Recollections of the Past 30 years pursuing Coelacanths
Jerome Hamlin, creator dinofish.com
Three of us arrived in the Comoro Islands, then known as the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros, at the end of November, 1986. Our 747 from Paris had stopped at Jedda, Saudi Arabia, which was interesting because all inflight magazines were collected and locked up during the refueling layover. We had letters of introduction to the small U.S. Consular office near Moroni, the capital, and the Governor of Grande Comoro island. Our group of three settled in at the aptly named Hotel Coelacanthe. Paul (of the volcano trip) made contact with the Governor, whom he impressed with his immaculate French and savoir faire. The wider diplomatic community was somewhat starved for visitors. Peter (of Canada) soon found himself in bed with one of the ambassador’s wives. We were under the care and assistance of a young man named Abbas Said. He gave us a tour of the island, the largest of the three which were independent of France. Abbas also led us up Karthala on a camping trip, showing us the largest active volcanic caldera in the world.
The U.S consulate was extremely supportive of our efforts. We were learning everything we could find out about coelacanths in the Comoros. There was no recent catch, but there were frozen specimens in a government warehouse. This was not unusual as fishermen were still paid a reward to bring them in and not eat them or let them go to rot. Paul was going through records at the Ministry of production, when he came back to the hotel one day and announced, “We’re fucked!” He had been given a copy of a letter from a French marine scientist named Raphael Plante which announced that he was coming to the Comoros with a colleague named Dr Hans Fricke and a small submersible for the purpose of filming coelacanths in their natural habitat. Paul also had a copy of a request from the Max Planck Institute, the institute Dr Fricke belonged to, for a coelacanth specimen. As they were intending to film not capture coelacanths, I didn’t see what the conflict was and why we were “screwed.” In this I was naive. Paul could see the writing on the wall and began to act accordingly. If I had followed his lead, the rest of my life would have had nothing to do with coelacanths. But I didn’t and I both suffered and reaped the rewards.
Ahamed Isalah with Coelacanth 1986
We were having morning tea in the breakfast area of the hotel, when suddenly a waiter came up and announced that a coelacanth had been caught the night before down the coast at the village of Itsoundzou. In a flash, we piled into the car of Abbas and headed south on the two lane coast road. In half an hour, we had passed the lava flows at Singani and ten minutes beyond, pulled off at Itsoundzou, a collection of several concrete buildings and corrugated metal huts with thatch roofs on a seaside precipice. There, next to the proud fisherman’s hut was the creature of dreams, still wet, but dead, with glowing eyes. It lay on the ground, fresh and intact, a presentation of millennia just there waiting for the world to remember. We took our pictures with the fish. We paid something to Ahamed Isalah, the fisherman. We took his picture with the fish. And then we put the fish in the car and brought it back to the hotel where we made measurements, and took more photos. We wanted to arrange for this very fresh specimen to be frozen, but the U.S. consulate’s freezer contained the body of a diplomat’s child who had died of malaria and was awaiting transport back to the U.S. The owner of the Coelacanth Hotel agreed we could put the fish, whom we now called Ahamed, into the hotel freezer. I took note that the fish of the day at the hotel coelacanth was coelacanth.
