Hi there. I'm a wildlife biologist, but my real passion is cryptozoology, and there's one case that's haunted me for years. It comes from the Congo, from the journals of a Belgian engineer named Johann Werner who worked on the river in the 1880s. What he documented, if you really sit with it, changes everything we think we know about crocodilians. Now I want to be clear about something. The Bobangi people who live along the Congo have a word for crocodile. Nkoli. They've lived alongside Nile crocodiles for generations, they know what a crocodile looks like, they know how big they get. Twenty feet, maybe a bit more for exceptional specimens. But they insist the Mahamba is something else entirely. Not just a big crocodile. A different animal. And Werner's accounts back them up.
Werner worked on a government steamer called the A.I.A., forty-two feet long. He wrote that seeing enormous crocodiles on the river was, and I'm quoting his journals here, rather common. But one encounter in particular stayed with him. He'd gone ashore to hunt ducks on a large sandbank. Shot one, saw the rest land behind a low ridge of sand, so he crouched down and crawled along behind the ridge to get within range. When he raised his head to look over, the ducks were there, about fifty yards out. But halfway between him and those ducks lay the biggest crocodile he'd ever seen. He compared it to the steamer, three hundred yards offshore, and reckoned the animal was fifty feet long. The ridge running down its back stood about four feet off the sand where its belly rested. He only had a shotgun. would not want to be that close with just a shotgun - Ray' Sent a native boy back to fetch his rifle and just watched the thing, waiting. It didn't move, either asleep or unaware of him on its starboard quarter, as he put it. When the boy took too long, Werner started backing away and spooked the ducks. They flew off and he took a snap shot after them, missed, but the sound sent the crocodile rushing for the water, scattering sand everywhere with a sweep of its massive tail.
But here's the encounter that really gets me. Early 1888, Werner's steamer suddenly ran aground in shallow water, only three feet deep. The bow embedded in the sand, but the sand itself seemed to heave up and down beneath them. The water churned strangely. Werner thought at first they'd hit a hippo, but there wasn't enough depth to cover one. Then he saw it. An enormous crocodile, longer than the A.I.A., over forty-two feet, rushed across the sandbank and tumbled into deep water. They had literally run their steamer into the thing at four miles per hour. Jammed it into the sand. And this creature, this massive animal, moved faster than any large crocodile Werner had ever seen. He couldn't even get a shot off. And when he looked, the animal showed no marks from the collision whatsoever. Dr. Roy Mackal documented similar accounts from the Bobangi in the 1980s. They told him the Mahamba resembles a crocodile but reaches fifty feet, sometimes more. It digs tunnels hundreds of meters long into the earth, leading to caverns where it sleeps. And it attacks canoes. Eats people. The Bobangi insisted these were not just large specimens of ordinary crocodiles. Something else. Something that's been in those waters a very long time.
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