In 1943, a camouflaged vessel departed from Australia en route to England, carrying a highly classified cargo: a single, juvenile platypus.
Dubbed “Winston,” after the then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, this rare monotreme was an unprecedented offering from a nation seeking to bolster favor amid the escalating conflict in the Pacific.
However, mere days before its anticipated arrival, the young platypus was discovered deceased within its specially designed habitat, a “platypusary.”
Fearing a potential diplomatic crisis, Winston’s untimely demise – and indeed, his very existence – was discreetly concealed.
The platypus was preserved, stuffed, and quietly relegated to a shelf within Churchill’s office, with whispers of a demise attributed to Nazi submarine-induced shell shock subtly circulating.
The mystery surrounding the true cause of death has remained unsolved – until now.
The platypus has long captivated the world. This egg-laying mammal, distinguished by its duck-like bill and feet, an otter-shaped body, and a beaver-inspired tail, was initially dismissed by many as an elaborate hoax.
For Churchill, an avid collector of rare and exotic fauna, the platypus’s unique allure only intensified his desire to acquire one – or even six – for his menagerie.
In 1943, he conveyed this sentiment to the Australian foreign minister, H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt.
Evatt viewed the existing export ban on the species, along with the inherent challenges of transporting such delicate creatures over vast distances, as mere obstacles to be overcome.
With Australia feeling increasingly isolated as the Japanese advanced, the prospect of securing Churchill’s support through the gift of platypuses was deemed a worthwhile endeavor.
Conservationist David Fleay, tasked with assisting the mission, expressed reservations.
“Imagine any man carrying the responsibilities Churchill did, with humanity on the rack in Europe and Asia, finding time to even think about, let alone want, half-a-dozen duckbilled platypuses,” he wrote in his 1980 book Paradoxical Platypus.
According to Mr. Fleay’s account, he managed to persuade the politicians to reduce the number from six to one, and the young Winston was subsequently captured from a river near Melbourne.
An elaborate platypusary, featuring hay-lined burrows and fresh Australian creek water, was meticulously constructed; a menu of 50,000 worms – and duck egg custard as a treat – was prepared; and an attendant was hired to cater to the animal’s every need throughout the 45-day voyage.
Winston journeyed across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and into the Atlantic Ocean, before tragedy struck.
In a letter to Evatt, Churchill expressed his “grief” at the platypus’s demise during the final leg of the journey.
“Its loss is a great disappointment to me,” he stated.
The mission’s failure was concealed for years to avert public outcry. Eventually, reports of Winston’s demise surfaced, attributing the death to a German U-boat encounter and the resulting explosions.
“A small animal equipped with a nerve-packed, super sensitive bill, able to detect even the delicate movements of a mosquito wriggler on stream bottoms in the dark of night, cannot hope to cope with man-made enormities such as violent explosions,” Mr Fleay wrote, decades later.
“It was so obvious that, but for the misfortunes of war, a fine, thriving, healthy little platypus would have created history in being number one of its kind to take up residence in England.”
“It is a tempting story, isn’t it?” PhD student Harrison Croft tells the BBC.
But it’s one that has long raised suspicions.
And so last year, Mr Croft embarked on his own journey: a search for truth.
Accessing archives in both Canberra and London, the Monash University student found a bunch of records from the ship’s crew, including an interview with the platypus attendant charged with keeping Winston alive.
“They did a sort of post-mortem, and he was very particular. He was very certain that there was no explosion, that it was all very calm and quiet on board,” Mr Croft says.
A state away, another team in Sydney was looking into Winston’s life too. David Fleay’s personal collection had been donated to the Australian Museum, and staff all over the building were desperate to know if it held answers.
“You’d ride in the lifts and some doctor from mammalogy… [would ask] ‘what archival evidence is there that Winston died from depth charge detonations?'” the museum’s archive manager Robert Dooley tells the BBC.
“This is something that had intrigued people for a long time.”
With the help of a team of interns from the University of Sydney, they set about digitising all of Fleay’s records in a bid to find out.
Even as far back as the 1940s, people knew that platypuses were voracious eaters. Legend of the species’ appetite was so great that the UK authorities drafted an announcement offering to pay young boys to catch worms and deliver them to feed Winston upon his arrival.
In the platypus attendant’s logbook, the interns found evidence that his rations en route were being decreased as some of the worms began to perish.
But it was water and air temperatures, which had been noted down at 8am and 6pm every day, that held the key to solving the mystery.
These readings were taken at two of the cooler points of the day, and still, as the ship crossed the equator over about a week, the recorded temperatures climbed well beyond 27C – what we now know is the safe threshold for platypus travel.
With the benefit of hindsight – and an extra 80 years of scientific research into the species – the University of Sydney team determined Winston was essentially cooked alive.
While they can’t definitively rule out the submarine shell-shock story, they say the impact of those prolonged high temperatures alone would have been enough to kill Winston.
“It’s way easier to just shift the blame on the Germans, rather than say we weren’t feeding it enough, or we weren’t regulating its temperature correctly,” Ewan Cowan tells the BBC.
“History is totally dependent on who’s telling the story,” Paul Zaki adds.
Not to be dissuaded by its initial attempt at platypus diplomacy, Australia would try again in 1947.
High off the achievement of successfully breeding a platypus in captivity for the first time – a feat that wouldn’t be replicated for another 50 years – Mr Fleay convinced the Australian government to let the Bronx Zoo have three of the creatures in a bid to deepen ties with the US.
Unlike Winston’s secret journey across the Pacific, this voyage garnered huge attention. Betty, Penelope and Cecil docked in Boston to much fanfare, before the trio was reportedly escorted via limousine to New York City, where Australia’s ambassador was waiting to feed them the ceremonial first worm.
Betty would die soon after she arrived, but Penelope and Cecil quickly became celebrities. Crowds clamoured for a glimpse of the animals. A wedding was planned. The tabloids obsessed over their every move.
Platypus are solitary creatures, but New York had been promised lovers. And while Cecil was lovesick, Penelope was apparently sick of love. In the media, she was painted as a “brazen hussy”, “one of those saucy females who like to keep a male on a string”.
Until 1953 that is, when the pair had a four-day fling – rather upsettingly described as “all-night orgies of love” – fuelled by “copious quantities of crayfish and worms”.
Alas, Penelope soon began nesting, and the world excitedly awaited her platypups, which were to be a massive scientific milestone – only the second bred in captivity, and the first outside Australia.
After four months of princess treatment and double rations for Penelope, zookeepers checked on her nest in front of a throng of excited reporters.
But they found no babies – just a disgruntled-looking Penelope, who was summarily accused of faking her pregnancy to secure more worms and less Cecil.
“It was a whole scandal,” Mr Cowan says – one from which Penelope’s reputation never recovered.
Years later, in 1957, she would vanish from her enclosure, sparking a weeks-long search and rescue mission which culminated in the zoo declaring her “presumed lost and probably dead”.
A day after the hunt for Penelope was called off, Cecil died of what the media diagnosed as a “broken heart”.
Laid to rest with the pair was any real future for platypus diplomacy.
Though the Bronx Zoo would try to replicate the exchange with more platypuses in 1958, the finnicky beasts lasted under a year, and Australia soon tightened laws banning their export. The only two which have left the country since have lived at the San Diego Zoo since 2019.
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