NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

By Richard J. King

Weak, exhausted, starved, thirsty, and with some of his men suffering from scurvy, Captain Thomas Bilton and his nine crewmembers shipped their oars and drifted up onto the beach of Anguilla, an island in the eastern Caribbean. It was 1707, and they had sailed across the Atlantic from Portugal, nearing the coast of Virginia when a gale blew their ship back to the open sea, almost to Bermuda.

Their ship began to take on water and then sank, leaving the crew with just the ship’s tender to serve as a lifeboat. When they stumbled onto that beach in Anguilla 31 days after abandoning their ship, the sailors were likely unaware of what sharp-toothed dangers might lurk in the shallows. They certainly could not have guessed that their story would lead to a small reptilian mystery more than three centuries later.

(left) Illustration from The English Empire in America by Robert Burton, 1729 edition. (right) Cover page from Captain Bilton’s published journal of his voyage.

The local people of Anguilla took them in and nursed them back to health. When the captain finally made it back to England, he published his logbook as Captain Bilton’s Journal of His Unfortunate Voyage (1715). At the end of the book is a section titled, “Prospect of the Isle of Anguilla,” with a description of the landscape and accounts of several “strange Four-footed Beasts.”

Of all the animals he described, Bilton wrote, “the crocodile is the most remarkable.” Crocodiles, “hideous to look on,” could grow to be eighteen feet long, he said. Their teeth could cut a person in two and the scales on their back and head were so hard that a musket ball barely made “an impression.” The captain learned to recognize their smell when out of the water, and he observed how the crocs hunted by floating as still as a log. The Unfortunate Voyage concluded: “There are abundance of these monstrous Crocodiles in these Islands that come in great Numbers in the Night to the Places where the Tortoises are killed, to feed on the Entrails left by Fishermen, who carry great wooden Leavers to keep them off, and oft kill them by breaking their Back therewith.”

The mystery is that there are simply no crocodiles in Anguilla today. In fact, there are no resident crocodiles anywhere in the eastern Caribbean. Did Captain Bilton make the whole thing up?

To begin to answer this, know that biologists recognize four species of crocodile living along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean today. The American crocodile, el cocodrilo, is the most widely distributed of crocodilians in the Western Hemisphere. It also grows the largest—some males are more than twenty-two feet long. This species of crocodile is the most comfortable in brackish and saltwater environments.

American crocodiles are skilled swimmers and can dive for more than an hour underwater on a single gulp of air. A recent study found that American crocodiles in 2012 and 2018 likely crossed more than 430 miles of open water in the Caribbean Sea, in the ocean long enough that at least one arrived with barnacles on its skin.

Today, American crocodiles live on the larger islands of the Caribbean, such as Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), which is only 300 miles west of Anguilla. American crocodiles will eat almost anything—fish, crabs, birds, and rodents. They also feast on turtles, whose populations in the Caribbean were once far larger than they are today. With the strongest bite in the animal kingdom—even more powerful than a great white shark—crocodiles can crunch right through a smaller sea turtle’s shell.

It’s certainly plausible that American crocodiles once lived on Anguilla and the other islands of the eastern Caribbean. Records from early European pirates, explorers, and naturalists describe crocodilians in other parts of the Caribbean, and they record their own reckless hunting and decimation of crocodile, shark, and turtle populations. It’s also possible that the original cultures of the region, such as the Taino and the Kalinago communities, who likely numbered in the millions across the Caribbean islands when the Spanish arrived, may have eradicated or at least severely reduced crocodile numbers in some locations.

So, Captain Bilton’s account of the presence and behavior of crocodiles on Anguilla was probably pretty reliable then, right?

Well, no.

Captain Bilton’s publisher in England, perhaps finding the journal of their ordeal too brief and not worthy of the six-pence sticker price, shamelessly copied this natural history section verbatim from another book, The English Empire in America (1685), by Robert Burton. This earlier volume had lovely illustrations, including one of a crocodile.

So then, Robert Burton must have visited Anguilla and left this important historical account of the island and its crocs. Right?

Nope.

Robert Burton was the pen name for editor Nathaniel Crouch, who stole the crocodile descrip-
tion from a 1666 book titled, The History of the Caribby-Islands, originally published in French. This account did not place the crocodiles in Anguilla, but more broadly
in the Caribbean, and more specifically in the Cayman Islands, a small island group with a well-known history of turtles and crocodiles. The name Cayman itself is derived from an early European (or maybe even African) word for crocodile.

When asked about historical crocodiles living in Anguilla, expert Frank Mazzotti of the University of Florida told me, “Maybe yes, but no reliable records.”

Alas, the work of the environmental historian is never done. To find out if Captain Bilton and his crew would have had to cower away from crocodiles when they crawled up the beach in 1707, we need more research into Indigenous art and culture histories, studies of fossils and archaeological sites, and more reading of colonial narratives and sailor stories. Knowing where crocodiles once lived before human hunting and the loss of much of their habitat helps modern conservationists work toward healthier coastlines and can help crocodile populations recover. Once officially “endangered” in US waters, the American crocodile is today listed as “threatened” and protected. The species seems to be recovering in many areas of its current range.

Read more Animals in “Sea History” or the book Ocean Bestiary: Meeting Marine Life from Abalone to Orca to Zooplankton, which is a revised collection of more than 18 years of this column!