John Alfred Jordan and the Dingonek of the Maggori River

The story belongs to one man. John Alfred Jordan was a British hunter and trader who worked the Lake Victoria region. He was also known as a notorious ivory poacher. He was host and guide to the American hunter Edgar Beecher Bronson. In camp, Jordan told him about the Maggori River. Today it is the Migori River, in south-west Kenya. It runs into Lake Victoria.

The year usually given is 1907. Jordan called the animal "that infernal horror of a reptilian bounder." Had he seen one? "Did I? Rather! Mataia, the boy there, and Mosoni were with me." Mataia was chief of the Manga Lumbwa. Mosoni was a scout. The boy was never named.

The thing in the river was "fourteen or fifteen feet long, head big as that of a lioness but shaped and marked like a leopard, two long white fangs sticking down straight out of his upper jaw, back broad as a hippo, scaled like an armadillo, but colored and marked like a leopard." A broad finned tail drove it through the water.

Jordan fired a .303 hard-nosed bullet from about ten yards. He believed he hit it. In a later telling, he described what came next. "The beast turned and, facing the bank, leapt straight upwards into the air, standing, as it appeared to me, 10 or 12 feet on end." Then, in his words, "losing my nerve, I scrambled up the bank." The creature ran off with surprising speed.

It left tracks in the mud. Clawed prints as wide as a hippo's. Jordan searched for two days along several miles of shoreline and found nothing more. No body. No blood. No photograph. The nightmares stayed. "I know Dingonek were trying to crawl into my blankets for weeks after we saw that bounder." When Bronson's doubt showed, Jordan offered his witnesses. "Ask Mataia, Mosoni, or the lad there what they saw."

There was no official inquiry. But the creature had a name and a following. The Lumbwa, Baganda, Wasoga and Kavirondo peoples knew of it, and sacrificed cattle and sheep to it. James Martin, a former Collector in Uganda, confirmed periodic reports of a great water serpent. C. W. Hobley, Senior Deputy Commissioner in Nairobi, said it was known as "Luquata." In 1913, Hobley described a witness on the Mara River who had also shot at a 16 ft animal, "spotted like a leopard, covered with scales, and having a head like an otter."

Everything rests on a single storyteller, and Jordan was a showman. The main conventional explanation is the Nile monitor lizard. Scaly, spotted, a strong swimmer driven by its tail. A Book of Creatures notes that the Maa word ɔl-máɨ́má means both "cripple" and Nile monitor. Bernard Heuvelmans first suggested a surviving prehistoric crocodile. Later he proposed an aquatic sabre-toothed cat, its wet fur clumped like scales. That idea goes back to Ingo Krumbiegel in 1947.

Bronson printed the story in In Closed Territory in 1910. Jordan told it himself in The Wide World Magazine in 1917. Maclean's reprinted it in January 1918 and called the evidence "very positive and believable." Then the legend grew. Pangolin scales, a single horn, a stinger tail, a "Jungle Walrus" nickname, a move to the Congo. None of it is in Jordan's account.