Back in 2009 I posted about refernces on the Patagonian hippopotamus.
In it I noted that Jules Verne had mentioned this animal in one of his books (Deux Ans de vacances), from where (see page 250) is the text quoted below, which I translated from its original French into English. In it, he mentions the hippopotamus:
"Around eight o'clock, while the team was painfully making its way along the edge of the bog, the shouts of Cross and Webb, who were walking a little ahead, brought Doniphan running first, then the others after him.
In the middle of the Bogwoods mud, about a hundred paces away, wallowed an enormous animal that the young hunter immediately recognized. It was a hippopotamus, fat and pink, which—fortunately for him—disappeared beneath the thick tangle of the marsh before it could be shot. What good, anyway, was such a useless shot!
"What's that big beast?" asked Dole, quite worried just from having glimpsed it.
"It's a hippopotamus," Gordon replied.
"A hippopotamus!... What a funny name!" "It's like a river horse," replied Briant.
"But it doesn't look like a horse!" Costar remarked very aptly.
"No!" cried Service, "and I think we would have done better to call it a pigpotamus!"
The original English language translation appeared in 1889 as a two-volume edition "Two Year's Vacation". It was also published in the UK under the name "Adrift in the Pacific".
On page 165 Verne also has the marooned boys find a ñandú, the South American ostrich, a distant relative of the African ostrich. They also hunted guanacos on the island.
Below is an engraving from the book (source) with the castaways lasooing guanacos in a thick forest.
There are no ñandús or guanacos on the western side of the Andes, they don't live in the rain-drenched islands along the coast. They are creatures of the arid steppe, to the east of the Andes. Right animals, wrong place. In the case of the hippopotamus, it is wrong animal, wrong place. Why would Verne place a hippopotamus on the island?
The boys are shipwrecked on an Island on the Southwestern Pacific coast of Chile, they named it Chairman Island, after their boarding-school in Auckland, New Zealand. The real island would probably be Hannover Island.
The castaways manage to get back to civilization and reach Punta Arenas, Chile.
Hippos in South America
There have been references (see my 2009 post) about hippos in South America, and I have found another one.
Thomas Ewbank, in his work "A Description of the Indian Antiquities Brought from Chile and Peru" published in 1855, (see pages 134 and 135 displays an image (below, red arrow "I") and comments that "Figure I. Is a calcareous stone, wrought in imitation of a bear or hippopotamus. The resemblance to the latter is the greatest; but the difficulty is, how ancient Peruvians could obtain a knowldege of that animal."
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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