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In December of 1952, a fisherman named Ahamadi Abdallah set out fishing as usual in his wooden canoe from Domoni, a town on the south coast of Anjouan in the Comoro Islands. When he dragged up his line, he found a large, unusual looking fish known locally as a gombessa.
He wasn’t too pleased – gombessa flesh didn’t taste good and was too oily for cooking. Once ashore, he was about to start cleaning and gutting the fish, he happened upon a local teacher named Affane Mohamed, who was passing on his way to the barber’s. Something about Abdallah’s fish stirred his memory – wasn’t someone looking for a fish like that? He took Abdallah to see the poster pinned up nearby. Abdallah was incredulous – who would want to pay money for a useless fish like that? – but was persuaded to take the fish to the authorities just in case. He heaved it onto his shoulders and set out for the capital, Mutsumudu.
Here he found a sea captain named Eric Hunt, who had been assisting the Smiths in their quest by distributing their leaflets wherever he docked his ship. Hunt took one look at the fish and immediately recognised it as a coelacanth. Trembling with haste, as the fish had already begun to putrefy, he paid Abdallah the reward and dispatched telegrams to Smith, thousands of miles away in South Africa: ‘Have five foot specimen Coelacanth injected formalin here’ and ‘Charter plane immediately’.
Smith received news of his second coelacanth on Christmas Eve. He knew that time was of the essence – not only would the coelacanth rot if left too long, but the French authorities who at the time controlled the Comoros might intervene and prevent a South African claiming it. This was a matter of national as well as scientific pride. Desperately Smith started placing calls to the South African cabinet, most of whom were abroad on their Christmas holidays. Finally, growing increasingly frantic, he placed a call to the Prime Minister himself, D.F. Malan. The odds were long – Malan was a fundamentalist, anti-British and deeply religious Afrikaner, but there was nothing left to do but to try.
Late in the evening on Boxing Day, Smith placed a call to the premier at his holiday cottage near Cape Town, and spoke to his wife. She refused to disturb her husband’s sleep by calling him to the telephone. Smith put down the receiver and slumped in his chair, convinced that his fish was lost. Suddenly the telephone rang again. It was the Prime Minister. He’d been woken by the ringing of the telephone and, by an incredible coincidence, had a copy of the professor’s book on holiday with him. Leafing through the coelacanth section, he declared ‘the man who wrote this book would not ask my help at a time like this unless it was important. Call him back’.
Malan agreed to mobilise an Air Force Dakota to fly Smith to the Comoros and claim the fish. A bemused crew of airmen arrived in Durban, still unsure why they had been called away from their holidays and commanded at the highest level to take part in a mission to bring back a dead fish. The military commanders in Mozambique were equally sceptical, and nearly refused the plane permission to land and refuel. Such a preposterous story must surely be a cover-up for some sinister spying mission. Smith fretted in the hold of the plane while negotiations took place – he had staked his reputation on this venture and faced lifelong humiliation if he failed to bring back a coelacanth. Eventually, however, Smith’s plane made it to the Comoros, and Smith rushed to Hunt’s vessel to see his precious fish. As Hunt’s crew slowly unpacked the fish from its box, Smith stood sweating, waiting to see he was to be proved ‘a fool or a prophet’.
A prophet it was – there before him, well preserved, was the world’s second coelacanth. Smith returned to South Africa in a blaze of glory and flew immediately to Cape Town to show the fish to the Prime Minister, surrounded by popping flashbulbs and related the story of the fish’s rescue in an emotional broadcast on national radio. Over the years that followed, dozens of further coelacanth specimens were netted off the Comoros, and their discovery put this small group of islands on the world map. Fish enthusiasts still visit to this day, using specially adapted submarines to try to find the fish in their natural environment.
For many years it was thought that the coelacanth was endemic to the Comoros, and that the original specimen found by Marjorie Latimer had simply gone astray. In recent times, however, coelacanths have been discovered not only off the coasts of South Africa, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya, but also in the waters of Indonesia. ‘Old Fourlegs’ is now a protected species and looks set to be around for another few million years. Copyright © Gemma Pitcher 2004 | 
