SACRED, HYPOCRITICAL, ARMOUR-PLATED?
CROCODILES AND ALLIGATORS

The Times, July 2002

You must never smile at a crocodile, however seductively he leers. "Come hither, little one", whispers the crocodile on the banks of the Limpopo River at the inquisitive, gullible Elephant's Child in Kipling's Just So Stories. Nineteenth-century European images of crocodiles, normally Nil-dwellers, picked on this hypocrisy.

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

runs the song in Alice in Wonderland. A.E. Housman wrote a strangely bilious satiric poem on public decency as a Nile crocodile swallowing (ie clothing) a naked local child so European travellers are not offended.

Come, awful infant, come and be
Dressed, if nothing else, in me.

This monster cares only about the child's exterior, not its welfare:

The infant, clad in crocodile,
Meekly yields his youthful breath
To darkness, decency, and death.

As for the crocodile, says the poet, dotting every i,

Its conduct does not seem to me
Consistent with sincerity.

Crocodile tears of false remorse are further tokens of hypocrisy. A thirteenth-century Franciscan monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote in his Encyclopaedia of natural science, "If the crocodile findeth a man by the brim of the water he slayeth him there if he may, then weepeth upon him and swalloweth him at last". In the fourteen century Mandeville's Travels popularized the motif. It spread to Shakespeare, and into the over-active imagination of a sixteenth-century slaver John Hawkins, who watched Caribbean crocodiles "cry and sobbe like a Christian body" to lure sympathetic victims into range before devouring them.

This was guilt projected from what he was up to himself, for what really happen is that a crocodile's lachrymal glands secrete protein-filled fluid behind the nictitating membrane: the third eyelid which sweeps across the eye's surface like a J-cloth to clean it and protect it when the crocodile submerges.You see these tears when the crocodile has been out of the water a long time and its eyes are drying.
So much for remorse. Hawkins should have examined his own eyes (and conscience) a little more closely instead.

Cultures that actually live with crocodiles have a wider range of associations, from terror to reverence. In parts of ancient Egypt they were connected with sunrise and flooding. "Having swallowed the moon (i.e. conquered the night) he wept", to make the Nile rise. At Thebes, a young crocodile was reared in a temple, decorated with jewels. Sobek the crocodile or crocodile-headed god was cheif deity of the Faiyum, a lake depression at the end of an offshoot of the Nile whose lake must once have gleamed and boiled with crocodiles.

But he was worshipped in other places too, and often shown with the Feather of Truth (which judged the soul of the dead man and decided his after-life fate). He shared an oracle, too, with Isis – for the crocodile was the ultimate truth of the river round which the whole culture was built. It was sacred, and sometimes mummified. Amazing energy (and endurance – think of the smell for a start) went into mummifying the hundreds of crocodiles excavated from a necropolis, now stored like stacked-up RSJs in the temple of Hathor at Kom Ombo on the Nile.

India's ancient civilizations also depended on powerful rivers and the crocodile, their underwater ruler, has a prime place in Hindu religion. River Ganga depends on a crocodile for her visits to the Bay of Bengal from the Himalayas; the rain-god Varuna rides on the crocodile Makara. But there also stories of its rapaciousness. When the elephant Gajendra is attacked he appeals to Vishnu who kills the crocodile for him. In moral educational stories, rather like Aesop's, crocodile Ugly-Mug stands for brute strength, outwitted by, for instamce, the vulnerable but intelligent monkey.

In Malaysia, a crocodile supposedly has two pairs of eyes, one for daylight, another for night and under water, and a special stomach where it hides human clothes. A child who falls into a river turns into a crocodile. (It begins by growing a tail; the head stays human longest.) In parts of Java, crocodiles were traditionally related to people and protected them from illness. Regular sacrifices were brought to the river; after giving birth women wrapped the placenta in leaves, placed little lamps on it, and floated it downriver as an offering to ancestors whose spirits lived in crocodiles.

In fact, the twenty-three species of crocodilians all over the world (except Europe) are, fascinatingly, the closest thing to a dinosaur left. The lineage is 240 million years old. There are three subfamilies: alligatorinae (the alligators of China and the USA, whose lower teeth cannot be seen when their mouths are closed, and South America's caimans); crocodylinae, "true" crocodiles; and gavialinae, the pin-nosed gharials. All have integumentary sense organs, sensory cells in their thick scaly skin, but alligators and caimans only have them around jaw, nose, and eyes, while crocodiles and gharials have them all over the body.826

The word "alligator" comes from Spanish el lagarto, "the lizard", but crocodilians are in many ways related more closely to birds. Biologically, both have an elongated ear canal, muscled gizzard, and separate ventricles of the heart. Behaviourally, most species build nests from plant material, lay eggs, and go in (as dinosaurs presumably did) for long-term parenting. In Florida's wetlands, you can see mother alligators with babies on their backs. The mother may stay near for over a year: a young alligator in distress croaks a series of sharp calls, just like an upset baby bird, that brings her running.

Hunted for skins and food everywhere until the mid twenetieth century, crocodilia are able to reproduce quite fast if their habitat is left alone. The Chinese alligator (which diverged from its American counterpart twenty million years ago and is six foot long, only half its cousin's size) is losing its habitat most quickly and is therefore most endangered: closely followed by the Philippine, Siamese, Cuban and Orinoco crocodiles. The largest species - the world's largest living reptile – is the saltwater or estuarine crocodile.