Chapter Text
In 1933, a single discovery, a single event, changed and shook the world forever.
In New York City, Carl Denham, a rumored controversial film director known to bring back stunning natural wildlife footage from the most dangerous of territories, had brought and unveiled to a stunned crowd at the Alhambra Theater a true wonder that he had discovered eight weeks ago on an uncharted island way west of Sumatra of the Dutch East Indies.
Not a movie...but a creature that was neither beast nor man.
A gorilla that was twenty-five feet tall and weighed in at 8-12 tons...
KONG, THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD!!!!
The beast's discovery brought awe, wonder, shock...and terror.
When Kong, also known as 'King Kong', was shot down from atop of the Empire State Building by F8C-5 Helldivers of the U.S Navy's fighting squadron VF-1B (also known as the 'Tophatters'), the story of his own life might've ended...
But not the story of his homeland: the infamous Skull Island, also known as the Island of the Skull.
Located at 6°05'00.0"S 93°00'00.0"E in the Indian Ocean, surrounded by a dense fog bank and just as mysterious or even more so than Kong, Skull Island was a complete geological and evolutionary anomaly that harbored both wonders and horrors from a bygone age.
One American museum curator had written in his journal: 'This island is a zoologist's dream—and a field scientist's nightmare.'
Shaped like a large hand with long, skeletal fingers and named for a distinctive knoll in the center that bears resemblance to a human head, little wondered why Skull Island lay undiscovered for so long. Well, the reason for that was because the island was located in the heart of a region afflicted by both intense magnetic anomalies and violent sea storms, not to mention that the very rock that Skull Island was built on was treacherous.
When Kong was revealed to the public on that fateful winter night in New York City, the giant gorilla delivered the scientific community a one-two punch that sent it reeling with the impact of this incredible discovery and subsequent tragic loss. But Kong, whose species was being named as Megaprimatus kong by the scientific community; it was just the beginning.
An entire island, bursting with prehistoric wonders, existed. If Kong had shocked the scientific world, Skull Island's emergence from the shroud of legend into reality shook it to its core. Not since the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus on October 12th, 1492, had mankind been offered such an opportunity to explore a land trapped in time. Kong's chest-beating roar at the summit of the Empire State Building heralded the greatest discovery of the century; arguably, the millennium.
In the wake of Skull Island's unveiling and somewhat reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa, universities and private organizations from all over the world fumbled to dispatch teams to investigate and catalog both of the island's wonders and secrets. The race of the century was on as rival expeditions fought for exclusivity and justification, with each one asserting its own legal standing to be first on Skull Island. Of the twenty-four different expeditions that journeyed to the island at the start of 1934, only six of them (three American, one French, one British and one Dutch) successfully made landfall; and of those, half of them were woefully unprepared for the terrors that awaited them there.
Skull Island almost immediately ate up the French and two of the three American expeditions with the appetite of a full-grown Vastatosaurus rex, which were ruling the landmass in Kong's absence. Although the remaining American, British and Dutch expeditions were slightly better prepared, they still suffered heavy losses.
One Dutch zoologist had written in his journal: 'As much a danger to the expedition as any dinosaur was the despair. While we were walking among wonders, the constant danger and our tragic losses were hard to bear. They certainly took their toll.'
Despite this, the surviving members of all six expeditions were still able to discover and catalog at least 15% of Skull Island's fauna. Also, the surviving ecologist (who was British) was able to break down the island's complex ecosystem into six major habitats:
- The Crumbling Coast and Village
- The Shrinking Lowlands
- The Winding Swamps and Waterways
- The Steaming Jungle
- The Abyssal Chasms
- The Barren Uplands
After the first two months of 1934, the remnants of all six expeditions returned home from Skull Island with some answers...and even fewer with their very own lives.
Upon hearing the tragic losses they had suffered on Skull Island, a properly-prepared, jointly-managed and financed effort was finally organized by the three biggest interests in the United States of America (the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City). And the man they had chosen to lead this three-month expedition was none other than Carl Denham himself.
After Kong's death, Denham had narrowly escaped lawsuits by blaming the giant gorilla's rampage on New York City on both the company that made the chrome steel chains that failed to hold him and the newspaper reporters with their flashbulb cameras that enraged Kong in the first place.
Shortly after making landfall on Skull Island on May 25th, 1934, Carl Denham's scientific expedition began to systematically explore and document the island. Project 8th Wonder (as the expedition was called) suffered its own share of mishaps and attrition, but it was a far cry from the earlier, ill-founded attempts. By the end of August, the members of the expedition had managed to discover and catalog the rest of Skull Island's fauna. Not only that, but they had exposed more of the island's secrets as well.
It was discovered that tiny Skull Island was once part of the vast and ancient continent of Gondwana or Gondwanaland in prehistoric times. What came to be Skull Island was a stretch near the coast of the great Tethys Sea or the Tethys Ocean, rich in life. When this landmass broke away, many of the prehistoric ancestors of Skull Island's modern inhabitants rode with it, guaranteeing their survival when catastrophe and ecological change wiped them out everywhere else in the world. Others joined later, rafting, swimming or flying to the island sanctuary. Land bridges came and went, bringing new fauna, each adding to the diversity of the island.
Another secret was that due to Skull Island being located close to the boundary of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates, the earthquakes there had produced massive fissures, which during the days of the dinosaurs, housed geothermal vents. According to one hypothesis, these geothermal vents kept the island temperate and even tropical, allowing the dinosaurs there to survive when the asteroid that struck the Earth sixty-five million years ago caused a prolonged global winter that wiped out their neighboring mainland inhabitants and 70% of all life on Earth.
The most important realization of this expedition was the understanding that Skull Island was too new, too strange and above all, too dangerous to explore and study in such a short space of time. With countless discoveries of new animal behaviors every day, it became painfully clear that decades of study might scrape the surface of what Skull Island had hidden from the world for so long. Project 8th Wonder was eventually expanded into a long-term study with annual expeditions; the long-term goal being the establishment of a permanent base of operations on the island.
Sadly, however, this was not to be.
As time went on, February 1st, 1935, was considered to be a turning point for the story of the creatures of Skull Island. On that day, an earthquake struck the island, sinking a small part of it and killing five team members of the Project 8th Wonder expedition that observed it. The lucky survivors then began conducting surveys of the seafloor around Skull Island, allowing past footprints of the coastline to be mapped with reasonable accuracy, and what the remaining members of the expedition discovered shocked them to the core.
The geologists on the previous expeditions to Skull Island had made a grave miscalculation: it turns out that the island was currently sitting square on top of the turbulent boundary of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates. The plates rolled over one another and stresses caused violent fracturing of the Indo-Australian plate beneath Skull Island. Significant volcanic activity had resulted in fissures and pressure spots creating land and forcing molten rock to the surface, while at the same time, great chunks of the island fell into the deep subduction trench that marked the plate edge. Skull Island owed its creation to the same forces that were tearing it to pieces by the mid-20th century.
In other words, the very same geological miracle that led to the survival of the dinosaurs on Skull Island had also cursed the island to a watery grave.
The coastline shattered and fell away while the entirety of Skull Island was slowly sinking. In the island's heart, volcanic forces brought mud and water bubbling to the surface, while other areas were gnawed hollow from beneath, leaving a crumbling land full of jagged abutments and bottomless chasms. As Skull Island eroded over the millennia and habitats were lost, life was concentrated into ever-shrinking areas. Competition became fierce and the island saw an evolutionary arms race erupt, forging into a menagerie of nightmares.
When it was heard that Kong's island home was slowly sinking into the Indian Ocean, many people either saw this with a 'such a pity' or a 'good riddance' gesture.
But one man, however, saw this as both a threat and an opportunity.
Carl Denham, who became pretty wealthy due to him being paid to guide expeditions on Skull Island, didn't wish to see what made him rich and famous to sink and in turn take his fame and glory along with it. While there was nothing that he could do to stop the island's sinking, the former film director did start to make plans to capture and contain as many if not all of Skull Island's creatures as he could so that he could breed them and they could still exist, even after the island sank beneath the churning waters of the Indian Ocean.
But there was one major problem...
Due to the incident with Kong in New York City and knowing how dangerous most of the creatures of Skull Island were, no zoo or aquarium in the world would even dare try to house and exhibit any one of those animals. In those days, few zoos or aquariums like those in the U.S were willing to take in a dangerous bull African Bush Elephant or an aggressive Bull Shark respectively, and fewer or none were willing to take in creatures that were even worse. So, Carl would have to try something or someplace else.
As he was trying to figure it out, Denham accidentally stumbled upon a German mining company that have lost their interest on a tropical island of theirs by the name of Isla Sorna, which was located 207 miles west off the coast of the Republic of Costa Rica and was also part of a remote island chain known as the Muertes Archipelago (consisting of Isla Sorna, Isla Pena, Isla Muerta, Isla Matanceros and Isla Tacaño).
Not only was Isla Sorna remote enough and cheap to buy, but it was also way larger and more geologically stable (despite being volcanic in origin) than Skull Island. It was also full of local invertebrates, avians, reptiles, pigs, goats, mice, fish, amphibians and cattle that would satisfy appetites of the ravenous Skull Island carnivores and omnivores; making a sort of buffering effect for the Skull Island herbivores, smaller insects and other creatures so that they could recover without the carnivores and omnivores seriously affecting their numbers.
Besides its excellent jungles and lowlands, Isla Sorna also had two marshes/lakes, along with six good-sized swamps and waterways for the aquatic Skull Island animals and fish, not to mention the four chasms that were ideal for the seven animal species of Skull Island's Abyssal Chasms. Plus, Isla Sorna's uplands and coastline were near-identical to those found on Skull Island.
In short, it would be paradise for the Skull Island fauna.
After he had bought Isla Sorna and started to organize both his operations and his team (which went slowly due to making thorough background checks on each member), Denham was then approached by an old friend of both his late father and his late stepmother, Preston B. Whitmore, the CEO of Whitmore Industries. A private billionaire, industrialist, shipping magnate, philanthropist and dinosaur enthusiast, Whitmore had shown great interest in Carl's mission to save as many of Skull Island's creatures and wanted to help, if possible, such as providing the former film director with ships and their crews from his company to help transport the animals from Skull Island to their new home on Isla Sorna.
It was then that Denham suddenly realized the weak point in his plan: he lacked the adequate shipping needed to transport the Skull Island fauna to Isla Sorna. Needing all the help he can get, Carl agreed to Whitmore's proposal. During that time, the two of them both realized that from the signs of trouble in both Europe and in the Pacific that a Second World War was going to commence sooner or later, which would interfere with their rescue mission (which was being called Project Legacy), meaning that they had a limited time window.
During the summer of 1935, Carl and his team successfully set up operations on Isla Sorna by building both a small outpost to study the Skull Island creatures in their new home and a port to supply it. Once that was done, Denham immediately sailed off to Skull Island with his rescue expedition. Back on Isla Sorna, a team from Whitmore Industries began building a massive complex of heavily-reinforced paddocks, pens, enclosures, aviaries, bughouses and aquariums for the incoming Skull Island fauna. They were to be housed there until they were ready to be released into the wilds of Isla Sorna.
Meanwhile, the rescue expedition consisted of fifteen very large modern cargo ships that were twice as wide than normal ones and outfitted with heavily-reinforced cranes, along with six small modern oil tankers that were carefully converted (after being very thoroughly cleaned) to carry fish and other aquatic creatures comfortably during their journey, and eight smaller boats that were designed to handle both rivers and the open ocean. All twenty-nine ships and their crews were on loan from Whitmore Industries.
Their passengers consisted not only scientists, but also dozens of professional and heavily-experienced animal wranglers and other kinds of workers (many of whom were veterans of World War 1), along with dozens of mules and forty Indian Elephants with their mahouts. Due to the terrain of Skull Island, mules and elephants would be much more useful than any tractor or car would.
Besides restraining equipment, including experimental gas grenades, everybody would be armed to the teeth (consisting of Luger P08 or Colt Commercial Model 1911A1 Pistols, Winchester Model 1897 Riot Pump-Action Shotguns, M1928 Thompson Submachine Guns (SMGs) and Gewehr 1898 Bolt-Action Rifles).
Project Legacy had begun.