The inquisitiveness of man is boundless. It was not enough that Professor J. W. Hopkins (Yale University), the greatest authority of the day in the field of herpatology, had declared these mysterious creatures to be unscientific humbug and mere fantasy; both the specialist and the general press began to report frequent discoveries of these previously unknown animals, resembling giant newts, in all parts of the Pacific Ocean. Relatively reliable reports came from the Solomon Isles, Schoutoen Island, Kapingamarang, Butarit and Tapeteuea, and then further reports came from entire archipelagoes: Nudufetau, Fanufuti, Nukonono and Fukaofu, and then from Kiau, Uahuka, Uapu and Pukapuka. Rumours about Captain van Toch’s demons and Miss Lily’s tritons circulated around Melanesia and Polynesia respectively; and the papers judged there must be various kinds of underwater and prehistoric monsters, especially as the summer had begun and there was nothing else to write about. The underwater monsters were especially successful among their readers and tritons became the height of fashion in the USA that season; a spectacular revue called Poseidon was performed three hundred times in New York with three hundred of the most beautiful tritonesses and syrens; on the beaches of Miami and California young people bathed in costumes of tritons and nayads (ie. three strings of pearls and nothing else), while in the states of the midwest the Movement for the Suppression of Immorality gained enormously in numbers; there were public demonstrations and several negroes were hanged or burned alive.
Eventually the National Geographic Magazine published a special edition covering the scientific expeditions of Columbia University (instigated by J.S. Tincker, otherwise known as the Tin-can King). The reports were endorsed by P. L. Smith, W. Kleinschmidt, Charles Kovar, Louis Forgeron and D. Herrero, which covered all the worlds’ authorities in the disciplines of fish parasites, ringworm, botany, infusoria and aphids. Their extensive coverage included:
(There followed a series of anatomical details which we laymen would be unable to understand; readers with specialist knowledge are referred to the bulletin cited.)
This learned bulletin would certainly have been sufficient to satisfy scientific curiosity about the mysterious sea monsters that were being talked about so much. Unfortunately though, the Dutch researcher, van Hogenhouck, published a report at the same time in which he classified these covered-gilled giant newts in the order of proper newts or tritons under the name of megatriton molucccanus and established that they were distributed throughout the Dutch-Sundanese islands of Jilolo, Morotai and Ceram; there was also a report by the French scientist Dr. Mignard who saw them as typical salamanders and concluded that they had originated in the French islands of Takaroa, Rangiroa and Raroia, calling them simply cryptobranchus salamandroides; there was also a report from H.W. Spence in which he claimed to have recognised a new order of pelagidae, native to the Gilbert Isles, which could be classified under the species name of pelagotriton spencei. Mr. Spence succeeded in transporting a live specimen to London Zoo, where it became the subject of further research and was given the names pelagobatrachus hookeri, salamandrops maritimus, abranchus giganteus, amphiuma gigas and many others. Many scientists insisted that pelagotriton spencei was the same as cryptobranchus tinckeri or that Mignards salamander was no other than andrias scheuchzeri; there were many disputes about priority and other purely scientific questions. So it was that in the end every nation had its own giant newts and furiously and scientifically criticised the newts of other nations. That is why there never was any scientifically agreed opinion about the whole great matter of the newts.