The Alligator
Surprisingly, in the Nordic Animal Exhibit one can see the only caught, wild alligator in Sweden.
On a cold day in September 1877, a couple of young boys named Wille Andersson and Alfred Nordfeldt were heading along a canal called Karls grav after a trip to Halleberg. They sat down by the canal in the hopes of catching a ride back to town with a passing boat. Suddenly, a live alligator crawled up out of the water in front of them. The boys were both surprised and excited and thus, began calling for attention on some workers nearby. One of the men hunted down the alligator and spiked it right through its neck with a boat hook.
The boys grabbed, the now dead, alligator and brought it to their biology teacher, Gustaf von Hackwitz (1838-1913), who was obviously puzzled by the occurrence of a wild alligator in the cold
waters of Vänern. After he examined it, it was decided that the alligator would be preserved and placed in the Grammar school’s museum where it was exhibited until 1891 when it was relocated to Vänersborg’s museum.
The mystery, of why the alligator had turned up, in what is a very unnatural environment for an alligator, was later resolved. Prior to its appearance in Sweden, it had been captured in Florida by adventurer Josef Henschen who had planned to donate the alligator to the natural history collection at Uppsala University. When traveling to Sweden, on a steamer named Baltzar von Platen, it was contained in a box. Somehow though, the alligator had managed to escape the box and had crawled into the cold water.
