Brian Rudman: NZ hoax went round world

COMMENT

My colleague Ana Samways' list of Best April Fool's Day hoaxes yesterday left out the really best April Fool's joke of all.

One pulled off in the pages of this paper back in 1883 that reverberated around the world, solemnly reported as fact in hundreds of world newspapers, from the London Times to the San Francisco News.

It was Herald columnist George Reed's world "scoop" that Noah's Ark had been discovered intact in a glacier on Mt Ararat.

These were obviously more trusting times, when the words of columnists were taken as gospel, and CNN couldn't ruin the prankster's fun by flying in a squad of sleuths to bring live coverage from the scene of the find.

Mr Reed, a presbyterian minister and legendary newspaperman around Australia and New Zealand, later claimed his aim had been "to indite ... humbug".

I'm not sure what that means, but even he must have been amused and impressed at just how successful his little prank (or should I say, inditing) turned out, being regurgitated in the principal British, American and Australian papers, translated into German and even popping up as fact in Constantinople - now Istanbul - whence Mr Reed had "sourced" his tale.

He attributed his story to the Levant Herald, which in fact had been out of business for two years, its editor behind bars for criticising the local ruler.

A series of avalanches had rocked Mt Ararat, began the story, quoting London "telegraphs" revealing that villages had been destroyed and hundreds killed.

In the aftermath, Turkish government officials had found the wooden remains of Noah's Ark protruding from a glacier.

Mr Reed claimed 20 to 30 feet of the boat was exposed. The wood was not local to the area, but from the Euphrates, "the ancient gopher wood of Scripture".

He reported it as "in good state of preservation, being painted or stained ... with a dark brown pigment".

The British and German governments were taking steps to protect the sacred relic after rumours that an American entrepreneur had begun negotiations with the local "pasha" to remove it to the United States for exhibition.

It was Mr Reed's most successful hoax story, but not the only one. In February of that year, he'd made mock of the original Mr "Think Big" of New Zealand politics, Julius Vogel, by announcing the "De Lesseps-Vogel" Panama Canal scheme.

At the time, Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, was three years into his failed attempt to repeat his Suez triumph in the Americas.

Mr Reed revealed that for just £2 million Vogel and de Lesseps would build a 6-metre-wide trench across Central America then sit back and watch the Gulf Stream pour through and scour out, within 12 months, a great opening.

The current would continue across the Pacific to the west coast of Australia, bringing with it enough rain to restore fertility to the barren interior.

Mr Vogel, revealed the columnist, planned to acquire the vast and worthless inland plains of Australia, then, when the rains came and the pasture sprouted, settle 10 million migrants there within eight years.

And just to show where our Pommy-baiting comes from, the Irish-born Reed had a boot in the tail for the mother country.

The diversion of the Gulf Stream through the new Panama canal would turn the British Isles into an icy wilderness, he gloated, and the British would have to accept the inevitable removal of the seat of empire "to southern climes".

In an earlier spoof he described how sailors on HMS Beagle, cruising the Greenland coast, had discovered a team of Americans dynamiting great chunks of ice and floating them down as icebergs to the coast of Britain in order to visit disaster on British farmers.

All very droll, but of course we're better educated these days and would instantly see through anything so transparently far-fetched. Wouldn't we?

It would be like trying to convince us that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that could be unleashed within the hour. Or that Auckland City council has a way of running a V8 car race without causing terminal gridlock.