by David Day
The Pinta Tortoise was believed to be extinct in the early twentieth century, but one last specimen was discovered in 1971 and taken into captivity. It is now listed as “extinct in the wild” and “functionally extinct” in captivity, as no female exists. Two attempts at mating this animal with females of other subspecies have resulted in the production of hybrid eggs. However, in both cases the eggs have failed to hatch. Known as “Lonesome George,” this animal is famously listed on Galapagos tourist advertisements as the “world’s rarest living creature.” He is estimated to be a spry and healthy one hundred years of age. He is the Galapagos Islands’ most celebrated tourist attraction and lives at the Darwin Biological Research Station on Santa Cruz Island.
LA TORTUGA NEGRA
Floreana Galapagos Tortoise – 1876
Known to the Spaniards as “La Tortuga Negra”
This ancient giant carefully paced out its life
Moving just fast enough to avoid the lava flow
And slow enough to endure the volcanic heat
A thousand millennia passed peacefully
As the island’s lava slowly cooled in the tropic sea
Then one evening, something appeared on the horizon:
Little floating isles with lights drifted ashore
Compare this encounter
To the tale of Aeschylus’ Turtle:
A tortoise scooped up and lifted
Into the air by an eagle
From a great height – we are told
That bird mistook the great man’s bald pate
For a large stone, and
Wishing to crack open his lunch
Let the turtle drop
Who was the more surprised, then
Upon hearing that fatal crunch:
Tortoise or Man?
One can only speculate, of course
But, most probably, with one last gasp –
Like the last Tortuga Negra dropped by sailors
Into a boiling pot –
Both died of astonishment
THE SHOGUN’S WOLF
FIRST WATCH 3 P. M. NONE
SHAMANU OR JAPANESE WOLF – 1904
Canis lupus hodophilax
Hirata Atsutane – 1810
The Superiority of the Ancients , Japan
There are many wolves which are called the messengers of the gods of the mountains, and people from other parts of the country come and, applying through the guards of these mountains, choose and borrow one of these wolves as a defence against fire. That is to say they only arrange to borrow it and do not take a wolf to their place. And from the day of borrowing they offer daily food to the spirit of the wolf.
The Shinto shrine Mitsumine Jinga was an important site of wolf worship in Japan. By tradition it was built by Prince Yamato Takeru, the legendary unifier of Japan in the 4th century, who, during his campaign of pacification of central Honshu, became lost in the mountain passes of the Karisaka. He was rescued and guided out of the mountains by a supernatural white wolf.
The Shamanu or Yamainu (meaning “Mountain Dog”) was the world’s smallest wolf: weighing about 14 lbs, it measured from 12-16 inches at the shoulder, and just a little over 3 1/2 feet in length (including its one-foot-long tail). The Shamanu was endemic to the Japanese islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu.
By the Ainus, the aboriginal Japanese people, the Shamanu was called the “Howling God” because it so often howled for hours from hilltops and mountains. There is an Ainu myth origin about a white wolf that mates with a goddess; the offspring of this union became the ancestors of the Ainu.
Coenraad Jacob Temminck – 1839
Fauna Japonica, Leiden, Holland
The Shamanu or Japanese Wolf is chiefly distinguished from the European Wolf by its smaller size and shorter legs. It is as much dreaded by the Japanese as the European Wolf is in its range.
The Shamanu or Honshu Miniature Wolf was first described to Western science in 1839 as Canis hodophilax by Coenraad Temminck, the first director of the Dutch Museum of Natural History. This was based on specimens from the first zoological expedition to Japan by Philipp Franz von Siebold and Heinrich Burger, both Germans, employed by the Dutch at a trading post near Nagasaki.
The Shamanu was just one of several hundreds of species classified by Coenraad Temminck, twenty of which carry his name. Although there is some dispute over the matter, today the Shamanu is commonly classified as a subspecies of the Grey Wolf: Canis lupus hodophilax.
C. P. Hodgson – 1860
A Residence in Nagasaki and Hakodate , Japan
Wolves were brought to the doors of the omnivorous Europeans and offered for sale. Every Japanese house in the north had, as well as a notice giving street number and family details, a charm to keep wolves away from their doors.
Small as it was, the Shamanu seems to have been greatly feared by the Japanese. However, there was once one other indigenous wolf on the island of Hokkaido. This was the Ezo Wolf (Canis lupis hattai), which became extinct in Japan by 1888. It was a much larger animal than the Shamanu: heavier and longer, with a bigger head and more powerful teeth and jaws. Already rare by the mid-19th century, bounties of 7 to 10 yen ensured its extinction. Between 1878 and 1888, more than 1,500 Ezo Wolves were brought in for bounty. Since then, no sign of this animal was seen again in Japan.
N. P. Anderson – 1905
Anderson’s Report – British Zoological Expedition , Japan
This Wolf was purchased in the flesh, and I can learn but little about it. It is rare, some say almost extinct.
N. P. Anderson was a collector for a British expedition to Japan. This skin and skull are now to be found in the British Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London. It is one of the only two or three specimens in existence outside Japan. There is a fully mounted specimen from the Fukushima Prefecture, Hondo which is preserved in the Tokyo Science Museum.
Anderson was correct about it being rare, but incorrect about it being “almost extinct.” The animal killed for the British collectors on 23 January 1905, near the village of Washikaguchi, Nara Prefecture, Honshu, was the very last the world would ever see of the Shamanu: the little Howling God that was the Japanese Wolf.
THE HOWLING GOD
Shamanu or Japanese Wolf – 1905
Broken wolf’s tooth
A charm, set in pounded gold
Ancient blood in a bronze bowl
Shogun hunted Shamanu, the little wolf,
Through forests and stony fields
Horses and dogs chased him to mountains
Beneath exhausted stars
In ancient days
Legends gave him hypnotic power
Geese swooned before
The glowing of his eyes
Beneath the willow tree
Travellers and pale maidens
Succumbed to his voice
Shamanu, the little Howling God,
Ascends the Nine Heavens
Wanders the land of nine jade rivers
And nine jade mountains
Shamanu’s blood is red amber now
His eye is sapphire
His flesh the cinnabar ore
That gives up bright quicksilver
And deadly vapour
THE KANGAROO WOLF
SECOND WATCH 4 P. M. NONE
THYLACINE or TASMANIAN TIGER – 1936
Thylacinus cynocephalus
Reverend Robert Knopwood – 1805
Pastor’s Diary , Risdon, Tasmania
Am engaged all the morn, upon business examining 5 prisoners that went into the bush. They informed me that on 2 May when they were in the wood they see a large Tyger that the dog they had with them went nearly up to it and when the Tyger see the men which were about 100 yards away, it went away. I make no doubt but here are many wild animals which we have not yet seen.
The name Tasmanian Tiger dates back to 1642, when the island had been “discovered” by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who named the island Van Diemen’s Land aft
er his patron, the Governor of Batavia. That year, Francoys Jacobz, Tasman’s pilot, led an expedition inland and reported “the footing of wild beasts having claws very like a tiger.” Later reports by Dutch East India Company officers also mentioned “tiger” footprints. However, there were no recorded sightings until 1805.
Robert Knopwood’s 18 June 1805 diary entry is the first recorded actual sighting of a Thylacine. Knopwood was the pastor for the first settlement on Tasmania: a penal colony at Derwent River founded in 1803.
The indigenous Palowi people, of Adnyamathanha Aboriginal stock, had occupied Tasmania for over ten thousand years after the end of the last ice age when the land bridge to Australia sank beneath the sea. They knew the Thylacine as the Marrukurli or Inarru-kurli and had many legends concerning the animal.
William Oxley – 1810
Van Diemen’s Land Company Report, Tasmania
Settlements here are free from the Native Dog – the Dingo, the dread of the Stock Holders in New South Wales. The only Animal unknown on the Continent is the Hyena Opossum, but even here is rarely seen. It flies at the approach of Man, and has not been known to do any Mischief.
In 1806, Tasmania’s Deputy Surveyor-General George Harris wrote an official description of this “newly discovered” creature and assigned it a genus and species: Dideiphis cynocephala (or “dog-headed opossum”). He sent an illustrated report describing both the Thylacine and Tasmanian Devil to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and former naturalist on Captain Cook’s first voyage.
The Thylacine was the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. Related to the kangaroo, it was often described as a marsupial wolf or (because of its stripes) a marsupial tiger. As it was primarily a nocturnal hunter, it also had eyes with strange elliptical pupils. Although it resembles the placental wolf, it is one of the most striking examples of “convergent evolution” – the evolution of a body shape suited to its role and resembling unrelated animals occupying similar ecological niches.
John Gould – 1863
Mammals of Australia , Australia
A price is already put upon the head of the native Tiger, as it is called; but the fastnesses of the Tasmanian rocky gullies, clothed with impenetrable forests, will, for the present, preserve it from destruction.
John Gould was Australia’s greatest and most informed naturalist painter of his time; however, his confidence in the survival of the Tasmanian Tiger in remoter parts of Tasmania did not prove to be correct. Thylacines were not only given an unreasonable reputation as sheep-killers, but despite all evidence to the contrary, some settlers even revived those old European superstitions about wolves, and insisted that the Tasmanian wolf killed only for blood (both animal and human) like a vampire.
By 1820 Hobart was the second-largest town in Australia. It had shifted from whaling and sealing to a farming and sheep-ranching settlement. The Thylacine soon became a scapegoat for sheep killings, although most killings were the work of feral dogs, descendants of dogs taken to the island in 1798.
Accounts of supposed Thylacine attacks on sheep are very dubious and were an excuse for mismanagement by the notoriously inefficient stockholders. As early as 1828 and 1829, livestock had been released into land not ready for them and without shelter. Hundreds died, compounded by unusually harsh weather in 1829. For those facing charges of incompetence, a ready scapegoat was found in the form of the Thylacine. In 1840, Van Diemen’s Land Company raised the bounty to 10 shillings per head.
George Smith – 1909
Royal Natural History Magazine, Australia
The shepherds wage incessant war on the creature, in summer laying traps and hunting it with dogs, in winter following up its tracks through the snow. A reward of a pound is given for the head by the Government, but the shepherd generally rides round with the head to several sheep-owners in the district, and takes toll from them all before depositing it at the police station. In consequence a large reward must be offered for the carcass of a Tiger, and an offer of £10 during a year for a live Tiger to be delivered was unsuccessful. It pays a shepherd very much better just to hack off the head and take it round on his rides.
The year 1884 saw the setting up of local groups such as the “Buckland and Spring Bay Tiger and Eagle Extermination Society.” It is unlikely that it ever existed in large numbers, but there were ridiculous stories of Thylacines hunting in packs and killing up to a hundred sheep in a night just for sport. In 1888, a bill was passed offering a £1-per-head bounty on Thylacines, a substantial amount in those days, and the animal was hunted in its own habitat far from any farms. Between 1888 and 1914 at least 2,268 Thylacines were known to have been killed and turned in. In 1910 a distemper epidemic (possibly brought in by domestic dogs) further depleted the population.
The first live captive Thylacines displayed were at Regent’s Park, London in 1850. Another was displayed in a menagerie in Hobart from 1854. By the 1860s several zoos around the world had Thylacines, but they were not often seen in the wild. In 1911, London Zoo paid £68 for a single Thylacine. The last captive Thylacine in America died in the Bronx Zoo, New York, in 1919. In September 1911, the earliest film footage of a live Thylacine was made in the Beaumaris Zoo, which later became the Hobart Zoo. Here five of the seven brief silent film appearances of this animal were made: one in 1911, three in 1928 and one in 1933. The other two films were of the last living Thylacine outside of Australia in the London Zoo before its death in 1931.
H. S. Mackay – 1914
Memoirs of a Tiger-Hunting Man, Tasmania
A bull terrier once set upon a Wolf and bailed it up in a niche in some rocks. There the Wolf stood with its back to the wall, turning its head from side to side, checking the terrier as it tried to butt in from alternate and opposite directions. Finally the dog came in close and the Wolf gave one sharp, fox-like bite, tearing a piece of the dog’s skull clean off, and it fell with the brain protruding, dead.
It was risky to hunt Thylacines with dogs; the creatures had no fear of them, and the dogs were often unwilling to tackle a trapped Thylacine, even if they outnumbered it. Even when cornered by the largest kangaroo-hunting hounds, they seemed to show little fear, and many of these valuable dogs were killed when attempting to chase them down. Thylacines could defend themselves well enough against dogs, but were no match for bullets, snares or poison. Strangely enough, there are no accounts of any even moderately successful attacks on humans, even when cornered or trapped. Despite its harmlessness to humans, the Thylacine none the less suffered the same persecution as the wolf suffered throughout the world.
Sir Ray Lankester in Harmsworth Natural History (1910) wrote: “When one watches the Tasmanian Wolf, one comes to the conclusion that its appearance, ways and movements suggest the fancy that it is a Kangaroo Masquerading as a Wolf, though not very successfully.”
R. Boswell – 1937
Australian Museum Magazine, Australia
The former range of the Tasmanian Tiger must have been very great as I know of one Tasmanian, who with his brothers, killed as many as twenty-four of these animals during one day, and received a reward of £1 per head for each animal. Fortunately, the Tasmanian Tiger is now wholly Protected.
The last authenticated shooting of a Thylacine in the wild was on 13th May 1930 by Wilf Batty on his farm in the Mawbanna district. The last one captured was in 1933, and kept in the Hobart Zoo. This animal was filmed by David Fleay in 1933, who argued forcefully for the animal to be kept in a better facility. This animal can be seen opening its formidable gaping jaws to about a 140 degree angle.
The Tasmanian government gave the Thylacine full legal protection on 14 July 1936. While a committee considered further methods of protection, another government department was still issuing hunting permits. Two months later, on 2 September 1936, the last Thylacine in existence, the animal filmed by David Fleay and named “Benjamin” – died as the result of near-starvation and neglect in the Hobart Zoo. Absurdly, that year the image of two rampant Thyl
acines were placed on the official Tasmanian Coat of Arms.
Arthur Mee – 1947
The Children’s Encyclopedia, London, England
A sort of nightmare wolf: its home is Tasmania, its lair is a dark cave or cleft in the rocks; its habits are those of our own wolves, reinforced with an acid tincture of peculiar savagery. It seems to be the Caliban of the wolf tribe, making up in ferocity and blank savagery what it lacks in refined cunning like other marsupials. It carries its young in a pouch, and the whimper of young Hopeful in that furry cradle has sounded in the ears of many a sheep as it has fallen a helpless victim to the fangs of the mother.
Arthur Mee perpetuated the misinformation about the supposedly bloodthirsty, sheep-killing Thylacine in his Children’s Encyclopedia. This is from an edition circa 1946. Over a decade after the animal became extinct, the myth of this supposedly ferocious vampire-like killer persisted.
The same year, there was a recording of a popular ballad about Tasmania with a verse that conjured up the bloodthirsty image of the Tasmanian Tiger that was published in O’Lochlainn’s Folk Songs of Ireland:
Our cots we fence with firing
And slumber while we can
To keep the wolves and tigers from us
In Van Dieman’s Land.
Ironically, in 1966, Tasmanian officials declared a huge game reserve as an area of preservation for the Thylacine, which had not been seen for 30 years. A number of expeditions have been launched, but it is now agreed the Tasmanian Thylacine is extinct.
