Free Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River by Robert Twigger

in Greenland, Hendri had no warning when he was snatched from behind by a giant Nile crocodile on the uncharted Lukuga waters, once considered a possible source of the Nile (they actually drain into a source of the Congo).
    I had wanted to meet Coetzee as he had more knowledge of the real conditions on the White Nile than anyone alive, and yet it seemed in some weird and atavistic way that his very challenge of the river, his domination of it by making the first complete descent (purists aside, who cavilled that by doing it in two stints it didn’t really count), anachievement which could be seen as yet another act of arrogance by man towards the natural world, had angered the river gods in some way. And the greatest of the Nile river gods has always been the crocodile.
    I could not escape the oppressive feeling that Gino Watkins had also courted his own death in some way. Watkins was the man who brought the Eskimo roll to the developed world. Before his year-long stay in Greenland it had been considered ‘impossible for a white man to perform such an acrobatic manoeuvre in a craft of mere skin and bone’. But Watkins became so good at rolling his kayak – essential in the frozen Arctic seas – that he was often mistaken for a native hunter. However, he did one thing no native would ever do: he hunted alone, and when he was tipped by a plunging ice floe from his frail craft of sealskin-covered sticks and bones he had no one to help rescue him from the freezing waters.
    I mention Watkins because that technique that he showed could be perfected (I, too, had benefited, learning years ago how to roll in a tiny canoe in a swimming pool in Oxford) was what enabled Hendri Coetzee to make his incredible journeys in such a tiny boat.
    Coetzee knew the risks and he knew crocodiles, though it is possible that he subscribed to a myth about their stupidity that is undeserved. The Nile crocodile has the most complex brain of any reptile on the planet, but it is not the most recently evolved; the crocodile has remained more or less unchanged in sixty million years, and close variants of the crocodile have been around as long as the dinosaurs – from 200 or more million years ago. Walking thirty miles from the current Nile valley I have found the polished teeth of Laganosuchus , one prehistoric ancestor of the crocodile. At first you think they might be belemnites, a good size at an inch or an inch and a half long, but then you see the unmistakable shiny patina of fossilised enamel, and the cutting edge, like a slanting chisel on even the most pointed teeth, and you realise that this long-dead creature was designed like a living cudgel or nailed club, that one strike from this density of sharpened nail-like teeth would result in being mercilessly taken. And a Nile crocodile has sixty-six teeth. Strangely, in the upper White Nile, when the river is low, crocodiles of immense proportions will hide themselves away in comparatively tiny potholes and puddles in the river bed. Their self-imposed incarceration, mired in clay and quite immobile, makes our smallest zoo cages look quite commodious.
    Hendri Coetzee warned his team to stick together – as one of themput it, ‘You appear not as one eight-foot-long kayak, but as a grouping that is larger; you appear as a larger organism.’ Crocs, it seems, don’t think quite like this. Though this tactic had served Coetzee well through such croc-infested areas as the Murchison Falls, these were areas where people and river craft were not unknown. It is possible that the ‘picking off’ strategy of the Nile crocodile had been blunted by the experience that a group of people may react differently to a group of deer, or pigs or Nile perch.
    It is one of the other great survival mechanisms of the Nile crocodile that it can live off a frog or consume a zebra. By basking on warm riverside rocks it conserves energy and can go long periods without feeding.
    The ‘picking off’ strategy works for the