I never found out who or what he was.
Hoping the above will be of some interest to you.
Yours sincerely,
(THOMAS HARDIE DALRYMPLE)
Retired Medical Officer
West African Medical Service
The Dinosaur-Hunters
Dr Dalrymple’s letter is a most evocative contribution to one of the longest-running sagas in cryptozoology – the search for dinosaurs in Africa.
The daunting, but beguiling, geography of Africa has always tempted the imagination. Dr Dalrymple describes the great stretches of mangrove swamp along the Gambia River, but there are vast stretches of swamp throughout Central Africa which remain far more remote and unexplored even than the Gambia half a century ago. The great Likouala swamps in the Congo stretch to more than 50,000 square miles. Roads are none, tracks are few, and travel is mainly by river. This area has always been the focus of speculation about the existence of huge and strange creatures unknown to science.
Immediately after the First World War Captain Lester Stevens, MC, was heading for these swamps when he was photographed, somewhat inappropriately attired and, as the Daily Mail caption reported, ‘accompanied by his ex-German war dog Laddie, before leaving Waterloo Station for Africa to search for the Brontosaurus’. Captain Stevens was encouraged by the prospect of a $lm reward offered by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and by reports that two Belgian travellers, Gapele and Lepage, had recently seen the monster in the Congo.
Captain Stevens, though armed with a Winchester repeater, a Smith and Wesson revolver, a shotgun and a Mannlicher rifle, was sadly never to claim the reward. But his successors have not been deterred, and in recent years there have been a number of expeditions inspired by continuing reports that a great animal exists – and was even captured and killed within the last generation by the local pygmies at Lake Tele in the heart of the Likouala swamps.
Texan explorer James H. Powell, with Professor Roy Mackal of the University of Chicago gathered the most intriguing accounts of the beast – mokele-mbembe, as it is known – on their expedition to the Congo in 1980. Powell had already been in the area twice before, but on this occasion the pair were able to track down a number of informants able to tell them of the killing, some twenty years earlier. Powell had a simple way of establishing with his informants exactly what animal he was seeking.
He carried cards showing known animals from Central Africa, animals from other regions which would be unknown in that area, and drawings of various types of dinosaur. He would gather, by showing the cards, the local names for gorillas, okapi, etc; check that their observations were genuine by showing, say, a bear which they could not identify; then he would show his dinosaur drawings. A number of his informants unhesitatingly identified the dinosaur as mokele-mbembe.
The most vivid description of the killing of mokele-mbembe was given to Powell and Mackal by Lateka Pascal, a fisherman who works a regular stretch of water on Lake Tele. He had heard of the incident as a child. Mokele-mbembe had entered Lake Tele via one of the waterways which drain the swamps into Lake Tele on the western side. The pygmies had blocked off this waterway by constructing a barrage of stakes and tree trunks. When mokele-mbembe tried to return, it was trapped by the barricade and killed with spears. According to Pascal, the pygmies cut the animal up and ate it. Everyone who ate the flesh died.
Powell and Mackal gathered together at Epena a number of people who had seen mokele-mbembe in recent times. One, Madongo Nicholas, described the creature – 30 ft (9 m) long or more – rising out of the water on the Minjoubou River just ahead of his boat. It had a long neck about as thick as a man’s leg, the head slightly larger in diameter, and a long, pinkish-coloured back. On top of its head the creature had something which looked like a chicken’s comb. Another man, Omoe Daniel, described the 8-ft (2.5-m)-wide trail left by some animal for about 100 yards as it had apparently dragged itself through the undergrowth from a pool across to the main stream of the Likouala Aux Herbes River. Another witness had seen a strange creature only half a mile or so upstream from Epena, where Powell and Mackal had convened their meeting. He identified it from a copy of Animals of Yesterday, which Powell was carrying, as a brontosaurus.
All those present agreed that mokele-mbembe lives in deep and narrow parts of the rivers, has the distinctive chicken’s comb on its head – and, above all, is a dangerous animal to have seen!
The political exigencies of the People’s Republic of the Congo – Africa’s first Marxist state – prevented Powell and Mackal from remaining. Their visas ran out.
Mackal led another expedition the following year, but with nothing more substantial to show for another gruelling venture through mud, swamp, jungle and river. He was, however, accompanied by a professional Congolese biologist, Marcelin Agnagna, who, two years later, was to provide the latest dramatic twist in the story of the swamp dinosaur.
The 1981 expedition, which included some rigorous scientists, such as Richard Greenwell and Justin Wilkinson (both from the University of Arizona), had come to respect Agnagna’s professional competence. So when, in 1983, he reported sighting mokele-mbembe himself, he was treated as an extremely reliable witness. Sadly, he proved to be a much less reliable cameraman.
Agnagna and a team of seven had reached Lake Tele on 1 May 1983. Agnagna himself was filming some monkeys at around 2.30 in the afternoon when there was a sudden shout. One of the local helpers called him down to the lake shore. About 300 yards away across the lake he saw an animal. It had a long back, perhaps 15 ft (4.5 m) overall, a long neck sticking out of the water and shining black in the sun, with a small head. He could see the eyes, but no other distinguishing features.
Agnagna had his movie camera in his hand, and he started to wade into the lake shallows until he was about 200 ft (60 m) from the animal. All the time he was filming. Then the animal, which had been slowly casting its head and neck from side to side, slowly submerged. The observers had had as much as a quarter of an hour to watch the creature, but no film emerged. As so often happens in the annals of cryptozoology, the pictures failed to come out. Agnagna had left his camera on a macro setting – another instance of the malign force which strikes photographers so unvaryingly when truly sensational events occur.
However, Agnagna was certain enough of his sighting. ‘The animal we saw was mokele-mbembe. It was quite alive and it is known to many of the inhabitants of the Likouala. I saw the animal. Mokele-mbembe is a species of sauropod living in the Likouala swamps and rivers.’ The news from Agnagna triggered a mini ‘scramble for Africa’, as different expeditions were mounted to try to be the first with definitive pictures and evidence. There were even accusations of ‘dirty tricks’, as it was alleged that the Congolese government was being lobbied to refuse visas to some and grant them to others. The perils of Congolese bureaucracy are quite sufficient in themselves, without any additional hurdles.
At the time of writing, however, no further evidence has emerged, other than of the immense difficulty of mounting expeditions to the Congo.
Puzzling Pumas, Curious Cats
The tactical situation on Exmoor in the early summer of 1983 seemed to be fully extending Britain’s crack military unit, the Royal Marines. Armed with high-powered rifles and the most up-to-date night sights, the men of 42 Commando were holed up in ditches or hunkered down behind walls and hedges. From time to time a cautious sortie would be made across the rocky pastures of the Exmoor upland. The troops were frustrated: for the second time in two months they had been fruitlessly engaged. Several of them thought they had seen the target in their night sights, but each time, the quarry had been out of range.
The operation around Mr Eric Ley’s farm at Drewstone had to go on, for this was the operation to hunt down the dreaded ‘beast of Exmoor’ – the beast that screamed in the night, displayed supernatural cunning in eluding its enemy, and was blamed for the deaths of nearly 100 sheep and lambs. A Marine officer said: ‘The animal moves like soldiers themselves do, from cover to cover, and it rarely crosses open ground. It kills ruthlessly, ripping open its prey, and it can eat 35 lb of meat.’
Those Marines who had seen something flash across their night sights were convinced that the animal was a large wild mongrel dog – some latter-day Hound of the Baskervilles. Others were sceptical. Mr Ley said: ‘What kind of dog is it that screams in the night? My wife has heard it and so have the troops. It is like a nightmare that never ends.’