At the Dawn of Cryptozoology: The Adventures of Captain Hitchens

In 1900, a certain Captain William Hitchens visited the African forests in the area of Symbiti (Tanzania) and saw many mysterious creatures there, about which he wrote in an article for Discovery magazine in 1937.

The first type of creatures resembled an ape. One day, these two creatures were accidentally met in the forest by the captain and the aborigines accompanying him.

"They looked like little men, walked on two legs, but were covered from head to toe with red hair," Hitchens wrote and supplemented the report with words that the local population looked at them "with a mixture of fear and surprise" and called these either people or animals the word "agogwe".

Hitchens was the first to inform the world about the mysterious agogwe, but since then science has not come a step closer to solving these creatures. Were these primitive tribes of pygmies lost in the jungle (their clothes made of grass and skins could easily be confused with hair) or was it still an anthropoid monkey that scientists had not yet discovered?

Anthropoid monkeys with red hair (orangutans) are known to science, but they live very far from east Africa on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

In addition to agogwe, in his article for Discovery magazine, Hitchens described a strange creature under the complex name "khodumodumo", which translates from the local dialect as "a monster with a huge open mouth".

And also mentioned the long creature "lukwata", which lives in rivers and lakes and is probably a huge fish.

Hitchens' article provoked skeptical ridicule from scientists and a whole barrage of attacks and criticism. Few people believed the captain, although even earlier there were stories in the press about the mysterious mokele-mbembe, a dinosaur-like creature with a long neck that lives somewhere in the swamps of the Congo. And ten years before Hitchens' article in Discovery, there was a report from Chamber's Journal describing a strange animal from Lake Edward, located between Uganda and the Congo.

"There are stories about a monster from Lake Edward, which the locals call the words "rizima" or "irizima", which roughly translates as "something that is not just empty talk."

This mysterious beast allegedly looks like a giant hippo with a horn like a rhinoceros on its head. Not so long ago, an adventurer went to the forests of the Congo to catch him. He stated that he saw something in the reeds of the swamp and that it was a huge animal. it looks like a brontosaurus. It was ten times bigger than the largest elephant.

In Cape Town, this guy was immediately called a liar, but a well-known American scientific institute decided to send an expedition to capture this brontosaurus. But they didn't catch anyone. Setbacks dogged their expedition all the way."

The author of this article in Chamber's Journal was someone under the pseudonym Fulahn. But they say that Captain Hitchens himself wrote under this name, who at that year had not yet decided to write under his own name, because he was afraid of criticism.

The article also contained a detailed description of this "irizima". It was pointed out that he has thick legs like a hippopotamus, a small head and looks like a lizard's head, and a naked and thick tail at the base like an aardvark.  It was also pointed out that there is something like a proboscis on the head.

Another mysterious creature, over which modern cryptozoologists are puzzling, and which was also described by Hitchens in his diaries, is a certain nandi bear or kerit. It is also a large creature, similar in description to a huge hyena.

He has almost no neck, an elongated muzzle, small ears and a shuffling gait like a bear. Now it's hard to say exactly what Hitchens saw and how much truth there is in his stories. But he was one of those who stood at the very origins of cryptozology, the science of mysterious animals that are not recognized by science and personally visited the places where these creatures probably live.