Eaten by a Giant Clam

352 Pages·12.849 MB·English

by  Joseph Cummins

EATEN BY A
GIANT
CLAM
Great adventures in natural science
JOSEPH CUMMINS
Eaten, by a Giant Clam
tells the
inspiring stories of explorers from the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Among the tales are:
Maria Sibylla M&rioa who, with her
daughter, travelled to Surinam in 1699
to study the life cycle of local spiders,
plants and moths
Brilliant Swedish botanist Cori
Linnaeus and his travels in Lapland
® Alexander noa Humboldt and
his travels down the Amazon through
wilderness previously unseen by
Europeans and who, according to
Charles Darwin, was the greatest
travelling scientist who ever Uved’
® Fossil collector and dealer Mary
Anniny, who found the first complete
connected skeleton of an Ichthjosaurus
George Forrest, one of the first
explorers of China’s mountain ranges
in Yunnan
Roy Chjopmau Andreros, the
American palaeontologist upon whom
Indiana Jones is apparently based and
who was the first to find dinosaur eggs
in the Gobi Desert

EATEN BY A
GIANT
CLAM
i
EATEN BY A
GIANT
CLAM
Great adventures in natural science
JOSEPH CUMMINS
9
PIER
CONTENTS
Introduction 6
The. Joha Trodesconls
‘what is rare in land, in sea, in air’ 9
Maria Sibylla Meriaa
The wonderful transformation 22
Carl Liruioeus
‘God created, Linnaeus arranged’ 36
Georg SteUer
Sunday’s child 51
William, Bortram.
‘Plant Hunter’ 66
Joseph Books
Gentleman naturalist 79
Aleoooder ooo HuioboldL
‘the unity of nature’ 95
Charles Waterloo
The squire of Walton Hall 109
Prince MaxiroUiao of Wied
‘a solemn silence prevailed’ 124
Coostootioe Samuel Rafinesque
‘It is usually safe to reject his conclusions’ 138
Joho Riehardsoo
‘an inhabitant of these wilds’ 152
Daoid Douglas
Scientific traveller 168
T_
Mary Anning
Fossils in the Blue Lias 183
Sir Joseph, Dalton. Hooker
Adventurous scholar 198
Henry Waller Botes
‘a solitary stranger ... on a strange errand’ 213
Marianne North
‘a very wild bird’ 228
Frederick Courteney Selous
‘the last of the big-game hunters’ 244
Eugene Dubois
Java Man 257
Mary Kingsley
“Why has this man not been buried?’ 270
George Forrest
‘of seed such an abundance’ 286
Roy Chapman Andreros
Dinosaurs in his bones 302
W. Douglas Burden
Here be dragons! 320
Bibliography 335
Index 339
INTRODUCTION
At one time, right up until the mid-twentieth century, being eaten by
a giant clam seemed one of the most exotic fates that could befall
any adventurer in the natural world. It meant, in a sense, that you
had arrived, had earned your stripes as a true explorer of the wild—
posthumously, of course. People simply accepted the fact that being
devoured by a giant mollusc was a possibility.
A 1924 issue of the famed magazine Popular Mechanics displayed
a murky picture of one evil-looking enormous bivalve and wrote:
‘Divers who often step into the open lips of such monsters are
frequendy held with such force that they cannot release themselves
and drown. The shells ... serve as gigantic traps.’ During World War II,
the official US Nai^ Diving Manual gave detailed advice to its frogmen
on how to cut a giant clam’s abductor muscles (used to open and close
the shell) if trapped. ‘The Attack of the Giant Clam’ was once a staple
of cinematic art. Early movies featured underwater scenes of killer
bivalves, not just catching and holding humans, usually pearl divers,
but swallowing them whole. The 1948 movie 16 Fathoms Deep had a
scene where a diver was caught by a giant clam and drowned—off
the coast of the southeastern United States, no less (the giant clam is
native to the warm seas of the Indo-Pacific region, not the Atlantic).
But then, alas, debunking in the form of cold, hard scientific fact
set in. ‘Although there are no accurate reports of people being caught
by giant clams, their reputation is extremely bad. Popular legends
describe giant clams trapping men with an incredibly powerful vice-
like grip and eventually drowning them’, wrote Ben Cropp in his 1986
book Dangerous Australians: The Complete Guide to Australia ’s Deadliest
Creatures, published by no less an authority than Murdoch Books.
‘However, as the giant clam is both conspicuous and slow to close its
valves, the danger is minimal.’
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