The Pacific Commercial Advertiser

STRANGE BEAST ON THE CARRIER DOVE

On board the four-masted schooner Carrier Dove, which vessel reached this port in distress on Saturday morning, Captain Jensen has one of the most remarkable living creatures, perhaps, that was ever brought to the islands. The Captain captured the strange beast, whatever it is, in the Booze river, in the Sofala district of South Africa, about half a dozen miles from the sea. It was engaged in a hot fight with a Kaffir dog at the time of the capture. Otherwise no man would have dared approach close enough to throw a rope around its neck.

The uncanny beast, whatever it is, looks like a rat, only it is about fifty times as large as any rat that ever lived, and it is utterly savage and untamable. It is kept in a barred cage, on the top of the pile of sand that forms the bulk of the schooner's ballast, and it begins snarling and growling the moment any one goes near its cage, and does not cease its hostile demonstration until the intruder has gone away.

The unknown monster is shaped precisely like a rat, with a rat's thin nose and long tail. It has sharp incisors, also like those of a rat, and a rat's adeptness in their use. It is of the gray rat color, about three feet long in the body, and weighs probably forty or fifty pounds. It has been shown by Captain Jensen to a number of experts in natural history, but no one of them has as yet been able to identify it. Captain Jensen feeds the beast on canned meat, which it eats with greedy relish, and has the hope that he will be able to deliver it to the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington. The Captain has, likewise, a long string of fine pairs of horns of the eland hanging in the hold of the Carrier Dove.