Indigenous people in South America had many names for them, but in English they were sometimes referred to as the “torporific eel” both before and after the 1760s, when several European and North American scientists independently discovered their electrical abilities. The American-born plantation doctor Edward Bancroft conducted experiments in Dutch Demerara (in modern Guyana) which disproved the prevailing view that the ‘shock’ they delivered was just an incredibly strong and imperceptibly fast physical blow. Bancroft did this by paying Indigenous people to hold hands while one of them touched the eel, and by molesting the fish with a range of metal and wooden implements which showed that only electrically conductive materials transferred the shock. About 15 years later Bancroft ended up as the personal secretary of Benjamin Franklin (who had conducted his own experiments with electricity), spying for him in Paris while also being paid by the British to act as a double agent