March 6, 2024 • 46 mins
The coelacanth was believed to have gone extinct about 66 million years ago, until one was spotted in South Africa in 1938. Naturalist and museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer played a key part in that event.
Research:
- Ashworth, Willam B. Jr. “Scientist of the Day – Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer.” Linda Hall Library. 2/24/2020. https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/marjorie-courtenay-latimer/
- Bruton, Mike. “Curator and Crusader: The Life and Work of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer.” Pinetown Printers, 2019.
- Courtenay-Latimer, M. “My Story of the First Coelacanth.” Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences. No. 134. 12/22/1979. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/15956893#page/18/mode/1up
- Courtenay-Latimer, Marjorie. “Reminiscences of the Discovery of the Coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae.” Interdisciplinary Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology. Vol. 8. 1989.
- Hatchuel, Martin. “The Coelacanth.” Knysna Museums. https://www.knysnamuseums.co.za/pages/the-coelacanth/
- Jewett, Susan L. “Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer: More than the Coelacanth!” Division of Fishes, Smithsonian Institution.
- Schramm, Sally. “Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer: Beyond the Coelacanth.” Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog. https://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2019/03/marjorie-eileen-doris-courtenay-latimer.html
- Smith, Anthony. “Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer.” The Guardian. 5/20/2004. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/may/21/guardianobituaries
- Smith, J.L.B. “The Living Cœlacanthid Fish from South Africa.” Nature 143, 748–750 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143748a0
- Smith, J.L.B. “The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth.” New York. Holt. 1956.
- Smith, J.L.B. Living Fish of Mesozoic Type.” Nature 143, 455–456 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143455a0
- The Coelacanth : the Journal of the Border Historical Society. Vol. 42 No. 1 (2004). https://journal.ru.ac.za/index.php/Coelacanth/issue/view/143
- Tyson, Peter. “Moment of Discovery.” PBS Nova. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fish/letters.html
- Weinberg, Samantha. “A Fish Caught in Time: the Search for the Coelacanth.” New York : HarperCollins Publishers. 2001.
- Yanes, Javier. “The Woman Who Brought a Fish Back From the Dead.” BBVA Open Mind. 2/17/2023. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/marjorie-courtenay-latimer-fossil-fish-coelacanth/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is a topic I've
had on my list forever, but I kept getting distracted,
(00:23):
and a big reason was because at first glance, it
just kind of seemed like there might not be enough
information to really make it work. So whenever this topic
would come back to the forefront, as I was figuring
out what was going to come next, it was just
very easy to get pulled onto something else instead. It
turns out plenty of information did not need to be worried.
(00:45):
I also thought this episode was mostly going to be
about a fish, specifically the selacanth, which scientists in Europe
and North America believed had gone extinct about sixty six
million years ago until one was spotted in South Africa
in nineteen thirty eight. Naturalist and museum curator Marjorie Courtney
(01:08):
Latimer played a key part in that, and I'm just
gonna say I've heard people say her last name slightly
different ways, depending on exactly where their accent is from. Uh.
I always planned for this episode to be at least
partially about Marjorie Courtney Latimer, because she's the person that
(01:29):
you know spotted this fish. Uh. Turns out though, she
became one of my favorite people to have researched on
the show in a long time, so now it became
her episode. Marjorie is a gift. Uh. Marjorie Eileen Doris
Courtney Latimer was born on February twenty fourth, nineteen oh seven,
in East London in what was at the time Cape Colony.
(01:52):
As a child, friends and family called her Margie or
my Genie, and after she grew up most people called
her Marge. The family was white. Marjorie's father, Eric Courtney Latimer,
was born in British India, and her mother, Willie Fulton Rait,
was born in South Africa to British parents. Willie was
a widow who had two daughters from her first marriage,
(02:15):
and she and Eric had seven more together, although one
of those children died as a baby. Marjorie was the
oldest of Eric and Willie's daughters. Marjorie was born about
two months premature after her mother experienced a serious fall
during her pregnancy and was just very badly injured. They
weren't sure she was going to survive. Today, babies born
(02:37):
that early who have access to modern medical care often
do really well, but baby Marjorie was not expected to survive.
She had to be dressed in doll clothes and fed
with an eye dropper because she was just so tiny.
Even so, the whole family moved to Cape Town about
a month later after Eric got a new job, and
they moved a lot during Margie's early life. Eric worked
(03:01):
at an assortment of jobs before inheriting some money that
he used to try to start a diamond mine. That
mine failed. He eventually got a job working for the railroad,
and for the next couple of decades they all moved
from one outpost to another as the job demanded it.
These outposts often were kind of remote. Sometimes there wasn't
a school in the place where they were living, or
(03:24):
if there was a school, it didn't really offer a
full curriculum. So Willie really tried to make sure her
daughters always had something at home to interest them and
learn from. She had been raised on an ant's farm
without any other children around, and she'd spent most of
her time as a kid exploring nature and befriending the
(03:45):
African laborers who worked on her aunt's farm, so while
Willie didn't have formal education beyond being tutored by a governess,
she became something of an amateur naturalist and ethnographer, and
these were often the things that she really focused on
with her children. Family members described baby Margie as small
(04:06):
and frail, and as she got older, she was sick
a lot, including several serious illnesses like whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria,
and the nineteen eighteen pandemic flu. But she also took
her first steps at the age of only seven months,
and from there quickly grew into a very bright, relentlessly
curious child with a deep and fearless love of the
(04:29):
natural world. She was tomboyish, but she also loved to
wear pretty dresses and was known to gather up ducklings
and kittens in her pinafore to carry them home with her.
From a very early age, she collected shells and rocks,
and bird eggs and flowers, and she developed a thorough
knowledge of all the plants that grew where they lived.
(04:49):
Sometimes this fearlessness and curiosity could be dangerous. Family diaries
and correspondents describe a number of pretty close calls, including
when Margie was too an encounter with a cobra on
the family's porch. Apparently, the family thought had that cobra
(05:10):
not been separated from her by the porch rail, she
probably would have been bitten. When she got a little older,
she and one of her sisters accidentally poisoned another sister
by feeding her mud pies that had been seasoned with
seeds that turned out to be from a deadly nightshade.
Margie also nearly died after climbing up a windmill, only
(05:32):
for the windmill veins to start turning after a sudden
gust of wind. But there were also times when young
Margie's fascination with the natural world helped her family survive.
This was a violent and uncertain time in Southern Africa,
with the British South Africa Company and British colonists waging
war against African peoples and against the Boors, who were
(05:54):
people of Dutch, German and Huguenot ancestry. When Marchie was
about seven, five was called a serve during a Boer
uprising against the British government that would eventually grow into
the Third Anglo Boer War. The family had no way
of getting supplies after the boor sabotaged the railway lines,
and Margie taught her sisters how to forage and which
(06:16):
mushrooms were safe to eat. I would probably be hesitant
to trust the mushroom gathering of a seven year old
who also accidentally fed a sister deadly nightshade, but this
worked out for everyone. When Margie was about fifteen, she
and her three oldest sisters were sent to boarding school
(06:38):
at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in East London,
South Africa, and in spite of their erratic education up
to that point, all four of them did really well there.
Margie particularly excelled in biology. When she was sixteen, she
caught the attention of naturalist doctor George Ratre, who was
one of the examiners in her end of year tens.
(07:01):
He thought that she would be well suited for a
position working in a museum, and he really encouraged her
parents to send her to college, but that was something
that the family could not afford. It was also still
fairly unusual for women to go to college. The assumption
was that they would get married and become mothers after
leaving the Convent of the Sacred heart. In nineteen twenty five,
(07:24):
at the age of eighteen, Margie got a part time
job at a grocery store so she could pay for
art supplies, and she continued to live at home, spending
a lot of free time building her collection of things
like flowers and bird eggs, and carefully painting what she
observed in the natural world. In June of nineteen twenty eight,
Margie became engaged to Alfred Hill, known as Alfie, but
(07:47):
it turned out Alfie didn't want a wife who went
tromping through the woods picking up bird eggs. He wanted
a wife who would stay home and keep house, so
she eventually broke off their engagement, and then turned down
her proposal from another suitor when it was clear from
the very beginning that he was not looking for a
naturalist wife. Eventually she started training as a nurse, but
(08:11):
then in nineteen thirty one, she was invited to apply
for the position of curator at the East London Museum.
This natural and cultural history museum had been founded by
the East London Museum Society, and its president was George Ratre.
Although the museum had technically existed since nineteen twenty one,
its first physical location was a one room shed rented
(08:34):
in nineteen twenty six. When Margie was approached about the position,
it was preparing to move to a new purpose built location,
which was the first purpose built museum in East London.
George Rattray, of course, was the person who recommended that
Marjorie Courtney Latimer apply for this role of curator. She
was only twenty four and she hadn't gone to college.
(08:57):
It's not even clear whether she took her matricula exams
from the Convent of the Sacred Heart before leaving that school,
but the hiring committee was really impressed by her thorough
knowledge of the natural and cultural history of Southern Africa.
She and her family had also visited a lot of
museums all around as they had been moving through her
(09:19):
father's work. She had very definite opinions about what museums
should be like. She thought they should be fascinating and
engaging to all of their visitors, not moldy and dusty
and boring. The committee also liked her enthusiasm and her
very obvious dedication to the idea of running the museum.
(09:39):
After she was offered the job on July fifteenth, nineteen
thirty one, she left her nursing training, although she kept
wearing her homemade nurses uniforms because it just didn't make
sense to her to throw them out. Repurposed nursing uniforms
were a staple of her wardrobe for the next couple
of years, and for the rest of her life. She
often wore outfits that we're in a very similar style.
(10:02):
She started work at the museum on August twenty fourth,
nineteen thirty one, which was a month before it opened
at its new location. Although there had been other women
applicants to the position in East London, this made her
one of only two women in South Africa to be
running a major museum. For the next twenty two years,
she was the museum's only professional level employee. The other
(10:25):
people who worked there were things like custodians and gardeners
and a general assistant. More about the museum is coming,
as well as the celycanth after we paused for a
sponsor break. When Marjorie Courtney Latimer started working at the
(10:49):
East London Museum in nineteen thirty one, it really did
not have much of a collection, and some of the
specimens that it did have had to be destroyed because
they had been very badly damaged by a beetle infestation,
so she supplemented what was already there with her own
family's collections, like her collection of bird eggs, which was substantial,
(11:13):
and her sister's collections of butterflies and pressed plants. Her mother, Willie,
also had a collection of African cultural items that she
had built well before Marjorie was born with the help
of the African workers on the farm where she had
grown up. These became the foundation of the museum's ethnographic collection.
In addition to providing many of the items for the
(11:35):
museum's displays, Courtney Latimer also reworked the displays themselves. In
her opinion, some of the display cases were completely unusable.
In one case, she got an axe and chopped out
the central beams that were in the way and used
evening dresses belonging to her and her sisters to make
backdrops for a display of china and historical items that
(11:57):
belonged to her mother. The museum's born was impressed with
what she was doing, but also recognized that she needed
some more training, so she was sent to other museums
to get more experience in things like mounting and labeling specimens.
In nineteen thirty four, Courtney Latimer was part of an
expedition to excavate a fossil skeleton, which turned out to
(12:19):
be a nearly complete Canemiria that's a large herbivore from
the Triassic period. Excavating and mounting the skeleton was an
extremely long process, and during that time she got to
know Eric Wilson, whose father was a member of the
museum board, and whose sister, Bess, she knew from school.
This really seems to have been the only time that
(12:41):
Marjorie was courted by somebody who truly shared her interests
and encouraged her pursuits as a naturalist and a museum curator.
But in nineteen thirty five, Eric was called up to
the military, and while he was serving, he contracted pneumonia
and died. Marjorie was heartbroken. In her words to an
inter you were later on quote, he was the love
(13:02):
of my life and I never fell in love again.
To make things worse, Eric's mother was asking for her
after his death, but she was too sick herself to travel.
She had both bronchitis and the flu. Marjorie recovered and
she kept on with her work at the museum. One
day in July of nineteen thirty six, she saw a
(13:22):
woman sitting out in the museum's garden with her head
in her hands. She asked this woman what was wrong,
and she said she had a terrible headache. So Courtney
Latimer invited her into her office for a cup of
tea and some aspirin. They had a very nice conversation
about how much this woman liked museums. After she left,
Courtney Latimer saw her name in the guest registry and
(13:44):
it was Amelia Earhart, who was in East London refueling
her plane after making an emergency landing nearby. By that point,
Courtney Latimer had spent five years working almost entirely on
the museum. Whenever she took time off, she spent it
studying the natural world and gathering specimens for its collection.
(14:04):
She never wore trousers to do this work, and she
was also never bear legged, so she usually came home
from all of these excursions with her stockings in shreds.
This is like thing number four that made me go,
I love you so much. In nineteen thirty six, the
museum board insisted that she takes some actual leave and then,
(14:27):
of course she spent that leave on her work as
a naturalist. She arranged a trip to Bird Island in
Algoa Bay. This is a place that had fascinated her
since she was a child, and she could see the
light from its lighthouse when visiting her grandparents, but Bird
Island was not a place that women visited. In nineteen
(14:48):
thirty six, the superintendent of the islands in the Union
government literally told her that women were not allowed there. Finally,
he said that if Courtney Latimer found another woman to
accompany her, he would permit her to go. So she
asked her mom. Willie agreed to make the trip, but
then Marjorie's dad tried to put a stop to it, saying, quote,
(15:10):
I do not approve of this escapade at all. Eventually
he agreed, and then at the last minute decided that
he would join them. Yeah. I read on all this
is that the superintendent thought there was no possible way
she would get another woman to agree on this to
go on this trip, and that that would just mean
he wouldn't have to allow it. But he got caught,
(15:32):
and now he had so many women on bird Eyelid.
Now there were twice as many women as before. This
trip was an absolute dream come true for Marjorie. She
gathered fifteen cases of specimens there, including birds and their
eggs and nests, sea life and mammals, but her father
(15:52):
quickly regretted his kind of last minute decision to also go.
He found this whole trip incredibly boring. And then on
top of that, while they were there, King Edward the
Eighth abdicated the throne so he could marry Wallace Simpson.
They were almost completely cut off from the news, so
his dad was like, there's this drama happening and I
can't even get it on the radio. I can't watch
(16:17):
my programs. During this trip, Courtney Latimer met Hendrik Housen,
captain of a supply ship who would stop at Bird
Island to get rabbits so that his crew could have
something to eat besides fish. He and Courtney Latimer developed
a friendship, and he eventually helped her get those fifteen
cases of specimens back to East London, carrying them one
(16:38):
at a time when he stopped at port. Courtney Latimer
wrote a paper based on her research from this trip
called Observations of Turns on Bird Island, and one of
the tools that she implemented in the research she did.
There was banding, also called ringing, so that's just placing
a small ring or band on a bird, usually on
(16:59):
the leg, to identify it in later study. Courtney Latimer's
notes from this trip describe her as doing this on
Bird Island as early as December of nineteen thirty six,
which was more than a decade before banding became a
standard practice among ornithologists in South Africa. After she got
back to East London, Courtney Latimer kept in touch with
(17:21):
Hendrik Housen. She'd already developed a network of local birders
and nature enthusiasts to keep her informed about their observations
and to collect specimens for her. When Husin moved from
the packet ship to a trawler called the Nereene, she
asked him to keep an eye out for anything unusual
in his nets. He even had a tank on board
(17:42):
for keeping potential specimens until they got back to shore.
On December twenty second, nineteen thirty eight, Courtney Latimer got
a call at the museum letting her know that the
Noreene was at the dock with a load of like
one and a half tons of potential specimens. She really
didn't want to go down there though, While she did
really like looking for new fines for the museum, she
(18:05):
had reached a point where the fishing boats were mostly
bringing her things that she already had. It was also
summer and it was particularly hot that day. She was
trying to finish cleaning and mounting the Canemiria skeleton that
we mentioned earlier, but she finally decided that this really
might be her only chance to pass along holiday wishes
(18:27):
to Housin and the crew. She considered all of them
to be friends, so she stopped what she was doing
and headed down to the docks. She took her assistant,
Enoch with her. Some accounts give his family name as
Thought and others as Elias. Enoch was Josa and his
work at the museum involved whatever needed to be done,
(18:48):
but he was also a big part of Courtney Latimer's
work with the African cultural objects and ethnography. Biographer Mike
Bruton describes Courtney Latimer as ahead of her time in
developing respectful relationships with the local African population and recognizing
that their lives and cultures were actively under threat from
European colonial and military efforts. Brutin also cites her experiences
(19:13):
with different African cultures as honing her instinct for storytelling
and with a realization that every object she encountered had
a story to tell. When they got to the dock,
Courtney Latimer didn't initially see anything of interest among all
of these fish, some of which were very large. But
then she saw a beautifully colored fin sticking out from
(19:36):
the pile, and at first she thought this might be
a lungfish. But then, in her words, quote, I picked
away in a layer of slime to reveal the most
beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was a pale,
movy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots. It had
an iridescent silver blue green sheen all over. It was
(19:57):
covered in hard scales, and it had four limb like
fins and a strange puppy dog tail. This fish was
very big, measuring roughly five feet or one and a
half meters long and weighing about one hundred and twenty
seven pounds. It's roughly fifty seven kilograms, way too big
for Husan's tank or for any kind of storage available
(20:19):
at the museum, so she and Enoch wrapped it in
the green sack that they had brought with them, and
they loaded it into a taxi, something the taxi driver
was understandably not especially happy about. They took it back
to the museum while they figured out what to do
with it. A lot of people they encountered with this
fish were like, I'm not taking that stinking fish, and
(20:40):
she was like, the fish does not stink like it
was a live hours ago. At this moment, it is fine.
Please chill out and let me put the fish in
the trunk or the boot, as she would have called it.
Uh as often happens when somebody is called to recount
(21:02):
the same story for years and years after it happened.
There are several somewhat different versions of what Courtney Latimer
did when they got back to the museum with this fish.
One is that she consulted some of their reference books
and concluded that it might be somehow related to Sela Cants,
but some later research suggests that the reference book that
(21:23):
could have told her that was not one that was
in the museum's collection. Another is that, in like thing
number five that I love about her, she remembered some
lines she had been made to copy as punishment in school.
When she had been caught not paying attention, and that
lesson was about fossil fish and the lines she had
to write out where something like a fossil fish has
(21:46):
ganoid scales, a fossil fish has limb like fins, and
still other retellings. She really did not know what it was.
She did bring up this fish to the head of
the museum board, who said that he thought that it
was just a rock cod, and then he left for
the Christmas holiday. Courtney Latimer could not ignore the possibility
(22:09):
that this fish might be important, though. She sent Enoch
to borrow a hand cart and together they loaded the
fish into it. First, they carted the fish to the
morgue at the Hospital, one of only two places in
East London that could keep something that big cold. After
being turned away from the morgue, they went to the
Cold Storage Commission, which also refused to store the fish.
(22:32):
Then they took the fish to taxidermist Robert Center. He
agreed to hold on to it if they could find
some way to preserve it. So Courtney Latimer went home,
where she got some old sheets from her mother. Then
she went to a chemist to get some formalin, which
is a preservative made of formaldehyde and methanol. She took
all this back to where center was. They tore the
(22:54):
sheets into strips and then wrapped the fish up in them.
They soaked all of this in the formalin and then
covered it up with newspaper, and then she went back
to the museum where she tried to call James Leonard
Brierley Smith at Rhodes University. Courtney Latimer and Smith had
known each other since nineteen thirty three. He was a
chemistry professor, but he had also become an expert in ethology.
(23:18):
Smith was not in so she left a message, and
when she had not heard back from him the next day,
she sent a letter with a rough sketch of the
fish asking what he thought. What followed was an incredibly
frustrating and stressful series of delays and missed communications. Courtney
Latimer would later describe it as the greatest trauma of
(23:39):
her career, and we will get to it after a
sponsor break. Rhodes University, where j LB Smith worked, was
about one hundred and sixty kilometers or roughly one hundred
miles from East London in but they were connected by rail.
(24:03):
He and Marjorie Courtney Latimer even had an arrangement with
the local railway superintendent to send marine specimens from the
museum to the university at no charge. She was basically
sending him duplicates of things that the museum already had
when they came in on the fishing boats. Smith, though,
was not actually at the university when Courtney Latimer tried
(24:27):
to call about the fish she had found. He was
in Nicna, which was much farther away, recovering from an illness.
He and his wife had a second home in Nicsna,
and this home had a laboratory for his research, but
no phone. There was a phone at the museum, installed
just about a month before all of this happened, but
(24:49):
Courtney Latimer also did not have a phone at home.
Even if they had both had phones, the long distance
lines in South Africa at this point were such that
it could take hours for calls to go through, and
then long distance calls were also very expensive, and letters
between East London and Nisnak could spend up to a
(25:10):
week in transit. Courtney Latimer looked for a response from
Smith and checked on the fish every day, since she
didn't know he was away. When she hadn't heard from
him by the twenty sixth, She thought he must not
have thought the fish was important. By then, the fish
was exuding large amounts of oil, which she thought was
probably keeping the formulin from doing anything to preserve it,
(25:33):
so she told Robert Center to go ahead and try
to mount it with the hope of preserving its external parts.
Center was self taught as a taxidermist, and he had
very little experience mounting fish. Courtney Latimer directed him to
make his incision through the fish's belly rather than down
(25:53):
the side, as was typically done at this time when
mounting fish, because she wanted to preserve as much of
the skin and scales and like external identifying marks as possible.
He started his work on the fish on the twenty seventh.
Smith finally got Courtney Latimer's letter on January third, after
(26:14):
a friend came to Nisna and brought the mail in.
In Smith's words, when looking at the sketch she had drawn,
quote a bomb seemed to burst in my brain. He
did not think he would be able to get a
long distance call through to the museum before it closed
for the day, so he sent her a telegram reading quote,
most important preserve skeleton and gillsfish described. Smith then sent
(26:38):
a letter with some more detail, saying that this looked
like a fish that had been extinct for quote many
a long year, but that otherwise he had no idea
what it could be. He said he hoped that she
had retained the gills and the viscera to help him
identify the fish. Then he got up early on January
(26:59):
fourth to call her from a nearby shop, and this
call took almost three hours to actually connect. When she
told him that the viscera had been discarded because they
were rotting. At that point, he offered to hire a
plane and fly to East London himself so he could
pick through the dump to look for them. She called
(27:22):
him back on the fifth to let him know that
she had learned East London's trash was disposed of at sea.
That's its own issue, but that meant there would be
no picking through trash looking for fish guts. It was
days after this that Courtney Latimer finally received Smith's letter,
meaning she got a letter saying he hoped she'd kept
(27:43):
the fish's organs long after they'd been discarded, and after
they had already had multiple phone calls about it. And
this was really how their correspondence progressed over the next
few weeks. She kept getting letters telling her not to
do things she had already done, and suggesting that the
things she'd already done, which of course Smith didn't know
about yet, would be the wrong thing to do. Like
(28:05):
Smith sent a letter on the ninth saying the fish
must not be stuffed before it had been examined. That
was a week and a half after the taxidermist had
started work, and five days after she'd sent a letter
that made it clear that the taxidermy work had started,
but he had not received her letter yet when he
wrote his on the ninth. Smith's own accounts of this
(28:27):
time describe him making himself sick with worry over this specimen.
I'm not judging him for this, I absolutely understand the feeling.
But he was not shy at all about letting her
know how anxious he was about it. And he also
told her that the loss of the fish's organs was
(28:49):
quote one of the greatest tragedies of zoology. This was
something he said to her after she had already gotten
a telegram and a letter and two phone calls about
needing to retain the organs. Meanwhile, she was trying to
deal with so many things that were totally outside her control,
like the lack of refrigeration or a professionally trained taxidermist
(29:14):
in East London, and the fact that the photographer who
took pictures of this fish on the deck of the
fishing boat had accidentally dropped the film into the mud
and ruined it. Smith eventually decided to cut his trip
to Niceness short by a week, leaving on February eighth,
although he noted to Courtney Latimer that he didn't really
(29:36):
think he needed to hurry since he wouldn't be able
to examine the fish's internal organs. He planned to go
directly to East London, but torrential rains meant that he
did not get there to see the fish until February sixteenth.
By that point, based on Courtney Latimer's sketches, her very
detailed descriptions of everything about the fish, and some scales
(29:58):
she had sent to him, he had concluded that this
fish must be some sort of sela canthd. This fish
had first been described and named by Lewis Agassiz in
eighteen thirty nine, with a name coming from words that
meant space and spine. Which referenced the hollow spines along
the fish's backbone as we sat up at the top
(30:20):
of the show. Though Western science had believed selacanthed fish
to be extinct and to have gone extinct all the
way back in the late Cretaceous period. After looking at
the mounted fish in East London, Smith asked for it
to be sent to the university so that he could
spend more time studying that. But before that it was
put on temporary display at the museum, and on February twentieth,
(30:44):
nineteen thirty nine, more than fifteen hundred people came to
see it. Local newspapers covered the event and published photos,
something Smith was concerned about because he was afraid that
someone else would try to claim credit for the fish's discovery.
A LB. Smith published a letter in Nature on March eighteenth,
eighteen thirty nine, titled a Living Fish of the Mesozoic Type.
(31:09):
This described the fish as a close enough relative to
the Mesozoic selacanthods as to be included in that family,
and he named the fish Latimeria Chalumney after Marjorie Courtney
Latimer and the Chelumna River, near where Hendrik Housen had
caught it in his trawling nets. When Smith called Courtney
(31:30):
Latimer to tell her he had named this fish for her,
she said the credit should have gone to Housen, who
was the person who actually found it. After spending some
time studying the fish at Rhodes University, Smith sent it
back to the East London Museum. By that point it
had become clear that Robert Center had done his best
on the taxi Derby, but that it really needed to
(31:52):
be remounted by someone who had experience with fish, particularly
very oily fish. So Courtney Latimer person escorted the selacanth
to the South African Museum in Cape Town to be
remounted by taxider Miss James Drury. Meanwhile, she was facing
backlash from the scientific community about how she had handled
(32:15):
the fish, as scientists and researchers jumped to the conclusion
that she just hadn't known what she was doing, or
had been inattentive or thoughtless or unaware of the specimen's
potential importance. Smith acknowledged this criticism in a longer piece
published in Nature on May sixth, writing quote, several letters
(32:36):
from overseas have contained very harsh criticism about the loss
of the carcass of this fish. Few persons outside South
Africa have any knowledge of our conditions and the coastal belt.
Only the South African Museum at Cape Town has a
staff of scientific workers, among whom is an ichthyologist. The
(32:57):
other six small museums serving the coastal area are in
extremely poor circumstances and generally have only a director or
curator who cannot possibly be an expert in all branches
of natural history. There are not uncommon fishes in the
sea which to any of the latter would appear as
strange as, if not stranger than a cela canthid. It
(33:20):
was the energy and determination of miss Latimer which saved
so much, and scientific workers have good cause to be grateful.
The genus Latimera stands as my tribute. This did not
really quell all the criticism, though, and scientists kept taking
potshots at Courtney Latimer in their papers. For example, on
(33:41):
July thirteenth, nineteen forty, Arthur Smith Woodward published a paper
in Nature which claimed the specimens quote scientific value was
not appreciated, saying this was why only its external parts
had been preserved. Woodward's name may sound familiar because he's
come up on the show before he and Charles Dawson
published work on a skull that came to be known
(34:04):
as the Piltdown Man, which was revealed to be a
hoax after both of their deaths. Courtney Latimer was deeply
hurt by these criticisms. I mean, she had gone above
and beyond trying to save as much of this fish
as possible, but she also had other things to worry about.
The United Kingdom and Germany declared war on one another
(34:26):
the day she returned to East London after escorting the
fish to Cape Town. She had helped establish a chapter
of the Red Cross in East London, and she became
actively involved in it during the war, including being elected
chair of the East London Chapter. She eventually had to
step back from a leadership role with the Red Cross
to keep up with her work at the museum, but
(34:48):
she remained active in it for the duration of the war.
As the war was ongoing, the East London Museum received
a grant from the Carnegie Trust which allowed a display
to be made for the taxidermy fish, as well as
a cast. Part of the money was used to compensate
Who's in for his work in collecting the specimen. Smith
(35:08):
desperately wanted to find another selacanth to study, but the
war put a complete stop to his efforts to find one.
After the war ended, he tried to establish the African
Selacanth Marine Expedition or ACME to find another specimen, but
he couldn't get funding for it. In nineteen forty eight,
(35:29):
he started distributing pamphlets to fishers offering one hundred pound
reward for a specimen, with very clear instructions not to
cut or clean the fish, but to get the entire
thing into cold storage right away. The East London Museum
moved into a larger space in nineteen fifty, by which
point Courtney Latimer's title had changed from curator to director.
(35:52):
In the nineteen fifties, the museum also started hiring additional
professional staff, so it was no longer just her and
an assistant doing everything themselves. In nineteen fifty two, Achman
Hussein caught a selacanth off of the Comoro Islands in
the Indian Ocean. Captain Eric Hunt, who was one of
the people who had distributed some of those pamphlets, contacted
(36:15):
Smith about it. Smith was in a weird coincidence once
again traveling. This time, he was away on a fish
collecting expedition. Word reached him about the find four days
after the selacanth was caught, basically the next time he
came to shore. This is kind of like how when
you're at a sporting event, your team will only score
(36:36):
if you go to the bathroom. Yeah. Getting to the
specimen was a challenge this time because there were no
commercial flights connecting where he was on the eastern coast
of South Africa to islands that were between the north
parts of Madagascar and Mozambique. Smith convinced the Prime Minister
of South Africa to deploy a military aircraft for this purpose,
(36:58):
which then required negotiations with the government of Mozambique to
explain why a military flight needed to cross its airspace
and make a refueling stop there. It did not seem
believable that all of this was to get a fish.
Marjorie Courtney Latimer really was not involved in this effort
to find another selacant specimen, but she was there on
(37:21):
December thirty first, nineteen fifty two, when Smith arrived with
it along with his wife Margaret, and their son William,
on a South African air Force, Dakota. Marjorie Courtney Latimer
was awarded an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University in nineteen
seventy one. She retired from the East London Museum in
nineteen seventy three, at which point she moved to vittelsboth
(37:44):
South Africa. She did a lot of hiking and bird
watching and grew a garden full of indigenous plants and
expanded the kitchen of her home herself, and she also
worked with museums in the area. She had been kind
of worried that if she stayed in East London she
would never actually leave the museum and her successors wouldn't
get to fully step into their roles. And the fact
(38:04):
that she was soon doing museum work in her retirement,
I think her impulse was correct. Yeah. She did move
back to East London around nineteen eighty seven at the
age of eighty, as her family members became concerned about
her living in an area that was so much more
remote and very far away from them. She had a
heart attack in nineteen ninety five and experienced some other
(38:27):
health issues afterward, including developing shingles. In two thousand and one,
she had a pacemaker implanted. After having another heart attack,
she was eventually diagnosed with osteoporosis, and after a fall,
she was moved into Fairland's Frail care Home. Marjorie Courtney
Latimer really wanted to go back home, but for a
(38:48):
number of reasons, her pension was very small. Her stay
at Fairland's Frail Care Home was subsidized, but she couldn't
afford the care that she would need to live at home. Eventually,
her friends worked out a plan to arrange for the
care she would need to live safely and comfortably at home,
and a plan to pay for it, but she died
on May seventeenth, two thousand and four, at the age
(39:10):
of ninety seven before she could be told about these arrangements.
Speakers at her funeral included Nossimo Ballindela, Premiere of the
Eastern Cape. Marjorie Courtney Latimer worked at the East London
Museum for more than forty years, shaping it into one
of the most respected museums in South Africa and developing
(39:30):
our reputation both for its permanent collection and its temporary exhibits,
which she always tried to make very lively and engaging.
During her career, she also published forty two papers on ornithology,
and she became known for her conservation advocacy. There is
some irony here, since collecting all these specimens for the
(39:51):
museum involved killing animals and removing plants and other objects
from their environment, but she wrote extensively about clean water
and air and habitat conservation and environmental protections. She also
advocated for domestic cats to be licensed because of the
impact they have on bird populations when they're kept outdoors.
(40:14):
The June two thousand and four edition of the Selacanth,
the Journal of the Border Historical Society, was dedicated to
Marjorie Courtney Latimer, and Latimer's Landing Docks in East London
are named after her. The East London Museum also still exists,
and it has a seilacanth on its logo. Today there
are two recognized species of selacanth. Latimia chelamney lives in
(40:38):
the Indian Ocean near the coasts of southeastern Africa, Madagascar
and the Comoro Islands, and Latimara mennaedoensis lives near northern
Sulawesi in Indonesia. Although Western science had believed these fish
to be extinct, they were known to people in the
Comoro Islands and Sulawtan, Although since they usually live in
(41:02):
deep water and they only feed at night, they were
not fish that were just routinely seen all the time.
They weren't caught or observed all that often. Because of
their habitat and behavior. Not much is known about them,
but Latimria Chelimnay is considered to be critically endangered and
Latin Maria Menadonsis is considered vulnerable. As a way to
(41:25):
sum it all up here is something Marjorie Courtney Latimer
wrote in nineteen seventy nine, quote this story is one
of the most astounding records of a woman's intuition. For
had I never gone to Bird Island, had I never
met doctor J. LB Smith, who, of all the scientists
I meant as a young girl struggling with meager funds
in a small museum, always gave encouragement and never criticism.
(41:47):
And had I not gone to the wharf to wish
the men a happy Christmas, there never would have been
a Sela camp discovery in South Africa on twenty two
December nineteen thirty eight. I love her, She's great. I
also have some great listener mail. This is from Kelly
and it was written after our episode in the London
(42:10):
Frost Fairs, and Kelly wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm
a high school history teacher for twenty seven years. Not
sure how that happened, as I am as young as
the day I started. I teach APUs history to sophomores
and accelerated humanities to seniors. I started listening to the
podcast during the pandemic. I listened in the many walks
(42:31):
I took with my sweet dog Charlie, who has sadly
passed away. I went all the way back to the
really short episodes, and I will earn my PhD in
stuff you miss in history class later this month or
in early March. I am finally writing to you both
to first of all, thank you for an amazing podcast.
I don't know what I will do when I don't
have a seemingly endless que to listen to. But I
(42:54):
was recently listening to the episode on Frost Fairs and
you mentioned that you were interested in frozen water stories.
I live in Michigan, and the Jewel of up North,
as we Michiganders call it, is Mackinaw Island. The island
is in the Straits of Mackinaw, which is where Michigan's
Upper and Lower peninsula are joined by the beautiful Mackinaw Bridge.
(43:16):
Yet the spelling changes in case you are not familiar.
The first Mackinaw I've been saying is m acki Nac.
You're right, it doesn't match. And then the bridge is
m acki Naw. Macinaw Island is a quaint place that
does not allow motor vehicles except for emergency vehicles. All
(43:37):
transport is done with horses and bicycles. It is also
well known for its fudge, which comes in many varieties
and are so delicious. The island is also well known
for the Grand Hotel, which has served the rich and famous,
and was the backdrop for the movie Somewhere in Time
starring Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour. Ferries run from the
mainland in the late spring through fall, but historically in
(43:58):
the winter, when the straits would over they would line
an ice path from the mainland with the discarded Christmas
trees from the holiday season. Macinaw has a rich history.
It might be a great episode for the future. Thank
you for all you do, Kelly ps attaches my pet tax.
This is Quincy, my two year old pity mix. This
dog is so cute. We have a dog sleeping on
(44:24):
a little bed that's been made of what looks like
a cushioned bed type thing of some sort and some blankets,
sleeping in an almost catlike position there. And then we
have puppy face looking in a window and looking over
what I think is the arm of a chair. I
love these dog pictures. I also love earing stuff about
(44:48):
Mcinaw Island. As you probably noticed when I spelled the word,
it is not spelled Mackinaw. And every time I'm listening
to a podcast or the radio or whatever and I
hear somebody say Mackinac, I'm like, oh no, your emails,
your mansions, they're gonna be full of corrections. There are
(45:12):
a couple of places that prompt that response for me
one hundred percent of the time when I hear someone
say them that one, I would probably never mess up
because that is a place my mom and dad used
to go a lot when they were recording. Yeah. Yeah,
it is a place that if you live locally, you
know how to say it, and if you live anywhere
else and you sound it out as how it is spelled,
(45:35):
it would be Mackinac. I think at some point, many
many many years ago we might have even said it
Mackinac on the podcast. Uh So, anyway, I love these
dog pictures. I love hearing about making an ice path
and lining it with the leftover like with the Christmas
trees from the season. I love all of this. Thank
you so much Kelly for this email. Uh if you
(45:58):
would like to write to us about this any other
podcast or a history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and
we're all over social media on mist in History, and
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(46:21):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is a topic I've
had on my list forever, but I kept getting distracted,
(00:23):
and a big reason was because at first glance, it
just kind of seemed like there might not be enough
information to really make it work. So whenever this topic
would come back to the forefront, as I was figuring
out what was going to come next, it was just
very easy to get pulled onto something else instead. It
turns out plenty of information did not need to be worried.
(00:45):
I also thought this episode was mostly going to be
about a fish, specifically the selacanth, which scientists in Europe
and North America believed had gone extinct about sixty six
million years ago until one was spotted in South Africa
in nineteen thirty eight. Naturalist and museum curator Marjorie Courtney
(01:08):
Latimer played a key part in that, and I'm just
gonna say I've heard people say her last name slightly
different ways, depending on exactly where their accent is from. Uh.
I always planned for this episode to be at least
partially about Marjorie Courtney Latimer, because she's the person that
(01:29):
you know spotted this fish. Uh. Turns out though, she
became one of my favorite people to have researched on
the show in a long time, so now it became
her episode. Marjorie is a gift. Uh. Marjorie Eileen Doris
Courtney Latimer was born on February twenty fourth, nineteen oh seven,
in East London in what was at the time Cape Colony.
(01:52):
As a child, friends and family called her Margie or
my Genie, and after she grew up most people called
her Marge. The family was white. Marjorie's father, Eric Courtney Latimer,
was born in British India, and her mother, Willie Fulton Rait,
was born in South Africa to British parents. Willie was
a widow who had two daughters from her first marriage,
(02:15):
and she and Eric had seven more together, although one
of those children died as a baby. Marjorie was the
oldest of Eric and Willie's daughters. Marjorie was born about
two months premature after her mother experienced a serious fall
during her pregnancy and was just very badly injured. They
weren't sure she was going to survive. Today, babies born
(02:37):
that early who have access to modern medical care often
do really well, but baby Marjorie was not expected to survive.
She had to be dressed in doll clothes and fed
with an eye dropper because she was just so tiny.
Even so, the whole family moved to Cape Town about
a month later after Eric got a new job, and
they moved a lot during Margie's early life. Eric worked
(03:01):
at an assortment of jobs before inheriting some money that
he used to try to start a diamond mine. That
mine failed. He eventually got a job working for the railroad,
and for the next couple of decades they all moved
from one outpost to another as the job demanded it.
These outposts often were kind of remote. Sometimes there wasn't
a school in the place where they were living, or
(03:24):
if there was a school, it didn't really offer a
full curriculum. So Willie really tried to make sure her
daughters always had something at home to interest them and
learn from. She had been raised on an ant's farm
without any other children around, and she'd spent most of
her time as a kid exploring nature and befriending the
(03:45):
African laborers who worked on her aunt's farm, so while
Willie didn't have formal education beyond being tutored by a governess,
she became something of an amateur naturalist and ethnographer, and
these were often the things that she really focused on
with her children. Family members described baby Margie as small
(04:06):
and frail, and as she got older, she was sick
a lot, including several serious illnesses like whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria,
and the nineteen eighteen pandemic flu. But she also took
her first steps at the age of only seven months,
and from there quickly grew into a very bright, relentlessly
curious child with a deep and fearless love of the
(04:29):
natural world. She was tomboyish, but she also loved to
wear pretty dresses and was known to gather up ducklings
and kittens in her pinafore to carry them home with her.
From a very early age, she collected shells and rocks,
and bird eggs and flowers, and she developed a thorough
knowledge of all the plants that grew where they lived.
(04:49):
Sometimes this fearlessness and curiosity could be dangerous. Family diaries
and correspondents describe a number of pretty close calls, including
when Margie was too an encounter with a cobra on
the family's porch. Apparently, the family thought had that cobra
(05:10):
not been separated from her by the porch rail, she
probably would have been bitten. When she got a little older,
she and one of her sisters accidentally poisoned another sister
by feeding her mud pies that had been seasoned with
seeds that turned out to be from a deadly nightshade.
Margie also nearly died after climbing up a windmill, only
(05:32):
for the windmill veins to start turning after a sudden
gust of wind. But there were also times when young
Margie's fascination with the natural world helped her family survive.
This was a violent and uncertain time in Southern Africa,
with the British South Africa Company and British colonists waging
war against African peoples and against the Boors, who were
(05:54):
people of Dutch, German and Huguenot ancestry. When Marchie was
about seven, five was called a serve during a Boer
uprising against the British government that would eventually grow into
the Third Anglo Boer War. The family had no way
of getting supplies after the boor sabotaged the railway lines,
and Margie taught her sisters how to forage and which
(06:16):
mushrooms were safe to eat. I would probably be hesitant
to trust the mushroom gathering of a seven year old
who also accidentally fed a sister deadly nightshade, but this
worked out for everyone. When Margie was about fifteen, she
and her three oldest sisters were sent to boarding school
(06:38):
at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in East London,
South Africa, and in spite of their erratic education up
to that point, all four of them did really well there.
Margie particularly excelled in biology. When she was sixteen, she
caught the attention of naturalist doctor George Ratre, who was
one of the examiners in her end of year tens.
(07:01):
He thought that she would be well suited for a
position working in a museum, and he really encouraged her
parents to send her to college, but that was something
that the family could not afford. It was also still
fairly unusual for women to go to college. The assumption
was that they would get married and become mothers after
leaving the Convent of the Sacred heart. In nineteen twenty five,
(07:24):
at the age of eighteen, Margie got a part time
job at a grocery store so she could pay for
art supplies, and she continued to live at home, spending
a lot of free time building her collection of things
like flowers and bird eggs, and carefully painting what she
observed in the natural world. In June of nineteen twenty eight,
Margie became engaged to Alfred Hill, known as Alfie, but
(07:47):
it turned out Alfie didn't want a wife who went
tromping through the woods picking up bird eggs. He wanted
a wife who would stay home and keep house, so
she eventually broke off their engagement, and then turned down
her proposal from another suitor when it was clear from
the very beginning that he was not looking for a
naturalist wife. Eventually she started training as a nurse, but
(08:11):
then in nineteen thirty one, she was invited to apply
for the position of curator at the East London Museum.
This natural and cultural history museum had been founded by
the East London Museum Society, and its president was George Ratre.
Although the museum had technically existed since nineteen twenty one,
its first physical location was a one room shed rented
(08:34):
in nineteen twenty six. When Margie was approached about the position,
it was preparing to move to a new purpose built location,
which was the first purpose built museum in East London.
George Rattray, of course, was the person who recommended that
Marjorie Courtney Latimer apply for this role of curator. She
was only twenty four and she hadn't gone to college.
(08:57):
It's not even clear whether she took her matricula exams
from the Convent of the Sacred Heart before leaving that school,
but the hiring committee was really impressed by her thorough
knowledge of the natural and cultural history of Southern Africa.
She and her family had also visited a lot of
museums all around as they had been moving through her
(09:19):
father's work. She had very definite opinions about what museums
should be like. She thought they should be fascinating and
engaging to all of their visitors, not moldy and dusty
and boring. The committee also liked her enthusiasm and her
very obvious dedication to the idea of running the museum.
(09:39):
After she was offered the job on July fifteenth, nineteen
thirty one, she left her nursing training, although she kept
wearing her homemade nurses uniforms because it just didn't make
sense to her to throw them out. Repurposed nursing uniforms
were a staple of her wardrobe for the next couple
of years, and for the rest of her life. She
often wore outfits that we're in a very similar style.
(10:02):
She started work at the museum on August twenty fourth,
nineteen thirty one, which was a month before it opened
at its new location. Although there had been other women
applicants to the position in East London, this made her
one of only two women in South Africa to be
running a major museum. For the next twenty two years,
she was the museum's only professional level employee. The other
(10:25):
people who worked there were things like custodians and gardeners
and a general assistant. More about the museum is coming,
as well as the celycanth after we paused for a
sponsor break. When Marjorie Courtney Latimer started working at the
(10:49):
East London Museum in nineteen thirty one, it really did
not have much of a collection, and some of the
specimens that it did have had to be destroyed because
they had been very badly damaged by a beetle infestation,
so she supplemented what was already there with her own
family's collections, like her collection of bird eggs, which was substantial,
(11:13):
and her sister's collections of butterflies and pressed plants. Her mother, Willie,
also had a collection of African cultural items that she
had built well before Marjorie was born with the help
of the African workers on the farm where she had
grown up. These became the foundation of the museum's ethnographic collection.
In addition to providing many of the items for the
(11:35):
museum's displays, Courtney Latimer also reworked the displays themselves. In
her opinion, some of the display cases were completely unusable.
In one case, she got an axe and chopped out
the central beams that were in the way and used
evening dresses belonging to her and her sisters to make
backdrops for a display of china and historical items that
(11:57):
belonged to her mother. The museum's born was impressed with
what she was doing, but also recognized that she needed
some more training, so she was sent to other museums
to get more experience in things like mounting and labeling specimens.
In nineteen thirty four, Courtney Latimer was part of an
expedition to excavate a fossil skeleton, which turned out to
(12:19):
be a nearly complete Canemiria that's a large herbivore from
the Triassic period. Excavating and mounting the skeleton was an
extremely long process, and during that time she got to
know Eric Wilson, whose father was a member of the
museum board, and whose sister, Bess, she knew from school.
This really seems to have been the only time that
(12:41):
Marjorie was courted by somebody who truly shared her interests
and encouraged her pursuits as a naturalist and a museum curator.
But in nineteen thirty five, Eric was called up to
the military, and while he was serving, he contracted pneumonia
and died. Marjorie was heartbroken. In her words to an
inter you were later on quote, he was the love
(13:02):
of my life and I never fell in love again.
To make things worse, Eric's mother was asking for her
after his death, but she was too sick herself to travel.
She had both bronchitis and the flu. Marjorie recovered and
she kept on with her work at the museum. One
day in July of nineteen thirty six, she saw a
(13:22):
woman sitting out in the museum's garden with her head
in her hands. She asked this woman what was wrong,
and she said she had a terrible headache. So Courtney
Latimer invited her into her office for a cup of
tea and some aspirin. They had a very nice conversation
about how much this woman liked museums. After she left,
Courtney Latimer saw her name in the guest registry and
(13:44):
it was Amelia Earhart, who was in East London refueling
her plane after making an emergency landing nearby. By that point,
Courtney Latimer had spent five years working almost entirely on
the museum. Whenever she took time off, she spent it
studying the natural world and gathering specimens for its collection.
(14:04):
She never wore trousers to do this work, and she
was also never bear legged, so she usually came home
from all of these excursions with her stockings in shreds.
This is like thing number four that made me go,
I love you so much. In nineteen thirty six, the
museum board insisted that she takes some actual leave and then,
(14:27):
of course she spent that leave on her work as
a naturalist. She arranged a trip to Bird Island in
Algoa Bay. This is a place that had fascinated her
since she was a child, and she could see the
light from its lighthouse when visiting her grandparents, but Bird
Island was not a place that women visited. In nineteen
(14:48):
thirty six, the superintendent of the islands in the Union
government literally told her that women were not allowed there. Finally,
he said that if Courtney Latimer found another woman to
accompany her, he would permit her to go. So she
asked her mom. Willie agreed to make the trip, but
then Marjorie's dad tried to put a stop to it, saying, quote,
(15:10):
I do not approve of this escapade at all. Eventually
he agreed, and then at the last minute decided that
he would join them. Yeah. I read on all this
is that the superintendent thought there was no possible way
she would get another woman to agree on this to
go on this trip, and that that would just mean
he wouldn't have to allow it. But he got caught,
(15:32):
and now he had so many women on bird Eyelid.
Now there were twice as many women as before. This
trip was an absolute dream come true for Marjorie. She
gathered fifteen cases of specimens there, including birds and their
eggs and nests, sea life and mammals, but her father
(15:52):
quickly regretted his kind of last minute decision to also go.
He found this whole trip incredibly boring. And then on
top of that, while they were there, King Edward the
Eighth abdicated the throne so he could marry Wallace Simpson.
They were almost completely cut off from the news, so
his dad was like, there's this drama happening and I
can't even get it on the radio. I can't watch
(16:17):
my programs. During this trip, Courtney Latimer met Hendrik Housen,
captain of a supply ship who would stop at Bird
Island to get rabbits so that his crew could have
something to eat besides fish. He and Courtney Latimer developed
a friendship, and he eventually helped her get those fifteen
cases of specimens back to East London, carrying them one
(16:38):
at a time when he stopped at port. Courtney Latimer
wrote a paper based on her research from this trip
called Observations of Turns on Bird Island, and one of
the tools that she implemented in the research she did.
There was banding, also called ringing, so that's just placing
a small ring or band on a bird, usually on
(16:59):
the leg, to identify it in later study. Courtney Latimer's
notes from this trip describe her as doing this on
Bird Island as early as December of nineteen thirty six,
which was more than a decade before banding became a
standard practice among ornithologists in South Africa. After she got
back to East London, Courtney Latimer kept in touch with
(17:21):
Hendrik Housen. She'd already developed a network of local birders
and nature enthusiasts to keep her informed about their observations
and to collect specimens for her. When Husin moved from
the packet ship to a trawler called the Nereene, she
asked him to keep an eye out for anything unusual
in his nets. He even had a tank on board
(17:42):
for keeping potential specimens until they got back to shore.
On December twenty second, nineteen thirty eight, Courtney Latimer got
a call at the museum letting her know that the
Noreene was at the dock with a load of like
one and a half tons of potential specimens. She really
didn't want to go down there though, While she did
really like looking for new fines for the museum, she
(18:05):
had reached a point where the fishing boats were mostly
bringing her things that she already had. It was also
summer and it was particularly hot that day. She was
trying to finish cleaning and mounting the Canemiria skeleton that
we mentioned earlier, but she finally decided that this really
might be her only chance to pass along holiday wishes
(18:27):
to Housin and the crew. She considered all of them
to be friends, so she stopped what she was doing
and headed down to the docks. She took her assistant,
Enoch with her. Some accounts give his family name as
Thought and others as Elias. Enoch was Josa and his
work at the museum involved whatever needed to be done,
(18:48):
but he was also a big part of Courtney Latimer's
work with the African cultural objects and ethnography. Biographer Mike
Bruton describes Courtney Latimer as ahead of her time in
developing respectful relationships with the local African population and recognizing
that their lives and cultures were actively under threat from
European colonial and military efforts. Brutin also cites her experiences
(19:13):
with different African cultures as honing her instinct for storytelling
and with a realization that every object she encountered had
a story to tell. When they got to the dock,
Courtney Latimer didn't initially see anything of interest among all
of these fish, some of which were very large. But
then she saw a beautifully colored fin sticking out from
(19:36):
the pile, and at first she thought this might be
a lungfish. But then, in her words, quote, I picked
away in a layer of slime to reveal the most
beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was a pale,
movy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots. It had
an iridescent silver blue green sheen all over. It was
(19:57):
covered in hard scales, and it had four limb like
fins and a strange puppy dog tail. This fish was
very big, measuring roughly five feet or one and a
half meters long and weighing about one hundred and twenty
seven pounds. It's roughly fifty seven kilograms, way too big
for Husan's tank or for any kind of storage available
(20:19):
at the museum, so she and Enoch wrapped it in
the green sack that they had brought with them, and
they loaded it into a taxi, something the taxi driver
was understandably not especially happy about. They took it back
to the museum while they figured out what to do
with it. A lot of people they encountered with this
fish were like, I'm not taking that stinking fish, and
(20:40):
she was like, the fish does not stink like it
was a live hours ago. At this moment, it is fine.
Please chill out and let me put the fish in
the trunk or the boot, as she would have called it.
Uh as often happens when somebody is called to recount
(21:02):
the same story for years and years after it happened.
There are several somewhat different versions of what Courtney Latimer
did when they got back to the museum with this fish.
One is that she consulted some of their reference books
and concluded that it might be somehow related to Sela Cants,
but some later research suggests that the reference book that
(21:23):
could have told her that was not one that was
in the museum's collection. Another is that, in like thing
number five that I love about her, she remembered some
lines she had been made to copy as punishment in school.
When she had been caught not paying attention, and that
lesson was about fossil fish and the lines she had
to write out where something like a fossil fish has
(21:46):
ganoid scales, a fossil fish has limb like fins, and
still other retellings. She really did not know what it was.
She did bring up this fish to the head of
the museum board, who said that he thought that it
was just a rock cod, and then he left for
the Christmas holiday. Courtney Latimer could not ignore the possibility
(22:09):
that this fish might be important, though. She sent Enoch
to borrow a hand cart and together they loaded the
fish into it. First, they carted the fish to the
morgue at the Hospital, one of only two places in
East London that could keep something that big cold. After
being turned away from the morgue, they went to the
Cold Storage Commission, which also refused to store the fish.
(22:32):
Then they took the fish to taxidermist Robert Center. He
agreed to hold on to it if they could find
some way to preserve it. So Courtney Latimer went home,
where she got some old sheets from her mother. Then
she went to a chemist to get some formalin, which
is a preservative made of formaldehyde and methanol. She took
all this back to where center was. They tore the
(22:54):
sheets into strips and then wrapped the fish up in them.
They soaked all of this in the formalin and then
covered it up with newspaper, and then she went back
to the museum where she tried to call James Leonard
Brierley Smith at Rhodes University. Courtney Latimer and Smith had
known each other since nineteen thirty three. He was a
chemistry professor, but he had also become an expert in ethology.
(23:18):
Smith was not in so she left a message, and
when she had not heard back from him the next day,
she sent a letter with a rough sketch of the
fish asking what he thought. What followed was an incredibly
frustrating and stressful series of delays and missed communications. Courtney
Latimer would later describe it as the greatest trauma of
(23:39):
her career, and we will get to it after a
sponsor break. Rhodes University, where j LB Smith worked, was
about one hundred and sixty kilometers or roughly one hundred
miles from East London in but they were connected by rail.
(24:03):
He and Marjorie Courtney Latimer even had an arrangement with
the local railway superintendent to send marine specimens from the
museum to the university at no charge. She was basically
sending him duplicates of things that the museum already had
when they came in on the fishing boats. Smith, though,
was not actually at the university when Courtney Latimer tried
(24:27):
to call about the fish she had found. He was
in Nicna, which was much farther away, recovering from an illness.
He and his wife had a second home in Nicsna,
and this home had a laboratory for his research, but
no phone. There was a phone at the museum, installed
just about a month before all of this happened, but
(24:49):
Courtney Latimer also did not have a phone at home.
Even if they had both had phones, the long distance
lines in South Africa at this point were such that
it could take hours for calls to go through, and
then long distance calls were also very expensive, and letters
between East London and Nisnak could spend up to a
(25:10):
week in transit. Courtney Latimer looked for a response from
Smith and checked on the fish every day, since she
didn't know he was away. When she hadn't heard from
him by the twenty sixth, She thought he must not
have thought the fish was important. By then, the fish
was exuding large amounts of oil, which she thought was
probably keeping the formulin from doing anything to preserve it,
(25:33):
so she told Robert Center to go ahead and try
to mount it with the hope of preserving its external parts.
Center was self taught as a taxidermist, and he had
very little experience mounting fish. Courtney Latimer directed him to
make his incision through the fish's belly rather than down
(25:53):
the side, as was typically done at this time when
mounting fish, because she wanted to preserve as much of
the skin and scales and like external identifying marks as possible.
He started his work on the fish on the twenty seventh.
Smith finally got Courtney Latimer's letter on January third, after
(26:14):
a friend came to Nisna and brought the mail in.
In Smith's words, when looking at the sketch she had drawn,
quote a bomb seemed to burst in my brain. He
did not think he would be able to get a
long distance call through to the museum before it closed
for the day, so he sent her a telegram reading quote,
most important preserve skeleton and gillsfish described. Smith then sent
(26:38):
a letter with some more detail, saying that this looked
like a fish that had been extinct for quote many
a long year, but that otherwise he had no idea
what it could be. He said he hoped that she
had retained the gills and the viscera to help him
identify the fish. Then he got up early on January
(26:59):
fourth to call her from a nearby shop, and this
call took almost three hours to actually connect. When she
told him that the viscera had been discarded because they
were rotting. At that point, he offered to hire a
plane and fly to East London himself so he could
pick through the dump to look for them. She called
(27:22):
him back on the fifth to let him know that
she had learned East London's trash was disposed of at sea.
That's its own issue, but that meant there would be
no picking through trash looking for fish guts. It was
days after this that Courtney Latimer finally received Smith's letter,
meaning she got a letter saying he hoped she'd kept
(27:43):
the fish's organs long after they'd been discarded, and after
they had already had multiple phone calls about it. And
this was really how their correspondence progressed over the next
few weeks. She kept getting letters telling her not to
do things she had already done, and suggesting that the
things she'd already done, which of course Smith didn't know
about yet, would be the wrong thing to do. Like
(28:05):
Smith sent a letter on the ninth saying the fish
must not be stuffed before it had been examined. That
was a week and a half after the taxidermist had
started work, and five days after she'd sent a letter
that made it clear that the taxidermy work had started,
but he had not received her letter yet when he
wrote his on the ninth. Smith's own accounts of this
(28:27):
time describe him making himself sick with worry over this specimen.
I'm not judging him for this, I absolutely understand the feeling.
But he was not shy at all about letting her
know how anxious he was about it. And he also
told her that the loss of the fish's organs was
(28:49):
quote one of the greatest tragedies of zoology. This was
something he said to her after she had already gotten
a telegram and a letter and two phone calls about
needing to retain the organs. Meanwhile, she was trying to
deal with so many things that were totally outside her control,
like the lack of refrigeration or a professionally trained taxidermist
(29:14):
in East London, and the fact that the photographer who
took pictures of this fish on the deck of the
fishing boat had accidentally dropped the film into the mud
and ruined it. Smith eventually decided to cut his trip
to Niceness short by a week, leaving on February eighth,
although he noted to Courtney Latimer that he didn't really
(29:36):
think he needed to hurry since he wouldn't be able
to examine the fish's internal organs. He planned to go
directly to East London, but torrential rains meant that he
did not get there to see the fish until February sixteenth.
By that point, based on Courtney Latimer's sketches, her very
detailed descriptions of everything about the fish, and some scales
(29:58):
she had sent to him, he had concluded that this
fish must be some sort of sela canthd. This fish
had first been described and named by Lewis Agassiz in
eighteen thirty nine, with a name coming from words that
meant space and spine. Which referenced the hollow spines along
the fish's backbone as we sat up at the top
(30:20):
of the show. Though Western science had believed selacanthed fish
to be extinct and to have gone extinct all the
way back in the late Cretaceous period. After looking at
the mounted fish in East London, Smith asked for it
to be sent to the university so that he could
spend more time studying that. But before that it was
put on temporary display at the museum, and on February twentieth,
(30:44):
nineteen thirty nine, more than fifteen hundred people came to
see it. Local newspapers covered the event and published photos,
something Smith was concerned about because he was afraid that
someone else would try to claim credit for the fish's discovery.
A LB. Smith published a letter in Nature on March eighteenth,
eighteen thirty nine, titled a Living Fish of the Mesozoic Type.
(31:09):
This described the fish as a close enough relative to
the Mesozoic selacanthods as to be included in that family,
and he named the fish Latimeria Chalumney after Marjorie Courtney
Latimer and the Chelumna River, near where Hendrik Housen had
caught it in his trawling nets. When Smith called Courtney
(31:30):
Latimer to tell her he had named this fish for her,
she said the credit should have gone to Housen, who
was the person who actually found it. After spending some
time studying the fish at Rhodes University, Smith sent it
back to the East London Museum. By that point it
had become clear that Robert Center had done his best
on the taxi Derby, but that it really needed to
(31:52):
be remounted by someone who had experience with fish, particularly
very oily fish. So Courtney Latimer person escorted the selacanth
to the South African Museum in Cape Town to be
remounted by taxider Miss James Drury. Meanwhile, she was facing
backlash from the scientific community about how she had handled
(32:15):
the fish, as scientists and researchers jumped to the conclusion
that she just hadn't known what she was doing, or
had been inattentive or thoughtless or unaware of the specimen's
potential importance. Smith acknowledged this criticism in a longer piece
published in Nature on May sixth, writing quote, several letters
(32:36):
from overseas have contained very harsh criticism about the loss
of the carcass of this fish. Few persons outside South
Africa have any knowledge of our conditions and the coastal belt.
Only the South African Museum at Cape Town has a
staff of scientific workers, among whom is an ichthyologist. The
(32:57):
other six small museums serving the coastal area are in
extremely poor circumstances and generally have only a director or
curator who cannot possibly be an expert in all branches
of natural history. There are not uncommon fishes in the
sea which to any of the latter would appear as
strange as, if not stranger than a cela canthid. It
(33:20):
was the energy and determination of miss Latimer which saved
so much, and scientific workers have good cause to be grateful.
The genus Latimera stands as my tribute. This did not
really quell all the criticism, though, and scientists kept taking
potshots at Courtney Latimer in their papers. For example, on
(33:41):
July thirteenth, nineteen forty, Arthur Smith Woodward published a paper
in Nature which claimed the specimens quote scientific value was
not appreciated, saying this was why only its external parts
had been preserved. Woodward's name may sound familiar because he's
come up on the show before he and Charles Dawson
published work on a skull that came to be known
(34:04):
as the Piltdown Man, which was revealed to be a
hoax after both of their deaths. Courtney Latimer was deeply
hurt by these criticisms. I mean, she had gone above
and beyond trying to save as much of this fish
as possible, but she also had other things to worry about.
The United Kingdom and Germany declared war on one another
(34:26):
the day she returned to East London after escorting the
fish to Cape Town. She had helped establish a chapter
of the Red Cross in East London, and she became
actively involved in it during the war, including being elected
chair of the East London Chapter. She eventually had to
step back from a leadership role with the Red Cross
to keep up with her work at the museum, but
(34:48):
she remained active in it for the duration of the war.
As the war was ongoing, the East London Museum received
a grant from the Carnegie Trust which allowed a display
to be made for the taxidermy fish, as well as
a cast. Part of the money was used to compensate
Who's in for his work in collecting the specimen. Smith
(35:08):
desperately wanted to find another selacanth to study, but the
war put a complete stop to his efforts to find one.
After the war ended, he tried to establish the African
Selacanth Marine Expedition or ACME to find another specimen, but
he couldn't get funding for it. In nineteen forty eight,
(35:29):
he started distributing pamphlets to fishers offering one hundred pound
reward for a specimen, with very clear instructions not to
cut or clean the fish, but to get the entire
thing into cold storage right away. The East London Museum
moved into a larger space in nineteen fifty, by which
point Courtney Latimer's title had changed from curator to director.
(35:52):
In the nineteen fifties, the museum also started hiring additional
professional staff, so it was no longer just her and
an assistant doing everything themselves. In nineteen fifty two, Achman
Hussein caught a selacanth off of the Comoro Islands in
the Indian Ocean. Captain Eric Hunt, who was one of
the people who had distributed some of those pamphlets, contacted
(36:15):
Smith about it. Smith was in a weird coincidence once
again traveling. This time, he was away on a fish
collecting expedition. Word reached him about the find four days
after the selacanth was caught, basically the next time he
came to shore. This is kind of like how when
you're at a sporting event, your team will only score
(36:36):
if you go to the bathroom. Yeah. Getting to the
specimen was a challenge this time because there were no
commercial flights connecting where he was on the eastern coast
of South Africa to islands that were between the north
parts of Madagascar and Mozambique. Smith convinced the Prime Minister
of South Africa to deploy a military aircraft for this purpose,
(36:58):
which then required negotiations with the government of Mozambique to
explain why a military flight needed to cross its airspace
and make a refueling stop there. It did not seem
believable that all of this was to get a fish.
Marjorie Courtney Latimer really was not involved in this effort
to find another selacant specimen, but she was there on
(37:21):
December thirty first, nineteen fifty two, when Smith arrived with
it along with his wife Margaret, and their son William,
on a South African air Force, Dakota. Marjorie Courtney Latimer
was awarded an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University in nineteen
seventy one. She retired from the East London Museum in
nineteen seventy three, at which point she moved to vittelsboth
(37:44):
South Africa. She did a lot of hiking and bird
watching and grew a garden full of indigenous plants and
expanded the kitchen of her home herself, and she also
worked with museums in the area. She had been kind
of worried that if she stayed in East London she
would never actually leave the museum and her successors wouldn't
get to fully step into their roles. And the fact
(38:04):
that she was soon doing museum work in her retirement,
I think her impulse was correct. Yeah. She did move
back to East London around nineteen eighty seven at the
age of eighty, as her family members became concerned about
her living in an area that was so much more
remote and very far away from them. She had a
heart attack in nineteen ninety five and experienced some other
(38:27):
health issues afterward, including developing shingles. In two thousand and one,
she had a pacemaker implanted. After having another heart attack,
she was eventually diagnosed with osteoporosis, and after a fall,
she was moved into Fairland's Frail care Home. Marjorie Courtney
Latimer really wanted to go back home, but for a
(38:48):
number of reasons, her pension was very small. Her stay
at Fairland's Frail Care Home was subsidized, but she couldn't
afford the care that she would need to live at home. Eventually,
her friends worked out a plan to arrange for the
care she would need to live safely and comfortably at home,
and a plan to pay for it, but she died
on May seventeenth, two thousand and four, at the age
(39:10):
of ninety seven before she could be told about these arrangements.
Speakers at her funeral included Nossimo Ballindela, Premiere of the
Eastern Cape. Marjorie Courtney Latimer worked at the East London
Museum for more than forty years, shaping it into one
of the most respected museums in South Africa and developing
(39:30):
our reputation both for its permanent collection and its temporary exhibits,
which she always tried to make very lively and engaging.
During her career, she also published forty two papers on ornithology,
and she became known for her conservation advocacy. There is
some irony here, since collecting all these specimens for the
(39:51):
museum involved killing animals and removing plants and other objects
from their environment, but she wrote extensively about clean water
and air and habitat conservation and environmental protections. She also
advocated for domestic cats to be licensed because of the
impact they have on bird populations when they're kept outdoors.
(40:14):
The June two thousand and four edition of the Selacanth,
the Journal of the Border Historical Society, was dedicated to
Marjorie Courtney Latimer, and Latimer's Landing Docks in East London
are named after her. The East London Museum also still exists,
and it has a seilacanth on its logo. Today there
are two recognized species of selacanth. Latimia chelamney lives in
(40:38):
the Indian Ocean near the coasts of southeastern Africa, Madagascar
and the Comoro Islands, and Latimara mennaedoensis lives near northern
Sulawesi in Indonesia. Although Western science had believed these fish
to be extinct, they were known to people in the
Comoro Islands and Sulawtan, Although since they usually live in
(41:02):
deep water and they only feed at night, they were
not fish that were just routinely seen all the time.
They weren't caught or observed all that often. Because of
their habitat and behavior. Not much is known about them,
but Latimria Chelimnay is considered to be critically endangered and
Latin Maria Menadonsis is considered vulnerable. As a way to
(41:25):
sum it all up here is something Marjorie Courtney Latimer
wrote in nineteen seventy nine, quote this story is one
of the most astounding records of a woman's intuition. For
had I never gone to Bird Island, had I never
met doctor J. LB Smith, who, of all the scientists
I meant as a young girl struggling with meager funds
in a small museum, always gave encouragement and never criticism.
(41:47):
And had I not gone to the wharf to wish
the men a happy Christmas, there never would have been
a Sela camp discovery in South Africa on twenty two
December nineteen thirty eight. I love her, She's great. I
also have some great listener mail. This is from Kelly
and it was written after our episode in the London
(42:10):
Frost Fairs, and Kelly wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm
a high school history teacher for twenty seven years. Not
sure how that happened, as I am as young as
the day I started. I teach APUs history to sophomores
and accelerated humanities to seniors. I started listening to the
podcast during the pandemic. I listened in the many walks
(42:31):
I took with my sweet dog Charlie, who has sadly
passed away. I went all the way back to the
really short episodes, and I will earn my PhD in
stuff you miss in history class later this month or
in early March. I am finally writing to you both
to first of all, thank you for an amazing podcast.
I don't know what I will do when I don't
have a seemingly endless que to listen to. But I
(42:54):
was recently listening to the episode on Frost Fairs and
you mentioned that you were interested in frozen water stories.
I live in Michigan, and the Jewel of up North,
as we Michiganders call it, is Mackinaw Island. The island
is in the Straits of Mackinaw, which is where Michigan's
Upper and Lower peninsula are joined by the beautiful Mackinaw Bridge.
(43:16):
Yet the spelling changes in case you are not familiar.
The first Mackinaw I've been saying is m acki Nac.
You're right, it doesn't match. And then the bridge is
m acki Naw. Macinaw Island is a quaint place that
does not allow motor vehicles except for emergency vehicles. All
(43:37):
transport is done with horses and bicycles. It is also
well known for its fudge, which comes in many varieties
and are so delicious. The island is also well known
for the Grand Hotel, which has served the rich and famous,
and was the backdrop for the movie Somewhere in Time
starring Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour. Ferries run from the
mainland in the late spring through fall, but historically in
(43:58):
the winter, when the straits would over they would line
an ice path from the mainland with the discarded Christmas
trees from the holiday season. Macinaw has a rich history.
It might be a great episode for the future. Thank
you for all you do, Kelly ps attaches my pet tax.
This is Quincy, my two year old pity mix. This
dog is so cute. We have a dog sleeping on
(44:24):
a little bed that's been made of what looks like
a cushioned bed type thing of some sort and some blankets,
sleeping in an almost catlike position there. And then we
have puppy face looking in a window and looking over
what I think is the arm of a chair. I
love these dog pictures. I also love earing stuff about
(44:48):
Mcinaw Island. As you probably noticed when I spelled the word,
it is not spelled Mackinaw. And every time I'm listening
to a podcast or the radio or whatever and I
hear somebody say Mackinac, I'm like, oh no, your emails,
your mansions, they're gonna be full of corrections. There are
(45:12):
a couple of places that prompt that response for me
one hundred percent of the time when I hear someone
say them that one, I would probably never mess up
because that is a place my mom and dad used
to go a lot when they were recording. Yeah. Yeah,
it is a place that if you live locally, you
know how to say it, and if you live anywhere
else and you sound it out as how it is spelled,
(45:35):
it would be Mackinac. I think at some point, many
many many years ago we might have even said it
Mackinac on the podcast. Uh So, anyway, I love these
dog pictures. I love hearing about making an ice path
and lining it with the leftover like with the Christmas
trees from the season. I love all of this. Thank
you so much Kelly for this email. Uh if you
(45:58):
would like to write to us about this any other
podcast or a history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and
we're all over social media on mist in History, and
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(46:21):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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