard’s salamander was nothing other than Andrias Scheuchzeri; there was a lot of argument about priority and about other purely scientific questions. Thus it came about that eventually the natural history of every nation had its own giant salamanders and was waging a furious scientific war against the giant salamanders of other nations. As a result, that whole important business of the salamanders was never sufficiently resolved on the scientific side.