The Sheridan Boy and the Striped Queensland Tiger, Cardwell (1871)

Cardwell sits in the Rockingham Bay district of north Queensland. Its Police Magistrate from 1870 to 1878 was Brinsley Guise Sheridan. He was commissioned by the Queensland Government to choose the site of Cairns on Trinity Bay, and he was said to descend from the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sheridan never saw the animal himself. His son did.

The boy was 13. One retelling calls him "accustomed to run the woods like an old hunter." No source records his name. He was out one day with a small terrier when the dog picked up a scent and followed it with eagerness. By one account the trail ran for half a mile from a piece of scrub.

The boy ran after his dog. He found himself face to face with an animal of the size of a dingo, crouching in the high grass about a mile from the coast. It had "a round head like that of a cat" and a long tail. Its body was striped with yellow and black, from the ribs under the belly.

The dog and the beast grappled. The boy tried to kill the animal with a pistol shot. He only wounded it, and it grew more furious. In the words of the 1890 retelling, "he judged it prudent to beat a retreat."

Modern cryptozoology summaries tell it differently. In their version the striped "cat" went up a tree, turned aggressive when the dog growled, and chased the boy and his dog home. No source consulted holds both the pistol and the tree. They may be pieces of the same story.

Sheridan wrote to Philip Lutley Sclater, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London. Sclater read the letter at a meeting of the Society. On 16 November 1871, Nature reported that he had "called attention to the supposed existence of an undescribed animal, of about the size of a Dingo, in the Rockingham Bay district of Queensland." The letter was printed in the Society's Proceedings for 1871. There was no expedition. No specimen. The animal was wounded, not killed.

Other strange reports came out of the Cardwell district. A police officer of the same district, Reginald Uhr, is said to have seen the same animal. A man named Hull, working with a party of five near the Murray and Mackay Rivers north of Cardwell, heard a loud roar near the tents at night. Next morning he sketched the tracks and sent the tracing to England. Tony Healy and Paul Cropper also note a possible earlier "tiger" report from Cardwell in 1864, from "a particularly disreputable bullock driver."

In 1890 the Melbourne Leader used the case to argue for "a carnivorous marsupial more or less analogous, if not identical, with the thylacine." Cryptozoologists have more often pointed to a surviving marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex. Others have proposed an unknown large dasyurid, a large feral cat, an escaped puma or leopard, a tree-kangaroo, a spotted-tailed quoll or a dingo. No hoax has ever been alleged.

The Queensland tiger has since filled pages in Bernard Heuvelmans's On the Track of Unknown Animals, Karl Shuker's Mystery Cats of the World and Healy and Cropper's Out of the Shadows. It reached television through *Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World*. The boy who faced it in the grass remains unnamed.