03-07-2025
Enter the dragon: When science catches up with folklore
One of the Komodo dragons encountered by the author on a recent trip to Indonesia's Komodo Island. (Photo by Andrew Benfield)
ANDREW BENFIELD
"Here be dragons" was a poetic turn of phrase used by cartographers in the past to indicate terra incognita. But it was unwittingly accurate on one 16th-century map of what is now Indonesia. Though the area in question was unexplored by Europeans at the time, it was already well traveled by local people, who had long known it as Nusa Nipa, or Dragon Island.
When Europeans arrived at the island's coastal villages to trade, they heard tales of fearsome beasts lurking inland, but dismissed them as fairy tales and folklore. It was only centuries later, when a curious Dutch colonial officer traveled to the interior and returned carrying the dead body of a Komodo dragon, that outsiders realized the locals had been telling the truth all along.
