Teddy Roosevelt's Man-Eating Catfish

While trekking through the Amazonian rainforest Theodore Roosevelt learned of a supposed man-eating catfish lurking in the rivers. In his book Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Roosevelt wrote that several Amerindians in his party had caught a catfish over three and a half feet long. When they cleaned the fish, its stomach contents contained a monkey. Roosevelt and the other Americans in the group were shocked that something as large as a monkey could fall prey to a fish. The locals told him that fish much bigger dwell in the lower Madeira; these fish occasionally snatched unsuspecting humans. The following passage can be found in his book:

"We Americans were astounded at the idea of a catfish making prey of a monkey; but our Brazilian friends told us that in the lower Madeira and the part of the Amazon near its mouth there is a still more gigantic catfish which in similar fashion occasionally makes prey of man. This is a grayish-white fish over nine feet long, with the usual disproportionately large head and gaping mouth, with a circle of small teeth; for the engulfing mouth itself is the danger, not the teeth. It is called the piraiba—pronounced in four syllables. While stationed at the small city of Itacoatiara, on the Amazon, at the mouth of the Madeira, the doctor had seen one of these monsters which had been killed by the two men it had attacked. They were fishing in a canoe when it rose from the bottom—for it is a ground fish—and raising itself half out of the water lunged over the edge of the canoe at them, with open mouth. They killed it with their falcóns, as machetes are called in Brazil. It was taken round the city in triumph in an oxcart; the doctor saw it, and said it was three metres long. He said that swimmers feared it even more than the big cayman, because they could see the latter, whereas the former lay hid at the bottom of the water. Colonel Rondon said that in many villages where he had been on the lower Madeira the people had built stockaded enclosures in the water in which they bathed, not venturing to swim in the open water for fear of the piraiba and the big cayman."

Stories of catfish large enough to prey on humans in the Amazonian rainforest and in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco have been around for a centuries; this makes Roosevelt’s account all the more interesting.

I wrote about man-eating fish in my second book, Water Monsters South of the Border.

In the fifth book of my Detours Into the Paranormal series, I discuss Roosevelt's role in the world of cryptozoology and the paranormal.

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