In Patagonia (32 page)

It was dark when I reached Puerto Consuelo. A flotilla of white coscoroba swans were swimming close inshore. The gables of a big German house showed above a planting of pines, but the windows were shuttered and the doors barred. Just then I heard a generator start up and saw a light about half a mile off.

Alsatians howled as I came into the yard; I was glad they were chained up. A tall, eagle-faced man, with white hair and patrician manners, came to the door. I explained, nervously and in Spanish, about Charley Milward and the Giant Sloth.

‘So,' he said in English, ‘you are of the family of the robber. Come in.'

He led me into a bare white German house of the 1920s, where there were glass-topped tables and tubular steel chairs by Mies van der Rohe. Over dinner he talked about his grandfather and we pieced the story together.

H
ERMAN EBERHARD was a virile boy of tremendous appetites. His father was a Colonel in the Prussian Army, who had gone from Rothenburg ob der Tauber to serve the Elector, and sent him to a military academy, from which, one summer morning, he walked out. He said he was going swimming in the river, left a spare set of clothes on the bank, and disappeared for five years—to a pig farm in Nebraska, a whaling station in the Aleutians, and to Pekin.

There, the German military authorities kidnapped him and shipped him home. His father had himself appointed the judge of his son's court martial and sentenced him to twenty years hard labour for desertion. Herman's friends appealed that the father was biased and got the sentence reduced to eighteen months—which he served.

He left Germany for ever and went to the Falklands where he worked as a pilot. One year, the British Embassy in Buenos Aires asked him to take the Earl of Dudley's yacht, the
Marchesa,
through the
canales
to Valparaíso. Having no sense of money, Herman said he was happy to do it for the ride, but, on leaving the yacht, Lord Dudley pressed an envelope into his hand and told him not to open it. Inside was a cheque for £1,000: in those days a lord was a lord.

The cheque was too big to squander and Eberhard became a sheep-farmer. In 1893, looking for new pasture, he rowed up Last Hope Sound with two English naval deserters, and on coming to Puerto Consuelo said: ‘We could do something here.'

In February 1895, Eberhard investigated the cave which he could see yawning into the mountain at the back of his settlement. With him went his brother-in-law Ernst von Heinz, a Mr Greenshield, a Swede called Klondike Hans, and their dog. They found a human skull and a piece of skin sticking out of the floor. The skin was about four feet long and half as wide. One side was bristly and covered with salt encrustation, the other embedded with white ossicles. Mr Greenshield said it was a cowhide stuck with pebbles. Eberhard said there were no cows and thought it the skin of an unknown sea-mammal. He hung it on a tree and let the rain wash it clean of salt.

A year later, the Swedish explorer Dr Otto Nordenskjöld visited the cave and found another piece of skin—or may have snipped a bit of Eberhard's. He also found the eye-socket of a vast mammal, a claw, a human thighbone of giant size, and some stone tools. He sent the lot to Dr Einnar Lönnberg of the Uppsala Museum, who was mystified and excited, but dared not publish without more information.

Rumours of something strange at Puerto Consuelo next attracted Dr Francisco Moreno of the La Plata Museum. He came in November 1897 and found nothing of interest except Eberhard's skin still hanging on the tree, but halved in size. The German gave it to him and he packed it off to La Plata with other material from his travels.

A month after the crate arrived, Moreno's colleague and enemy, Florentino Ameghino, the doyen of South American palaeontologists, published a sensational paper:
First Note on Mylodon Listai—a LIVING Representative of the Ancient Gravigrade Fossil Edentates of Argentina.

But first a little of the background:

T
HE MYLODON was a Giant Ground Sloth, rather bigger than a bull, of a class unique to South America. In 1789 a Dr Bartolome de Munoz sent from Buenos Aires the bones of its even bigger cousin, the Megatherium, to the King of Spain's cabinet of curiosities in Madrid. The King ordered a second specimen, live or dead.

The skeleton astonished naturalists of Cuvier's generation. Goethe worked it into an essay which appears to anticipate the Theory of Evolution. The zoologists had to picture an antediluvian mammal, standing fifteen feet high, which was also a magnified version of the ordinary, insect-eating sloths that hung upside-down from trees. Cuvier gave it the name Megatherium and suggested that Nature had wanted to amuse herself with ‘something imperfect and grotesque'.

Darwin found the bones of a mylodon among his ‘nine great quadrupeds' on the beach at Punta Alta, near Bahía Blanca, and sent them to Dr Richard Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons. Owen laughed at the idea of giant sloths up giant trees before the Flood. He reconstructed
Mylodon Darwini
as a cumbersome animal that reared up on its haunches, using its legs and tail as a tripod, and, instead of climbing up trees, clawed them down. The mylodon had a long extensible tongue, like a giraffe's, which it used to scoop up leaves and grubs.

Throughout the nineteenth century mylodon bones continued to surface in the barrancas of Patagonia. Scientists were puzzled by the innumerable lumps of bone found with the skeletons until Ameghino correctly interpreted them as an armour plating, like the plaques of an armadillo.

There was, however, a point at which the extinct beast merged with the living beast and the beast of the imagination. Indian legends and travellers' tales had convinced some zoologists that a big mammal had survived the catastrophes of the Ice Age and lingered on in the Southern Andes. There were five contenders:

a. The
Yemische,
a kind of ghoul.

b. The
Su,
or
Succurath,
reported as early as 1558, living on the banks of Patagonian rivers. The creature had the head of a lion ‘with something human about it', a short beard from ear to ear, and a tail armed with sharp bristles which served as a shelter for the young. The
Su
was a hunter but not for meat alone; for it hunted animals for their skins and warmed itself in the cold climate.

c. The
Yaquarũ
or ‘Water-Tiger' (often confused with the
Su
)
.
The English Jesuit, Thomas Falkner, saw one on the Paraná in the eighteenth century. It was a vicious creature that lived in whirlpools, and when it ate a cow, the lungs and entrails floated to the surface. (It was probably a caiman.) ‘Water-Tigers' also figure in George Chaworth Musters's memoir
At Home with the Patagonians;
the author describes how his Tehuelche guide refused to cross the Rio Senguer for fear of ‘yellow quadrupeds larger than a puma'.

d. The
Elengassen,
a monster described by a Patagonian Cacique to Dr Moreno in 1879. It had a human head and armoured carapace, and would stone strangers who approached its lair. The only way to kill it was through a chink in its belly.

e. The fifth and most convincing report of unexplained fauna was a huge animal ‘resembling a Giant Pangolin' shot at in the late 1880s by Ramón Lista, then Governor of Santa Cruz.

Such was the background to Florentino Ameghino's pamphlet. For years, he told journalists, his brother Carlos had heard the Indians tell of the
Yemische.
At first they assumed it was an aboriginal terror myth, a mere product of their incoherent theology. Now they had new and startling evidence to believe in its existence as a living mammal:

In 1895, he said, a Tehuelche called Hompen was trying to cross the Rio Senguer, but the current was strong and his horse refused to enter. Dismounting, Hompen waded in to persuade it to follow. But the horse whinnied, reared, and bolted for the desert. At that instant Hompen saw the
Yemische
advancing towards him.

Coolly eyeing the beast, he threw his boleadoras and
bola perdida
‘weapons of formidable efficiency in the hands of an Indian'. He entangled it, skinned the carcass, and kept a small piece for his friend the white explorer.

Carlos sent the skin on to Florentino. The moment he handled the skin and saw the white ossicles he knew that the
‘Yemische
and the Mylodon of past ages were one'. The discovery vindicated Ramón Lista's hunting story: he was renaming the animal
Neomylodon Listai
in memory of the assassinated ex-Governor.

‘And the skeleton?' asked the journalist.

‘My brother is looking into the matter of the skeleton. I hope to have it in my possession soon.'

No. Dr Ameghino did not think the animal could have floated from Antarctica on an iceberg.

Yes. He had asked the Minister of Public Works for a large sum of money for a mylodon hunt.

Yes. The Tehuelches hunted mylodons, often with sunken pits, hidden by leaves and branches.

No. He didn't doubt they would catch it. ‘Despite its invulnerable carapace and aggressive habits, it will eventually fall prisoner to man.

No. He was not impressed by Dr Moreno's discoveries at the Eberhard Cave. If Dr Moreno knew he had a mylodon skin, why hadn't he brought it to the attention of science?

Ameghino's press conference was another international sensation. The British Museum pestered him to cut off a tiny piece. The Germans wanted a photo of the dead animal. And, throughout Argentina, there were a number of sightings: an estanciero on the Paraná lost a peon to a ‘water-tiger' and heard the crack of branches and the animal swimming: ‘clap . . . clap . . . clap . . . 'and howling ‘ah . . . joooooo!'

Moreno got back to La Plata and took his piece of skin to London. He left it at the British Museum for safe-keeping, where it remains. In a lecture to the Royal Society on January 17th 1899 he said he had always known it was a mylodon, and that the animal was long extinct but preserved under the same conditions as moa feathers from New Zealand.

Dr Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Palaeontology, only half believed this. He had handled moa feathers. In St Petersburg he had also handled pieces of Pallass's woolly rhinocerous and the deep-frozen mammoth from Yakutia. Compared to these, he said, the mylodon skin was so ‘remarkably fresh' and the blood clot so red that, were it not for Dr Moreno, he would have ‘no hesitation in pronouncing the animal recently killed'.

Certainly there was sufficient doubt in England for the
Daily Express
to finance the expedition of a Mr Hesketh Prichard to look for it. Prichard found no trace of the mylodon, but his book
Through the Heart of Patagonia
seems to have been an ingredient of Conan Doyle's
The Lost World.

Meanwhile two archaeologists dug in the cave. The Swede Erland Nordenskjöld was the more methodical. He found three stratified levels: the upper contained human settlement; in the middle were the bones of some extinct fauna including the ‘Dawn Horse'; but only in the bottom layer did he find remains of the mylodon.

The second excavator, Dr Hauthal of La Plata, was an impressionist who apparently didn't even understand the principles of stratigraphy. He uncovered the layer of perfectly preserved sloth dung, mixed with leaves and grass, which covers the floor to the depth of a metre. He also pointed to the wall of stones which cut off the back part of the cave. And he announced that the place was a mylodon corral. Early man had domesticated mylodons and kept them penned up for winter rations. He said he was changing the name again, from
Neomylodon Listai
to
Gryptotherium domesticum.

Among Erland Nordenskjöld's helpers was the German gold-panner Albert Konrad. Once the archaeologists were out of the way, he rigged up a tin shanty at the cave-mouth and started dynamiting the stratigraphy to bits. Charley went up to help him and came away with yards of skin and piles of bones and claws, which, by this time, were a saleable commodity. He packed the collection off to the British Museum, and after a tremendous haggle with Dr Arthur Smith Woodward (who thought Charley was trying to up the price when he learned that Walter Rothschild was paying) sold it for
£
400.

My grandparents got married about this time and I imagine he must have sent a small piece as a wedding present.

Ameghino's part in the affair is most suspicious. He never came up with Hompen's piece of skin. The chances are he snooped in Moreno's crate, and saw the skin but dared not steal it. One fact is certain: his pamphlet became as rare as the beast it attempted to describe.

The modern verdict, based on radio-carbon dates, is that the mylodon was alive ten thousand years ago, but not since.

I
N THE morning I walked with Eberhard in driving rain. He wore a fur-lined greatcoat and glared fiercely at the storm from under a Cossack hat. He said his favourite writer was Sven Hedin, the explorer of Mongolia.

Mongolia—Patagonia, Xanadu and the Mariner
.

We looked at his German barns now falling in ruins. He had lost most of his land in the reform and took it with stoic resignation. As a young man he had worked as an apprentice on the
Explotadora
:

‘Was run like a crack regiment in the British Army. Orders were posted up each morning in two languages and you won't guess what they were.'

‘English and Spanish,' I said.

‘Wrong.'

‘English and German?' I was puzzled.

‘Try again.'

‘Spanish and . . . '

‘Wrong. English and Gaelic.

‘General Manager of the
Explotadora,
' he continued, ‘was Mr Leslie Greer. This man was a tyrant, an absolute tyrant. But he was a brilliant administrator and everyone knew where he was. Then he said NO to Directors and they sacked him. Directors wanted yes-men and they got them. So they wondered why their profits go down and they called in technicians. Technicians had superior degrees and all that and ordered managers about. Countermanded managers' orders and managers countermanded their orders, and the whole blinking edifice fell down under its own weight.