On 26 March 1883, an avalanche was reported at Mount Ararat which destroyed several villages. As an April Fools' Day joke, George McCullagh Reed, writing as "Pollex" for his opinion column in the "New Zealand Herald", claimed that the avalanche had revealed the remains of Noah's Ark. Reed's story largely takes the form of a dispatch supposedly received from the "Levant Herald" in Constantinople, which he believed to have ceased operations several years earlier; in fact the paper had by that time relaunched as the "Eastern Express". The report describes the findings of "Comissioners appointed by the Turkish Government," including a nonexistent English scientist named "Captain Gascoyne," which had already been submitted to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. A reference to "an enterprising American traveller" seeking to purchase the Ark for exhibition in the United States was intended by Reed to be recognized as P. T. Barnum.