During his third expedition to South America, in 1820, the Roman Catholic naturalist Charles Waterton found himself in a rather awkward situation. An avid collector and taxidermist, Waterton had travelled 540 km through the ‘wilds of Guiana’ with his entourage to obtain a perfect cayman specimen for the museum at his country house back in Yorkshire. Now, faced with the furious beast stuck fast to the end of a rope – it had swallowed a baited hook cast into the Essequibo river – Waterton was at a loss. His helpers were divided: some wanted to kill it with arrows, whilst others preferred to shoot it. Either would have been disastrous. Waterton wanted a perfect specimen, not a mutilated one, and so there was only one thing for it: it had to be taken alive. Grabbing a canoe mast for protection, Waterton crouched down by the bank of the river, holding the mast like a bayonet, and ordered the men to haul the unhappy reptile out of the water. As soon as it was landed, he leapt fearlessly onto its back, turning half round as he vaulted, and grabbed hold of its forelegs, twisting them behind its back to serve as a bridle as the men continued to drag the pair further inland to safety. ‘It was the first and last time I was ever on a cayman's back’, Waterton later explained. ‘Should it be asked, how I managed to keep my seat, I would answer, – I hunted some years with Lord Darlington's fox hounds’. In 1825, Waterton published an account of this and many other adventures as Wanderings in South America, the North-west of the United States and the Antilles, in the Years 1812, 1816, 1820 & 1824. Before long, the cayman anecdote had been reprinted in virtually all the newspapers, and the caricature shown in Figure I.1 could be seen in print shop windows across Britain. People flocked from all around to the home of the celebrated naturalist to view his collection of specimens, the unfortunate cayman amongst them.