The second cause of even still more recent ill feeling in Daintree was the eighteen-foot crocodile in whose belly only the fingernails of his female victim had been found. We’d read about the case in the newspapers while we were still in England, but we came to hear some of its more frightful details from one of the actors in the ensuing drama, an urbane middle-aged European with a polished forehead and a gold chain around his neck, who ran the Daintree souvenir shop and had spoken out against the wanton destruction of crocodiles which had followed the accident. Why blame them? he had asked. The crocs were just being crocs, doing what any croc would do. Anyone fooling about in that river, known to be infested with crocodiles, was asking for trouble. ‘I’d been out in it after a party myself, only a few days before,’ he told us. ‘A few of us had gone for a swim. I was the last. It’s a known fact that a crocodile will only ever take the last person in a group. I suddenly became frightened. I had bad feelings. I knew I had to get out of that water fast. Drunk as I was I knew I shouldn’t have been in there. If anything had got me it would have been entirely my own fault.’

Beryl Wruck hadn’t been swimming. She’d simply been larking about on the jetty after a barbecue. She had a drink in her hand. And a few of her friends were by her. It was low tide and maybe her feet were in an inch or so of river on the bottom steps of the jetty. Then there was a sudden violent agitation of water, though not a sound from the woman, and that was the last anyone saw of her until her fingernails showed up three weeks later.

The shooting began early the very next morning, men arriving from miles around with guns and rifles. Ready to shoot up anything in the river that moved. They called themselves the ‘Daintree vigilantes’. By the time the patrols had finished – and the night-time ones had been especially exciting, full of wild talk and booze – upwards of twenty crocodiles had been accounted for.

The man at the souvenir shop had not been the only one to raise his voice against the slaughter. ‘It divided the town down the middle,’ he said. The old hands against the new. I knew the scenario. I knew how the sides would have fallen out in North Cornwall. ‘There was even talk one night,’ he said, ‘of them lynching me. But that was just drink.’