“~s End leaf photo: Winslow Homer’s “The Gulf Stream,” , The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wolfe Fund, 1906 Title photo: Tom Allen Opening sketches: Ronald D. Schwartz SS. Shadows in the Sea MARINE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY Ca enn A LIBRARY WOODS HOLE, Mass. W. H. O. I. Illustrated Harold W. McCormick and Tom Allen with Captain William E. Young CHILTON BOOK COMPANY PHILADELPHIA NEW YORK LONDON i \ = YU SL) YU o tow) = 2) 5 © ae 90) —o SF) 7] e 2292100 TOEO O UM 00 0 IOHM/18lN \ Skates and Rays JI The Sharks Copyright © 1963 by Chilton Book Company First Edition All Rights Reserved Published in Philadelphia by Chilton Book Company, and simultaneously in Ontario, Canada, by Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-16260 ISBN 0-8019-5460-4 Second Printing, July 1965 Third Printing, December 1970 Designed by William E. Lickfield Manufactured in the United States of America by Quinn & Boden Company, Inc., Rahway, N. J. To CapTAIN WILLIAM E. Younc 1875-1962 Foreword Captain Young and I for some years have been gathering material from all over the world about the Selachians—the Sharks, Skates, Rays, and their allies—of which there are more than 600 known species. We originally intended merely to up-date Captain Young’s book “Shark/! Shark!!” (published by Gotham House in 1934, and now a collector’s item), but, as the material ever expanded, it was decided that an entirely new book, covering a much broader field, was needed. Material was collected from all over the world for many years. When Captain Young and I felt that the research was nearly completed, we called upon Tom Allen, an experienced newspaperman, to aid us in trans- forming the research material into a book. Tom and I continued the research up to (and beyond!) the completion of the manuscript. Tom also did further research and added new material in the course of writing the book. In all scientific classifications, the Selachians are separated clearly from the Teleosteans, or Bony Fishes, and there are even leading ichthyol- ogists who do not regard the former as fishes at all but rather as repre- senting a separate and distinct Class of animal life. Selachians are among the most adaptable and hardy forms of life on this planet and have survived longer hereupon than most. Among them are probably the most deliberately ferocious forms of life on earth. The Selachians are to be found from polar to equatorial seas; from shallow to abyssal waters; in salt, brackish, and fresh waters, and all over the world. Some have changed little, if at all, during millions of years. No one knows just how many kinds exist today, and scientific expeditions probing both the ocean depths and tropical jungle rivers continue to find new ones almost every year. The behavior of sharks toward men is inexplicable and may possibly forever be a mystery. The more that they are observed, the less certain we seem to be as to just what motivates them. Even those considered most dangerous are known to have ignored men who were helpless in the water beside them. Other species, long considered to be harmless, have been reported to have attacked swimmers and divers without provocation. The United States of America and several other Govern- vii Vill Foreword ments besides have spent huge sums to try to develop an effective pro- tection for men in shark-infested waters, yet, no foolproof repellent is known today. Information on shark attacks upon men is now being gathered scien- tifically on a world-wide scale for the first time; but, until we know much more about the sharks themselves, and until an effective means of protection against their attacks has been developed, they will remain a constant threat to man whenever and wherever he enters waters in which they dwell. Some species of sharks appear to be more prone to attack humans than others, but just how many species should be classed as dangerous we do not know. The size of the individual fish is no indica- tion of its aggressiveness, its viciousness, or its potential. The largest of the sharks—the mighty Whale shark and the great Basking shark—eat, primarily, plankton and very small fish, have tiny teeth, and are generally considered to be harmless. The Skates are generally inoffensive creatures and the same may be said of the Rays. However, if molested or trodden upon unexpectedly, some of the latter may inflict painful and even mortal wounds with their “stings.” Yet again, the largest of the Rays—the huge Manta or Devil- Fish—does not have a sting and is harmless. Both Skates and Rays are of world-wide distribution, but the Rays occur in both salt and fresh water, and some species of the latter are found thousands of miles from the oceans—almost to the headwaters of the Amazon and its tributaries, for instance. The Sawfishes, which form another group related to the Sharks, are also found in salt, brackish, and fresh water. Some of them in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans attain great size and are capable of severing a man with one swipe of their rostra—the great, flat, tooth-beset, bony structure that projects from their heads. Man’s age-old fear, hatred, and even worship of the Shark has preju- diced and limited the eating of not only its flesh but also that of all Selachians. Yet, they are eaten all over the world in all countries that border the sea, though usually under some trade name that disguises their true identity. Many species are excellent eating and they are almost all good food. Selachians are readily marketed in all the major sea and fishing ports of the world—New York, London, Barcelona, Marseilles, Hamburg, Madras, San Francisco, Melbourne, Tokyo, and so on. Perhaps you, too, have enjoyed an excellent fish dinner at some time or another and won- dered at its fine flavor. It may well have been the flesh of some Selachian. We would have liked to have presented in this book some reassuring and dependable prescription for avoiding shark attack. Unfortunately, there is none. We base this pessimistic conclusion on reviews of the circumstances of attacks around the world, selected samples of which are reported in this book. Foreword 1X At one point, we compiled a list of factors and conditions which seemingly would encourage a shark attack. It was a long list. We decided not to print it because, we realized, the list was based on human thinking —and not on whatever goes on in the brain of the shark. The shark is unpredictable. If you venture into the shark’s domain, you must calculate your own chances that a shark will not single you out. Your guess is as good as our advice would have been. Our knowledge of the Selachians is really very limited and the authors of this book are most interested in gathering all further information possible about them, and from all parts of the world—reports of their behavior, both usual and unusual; their invasions of fresh waters; ob- servations on their breeding habits, their migrations; utilization of them by man; methods of capturing them; rituals that concern them, and any other aspects of these remarkable animals. All information will be wel- come. We are particularly interested in receiving reports of any Sela- chians from the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, and the seas and the rivers that are tributary to those oceans; also, from the rivers of Africa, Indo- nesia, and Central and South America. We will welcome anything that our readers may be kind enough to contribute, including sketches and photographs. (These should be addressed to Dr. Harold W. McCormick, 11 Riverside Drive, New York 23, New York.) You may not realize the fact, but you may be the one to make the definitive observation on some point that has bafHled the experts for many years! Harotp W. McCormick = Te Bune ' ip | 2 Wagh ae? (nea: ths dincn wthinn’ aegtines Pa thew 4 b( Ryerss ew) ceine ol wie Giy cout!’ Maur uae eet tek in doe mY - hehe PETITE 7 ails Lee TD i 7 a f s tue Pend ae y: & § » Vo _ 7s Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Contents FOREWORD PART 1. SHARK AGAINST MAN THE SHapows ATTACK Documented attacks by shiatlges on men, mostly on the East Coast of North America More SHApows ATTACK Attacks on people on the Wrect He GE North America and elsewhere PART 2. MAN AGAINST SHARK Captain SHARK-KILLER The personal story of Wallin Young, from youth to the capture of his last shark SHARKS ON A LINE The fishing of dharles foie sport, aud che Atieial records of catches in this field ANTI-SHARK WARFARE Attempted methods of preventing aha deeclee precautions advised; and official warnings PART 3. MAN AND SHARK . SHARK DeEvILS—AND Gops . Sharks and their allies in mythology, legend, ae lore, and crime SHARK-EATING MEN Sharks and their allies as dead oo man; ae a world-wide report on Selachian cuisine SHARK TREASURES Commercial shark- fishing; and he products, ore than food, obtained from sharks xi Vil 25 61 89 iGile) 137 159 179 Xll Contents PART 4. SHARK AND COMPANY Chapter 9. WHENCE THE SHADOWS? The origin of the Selachians Ane chu OF fie sharks, and how they are today Chapter 10. SELACHIANS EXTRAORDINARY . es) ee Sharks and their relatives, namely, the Batoids (Skates and Rays), the Chimaeras, and the “Links” Chapter 11. THe SHarKs—Part ONE Descriptions of several species, including the Great White Shark and the Whale Shark Chapter 12. THe SHarks—Part Two Descriptions of more species, including the Tale and River Sharks. With a list of the commoner Selachians of North America APPENDIX—SELACHIAN COOKERY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 205 241 291 324 365 378 384 395 Part ] P> Shark Against Man Chapter I The Shadows Attack Down the beach he ran, an impatient young man drawn to the cool and beck- oning sea. He had arrived at the resort in Beach Haven, New Jersey, scarcely minutes before. And now—Saturday, July 1, 1916—Charles Van Sant was plunging into the surf. He was 23 years old, and his life stretched before him as did the sea— invitingly, excitingly, seemingly without end. On his own horizon, and on the horizon of millions of other young men, there hung a cloud of war. On the horizon of the sea around him, there was not a cloud. Behind him, on the beach, a holiday crowd was gathering. Soon his father and two sisters would be there. He had left them still in their shore-front suite, unpacking and settling themselves. They had been too slow for him. Time had been too slow for him. He had spent ages on the hot, jammed train that carried him across the breadth of New Jersey from the Van Sant home in Philadelphia to Long Beach Island, a narrow strip of land dotted with resorts like Beach Haven. Finally, the trip had ended. Charles rushed into the suite, hastily donned his bathing suit, threw on a robe, and rushed to the beach. As he dived in, he might have heard someone singing, “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea . . .” The sea was beautiful in Beach Haven that day. Charles was a strong swimmer. With powerful strokes he pulled away from shore. He swam out about a hundred yards—far enough, he de- cided, for a first swim. Leisurely, reluctantly, he turned back toward shore, trying to prolong this serene and solitary communion with the sea. But he was not alone. Directly behind him, knifing toward him straight and sure, was a gray shadow beneath a black fin that crested the water. They saw it from the beach. Bathers screamed, but the man did not hear their cries. Then, suddenly, they stood silent and motionless, frozen by the sight of the narrowing gap between Van Sant and the pursuing fin. He was still swimming excruciatingly slowly, unaware that he was the hunted in a deadly chase. He was close to shore when the water churned and red foam billowed around him. At that moment Alexander Ott, a former U.S. Olympic team swimmer, dived into the sea and began to swim faster than he had ever 1 2 Shark Against Man swum before. As Ott reached the red blotch on the water, the gray shadow turned menacingly, then darted away for blue water, leaving Van Sant to the man who had come to save him. Ott managed to get Van Sant to shore, and there, on the warm sand, Van Sant’s life ebbed away. His legs had been horribly ravaged. He died that night from shock and loss of blood. The gray shadow glided seaward, unseen and unheralded. No alarm was spread. No one could remember a shark ever having killed a swimmer before. Perhaps it had happened in the South Seas or in Australia. But never in New Jersey. And the experts said that there never had been an absolutely authenticated case of a shark attacking a swimmer any- where in the world. Herman Oelrichs, a wealthy New York banker, had offered a $500 prize to anyone who could prove to him that any bather actually had been attacked by a shark anywhere north of Cape Hatteras. The prize had gone unclaimed for 30 years. Only three years before, on August 26, 1913, a fisherman had caught a shark off Spring Lake, New Jersey, 45 miles up the coast from Beach Haven. When the shark was cut open, a woman’s foot wearing a tan shoe and a knitted stocking was found in its stomach. But this gruesome dis- covery—like similar ones attested to down the years by numerous sailors and fishermen—was explained away: though sharks might devour bodies, never would a shark attack a live swimmer. In Spring Lake on July 6, five days after Charles Van Sant was killed, more than 500 people were lounging or strolling on the beach. It was after lunch; the tide had ebbed. Relatively few swimmers were in the water. Children splashed at the water’s edge. A few bathers stood in knee-deep water. Life was elegant and tranquil at Spring Lake, one of the favorite resorts of society. The socially prominent of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York gathered there. Some lived in fabulous shore homes they liked to call cottages. Others stayed at the New Monmouth Hotel or the Essex and Sussex Hotel. Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo, who was married to a daughter of President Wilson, was one of the lead- ers of Spring Lake society. New Jersey Governor James F. Fielder and former Governor John Franklin Fort spent most of their summers there. And hundreds of wealthy New Yorkers had fled to Spring Lake with their children that year to escape the infantile paralysis epidemic in New York City. Since June 10, 165 persons had died of the disease in the city. On July 5 alone, 24 deaths had been reported . . . And there were rumors that the epidemic was spreading to New Jersey. So the talk on that July 6th afternoon in Spring Lake was not about the new Allied offensive against the Huns or the neutrality policy of Wilson. It was not about Wilson’s chances of reelection or Charles Evans Hughes’ chances of The Shadows Attack 3 defeating him. It was not about sharks, or the death of an obscure young man at a rather unfashionable beach resort 45 miles away five days before. Infantile paralysis dominated the conversations at Spring Lake just as it dominated the headlines in the New York City newspapers . . In the democratic sea, a bellboy was as good as a millionaire. Perhaps that was why Charles Bruder loved the sea. Charles was a bellboy at the Essex and Sussex Hotel and when he was not working could usually be found swimming. He was 28 years old, personable, and well liked by hotel guests, who considered him part of Spring Lake. Even people who had been coming to Spring Lake for much of their lives could not re- member Spring Lake without him, for it was said that he had appeared there when he was 8 years old and had been working at various hotels every summer since. From the tips he earned he supported himself and his only known relative, his mother, who lived in Switzerland. Bruder had the afternoon off on July 6th, and ebb tide or not, he was going swimming. He walked out through the surf, nodding and smiling at hotel guests he recognized. When the water reached his waist, he dived in and began to swim. He was soon beyond the life-lines. George White and Chris Anderson, the lifeguards on duty, did not call him back as they would have summoned most swimmers, for everybody knew that Charles Bruder was a strong swimmer. A woman’s scream shattered the air of Spring Lake. Instinctively, White and Anderson turned narrowed eyes seaward. Bruder had disap- peared. “He has upset!” the woman screamed. “The man in the red canoe is upset!” Even as she screamed, White and Anderson were racing toward their boat. They knew that it was not the reflection of an over-turned canoe they saw, for even now the red blot was spreading, and in the midst of it, for one awful moment, Bruder’s agonized face appeared, and he flung up a bloodied arm. The boat reached him. White leaned from the bow and held out an oar to Bruder. Somehow, he grasped it. They pulled him toward them. His face was sickeningly white and his eyes were shut. “Shark—shark got me—bit my legs off!” he gasped and, mercifully, fainted. White hauled him over the gunwale. His body was not heavy. Mrs. George W. Childs, one of the principal envoys of Philadelphia society at Spring Lake, was standing on the private balcony outside her suite at the Essex and Sussex when she heard the screams from the beach. She turned to her maid and asked for her spyglass. Below on the shore, she saw White and Anderson beaching their boat. She saw them hesitate to lay Bruder on the sand. From the crowd a woman darted forward and put down her linen coat, turning her eyes away as she did so. Several women fainted. Mrs. Childs, 74 years old and 4 Shark Against Man indomitable, did not faint. She went to the phone in her room, called the manager, and told him what she had seen. She also asked that her car be brought around. Three minutes later she was speeding to Deal Beach, some 5 miles north. Her niece took a plunge in the surf there every afternoon, and Mrs. Childs wanted to get to Deal Beach before the shark did. Bruder was dead. The doctor called to tend him was treating the women who had fainted. At the Essex and Sussex, the telephone operator was ringing up every central switchboard from Point Pleasant to Atlantic Highlands. Within 12 minutes, swimmers were streaming ashore along 20 miles of New Jersey beaches. But was it a shark? Was it true that man-eaters were prowling the shore of New Jersey? Hotel men, resort operators, summer colonists wanted to be told that it could not happen. They anxiously awaited the verdict of Colonel William Gray Schauffler, an eminent physician and Surgeon General of the New Jersey National Guard. He had examined Bruder within 15 minutes after he had been taken from the sea. “There is not the slightest doubt,” Colonel Schauffler reported, “that a man-eating shark inflicted the injuries. Bruder’s right leg was frightfully torn and the bone bitten off half-way between the knee and ankle. The left foot was missing, as well as the lower end of the tibia and fibula. The leg bone was denuded of flesh from a point half-way below the knee. There was a deep gash above the left knee, which penetrated to the bone. On the right side of the abdomen, low down, a piece of flesh as big as a man’s fist was missing.” That night, while hotel residents, at Mrs. Childs’ suggestion, took up a collection for Bruder’s mother, motorboats equipped with searchlights slipped out to sea in a futile hunt for the shark. Colonel Schauffler called a meeting of resort owners and town Officials to discuss ways to make the beaches safe from sharks. Rifle-toting boatmen were hired to patrol the beaches. Fishermen volunteered to fish for the shark with great hooks, sturdy lines, and chunks of prime mutton, reportedly the best shark bait, donated by cooperative Spring Lake meat markets. “I am cer- tain that the bathing beaches will be made safe within two or three days,” Councilman D. H. Hill announced . . . No shark was caught, shot, or even seen. The day Bruder was killed, 24 people died in New York City of polio, then called infantile paralysis. Bruder’s death received far larger coverage in the New York papers. Such is the glamour and the terror of the shark! Each resort town along the New Jersey coast went its own brave way. Atlantic City was more upset by a ban on bathing suits that exposed “the nether extremities” than by sharks, although some daring souls made an adventure out of the shark scare by contemptuously swimming be- The Shadows Attack 5 yond the end of the piers. At Asbury Park, with a flourish of publicity, a motorboat shark patrol was begun and workmen were set to enclosing the bathing area with “shark-proof” wire netting. A net was not neces- sary, according to a sea captain interviewed as a “shark authority.” Sharks scared easily, he said. “The best thing to do when a shark comes along,” he advised, “is to shout as loud as you can and splash the water with your hands and feet.” The Atlantic seemed alive with sharks and tales of sharks. At Spring Lake, a lifeguard told of battling a 12-foot shark with an oar some 50 feet offshore. At Bayonne, New Jersey, 20 boys were swimming off a yacht club float when they saw a shark. A policeman heard their cries and emptied his revolver at an ominous black fin. The shark, he said, fled to the open sea. In shallow water off Eldred’s Bar near Rockaway Point in Brooklyn, eight men digging for sandworms saw a shark driving a school of weakfish toward shore. With eel-tongs, oars, spears and spades, they said, they slashed at it and killed it. All along the coast, shark vigi- lantes were firing their rifles at anything that looked big and moved in the sea. Finally, out of this hysterical war on sharks, porpoises, and any other shadows in the sea, came the sobering voice of academic authority. Dr. John Treadwell Nichols, curator of the Department of Fishes in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy of the Brooklyn Museum, declared that there was very little danger that a shark would attack anyone. Dr. Frederick A. Lucas, director of the Museum of Natural History, added his agreement. No shark, he said, could snap off a man’s leg “like a carrot.” A shark’s jaws were simply not powerful enough to do the kind of bodily damage Dr. Schauffler described, Dr. Lucas insisted. The experts had spoken. The shark scare abated somewhat. New Jersey bathers believed that they could once more enter the water un- afraid. But the shark panic had cost New Jersey resort owners an esti- mated $250,000 in lost tourist business. In some areas, bathing had fallen off more than 75 per cent. Six weeks of summer still remained, and, with plenty of hard work, the resort owners assured each other, the loss could be made up. “Tiger sharks will hold but little terror for bathers in the waters hereabouts within a few days,” the New York Times reported from Asbury Park on July 10th. “Today the final work was being rushed on the net protectors about the Asbury Park beaches, and in Ocean Grove the contractors who received the job of erecting steel nets began work. At Fourth Avenue, where the grounds had been enclosed by the steel nets, a record-breaking crowd of bathers enjoyed the surf.” The dispatch was not entirely optimistic, for it reported that a fishing 6 Shark Against Man boat had sighted four sharks 8 miles off Asbury Park. Another shark had been reported 200 yards off Bridgehampton, Long Island, by Esterbrook Carter, nephew of Charles E. Hughes, the Republican candidate for President. Carter, along with all other Republicans, was relieved to learn that Hughes had spent the day indoors, polishing his speech accepting the nomination. Officials of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in Washington tried to dispel the fear of sharks en masse. A single shark, they theorized, was probably responsible for both fatal attacks. Because of a scarcity of food fish off the New Jersey shore, they said, this renegade shark may have been driven far inshore and, maddened by hunger, attacked Van Sant. Then, having acquired a taste for human flesh, it continued swimming near shore until its appetite was satiated by Bruder. It was a ghastly theory. In an apparent attempt to still renewed apprehension, U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries Hugh M. Smith hastily pointed out on July 9th that “The case is extremely unusual. I don’t look for it to happen again. The fact that only two out of millions of bathers have been attacked in many years is evidence of the rarity of such instances.” Again, the very best assurance—from an expert. On a map, Matawan, New Jersey, appears to be an inland town. It is 11 miles west of the Atlantic Ocean and 2 miles south of Raritan Bay, a body of water that blends into the Lower Bay, gateway to the great port of New York. Matawan’s only link to salt water is a tenuous one, a meandering tidal creek—barely a stream at high tide—that empties into Raritan Bay. In the summer of 1916, as in countless summers before, Matawan boys spent every minute they could in Matawan Creek. The most popular swimming hole was at the old Propeller Wyckoff Dock, named after the tug-sized steamer Wyckoff which, years before, used to come up the creek with the tide to pick up farmers’ produce and carry it to the New York market on the next tide. The dock had deteriorated into a dozen or so pilings that jutted close to one another along the edge of a dilapidated pier. Diving and jumping off the pier and the pilings was not adventurous enough for the boys who swam at Wyckoff Dock, so they usually played tag, hopping from piling to piling in pursuit of one an- other. One day in early July, 1916, Rennie (for Rensselaer) Cartan, aged 14, was playing tag on the Wyckoff pilings. To escape an outreaching hand, Rennie dived into the creek. As his head and shoulders entered the murky water, he felt something like a strip of very coarse sandpaper grate along his stomach. He arched his body to the surface and stroked for the pier. His stomach was streaked with blood as he clambered up a piling and The Shadows Attack 7 At this spot in Matawan Creek, in Matawan, New Jersey, Lester Stilwell and Stanley Fisher were attacked by a shark. The pilings in the foreground served as diving platforms for Lester and other boys playing in the creek. The dilapidated wharf at the right was where the mortally wounded Fisher was brought ashore. From a contemporary news photo onto the dock. “Don’t dive in any more!” he shouted to his companions. ‘“There’s a shark or something in there!”’ No one paid much attention to Rennie, and, as a matter of fact, he ignored his own warning a few minutes later by diving into the creek. He was in a hurry to get home. It was much quicker to swim across the creek than to walk to the nearest bridge. (More than 40 years later, the scars from the sandpaper-like burn still on his stomach, Rensselaer Cartan would stand by the creek, and, shaking his head, say to one of the authors, “It might have been me. You know, it might have been me.”’) On July 11th, in Belford, on Sandy Hook Bay, a few miles east of the mouth of Matawan Creek, Herman Tarnow, a fisherman, caught a 9- foot shark 120 feet out from the low-water mark. No one paid much attention to Herman Tarnow, either. In the late morning of July 12th, Captain Thomas Cottrell, a retired sailor and part-time local fisherman, was walking along the new trolley drawbridge that crossed Matawan Creek about a mile and a half down creek from Wyckoff Dock. Eleven days had passed since Charles Van Sant had died at Beach Haven, 70 miles as a shark would swim, from Matawan. Six days had passed since Charles Bruder had died at Spring Lake, 25 miles as a shark would swim, from Matawan. Now, as Captain Cottrell walked across the bridge that hot, bright morning, he saw a 8 Shark Against Man dark gray shadow sweeping up the creek with the incoming tide. The shadow was moving swiftly. But the captain, a man who trusted his eyes, believed what he had seen. He shouted to two workmen on the bridge. They saw the shadow, too. They ran to a telephone and called John Mulsonn, a barber who was also Matawan’s chief of police. Captain Cottrell ran the half mile to Matawan center. He tried to stop groups of boys who were heading for the creek. He toured Matawan’s short and busy lower Main Street, shouting his warning to merchants and their customers. Everyone laughed at the idea of a shark in a shallow creek, only 35 feet across at its widest point. Chief Mulsonn did not even leave his barber shop. Captain Cottrell walked back toward the creek. One of the shops Captain Cottrell stuck his head into on his futile trip up Main Street was Stanley Fisher’s new dry-cleaning establishment. Stanley, one of Matawan’s best-liked young men, had only recently started this business, which had shown no promise of making his fortune. As a sideline he was also taking orders for men’s suits. He had made an unusual sale a few days before. A man had come in and bought a suit. Instead of paying cash for it, he had bought Stanley a $10,000 life in- surance policy. Stanley, a blond-haired, 210-pound giant of a man, was taking a ribbing from his friends. He was, after all, only 24 years old; in the prime of life, they told him. What would he need with an insurance policy? Stanley’s father, Watson H. Fisher, had followed the sea most of his life and risen to Commodore of the Savannah Line. Now retired and well off, he was one of Matawan’s leading citizens. If he had ever wished that his son might go to sea, he had kept the wish to himself. Some people in Matawan did say, though, that it was a shame a big, strong man like Stanley was running a dry-cleaning store instead of sailing the seas as his father had before him. July 12th was a scorching, muggy day. The heat was nearly un- bearable in Anderson’s Saw Mill, where Lester Stilwell worked with his father, William Stilwell. By 2 o’clock, Lester had finished nailing up his last wooden box, a task he was especially good at, and, since he was only 12 years old, he was given the rest of the day off. He waved good-bye to his father, dashed out of the stifling mill, and headed for Wyckoff Dock with his pals—Johnson Cartan, Frank Clowes, Albert O’Hara, and Charles Van Brunt. Soon they were all splashing around in the creek. Most of them, like Lester, were not wearing bathing suits. Albert O’Hara, aged 11, was near the dock, about to climb out of the water, when Lester yelled: “Watch me float, fellas!” Albert turned to look. Lester was so thin he usually had trouble floating. At that instant, something hard and slippery slammed Albert’s right leg. He looked down and saw what looked like the sinuous tail of a huge fish. Charles The Shadows Attack 9 Van Brunt, 13, still in the water, saw it too. It was the biggest, blackest fish he had ever seen, and it was streaking for Lester Stilwell. Lester screamed. Charles saw the big black fish strike, its body suddenly twisting as it hit Lester, and Charles saw that the fish was not all black, for as it rolled it exposed a stark white belly and gleaming teeth. And Charles knew, to his everlasting horror, that he had seen a shark. In an instant, it all but closed its jaws about Lester’s slim body and dragged him be- neath the reddening waters of Matawan Creek. Lester had neither time nor life to scream again. Lester’s pals and other boys who had been swimming nearby scamp- ered out of the water. Some ran into Fischer’s bag factory at the creek and summoned workmen to Wyckoff Dock. Others ran up the steep dirt road from the creek and raced to the center of town. Now, where Captain Cottrell had walked, there was panic, and screaming, naked boys. Boys who had seen the shark were yelling, “Shark! Shark! A shark got Lester!” Along the shore by the dock, those who knew only that Lester Stilwell had gone under were calling his name: “Lester! Lester!” Out of this tumult somehow came the report that Lester, “a boy who took fits,” had been seized by an attack and was drowning. All that the townspeople knew for sure was that a boy was in trouble at the creek, and men, women, and children began running there to help him. Among them was Stanley Fisher, who had ducked into the back of his dry-cleaning shop only long enough to put on a bathing suit. “Remember what Captain Cottrell said,” Mary Anderson, a Matawan teacher, shouted at Fisher as he ran. “It may have been a shark!” Fisher stopped for a moment. “A shark? Here?” he asked. He looked immense as he stood there, towering above Mary Anderson. “I don’t care,” he said, as if finally answering some inner doubt. “I’m going after that boy.” Then, turning to his errand boy, 8-year-old Johnny Smith, who was standing nearby, Fisher said, “Take care of the store until I get back.” And Fisher sprinted to the creek. The son of Commodore Fisher took command at Matawan Creek. His quarterdeck was Wyckoff Dock, and his enemy was a shark. Some 200 townspeople, including Lester Stilwell’s mother and father, lined the dock and nearer bank. Fisher soon had men in boats, poling for Lester’s body. Someone brought a roll of chicken wire to the dock. Fisher or- dered a couple of young men to get into a rowboat and string the chicken wire, weighed down with stones, along the bottom of the creek, down- creek from the dock, where the channel was about 20 feet wide. Fisher knew there was a deep spot, off the farther bank, directly opposite the dock. There, he believed, the shark was lurking with Lester’s body. Fisher’s plan was to flush out the shark, driving it into shallower water 10 Shark Against Man down-creek, where it would be trapped by the chicken-wire barrier. But the hastily strung fence only partially blocked the creek. When this futile fence was completed, Fisher dived into the creek. Several men were in the water, diving to the bottom, feeling in the mud for Lester’s body. Fisher swam alone to the deep spot. Arthur Smith, 51, a carpenter by trade and a hunter by avocation, was diving, too. On shore, his daughter was screaming to him: ‘““Come back, Pa! Come back!” The task was for younger men. But Smith kept diving, defying the death that swam by him and, finally, touched him. (A day would come when Arthur Smith, half blind and almost deaf at 95, would sit hunched and feeble in an old house on the bank of Matawan Creek. Suddenly, at shouted mention of that awful day, he would spring forward in his chair and vividly recreate that moment when he felt the shark scrape his leg. At 95, he would still carry the scars and show them to one of the authors. ) Smith saw Fisher make two “overhangs’”—powerful overhand strokes —and dive down, down... Arthur S. Van Buskirk, a local deputy of the Monmouth County Detectives’ Office, had just arrived at the creek. He was sitting on the forward deck of a small boat when he saw a thrashing in the water at the farther shore. Even as he looked, the water calmed and a rapidly widening red stain spread on the surface. Van Buskirk yelled at the other man in the boat to start the engine and, while it sputtered to life, Van Buskirk sculled toward the red stain, in the midst of which Stanley Fisher had suddenly appeared. Fisher was facing the farther bank. The silent crowd at Wyckoff Dock could see only his broad back and shoulders. He was drawn up, half crouching in waist-deep water and he seemed to be tottering on one leg. The boat pulled up directly behind Fisher. Van Buskirk could see that Fisher was holding the bloody remnants of his right leg in both hands. Just as Fisher was about to pitch forward face first into the water, Van Buskirk reached out and pulled him into his arms. He could get Fisher only halfway out of the water. The boat backed out of the shoal water and, as it turned to head toward the dock, a gasp rippled through the crowd. Now they could see Fisher, breasting the water like a macabre figurehead on the prow of the boat. Enough of him was out of the water so that his terrible wound could be seen. From groin to kneecap the flesh was gone from his right leg. Several women fainted. Little Alfreda Matz, one of the many children on the dock, tried to look. But her father threw the tail of his suit coat across her eyes and hugged her face to his side. She thought, A crocodile bit Mr. Fisher. A sound like a moan went up as the boat neared the dock, for Fisher almost slipped from Van Buskirk’s grasp. Staring down at Fisher’s leg—it The Shadows Attack 11 was hardly more than a bone and that bore jagged scratches running lengthwise along it—Van Buskirk saw blood pulsating from a torn artery. There was a rope on the deck beneath him, and he thought of tying a tourniquet with one hand. His own weight and that of his burden com- bined to prevent him from getting the rope, and he almost lost his grip on Fisher as well. Just then, hands reached out from the dock and grabbed Fisher. He was still conscious. Gently, men placed Fisher on a stretcher improvised from planks and bore him to the Matawan railroad, about a quarter of a mile away. Each jolting step up the bank and along the track stabbed him with searing pain. Merciful unconsciousness awaited him, but he seemed to fight it off. There was something he very much wanted to say. At the station, they placed him on a baggage car and waited for the next train. A doctor had been found. There was little he could do, other than to retard the flow of blood. Nearly three hours went by until the 5:06 train from Long Branch was flagged down. Even on the train, Fisher held on to consciousness. Not until 7:45 that night, as he was wheeled into the operating room at Monmouth Memorial Hospital, did he die. Before he died, he had said what he wanted to say: on the bottom of Matawan Creek, he had reached the body of Lester Stilwell and wrested it from the jaws of the shark. While Fisher lay on the baggage car waiting for death and the 5:06, several men went to Asher P. Woolley’s store and got dynamite to blow up the shark they believed to be still off Wyckoff Dock. The creek was cleared of boats. But, moments before the charge was to be set off, a motorboat hove into view from down-creek. Jacob R. Lefferts, a Matawan lawyer, was at the wheel. Lying on the bottom of the boat was a boy. His right leg was swathed in bloodied bandages. “A shark got him,” Lefferts shouted, as he pulled in to shore. The boy was transferred to a car and speeded to St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick. At first the boy would not give his name. He was afraid his mother would be angry at him. Soon he was identified as Joseph Dunn, aged 14. He had been swimming with his older brother, Michael, and several other boys off the dock of the New Jersey Clay Company brickyards about a half mile down Matawan Creek, near Keyport. Someone had run to the brickyards and told the boys about the shark. They were all in the water when the warning came, and they swam swiftly to the dock. Joseph Dunn, the youngest, was the last one out of the water. As he started up the ladder, something that felt like a big pair of scissors, he said, grabbed his right leg. (“I felt my leg going down the shark’s throat,” he said later. “I believe it would have swallowed me.’’) Joseph screamed, and the older boys sprang to the ladder. Joseph kicked the water with his free leg. Michael Dunn and two others began 12 Shark Against Man a tug of war with the shark, ripping Joseph’s flesh to save his life. For a moment or two, the shark hung on. Then, suddenly, Joseph was free. The shark had let go—and vanished. Its third victim in less than an hour had been snatched from death. In St. Peter’s Hospital, hope was high that Joseph Dunn’s life would be saved, but saving his torn leg—slashed with tooth marks, a major tendon severed, muscles badly mangled—seemed hopeless. Dr. R. J. Faulkingham, on general surgical service at the hospital, was given the case. All that night and into the morning, Matawan Creek was the scene of an orgy of vengeance. Blast after blast of dynamite sent geysers of water and fish skyward. Hundreds of men lined both banks, armed with scythes, pitchforks, and old harpoons taken from living-room walls. By lantern light and by the first glimmer of dawn, men fired shotguns and pistols into the creek. At low tide, men waded into the water with knives—and even hammers. The creek was soon laced with tangles of chicken wire and fishing nets. Newspaper reporters and photographers swarmed into Matawan, and one newspaper proclaimed that it had organized a shark-hunt—a boat loaded to the gunwales with men carrying rifles. Extra-large charges of dynamite were set off for the benefit of newsreel cameras. Stores in Matawan and Keyport ran out of explosives and ammunition. A special order was sent to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, for more. “We've got a shark!” a man shouted here . . . then there. Reports came in with the tide: one shark, two sharks, three sharks, four sharks were trapped in Matawan Creek. With the outgoing tide went reports that shark after shark had escaped from Matawan Creek. The only respite from the frenzy at the creek came when Matawan buried its dead. The boys who had been the last to see Lester Stilwell alive bore him to his grave. At the First Methodist Church on Main Street, Stanley Fisher’s voice was missing from the choir that mourned him. But his memory would live on in the church. With the money from the new insurance policy he had so strangely acquired, Stanley’s parents purchased a stained glass window—a landscape of Bethlehem. In the years to come, the rays of the setting sun would filter through the window as day’s end came to the little town of Matawan. At St. Peter’s Hospital, Dr. Faulkingham was quietly, skillfully tend- ing the wounds of Joseph Dunn. Newspapers had already reported that Joseph’s leg would undoubtedly have to be amputated. But Dr. Faulking- ham didn’t have time to read the newspapers. He had sutured Joseph’s severed tendon and ripped muscles, and a slow, uncertain recovery be- gan. It would be 59 days before Joseph Dunn would walk out of St. Peter’s Hospital, but walk he would, on two strong legs. The Shadows Attack 13 The savage triangular teeth of a Great White shark show plainly in this specimen, which is a small Carcharodon carcharias. No other shark has teeth like the Great White’s. Note that it is not truly a “white” shark. The underbellies of virtually all sharks are white. The upper body of the Great White may vary from an oyster-shell white to deepening shades of gray. Courtesy, Miami Seaquarium Six days after the attack, a shark was finally caught in Matawan Creek—by none other than Captain Cottrell. He was coming up the creek in his motorboat Skwd with his son-in-law, Richard Lee, when, about 400 yards from the bay, not far from the bridge where he had first seen that lethal shadow, he saw a dorsal fin rise out of the water, then disappear. Swiftly, he and Lee let out several yards of gill net, weighted with lead at the bottom and strung with corks on the top. The net bil- lowed out as the outgoing tide carried it down-creek. Both ends of the net were secured in the boat. By deft maneuvering, the Captain trapped the shark between boat and net. The shark struggled furiously but, foot by foot, the two men hauled in the net, which was to be the shark’s shroud. Using the hull of his boat as an anvil, Cottrell smashed the shark on the head again and again with a large mallet. When he was convinced the shark was dead, Cottrell hauled it ashore. It weighed 230 pounds and was almost exactly 7 feet long. He put it on exhibition in his fish shed, and nearly everyone in Matawan and Keyport lined up to see it as it lay on ice. They paid 10 cents each to view the “Terror of Matawan Creek.” In Bridgehampton, Long Island, scene of another shark scare, a fish- erman caught a shark, rented a zinc-lined coffin from a local undertaker, and exhibited his shark for 5 cents a look. 14 Shark Against Man Actually, the killer of Matawan Creek may have been caught two days after the attack. Michael Schleisser, a New Yorker who was one of the many shark-hunters prowling the local waters on July 14, was dragging a drift net behind his boat in hope of snagging a shark. He was in Raritan Bay, off South Amboy, New Jersey, less than 4 miles northwest of the mouth of Matawan Creek, when a large shark charged the net. Though quickly enmeshed, the 814-foot shark fought savagely, snapping a jaw in which row upon row of teeth glistened menacingly. Schleisser, un- aware that he had caught a shark of the most feared species in the sea, strained to haul the net closer to the boat, and clubbed the shark again and again. Although many other sharks were being hauled in and dis- played by fishermen, Schleisser’s shark was a killer. Had Schleisser slipped and tumbled into the net, he might have become another victim. For, when he finally subdued the shark, towed it into South Amboy, and ripped it open, he found 15 pounds of flesh and bones in its belly. One of the bones, 11 inches long, was identified as the shinbone of a boy. Another fragment appeared to be part of a human rib. There was no doubt that the shark had probably attacked and certainly eaten at least one human being. Dr. Lucas of the Museum of Natural History, skeptical about local shark attacks only a few days before, personally identified the remains as human. The shark itself was identified, too. It was a Great White shark (Carcharodon carcharias), feared as a man-eater in tropical waters but, until the period dealt with here, unreported along beaches as far north as New Jersey. Doctor Nichols, an expert who had joined with Doctors Murphy and Lucas in minimizing the possibility of shark attacks after the first two New Jersey killings, now joined with them in conceding the existence of dangerous sharks in northern Atlantic waters. They granted at least one man-eating shark, for Nichols and Murphy con- cluded that Schleisser’s Carcharodon carcharias was probably responsible for all five attacks. Whether or not this conservative estimate was accurate, it is possible that there were many of these dangerous sharks in the waters at the time. Schleisser, who had had some training as a taxidermist, mounted his shark and placed it on exhibit in a New York newspaper office. Later, “The Jaws of the New Jersey Man-Eater” wound up in the window of a Broadway fish shop. The capture of the apparent killer did not stop the stories that were sweeping the Eastern seaboard. From Florida to Rhode Island came re- ports of sharks. Virtually every ship that came into New York carried a cargo of shark stories. Several hundred sharks were reported off Fire Island, Long Island, and possés were formed to track them down. The Shadows Attack 15 Theories abounded, too. One was that heavy cannonading in the North Sea had driven sharks across the Atlantic to more tranquil seas. Another theory held that sharks were feeding on swimmers because they had been deprived of their usual diet of refuse from passenger liners, whose sailings were being curtailed by another kind of shark, the U-boat. The European war also spawned the idea that sharks had been feasting so well on war dead floating down rivers into the sea that they had undergone a change of dietary habits. One New York Times \etter- writer gravely calculated the figures: more than 12,500 war casualties had been gobbled up by sharks, he claimed. By stoking their imaginations a little more, some of the theorists concluded that the ghoul-sharks of European waters had deserted their bountiful feeding grounds in the war zone for the far less ample larder offered by New Jersey bathing beaches. Logic and reason fell victims to the shark scare. A neighbor of Teddy Roosevelt’s said she saw a shark off the beach in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and called upon him to do something about it. A long-distance swimmer announced that he would brave the terrors of the lower bay of New York Harbor in a round trip from the Battery to Sandy Hook—in a wire basket. In the New York Times, America’s leading woman swimmer, Annette Kellerman, advised bathers to dive under an onrushing shark. “As he is coming at you upside down,” she explained, “you have a chance to get away, if the distance to shore or safety is not too fais? A chorus girl rushed into print with the exciting news that she had es- caped a shark by frightening it off with an impromptu ballet of splashes and kicks. Human sharks profiteered from “special swimming courses” to teach bathers how to outwit sharks. Arguments broke out over whether the shark attacks weren't rather the doings of giant turtles! After losses estimated at $1,000,000 in canceled reservations, the mayors of 10 New Jersey resort towns met at Beach Haven, where the first shark attack had occurred, and pleaded for an end to the panic. They asked newspapers to refrain from publishing stories that “cause the public to believe the New Jersey seacoast is infested with sharks, whereas there are no more than in any other summer.” The resort men thus went on record that there were sharks in their waters every summer! The mayors’ plea went unheard. Shark stories continued for a few more days to push news of the war and the infantile paralysis epidemic to secondary positions on newspaper front pages. “Sharks are the undisputed masters of the Atlantic coast,” one New York newspaper exclaimed. “The federal government yesterday aban- doned its proposed campaign of extermination along the New Jersey beaches. The enemy was too numerous for the Coast Guard to tackle, it was said.” 16 Shark Against Man There was some truth in the story of the government’s so-called surrender. The federal government had indeed declared war on sharks. A Coast Guard cutter had been dispatched to New Jersey to fight them. A congressman, predictably from New Jersey, had risen in Congress and asked for a $5,000 appropriation to launch a federal crusade against the shark. And ultimately the strategy of the shark war was discussed at the highest possible level. At a time when Presidential worries included Pancho Villa’s raids, a national election campaign, and possible U.S. participation in the World War, the President’s Cabinet actually placed the subject of sharks on its agenda. After this Cabinet meeting, Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo announced that the Coast Guard had been ordered to do what it could, which eventually turned out to be nothing. Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield stated that his Bureau of Fisheries had not yet discovered why the sharks had appeared. Later, the Bureau of Fisheries officially warned bathers to stay in shallow water, because there was no known way to get rid of sharks. But already, as unexpectedly and as unpredictably as they had ap- peared, the sharks had disappeared and become, once more, merely shad- ows in the sea. Why? Why was the New Jersey coast the fateful rendezvous for four deaths by shark bite? Why had five shark attacks occurred in 12 days in an area where none had occurred before? Why? (And why is the New Jersey coast still one of the most shark- ridden coasts in the northern latitudes? ) After the panic-mongers and the tale-spinners had left the stage, taking with them their bizarre theories about shark attacks, the scientific experts stepped forward to explain the 1916 attacks. The experts looked a bit embarrassed. In April, 1916, three months before the attacks in New Jersey, Doc- tors Nichols, Murphy and Lucas (the three shark experts) had collabo- rated on an article on sharks in Long Island waters. Their paper, pub- lished in the highly respected Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, all but dis- missed the possibility of a shark attack on a “living man.” “Probably few swimmers have actually met in him their fate,” Nichols and Murphy wrote, “but doubtless many a poor drowned sailor has there found his final resting place.” And, in a separate postscript, Lucas added his voice of authority: “Cases of shark bite do now and then occur,” Lucas conceded, “but there is a great difference between being attacked by a shark and being bitten by one, and the cases of shark bite are usually found to have been due to someone incautiously approaching a shark impounded or tangled The Shadows Attack iti) in a net, or gasping on the shore. And, under such circumstances, al- most any creature will bite.” Recalling the unclaimed $500 reward Herman Oelrichs had offered for proof of a shark attack north of Cape Hatteras, Lucas concluded: “That this reward was never claimed shows that there is practically no danger of any attack froma shark about our coasts.” In October, 1916, Nichols and Murphy were back in print again. In a cautious understatement, they noted that “the New Jersey accidents of July, 1916,” had brought “the whole shark question before us in a new phase.” After making the concession that four “living men” had indeed been killed by sharks, they wrote: “It must be admitted that deaths from shark bite within a short radius of New York City would seem to be one of those unaccountable happenings that take place from time to time to the confounding of savants and the justification of the wildest tradition.” After investigating the attacks and searching for clues to explain them, Lucas, Nichols, and Murphy confirmed that an unusual number of sharks had summered in New York-New Jersey waters. “The nearest I can come to accounting for the sudden preying of these fish,” Lucas said, “is to say that this is a ‘shark year.’” In line with this theory, Nichols and Murphy wrote: “It is not impossible that this summer sharks really are with us in unprecedented force, and that we are experiencing an extraordinary shark migration, a movement comparable with the sporadic abundance during certain years of army worms, or jellyfishes, or western grass- _ hoppers, or northern lemmings—movements that all have their source in overproduction and other little understood natural agencies.” Further indication that 1916 was a “shark year” comes from the records of a remarkable shark-watcher, Edwin Thorne, a member of the Board of Managers of the New York Zoological Society. Thorne’s hobby was not only shark-watching but also shark-catching. Between the years 1911 and 1927, Thorne spent a total of 302 days looking for sharks in Long Island’s Great South Bay, then and now a popular bathing and boating area. Great South Bay was also popular with sharks, Thorne discovered. For, in those 17 years, he sighted 1,799 sharks and killed 305 of them. In 1916, he saw 277 sharks and killed 102. In no other year did he see or kill as many. Nearly all the sharks Thorne killed were female Brown sharks (Eulamia milberti, formerly Carcharinus milberti), which had entered Great South Bay to spawn their litters of 6 to 13 young. (Like many species of shark, the Brown shark brings forth young alive.) Great South Bay was—and is—a “shark nursery,” a sheltered spot where newly 18 Shark Against Man born sharks can begin their lives in relative tranquillity, one of many such nurseries that have been found all over the world and that are used by various species of sharks. No Brown shark has ever been convicted of attacking a bather. An increase in the number of Brown sharks in New York waters would have had no direct connection with the New Jersey attacks. The indication, however, that more Brown sharks than usual were around in 1916 did raise the question of whether a population explosion in indigenous sharks somehow had brought about the appearance of a dangerous stranger, such as a Great White shark. Besides the “shark year” theory, there was some speculation that hunger had driven sharks closer to shore. Because of unexplained short- ages of normal food at sea, the sharks were said to be prowling the coasts, seeking new prey: and five times—or so the theory went—that had been man. This theory, of course, did not square with the assumption that a single shark had been responsible for all five attacks. But, even though human remains had been found in the Great White shark caught on July 14th, this was not irrefutable proof that the Great White had been the only one of its kind—or the only large and potentially dangerous shark—in New Jersey waters during that particular summer. On a hot August afternoon in 1960, 44 summers after the New Jersey shark attacks of 1916, John Brodeur, a 24-year-old accountant, and Jean Filoramo, his 22-year-old fiancée, walked hand in hand into the surf off a beach at Sea Girt, New Jersey, barely 2 miles from Spring Lake, where Charles Bruder had been killed by a shark so long before. In waist-deep water, John and Jean waited for a breaker that would carry them to shore. A glistening, frothing breaker bore down on them. Brodeur let it pass; he wanted a bigger one. As the breaker rolled past him, he thought he saw something black within it. He wondered idly for a moment what that something was. Then, something—that black something—struck him from behind and seized his right leg. Brodeur kicked his left leg at the thing that was clamping an ever-tightening grip about his other leg. His left leg struck something hard and coarse. He twisted about and hit a black body with his left hand So rough was the surface of what he hit that it badly cut two of his fingers. The sea around him was red and he saw, floating to the surface, bits of red flesh torn from his leg. Submerged by the next breaker. Brodeur lost consciousness. Miss Filoramo pulled him to the surface and screamed for help. Three men dashed into the surf and helped her carry him to the beach. Norman Porter, a former Marine major, ran to where Brodeur was being placed on the beach, grabbed a leather belt from a lifeguard, and wrapped it around Brodeur’s thigh as a tourniquet. The Shadows Attack 19 The calf of his leg was hanging by a few shreds of flesh and muscle. One leg bone was crushed, the other was deeply gouged. By the time he reached a hospital, only a few minutes after he was carried to shore, he had lost an estimated 8 pints of blood. Eight days after he entered the hospital, Brodeur’s mangled right leg was amputated at the knee. But he was lucky. He had survived a shark attack. The sharks were off the New Jersey coast in the summer of 1962, just as they were every year. But when, one pleasant Sunday in August, a bather stumbled, bleeding, out of the water at the beach in Manasquan, the resort-minded police stubbornly insisted that “a big fish,” not a s---k, had done the job. The bather, Michael Roman, aged 24, was taken to Point Pleasant (N. J.) Hospital. The physician who stitched up Roman’s left hand and left thigh said that an outline of teeth, forming an incomplete oval of 7% by 9% inches, was clearly visible on Roman’s leg. Still, the official report persisted: “A big fish.” On Monday, Kendall H. Lee, City Manager of Asbury Park, a popular resort a few miles north of Manasquan, sent telegrams to newspapers in the area: PLEASE BE ADVISED OUR BATHING BEACHES ARE AND HAVE BEEN IN FULL OPERATION AND HAVE NOT BEEN SHUT DOWN AT ANY TIME . ASBURY PARK IS PROUD OF ITS LONG AND OUTSTANDING SAFETY RECORD. Finally, on Tuesday, State Conservation Commissioner H. Mat Adams courageously faced the fact emblazoned on Michael Roman’s left thigh. What had attacked Michael Roman, the commissioner solemnly an- nounced, was a shark. It was a very special kind of shark, however, for, Adams pointed out, it had not engaged in a “vicious attack.” He said that the shark had not closed its jaws. Rather, Roman had unknowingly put his arm into the shark’s mouth up to his elbow. It almost seemed as if Roman was being blamed for attacking the shark! What happened to John Brodeur that day in 1960; what happened to Charles Van Sant, to Charles Bruder, to Lester Stilwell, to Stanley Fisher, to Joseph Dunn, what happened down the years to so many— and yet, proportionately, to so few—bathers could happen on any warm day in any year at any beach on the East Coast, West Coast, or Gulf Coast of the continental United States. It could happen, too, on any day or night in any warm or temperate sea on earth, for the shark lives in them all. And there are many rivers and at least one fresh-water lake where it could also happen! Rarely does it happen. The chances of being attacked by a shark, it is often said, are about as great as of being struck by lightning. Actually, there is no comparison between the rarity of death by shark bite and the frequency of death by lightning. In 1959, for instance, 183 persons were killed by lightning in the United States—and only 3 were known 20 Shark Against Man to have been killed by sharks. Australia is regarded as one of the most shark-infested countries in the world. Since 1919, there have been about 100 reported attacks on swimmers in Australia—less than three a year. And at one beach, even after three attacks took place, it was calculated that for each bather attacked by a shark, about 30 million bathers had suffered no more than sunburn. Of the swimmers who have enjoyed Florida waters in modern times, less than one out of every 5 million bathers has been attacked in any way by a shark. But statistics cannot still the fear evoked by the sight of a dark dorsal fin or just an ominous shadow beneath the surface—or the panic loosed on beaches when an attack does occur. Brodeur was attacked on August 21, 1960, and a mild panic began. Police of several New Jersey shore towns ordered the beaches closed. Life- guards at New York City’s teeming beaches were ordered to use “extreme alertness and caution” in watching not only for sharks but also for panic caused by baseless shark reports. (A New York Park Department spokesman explained that in past shark scares children had been trampled during the stampede out of the water.) On August 24th, a man in 444 feet of water 75 yards offshore in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was nipped on the left arm by a shark. The panic increased. Sharks were being reported—and, occasionally, caught— off beaches from Boston to Florida. Beach after beach was closed. In New York City, policemen armed with submachine guns manned six police launches, which, along with two helicopters, were assigned to special shark-patrol duty. On August 30th, still in 1960, a man swimming 2 miles from shore at Ocean City, New Jersey—about 40 miles south of the scene of the Brodeur attack—was savaged by two or more sharks. His right leg was severely torn and his body slashed, but he managed to swim ashore. Eventually, he recovered without losing his leg. The panic was really on now: 25,000 bathers were ordered out of the water after a shark was reported off New York City’s Orchard Beach. (There were no reports of children being trampled.) Coney Island bathers scrambled ashore when policemen, firing rifles and submachine guns for the benefit of cameramen, inadvertently triggered a shark scare. It was like 1916, with modern touches. Besides the submachine guns and the helicopters, a Navy blimp was put on shark-spotting duty, and Coast Guard cutters scoured the sea, directed to reported shark packs by radio. The anxieties of bathers presumably were put to rest by the knowl- edge that nearly every modern weapon was being used against the shark. But few realized what a senseless war it was. For the seas abound in sharks. Sharks menace popular bathing, boating, and water-sports areas all The Shadows Attack Zi over the world—from the beaches of Australia, South Africa and Cali- fornia to the sun worshipers’ meccas of Florida and the shores of Long Island. Between August 13th and October 13th, 1961, a total of 310 sharks were caught off the New Jersey and the Long Island coasts by agents or the U: S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of a very limited study of predators of game fishes. The catch, according to Dr. Lionel A. Walford, director of Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory at Highlands, New Jersey, included six Great White sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), ranging in weight from 151 to 285 pounds." Florida, with its 1,277 miles of coastline, has at least 40 species of sharks within its waters, most of which are said to be harmless. But many a “harmless” shark inexplicably turns on man. One species, long dismissed as harmless, has, in very recent times, been accused of 14 known attacks. Bathers have been scraped, maimed, or killed by small sharks, big sharks, and such bizarre shark relatives as the Saw fish, whose long snout is studded with thick and massive teeth, and the sting ray, whose tail is a whip that bears one or more venomous spines. It is impossible to classify precisely some sharks as harmless and some sharks as dangerous. But there is one shark that ranks above all others as a killer and that is the Great White shark. Even after the attacks in 1916, when the Great White was captured off New Jersey, U.S. Commissioner of Fish- eries Hugh M. Smith said, “It must be regarded as comparatively in- offensive in our waters.” The Great White was then thought to be a tropical shark. We know today, though, that it often cruises as far north as Nova Scotia. The Great White is also described as a pelagic (oceanic) shark, but it makes excursions into bathing areas. And monstrous speci- mens have been taken not far from such areas. A 3,000-pound, 16-foot Great White, for instance, was harpooned a few miles off Amagansett Beach on Long Island in 1960. In 1950, the California Bureau of Marine Fisheries published a guide to sharks found in that state’s waters. The guide said that the Great White was “uncommon at best in our waters, and, since it rarely comes inshore, it is a negligible hazard to California swimmers.” [Italics added. | One day in October, 1955, a shark appeared near two skin-divers swimming not far from shore off La Jolla, California. The divers were not attacked and the incident probably would not have been investigated 1 Other species caught in the Fish and Wildlife survey: 124 Sandbars (Eulamia milberti), weighing 8 to 348 pounds, 77 Duskys (Carcharhinus obscurus), 12 to 590 pounds; 52 Smooth Dogfish (Mustelus canis), 1% to 18 pounds, 29 Tigers (Galeo- cerdo cuvieri), 29 to 1,100 pounds; 9 Hammerheads (Sphyrna zygaena and Sphyrna diplana), 24 to 225 pounds; 6 Makos (Isurus oxyrinchus), 220 to 320 pounds; 1 Sand (Carcharias taurus), 250 pounds, and a 650-pound Thresher (Alopias vulpinus). Six sharks were lost before they could be positively identified. 22 Shark Against Man except for a quirk of geography. The shark had chosen to appear right off the pier at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography—and an ichthy- ology student was there to identify it as a Great White shark. The next day, a Scripps specialist in sharks, Arthur O. F lechsig, was at the pier. He baited a hook and caught the shark. It got away before Flechsig and his two companions could land it. But it had attacked their boat not far from the pier and left behind proof of identification as reliable as a fingerprint: two teeth embedded in the gouged bottom of the skiff. One of the most positive means of identifying a shark is by its teeth. There was no doubt that the teeth in Flechsig’s boat belonged to a Great White. Within two weeks, nine Great Whites had been caught in the area. Shark attacks had been rare in California coastal waters up to 1955, when the Great Whites suddenly appeared. Besides two cases of swim- mers being brushed by sharks, there were on record only three known attacks, one of which in Monterey Bay, on December 7, 1952, was fatal. But in 1955, California’s shark-attack pattern changed drastically: two reports of minor injuries from encounters with sharks off Venice Beach . a grapple between a surfboarder and a shark off Santa Monica... . a vicious attack upon a SCUBA diver by a 3-foot shark . . . the aston- ishing escape of a spear-fisherman who had been seized by a shark but suffered only a scratched foot. The spear-fisherman had been diving in Monterey Bay. He wore a black rubber diving suit and rubber swim fins. The shark grabbed him by the ankles, ripped both “ankles” off the diver’s rubber suit, tore off his right swim fin and a heavy wool sock, and bit through his left swim fin. The fisherman identified the shark as a Great White. There was one report of a non-fatal attack in California in 1956. Then in 1957, one eerie encounter with a shark was reported. Peter Savino and Daniel Hogan were swimming beyond the breakers of Morro Bay, near San Luis Obispo. Savino became tired and Hogan began towing him toward shore. A shark appeared, nudged Savino and slashed his arm, apparently by rubbing him with its sandpaper hide. “I have blood on my arms! We’d better get out of here!” Savino yelled to Hogan. They began swimming separately. Hogan turned a moment later to see whether Savino was all right. Savino had disappeared, without an outcry, and was never seen again. In 1959, California again experienced a Year of the Shark. On May 7th, a swimmer was killed by a shark practically within the shadow of Golden Gate Bridge. And, on June 14th, there almost certainly was another Great White shark off La Jolla, but this time the shark was not caught. Instead, it caught a man. Robert Pamperin, a husky, 33-year-old aircraft engineer, was diving The Shadows Attack 23 for abalone about 50 yards off La Jolla with another skin-diver, Tom Lehrer. Suddenly, Pamperin rose high out of the water. His skin-diver face-plate had been torn off. He screamed once. “I was swimming about fifteen feet from Bob,” Lehrer said later. “I heard him calling, ‘Help me! Help me!’ “I swam over to him. He was thrashing in the water, and I could tell he was fighting something underneath . . .” In the next instant, Pamperin went under. Lehrer peered underwater through his face-place. The water, though bloodied, was remarkably clear, and he saw his friend’s body in the jaws of a shark. “It had a white belly and I could see its jaws and jagged teeth,” Lehrer said. “I wasn’t able to do anything more. So I swam to shore to warn the other swimmers.” Before 1959 ended, there were three more attacks in California—a spear-fisherman whose left leg was slashed by a Hammerhead shark 300 yards from where Pamperin ‘had been dev oured; a swimmer whose left arm was raked from wrist to elbow by a shark ote Malibu; and a skin- diver who lived to tell how (what he presumed to be) a Great White shark bit down on one of his rubber swim fins, “shook me like a dog shakes a bone,” and then released him, unharmed. Public officials in California talked of somehow finding a way to stop the sharks. Swimmers and skin-divers sought an explanation for the attacks and the presence of Great Whites in California waters. Ocean- ographers said that there had been a rise in water temperatures off the coast of California in recent years. But no one really knew why the sharks had come, why bathers had been attacked—or even how many had been attacked. For, when a man goes for a long ocean swim and never returns, or when men go out fishing in a small boat and only the boat is found . . . what was their fate? Captain Charles Hardy, chief of San Diego lifeguards, remarked after Pamperin’s death that three persons had disappeared in the area during the previous three months, and that their bodies had never been found. Were they, too, victims of sharks? Eight days after Pamperin was killed, a 12%-foot shark was caught off Catalina Island, about 60 miles north of La Jolla. In its belly was found a man’s watch, too badly deteriorated to be identified. It could not have been Pamperin’s, for he wore no jewelry when he went on his last abalone hunt. But whose watch was it? Had a man lost it at sea and, as it fell to the bottom, had its eleem lured a curious shark? Or had a man been wearing it? When the southern summer began in Australia in November of 1961, the warm weather ushered in another tragic “Year of the Shark.” Fisher- men and bathers began reporting the sighting of more offshore sharks 24 Shark Against Man than had been seen in recent memory. This time, there was no mystery about what had lured the shark packs. Heavy rains and floods had swept countless fish down the rivers and into the sea along much of Australia’s coast. At many beach resorts, shark patrols were doubled, and swimmers were continually warned against swimming alone or venturing out too far. Along the coasts of Victoria and New South Wales, at least. 15 Gray Nurse and White Pointer sharks were killed. But, in mid-December, a 22-year-old man was attacked off the Queensland coast. His left leg was mauled, and he died within a week. Then, on December 28th, an 18-year-old girl and her 24-year-old boy friend went swimming at Mackay, Queensland. They were standing in about 2% feet of water about 12 feet from shore when a shark knocked down the girl. In three savage attacks, the shark ripped off one of the girl’s arms and part of the other and slashed her right thigh. Her com- panion desperately beat the shark with his fists. His right hand suddenly gushed blood. By this time, a third bather came to their aid, and the shark disappeared. Forty-eight hours later, the girl died. Chapter 2 More Shadows Attack The hazardous creatures of the sea are many, but there is one that man fears above all others: the ominous, stealthy shadow—The Shark. The fear of sharks is older than the recorded history of man, for tales of terrible encounters between sharks and men go back to pre- historic times. In recorded history the Greek poet, Leonidas of Taren- tum, told of Tharsys, a sponge diver, who was being pulled into a boat when a shark attacked him, tearing away the lower portions of his body. Tharsys’ companions took his remains to shore, and thus, the poet wryly noted, Tharsys was buried “both on land and in the sea.” Since the time Europeans first sailed the open sea, they carried back to port tales of fearsome fishes—“cruell devourers, the ravenous tiburon,” man-eating monsters. They were sharks. Yet, skeptics ashore doubted the tales, and the doubts grew as sea voyages became more commonplace. By relatively modern times, the skeptics were insisting that no adequate proof existed to show that sharks try attacked living men. In 1916, when the first New Jersey shark attack occurred, the skeptics were shaken, but they still clung to their claims. Even after five suc- cessive attacks in New Jersey waters that summer, alleged experts held out against the belief that a shark, unprovoked, would devour a living man. The evidence occasionally found in the bellies of sharks, they said, proved only that sharks would eat bodies, and this was really no proof that the persons were alive when the sharks found them. This was and is a perfectly valid statement. Ten years after the New Jersey attacks, a businessman named Louis J. Crossette announced that he was going to start a shark fishery in the Caribbean. He wasn’t worried. “Sharks do not eat human beings,” he explained. “The shark is one of the worst cowards in the sea.” Crossette pointed out that no less an authority than William Beebe, the famed underwater explorer, also scoffed at stories of shark attacks. Beebe, in his bathysphere at the bottom of the ocean, had peered through the thick windows and had seen sharks. He had observed them close at hand while in a bathing suit and diving helmet, in fairly shallow 25 26 Shark Against Man water. None had menaced him. He had also, he said, talked to men in the tropics who had encountered sharks. And, Beebe said, he had come away unconvinced that the shark was a man-eater. Once, he recounted, he had asked the head of the pearl-diving industry in Ceylon if sharks bit men. “Why, yes,” the head pearl diver replied. “We lose many men. They go down, disappear, and we see blood coming to the top of the water.” “Now, tell me,” Beebe said, “as one man of science to another, did you ever know a shark to bite a man?” The way Beebe told the story, the head diver grinned sheepishly and answered: “No, but the tourists like to hear such stories, so we tell them what they want to know.” With well-known experts like Beebe around, the reality of the five New Jersey shark attacks could not compete with the unreality of ig- noring the facts of the shark menace. Telling people what they wanted to hear, many alleged experts said that no one need fear the shark. “Where are the records to prove shark attacks?” the experts said. “What is there to rely on besides sailors’ yarns?” The record was there, if anyone bothered to look at it. There was, for instance, the Imdian Medical Gazette of April 1, 1881, in which a surgeon routinely reported that “more than 20 persons have been se- verely bitten by sharks this year. Almost all were fatal.” And there were on record in 1926 at least four well-documented shark attack re- ports in the archives of the United States Navy. Apparently, these Navy records were not consulted by those who refused to believe that sharks would attack men. It seems likely, though, that the following report by a Navy surgeon would have converted any non-believer: The U.S.S. Dale, at the time of the accident, was anchored in Canacao Bay, P. I. About 5 p.m., May 31, 1917, E. E., water tender, attached to the U.SS. Dale, started out for a long swim, accompanied by one of his shipmates. E. E. was an excellent swimmer and, after a time, his companion, becoming tired and not wishing to go further, left him and he continued to swim alone in the direc- tion of the open bay. About 5:45 p.m., a seaman on the U.S.S. Monterey happened to notice E. E., who was then some 200 yards from the ship, fall suddenly on his back and then give two or three violent strokes in the water. At the same time, the observer saw a shark in close proximity to the bather. It was not hard to conjecture that some accident had occurred, and a boat was rapidly lowered and rushed to the vicinity where the man had last been seen. The body was recovered, but it was evident from the extensiveness of the wound that the man was dead. He was then taken to the morgue of the United States Naval Hospital, Canacao, P. I. More Shadows Attack 2) Nearly the entire abdominal cavity had been torn away. Indeed, the wound extended from the ensiform cartilage nearly to the brim of the pelvis. Laterally, from the right mid-axillary line to the left mid-axillary line. The stomach, the small and large intestine, with the exception of a few feet, most of the liver and bladder. half of the left kidney and all of the large abdominal blood vessels were removed . . . A portion of the ribs had been taken out with the nicety of a costotome. Some of the skin along the edges of the wound was in ribbons and bore the imprint of the monster’s teeth. E. E. was of large stature. He was about 5 feet, 11 inches tall and weighed approximately 200 pounds. No doubt if he had been of much smaller dimensions the force of the attack might have been sufficient to have cut his body in two. If indisputable medical reports such as that one had gained circulation, the question of whether or not sharks attack men would have been settled long ago! The first documented study of shark attacks in U.S. waters did not come until 1935, when E. Milby Burton, director of the Charleston (South Carolina) Museum, reported, Authentic published records of persons having been bitten by sharks while in bathing along the Atlantic coast north of Florida are rare . . . Yet, within the last decade, off the coast of South Carolina, there have been several well- authenticated cases of fierce attacks upon bathers. Burton examined hospital records, interviewed victims, and talked to the doctors who had treated them. The first attack Burton docu- mented occurred on July 16th, 1933, when Miss Emma G. Megginson was standing in the surf at Folly Island, which lies south of Charleston harbor and faces on the Atlantic. The water was about up to Miss Megginson’s waist. Her younger brother was in the water with her, and, when she felt something pinch the calf of her left leg, she thought it was her brother trying to frighten her. But a moment later, her right leg was seized savagely, and blood tinged the water around her. She staggered ashore and was taken to the Roper Hospital in Charleston, where 30 stitches were needed to close the wounds imprinted by the jaws of a shark. Five days later, Drayton Hastie, aged 15, was swimming at the north end of Morris Island, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. The attack on Miss Megginson, and the almost simultaneous capture of an 8-foot Cub shark, had made everyone around Charleston shark conscious. So, when Drayton saw what he thought was a dorsal fin of a shark far up on the shore from where he was swimming, he was momentarily frightened. He concluded, though, that he had excitedly identified a choppy wave as a fin. Just to play it safe, however, Drayton waded to shore and sat down in about 3 feet of water in a place where the beach sloped gradually 28 Shark Against Man Three hundred yards off the shore of North Bondi, Australia, two surf-boarders freeze in terror as the dorsal fin of a shark cuts through the water close to them. The shark circled the youths for 40 minutes before a boat chased it out to sea. (This unbelievable picture has been double-checked for accuracy. It was taken by Sydney Daily Telegraph photographer John Askew. ) United Press International Photo to a drop-off some 6 feet from shore. “I was almost certain,” he said later, “that in such shallow water I would be safe from anything large enough to bite.” Drayton was thus sitting in shallow water when . . . “I felt a swerve of water, which was immediately followed by an impact which brought me to my senses. Something clamped down on my right leg. I was aware of a tearing pain up and down my leg, and that I was being pulled outward by something which seemed to have the power of a horse. Looking down, I saw, amid the foam and splashing, the head of a large shark with my knee in its mouth, shaking it as a puppy would shake a stick in attempting to take it away from someone. Through natural instinct, I started kicking frantically with my unharmed leg, in order to free myself. I freed my right leg, only to have the monster bite me on my left one. “All this time I had been pulling myself up on the beach backwards with my hands and kicking at the rough head of the shark, which seemed to me as solid as Gibraltar. “Although to you this may seem long and strung out,” Drayton told Burton, “it must have all happened in a space of ten seconds. . . Some people said I had been bitten by everything from crabs up to whales . . . I still have a perfect design of a shark’s mouth around my knee, measuring ten inches across. This confirms the statement of my More Shadows Attack 29 friend who was standing on the bank and who said that the shark was easily eight feet long.” Drayton Hastie recovered. Possibly confirming his story, within a week after the attack, an 8-foot Cub shark (Carcharhinus leucas) was caught less than a hundred yards from the scene of the previous attack. It may well have been the same culprit. A little more than a month after the attacks on Miss Megginson and Drayton Hastie, Kenneth Layton and a friend were swimming at Paw- ley’s Island, about 75 miles north of Charleston. They were far from shore, although the water they were in was only about 4 feet deep. Suddenly, a man on the beach shouted: “Shark! Shark!” Layton heard the warning at about the same instant he saw what had inspired it: a large dorsal fin about 50 yards away from him and bearing toward him fast. Layton and his friend frantically began swimming to- ward shore. But the shark veered and seemed to be trying to cut the swimmers off before they could reach shallow water. It did not attack immediately. Almost as if it were toying with the swimmers, or singling one of them out, it held off until the swimmers were in waist-deep water. Then, in a flash of movement, the shark struck Layton, seizing his right heel and ankle. Courageous friends splashed through the sea to his side, and, by sheer tugging, pulled him from the shark’s jaws. The shark disappeared. Several tendons of his right ankle were severed, but Layton survived—and eventually regained use of his crippled foot. These were not the first shark attacks South Carolina had known. In 1924, for instance, a man was attacked by “a large fish” while standing near the shore of Folly Island. More than 100 stitches were taken in wounds in his left leg. Two months after the attack, he went back to the hospital, complaining about intense pains in his left knee. The knee was operated upon, and a remnant of a tooth was removed. The tooth was immediately mis-identified as a barracuda’s. This, presumably, re- lieved people around Folly Island, for, when faced with some seemingly incontestable piece of evidence proving an attack, the believer in the benevolence of the shark always somehow finds solace in blaming a creature other than a shark. (When Burton was assembling his evidence of South Carolina shark attacks, he had the tooth-from-the-knee clue examined by two ichthyologists who positively identified it as having come from the jaw of a shark!) Competent research such as Burton’s could have turned up numerous shark attacks along United States coasts. But the public, to the delight of concessionaires and chambers of commerce in coastal resort towns, asked for no revelations about shark attacks. They preferred to continue to ignore the shark. Skepticism about shark attacks persisted up to the advent of World 30 Shark Against Man The mass feeding habit of sharks is shown here. The seas are frothing from the frenzied thrashings of sharks in search of food. This is the most perilous situation a man in the water can face. The photo was taken during the Navy's wartime experiments to develop a shark repellent. The sharks are feeding on trash fish dumped overboard by a shrimp boat off Mayport, Florida. The sharks here were tentatively identified as Small Black-Tipped sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus ). U.S. Navy Photo War II. When the war began, neither sailors nor ocean-spanning pilots were prepared for what awaited them if they were cast into shark-in- fested waters. On the very day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, half a world away sharks were attacking, too. A British warship was torpedoed in the South Atlantic on that day. As survivors swam to life-rafts, a pack of sharks appeared among them. Man after man was attacked. The blood triggered a frenzy, and the sharks went mad with hunger-lust. The men lucky enough to reach the rafts fought off emboldened sharks with paddles. When the survivors were rescued five days later, weary, rerrified men were still wielding paddles, and sharks were still claiming victims. Of the 450 men aboard, 170 survived. How many were killed by the torpedoing, how many drowned—and how many were devoured by sharks—will never be known. Nor will it be known how many victims sharks claimed in other war- More Shadows Attack 3] time disasters, such as the torpedoing of the troopship Nova Scotia at night off Delagoa Bay, southeast Africa just north of Durban, or the sinking of the cruiser Indianapolis by a Japanese submarine in the Philip- pines. A thousand men were lost in the Nova Scotia tragedy. Next morning, when rescue ships arrived, they found numerous corpses in lifejackets. The lifejackets had saved the men from drowning. But their dead bod- ies were legless. Nothing could have saved the men from the hordes of sharks that swarmed the sea. In the sinking of the Indianapolis, 316 men survived and 883 died, most of them in the water, awaiting a bungled rescue that did not come for four long torturous days. The number of men killed by sharks is not known. Many of the men who survived bore shark bites. And 88 of the bodies recovered had been mutilated by sharks. Despite the earlier known shark attacks, U.S. survival manuals pub- lished at the start of the war dismissed the shark as “slow-moving, cow- ay and easily frightened off by splashing.” The shark was described as “a wary fish, suspicious of noise, movement, unfamiliar forms. Lie trait alone would restrain a shark from attacking a swimming person.” The shark described in the survival manual appeared to be a creature akin to the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz, and the recommenda- tions for fighting off a shark read like something out of a fairy tale. After “striking him on his tender, vulnerable nose, in the ae, or knifing the more vital gills,” the manual writers bravely advised, “swim out of the line of his charge, grab a pectoral fin as he goes by, and ride with him as long as you can hold your breath.” —Probably the silliest armchair advice that could be offered. But this was only the beginning. “If you can attach yourself to him,” the manual went on, “the shark may lose his viciousness and become his usual cowardly self. If you have a knife, cut the shark’s belly open. By opening the shark’s belly, you let water inside; this will kill him almost instantly.” —More absolute nonsense. A reader of the manual, who did manage to survive a shark attack despite the book’s advice, told how he pounded his unloaded .45 pistol on an attacking shark’s “vulnerable nose”’ and “soft” belly. “He turned over then,” the pilot reported, “and I started to pound him on the top of his head. He was as hard as steel there, and I later discovered I'd partially flattened the little steel eyelet on the butt of the gun, where the lanyard is attached.” Life-raft occupants were also attacked, and what happened to some of them was certainly not covered in the survival manual. “Late in the afternoon,” a man who lived through 17 days on a life-raft recounted, “a shark about four feet long struck at the raft, and, going right over 32 Shark Against Man my shoulder, slid into the raft. It took a bite out of (C——. Onevofethe men and myself caught the shark by the tail and pulled him out of the raft. C—— became delirious and died about four hours later.” In the South Pacific, potential shark victims did their own field re- search. Some rescued airmen claimed sharks could be driven off by sea-marker dye, a brilliant yellow preparation used to stain the water to facilitate rescue; others complained that sharks were attracted by the dye. Many men put their faith in water-purifying tablets, the theory being that the chlorine in the tablets repelled sharks. At least two cases were recorded in which the survival manuals themselves were used to shoo away sharks. An airman downed in the Yellow Sea had nothing to do but pass the time reading a booklet attached to his lifejacket. After reading the booklet, Survival at Sea, he tore it up and threw the pieces in the water. A shark that had been following the airman’s dinghy darted after the paper and never bothered the airman again. Over the South Pacific, five men bailed out of a crippled plane. They had no life-raft, and, as they trod water together in their lifejackets, sharks began circling around them. The airmen tried to drive off the sharks by kicking at them. Then, in disgust, they tore up two survival manuals and tossed the pieces away. The sharks left the men and swam off to examine the manuals. A short while later, the men were rescued. What happened to the sharks after digesting the message in the manuals is not known. Dr. George A. Llano, an Air Force research specialist, and an inter- nationally known student of shark attack, himself a life-raft survivor, gathered these reports in an exhaustive study of airmen who ditched their planes or who were shot down over the sea during the war. He examined the reports of 2,500 victims of wartime sea survival experiences. Surprisingly, only 38 reports mentioned actual contacts with sharks. But, as Llano grimly remarked, “When sharks are successful, they leave no evidence, and the number of missing airmen who may have succumbed to them cannot be estimated.”’ Llano told of one Navy officer who survived a shark attack during the 12 hours he floated in the water off Guadalcanal after his destroyer was sunk. At dawn, he said, he was floating in the water when he felt something “tickling his left foot.” “Slightly startled,” his account reads, “I . . . held it up. It was gush- ing blood . . . I peered into the water . . . not ten feet away was the glistening, brown back of a great fish . . . swimming away. The real fear did not hit me until I saw him turn and head back toward me. He didn’t rush... but, breaking the surface of the water, came in a steady direct line. I kicked and splashed tremendously, and this time he More Shadows Attack 33 veered off me . . . went off about twenty feet and swam back and forth. Then he turned . . . and came from the same angle toward my left . When he was almost upon me I thrashed out... brought my fist down on his nose . . . again and again. He was thrust down about two feet . . . (he) swam off and waited. I discovered that he had torn off a piece of my left hand. Then . . . again at the same angle to my left . . I managed to hit him on the eyes, the nose. The flesh was torn from my left arm ... At intervals of ten or fifteen minutes he would ease off from his slo swimming and bear directly toward me, coming in at my left. Only twice did he go beneath me. Helpless against this type of attack, I feared it most, but because I was so nearly flat on top of the water, he seemed unable to get at me from below . . . The big toe on my left foot was dangling. A piece of my right heel was gone. My left elbow, hand and calf were torn. If he did not actually sink his teeth into me, his rough hide would scrape great pieces off my skin. The salt water stanched the flow of blood somewhat and I was not conscious of great pain.” (Though by now the shark had bitten his thigh, exposing the bone, the officer was more concerned with attracting the attention of a ship that was going by. He waved frantically. The ship spotted him and sped to his rescue scant seconds before he would surely have been devoured. Sailors aboard the ship began firing rifles at the shark to drive it away.) “A terrible fear of being shot to death in the water when rescue was so near swept over me,” the officer later told his rescuers. “I screamed _ and pleaded and cried for them to stop. The shark was so close. They would hit me first.” Llano discovered that every shark encounter produced an apparently unique. pattern of behavior, by both the shark and the man who faced it. A pilot swimming toward an island after being downed in the southwest Pacific told of seeing four sharks come within 25 yards of him. He ignored them. “I made up my mind not to get panicky, but to keep plugging along until I got there, or the sharks got me,” he said. He made it, unmolested by the sharks. Another pilot who parachuted into Philippine waters was shadowed by four sharks. As long as he kicked at them, they did not bother him. When he stopped to rest, one of them would make a pass at him. In one of these lunges, a shark grazed his legs. Even though blood colored the water around him, he was not attacked again. After eight hours in the water, he was picked up by a destroyer. “Men have spent hours in the water among sharks without being touched, and in view of the evidence some of the escapes seem little short of miraculous,” Llano reported. “The one feature all accounts 34 Shark Against Man illustrate is the fact that, though clothing cannot be depended on to prevent attack, sharks are more apt to bite a bare than a clothed body.” The wartime experiences recounted to Llano and other researchers in the Air Force and the Navy provided science with some new informa- tion about shark behavior—and showed the absurdities of some old be- liefs about sharks. But man still has a lot to learn. Anyone who read of a shark attack, then went to the beach, felt a slight chill when the thought of a shark passed through his mind. The very terror of the shark, however, often suppresses reason. Shock, horror, revulsion, grief, panic, fright—these are the typical ingredients of a shark- attack story. They are ingredients that rarely produce a cool, analytical report of what actually happened. After an attack, if the victim is dead and the body is recovered, it may still bear some evidence. Pathologists may find some clues: a tooth, or a crescent of wounds that will indict a certain species of shark. If the victim lives, he may babble an incoherent story, or, as has happened several times, he may be able to recount, vividly, exactly what happened —but only during those few awful seconds when his life or death hung on the whim of a shark. ‘All I remember about the actual accident,” one victim said, “was that there was a movement on the surface and my left hand had disap- peared in a shark’s mouth . . . I closed my right hand and hit upward on the end of his nose . . . The fish obligingly opened his mouth and disappeared. I had not seen him come, nor did I see him go—even though we were only a foot or two apart.” The man who told this story, Philip C. Diez of Honolulu, was at- tacked off the Island of Molokai in Hawaii in 1956. He was hauled aboard a nearby boat and taken to shore, where prompt medical attention saved his mangled arm. To Diez, the attack was as sudden and as inexplicable as a bolt of lightning searing a sunny summer sky. Rarely are there calm, competent witnesses who have seen the whole terrible tableau of an attack and have had the necessary background to interpret soberly what their shocked eyes have seen. There is on record, however, at least one such accumulation of eyewitness testimony about an attack. From this testimony has come a thorough study of a shark attack. But for this detailed report, a young man had to die, and several brave men had to risk death. The victim was Barry Wilson, aged 17, who was attacked by a shark off Pacific Grove, California, about 2 o’clock in the afternoon of De- cember 7th, 1952. Barry’s ordeal with a shark began, like many another, with a scream. More Shadows Attack 35 His cry was heard simultaneously by his friend, Brookner Brady, Jr., aged 15, who was swimming close by, and John C. Bassford, who was sitting on a rise directly above the beach. Bassford, assistant manager of the Monterey (California) office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and an experienced skin- diver, was 30 yards from Barry when he heard the scream. Bassford saw the actual ‘attack. An instant before Barry screamed, Bassford noticed that the youth seemed to be frantically scanning the water around him. Then, as Barry’s face was transfixed in terror, a large shark appeared directly in front of him. While Bassford shouted a warning to Barry’s companion, the shark struck Barry. Bassford saw Barry’s body thrust straight out of the water up to about his thighs. Barry pushed both his hands against the shark, trying to free himself. But he fell sideways, still clutched by the shark, and was pulled under. Blood gushed upward and spread on the surface, forming a circle about 6 feet in diameter. Barry suddenly bobbed to the surface in the middle of the circle, screamed again, and began beating the water with his hands. Now the shark appeared again, part of its back showing above the surface. It swept past Barry, then returned—and finally disappeared. Whether it struck Barry again, Bassford didn’t know. Although he had seen the attack, 15-year- old Brookner Brady would not leave his friend. He swam 50 feet to Barry’s side and began towing him to shore. Meanwhile, four members of the Sea Otter Club, a skin-divers’ group, swam out to Barry and Brookner. Three of the Sea Otters were trained _ investigators: Sergeant Earl Stanley of the 63rd Military Police Platoon stationed at nearby Fort Ord, Robert Shaw of the 313th Criminal In- vestigation Detachment at Fort Ord; and Frank M. Ambrosio of the California State Highway Patrol. The fourth Sea Otter was John L. Poskus, a mathematics and physics teacher at Monterey High School. The four rescuers brought with them a large inner tube which they managed to get around Barry’s body and up under his limp arms. As they struggled in the water with the bulky tube, Barry suddenly lunged forward. Startled, Shaw looked around to see who had pushed Barry so violently. Shaw saw a shark, just as it turned away, and he realized what had pushed Barry. The shark had not given up its victim. Shaw and Ambrosio clung to opposite ade of the inner tube, pushing it, while Poskus pulled it with a nylon rope he had attached to it. Stanley kept to the back of the tube, supporting Barry’s head to keep it from falling backward into the water. Through rough seas, the men headed for a small breakwater pier. It was a slow, arduous journey that lasted more than 20 minutes. And 36 Shark Against Man during those 20 long minutes, the shark constantly hovered close by the rescuers and the victim they had snatched from it. Again and again— usually when the men stopped to prop Barry’s slipping body back into the tube—the shark appeared. That is all it did. Appear. Never did it strike at Barry. Never did it make a feint. The men said its movements were slow, deliberate, almost leisurely. Somewhere during that nightmare, Barry died. He was dead when a waiting physician examined him the moment his body was carried up to the pier. The lower part of his right buttock and nearly all of the back of his right leg from the thigh almost to the knee was ripped away. His left leg bore deep slashes. By careful examination of the wounds—and by interviewing the rescuers, who had been able to observe the shark closely, ichthyologists concluded that the killer had been a Great White, 12 to 13 feet long. Rolf L. Bolin, an ichthyologist from Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, deduced that Barry had been bitten at least four times. “The corroboratory evidence of the witnesses,” Bolin reported, “in- dicates the sequence: first, on the lower left leg from behind, which strike wounded and startled him; second, on the medial surface of the right thigh, when the shark approached him from in front, and, passing partially between his legs, lifted him high out of the water; third, on the upper left leg from the back and side, when Wilson struck in desperation at the water, and, finally, on the back and side of the right thigh, while he was being placed in the tube and when he was undoubtedly already dead.” The attack took place in water about 30 feet deep. The water tem- perature, which had been slowly falling from about 56° to 55° Ri fae about a week, was hovering at around 55° at the time of the attack. A heavy surf, reaching to heights of about 8 feet, was running, and the water was somewhat murky—because of dirt washed into the sea by rain the night before and a heavy concentration of plankton. Visibility was limited to about 6 to 8 feet underwater. The day was partly cloudy. Those were the factual ingredients of the attack. Is there, somewhere among them, an answer to the riddle of why sharks attack men? If there is an answer to the riddle, it is certainly hidden in the se- quence of events that trigger an attack—the conditions in the water, the reaction of the swimmer, the responses of the shark to a complex series of causes and effects. But so many factors seem to be involved that no simple equation can be set up. With what is known about sharks today, no one can honestly say that a certain set of conditions will or will not produce a shark attack. Only one categorical statement can be made about sharks: they are unpredictable. Captain Cousteau, who has become one of the world’s outstanding More Shadows Attack 37 authorities on life beneath the sea, and has survived many confrontations with sharks, says in his famous book, The Silent World» “From the data, covering over a hundred encounters with many varieties, I can offer two conclusions: the better acquainted we become with sharks, the less we know them; and one can never tell what a shark is going to do.” Dr. Gilbert Doukan, a doctor of medicine, and a pioneer in under- water hunting, exploration, and photography, is only a trifle more opti- mistic. Perhaps, he writes in his The World Beneath the Waves,’ the day will come when we will “know which sharks are the ‘good’ ones, and which are the ones whose aggressive and dangerous nature makes it advisable to give them a wide berth.” But he adds: “Unfortunately, however, by the time we have suc- ceeded, in the bluish immensity of the water, in recognizing to which type a shark belongs, it may be too late. There are no charitable beings dwelling in the depths of the tropical waters who will considerately erect, in the appropriate regions, notices saying, ‘Beware of the sharks.’ ” The enigma of the shark is not left unchallenged. Scientists of shark- menaced shores from Florida to Australia are seeking to unravel the mystery. It is frustrating work. The typical dangerous shark is large, difficult to handle, and not designed for laboratory study. It often lan- guishes in captivity, and whatever secrets of behavior it may reveal in a tank or a pen are muted by its apathy in imprisonment. With patience and skill, however, scientists are managing today to keep sharks in captivity and study them. Dr. Eugenie Clark is testing the behavior and the intelligence of large sharks of several species at the - Cape Haze Marine Laboratory on Siesta Key, Florida. Recently, Dr. Clark delivered 37 Tiger shark pups by cesarean section. One survived. Thanks to constant, almost maternal care, the shark pup lived for three and a half months while Dr. Clark scrupulously observed it. She hoped to learn when the shark reached maturity—an elementary fact, but one that is not positively known, so scant is our knowledge of sharks. One morning Dr. Clark checked her shark pen and found the pup dead. It was killed, she believes, not by natural causes or by another shark, but by a vandal who sneaked into the laboratory compound, somehow caught the little shark, and beat it over the head. With the aid of an anesthetic known as M.S. 222, sharks can be captured and subdued, experimented on or examined—and then returned to the sea, unharmed. The anesthetic can knock out a 400-pound shark in 1 minute or less. It is merely squirted into the mouth of the shark 1 Jacques Yves Cousteau, The Silent World (New York: Harper, 1953). 2 Dr. Gilbert Doukan, The World Beneath the Waves (New York: John de Graff, 1957). 38 Shark Against Man Dr. Eugenie Clark holds a 34-inch Tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvieri), last of a litter of 37 born at the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory at Sarasota, Florida. The pup was apparently killed by a vandal. Dr. Clark had hoped that the sharks would live long enough to reach maturity and perhaps provide clues to the Tiger shark’s ravenous eating habits. Wide World Photo (the spiracles of a ray) or sprayed over the gill slits. A simple water pistol can be used. The anesthetic has been used extensively in recent experiments on sharks under conditions as close as possible to their normal environment. Research has not usually been encouraged in areas sensitive to pub- More Shadows Attack 39 licity about shark attacks. In 1958, however, the Sarasota County Chamber of Commerce requested the Florida State Board of Conservation to “determine as many facts as possible about sharks in Florida waters, their potential (statistical) danger to bathers and what measures or recom- mendations for precautionary measures seemed advisable.” The Chamber’s unprecedented request was not inspired by a sudden academic interest in ichthyology. In the summer of 1958, four shark attacks occurred within five weeks along a 60-mile stretch of beach between Sarasota and Sanibel Island on the lower west coast of Florida. On June 24th, Frank A. Mahala, aged 17, was walking toward shore in 21% feet of murky water at Turtle Beach on Siesta Key. He was about 10 feet from shore when, coming from behind, a shark grabbed his left leg. Mahala said he did not feel any sensation in his wounded leg. He thought he had been bitten only once. Actually, he had several wounds. This insensitivity to pain is typical in shark bites.* He was dragged to shore by relatives and taken to a hospital, where it was found that his left foot and leg were severely injured by what the AEDES physician described as cecth | ‘shaped like the teeth of a heavy saw.” The physician believed, from the nature of the wounds, that the shark had taken the youth’s entire foot in its mouth, but had not been quite strong enough to bite through it. Mahala recovered. On June 26th, Eric N. Cockerill, aged 59, was wading in water about 3 feet deep on a sand bar some 30 feet from shore off Sanibel Island. Cockerill said that he felt a sharp pain in his right foot and realized that he had put it right into the mouth of a shark. He yanked his foot out of the water and saw the shark’s jaws still locked around it. The shark let go and disappeared. Cockerill limped ashore, and eventually recovered the use of his foot. From Cockerill’s description of the shark and from the pattern of the wounds, it was concluded that a “harmless” Nurse shark, about 7 feet long, had attacked him. On July 2nd, again at Siesta Key, Jon Hamlin, aged 22, was skin-diving about 10 feet from shore. He saw a “harmless” Nurse shark lying amid some rocks on the bottom. Hamlin grabbed the 54%4-foot shark by the tail with both hands and started making his way toward shore. Sud- denly, the shark twisted and sank its teeth into the inner part of Hamlin’s left leg, just below the knee. Hamlin immediately released his grip, and so did the shark, which rapidly swam away. Hamlin recovered. The fourth attack occurred on July 27th, 9 miles north of where Frank Mahala had been attacked on June 24th. Douglas Lawton, an 814- *The authors have no explanation as to why some sharks can bite sizeable chunks of flesh from victims without apparently causing pain. This phenomenon is reported frequently in case histories of shark attacks. 40 Shark Against Man Thirteen-year-old King Scherer displays a 28-inch Nurse shark (Ginglymostoma cir- ratum) which ripped his arm when he tried to grab its tail while he was skin-diving off Delray Beach, Florida. Despite the wound, he towed the shark to shore. Nurse sharks have long been classified as “harmless,” despite the fact that they have often viciously, though not fatally, attacked swimmers. United Press International Photo year-old aspiring skin-diver, was playing with his 12-year-old brother in about 3 feet of water 10 feet from shore. He and his brother were wearing green face masks and green flippers. They were alone in the water. The boys’ father and mother, an uncle and an aunt, were sitting near the water’s edge. No one saw the shark glide into the water near the boys. When Douglas screamed and was pulled under, his brother rushed to him, and, in rapidly reddening water, supported his brother’s head. Douglas’ par- ents, aunt, and uncle ran into the shallow water. They saw the shark striking again and again at Douglas’ left leg. So shallow was the water that the shark’s head, clamped to the boy’s thigh, broke the surface. Doug- las struck at the shark with his left hand. Slashed by the shark’s teeth, his hand began to bleed. The boy’s father pulled the shark by the tail, trying desperately to tear it from his son. Douglas’ uncle held the boy by the shoulders and tugged against the shark. Douglas’ brother was scratched, apparently by the shark’s hide, as he held his brother’s body. Unable to wrest Douglas from his family’s grasp, and partially exposed More Shadows Attack 41 in the shallow water, the shark floundered, then slithered into deeper water and vanished. A tourniquet was applied to Douglas’ ravaged left leg. He was taken to a hospital, where his leg was amputated above the knee. Dr. Clark, whose marine laboratory was nearby, studied the four attacks. She interviewed victims, witnesses, and attending physicians. She showed them pictures of various species of shark. She decided that a Tiger shark had been the attacker. And, after discovering a sand bar off the attack site, she reconstructed what she believed to be the events leading up to the attack. “It is possible,” she said, “that the shark swam over the sand bar earlier in the day and then found itself trapped in the channel as the tide became lower; or it may have swum into the channel from either of the passes at the ends of Longboat Key. The victim and his brother were the only people in the water at the time and the shark might easily have detected the vibrations made by the boys slapping their foot flippers at the surface of the water. “The victim’s feet and ankles were not as deeply tanned as the rest of his legs, as he usually wore shoes and socks when playing in the sun. It seems possible that the shark, attracted by the vibrations made by the flippers, saw the pale lower portion of the boy’s leg and struck at that point, first causing the large wound on the foot [the victim’s left flipper was lost, presumably during the attack |.” Her criminological study of the four cases led her to another possi- bility. “The shark which attacked Frank Mahala on June 24, 9 miles south,” Dr. Clark said, “could conceivably have been the same species and possibly the same individual shark. The latter is considered doubtful, but . . . this could be an explanation for the unusual occurrence of these two unprovoked attacks so close together in time and location in an area where no similar attack had been reported in 38 years.” The theory that a solitary, malevolent shark may be responsible for a series of adjacent attacks has been proposed by Dr. V. M. Coppleson, the Australian surgeon who has made a lifelong study of shark attacks in his home waters. Dr. Coppleson, who named these reputed marauders “rogue sharks,” suggests in his book, Shark Attack,’ that the “rogue” is “a killer which, having experienced the deadly sport of killing or mauling a human, goes in search of similar game.” He said the shark with a taste for human flesh is comparable to the man-eating lions and tigers which especially seek out only humans for prey. Dr. Coppleson once dramatically demonstrated his “rogue shark” 8V. M. Coppleson, Shark Attack (Sydney, Australia: Angus & Robertson, eta, 1959). +2 Shark Against Man theory in Australia. After reading a newspaper report that dogs were being attacked by sharks in George’s River near Sydney, Coppleson suspected that a rogue shark was in the area. He became convinced when a 13-year-old boy was killed by a shark at North Brighton Beach, not far from George’s River. The fatal attack occurred on January 23rd, 1940. That day Coppleson wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, warning that a man-eating shark was in the area and might strike again. Eleven days after his letter was published, a man was killed by a shark 400 yards from the scene of the first attack. Several cases may give weight to the rogue-shark theory. The five attacks in New Jersey in 1916 conceivably could have been the work of a single shark. In 1931, three persons were attacked—two of them fatally —within nine days in the waters around Havana, and a solitary shark was blamed. Probably the most damning indictment of a rogue shark occurred in 1899 in Port Said, the bustling seaport at the Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal. Dr. William Bryce Orme, the port medical officer, reported that about 8:30 on the morning of August 8th, 1899, a 13-year-old Arab boy was brought into the hospital. He had been bitten by a shark. An hour later, a 19-year-old boy was brought in, an arm and a hand torn by a shark. At 11:30 A.M., a 9-year-old boy was admitted. Part of his back had been ripped away by a shark. “None was bathing at the same place or the same time,” Dr. Orme reported. “Many people have expressed the opin- ion it must have been one shark which bit all three boys and I think this very likely.” Although it is possible that a single shark may be responsible for more than one attack within a short period of time or within a short span of coast, the rogue-shark theory cannot explain all shark attacks. In fact, nothing seems to! Every apparent key to the why of shark attacks unlocks one part of the mystery only to reveal another. Conditions that seem to trigger some attacks do not trigger others. Every statement advanced to cover a number of attacks has to be jettisoned when exception after exception is found to it. Here are three categorical statements often made about shark attacks—and here are the inevitable contradictions: Only large sharks attack men: On February 10th, 1955, while on the bottom of Trinidad Bay, near Trinidad, California, John Adams, a professional diver, was attacked by a hitherto “harmless” Leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata). It was 3 feet long. This is but one of several cases of small sharks attacking men. Sluggish, bottom-dwelling sharks do not attack men: Two of the Florida attacks mentioned earlier were made by Nurse sharks (not to be confused with the Australian Gray Nurse), sluggish, bottom-dwelling More Shadows Attack 43 sharks that have been described for years as “harmless.” Nurse sharks are known to be responsible for several other attacks, especially on skin- divers. A similar, reputedly inoffensive shark, the Wobbegong of Australia, lost its benign reputation after biting off the foot of a fisher- man who apparently stepped on it. Admittedly, these “attacks” are noth- ing of the sort in actuality, any more than is the lashing strike of a dis- turbed sting ray. They are classified as “provoked attacks.” Sharks do not attack when the water temperature is below 65 or 70 degrees: The fatal attack on Barry Wilson off Pacific Grove, California, occurred in water whose temperature was 55°. On May 7th, 1959, a Great White mauled 18-year-old Albert Kogler while he was swimming about 50 yards off Bakers Beach, near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Kogler’s left arm was nearly ripped off. His courageous companion, Shirley O'Neill, also 18, swam to his side and tugged him to shore, where, 90 minutes later, he died. Within three hours after the attack, the tem- perature of the water was taken at the attack site. It was 55°. Another device that is used in attempting to explain shark attacks s “The List.” This sets down exactly how many species of sharks are dangerous. Sometimes “The List” has 8 names, sometimes 13. A cur- rently favorite number, used by the list-makers who are playing it safe, is 28. The reader will not find “The List” in this book. For one reason, no one knows how many species of sharks there are, let alone how many species are “dangerous.” For another, many species are so similar that even an ichthyologist cannot distinguish between them unless he has one stretched out dead in his laboratory and can count the teeth, measure the distance between dorsal fins, and ponder other anatomical quid- dities. Few swimmers, seeing a shark lurking in the water, will be able to identify it correctly. Of the numerous attacks studied by scientists, only 5 per cent have yielded enough information on which to base an identification of the attacker. So “The List” is invariably drawn up on the basis of inadequate information. “In general, good advice about sharks seems to be not to trust any of them,” a Florida ichthyologist says, and good advice it is. The Inter- national Oceanographic Foundation’s assessment is: “All sharks are po- tentially dangerous. Some sharks, shorter than 4 feet, are not so danger- ous as the longer and larger ones, but one should beware of any shark, just to make sure.” Concerned over the lack of dependable information on shark behavior and the scarcity of facts about shark attacks, scientists from 34 nations met at Tulane University in New Orleans in April of 1958. The con- ference, sponsored by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, led 44 Shark Against Man to the creation of the Shark Research Panel (SRP). The SRP, affiliated with the Institute’s Hydrobiology Committee, is supported by the Office of Naval Research, Cornell University, and the Smithsonian Institution. Members of the SRP are Dr. Perry W. Gilbert, Cornell University zool- ogist, who is chairman of the panel, Dr. Stewart Springer, Chief of the Exploratory Fishing and Gear Research Branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Dr. Leonard P. Schultz, curator of fishes for the Smith- sonian Institution, Dr. Eugenie Clark, Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, Placida, Florida; Dr. Sidney R. Galler, Office of Naval Research; Dr. Robert W. Hiatt, University of Hawaii, Dr. James Snodgrass, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California; and F. G. Wood, Jr., Marineland Research Laboratory, St. Augustine, Florida. The SRP maintains a Shark Attack File, a permanent, elaborately cross-indexed record of attacks from all over the world. When an attack is reported anywhere, the SRP moves swiftly to obtain all available in- formation. A physician in the area is asked to help, or one of the many ichthyologists cooperating with the Panel goes to the scene. If the victim survives, he is asked to fill out a detailed questionnaire. Whether he lives or dies, witnesses, policemen, hospital attendants, his physician, and his relatives are interviewed. The questionnaire and the interviews seek such information as the depth, the temperature, and the condition of the water; the time of the attack and what the weather was like; the color of the victim’s clothing or bathing suit, and the color of his or her skin; the kind of shark and who identified it; the nature and treatment of the wounds; and how both the victim and the shark behaved before, during, and after the attack. From the answers to these questions, from the study of the cir- cumstances surrounding attacks, and from research into shark behavior, the SRP hopes to find enough evidence to settle several theories about what triggers an attack. High on the list of suspected causes of many attacks is the presence of blood. One moment the sea is empty of sharks. Then, a ship sinks or a plane crashes, and human blood, perhaps only in minute quantities, mingles with the sea. Suddenly, like wraiths instantly embodied, sharks appear. They circle warily. They hesitate to come close. Then one finds prey. Then another. Finally, the shark pack churns the water in a frenzy of feeding. Seemingly maddened by the intoxicating scent of more and more blood, the sharks gorge on any prey—including each other. Fishermen have seen such sights whenever shark packs attack a school of fish or a bleeding whale. When survivors of a ship or a plane disaster are the victims, the massacre may be so thorough that there is no one left to tell the tale. But from the lips of some survivors has come testimony to show that More Shadows Attack 45 many men have leaped from sinking ships only to die in the jaws of sharks. When the troop transport Cape San Juan, torpedoed by a Japan- ese submarine, went down in the South Pacific during World War II, 1,429 men were aboard. The merchantman Edwin T. Meredith saved 448, and even during the rescue operation, great schools of sharks were still savaging the life-rafts and their occupants. A member of the Mere- dith crew later told what he had seen and heard: ‘Time after time, I heard soldiers scream as the sharks swept them off the rafts. Some- times the sharks attacked survivors who were being hauled to the Mere- dith with life ropes.” A soldier who survived the torment etched one stark vignette from the hours of horror: “I was sitting on the edge of a raft talking to my buddy in the darkness. I looked away for a moment, and when I turned back, he wasn’t there any more. A shark got him.” The water need not be extensively bloodied to attract sharks. A drop of blood seems capable of alerting sharks to a potential feast. In the exhaustive investigation of the previously mentioned attack on Barry Wilson in California, scientists learned that just before the youth en- tered the water a veteran diver noticed that Barry’s body bore several fresh scratches, inflicted when he skinned himself on a rock. The older man warned Barry that the infinitesimal amount of blood oozing from the scratches could attract sharks. Ignoring the warning, Barry dived into the water, and a few minutes later he was seized by a shark. In another case, a skin-diver wearing an aqualung was swimming near the bottom when his nose began bleeding. Some of the blood was draining into his mouth and entering the exhaust tube of the aqualung, ~ sending out a stream of blood-tainted bubbles. A small shark, apparently aiming for the source of the alluring blood, twice struck at the skin- diver’s head and face, then darted away. The skin-diver was only slightly injured. So sensitive is the shark’s perception of blood in the water that Dr. Schultz of the SRP believes it is possible that a woman bather may be in more danger of a shark attack when she is menstruating. The presence of fish blood or struggling fish is a well-known shark attractant. Most often skin divers report the loss of the fish that they have captured. Some, less lucky, attract the sharks to themselves. On August 19th, 1962, a fisherman named Hans Fix was standing in waist- deep water off Padre Island, a thin strip of land that extends along most of the Texas Gulf Coast. Fix had a string of fish dangling from his belt. A shark, undoubtedly lured by the fish, rushed at Fix. In seconds, the shark bit the fisherman’s right leg three times, nearly severing it. Thirty minutes later, Fix died in a hospital. When a single shark swoops into a group of persons, usually, it seems, one victim is selected, and the shark pursues that one, ignoring other 46 Shark Against Man persons nearby. On May 19th, 1960, four teen-agers were clustered around an inflated inner tube about 150 yards off Hidden Beach, 6 miles southeast of Santa Cruz, California. They were members of a high school sophomore class who had earned a day off as a bonus for selling the largest number of school yearbooks. Playing around the tube were Nick Buak, aged 16; Larry Cronin, 15, Tessie Lettunich, 15; and Suzanne Theriot, 16. “Larry and Suzanne were swimming around the tube, and Nick and I were in it,” Tessie later reported. “Suzanne screamed that something was on her leg. Larry grabbed her arm and Nick told me to pull my feet up onto the tube. I saw the blood, and the fin sticking out of the water. We started kicking, and Larry, holding Suzanne, clung to the tube.” At this point, another swimmer, Edward Cassel, aged 17, reached the tube and helped get Suzanne ashore. Her left leg, which was later amputated, was mangled. But the shark had not touched any of her companions. (Similarly, none of the rescuers of Barry Wilson was touched by the lurking shark that followed them as they got him to shore.) A macabre tale of a shark’s persistence in singling out a victim came out of World War II. An Esso tanker was fired upon and then torpedoed by a German U-boat. Two members of a Navy gun crew aboard the tanker were shot down at their battle stations when the U-boat shelled the tanker. After the vessel was torpedoed and the order given to abandon ship, a heroic seaman, Charles D. Richardson, dragged the two wounded men to the railing and dropped them over the side. Then he dived in after them. Richardson got one man on his back and told the other to cling to his neck. With his double burden, Richardson began struggling through the oil-coated water toward a lifeboat. He heard the man on his back moan and felt him begin to slip. Richardson turned to see a shark pulling at the man on his back. While the second wounded man still clung to his neck, Richardson pulled a knife and slashed at the shark, trying to drive it away. But the shark kept gnawing at the man on Richardson’s back, as if determined on him alone for its victim. Ignoring Richardson and the second wounded man, the shark kept on tugging. The shark got its man. Richardson did save the other man, and they reached outstretched hands in the lifeboat. The valiant seaman later received the Maritime Commission’s Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal for his heroism. In several Australian shark-attack cases, the strange pattern has been the. same—a single victim selected from several bathers; an attack on him alone; his rescuers untouched. The theory has naturally arisen that the rescuers of an attack victim are somehow themselves immune from attack. But this theory has been More Shadows Attack 47 demolished by careful Shark Research Panel investigations. Dr. Schultz reports: “Our records indicate that of 68 individuals who have gone to the aid of a victim of shark attack, 12, or 17.7 per cent, have been attacked. Hence, anyone going to the aid of a person being attacked is definitely placing himself in a dangerous situation.” Are there no clues to what causes an attack? Is there no theory that will stand up under scientific scrutiny? Two factors that trigger attacks seem to be established beyond question: Blood, even greatly diluted and in small quantities, definitely attracts sharks. So does vomit, offal, garbage, and carrion. The behavior of an injured or inexperienced swimmer—irregular, frantic motions, panic—can set off a kind of signal that may embolden an approaching shark to attack. The behavior of the swimmer may sug- gest to the shark that something wounded is in the water and this attracts the shark just as would a fish writhing on a hook. Perhaps the very chemistry of che body sets off this signal. When the senses of the human body ‘detect a threat—such as a loitering shark— what is usually called “fear” manifests itself in a series of swift, involun- tary activities within the body. Epinephrine (also know as adrenalin) is secreted by the adrenal gland to step up the heart beat and raise the blood pressure, thus increasing the flow of blood to muscles the body may have to use to fight the threat its senses have detected. The blood vessels of the stomach, the intestines, and other internal organs suddenly con- strict to lessen the flow of blood so that more will be available to the _ muscles. The liver pulses with new, fear-inspired activity, converting glycogen into sugar to provide more fuel for the muscles. The pupils of the eyes dilate to increase the field of vision. The body trembles. Goose pimples erupt on the flesh. Cold perspiration breaks out on the brow. The body seems coated with cold sweat. The mouth goes dry. These manifestations of fear occur because the body’s chemical ma- chinery is unbalancing the normal, orderly functions as it works at full throttle, preparing for an emergency. The body may emit a subtle (chemical) “aura” of fear. And it may be this which lures the shark on some occasions. The list of conditions that may bring about a shark attack is seemingly endless: refuse strewn into the sea from sewers, abattoirs, and factories . . . the shark-trailed schools of migrating fish . . . sea- quakes and storms that disrupt the delicate balance of marine ecology, sending sharks foraging for new feeding grounds, perhaps closer to shore—and swimmers! Anything unusual, such as the impact of a plane plunging into the sea or the mass of sounds transmitted through the sea when a ship sinks, appears to attract sharks, and may trigger attacks. 48 Shark Against Man But the conditions that lure sharks do not always of themselves trigger an attack, the effect of them may be, curiously, the opposite. The famed shark expert, E. W. Gudger, noted, for example: “At Key West, I have seen boys diving for pennies off the old Mallory Line dock, while 200 yards away, a dead horse drifting out with the tide was surrounded by four or five 10-foot Tiger sharks bucking and surging, trying to tear it apart so that they could eat it. The point is plain—the Tigers preferred dead horse to live boy.” A man adrift at sea, far from land, never knows, however, when or whether a shark will be drawn to him. Two Air Force men parachuted into the Atlantic about 200 miles east of Savannah, Georgia, one night in 1953. The men, Sergeant Larry C. Graybill and Airman Second Class James B. Henderson, kept afloat by their lifejackets, lashed themselves together back to back. They floated for 22 hours until they were rescued. And for most of those hours, they fought off sharks. “IT remembered something I had read—if you hit them on the snout, they take off. It worked,” Henderson said. Graybill was not so lucky. “Something rushed by me,” he recounted. “I felt one hand in a mouth, so I took a poke at him to get loose.” Graybill’s hands were both cut and scraped by the sharks. Hender- son’s forearms were raw with Portuguese men-of-war stings. Their blood in the water should have doomed them to the jaws of gore-crazed sharks. But no such mob-feeding frenzy occurred. Once more, sharks showed how unpredictable they could be. The greatest number of shark-attack victims have died during marine disasters. More people were killed by sharks in several World War II ship sinkings than were killed close to shore in all of recorded history. But, of those killed near shore, most have been in areas “where bathers are most thickly congregated,” a Shark Research Panel report points out. However, it is thought that the danger is far greater in some of the open seas, and the proportion of attacks all over the world bears this out. Also, men have drifted for long periods in warm seas without seeing a shark or any other fish. We simply know nothing valid of shark, or even of fish migrations in any true scientific sense. How does a shark select one out of many bathers? What attracts a shark to one man or one woman? Is the attack only a wild, random raid? Or is the shark truly selective about its victim? Assuming that the shark is somehow selective, the list of possible attack-triggering factors is again a long one. A glittering ring, a flashing piece of jewelry, or a shiny brass beach-locker tag worn on wrist or ankle may lure a curious shark, just as dazzling manufactured fish lures are supposed to attract game fish. The color or pattern of a swimmer’s bathing suit may be the lure. More Shadows Attack 49 Because so many attacks occur near the beach in shallow water, the theory has arisen that some attacks may unfold in this way: Some distance from shore, while the bather is swimming in deep water, he is spotted by a shark, which silently glides near and sees a strange creature of fair size. Still curious, but cautious, the shark lurks unseen. As the bather makes for shore, the shark follows. Then, when the bather’s feet touch bottom and he begins to wade in, to the shark’s eyes it looks as if the strange, large creature it has been following has disappeared, and in its place are two smaller, slow-moving, inoffensive creatures that seem incapable of hostility—the bather’s legs. Instinctively, the shark charges them. But, as it does, the bather kicks and thrashes the water. Other bathers rush to his aid, churning the water still more. No cod or sea turtle ever acted this way, so the shark, confounded and frustrated by this unfamiliar behavior of prey, hastily withdraws. This is only a theory. Scientists who have been studying sharks and shark attacks are not satisfied that any explanation can be made au- thoritatively for anything a shark does or does not do. We simply do not know enough about sharks or shark attacks. A clue is picked up here, another there. In one case, there is blood in the water and, though sharks are present, they do not attack the swimmer. In another case, there are no apparent conditions for bringing on an attack, yet an attack takes place. The paradoxes appear in attack after attack. Until the Shark Research Panel began its study, the facts about attacks throughout the world had never been analyzed so thoroughly. Now, finally, for the first time, an unprecedented world-wide analysis is being undertaken. | Searching through old medical journals, ships’ logs, hospital and physicians’ records, and newspaper files from all over the world, the SRP has tracked down information on 1,251 attacks that go back as far as the year 1580. Out of this accumulation of facts has come an analysis of 790 shark attacks which the SRP felt were well enough documented to warrant study. The facts about the attacks were then reduced to these statistics: Of the 790 attacks, 599 were unprovoked. Of individuals attacked, 408 died and 390 recovered. (Many records are incomplete, the total number of persons attacked is not known.) Most attacks (75.4 per cent) in Australian, North American, and African waters occurred in summer months. But in equatorial waters, attacks occurred equally in all months. This means that the so-called shark-attack season is nothing more than the human swimming season, whenever that happens to be. Most individual attacks (62.2 per cent) occurred within 300 feet of shore. 50 Shark Against Man Most (70.2 per cent) occurred within five feet of the surface, 24.9 per cent of the victims were in water more than knee-deep and no more than shoulder-deep when attacked. Most persons (63.3 per cent) were swimming or floating on the surface when attacked; 20.8 per cent had been wading; 19 per cent had been spear-fishing or carrying fish; 10.3 per cent had been standing close to where fish were being caught, or near swimming fish, just prior to the attack. While 38.2 per cent of the attacks occurred while persons were alone in the water, 24.8 per cent had companions less than 10 feet away; 15.8 per cent were 10 feet or more from companions; 21.2 per cent were within a few feet of one other person. Most attacks (94.3 per cent) occurred during daylight hours. The fact that 5.7 per cent of the attacks occurred at night does not mean that a romantic moonlight swim is safer than a daylight dip. Ac- tually, the statistics tend to show a quite opposite picture when they are ‘interpreted. Most people swim during the daytime. Certainly, the number of nighttime swimmers is far less than 5 per cent of the number of day- light swimmers. Thus, proportionately, more nighttime swimmers are attacked than daylight swimmers. Nighttime is feeding time for many species of shark. In the tropics, knowledgeable natives usually will not enter the water at night, though they may swim unconcernedly during the day, even when sharks are present. In Cuba, fishermen catch Tiburon de Noche, the Night shark (Hypoprion signatus), in relatively shallow depths, only after the sun has gone down. In the Caribbean, the Tiger shark is said to appear rarely near the surface during the daytime. The nocturnal feeding pattern begins when, in darkness, plankton rises. Small fish rise to feed upon the plankton. Bigger fish follow the small fish up— and last in the eat-and-be-eaten line comes the hungering shark. ‘Weather and other physical factors do not appear to be especially significant in triggering shark attacks,” says Dr. Schultz, author of the SRP shark-attack report. “For example, the number of attacks when the sky is clear and the number when the sky is cloudy are about equal. “We have no evidence that a peculiar color of clothes or shade of skin is an important factor in stimulating sharks to attack. Bright, shiny objects, or contrasting light and dark objects, do attract the attention of sharks. However, our data are too scanty and unreliable at present to suggest significant conclusions about physical factors.” Consider the question of color preference, for instance. Given a choice between a light-colored lure and a dark-colored one, a shark seems more attracted to the light one. Captain Young has stated that sharks apparently are lured more by the carcass of a white horse rather than that of a dark one. Dark-skinned native divers in tropical waters cover up More Shadows Attack 5] A shark attack on a fishing boat in the Parramatta River in Australia is illustrated in an old Sydney newspaper. Shark attacks on boats are often provable by irrefutable evidence: teeth marks and sometimes teeth themselves, left in the damaged hull. From an old print the soles of their feet with black sandals before they dive beneath the surface. Greek sponge divers hide the palms of their hands in the armpits of their black suits when a shark appears near them. One of the most dramatic examples of a shark’s apparent preference for white objects occurred in Nova Scotia in the summer of 1953. The episode took place off Fourchu on the southeastern coast of Cape Breton Island. Numerous fishing dories dotted the sea. One dory, about 12 feet long, was painted white, and this one was haunted for several days by a huge shark. Many fishermen in the area saw the eerie drama—the white dory would put to sea, and, soon, trailing behind it, appeared a dorsal fin. Finally, on July 9th, as the dory was sailing alone, the shark suddenly charged it, smashing an 8-inch hole in the bottom of the boat. Both occupants of the boat were thrown into the sea. One man drowned. The other held onto the boat and remained in the water for hours until he was rescued. Neither he nor his companion was molested by the shark. (The companion’s drowning was incidental to the attack. As far as is known, the shark did not go after his body.) A tooth found imbedded in the smashed boat was later identified as that of a Great White. William C. Shroeder, of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, made the iden- 2 Shark Against Man tification. Shroeder, an outstanding authority on sharks, estimated that the tooth had come from a Great White 12 feet long and weighing 1,100 to 1,200 pounds. The Great White, one of the most dangerous species, certainly could have devoured either or both men, yet it appears that the target of its voracity was the only white dory in the area. If white attracts sharks, however, it would seem that the chances of survival are slim for the amazing Japanese ama, or “sea woman,” who dives for pearls wearing a white jacket, a white skirt, and a white hood. These women believe that white repels sharks and jellyfish. Sometimes the women—and girls, for many an ama is a mere teen-ager—wear brightly colored garments, and wrap white towels around their long, jet-black hair. Their only equipment is a pair of goggles, a container for their catch, and a hooked iron knife to pry the akoya, the pearl- producing oysters, from rocks some 40 feet below the surface. They are ever on the alert for sharks, but, even in their gleaming white cos- tumes, they are rarely attacked. The claim that dark-skinned swimmers are immune to shark-attack has proved to be a fallacy many times and in many parts of the world. In the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, for instance, when pearling was a major occupation for natives, attacks averaged three a year. A medical report on the attack experiences of Torres Strait divers noted that “a diver rarely fails to see at least one shark during any day.” Sometimes, the shark attacked. After recounting several attacks and near-attacks, the medical report said: “These facts dispel a popular mis- conception that a shark will not attack a human being with colored skin . . . Actually more natives are attacked on the Australian coast each year than whites.” One Torres Strait pearl diver, a black-skinned native named Iona Asai, was diving in 12 feet of water one day when a Tiger shark charged him. The shark dived down on Iona, and an instant later Iona’s head was in the shark’s mouth. What happened next can best be told by Iona, for, incredibly, he lived to tell this story: “When I turned I saw the shark six feet away from me. He opened his mouth. Already I have no chance of escape from him. Then he came and bite me on the head. He felt it was too strong so he swallow my head and put his teeth around my neck. Then he bite me. “When I felt his teeth go into my flesh, I put my hands around his head and squeeze his eyes until he let go me and I make for the boat. The captain pulled me into the boat and I fainted. They get some medi- cines from Jervis Island school-teacher.” It took more than medicines to repair Iona, whose story, incidentally, is thoroughly documented by hospital records and photographs. Nearly 200 stitches were needed to sew up the two rows of teeth marks around More Shadows Attack 53 Iona Asai, a pearl diver in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, lived to tell the tale—and show the scars—after a shark seized his head within its jaws. Courtesy, Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Co. from The Fishes of Australia by G. P. Whitley, 1940 his neck and jaws. Three weeks after he left the hospital, a small abscess developed on his neck. When the abscess was drained, in it was found one last bit of proof of Iona’s tale: the tooth of a Tiger shark. Iona, aged 38 at the time of the attack in 1937, had been wounded by a shark 19 years before. He was aptly named, for Jona is the native version of one of their heroes of the Christian Bible, Jonah. The Shark Research Panel’s quest for a solution to the mystery of shark attacks is leading down many trails. Water temperature, for in- stance, once seemed a likely factor in attacks, and the SRP did establish the fact that sharks attack most frequently in waters warmer than about 65°F. (Some experiments have shown that certain sharks seem to lose their appetites when the temperature drops to the low 60’s.) When the coastal waters in temperate seas warm, the temperature change is often a harbinger of large, voracious sharks, roving from their tropical home waters. The sharks arrive in their new pastures just as these same seas are teeming with migrating fish—plus waders, swimmers, boatmen, water-skiers, spear-fishermen, and surfboarders. Great Whites, formerly reputed to be tropical, have been caught and spotted so often outside of the tropics in recent years that some ichthyologists believe that the sea’s most dreaded sharks have become regular summer visitors to waters as far north as Nova Scotia. There has been one known fatal shark attack in New England waters, and it was almost certainly the work of a Great White. The victim was a 16-year-old Massachusetts boy, Joseph Troy, Jr., who was swimming on July 25th, 1936, about 150 yards off Hollywood Beach, just above 54 Shark Against Man Mattapoisett Harbor in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, when a shark sud- denly seized his left leg and pulled him under. A courageous companion, Walter W. Stiles, who was 10 feet away, swam to the youth’s aid. When Troy, pummeling the shark with his hands, broke the surface, Stiles was at his side. The shark released Troy, but remained nearby in the bloody water while Stiles supported the youth and managed to get him into a boat. The shark did not charge Troy again, nor did it attempt to molest Stiles. Troy died in a hospital five hours after the attack. The tropical sharks that are appearing in temperate waters are prob- ably following food—fishes deviating from normal haunts because of temperature shifts. Gradual, imperceptible changes in the temperature of the sea are apparently breaking down the arbitrary boundaries that once marked off the habitats of tropical, subtropical, and temperate marine life. There is now ample evidence that the seas are getting warmer, prob- ably as the result of an apparently global climatic change which can be perceived only by studying accurate, long-kept records. A recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report showed, for instance, that the January sea temperatures near New Haven, Connecticut, have increased three to four degrees Fahrenheit since 1780; winter sea temperatures off Booth- bay Harbor, Maine, have gone up by about two degrees since 1930. At the same time, man has been venturing into colder waters. As Dr. Schultz points out in the SRP shark-attack report: “Divers with swim suits do enter colder waters, and three attacks have occurred in waters of 55 degrees along the California coast. We believe the area of the world in which shark attacks occur will be extended as more and more divers enter the domain of the predaceous sharks in temperate and subtemperate latitudes.” Because of the relatively few attacks on skin-divers, many divers seem to believe that they have a kind of immunity from attack. Some divers have become so contemptuous of the shark that they ride sharks or hang onto their tails. The Shark Research Panel has issued a stern warning that those who cavort with sharks have chosen deadly play- mates. “It would seem unnecessary,” the SRP’s Dr. Gilbert says, “to tell people not to grab the tail of a shark or to try to ride one. Yet, strangely, it is not. There are skin-diving clubs in California whose qualifications for membership require that you first must ride a shark. This we dis- courage.” The spear-fishermen in the underwater fraternity often unwittingly act as human shark lures. A spear-fisherman kills a fish. The water around him becomes laced with fresh blood. And when a shark flashes toward the exquisitely alluring scent of blood, it will usually charge toward the More Shadows Attack 55 scent with a lust for any food in sight. Often the shark will snatch the catch off the spearman’s weapon, or, as has happened, right off the line he has strung the fish on and tied around his waist. Sometimes, rushing past the speared fish, the shark selects for its meal the spearman himself. Leniord Higgins, an Australian spearman, was towing a large catch of fish one day on a line 15 feet long. This is a safety measure, for the belief is that a shark will grab the fish and, while it is devouring the fish, the man can drop the line and get out of the water. But the shark that found Higgins that day ignored the catch and rushed for him, hitting him with such force that, wedged in the shark’s maw, he was carried 6 feet beneath the surface. Higgins screamed. The shark let him go, and disappeared as silently as he had appeared. An 18-inch wound ripped in his body, Higgins struggled to shore. He survived. He was not eaten, he believed, because the shark lunged for him so avidly that Higgins’ body was jammed, edgewise, deep into the shark’s mouth, and the shark was unable to snap its jaws shut. The shark itself has become the prey for skin-divers who seek out and fight it as big-game hunters track down and kill the lion and tiger. Two Australian spear-fishermen use what they call a “death needle” for their shark hunting. The men, Benn Cropp and Ron Taylor, claim to have killed as many as 50 sharks in a week-end with their needles, which are loaded with strychnine nitrate. “We shot and killed all types of shark—Blue Pointers, Gray Nurses, Hammerheads, Tigers, and Whalers,” Cropp said in an interview. “Once the needle struck, it was curtains for them.” The needle filled with the strychnine nitrate is attached to the point of a spear-gun projectile in such a way that, when the spear enters the shark, the needle forces the poison deeper into the prey’s body. The men said that the poison could kill a shark in 30 seconds. Another shark hunter is Scott Slaughter, a former commercial spear- fisherman who became a Navy frogman. Slaughter’s shark-killing career began off Key West, Florida, where he was spear-fishing for snappers and groupers. With a big snapper writhing on the end of his spear, Slaughter started for the surface. Suddenly, a shark swished across his legs, darted for the speared fish, and ripped off all but its head. Then still hungry, the shark whirled toward Slaughter. The shark charged just as Slaughter reached the surface, near his boat. Like a fencer, he thrust his spear toward the shark. It gobbled down the last morsel of the snapper as Slaughter clambered into the boat. Mo- ments later, he jumped into the water again. In one hand he held his spear, on which was impaled a 40-pound grouper he had caught pre- viously. In his other hand was a metal tube about 6 feet long. Using the grouper as a lure, Slaughter brought the shark closer to 56 Shark Against Man him and, as the shark’s teeth sank into the fish, Slaughter plunged the tube down on the shark’s head, directly over its tiny brain. There was a muffled explosion, and a hole as big as a man’s fist appeared on the shark’s head. The shark was dead. Slaughter’s weapon was a “powerhead,” a lethal device attached to the end of the tube. The powerhead is a length of hollowed steel cylinder consisting of a chamber for a 12-gauge shotgun shell and a firing mecha- nism. The cylinder is plugged with petroleum jelly to seal it from the water. In firing the shell, the powerhead is jammed directly against the shark’s head. The thrust drives the end of the shell against a firing pin, which detonates the shell. A massed charge of No. 8 shot is propelled through the petroleum jelly seal and right into the shark; it meets no resistance from water, for its passage is directly from the cylinder to the shark. The charge smashes into the shark’s brain, usually killing it instantly. If Slaughter misses the brain, he blows a hole in the side of the shark, but the gaping wound hardly slows down the shark. Bullets fired from the surface at sharks beneath the surface are deflected by the water and, even if they penetrate the shark’s hide, they do not have the destructive power of the massive shotgun shell charge. With the powerhead, Slaughter says he has killed more than 100 sharks, including Hammer- heads and Great Whites. Armed with powerheads like his, more and more underwater hunters are tracking down what they see as the ultimate game—and they are exposing themselves to the ultimate danger. Yet, even when they are stalking the shark, even when they are attacking it, the hunters have rarely been charged by their prey. These experiences have led many skin-divers and spear-fishermen to insist that the shark is a timid creature, whose ferocity has been vastly overrated. Then comes a day like August 15th, 1959. On that day, James C. Neal, SCUBA diving about 7 miles off Panama City, Florida, followed a guide cable down to rocks on the bottom. He was never seen again. All that was found was his bloody, tooth-marked clothing and gear... . “Sharks are one of the sea’s greatest dangers,” a veteran Ceylon skin-diver says, “because they are more a potential than an actual danger to a diver, which leads to a disregard for them that can be fatal.” Michael Lerner, president of the International Game Fish Association, adds his voice of caution: “We feel that fishermen, boatmen, swimmers and skin-divers are becoming increasingly careless about the danger of attack by sharks and barracuda, owing partly to the fact that several recent published reports have tended to discount the ferocity of those fishes. It may be true, especially of sharks, that certain species do not More Shadows Attack 57 appear dangerous in some locations. But it also is a proven fact that some of those ‘harmless’ breeds have attacked, wounded, even killed human beings in other areas.” The foolhardy diver who has become contemptuous of sharks, be- cause those he has met retreated from him, insists that sharks are cow- ardly. The wise diver who has had the same kind of experience with shy ‘sharks says merely that sharks are unpredictable, for he knows that, in his next confrontation, it may be he that flees, or attempts to flee. There is absolutely no way of knowing what a shark will do when it encounters a swimmer—or a boat. Boats and rafts have been bumped, bitten, smashed, capsized—even boarded by sharks. There are several well-documented cases of sharks leaping into small craft where, thrash- ing their tails and gnashing their teeth, they have been as dangerous and difficult to subdue as they are in the water. Natives of the Gilbert Islands ordinarily fear only one kind of shark —the rokea—and it is feared because of its vicious attacks on canoes and the men in them. If a fisherman is hauling in a tuna, say, and it comes up half-eaten, he will cut the line to give the rest of the fish to the rokea, a deep sea shark. Otherwise, the rokea will come after it. Unfortunately, its scientific name is unknown, but it is mot the Tiger shark (Galeocerdo) which the natives know well, and of which they are only normally cautious. Superstition? Sir Arthur Grimble, a former British administrator in the Gilberts, in his book, We Chose the Islands,* gives an eye-witness account of just such an incident. “We heard a thud and a crack from a craft not sixty yards off,” he wrote. “As we looked up, there came another thud; a vast tail had frothed from the water and slammed the canoe’s side. A second later, the whole fish leapt, and there was a third smashing blow. We saw the hull cave in and start sinking. The rokea leapt again, and one of the two fishermen on board was swept off the foundering deck by that fright- ful tail. We saw him butchered as we raced to rescue the other man .. . The survivor, a boy of seventeen, confessed with tears that he was to blame; he had whipped a bonito aboard as a rokea was after it. The demon’s attack followed in the very next instant.” Dr. Coppleson estimates that as many people in Australia are injured by sharks “bumping” them or their surfboards as are injured by being bitten. Why sharks bump into surfboards or boats is not known. One theory is that they are curious, and somehow satisfy their curiosity by charging the object. One of the more curious shark-boarding incidents on record occurred 4 Sir Arthur Grimble, We Chose the Islands (New York: Morrow, 1952). 58 Shark Against Man in Australia. Three amateur fishermen were in a 16-foot dinghy off Seaholme, Victoria. For one of the fishermen, Doug Miller, it had not been a pleasant day. A violent attack of seasickness had left him a wretched man. Miller had collapsed in the bottom of the boat, wondering why he had ever taken up the miserable pastime of fishing, when. . . but let him tell it: “One minute I was lying there, wishing I was dead. I felt terrible. Suddenly, I heard a scream and a yell and an eight-and-a-half-foot Gray Nurse landed fair on top of me. For a second, I didn’t know what it was. Then I knew and nearly blacked out. I fought to get to my feet, and as soon as I did I was knocked down by its tail. Three times I stood up and three times I landed back on the bottom of the boat. I felt like going overboard, but I couldn’t leave the other two.” After making the most rapid recovery from seasickness ever recorded, Miller sprang to the aid of the other two fishermen, and together they finally vanquished the shark by beating it over the head with the boat’s tiller. To dive from a boat at sea or even in harbor is possibly to invite shark attack, and similarly a possible danger is the sport of being towed in the water by a moving ship. When a man is being towed he may look, to a shark at least, like a fish. In 1959 alone, the SRP reported 12 unpro- voked “contacts,” including boats, life-rafts—and water-skiers. Twelve similar incidents were reported in 1960. Sharks attacked four boats in 1961, according to a SRP report issued in June, 1962. In one case, the report said, “a dinghy with two occupants was used as a toy by a school of sharks which swirled it around and around.” “Our data reveal,” the SRP also says, “that it is dangerous to dive off piers, boats and ships at anchor in shark-infested bays and lagoons, for we have several records of divers who were attacked under such circumstances the moment they entered the water.” The Shark Research Panel’s report on shark attacks in 1961 says that sharks made 30 unprovoked attacks on humans during 1961, injuring 31 persons, 6 of them fatally. The attacks listed were in waters off both coasts of the United States, off Hawaii and other Pacific islands, Bermuda, Australia, South and East Africa, the Philippines, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, and 150 miles up the Limpopo River in East Africa. Though the attacks span a large part of the world, none is listed from South or Central America, the East Indies, or other coasts of Southeast Asia. Dangerous sharks are known to be plentiful in these areas, and attacks are known to occur, but most of the sharks’ deeds go unrecorded. Part 2 m> Man Against Shark rf Atel d a -) 7 i tne ieee aehey O i ie S Pus ea a ae 2 — ore Chapter 3 Captain Shark-Killer The boy was 10 years old on that sum- mer’s day. A friendly fisherman had taken the boy out to sea with him, and now the boat was sailing over the rippling forests of kelp that cover the ocean floor at La Jolla, Cali- fornia. Fascinated by the silent, shimmering beauty that swept before him as he stared down through the clear water, the boy at first didn’t hear the fisherman’s call. “Bill!” the fisherman shouted again. “Quick! Look over the other side!” The boy darted to the other side of the boat and looked over the gunwale. There, gliding through the kelp a few feet below the surface, was a long, sinuous fish that looked like a graceful shadow amid the tendrils of kelp. The fish was as long as the 20-foot boat. “That’s a shark, Bill,” the fisherman said. Again, the boy didn’t hear. For he was once more enthralled by a look at beauty. But this was a beauty of strength and boldness, and wrapped in that beauty, unseen, was a thing of terror. William Young, in 1885, had seen his first shark. In the many years that were to follow, in the many places where he would pursue the shark, ~ William Young would never forget that shadow in the kelp beds of La Jolla . In 1900, Bill Young and his brother Herb sailed away from their home in California. Lured by a lust for adventure and fortune, they shipped aboard a two-masted schooner bound for the Hawaiian Islands. They found work there, but it was not exactly adventurous. They signed a contract to haul to sea the garbage of the city of Honolulu. This was the humble beginning of what would be a prosperous waterfront business. It was also the beginning of Bill Young’s lifelong passion for catching sharks. The refuse from the city dump frequently included the carcasses of horses. Whenever these carcasses were hauled to sea and dumped, hordes of sharks would suddenly appear. In their frenzy to devour the offal, the sharks would turn the waters into a maelstrom of blood and snapping jaws. This was not beauty. This was the shark with its grandeur stripped away. So, there in the bloody seas off Honolulu, an older, wiser William Young saw the other aspect of the shark, the thing of terror beneath 61 62 Man Against Shark the beauty. But the terror did not repel him, as it had repelled so many men before him. Instead, it challenged him. He was seized by a desire to conquer the shark, to learn its ways, to hunt it down. The shark be- came his Moby Dick, an ageless, dreaded, murderous demon spawned of legend and fact. It could be attacked, but never destroyed, studied, but never understood, captured, but never tamed. On the waterfront of Honolulu, where sailors spun their tales of sharks, and in native huts, where squatting Kanakas retold their myths of the mano, Young learned about the shark. And, in the blood-frothed waters of the shark orgies upon the carrion, Young killed sharks. He became known first as “Sharky Bill,” a nickname that carried a trace of disdain for this man who seemed always to be asking about sharks, listening to shark stories, or talking about sharks. Soon, though, as stories about his prowess as a shark-killer circulated in the islands, he earned a title that was bestowed in awesome respect. They called him Kane Mano, “The Shark Hunter.” Before he killed his last shark—at the age of 70—Captain William Young had hunted sharks from Honolulu to Australia, from Florida to French Somaliland. At the age of 87, he could look back on 60 years of shark hunting—years in which he killed 100,000 sharks, often at the rate of 20 or 30 a day. At 87, he was still Kane Mano: “In Kon-Tiki, a book by a good friend of mine, Thor Heyerdahl, he told of catching sharks by the tail with his hand. I’ve never tried that game before, but I’m sure I can do it, even at 87.” The log of Kane Mano has many entries. It spans many years and many seas. It recounts the lives—and deaths—of many sharks. Most of all, it tells the many adventures of a unique man. Here are some leaves from 1G: When one hears the word shark, a powerful mental image is generated of a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might fall into the cavernous maw and stay the gnawing hunger which drives the rapacious fish relentlessly on his way. A terrible creature, afraid of nothing. The savage fury with which he attacks, the rage of his thrashing when caught, his brutal insensi- bility to injury and pain—all well merit the name of Afreet, symbol of all that is terrible and monstrous in Arabian superstition. The shark is this, but I have found him to be a thing of endless paradoxes, too—sinister enigma, which one time may kill a man and another time flee from a man as if in fear; a cunning adversary which may trick a fisherman one day and a loutish brute which may blunder into a net another day; a creature of consummate grace and a beast of loathsome habits. 1 Though he lived to see this book written, Captain Young died before it was published. Death came to Kane Mano on October 31, 1962. Captain Shark-Killer 63 I have known the shark in many seas, but I do not know the shark. No one does. After having hunted him, killed him and found uses for his products throughout the world, I do feel qualified to talk about him. (I know that a shark should properly be addressed as it, but to me the shark will always be a he, for he has as much character and personality as any man I have ever met.) As I sit here in my snug harbor in Miami, writing my Log of time past, the memories of thousands of sharks parade through my mind. Most of them are dead. Some may still be alive, for no one knows for sure the lifespan of a shark. Others live in a curious way: in the sharkskin shoes I wear; in the mementoes that surround me—the dried gaping jaws, the thousands of teeth I have fashioned into jewelry to sell to tourists; the film I once made; in my book, Shark! Shark!*, published decades ago; and now these leaves from my shark-hunting Log: Hono.LuLu This is where it all began, where the shark and I first met in combat. The Islands were quiet then, and life was simple. It was 1900, and Pearl Harbor was not yet a name that would live in infamy. Sailing vessels filled the harbor, and one motorboat, a 22-footer with a 4-horsepower gasoline engine, chugged around. That boat, the Billy, the first motorboat to enter Pearl Harbor, be- longed to my brother Herb and me. (I still have a piece of the red-white-and- blue ribbon that was stretched across the harbor the day it opened.) Soon we were prospering. We bought several other boats for a variety of jobs—diving and salvage work, running passengers from ships to shore, carrying pilots, customs officials and immigration inspectors to incoming ships. We had come a long way from those first days when all Young Brothers, Ltd., did was haul garbage out to sea. And always there were sharks. “Mano! Mano!—Shark! Shark!” the Kanakas ~ would call as they spotted the sharks circling around ships in the offshore anchorage awaiting the free meals the ship provided when garbage was thrown overboard. Often the clear water was alive with hungry sharks. As I watched the shark-swirled waters one day from the deck of my boat, I was seized by a sudden, overpowering desire to catch a shark. I told one of the English-speaking Kanakas aboard that I wanted to catch a shark. “Mano?” he asked, looking at me curiously. “Yes, mzano,” I replied. The Kanaka disappeared in the direction of the galley and soon returned with a big piece of salt pork, a stout line and a great hook. He was jabbering excitedly. “Hana paa mano—we'll catch a shark! He is much wikj wikj kau kau haole—he will eat a white man, very, very quick! Pilau—rotten—he is no good!” He and another Kanaka dropped the baited hook over the side. The moment it struck the water it was seized. Mano was hooked! One of the boys borrowed a meat hook from the cook, got into a small boat alongside and hooked the shark through the mouth. The line was run through a boat davit and hauled up. The boat falls shivered as the shark thrashed at the end of the line. Quickly 2 William E. Young, with Horace S. Mazet, Shark! Shark! The Thirty-Year Odyssey of a Pioneer Shark Hunter (New York: Gotham House, 1934). 64 Man Against Shark another line was secured around his tail. Now the shark hung suspended within reach of the rail. Swish! The glint of a big knife caught my eye as a native hacked off the shark’s tail. The rest of the boys aboard danced around shouting curses at the mutilated enemy. Suddenly, the falls were slacked off, the boy in the boat cut the hook from the mouth and the shark was free—free to die a cruel death. For, if he were not immediately devoured by other sharks, he would soon weaken from loss of blood and die. This one died at the jaws of other sharks. Killed by shark and man, by hunger and vengeance. Even then, I wondered if there could be some commercial use for sharks. The thought faded away; I had more pressing business there in the islands with our various shipping enterprises. But the thought—and the persistent desire to catch sharks—never left me. It was off Honolulu one day that I saw the biggest shark in the sea, the Whale shark. It was about 35 feet long, and it seemed to be suspended in the water, no more than 2 fathoms below the surface, right next to our small boat. I could see its checkerboard skin so clearly I felt I could almost lean out of the boat and touch it. The presence of our boat did not disturb this huge, sluggish shark. But my brother and I were practically holding our breath while we decided how to take him. We were determined to bring him in. Then, both of us realized at almost the same moment the awful truth. We had left port without a harpoon! We didn’t have so much as a marlin spike aboard. So we just drifted there and after a while the biggest shark I have ever seen slowly swam out of my sight. Once again, the old adage held true: the biggest ones always get away. My curiosity about sharks and my frequent harpoonings of sharks that attacked the dead horses we hauled to sea eventually led to a sideline for Young Brothers, Ltd.—shark hunting. A shark hunt usually began with a phone call to our boathouse. “Hello, Young Brothers? Is Bill there—Sharky Bill. Well, tell him there’s a party at the hotel who wants to go shark fishing.” When I got a call such as that, I would telephone the Humane Society and offer to take a condemned horse off their hands. The shark hunt begins. The poor old horse is led to the end of the wharf and put out of its misery. It tumbles into the water at the end of a stout line. The fishing party arrives from the hotel and boards the boat. The fishermen look anxiously at a crewman honing a harpoon. Not far out of the harbor one of the boys slits the carcass up the belly. Soon the water is saturated with the blood and scent of fresh-killed prey. We stop the boat. The fishermen are tense, not quite sure what is going to happen next. We tell them to keep quiet. They don’t utter a sound. All that can be heard is the sound of the waves lapping at the sides of the boat. The sea is still, except for the bobbing body of the horse. I can see, far off, a shadow in the water, zig-zagging ever closer to the surface and a black triangular fin cuts the water above it. Now it is the fin that is zig-zagging. It circles the carcass. A couple of times. A head appears forward of the fin and a cold, expressionless eye can be seen. It is the eye of a shark. Captain Shark-Killer 65 The shark, quite suddenly, is gone. No shadow. No fin. Nothing. The sea is deserted—at least by life. For the dead horse still floats there, awaiting its fate. In twenty minutes or so, the shark is back. This time four or five other sharks accompany him. They prowl about, slowly circling closer and closer to the carcass. Occasionally, they nose it. But they seem hesitant, cautious. If this were a white horse they would have attacked it long ago. But a dark horse does not quickly arouse the shark’s hunger. Suddenly, they strike! The first shark bites a huge piece of flesh from the corpse’s neck. Then the second darts in for a bite. Then the third. The water is swirling now with hungry, rapacious sharks bathed in the blood of their prey. A gleaming skeleton is rapidly appearing where moments before there was the outline of a horse. Slowly, steadily, I draw the line attached to the horse closer and closer to the boat. Oblivious to the boat—and the gaping amateur fishermen aboard her—the sharks follow the corpse, still feeding on it savagely. I hand the line to one of the boys and turn my attention to the fishermen. “Here,” I tell one of them, “hold the harpoon like this. Then strike down into the neck or gill of the biggest one. And don’t fall overboard!” The fisherman grasps the harpoon tightly with one hand—and with his other hand holds onto the gunwale. He is visibly shaking, he looks as if he is getting seasick, and he cannot tear his wide-open eyes from the seething water. So close is the orgy of feasting that blood-flecked spray occasionally showers the fisherman. “All right,” I shout to the harpoon-holder. “Take that big one—the one that is biting right now!” The fisherman pales—and freezes. “You, you take it, Captain,” he says in a quavering voice. “I don’t think I— Here, I might miss—” I take the harpoon and hurl it. The iron strikes home into the forebody of the biggest shark! Immediately, he spews forth all he has eaten. Instantly, this is devoured by the other sharks. They will turn on him next, so he thrashes a moment, and then sounds. Away goes the boat, towed by the wounded shark. Five minutes, he tows. The scene of the bloody feast is far behind us. Ten minutes, he tows. The fisher- men look worried. They wonder how long this can go on. I feel the line. It gives the jerks that signal the fact that the shark is rolling— and thus done for. Too weak to pull against the line, he can only twist over and over, trying to get loose, but only winding the line about his body. I begin to pull in the line, keeping a steady pressure on it. The wet slack comes in, fathom after fathom. Then, out of the sea, his great jaws still gnashing, his arrogant eye still seeing, comes the shark, a 12-footer, vanquished but unyielding. Swiftly, he is hooked through the mouth as he is drawn alongside the boat. He is securely held now, but he is thrashing, beating the water with his tail and drenching us with spray. We get a line around his tail and make it fast to a stern cleat. A sharp thrust from a whale-spade through the brain finishes him. The harpoon and hook are cut loose, and, with our first catch under our belt, we go after his companions. 66 Man Against Shark They are still attacking what is left of the corpse, snapping scraps from it and dashing after any piece which is torn away. We get another one, with a harpoon through the gill. There is no fight in this one, stabbed in a vital spot. He is quickly brought alongside and dispatched with the whale-spade. We return home with our two trophies in close tow. The fishermen try to look casual as we pull up to the wharf. One of them is nonchalantly wiping shark’s blood from a harpoon. They try to look modest. But they can’t help swaggering a bit as they walk off the boat. After all, they just caught two sharks, didn’t they? And so it went. Day after day, we killed sharks. Except for the Chinese merchants who magically appeared on the wharf and hacked off the shark’s fins for shark fin soup, no one seemed to have any use for the sharks, however. I am by nature a thrifty man, and I brooded about this waste. Wasn’t there some commercial use for sharks? Couldn’t a use be found for their incredibly tough hide? Wouldn’t their huge livers give up oil as medically valuable as cod liver oil? No one in the Islands had the answers. Though people talked a lot about sharks there, few knew very much about them. I remember one day I caught a beautiful Tiger shark who was carrying 42 young. I packed her and the babies in an ice-lined trough and exhibited the whole family at the fair in Waikiki. I charged ten cents admission (collecting $1,500 in a week, incidentally), and, as the viewers filed past, I answered their questions. One of the visitors was a physician. He looked the Tiger and her pups over very carefully, and then called me aside. “Tl tell you something about that mother Tiger shark that you don’t know,” he said. “All right, Doctor,” I replied, “what is it? I know where to find them and catch them, but you can probably tell me something else.” “Here,” he said, pointing to the Tiger’s mouth, “see this thin membrane running around the jaw over the teeth? You don’t know what that’s for, do you?” “No,” I honestly replied. “You're a good fisherman, all right, but fishermen don’t learn much about anatomy. As a matter of fact, this membrane is such an oddity, you won’t find out anything about it in a textbook. But I happen to know that is where the Tiger shark nurses her young.” “Nurses her young!” I exclaimed. “You mean to tell me that you think . . .’ “Think?” he interrupted. “I know. The baby Tigers are born alive—you know that; you’ve seen them. Well, inside of the Tiger shark, when they want to feed, the babies come forward to this membrane and get their food by nursing at this membrane. It has to be the answer, Captain. After all, there is no placenta connecting the young to the mother. So obviously they live in a free state inside her, and .. .” I let him spin his ridiculous theory, but I wasn’t listening. It simply amazed me how little was known about the shark, even by so-called scientists. It was not until 1920, however, that I had an opportunity to satisfy my ? Captain Shark-Killer 67 curiosity about commercial uses for sharks. And I was to devote my life to this venture. I left the islands in 1920 for a change of scene in the States. Footloose, restless for a challenging job, I wound up in New York City. I was walking up Broad- way one day when I happened to glance in a shoe store window. I saw a pair of shoes with sharkskin tips! I all but ran into the store to find out about the shoes. The sharkskin trail eventually led from the shoe store to Newark, New Jersey, where the Ocean Leather Company headquarters were. They were pioneering in the manufacture of shark hides. Shark-catching stations were being set up in Florida and North Carolina, I was told. And, before you could say “Jack Shark,” I was on my way to one of the stations. In the years to come, I would journey throughout the world in search of sharks. This would be my job, my vocation, my way of life. At each way station in this world-wide pursuit of the shark, I would have adventures and I would learn more and more about the wily shark. I have put down, in the pages that follow, some of my adventures among the mano. Bic Prine Key, FLorma I’ve been convinced for years that sharks are man-eaters. The natives in the Pacific, the old-time seafarers and many of my friends hereabouts believe it. But the unbelievers—most of whom have never seen blue water, let alone a shark—demand proof. I got them their proof today. Walter Johnston—he calls himself Pete the Shark—and I have been catching shark here and skinning them for their hides. We’ve been doing pretty well. We go out in the morning, make a catch, and then come in to skin them at the end of the day. Today, while skinning a 12-foot Brown shark, I noticed an odd protuberance on the stomach wall, so I slit the lining a bit. The round end of a bone came out. I grasped it with one hand and cut a little more so I could pull it out. It was what was left of a human right arm and hand. The arm was in a good state of preservation, indicating that it had been in the shark only a short time. The palm of the hand and fingertips were wrinkled, as they would be in life if immersed for a long time in water. I concluded it was the hand of a man who had not engaged in manual toil. It bore neither rings nor tattoos. The arm to the elbow was not mangled, but from the elbow to the shoulder joint all the flesh had been torn away. I knew I had to search the shark more thoroughly to see if there were any more clues to this poor devil’s identity. I carefully probed and found six fragments of flesh—and a piece of blue serge cloth, about 12 by 18 inches, apparently ripped from a man’s coat. I photographed my gruesome find, and Pete amputated the hand and put it in a glass of alcohol. I called the coroner at Key West. While he was on his way to Big Pine Key, I made some inquiries and learned that a plane had gone down the day before about 20 miles from Key West. A man named Atkins was reported missing. He had a blue serge coat on when he was last seen alive. 68 Man Against Shark San Juan, Puerto Rico Two years ago, I found a hand in the belly of a shark. Yesterday the hand came back to haunt me. I had come here on a little vacation from shark-hunting. On the steamer on the way over, I was chatting with a man and his wife at dinner, and, as it usually does with me, the conversation soon turned to sharks. I showed the couple a few of the shark’s teeth I usually carry to illustrate my stories about the shark’s rapacity. The inevitable question—“Will a shark really eat a man?”— came up. I replied with the certainty I have held for the past two years. But the man persisted in his questioning. “How do you know?” he asked. “What makes you so sure?” I told him that I had grisly proof not particularly suited for the dinner table. “It is a photograph,” I said, “and not a very pretty one.” He insisted on seeing the photograph. Finally, somewhat disgusted with the man’s macabre curiosity, I took out the photo and showed it to him. He took one look at it and gasped, “So you’re the man who found him!” “Found who?” | asked, not immediately remembering the name of the victim whose arm I had discovered. “Edwin Atkins!” my dinner companion replied. “The widow of that poor fellow is marrying my best friend.” Later, I learned the whole story of the tragedy. Edwin F. Atkins, Jr., his wife, their two young sons, Edwin, 5, and David, 3; a nurse and a governess had all boarded a two-motored seaplane, the Columbus, in Key West. They were bound for Havana, along with another passenger, a New York banker and broker named Otto Abrahams. Also aboard the plane were a pilot and a mechanic. About 20 miles from Key West, the plane’s starboard motor began to miss. The pilot, C. W. Miller, spotted a ferryboat and decided to try to land the plane near it. The day was calm, but the seas were surging. As Miller brought the plane in, a wave nearly 20 feet high struck the plane’s pontoons and hurled it upward. The plane plunged downward into the swells and smashed nose-first into the sea. As it struck the surface, another huge wave hit the plane and spun it around. The impact tossed the passengers out of their seats. Mr. and Mrs. Atkins had been holding the children on their laps. When the plane crashed, the children were hurled from their parents’ arms and were never seen again. Atkins tried to make his way back to the cabin, but Abrahams, realizing the children were surely dead, grabbed Atkins and managed to get him out of the water-filled plane and onto a wing. The governess, Grace McDonald, also clambered out on the violently bobbing wing. The ferryboat, H.M. Flagler, meanwhile, was speeding toward the downed plane. Despite the mountainous seas, the Flagler’s skipper, Captain John Albury, launched a lifeboat, which fought its way toward the now rapidly sinking plane. As the lifeboat neared the plane, a wave suddenly erupted and threw Miss McDonald off the wing. Passengers aboard the Flagler, lining the rail to see the drama, screamed as Miss McDonald vanished beneath the sea. Captain Shark-Killer 69 The lifeboat came alongside the plane at last. Seamen snatched the survivors out of the wreckage. They saved Mrs. Atkins, the pilot, the mechanic, the nurse and Abrahams. But Atkins, his two sons and Miss McDonald were lost. Had Atkins been alive when the shark found him? I don’t know. I do believe, however, that more than one shark got Atkins, dead or alive. Since no other remains were found in the shark I caught, I assume that several sharks attacked the body. And I assume that the other victims met the same awful fate. The Brown shark, by the way, is listed by some so-called experts as a “harm- less” shark. TRINIDAD The hand again. I was in the smoking-room of an island steamer going from St. Thomas to Trinidad. Again, I had struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger. Again, we had started talking about sharks. Again, the question, “Will a shark eat a man?” Again, the persistent pleas to see the picture. And again, I showed it. It was then that my companion told me that he had been a boyhood chum of Edwin Atkins. I should destroy the photograph, I guess. It almost seems to be cursed. Yet, in thinking it over, I believe I will continue to show it when a skeptic demands proof of the claim that sharks eat men. In that way, perhaps, it will serve as a vividly grim reminder to beware of sharks. FERNADINA, FLORIDA Pete the Shark says he can smell sharks when they’re around, and sometimes I think he actually can. In fact, I have wondered a couple of times if Pete isn’t part shark himself. I had figured out a new way of netting sharks by allowing a net to drift along vertically with the tide, instead of securing it at the bottom with anchors. We went out today to try the new technique because Pete said he had smelled sharks. We set out the net, and we didn’t have long to wait to see how well the drifting net idea worked. Minutes after we set the net adrift the nearest buoy disappeared. We hauled in a big Tiger shark. Even before we had him killed and stowed aboard, another buoy disappeared. We pulled in the net again and found a big Tiger thrashing in it. Again, and again, for four back-breaking hours we let out the net and hauled it in, each time landing a shark. Frequently, we netted a batch of skates and rays. We cut them up and left them in the net, providing a bloody bait for the next shark which happened along. There is no better scent to be had. The sharks kept striking the net and we kept pulling them in. When the thirty-sixth shark had been hauled into the 20-foot boat, there was barely 3 inches of freeboard left. A fair-sized wave would have swamped the boat and sent Pete and me spilling into some obviously sharky waters. We hailed a nearby shrimp boat which took us in tow. But we had such a 70 Man Against Shark load that water poured in through two small holes in the sternboard, where a bumper formerly had been secured. Not a stick or a plug of any kind was in the boat. I couldn’t let that great catch go to the bottom, though, so I did what that boy at the dike did, only more so. I stuck my two thumbs into the holes. We made it to shore safely. Our catch weighed 9,985 pounds. Nantucket, MAssacHUsETTS Captain Ernie Schuetz and I are catching about 350 sharks a month, right off this summer colony where people are swimming without realizing that thousands of sharks are swimming here, too. These sharks aren’t after bathers, though. Not as long as there are great schools of menhaden about. And most of the sharks we are catching are not dangerous. Because I knew this, I got careless the other day. You should never get careless around sharks, even the “harmless” ones. We had caught an 8-foot Sand shark on a hand line. The Sand shark isn’t exactly harmless, but it isn’t exactly ferocious, either. You just have to be watchful when you handle one. And I wasn’t. When we brought him alongside the boat, I clubbed him across the snout and swung him inboard with the block and tackle. He dropped down on the deck, apparently dead. (That blow on the snout does it—usually.) I wanted to move him forward a bit because he was in the way of the wheel. I started tugging him by his head while Ernie pushed him from the back. Suddenly, the shark gave a convulsive flop. His jaws yawned open and, somehow, he seemed to lunge forward. I leaped backward, lost my balance and fell. As I lay there, stunned on the deck, I could see the sky spinning above me, for I was flat on my back, and I could feel the shark’s jaws slowly closing on my left leg. I sat up. I just froze there, watching the shark’s upper jaw descend over my leg like a jagged curtain. At that moment, the shark died. Only the pinpoints of his teeth penetrated my skin. I was covered with cold sweat, and as I looked at my leg with its dim crescent of tiny pricks, I could hardly believe it was still intact. Everything had happened in only a few seconds. Ernie was already prying the shark’s jaws apart and gently lifting my leg from the maw. Shark bites were no novelty to Captain Ernie. He told me once about the time he was working a ship out of Nassau. The Una, a small Bahamas steamer bound for her home port at Turks Island, hit a coral reef. “She had about 75 laborers aboard,” Ernie recalled, ‘and when that little ship hit the reef, there wasn’t much time for many of them to get into the life- boats, or even on the life-rafts. Lots of them—God only knows how many—were dumped into the water and kept afloat by grabbing at whatever bobbed by. “There wasn’t much panic, though. That is, not until one of the passengers on a raft tumbled off and disappeared. Just one word was all he yelled: Shark! “All of a sudden, the sea was alive with those monsters from hell! They smashed into the rafts, overturning them and throwing screaming men into the sea. One of them even half-leaped out of the water and pulled a man right off a raft. Captain Shark-Killer iA “Men tried to beat the sharks off with oars. The oars broke over their heads—or a shark would grab an oar in his teeth and splinter it as if it was a toothpick. “Some of the men went crazy and jumped right into the sharks’ jaws. “How long the nightmare went on, Bill, I don’t know. It ended as fast as it started. The sharks just disappeared. They didn’t go away hungry, though. I'll vouch for that.” MorenHeap City, NortH CaroLina We're supplying sharks for a fascinating shark “disassembly line” at the Ocean Leather shark station here. We're catching between 50 and 60 a day (on good days, and that’s what most of them are). As soon as we pull into one of the station’s wharves, the sharks are quickly unloaded and skinned right there on the platform. A skilled skinner can do the job in less than 15 minutes, providing his knife is razor-sharp and he knows his shark anatomy. The shark’s dorsal fins are first hacked off. Then a long slit is made down the midline of the back. Next, the skinner peels away the hide by pulling it with one hand while, with the other hand, he wields Shark-skinning is an art demanding skill—and a very sharp knife. The dotted lines on the figure of the shark and the hide show where trims are made. Skinning, according to Captain Young, begins with a cut down the center of the back, then up to the head and around the eyes and the gill slits. A second skinning operation begins along the top of the tail and is continued up the underside to the ventral fin, around it and back to the other side again. The result: the hide comes off in one piece, shaped as shown. From Shark! Shark! 72 Man Against Shark his knife to cut the hide away from the carcass. The hide is washed down with sea water, then put in a barrel of brine for 3 or 4 hours to prepare it for fleshing. Fleshing is done by stretching the hide on a beaming board, a stout board about 3 feet wide and 5 feet long, which is curved to match the beaming knife, a curved, 16-inch blade with handles on both ends. Excess flesh is removed by carefully drawing the knife along the hide. It is now ready to be cured. Generous amounts of salt are spread on the flesh surface of the hide in the curing process. This is done in the salt house, at the end of the wharf. There, too, the hides are baled for shipment to the tannery. While this is going on, the carcass of the shark is being readied for eventual sale. Though most species of shark provide tasty meat (I rank it among the best fish I’ve ever eaten), because of the prejudices that exist against shark, we had to find another use for the nutritious meat. The answer was fertilizer. The carcasses were wheeled, on a narrow-gauge railway, from the skinning platform to the fertilizer sheds. Here, in several large frame buildings, was the machinery for reducing the carcasses to fertilizer. The carcass of each shark was run through a hopper, where it was ground up. Then the finely chopped pieces were fed into a hot-air dryer. The dried product was next pulverized and put into bags. The result was a fine fertilizer, so rich in vitamins and min- erals that it had to be mixed with other, less potent fertilizers for best results. The disassembly line had still other by-products. The shark’s big, vitamin- filled liver was rendered by boiling it in a double-boiler contraption, then skimming off the oil. The fins were dried and shipped to Chinese merchants who sold them for shark fin soup. The teeth and dried jaws went to curio dealers. Because of Prohibition, we had another unexpected by-product. I found out about this one night when one of the men at the station (most of us lived in bunkhouses right near the wharves) invited me to have a few drinks. I was surprised that he was serving the real stuff. Imported, too. When I asked him where he had got it, he looked around very carefully and then told me the story. It seemed that a rum-runner had run aground on a sand spit offshore a few nights before. Afraid the Coast Guard would catch him if he was still hung up there at dawn, the rum-runner jettisoned his load of imported liquor. Thus lightened, the boat floated clear of bottom and the rum- runner sped off. Somehow—my host never explained this—he heard about the bootlegger’s jettisoned cargo. He went out with a grappling line and fished up several cases of liquor. He was a fisherman, not a bootlegger, though. He never sold a bottle. He just became a grand host and a connoisseur of fine spirits. Bootleggers soon realized that our shark-fishing could be a fine cover-up for rum-running operations. I was approached by one of the members of the local gang, who made me an offer. His ingenious idea was for me to rendezvous with a liquor-carrying boat offshore after I had got my day’s catch of sharks. I was to stuff bottles of liquor into the sharks and then go ashore. There, a member of the gang, who was to get a job working on the wharf, would smuggle the contraband into a “special shipment” of fertilizer. It sounded like Captain Shark-Killer ip a great idea. But I turned it down. I'd take my chance with real sharks, but not the human variety. Shark-catching here is not as spectacular as it was in my mano-harpooning days. But it is much more effective. We set our nets in the afternoon to trap sharks, who do most of their foraging for food at night. Each day before sunset we embark on our three small boats and put out to the sharking grounds at Western Shoals or Cape Lookout. Each boat has ten nets, each of which is rigged with two anchors and four buoys. The anchors pull the net to the bottom, and the buoys mark the nets on the surface. A line strung with lead pulls the bottom of the net down, and a line strung with cork buoys holds up the top of the net. The net hangs vertically in the water like a curtain. The nets are staggered so that a long line of them stretches for about half a mile out from shore. Thus, the sharks are stopped by the net “curtain” as they head for shallow water in search for food. The nets are hung so that they will “fin” the shark. He swims into the net, whose diamond-shaped openings allow his head to get through, but hold him by his pectoral fins. Once trapped, the shark cannot back up. He is simply incapable of backing up. He hangs there and tries to get away by rolling. This maneuver only enmeshes him more. Frequently, his rolling wraps the net around his gill slits, and prevents him from breathing. He dies by suffocation. Just before dawn, we set out again for the nets. Hand over hand, the crew hauls the boat along the length of each net, pulling up the cork line and passing it aft. When a shark’s head breaks surface, it is hooked through the jaw. The shark is clubbed and, hopefully dead, is swung aboard. Sometimes we set trawls. To a long line, secured at both ends by anchors and buoys, we fasten “gangens,” or lengths of line about a fathom long strung with a length of chain and a steel, king-sized sharkhook baited with fresh- caught white fish. From 25 to 50 of these lines are set. The next morning, when we haul in the catch, often all we get are sharks’ heads. The entire bodies, up to the gill slits, have been eaten by cannibalistic sharks. Sometimes, as we pulled in the trawls, the cannibals would still be attacking their helpless relatives. Most of our luck, though, is good. The same cannot be said of the menhaden fishermen, for our good luck is their very bad luck. Cape Lookout is a great “pogie,” or menhaden, fishing ground. The menhaden are caught by surround- ing the huge schools with purse seines a thousand feet long. Once the seine is closed and the bottom pursed with a draw string, thousands of “pogies” are caught. The sight of this mass of trapped prey is maddening to a shark. He bites a hole in the net, and the “pogies” pour out—right into the shark’s mouth. Other sharks converge at the feast. Each one bites one or more big holes in the net to gorge himself on the fish, whose short-lived freedom ends where the shark’s maw begins. The sharks stuff themselves on “pogies.” I once caught a shark who had just left a “pogie” feast. He had in his bulging stomach 57 fish, each 5 to 8 inches long, and each swallowed head first, which showed that the shark had got them as they swam toward him, undoubtedly from a net he or another raider had ripped open. 74 Man Against Shark PANAMA City, FLorIDA Sharks are where you find them, but finding them is often much more diffi- cult than catching them. One day, you are pulling them in with every haul of the net. The next day, they are gone. But one of the charms of shark-fishing is the interesting people you meet while you are trying to meet some sharks. While scouting the Gulf of Mexico for a likely spot for some profitable shark fishing, I met a couple of sharkers with some good yarns to tell. Captain Charles Thompson told me about a whale shark that didn’t get away. [’ll pass along the story as he gave it to me. “We were anchored just below Knight’s Key, about half a mile from the old Florida East Coast dock. Looking over there one morning about 9 o’clock, I saw an unbelievably large shark within a few feet of the dock trestle. We immediately took to the launch and started after the fish. “We got nearer and nearer until the boat was right over him and we could see his spotted back 3 or 4 feet below the surface. I drove a harpoon into him near the gills. “We called to some nearby fishermen to come and help us, and with their assistance we did everything we could think of to make him fast: 40 or 50 times during the day we shot at him with a rifle. At a distance of about 2 feet from his back we let fly with a shotgun loaded with No. 2 shot, which just bounced, leaving a little circular mark in his skin. “Unruffled by our little attentions, the fish circled several times in from the trestle to perhaps a mile inshore, coming back again and again, and about 1 o’clock in the afternoon, when the tide was running out, we thought he would get outside the bay. “But the fish remained in the bay. I was surprised that he did not put up any fight and was so extremely sluggish. He seemed not to realize that any- thing in particular was happening to him. He kept circling around, moving his big tail in a slow, regular way, drawing the small boats after him with the greatest of ease. There were now several harpoons in him, and one line was fastened through his tail and another made fast to the dorsal fin. “About half past five that night he made his last circle in from the trestle, and this time we headed him over toward a sandbank by poking his head with a boat hook. He finally stranded on the sandbank, where he was made fast with lines around his body stretched to oars stuck deep in the sand. ‘A piece was then cut from the top of his head. With a knife on the end of a pole we tried to reach his brain and kill him. We were surprised to discover about three inches of gristle at this point in his head.” I later saw Captain Thompson’s great shark on exhibit in Miami. It weighed 13% tons and was 38 feet long and 18 feet in girth. A careful examination showed that it was a young Whale shark which had not yet reached maturity. Another yarn came from Captain W. B. Caswell, Sr., an old-time Gulf fisherman who called Panama City his home port. “T had built a campfire in the palmetto,” he began, “and was boiling a pot of coffee about 2 o’clock one morning. It had been a cold, raw night, and my crew had made three long hauls over coral reefs. Just after midnight, a big shark, striking at the gilled mackerel in the bunt, had torn our seine half in two. So Captain Shark-Killer 5 we were out of business temporarily until it got light enough to see to mend our net. “While I was making the coffee, I heard the chug-chug of a motorboat coming in, and from the exhaust noise | knew whose boat it was. Sure enough, when the boat came abreast of our fire on the beach, I recognized it. My friend stopped the engine, and hailed: “That you, Captain Caswell?’ wes, diyelled back. “Before I could shout that there was coffee ready, he must have smelled it, for his next inquiry was: ‘How’s coffee?’ “ Sure,’ I answered. ‘Come ashore and join us.’ “The crew waded ashore, and even before they reached the fire I could tell there was something wrong. They just didn’t have that air fishermen have when they’ve finished a good day’s work. “What's wrong, Captain?’ I asked my friend. ‘Sharks eat up your seine, too?’ “Seine, hell!’ he said. ‘Look at me!’ “He turned around. | saw that half his coat and the back of his pants had been completely torn away. “What happened?’ I asked. “Well,” he answered, still angry about the incident, ‘I was holding the lead line down in a swash below the Bell Shoals and we caught a seine full of sharks along with the mackerel, and one of them took a nip at me. Them slickers cost me six dollars and them dungarees cost one dollar and 90 cents—best duck brand—and that flannel underwear cost me three dollars a suit. And I had a big bandanna handkerchief in my hip pocket and he got that, too.’ “Even the coffee didn’t cheer him up. He was still grumbling about that shark when he went back aboard his ship, getting more than his feet wet as he waded into the surf.” Captain Caswell, who retired after 42 years of fishing in the Gulf, developed his own method for keeping sharks from tearing his seines. But I wouldn’t recommend it. “A fisherman often cruises for four or five days through all kinds of weather, risking his life, health and the money invested in his rig,” Captain Caswell said by way of introduction to describing his anti-shark warfare. “So, when he finds a 10,000-pound bunch of salable fish in his seine and a big shark tearing 10-foot holes in it, he is pretty apt to take the most effective and surest method at hand to get rid of the shark. “My particular method was to shove off in the seine boat, get within reach of the shark and dive overboard for the dorsal fin. It’s easy to grasp, being rough and not slippery. Usually, it’s not difficult to get hold of this fin with the left hand, and to make myself secure I wrap my legs around the shark behind the fin. The shark makes a lunge and at same time starts to roll over. I take my sheath knife and, reaching as far forward with it as I can. draw it strongly across the muscles of the back of his neck. One slash with a good sharp blade, 7 or 8 inches long, usually cuts the muscles and cords that direct the shark’s movements. The head bends down, the wound opens and the loss of blood soon weakens the shark. I get out of the water while the shark aimlessly rushes about, 76 Man Against Shark rolling over and over and pounding the water with his tail. After a few minutes, he settles toward the bottom, and my catch is saved.” Captain Caswell later taught his son, Wallace, to ride sharks. But what the old Captain did to save his catch, Wallace did for a living. Billed as the “Tarzan of the Sea,” Wallace would enter a tank at a seaside resort, and, while a crowd of paying viewers gaped, battle a shark. Wallace always won. (During the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40, Billy Rose wanted to stage a sensational show—Captain Caswell versus a shark. I was hired to design the tank, make arrangements for the delivery of sea water to it, and, of course, catch the sharks. It would have been a great show, but the New York Humane Society got wind of it, and the project was quietly dropped.) IsLE oF WarimMos, FRENCH SOMALILAND When my employers at the Ocean Leather Company once asked me how far I would be willing to go to hunt sharks, I said, “To the ends of the earth.” This is the end of the earth. Unbelievably hot, unbelievably desolate, this island is so barren not a blade of grass grows upon it, let alone a tree. It lies, low and sun- baked, about 8 miles south of Djibouti, the only place in French Somaliland that could be loosely termed a city. Djibouti has been called the hottest place on earth. Warimos is hotter. Djibouti is on the Gulf of Aden, near the neck of water that connects the southern terminus of the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden. Here, I was told, an experimental shark station could be set up. If it proved successful, another would be established on Madagascar. On the way to Djibouti, I met Ras Tafari, a friendly, dignified little African. I invited him shark-fishing and he invited me to a lion hunt. Neither of us could accept the other’s invitation. I was about to plunge into my job as a shark fisherman, and Ras Tafari was heading for his new job. He was on his way to Ethiopia, where he would be crowned Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia and Lion of Judah. I often envied him his palace, in the months that followed. Imagine landing on the moon and trying to build something there. That is the way it was on Warimos. Lumber had to be brought in from Trieste. Water, scarce even in Djibouti, was non-existent on Warimos. Our drinking water was brought to the camp on the backs of donkeys from an oasis 10 miles in the desert. Other water came by boat. We had ice brought in, too—by a native runner, who carried it from Djibouti to the island, which was accessible by foot twice a day at low tide. At night, hyenas prowled the island, looking for the shark carcasses which they could smell from shore. The terrifying howls of the hyenas woke us in the middle of the night, frightened the natives, and even sent the dogs whimper- ing under the beds. A dry, unceasing southeast wind swept across the parched land, carrying sand and dust into everyone’s eyes. The wind had been blowing for centuries, and it filled the floor of the sea around the island with fine mud. The water was always muddy; particles of sand and dirt were constantly being deposited on the Captain Shark-Killer fal water by the wind and drifting to the bottom. Mud clung to our nets and caked the hulls of our boats. But that mud was a good omen, for mud means sharks. Our shark-hunters were a motley lot: tall, regal Abyssinians; wiry little Arabs; Dankali natives from northern French Somaliland, their long-time rivals, Somali from the south. Both the Somali and the Dankali carried knives. The natural rivalry between them would have been murderous if we hadn’t dis- armed them. We took advantage of the rivalry by urging them to compete against each other as shark-catchers. My private shadow was a big, muscular, ugly Somali who wore tattered dungarees and a vest. He was handy with tools and quick witted. He attached himself to me and called himself Ali Young. He dogged my footsteps so closely, ashore or afloat, he was something of a nuisance. But if he hadn’t been an arm’s length away from me one day . . . We were in a small boat about 5 miles southeast of Warimos. It was a spot known for big sharks—Kabir Lokhom, the natives said. At daybreak, we started hauling in our first shark net. We pulled in a few Mantas, a couple of Hammer- heads and some Tigers. Ali was ever at my side, as I helped to work the net or manhandled the writhing sharks and Mantas into the stowage compartment. The nets were slippery with mud, and, as the nets were taken aboard, they coated the decks with slime. The sea was pretty rough. And the slippery decks didn’t help us keep our feet under us. Suddenly, the sea heaved mightily, and I tumbled into a net which was already crowded with sharks. Just as I landed in the net, I heard one of the boys scream: “Lokhom! Kabir lokbom!—Shark! Big shark!” I felt I was safe for a moment or two. I wasn’t bleeding, so the sharks would probably not attack me immediately. Luckily, I hadn’t landed on any of them, so I had not yet provoked them. And—except for the kabir lokhbom who had just swum into the net—the sharks were near exhaustion from their hours of struggle in the net I now shared with them. The big Tiger was a different matter. He was after prey, for he was still free and not yet entangled in the net. I felt I could hold him off momentarily by taking a chance at splashing and thrashing about. Then I realized that I could not move. A net is a treacherous thing, which I had learned to fear, for, if a foot or arm is caught in it, a fatal entanglement almost surely begins. It was like a variation on that old legend of the Tiger or the Lady. For me, it was the Tiger or the lethal embrace of the net. Whenever I see the phrase “snatched from the jaws of death,” I think of that moment in the net, for that is exactly what Ali Young did. He reached down and, holding onto the gunwale of the tossing boat with one hand, he grabbed me with the other. He tightened his big hand around my wrist and plucked me out of the sea. That night, Ali was the hero of the camp. His own account of the adventure lost nothing in the telling. His listeners were properly awed by both the story and the large supply of tobacco I had rewarded him with. One of the most spectacular catches off Warimos was made by a couple of natives in the smallest boat we had. They were hauling in a net when they felt something huge tugging it down. Inch by inch, they pulled the net up high 78 Man Against Shark enough to see a great Manta entwined, but still very much alive. Rigging a line through a block on the mast, they pulled away. But the mast gave way, cracked at the deckline and fell into the net, too. Still undaunted, the natives kept trying to pull in the net and, at the same time, make for shore, which was not far off. Then they discovered another monstrous Manta entangled in the net! Towing the net, the two big Mantas and the mast, they somehow managed to make shore. We had a derrick on the wharf, but it was not big enough to lift the Mantas, so we beached them in the ebbing tide. When the water receded, we made lines fast around them and rounded up a few natives to pull them to the skinning platform. The Mantas wouldn’t budge. We called a few more boys. Again, they could not pull them in. We finally needed 22 boys to lift and drag the carcass of each of the giant rays to the skinning platform. From one of the Mantas I removed an embryo weighing 50 pounds. It was folded up in the shape of a letter S, with one pectoral “wing” enwrapping the top of its body and the other enwrapping the bottom. I carried it to the sea and put it in the water. Its “wings” unfolded and it swam away, as gracefully as a bird. The waters off French Somaliland were full of sharks, and their cousins. We caught not only sharks and Mantas, but Sting rays, Torpedoes and Sawfish. We dried and cured shark jaws and Sting ray tails, and sent them to the Commis- sioner of Fishes in Paris. He forwarded many of them to the Kensington Museum in London and the Museum of Natural History in New York. Years later, I learned from my friend Dr. Gudger at the Museum of Natural History that I had made several valuable contributions to ichthyology. Many times I would be sitting in his office, telling him some experience of mine, when he would say, “Just a minute, Captain Bill.” He would ring for his stenographer, and, when she appeared with her pad and pencil, he’d say, “Now, Captain Bill, spill the beans.” In many papers which Dr. Gudger wrote he generously credited me for supplying him with facts I had gathered in my shark travels. Among my souvenirs of the shark-hunting days on Warimos was the 6-foot saw of an 18-foot Sawfish we caught one day. I had to restrain Ali when the Sawfish was brought aboard, brandishing her dangerous weapon. He was all for grabbing the fish as his own property, even before a few swipes of a hatchet lopped off the wicked-looking saw-toothed snout. Back on shore, when the Sawfish was hoisted to the skinning platform, Ali danced around it, yelling, “Les oeufs, les oeufs!” His was the first of many greedy hands that reached into the shark’s slitted stomach and pulled out Jes oeufs. The eggs were not truly eggs. The Sawfish is viviparous. But the embryos are connected in the womb to yolk-sacs which start off the size of ostrich eggs early in the embryo’s development. As the embryo grows, the yolk-sac is used for food. Finally, at birth, the empty sac is cast off. Ali and the rest of the epicureans who raided the Sawfish’s larder were not aware of these anatomical facts. The yolk-sacs were true eggs to them. Les oeufs—there were about 10 good-sized ones—were roasted on hot rocks over a charcoal fire. When the cooks thought their “eggs” were done, they picked them up, smoking hot, opened their thin shells and ate the gooey mess with their fingers, which were carefully licked, one by one, when the feast was over. Not long after the Sawfish egg cookout, our work ended at Warimos. We Captain Shark-Killer 79 had amply shown that a successful shark station could be set up there to provide the natives with a badly needed industry. We were supposed to return to Paris, headquarters for the European branch of the leather company, make our report, and then head for Madagascar, where another shark station was to be established. I said a sad goodbye to Ali. Then I started walking across the tide flat to our battered old Ford that rattled out to Warimos from Djibouti at low tide. The Ford had to make a fast turn-around in order to make the round-trip during a single low tide. Ali, ever my shadow, ran after me. He knew there wasn’t any time for cere- monies; the Ford had to start off right away. I tried to soothe him by telling him I'd be coming back to Madagascar, and, when I did, I would take him with me. A big grin spread across faithful Ali’s face. He knew practically no English, but he managed to say, “I wait for you.” How long Ali waited I'll never know. Our plans were changed in Paris. The company decided against starting a station at Madagascar. My next shark- hunting grounds would be Australia. En Route to AUSTRALIA After a short Hawaiian vacation that included a few old-fashioned shark hunts, I set out for Australia on a ship that stopped at many South Pacific islands along the way. At every stop I made it my business to inquire into the local shark situation. A sharkman’s holiday. I spoke to missionaries who had spent much of their lives in the islands; through interpreters I interviewed native fishermen; I discussed shark, in pidgin English, with venerable chieftains whose knowledge of the ways of the shark was based on decades of practical experience. I soon learned that there was no doubt in this part of the world about the - shark’s man-eating habits. Every island I visited had its own history of shark attacks. And, on nearly every island, there was visible evidence: one-legged or one-armed men and boys who explained their injuries with whatever their word was for shark. The islanders respect the shark, but they do not panic at the sight or thought of him. They seem to have the same regard for the shark that the African has for the lion, and, like the African, an island fisherman is not afraid to hunt the shark when conditions are favorable. * In Samoa, natives catch sharks for food. They wrap the sharks in broad ti leaves and roast them in underground pits. Sharks are so abundant around some of the islands that for countless years the natives have had a regular trade with the Chinese for shark fins. One popular method of fishing in the islands is with a great net which is taken out by about 10 men who form it into a semi-circle, with the open end pointing toward shore. As they slowly walk the net toward shore, corralling small fish in the process, sharks almost inevitably appear near the fishermen, who apparently are not bothered by this uninvited company. But the natives will not share the water with the shark at night, the time when most species of shark prowl for food. The shark at night is looked upon 80 Man Against Shark as an aggressive predator who will attack any potential food. The sharks often follow boats and canoes at night, biting the oars, paddles and outriggers. I was told of violent attacks by large sharks on boats. Oars have been ripped from natives’ hands, and, many times, sharks have so savagely snapped at the outriggers that boats have been overturned, spilling the occupants to nearly certain death. In the Ellice Islands, northwest of Samoa, about 40 natives, crossing in canoes at night between islands several miles apart, were caught in a sudden squall. One of the canoes was swamped. Instantly, the sea was seething with sharks that had been trailing the canoes. The sharks devoured the natives in the first canoe, and then began attacking the other canoes, which were foundering in the storm- churned sea. The natives’ two pitiless enemies—storm and shark—merged their malevo- lence. Canoe after canoe was capsized, native after native was torn to pieces. When the storm and the sharks disappeared with the coming dawn, only two natives were alive to carry the awful tale back to their home island. Word of the massacre spread throughout Polynesia, and I heard the story again and again on many islands. A similar story was told in the Fijis, where a large double sailing canoe had capsized well off shore. More than 20 natives clinging to the overturned canoe were attacked by sharks. Only a few escaped. One of the tiny atoll islands I visited was the hunting ground, the natives insisted, of a single big shark that patrolled the entrance to the atoll. The natives would swim and dive without fear in the lagoon, but they would not venture into the entrance of the lagoon with its shark sentry. The shark, they said, would not enter the lagoon. Solomon Islanders claimed that their sharks were fiercer and bolder than the sharks around other islands. There may have been basis for their claims, I was told, because the Solomon Islanders throw their dead into the sea, which is a sure way to attract sharks. Shark teeth are not used for money in the South Pacific, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. But the teeth are often used as ornaments and talismans. I once met the widow of a New Zealand lawyer who had somehow aided the Maoris in New Zealand. Before he died, he presented his wife with a prehistoric shark tooth which had been given to him when he was initiated as a member of a secret Maori society. He told her to wear the tooth when she was among the Maori, for it would be honored as the sign of a friend. The words tooth and shark are often synonymous in Polynesian dialects. Mako is the most frequently heard word for either tooth or shark. Other Poly- nesian words—mao, mano, mago—are local names for various kinds of sharks. PInpDIMAR, AUSTRALIA While we were setting up Australia’s first shark station here, I took a day off and went to Sydney, which was nearby, to try my hand at fishing for Aus- tralian sharks. Zane Grey’s adventures as a game fisherman had received wide- spread publicity in Australia. Now here was another American who was going to not only catch sharks, but turn them into money. The Aussies were a bit Captain Shark-Killer 81 skeptical, and, when I went out on my first hunt, it was a news event. Luckily, I received this notice in the Sydney Daily Guardian: “Captain W. E. Young, well known in many parts of the world as a com- mercial shark hunter, took a holiday on Anzac Day, and went fishing in Sydney Harbor with two of his colleagues. “Many and various were the lines which hung down from the boat’s side, and many and various were the creatures that came squirming into the cockpit, but Captain Young was beyond such trivialities. His line was stout manila rope, his hook was a terrifying affair reminiscent of a shepherd’s crook, and his bait was one large mullet. He watched the line and brooded, while the others trifled with the flathead and similar prosaic beasts, and made merry amongst them- selves. “ don’t want a great big brute,’ said Captain Bill, ‘and I don’t want a little runt. I want a nice one—about 400 pounds. And I’m going to get it.’ “And he did. His sudden bellow, ‘Clear all lines!’ meant swift and ordered action, and within a few seconds the boat was cleared for combat. “Captain Young stood by the bitt round which his line was turned, and watched intently the convulsive movements in the water, to which all eyes were now directed. He took the line in his hands as soon as these movements changed in character, and, with the dexterity of long experience, proceeded to find out how safely the hook was embedded in the monster. “In those hands Mr. Shark never had a chance. When he dived, he found himself swept up to the surface and above it; when he swerved he was pulled around in a circle; when he made a full-speed attempt to get away from the scene of his discomfiture he was stopped with a dreadful jerk as his tormentor took a sudden turn with the line around the bitt. “Captain Young chuckled and spoke words of wisdom. ‘Just about 400 pounds, I reckon.’ The rope slackened and was as quickly hauled in. A tremen- _ dous splashing, and a first view of the monstrous fish. ‘No, I guess he’s a “she.” ’ “More splashing, and another brief glimpse. ‘A Tiger, about 10 feet.’ “Five more minutes of watchful endeavor and cunning line-play; then, for an instant a sleek gray head and a baleful eye appeared. Crack! “Young’s automatic appeared from nowhere, planted a slug in exactly the right spot, and disappeared again. Twenty seconds later the victor gazed down cheerfully into the leering dead face, with its rows of ghastly teeth. “*This lady’s a respectable married woman. Let’s tow her home and count the family. About two dozen, I should say.’ So Mrs. Tiger Shark went on her last voyage, ignominiously dragged up the harbor. “There may be other men who can catch just the size shark they require, and even name its length and species by the feel of the line. But Captain Young raised himself above the heights of mere man when he finished his operation on the corpse. Three pairs of eyes asked him a mute question, and he grinned engagingly. “ “Just twenty-four,’ he said.” That highly successful demonstration in Sydney Harbor did wonders for our venture. Word spread that we were not a bunch of amateurs with a hare- brained idea. And we received wonderful cooperation in setting up our station in Pindimar. 82 Man Against Shark Buildings still stood from a refrigeration plant the government had built and later abandoned. Sharks abounded there, we were told. Pindimar oystermen, plagued by sharks, happily showed us where to find sharks—right in the middle of the oyster beds. On our first day of operation we headed out into the bay, near the oyster beds, with mullet-baited hooks. I decided to use my prize hook, made to order for me in London by a fine hook-maker. Galvanized, of half-inch carbon steel, with a chisel-pointed barb that was razor-sharp, it was designed to catch the biggest, toughest sharks in the sea. The gleaming hook hung from a brass chain and a sturdy swivel designed to keep the shark from twisting off the hook. All the way out I thought about the monster this gear would surely land. When we reached a likely looking spot, the weather turned nasty. I made the hook line fast and went below to the shelter of the cabin—a comfort our 50-foot boat boasted. There, protected from the weather, I could still keep an eye on my line. I hadn’t been down below long when the launch shivered from stem to stern! My line was taut, drawn stiff as a ramrod by a huge shark on the other end. I rushed on deck to begin what I thought would be a classic battle. But when I grabbed the line it was slack. The shark had struck and managed to get off the hook. Cursing under my breath, I hauled in the line as quickly as I could. I was determined to bait it and get it back in the water immediately, for the monster might still be about. When I pulled in my hook, though, I discovered that it was broken in two. I examined it carefully. There were no defects in it. The explanation was simple, but incredible. A shark had struck my steel hook hard enough to break it as easily as I could have snapped a twig. We decided to use nets, the like of which had never been seen in Australia before. They were about 1,000 feet long, 16 feet deep, with an 8-inch mesh. They were hung in the same “curtain” fashion that I had found to be so effec- tive elsewhere. In my entire sharking career never had I been given an oppor- tunity to test out the theory that sharks were attracted to white or light objects. I decided to try an experiment with the nets. We alternated blue, green and white sections in one net. Invariably, we found sharks in the white section— and none at all in the colored. The experiment left no doubts, in my mind at least, about the effect of color on a shark’s senses. We had been told that the waters were full of sharks of many kinds—Gray Nurse, Hammerhead, Carpet, Whaler, Tiger, Blue Pointer, Wobbegong, Shovel Nose, Port Jackson, Angel, Gummie. But we were not prepared for the bonanza we would strike. Our specially built boats arrived at Pindimar from Sydney, trim 30-footers powered by 12-horsepower diesels. We set our nets for the first time, about 3 miles out from the station. The next morning, we began to under-run our nets. Our first surprise came when we saw that the sealed cans which buoyed the top-line of the net had collapsed. That meant the net had been dragged to 20 fathoms by some enormous weight. The weight was pure shark. The net was alive with them, and every one big. As each shark appeared, his tail was securely lashed, the derrick arm was swung out, the windlass was turned, and up came a shark, tail-first, still en- Captain Shark-Killer 83 meshed in the net. The shark could be cut out of the net, of course. But nets cost money, and, as long as you watch your fingers when you’re near the entangled shark’s jaws, untangling the net is not as dangerous as, say, working around a buzz saw. We clouted the shark with an outsized baseball bat, and sometimes shot him, but we could never be sure he was dead. Anyway, in that furious under-running on that first day’s haul, we had hardly time to do anything more than swing ’em aboard. We hauled in 22 from that net, all of them big Dusky sharks, and we were lucky there weren't 23, for the boat gunwales were hardly 3 inches above the water when we headed home. We never topped that first day’s catch. It was a record for a single net. Apparently, a school of sharks had blundered into our net. But it was a great start, and good catches continued. Of course, the usual cannibalism deprived us of many a good hide. The Tigers were particularly vicious. When we took in a net with Port Jacksons, Wobbegongs and Tigers, the Tigers would usually be the only whole captives. Once, though, we saw evidence that a little 3-foot Port Jackson had out- witted a big, 12-foot Tiger. The Port Jackson shark is an inoffensive shark that feeds on shellfish and has pavement-stone-like plates instead of teeth. Put a Port Jackson and a Tiger in a net, and the life expectancy of the Port Jackson is about 30 seconds. Never underestimate the shark, though. And that means any shark. For I know at least one Port Jackson who attacked a Tiger—and survived. We found them both in the net. Reconstructing what had happened, we decided that the wily, 3-foot Port Jackson had been netted first. Next came the 12-foot Tiger. He darted for the Port Jackson, but the latter somehow evaded the Tiger’s attack. The Tiger was now entangled himself, but he made another lunge for the Port Jackson. As he did, the little Port Jackson, though also enwrapped in the net, grabbed the Tiger as he flashed by. The Port Jackson bit the Tiger in the soft vulnerable flesh near the gill slits. The little shark’s pavement-stone teeth clamped on the gills and hung on. That’s the way they were found when the net was hauled in the next morn- ing. How long the Port Jackson had clung there, we didn’t know. But clung he had. Even as the Tiger, still alive, was hauled up, the game little Port Jackson hung on. The Tiger was killed and tossed into the hold. The Port Jackson, exhausted, fell back into the net. No one had the heart to kill him. He was thrown back, and swam away, almost proudly, it seemed. The Tiger, inciden- tally, had two Port Jacksons in his stomach. Porpoises were frequently found in our big Australian sharks’ stomachs, which made these Aussie monsters somewhat unique, for never before had I seen sharks who made a regular diet of porpoises. Usually, .a porpoise does the chasing. And, when a porpoise mother is giving birth, other porpoises will gather around her to protect her from sharks. If a shark comes close, the por- poises will actually charge him and butt him aside. [The first porpoise (Bottle-nosed dolphin, Tursiops truncatus) ever born alive in captivity came into the world at Marineland in Florida in 1947. Several Sand-bar or Brown sharks were in the tank at the time, and biologists observing the birth saw protective porpoises butting sharks away from the mother. 84 Man Against Shark [Porpoises often seem to have no fear of sharks. In the Gulf of Mexico, I know, porpoises will sometimes chase sharks out of a feeding area. In captivity, at least, porpoises have even been accused of ganging up and killing a shark, apparently by butting its relatively delicate gill slits and crowding it against the wall of the tank, preventing it from swimming—and thus breathing. | While we were setting up the Pindimar station, several bathers were attacked by sharks at Sydney’s beaches. A day after a fatal attack at Bondi, one of Sydney’s most popular beaches, we sent a shark boat down to sweep the waters of any sharks that might be around. The man-eater who attacked the bather was shrugged off by some as a rare rogue whose presence at the beach was extraordinary. We didn’t find the sharks rare; we caught 29 sharks in one day, right off Bondi. Most of them were man-eaters, and one of them, a 14-foot Tiger, was caught in the first line of breakers, a favorite rendezvous for surf enthusiasts. When the station was running smoothly at Pindimar, my job was done. I could have stayed on, but I was seized by wanderlust again. After a brief stay in Honolulu, where I got in some shark fishing for sport instead of profit, I received my next assignment: the Caribbean. TortoLa, British West INDIES Tortola means Land of the Turtle Dove, and, though the turtle doves have long since vanished, it is the kind of beautiful, peaceful island that would be a homeland for them. Tortola is about 12 miles long and 3 miles wide at its broadest point. Its only community is Roadtown, a neat, quiet little town which has the charm of a small English village. There are sharks around Tortola, and there is obeah in the air. Obeab is a kind of sorcery that originated in Africa and is still believed in here. On one of my first hunts here, I towed out a horse carcass. It didn’t work the way it did in Honolulu. “Perhaps I need obeah,” I mused, as I cut loose the carcass and sailed home empty-handed. Just then, a school of porpoises appeared. I harpooned a large one, cut him up for bait and drew off his blood into a bucket. My companion in the boat was John Neville, one of the best shark-catchers on the island and a man who reeked of the scent of shark oil. He ate shark liver raw. He rubbed himself with shark oil. He even used soap he made from shark oil, lye and ashes. John and [ let out a trawl line with several hooks on it. Each hook was baited with porpoise, and the sea where we dropped the line was tinged with porpoise blood, which we dumped, still warm, from the bucket. No sooner had the third hook hit the water, than down went the barrel that marked the end of the trawl line. A shark! As we started to haul him in, two more sharks hit two other hooks on the trawl line. Three sharks were all we could accommodate in our small boat, so we headed for port. The next morning, we returned to the trawl line. Five more big sharks hung on the only remaining hooks. The rest of the hooks had been ripped off the line. Never before had I seen sharks go so avidly for bait. I wondered, “Was it the porpoise blood—or the scent of John Neville?” Captain Shark-Killer 85 Another outstanding shark-hunter was a remarkable old man named John Smith. Gray-haired with a flowing white beard, he was 75 years old, didn’t have a tooth in his head, sailed the smallest boat in our shark-catching fleet— and caught the biggest sharks. John knew every rock and shoal within 50 miles of the island, and he rarely came in without a shark. One day, though, he moored his 18-foot boat at our wharf, and, walking straight and tall as he always did, strode up to me. ; © Captain Young caught this Hammerhead shark (Sphyrna zygaena) during his shark-catching days in the Virgin Islands. The Hammerhead was torn by another shark while it was fast in the net. From Shark! Shark! “Boss,” he said, “there’s a big shark hooked out there, but I can’t lift him into my boat. Will you come and help me?” I was surprised to hear an appeal for help coming from him. But I hopped aboard our biggest boat, the 40-foot Venus, and we set out for the net, which was not far from shore. A large shark was thrashing about in the net. Not until we starting under-running the net, though, did I realize how large the shark was. Alone in his 18-foot boat, John Smith had been struggling with a 990-pound Tiger shark 16 feet long! On the leeward side of Tortola was a strait we called The Gut, which sepa- rated Tortola from Beef Island. While standing on a bluff overlooking The Gut 86 Man Against Shark one day, I was startled to see a school of big sharks swimming from the wind- ward side of Tortola and into The Gut. Then came another school, and another. The Gut was filling with sharks which would normally be found only at sea. I was excitedly planning the strategy for an epic shark hunt in The Gut when one of my native shark-catchers politely suggested that I should be planning for a hurricane instead. It was hurricane obeah, he explained, that had sent those sharks to the shelter of The Gut. And hurricane obeah had sent the smaller fishes away, for the fish pots put out the night before were nearly empty in the morning. It was another sign. Call it instinct, obeah, intuition—Tortola’s people knew a hurricane was coming, and they knew it would be a bad one that would strike their island hard. (I learned later that the Governor of the nearby Virgin Islands had been warned of the hurricane by natives long before the official forecast had reached him. Acting only on the natives’ warning, the Governor sent out a hurricane alert that enabled the islands to batten down for the blow.) No amount of money would have lured my shark-catchers to sea. They were drawing up their boats from the water, nailing fast the shutters of their homes, taking their barrels of precious rain water inside. Our two big boats—the Venus and the J. H. Smith—had to be anchored as firmly as possible. We put down four anchors fore and aft on the Venus. The Smith had two big anchors well bedded in the coral. We put down two more. But my helpers advised me to string a heavy line from the Smith to shore, and make the line fast to a sturdy coconut tree. This was necessary, they told me, because, after blowing in from the sea, the hurricane would suddenly shift and blow outward from the shore in the direction of the Smith. No safety line was necessary for the Venus, they said, since the off-shore wind would not bother it. We had made our preparations just in time. Our work done, I started for my cottage atop a hill. Halfway up, I was flattened by a mighty gust. I crawled the rest of the way on my hands and knees. I nailed down the windows and door of my cottage from the inside, and, alone, waited out the hurricane. Above the winds I could occasionally hear the bleating of goats which had sought shelter under my cottage. The cottage was built 4 feet above the ground to allow the buffeting winds to pass through, thus weakening their force. For 24 hours my little cottage shivered, but it was not even weakened. A straw- thatched native hut, built on the ground next door to me, was swept away early in the storm. The day after the hurricane was calm and clear. I rushed down to the water- front to inspect the damage. There was none. Both the Szzith and the Venus still rode at anchor. An off-shore blast had hit the Smith, as my native weathermen had predicted, but the coconut tree anchor had held. Weeks passed before the small fish returned to shore and began appearing again in the fish pots. And not until they reappeared did the hungry sharks return from their hurricane haven. When shark-catching was back to normal on Tortola, I put John Neville, the man with the scent of shark, in charge of the station. I then set up a smaller station, as an auxiliary to Tortola, on the island of Anegada, about 40 miles away. I left this in the hands of native supervisors. Once more, I had finished a job and was anxious to get started on another one. Captain Shark-Killer 87 HaAvaNa I had known for a long time that sharks were prevalent in Cuban waters, and I thought a shark industry might be feasible here. But I soon learned that, through a curious mixture of sharks and politics, the government had given a mysterious Cuban named Dominguez exclusive rights to shark hunting in Cuban waters. Dominguez’ job was to exterminate the sharks, especially those around Havana, so that political enemies of the régime would not have such a con- venient way to dispose of their victims. A kind of Murder, Inc., that specialized in liquidating politicians, was reportedly using the sharks, if not as assassins or corpus delicti removers, at least as a cover-up. It seemed that when a politician disappeared, the inevitable verdict was: sharks. But it was never made clear whether the victim’s killers were two-legged sharks. In years past, sharks had been used effectively, I was told, to snatch prisoners trying to escape from Morro Castle, the grim old fortress that guarded Havana harbor. Accompanied by the old keeper of the Havana harbor lighthouse, I went out to the ruins of the castle to see if I could find any basis for this tale. After exploring a while, we came to a long, dark stairway that led up to a little room which had in the center of its floor a round hole open to the sea, about 200 feet below. Leading from the hole was a chute that ended in mid-air quite a way above the sea. When the castle was used as a prison many years ago, garbage was thrown down this chute, and naturally, hordes of sharks gath- ered there to gorge themselves on the refuse. “Amigo,” I asked the old keeper, “what is there to the tale that prisoners in Morro Castle were permitted to escape through the garbage chute?” He paused a moment to light his pipe. Then, looking down the hole in the floor, he replied, “Quién sabe? Who knows whether there is truth in the story? There are many tales.” As far as I could see, the plunge into the sea from that height would be enough to kill a man. If he survived the fall, though, he would have little chance of surviving the sharks. Several times a day, garbage scows would leave Havana to dump garbage about 4 or 5 miles off shore. Sharks would suddenly appear, and so would shark- catchers, who were poaching on Dominguez’ private concession. I went out on several of these shark hunts. I once asked my host how he was able to get away with catching sharks when Dominguez had exclusive rights. “Ha!” he laughed. “He cannot be everywhere, and sharks are in all places, no?” Sharks did seem to be in all places around Cuba, and so did the poachers. The poacher lay in wait in his small boat amid the freshly dumped refuse until a shark appeared near him. The harpoon flashed, the shark was pulled alongside the boat and then the fisherman slashed the shark across the back with a long, keen knife. If he was lucky, he severed the backbone and paralyzed the shark. Next, he sliced off the shark’s fins. That was all he took of the shark; the rest was left to the other sharks. The fisherman could get a dollar a string for fins from Chinese merchants, and didn’t bother with anything else. (Dominguez, though, went into the shark business, processing both hides and oil.) On one of the poacher hunts, I saw a startling example of the keenness of the 88 Man Against Shark shark’s scent. Among the litter that had been dumped by the garbage scow was a burlap sack. As it floated by our boat, I saw a big Tiger shark appear in the spreading circle of refuse. He headed straight for the burlap sack, grabbed it between his jaws and shook it. The sack ripped open, and for an instant I saw its contents—a dead cat and four kittens. We rowed over to harpoon the shark, but he gulped down the cat and swam off, leaving the kittens for his companions. He had found, and gone straight to, the only bit of animal meat in the garbage- strewn area. Then, in a split-second decision before fleeing, he had selected the biggest morsel, the cat. Cuba is the only place where I caught a shark with a piece of cloth for bait. The fisherman I accompanied to the dumping grounds had a scrap of white cloth tied onto a big shark hook. When he had this, he explained, he did not need bait. Somewhat skeptically, I hung it over the side. Sure enough, a large shark took the hook in a few minutes. We pulled him in, but he turned out to be a she. She was close to giving birth, so I cut her open carefully, performing a cesarean section with the bottom of our little rowboat as my operating table. Two lively pups emerged, each about 15 inches long. One leaped out of my hands, fell into the sea and swam away. It was a perfect cesarean, which I believe would have been a credit to any obstetrician. Home Port In the years that followed my stay in Cuba, there were fewer entries in my Log. I was growing old, happily growing old, with no regrets. But no longer were my hand and eye as swift as the shark, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would make that one mistake that would be my last. Reluctantly, I decided to give up shark-hunting. I became a lecturer on sharks. It was a poor substitute for shark-hunting, but I knew, as the years passed and I neared 70, that it was the only way. I had just about convinced myself that I would never again see a shark out- side an aquarium when World War II began, and I was summoned back to the sharks. I had two missions. I aided the Navy in its research to develop a repellent that would keep sharks away from fliers downed at sea. And I led a search in the Gulf of Mexico for sharks. Sharks were vitally needed during the war for the vitamin A in their livers, and even an old man could help. One beautiful day I was in the Gulf aboard the pickup boat that was carrying ice to the shrimp boat fleet. As we sailed along, I threw some chum over the stern, and dropped over a couple of hand lines. A shark took the moving bait. He came fast and he hooked clean. I was an old gaffer, and some of the younger men aboard tried to give me a hand. But I wanted to land this one alone. I pulled him aboard, trying not to look as if my arms were aching. I almost had to let go. But I kept on pulling, and I landed him. Sixty years had passed since that day off La Jolla when I looked over the side of the boat and saw my first shark. Now, as this big, gray beauty struggled on the deck, I looked at him and I knew that I was looking at the last shark I would ever catch. Chapter 4 Sharks on a Line One distant, unchronicled day in some prehistoric sea, man and shark met—and, incredibly, man triumphed. Since that epic day, men have been seeking the shark, and, not merely for food, for there have always been drab and feckless fish enough for food. Men have hunted down the shark for the matchless sport and keen-edged danger. We can today envision some of the early duels between shark and man in the Pacific. We have artifacts that have survived the participants; we hear the ageless tales that have been handed down from generation to generation of native fishermen in Japan, the East Indies, Polynesia, and Micronesia; and we can see the curious vestiges of ancient shark fish- ing still found today in the islands of the Pacific. One of the oldest devices for catching sharks in Micronesia is the shark snare, which has been used for centuries. The snare is a coarse rope of plant fibers, made into a noose. The noose is dropped in the sea from a canoe. The fisherman attracts sharks to the area by swinging a rattle—usually hollowed-out coconut shells or large sea shells threaded _ onto a stick. Small fishes or bits of meat are swirled in the water to further attract the shark, once the rattles have brought it near. Slowly, with infinite patience, the fisherman lures the shark’s head into the noose. Suddenly, the noose is drawn tight, snaring the shark just behind the gill slits. Then, as the shark struggles in the noose, it is clubbed to death. The Maoris of New Zealand are said to have favored the noose method because they treasured the center tooth of the “szako” (Isurus sp.)* as an ear ornament. The tooth might have been damaged if a hook were used. Some snare fishermen found that their hands were the most depend- able bait for sharks. While one occupant of a canoe trailed his hand along in the water, another man dropped a noose aft of the enticing hand. The shark swam into the noose in pursuit of the hand. Then, when the shark’s body was well into the noose and the jaws near the hand, the noose was tightened and the man withdrew his hand. The hand had to be gently, slowly swished in the water. If the hand moved 1 The name Mako is of Maori origin and applies in their language to this shark specifically. We have adopted it (in English) for the genus. 89 WETS FHNG iN ‘ hy OS A shark is caught by seamen in the days of sail. Sharks often trailed ships for weeks to pick up easy meals from refuse dumped overboard. From an old print 90 Sharks on a Line 91 slowly, so did the shark. If an unwary “baitsman” jerked his hand or made a sudden movement, the shark would strike—and snatch off the hand. Some snares have a kind of float, a propeller-shaped block of wood whose upcurving ends resemble the hull of a boat. This block is deco- rated with ornamental carvings or paintings whose patterns are derived from some dimly remembered rituals involving fishing magic. For the hunting of the shark has long been involved in magic and religion. The mixture of sharks and sorcery is complex, and neighboring islands some- times show vastly different attitudes toward the shark. In the Tabar Islands of the Bismarck Archipelago off New Guinea, sharks are caught, but in the nearby Tanga Islands there is a long-standing taboo against the hunting of the shark, which is believed to be a dangerous wizard. There are reasonable grounds for this superstition, because snared sharks have frequently towed away their would-be captors’ canoes and neither canoes nor canoeists were ever seen again. A dangerous variation of the snare was developed by some unsung primitive Pacific island fishermen. They would dive from a canoe to caverns in the reefs, where sharks sometimes rested with their heads in crevices and their tails sticking out. The diver would loop a noose around the shark’s tail and signal, by tugging on the rope, to his confederates in the canoe. The startled shark would be hauled to the surface, tail first, and clubbed to death. This technique is still used by some natives in Papua and New Guinea. They also believe in the use of shark rattles—as does, oddly enough, A. M. Rapson, the Chief of the Division of Fisheries _ there. One theory is that the rattle sounds, to a hungry shark at least, like the excited cries of sea birds feeding upon a shoal of small fish, and the shark rushes to share in the feast. Native divers on Thursday Island, Australia, are afraid to go after crawfish (Spiny lobsters) in deep water because of another phenomenon of sound. The natives say the crawfish make a snapping noise with their tails when anyone tries to catch them— and this sound lures sharks like an underwater dinner bell. There is some evidence to suggest that crude hooks preceded the snare as an implement for catching sharks. Hooks made from human bones were common, and, in old Hawaii, a chief might will his bones to friends or personal servants so that they could fashion hooks from them. In some areas, the bones of great fishermen or brave chiefs were par- ticularly prized for hook-making. The hooks were made by drilling a series of holes along a line following the desired curve. This weakened portion was knocked out and the remainder was smoothed down. Other hooks were made of wood. A twig of a young ironwood tree was bent so that it curved back on itself. It was lashed in this position for a year or two, until it was more than half an inch thick. Then the 92 Man Against Shark These primitive shark hooks from Tahiti and Hawaii were formed by lashing a young twig into a curved position, allowing it to grow the hook-curve permanently, then hacking the hook portion off the living tree. The point on the shark hook at the right is bone—possibly human bone, a favorite with ancient fishermen of the South Seas. Courtesy, Almqvist & Wiksells Boktrycheri Ab from Contribution to the History of Fishing in the Southern Seas by Bengt Anell, 1955 portion of the twig bearing the natural curve was hacked off the tree and fashioned into a hook. Sometimes a point of sharpened bone was lashed to the end of the hook. The hooks were baited with small fish, or even a piece of white tree bark, lashed to a fiber-strand rope, and usually trolled from a canoe. In New Zealand, among the Maori, shark fishing was once a religious ceremony supervised by a priest who stood atop a rock on shore and Sharks on a Line 93 directed as many as a thousand men who set out to sea in big canoes on two specified days of the year. They hunted, on these appointed days, only one kind of shark—kapeta, apparently a species of dogfish. Other species of sharks could be caught any time. In 1961, in the apparently civilized precincts of Lauderdale-by-the- Sea, Florida, there was a taboo on shark fishing. The taboo was inspired not by black magic, but by the even more potent talisman of the tourist’s dollar. Fishing for sharks, barracuda, or sting rays in the territorial waters of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea was forbidden in 1961 because, in the words of Mayor G. H. Colnot, “the sight of them being caught frightens tourists and makes them believe our waters are infested with dangerous fish.” The fact is that Florida waters are full of sharks. In one 6-month period, a shark-fishing club in Palm Beach, Florida, caught 21 sharks, averaging 318 pounds, right off the pier, near the world-famous bathing beach. For years a Florida shark-fishing enthusiast has been pulling in sharks every Sunday by casting for them from Boynton Beach. The surf-casting sharker is Herb Goodman, a 5 foot-6 inch, 135-pounder who habitually catches sharks three or four times his own weight. Goodman fishes exclusively for shark, using a unique method. He attaches balloons to three big, baited 10/0 hooks, which are strung on a 130-pound test line. The balloons act as floats, carrying the hooks 1,000 feet out to sea on the swift-flowing currents of Boynton Beach Inlet. The hooks are baited with about 6 pounds of bonito, kingfish, or dolphin. When a shark strikes, Goodman works it in on a 9-foot glass rod, and the fight the _ shark puts up usually draws a crowd. Once, deciding to give the crowd a thrill, he decided to ride a 10-foot Hammerhead he had hooked and reeled in close to the beach. “I passed my rod and reel to someone else,” Goodman recounted, “and climbed on the shark’s back. A sudden swell tipped both me and the shark, and when he tried to right himself, he swished his tail and caught me across both my legs. My legs were covered with bandages for almost two weeks.” That was the last time Goodman tried to ride a shark. Another unorthodox shark fisherman who hauled in sharks to the consternation of bathers was U.S. Marine Sergeant Richard C. Lawrence. His hunting grounds were the waters off Fort Weaver, Hawaii. Law- rence’s fishing line consisted of an inner tube lashed to a piling on the Fort Weaver pier and attached to a 150-foot length of quarter-inch manila rope. Secured to the other end of the rope were 3 feet of %-inch chain and a 4-inch shark hook. He threw the baited hook about 20 feet off the pier and just waited. Soon a shark grabbed the bait and tried to dislodge the hook by pulling on the line. The inner tube—and Sergeant 94 Man Against Shark Py A fisherman holds a small Spiny dogfish (Squalus cubensis) caught in the Gulf of Mexico. Dogfish of similar species are found throughout the world, often in fantastic abundance. Tagging experiments have shown that some species travel at a rate of 3 to 8 miles a day. One tagged specimen migrated from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Massachusetts, a distance of at least 1,000 miles, in 132 days. Courtesy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Lawrence—fought the shark. Lawrence has caught some 40 sharks, in- cluding a 1,950-pound, 17-foot Tiger, with his inner tube tackle. Sharks are hauled out of the surf at Long Island, New York, often before bathers’ frightened eyes. Using conventional surf rods and reels, spooled with 220 yards of 45-pound test line, a surfcaster can reel in 100- and 200-pound sharks, and occasionally 150-pound Sting rays, not far from one of America’s biggest bathing spots, Jones Beach. Eel is a favorite bait of the Long Island surfcasters. Sharks are both liked and disliked in the waters around Long Island. Sports fishing parties, seeking game fish, are often plagued by packs of Dogfish which flock around the boats, snapping at bait and driving off game fish. Bigger sharks also rob fishermen of hard-won fish. It is not unusual for a Mako to snap 40-pound stripers right off a man’s hook. A knowledgable angler in shark-prowled waters will release the drag and let a fish run if a shark of any kind is seen after a game fish is hooked —and before the fisherman strikes it. A hooked fish can, sometimes at least, outrun a shark that is pursuing it, and eventually, the game fish can be struck and reeled in. The game fisherman who ignores the shark as a game fish is passing up some of the best fighters—and most abundant big fish—in the sea. On the West Coast, sports clubs have been fishing sharks for years. One Sharks on a Line 95 favorite spot is Monterey Bay, California, about 60 miles south of San Francisco. There, twice a year, shark derbies are held. Fishing begins at 7 A.M. and continues until 1 P.M. In those 6 hours, in a typical derby, fishermen will reel in about 150 sharks and rays whose total weight will be around 2,000 pounds. Sharks often come big—so big that they cannot be weighed on ordi- nary scales. Their size has to be figured out mathematically, by the formula given on page 314. And sharks are fast. The Great Blue is said to be able to reach speeds up to 20 miles an hour. A shark of unknown species was once speared by an underwater spear-fisherman off Cape Cod. A pursuing boat eventually overtook both the exhausted spear- fisherman and_his apparently tireless quarry. The boat clocked the shark—and its human caboose—at 14 knots. One of the biggest sharks ever taken by a spear-fisherman was a 1,400-pound Basking shark caught in 1955. About 25 yards off Santa Monica, the spear-fisherman, Bob Lorenz, spotted the huge shark. Lorenz was armed with a gun that shot steel darts with cables attached. “T got a good shot in, just ahead of the dorsal fin,” Lorenz said. “The shark headed for the open sea, and sounded in about 10 feet of water. I followed the line down and hit him again, but it wasn’t a good shot. His lashing tail stirred up the sand so that it was hard to see. The dart hit just forward of the tail.” Lorenz continued the battle in his boat, a 30-foot cruiser. The cables were made fast to the boat, and the fish towed it for 90 minutes until Lorenz and three other men managed to pull it in and lash it to the side of the boat. It measured 13 feet, 9 inches. Neither the Basking shark nor the Whale shark is a game fish, but their sheer enormousness attracts fishermen interested in landing some- thing larger than anyone else has ever landed. Native fishermen in the Persian Gulf say they catch the Whale shark by rowing alongside its lazily moving hulk and then boarding it. A fisherman walks down to the torpid shark’s mouth, stuffs a big iron hook into it, and then reboards the boat, which tows the shark ashore. Stull, the Whale shark can give a ponderous battle, not between the sports fisherman and itself, but between itself and the fisherman’s boat. One day, during the annual Bimini Marlin Tournament in the Bahamas off Miami, a 45-foot cruiser, the Alberta, was searching for marlin. The biggest tackle aboard was a light rod spooled with 9-thread line. But when the skipper, Captain Johnny Cass, spotted the hulk of a Whale shark, he decided to try for it. Another boat had got a flying gaff into the 37-foot fish, but the gaff had hardly slowed it down. When the Alberta hove to, the skipper of the other boat told Cass he was welcome to try his hand at the shark. 96 Man Against Shark Cass decided not to use the 9-thread line. He chose instead a 114-inch line, a length of chain, and a grapnel. When the Alberta was directly above the huge shark, the grapnel and chain were lowered under its jaw, then jerked upward, so that the grapnel hooked into its neck. The shark thrashed, snapping the line that reached from the gaff to the other boat. But the Alberta’s line held. Cass played the fish for about 3 hours— a 19-ton cruiser against a 10-ton shark. The shark was relatively lethargic, but each twitch of its great body shivered the Alberta. Two men were sent out in a small boat to make fast two heavy lines around the shark’s tail. They managed to do it, though once their small boat was nearly swamped by a casual flip of the tail. Now secured, the shark was towed to Bimini, a 344-hour trip, during which the shark cum- bersomely struggled against the fetter of the lines. Cass made it to port, and with the shark he brought in an unusual record for a boat whose orthodox fishing tackle consisted of a 9-thread line and a light rod. Cass’s record: the largest Whale shark ever caught without the aid of gunfire, harpoons, or a platoon of helpers. Another skipper who tangled with a Whale shark of about the same 10-ton size was Captain J. B. Mathews of the Captain Bae Strickland. Off St. Petersburg, Florida, Mathews sighted a Whale shark. After snar- ing the shark by snagging a hook in its jaw, Mathews added a new twist. He had double-spliced 500 feet of %-inch manila line into the anchor cable of his 65-foot boat. He attached the line to the steel leader on the hook in the shark’s jaw. Then, using the anchor windlass as a gigantic reel, he tried to play the shark. The shark would not play, however. It headed off with the power of a locomotive, and towed the Bae Strickland for 18 miles, and then, with one burst of energy, it parted the line and kept going without looking back. Hooking into a Whale shark is not a guarantee of a thrilling ride or several hours of a mighty tug-of-war. The Whale shark’s inertia is often as massive as its bulk. For some reason, however, stories of exciting Whale shark encounters have a way of becoming more widely told than the dull ones. Zane Grey, for instance, once hooked a Whale shark off the tip of the peninsula of Lower California. He snagged its tail with a gaff hook. Grey later vividly described how the Whale shark tried for 5 hours to fight off capture, towing Grey’s boat for miles. Finally, it plunged into the depths, running off some 1,600 feet of line before it tore out the hook. During the chase, or rather, the tow, harpoons were hurled at the shark. Grey said they bounded off the shark’s thick hide or bent under the pressure exerted by harpooners trying to thrust them into the shark. Writing about effortless captures of Whale sharks and their “entirely inoffensive . . . sluggish” habits, E. W. Gudger, the outstanding au- Sharks on a Line 97 This old print portrays fishermen landing the first Devil ray caught off Sydney, Aus- tralia, in 1868. Dr. Whitley identifies it as Daemomanta alfredi Krefft, 1868. He reports that it grows to a width of at least 18 feet. Courtesy, Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Co. from The Fishes of Australia by G. P. Whitley, 1940 thority on the Whale shark, drily remarked, “Mr. Grey’s fish seemingly was the most active of any of which we have accounts.” ; It must be said for Zane Grey, however, that he did go after real fighting sharks. And he probably did more to establish the shark as a game fish than any other angler. Like the 4-minute mile and the 7-foot high jump, the 1,000-pound shark stood for years as a seemingly unat- tainable goal for game fishermen. Gradually, as tackle and fishing tech- niques improved, the records went higher and higher: 800 pounds . 900 pounds. Then, on March 11, 1936, a 9964%4-pound Tiger shark was caught off Australia. The record stood but a month, for Zane Grey had arrived in Australia determined to land a 1,000-pound shark. He got one—a 1,036-pound Tiger shark. Since then, the records have been tumbling regularly, especially in Australian waters. One Australian shark fisherman extraordinary, Alf Dean, has caught the four largest fish ever taken on rod and reel—each a Great White and each weighing more than a ton. Dean, a genial, burly man who runs a small vineyard when he isn’t shark fishing, caught his first shark in 1939. It weighed 868 pounds. In the years that followed, Dean’s prowess as a shark fisherman increased, and so did the weight of his sharks. His fishing ground has been the 98 Man Against Shark Great Australian Bight, that huge, crescent-shaped curve along the southern coast of the continent. Great schools of fish sweep through the Bight, and, savagely competing for food among them, are innu- merable sharks, including some of the largest found in any sea on earth. In 1951, Sir Willoughby Norrie, governor of South Australia, caught a 2,225-pound Great White shark, at that time the largest fish ever landed with rod and reel. Dean was determined to beat Norrie’s record, and, in 1952, he did. Dean’s encounter with his first record shark began at 2 o’clock one morning when his hired boat was riding at anchor in the Bight after a futile, all-day search for sharks big enough for Dean’s taste. A banging on the hull of the boat awakened him; he rolled out of his bunk with a flashlight, went on deck, and in the flashlight’s beam caught the dorsal and tail fins of the biggest shark he had ever seen. The shark was violently nuzzling the boat, intoxicated by the scent of whale oil dripping from a tank in the stern. (Using whale oil, and an occasional bucketful of steer’s blood, Dean lays down an alluring, provocative slick that sharks pick up miles away. They trail his boat, ravenous for the food promised by the savory scent of the wake.) All night long the great shark banged noisily against the side of Dean’s boat. The maddening scent of food so excited the shark that once it grappled the propeller and shook the boat, as if to awaken the occu- pants to get the meal it yearned for. Soon after dawn, Dean dropped his line off the stern, and the shark took it, racing off 250 yards. The shark writhed and rolled. Once it leaped almost fully out of the water. But, by fighting on the surface instead of sounding, the shark soon tired. It was all over in about 45 minutes. The shark, a Great White, weighed 2,333 pounds and was 16 feet long. The world’s record belonged to Alf Dean! Less than a year later, he topped his own record by landing a 2,372-pound Great White. On April 10th, 1955, Dean caught a 1,600-pound shark, lashed it to the side of the boat, and went off looking for something more worth while. Suddenly, a huge shark began to attack the captured 1,600- pounder. Oblivious to Dean, who clouted it with the handle of a gaff, it kept ripping big chunks out of the dead shark. Finally, the mate aboard the boat threw a set of baited hooks to it. The shark lunged for the line, but somehow managed to hook itself in the tail. Dean fought to land the shark, tail-hooked or not. It was impossible. He cut the line. Again, a set of hooks was cast out, and the shark grabbed for the bait, this time hooking itself in the mouth. Dean struggled for half an hour to set the hooks. They tore out, and the shark disappeared. The boat had gone about a mile from the spot where the shark first struck. Dean decided to head back to the spot and anchor. As soon as Sharks on a Line 99 the boat anchored, the same shark—the cut line still hooked in its tail— reappeared. Dean tried again, and this time, after a fight of an hour and a half, he landed the persistent shark. It weighed 2,536 pounds. Dean had once more broken his own record. Dean broke his world record a fourth time, in 1959, when he landed a 2,664-pounder. But Dean’s biggest fish, like the biggest fish of all fisher- men, was the one that got away. In Australia they call Alf Dean’s biggest fish Barnacle Lil, for she is a female and she has broken the heart of many a shark fisherman. Dean met her one moonlit night in the Bight when she banged his boat and tore off a seal carcass, a piéce de résistance Dean often hangs over the stern of his boat to lure sharks that follow his piquant wake. He got a look at her as she lingered near the surface a few yards from the boat, munching on the seal. He looked her over avidly and estimated her measurements: more than 20 feet long and at least 4,000 pounds. He lowered a new seal lure over the side. Near it he dropped his line, baited with his favorite shark bait, seal liver, skewered on two great hooks. Barnacle Lil charged for the hooks, the lure, the liver—every- thing, including part of the boat’s transom. Through the spray churned up by her explosive lunge, Dean could see that she had the hooks in her mouth. He put his reel in gear and set the hooks. Time after time, she fought the hooks by rocketing to the surface, lifting her huge, graceful white body nearly out of the sea. Then she settled down, pitting her 4,000 pounds of controlled fury against Dean’s straining arms and ever- taut line. For two solid hours she fought. Then, slowly, foot by foot, turn by turn, he began reeling her in. He got her to the side of the boat. A crewman reached his gloved hands down to the wire leader attached to the end of the line. (Under game fishing rules, in order to claim a record, the fisherman cannot be aided until he brings his fish to gaff. At that time, another person can grasp the leader, but not the line. During a fight, no part of the fishing tackle may be touched by anyone except the fisherman.) But Barnacle Lil was not through. She suddenly found new strength and whirled seaward again, tearing the leader out of the boatman’s hands. “Twenty men could not have held it,” Dean later reported. Dean’s hands were turning to mush. Blisters erupted and broke on his palms. His fingers, chafed raw by the constantly bobbing rod, were stiff with pain. His legs were knotted with cramps. The aching muscles in his back and arms seemed ready to burst. And the fight went on. One hour ... Two hours... Three times Dean brought the shark to the boat. Three times the glistening leader cleared the water, and three times Barnacle Lil dashed out to sea with new strength! As the fight went into its fifth hour, Dean was seized by a new 100 Man Against Shark torment, stomach cramps. Still in the bolted-down tractor seat he used for his fishing chair and still fighting the shark, he relieved the cramps somewhat by urinating in a can, a feat he never could figure out how he performed. After five and a half hours, Dean knew he could hold out no longer. But some tremor in the line, some mysterious signal he felt almost intuitively, told him that Barnacle Lil was tiring. Once more, with aching hands, he began to reel in. He got her to the boat, and the boatman began pulling up the leader. About 10 feet of the 30-foot leader were in the boat when Barnacle Lil made her last, wild try for freedom. She dove, straight down. The leader, snagged on the boat’s pipe railing, followed the shark down and, in a flash, tore out 7 feet of railing, then snapped. The indomitable Barnacle Lil was free. Several big-game fishermen had sighted and pursued her before Dean had his frustrating affair with her, others have since given chase, but she has not yet been vanquished. There are many stories of sharks spoiling world’s record catches of other game fish by gnawing on the carcass as the proud fisherman sails home with his prize attached to his boat. By the time the fish is strung up to be officially weighed, it has lost several pounds. Often this loss to ravening sharks has been enough to make a chewed-up also-ran out of a record-breaking fish. The most poignant story of a shark’s theft of a record is told by Dolly Dyer, of Australia, undisputed champion woman shark fisherman. Mrs. Dyer and her husband Robert, between them, currently hold 16 world shark-catching records, attested by the International Game Fish Association. Mrs. Dyer landed a promising-looking Tiger shark a few years ago. To her expert eye, it looked to be at least 1,400 pounds. And it was there, right alongside the boat. Sharks did come to gnaw on it, but she successfully warded them off by personally clouting them on the snout with a gaff handle. She lost no precious poundage to them. A pinnacle record—the largest Tiger then ever taken by rod and reel by man or woman—seemed to be hers as her boat reached the dock. But, shortly before the dying Tiger was to be weighed to establish the record, it played a dirty trick on her. It gave birth to 40 pups. The loss of her progeny transformed the mother Tiger into an ordinary, non-record- breaking shark. Australia is not the only place on earth where record-making sharks are caught. Seventeen current shark records were achieved in the waters off Montauk, Long Island. Blue, Porbeagle, and Mako sharks abound there, and many of them are potential record-breakers. Long Island’s shark fishermen say that the best times for catching the monsters are the days—and nights—around the full of the moon. Sharks on a Line 101 After finding a place where bait-fish, such as whiting or porgies, are abundant, and the water 50 to 150 feet deep, they chum. Whalemeat is the favorite chum of Frank Mundus, Montauk’s most famous and suc- cessful shark-fishing charter-boat captain. He also recommends using small, live fish for bait. On calm days, his advice is to fish close to the surface, using cork floats. When the sea is choppy, he suggests fishing about halfway down. Mundus tries to make shark fishing as sporting as possible by urging his patrons to fight their sharks standing up, in a belt harness, rather than in a fighting chair. He also prefers that they use nothing heavier than 45-pound test line. For real sport, his customers sometimes use 30- or 20-pound test line. The Mundus-preferred tackle is a heavy-duty star drag reel and a glass rod. Aboard Mundus’ “monster-fishing” boat, Cricket II, fishermen have also been known to use crossbows and arrows on sharks. “Of all the game fish in the sea, none—when fighting the hook and line—can outjump the Mako shark,” one of Mundus’ passengers ecstati- cally reported, telling how a Mako (Isurus oxyrinchus) ran out 100 yards of line from Mundus’ boat, then made four successive vertical leaps 10 to 15 feet out of the water. It is fight such as this that has given the Mako a reputation as one of the gamest fish in the sea. “The Mako shark, which can jump as high as any fish, run faster than most, and pull as hard as any, seems to me to be a true fighter,” Ernest Hemingway wrote of this aggressive shark. “He will deliberately leap at a man in a dory who has hooked him on a handline . . . I have _ seen a Mako, after being clubbed and tied up, come out of the effect of his clubbing and wait quietly until someone would come within range of his jaws.” The Mako shark of the western Atlantic is a very close relative of the Blue Pointer (Jswrus glaucus) of the Indian and the Pacific Oceans, which is also sometimes called a Mako. The Blue Pointer, in turn, is a name given by some South African fishermen to the shark elsewhere known as the Great White, called in Australia the White Death or White Pointer. The mix-up in nomenclature stems from confusion over the word mako, which originally was a Maori word for a certain kind of shark. Out of all this confusion, one thing is certain: the Blue Pointer of South Africa, by any name, is a fighter. And the pursuit of it has produced some of the most exciting battles in the annals of shark fishing. The scene of these battles is the South Pier of Durban, which stretches out from the beach for about 700 yards. The pier, made of great con- crete blocks, is about 40 feet wide. More blocks have been dumped, helter-skelter, along both sides of the pier and around its tip. They are covered with seaweed and barnacles and provide a precarious perch 102 Man Against Shark for fishermen. When he hooks a shark, a fisherman must simultaneously fight the shark and fight to keep from falling into the sea. Then, to beach the shark, he must stumble along the blocks, working his way back the length of the pier to shore. A misstep can send him plunging into a maelstrom of swift currents and voracious sharks, lured to Durban harbor by the scent of whale carcasses towed into port by whaling ships. Brian Bernstein, a veteran fisherman at the age of 15, may serve as an example. At the age of 7, Brian caught his first fish, a 15-pound salmon. At the age of eleven, he caught his first shark, a 20-pound Hammerhead pup. By the time he was 14, he had caught several little Hammerheads, some Small Black-Tipped sharks (called Gray sharks in Durban) and a few Milksharks (Scoliodon walbeehmi), which never grow to more than 4 feet. One of his Gray sharks was a 444-pounder, a respectable size, especially considering that Brian weighed 140 pounds himself. The Blue Pointer of Durban harbor is a match for any fisherman. It is a ferocious fighter and, though its Durban alias masks its man-killing notoriety, it is indeed the dread Carcharodon carcharias—the Man-eater, the White Death, the Killer. Brian’s first Blue Pointer was a 430-pounder, which, by the standards of the South Pier shark aficionados, is a small one. It had not given Brian a great fight—again, by South Pier standards. But, in a patronizing sort of way, he was welcomed, at 15, into the informal fraternity of Blue Pointer hunters. A few days after he caught his first Blue Pointer, Brian was out on the seaward corner of the South Pier again. At 9:30 a.m., a shark took his bait and streaked 500 yards seaward. Only 200 yards of line, strained to the breaking point, remained on the lad’s burning reel. He succeeded in preventing the shark from ripping out the rest of the line. But the battle was far from over. It took six hours of fighting to land that 764- pound shark (another Blue Pointer), and, before the duel ended, Brian had used every trick known on the South Pier. He had run up and down the pier, struggling to keep the shark from running out to sea. He had “winched”—that is, he squatted down, crooked his right leg around the butt of his rod, and rested the rod on his left leg. Then, with both hands, he arduously turned the reel. At one point in the battle, the boy had even shouldered his rod like a rifle, turned his back to the water, and dragged against the shark, as a plowhorse strains against the plow. This is real shark fishing. No shark hooked off the South Pier is an easy catch. Every battle is exciting and unpredictable, for inevitably the angler must clamber over rocks and struggle along the pier to land his shark. Under the code of the pier, no one may aid him—unless, which is unthinkable, he asks for Sharks on a Line 103 help—until the wire leader is near enough to grasp. It is also considered cricket to muster help for getting a rope around the shark and hauling it up to the pier. These post-battle tasks are not always easy. One day, Peter Botha was out at the end of the pier when another fisherman caught an 800-pounder, which was technically landed, except for the fact that it was lodged in some rocks a few feet off the pier. Botha jumped out on the rocks, one hand holding onto the wire leader, the other grasping a gaff. He leaped atop a small rock and, just as he lunged to gaff the shark, a wave smashed over his perch and hurled him into the sea, directly in front of the jaws of the thrashing shark. Luckily, Botha had not lost his handhold on the leader. Hand over hand, he pulled himself along the leader and got back on the rocks. A year after this incident, Botha found out what can happen to a person who strays near the jaws of a killer shark. He caught a 600- pounder and cut it open. In its belly he found the head, right arm, and part of the backbone of a man. Colonel Hugh D. Wise, who long and avidly fished for several species of sharks along the Atlantic coast of the United States, says some sharks were fast, some struck savagely and then ran, and some were just plain mulish. All, however, exerted formidable pulls on the line. Curious about the force of these pulls, Wise set up a novel experi- ment to determine how hard a shark pulls. From his boat, he hooked some sharks on a thick rope that was threaded through a spring scale held by two men in the boat. Wise found that a 230-pound Sand shark 814 feet long could exert a 110-pound pull—about .48 of a pound of pull _ for each pound of its weight. When the shark tired, the pulls dropped drastically to feeble surges averaging a mere 18 pounds. Wise reported that sharks use their maximum strength sparingly, and rest frequently from their exertions. “It is interesting to consider this in comparison with the wild and almost continuous fury of the swordfish,” Wise noted,? “but also let it be remembered that it is this intermittent resting which adds to the difficulty of conquering the shark.” The Sawfish and six species of shark—Blue, Mako, Great White, Porbeagle, Thresher, and Tiger—are recognized as game fish by the International Game Fish Association, which sternly authenticates world game-fish records. Anglers are beginning to recognize sharks too. Fish- ing clubs devoted exclusively to shark-catching have been attracting anglers from Florida to New Zealand. Members of the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain, who fish the sharky waters off Looe in Cornwall, have been reeling in more than 2 Hugh D. Wise, Tigers of the Sea (New York: Derrydale Press, 1937). 104 Man Against Shark A Great Blue shark (Prionace glauca) is hauled aboard the boat Paula off Looe, Cornwall, England. Thousands of sharks—mostly Great Blues—are caught off Looe each year by members of the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain. Courtesy, The Field Magazine 5,000 sharks—mostly Makos and Great Blues—a year. One Looe sharker in a single day landed 44 Great Blues, whose total weight topped a ton. A champion Looe fisherwoman, Mrs. Hetty Eathorne (weight 108 pounds) has caught a record Great Blue (1,671 pounds). She never wears a harness. “I fish only for sport,” she says, “and this way it gives the shark a better chance.” A shark fisherman never knows what he is going to haul in when he hooks a shark. Dr. C. T. Newnham, regional medical officer for the Western Region of the British Transport Commission, for instance, was presented with a maternity case when he landed a shark off Looe. “It was noticed on landing that she was ‘fat-bellied’ [a term used by local fishermen] and also that there was a healing gaff wound towards the tail,” Dr. Newnham reports in his account of what he calls a case, not a catch. “Apart from these two observations, there was nothing particularly unusual about the captive. As is customary, the shark was killed by hitting it several times on the head with a truncheon carried for this purpose, and then, when movements ceased, the hook and trace were cut out and the body put under the floorboards of the well of the deck. In an attempt to rid itself of the hook, the shark had obviously tried to vomit, as, when caught, the everted stomach was protruding from the jaws. (This is not an uncommon thing to happen. )” Sharks on a Line 105 Dogs confront a shark which is being brought aboard H.M.S. Challenger, the converted British man-of-war which logged 68,350 miles in an epic oceanographic voyage that began in 1872 and lasted three and a half years. From an old print When the boat started heading home for Looe, the seemingly dead shark was removed from under the floorboards to be washed down. The man who washed the shark noticed that something was emerging from her, and the call went out for Dr. Newnham. “Within a very short space of time,” the doctor noted in his clinical report on the case, “the tail of the first baby shark presented itself. This was rapidly followed by a further four babies and two spherical bright yellow objects which were enclosed in loose folds of membrane and which were taken to be placentae. . “Each of the first five baby sharks born was alive and made swimming movements in the fluid which was escaping from the mother and which had changed in appearance and become far less viscous and clear. Pal- pation of the abdomen suggested that there were more to come and, by 106 Man Against Shark exerting slight pressure, a further six or seven babies were born. It was noticed with interest that each one arrived tail first. During the course of a few minutes the remainder of the babies—there were 22 in all— were born, and at no time was any movement of the mother noted, nor was there any contraction of the abdominal muscles or waves of uterine contraction, such as seen in a human.” As the ship entered port, two yellow pennants flew from her mast, the customary sign that two sharks had been caught. And fluttering beneath the pennants was a string of tiny flags made of rags and brown paper. By the time the ship reached Looe, all the sharks were dead. Dr. Newnham concludes the report on his case with this note: “On arrival in Looe harbour the usual ceremony of weighing and photo- graphing was gone through and the mother was found to weigh 100 pounds exactly and the 22 babies, six and three-quarter pounds. Whilst the mother was suspended by a hook in the lower jaw during the weigh- ing, another baby shark fell out. But this was dead on arrival. It was subsequently learned that a post-mortem examination had revealed two further dead babies, but the author was not present at this examination because the interests of science were forgotten in the celebration of this interesting adventure.” An angler who returns from a shark fishing trip may not always bring back a fish story as good as Dr. Newnham’s. The chances are good, though, that even the shore-hugging fisherman who seeks sharks will not have much trouble finding them. There are plenty of sharks near shore, and a fisherman needs only a small boat, an outboard motor, and savvy to get them. (One such American spot is the Delaware Bay: 300- pound Sand sharks have been reeled in there by fishermen in 14-foot boats.) Along the entire coastline of the continental United States, and in the waters of Hawaii and Alaska, there are sharks waiting to be caught by fishermen with strong arms, strong backs—and great expectations of the unexpected. SHARK CATCH RECORDS Sharks of truly monstrous weight, length, and girth have been har- pooned, trapped in nets, shot or gaffed to death while snared, caught on long-lines, and hauled in by anglers aided by one or more companions. But the sharks listed here have been caught on lines by anglers and sport fishermen. What follows is the roll of the premier amateur shark fishermen— and fisherwomen—of the world, anglers who have reeled in, without aid, on regulation tackle, and according to the strict protocol of game fishing, sharks of record size. Sharks on a Line 107 The records are kept and authenticated by the International Game Fish Association (IGFA), the arbiter of official, world-record catches of all game fishes. The IGFA recognizes the Sawfish (Pristis pectinatus) and seven species of sharks as game fishes. Of the 49 types of game fishes listed in the 1961 All-Tackle Records of the IGFA, the only bony fish which comes close to the record sharks in size is the Black Marlin. (The record Black Marlin weighed 1,560 pounds and was 14 feet, 6 inches long. The record shark, a Great White, weighed 2,664 pounds and was 16 feet 10 inches long.) The shark species recognized by the IGFA, and the common and scientific names under which they are listed in IGFA records are: Blue shark (Prionace glauca), Mako shark (Isurus oxyrhynchus or Isurus glaucus), Man-Eater or White shark (Carcharodon carcharias), Porbeagle shark (Lamna nasus), Thresher shark (Alopias vulpinus), and Tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuviert). The 1961 shark records as listed by the IGFA follow. They include the All-Tackle Records for both men and women, the All-Tackle Records for women, and records based on line size, the system the IGFA uses in classifying catches according to the tackle used. The women’s records in all line-test classes are also listed. Note: All the following records are based by the IGFA on line tests. All records where the name of the angler is followed by (*) were arbitrarily assigned to their classes on a 3-pound wet test to a thread. No further claims will be accepted by the IGFA unless accompanied by a sample for testing of the actual line used in the catch: 10 yards up to and including the 30-pound class; 30 yards in the 50-pound class and over. Records in the 180-pound class are kept, but not listed, except in All-Tackle Records. Man Against Shark 108 orl Ort oe Oel O¢l OS (90) aurT OeT O¢T 08 £6/L2/L eyeajsny ‘uozsoyy ade | “Ul 68} “UlG “ET | ALPTE'T | stl 6S/€/9 | purleaz Mon ‘purys] Jose) “ULTO} “WE 'I8l “ql6zL| Joysery LT ‘us/si/e)SSSCé Buy ‘200 ‘uUr6p | “UZ 38) “AL TLZ cesses ss gieaquog 0S/L7/9 eByeasny ‘voyoyy aded | “Ul SqZ1 | Ul OT “IF ET | AL ZSO'T | Jojeq-ur yA] 1S/¥1/P | purleez MeN ‘puejsy ypeaeD | “Ur PO |) “Ul yY “34 TT . 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OLD) |e" ae aoe en ee Sut aq 99D yan) yysUaT 131M yADysS (41) aurT aA WIqoy ‘sIq uMOIG “A “SIJAJ ausoyyzeY AH “SIP Jahq WeqoyY ‘sI JaAvag ey “SIP PJajoysen MA VLIAyTe A, 4ajauy uosurqoy “H ‘[ » SUIPMOG “MM Jouse\ yoerf F271 NNS cl, 1G ura payly pecollhled al lets! raasqe My “D preyory 4aBupy (uamo pun uapy 410g) SaduOOayY ATAOVL-TIV Sharks on a Line 109 12-PounpD LINE TEsT REcorpDs t (Both Men and Women) Shark Weight Length | Girth Place Date Angler Blweate che Jost 169 lb. Sift. 361% | Montauk, 6/24/59 | James F. 11 in. in. Nays Baldwin Mialkona.2e) oe 261 |b., Uf tikes, 4416 | Montauk, 10/1/53 | C. R. Meyer 11 oz. 4 in. in. NGY< Man-Eater..... 66 lb. Dghte 28 in. | Acapulco, 10/26/51 | Dr. Phil 10 in. Mexico Corboy Porbeagle.......| 66 lb. Ati. 30 in. | Montauk, 6/8/58 M. H. Merrill 10 in. INFOS Sawilishe..o. .-.2|40ub. Ovfts, 33 in. | Islamorada, | 5/6/59 Ernest R. 1 in. Fla. Braun, Jr. sihmesher, .).-... | 92.1b:, A ft., 31 in. | Long Beach, | 12/12/59 | D. F. Marsh 8 oz. 9 in. Calif. 1 Up to and including 12 pounds. 12-PouND LINE TEST RECORD ft (Women) Shark Weight Length | Girth Place Date Angler Mako, 12%. 52 |b., 4 ft., 2744 | Montauk, 9/11/53 | Anne Bow- 5 oz. 6%in.| in. Na? ditch t Only woman’s record in 12-Pound Line Test Class. 110 Man Against Shark 20-PounD LinE TEsT RECORDs f (Both Men and Women) Shark Weight Length | Girth Place Blues, ess: 218 lb., Ore 42 in. | Montauk, N. Y. Doz: 9 in Makov. see. 242 Ib., Sate 44 in. | Montauk, N. Y i2rozs 1 in Man-Eater.. .| 1,068 lb. 2 ites 77 in. | Cape Moreton, 6 in Australia Porbeagle. .. .| 180 lb. 8 ft., 37 in. | Block Island, 7%in aele Thresher..... 81 Ib., Ont: 30 in. | Santa Cruz, 8 oz. 7 in Calif. MNgSpe 3. 254 o. 341 Ib. 10 ft. 55% | Cape Moreton, + Over 12 pounds, up t in. Australia o and including 20 pounds. 20-PounpD LINE TEST RECORDS (W omen) Shark Weight Length Bltes ee: s. 204 Ib. Ont 9 in. Miallkon, svete ws 150 lb., di hte, 8 oz. fin Man-Eater.. .| 369 lb. 9 ft., 3 in. Girth 34 in. Sif Shale 57 in. Cape Moreton, Place Montauk, N. Y. Montauk, N.Y. Australia Date Angler 7/22/55 | M. B. Mittleman 7/12/58 | M. B. Mittleman 6/18/57 | Robert Dyer 8/9/60 | Frank K. Smith 8/2/58 | E. G. Volpe 7/6/57 Robert Dyer Date Angler 8/11/59 | Jacqueline Mittleman 6/29/56 | Mrs. M. B. Mittleman 7/6/57 | Mrs. Robert Dyer Sharks on a Line ria 30-Pounp LINE TEsT RECoRDs t (Both Men and Women) Shark Weight Length | Girth Place Date Angler Bitte so 0%: - 284 |b., 10 ft: 42 in. | Montauk, N. Y.|} 8/11/59 | Jacqueline 8 oz. 8 in. Mittleman MialsOna. on oo: 522 lb: oft. 42 in. | Elberon, N. J. | 8/25/52 | W. J. Mahan 1 in. Man-Eater.. .| 1,053 lb. 12 tts 68 in. | Cape Moreton, |} 6/13/57 | Robert Dyer 8 in Australia Thresher..... 145 lb 10 ft 40 in. | Simonstown, 4/6/53 R. C. Wack S. Africa (in ee 362 |b ILL tite, 521% | Cape Moreton, | 7/6/57 | Robert Dyer 2 in in. Australia +t Over 20 pounds, up to and including 30 pounds. 30-PounpD LINE TEsT RECORDS (Women) Shark Weight | Length | Girth Place Date Angler Bluerars ews cars 284 lb., | 10 ft., | 42 in. | Montauk, N. Y.| 8/11/59 | Jacqueline 8 oz. 8 in. Mittleman Make. srs eds 8 Nn oe fetes 40 in. | Montauk, N. Y.| 8/31/58 | Mrs. Lee 3 in. Reichenberg Man-Eater......| 803 lb. | 12 ft., | 70 in. | Cape Moreton, | 7/5/57 | Mrs. Robert Spins Australia Dyer Angler Julius Duciewicz R. P. Alex Robert Dyer D. P. Walker Jack D. Wagner G. Partridge Robert Dyer 112 Man Against Shark 50-Pounp LINE TEstT RECoRDs + (Both Men and Women) Shark Weight Length | Girth Place Date Blwemsese ae 334 Ib. OMe 43 in. | Montauk, N. Y.| 8/27/58 9 in. Malone 683 lb., lalate 4 ft., | Montauk, N. Y.| 8/10/56 WtOz. 9 in. 9 in. Man-FEater.| 1,876 lb. | 15 ft., 10114 | Cape Moreton, | 8/6/55 6 in. in. Australia Porbeagle. .| 366 lb., Sette 46 in. | Montauk, N. Y.| 6/5/60 8 oz. 4 in. Sawfish....} 721 lb. A Satie 71 in. | Fort Amador, 2/6/60 Sine Canal Zone Thresher . .| 338 lb. WA Tae Port Stephens, | 3/2/57 8 in. Australia Nicene | eleOnsilibe iS) ic. 68 in. | Cape Moreton, | 6/12/57 3 in. Australia t Over 30 pounds, up to and including 50 pounds. 50-PounpD LINE TEST RECORDS (Women) Shark Weight Length | Girth Place Date Blue 298 |b. Li ates - 40 in. | Montauk, N. Y.| 10/5/59 6 in Makov 25-45. 478 lb. ite 46 in. | Broughton 5/17/57 Island, Australia Man-FEater...} 801 lb. il rae. 75 in. | Cape Moreton, | 6/11/57 3 in. Australia Thresher.....] 248 lb. 12 tite, 40 in. | Broughton 8/16/56 1 in. Island, Australia Wiggles. 458 lb. | 10ft., | 57 in. | Cape Moreton, | 7/3/57 if tia. Australia Angler Valerie Wuestefeld Mrs. Ron Duncan Mrs. Robert Dyer Mrs. Ron Duncan Mrs. Robert Dyer Sharks 80-PouNnD LINE TEsT RECORDS f (Both Men and Women) on a Line Shark Weight Length Girth Place Date Blues oee. 410 lb. | 11 ft., 52 in. Rockport, 9/1/60 6 in. Mass. Makoaess. 2 745 lb. | 9 ft., 6 ft.; Shinnecock In- | 10/8/46 5 rim. 24% in. let Nee Man-Eater .| 2,071 lb.) 15 ft., 98 in. Cape Donning-| 1/9/52 9 in. ton, Aus- tralia Porbeagle ..| 260 Ib. | 11 ft., 6834 in. | Durban, 2/5/49 4 in. S. Africa Sawfish. .. .| 890 lb., | 16 ft., 92 in. Fort Amador, | 5/26/60 8 oz. iL tim Canal Zone Thresher. ..| 413 lb. | 15 ft. 4914 in. | Bay of Islands, | 6/28/60 New Zealand ihicerenee 1305 lps oeites 8614 in. | Coogee Wide, | 5/17/59 7\% in. Sydney, Australia * See p. 107 for explanation. Shark Mako (Tie) Man-Eater...... Thresher....... Weight | Length | Girth Place 144 lb., | 8 ft., 38 in. | Looe, England 8 oz. 3 in. 553 Ib.,| 9 ft., 68 in. | Cat Cay, 8oz.| 10 in. Bahamas 554 Ib. | 10 ft., 65 in. | Montauk, 11% in. INGAYS OZ bea nlietts, 71% | Cape Moreton, in: in. Australia a 41salbo | Mskit: 4914 | Bay of Islands, in. New Zealand Sl Moy || We ae 70 in. | Sydney, 6 in. Australia 113 Angler Richard C. Webster H. Hinrichs * J. Veitch J. L. Daniel Jack D. Wagner Mrs. E. R. Simmons Samuel Jamieson + Over 50 pounds, up to and including 80 pounds. 80-PounbD LINE TEST RECORDS (Women) Date Angler 7/30/59 | Patricia McKim 3/30/53 | Mrs. H. Stringer, Jr. 9/1/53 | Mrs. R. MacGrotty 8/29/54 | Mrs. Robert Dyer 6/28/60 | Mrs. E. R. Simons 3/2/53 | Mrs. Robert Dyer 114 Shark Thresher....... MI Gr See vs eee Weight 258 |b. 1,000 Ib. 2,664 Ib. pinieea 736 lb. 922 |b. 1,422 lb. Man Against Shark 130-Pounp LINE TrEst REcorRDs f (Both Men and Women) Length Ot 1 in. 1D etitee Lot 10 in. Sift. 2 ne ae aie 7 in. 13) ft.; 7 in. * See p. 107 for explanation. Shark Man-Eater..... Porbeagle...... Mhreshersaseees Weight Girth 39% in. 95 in. Mayor Island, New Zealand Looe, England Galveston, Tex. Bay of Islands, Cape Moreton, Place Date Block Island, Rome 8/8/59 3/14/43 Ceduna, 4/21/59 S. Australia 8/18/57 9/4/38 3/21/37 New Zealand 7/20/58 Australia Angler Theodore Belling B. D. H. Ross * Alfred Dean Mrs. Hetty Eathorne G. Pangarakis W. W. Dowding * eae Robinson + Over 80 pounds, up to an including 130 pounds. 130-PounpD LINE TEST RECORDS Length 1,052 lb. 271 Ib; 729 Ib. 1,314 Ib. Tek; 84 in. 1 ties. if sia 13stte 10 in. (Women) Girth Place Date 44 in. | Looe, England | 10/10/56 64 in. | Cavalli Island, | 4/14/51 New Zealand 721% | Cape Moreton, in. Australia 49 in. | Looe, England | 8/18/57 61 in. | Mayor Island, | 6/3/59 New Zealand 89 in. | Cape Moreton, | 7/27/53 Australia 6/27/54 | Mrs. Robert Angler Mrs. Daphne Case Mrs. Rita Beaver Dyer Mrs. Hetty Eathorne Mrs. V. Brown Mrs. Robert Dyer Chapter 5 Anti-Shark Warfare Christmas was 12 days away. The sound of carols was wafted among the shoppers along the streets of town. Choirs were rehearsing for their Christmas Eve concerts. And children were playing, not in snow, but in the surf. For this was Christmas time in Hawaii, and the temperature hovered at around 80 degrees. It was Saturday, December 13, 1958, and 15-year-old Billy Weaver and five pals were in the surf off Lanikai, a long, wide stretch of beach east of Honolulu. “All of us surfed for a while,” one of the boys, Terry Oakland, aged 14, said later. “Billy was on an air mat. We had just caught a wave, all except Billy, and rode a short distance. We were about 50 yards from Billy when we saw him slide off his mat into the water.” Terry said he was within reach of Billy before he realized that his pal was not playing a prank. Billy was being pulled under by a shark. As Terry neared him, he heard Billy scream: “Help!” Billy bobbed to the surface. “There was blood all in the water and his leg was cut off,” Terry said. ' Mahe boys tried to keep Billy afloat and get him ashore. But he slipped from their grasp and, as he sank beneath the water again, they saw a shark move in toward him. The boys rushed ashore and summoned help. Soon, boats were swarming around the waters of Lanikai searching for Billy’s body—and a shark. The searchers found both. A shark nearly 20 feet long appeared among the boats. And, wedged in a hole in the reef off the beach, about 7 feet beneath the surface, was Billy’s body, the right leg gone up to the knee. The next day, Sunday, Lanikai beach gleamed under a bright sun. The sea was smooth. But there were no water-skiers on it. There was a gentle breeze. But no one was sailing. The water was clear. But no one was skin-diving or surfing. “We'll wait about three weeks,” a teen- ager on the nearly deserted beach said. “Then, if nothing has happened, we'll start surfing again.” There was no panic, for Hawaiians have learned to live with sharks. Though sharks were no novelty in Hawaii, a shark attack was. Since Ite 116 Man Against Shark Young Lang Hedemann looks into the gaping mouth of an 11-foot, 2-inch Tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvieri) caught in an Hawaiian shark hunt by his father (behind Lang) and three others. The shark weighs 700 pounds. It was caught in the same Hawaiian shark-hunting campaign inspired by the fatal attack on Billy Weaver. The shark shown was caught less than 1,000 yards from the spot where Billy Weaver was killed. Courtesy, Honolulu Star-Bulletin 1886, there had been 16 known shark attacks in Hawaiian waters, and only 5 had been fatal. But, even before Billy Weaver was killed, there had been a growing apprehension about sharks in Hawaii. For six months prior to the boy’s death, a research vessel had been hunting sharks around Oahu. The vessel had been scheduled to hunt off the Lanikai area early in December. The trip had been canceled because of heavy weather. And now it was too late. Billy Weaver was dead. Within two days after Billy was killed, community leaders and gov- Anti-Shark Warfare 7 ernment officials met to plan an attack on the sharks that menaced the island of Oahu. The plan called for the extermination of the sharks. A research vessel was sent to Lanikai two days after Billy was killed. Three Tiger sharks—one 12 feet long and weighing 800 pounds—were caught, along with two Sand sharks. That was only the beginning. A Billy Weaver Shark Control Fund was started to finance the catching and destruction of sharks menacing the inshore waters. Solicitors went from house to house on Oahu to raise funds. As an added inducement to the shark hunt, a merchant offered a $20 bounty for any shark caught in Oahu’s inshore waters, and a jewelry company said it would pay 25 cents for each shark tooth a hunter brought in. Under the chairmanship of Kenneth M. Young (a nephew of one of the authors, Captain Young), $27,476 was raised. The money was used for the chartering of a boat, the Holokahana, which was to make circuits of Oahu, killing as many sharks as possible, until the money ran out. Each shark was to be examined by a marine biologist. The shark-killing was not inspired by vengeance. Not only would the shark- catching produce new information about sharks, it was also hoped that the pressure of constant fishing would cut down the population of sharks around Oahu. Holokahana means “hard worker” in Hawaiian, and the boat lived up to its name. On its shakedown cruise, it caught 63 sharks in 48 hours. The sharks were caught with specially designed shark lines—a main line of half-inch manila rope about a half-mile long, from which were suspended 24 hooks. The line was anchored at each end and buoyed by floats to prevent the hooks from fouling on the bottom. Three such lines ~ were laid parallel with the shore, left overnight, and then hauled up. The skipper of the Holokahana was Fred Inouye, vice president of Hawaii Marineland and a veteran sharker who had 5,000 kills to his credit when he took the shark-hunting Holokahana on its four circuits of Oahu. During the year-long campaign, 697 sharks and 641 unborn pups were captured and destroyed. One Tiger (Galeocerdo cuvieri) was carrying 57 pups when she was caught. At least nine species were taken— including a Six Gilled shark (Hexanchus sp.), a species which had never before been recorded in Hawaiian waters. Also caught was a Bramble shark (Echinorhinus sp.), the second ever caught in those waters. The first had been reported 30 years before. The hard work of the Holokahana showed that constant fishing pro- vides some defense against sharks. On each trip around Oahu, the Holokahana found fewer sharks. But it is expensive—it cost about $2,200 a month in Oahu, and that is only one of Hawaii's eight major islands. A war of annihilation cannot go on forever, and if it stops, the sharks 118 Man Against Shark start appearing again. The Soupfin shark (Galeorhinus zyopterus) was practically exterminated off California during the vitamin A “gray gold rush” of the 1940’s. After a couple of years of relatively light fishing, due to the slackening demand for shark-liver oil, the Soupfin again became plentiful. “It must be remembered above all,’ warns Dr. Perry W. Gilbert, chairman of the Shark Research Panel, “that sharks are unpredictable. Moreover, we know relatively little about the behavior patterns of sharks, about the environmental conditions which compel a shark to attack, and about the conduct of a swimmer which may provoke a shark to attack.” With this warning in mind, let us take a look at some weapons, new and old, in man’s age-long war against dangerous sharks. Several methods of making beaches—and individual bathers—safe from sharks have been tried. All have been found to be far less than perfect, but some still offer some hope of shark defense. Many seem to work, but their apparent efficacy may be mere luck. In 1934, after a series of fatal attacks around Sydney, Australia, a Shark Menace Committee was appointed to investigate ways to rid the beaches of sharks. The committee eventually recommended that nets be strung to catch sharks cruising along the beaches every night and then be removed the following morning. The scheme was called “mesh- ing” by the committee. It was called “a stupid, futile waste of money” by one of its many critics. Because of the criticism, and because govern- ment funds to finance meshing were slow in coming, this effort to protect the bathing beaches did not begin until 1937. Since then, however, there has not been a recorded shark attack at a meshed Sydney beach. For several years, counts were kept on the number of sharks en- meshed in the nets. From December 1, 1939 to December 1, 1940, a total of 751 were caught. The following year, 705 were caught. No meshing was done during World War II, but even by 1948 the annual number of sharks caught was down to 260. Since then, the number of sharks caught each year has continued to decrease. The general as- sumption is that the shark population is decreasing also. There was a time when a dozen or more sharks would be caught overnight in a single net. Today, the nets are often empty for days at a stretch. Yet, barely a mile off the beaches, sports fishermen still regularly catch sharks 12 to 15 feet long. The meshes used around Sydney today are great nylon mesh nets 500 feet long and 20 feet deep. The area is not actually enclosed; the meshes are anchored outside the breakers athwart the probable paths of sharks. The bottoms of the nets are weighted to keep them on the sea floor. Glass floats strung along the top of the nets keep them vertical. Anti-Shark Warfare 119 ay x A) ie This diagrammatic view shows how the shark meshing net system is used to protect the swimming area at Port Stephens, New South Wales, Australia. Once a shark’s head is through the net, it is trapped because its gill slits are snared and a shark is physically unable to back up. Courtesy, Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Co. from The Fishes of Australia by G. P. Whitley, 1940 Heavy anchors at each end hold them in position. The fishermen who have the government contract to keep Sydney’s beaches shark-free are not permitted to set baits to attract them. Nor are they paid by the number of sharks caught. They get a flat annual fee, and government . inspectors regularly accompany them in meshing trips to make sure that they are fulfilling their contract. Sharks are often drowned in the nets, their gills unable to function. Those that are still alive when the mesh is cleared are killed, and their carcasses towed to sea and dumped. (Though Australians do eat sharks, they abstain from eating dangerous species. ) North of Sydney, and along the rivers, estuaries, and harbors of the eastern coast of Australia, sharks still attack swimmers. In an average year, at least one swimmer is killed in Australian waters unprotected by meshing. Meshing cannot be effective under all conditions. Heavy seas wash the nets away. If the nets are not properly located along shark pathways, they are ineffective. Meshes sometimes keep sharks within a bathing area, a chilling fact which has been proved by finding sharks that had been snared in the nets as they attempted to travel away from meshed beaches. In 1952, after 35 shark attacks in 10 years, authorities in Durban, South Africa, decided to try meshing. In previous years, going back to 1907, they had tried practically everything else, from shark watch- 120 Man Against Shark towers on the beaches to a permanent enclosure, which was repeatedly smashed by waves and in almost constant disrepair. The Durban nets are set about 800 yards off the beach, parallel with it. Since the nets were installed, no bather has been attacked in Durban. Careful records have been kept on the number of sharks netted each year. In 1952, a total of 602 sharks were caught. A year later, the number had dropped to 158. Since 1952, the average number has been about 170. Dr. David H. Davies, director of the Council of the South African Association for Marine Biological Research, took a hard look at the Durban meshing. As a marine biologist and a specialist in sharks, he was baffled by the apparent effectiveness of the meshing as a shark barrier. “There is no really satisfactory explanation for the.“success.” a. Davies reported. “Although the nets extend for a considerable distance parallel to the bathing beaches, they do not form a continuous wall, and at all times sharks are able to penetrate the area between the beach and the nets by swimming between separate nets or round the ends. Sharks have been found to have been gilled on either side of the nets when traveling both toward and away from the beaches. “The only reasonable explanation for the success of the set-net system seems to be related to the already established fact that it is possible to reduce a shark population by systematic netting. This has been shown in commercial shark fisheries in various parts of the world . . .” Echoing Gilbert’s words, Davies cautioned that “no completely re- liable system has yet been devised for the protection of humans against shark attacks.” But, marine scientists have known for years that elec- tricity often has weird effects on fish. In an experiment in Australia more than 20 years ago, an 11-foot shark was seemingly paralyzed by an electrical barrier. When the current was turned on, the shark would not move; when the current was turned off, it swam away. More elaborate electrical experiments have been conducted on bony fishes. When current is passed between two electrodes, with fish between them, it has been observed that the fish turn to follow the current toward the positive pole. The current does not attract them. Methods of using electricity for commercial fishing have not been practical so far in salt water because of the large amount of current required. Better success has been had in fresh water, especially in Russia. Davies and Dr. J. P. Lochner of the National Physical Research Laboratory in Pretoria, South Africa, recently tried an “electric fence” on sharks. It seemed to work, they reported. Although they stressed that their experiments were only preliminary, they found that an elec- trical current passing between two electrodes acted as a barrier to sharks. They also found that an electrical charge strong enough to turn back a shark was not so strong that it would give a swimmer much discomfort. Anti-Shark Warfare 1211 In November, 1961, John Hicks, a skin-diver turned inventor, dem- onstrated a “shark-shocker” in the shark channel of the Miami Sea- quarium. Witnesses reported that 40 to 50 sharks in the channel rapidly swam away from a dangled chunk of fish when Hicks switched on his electronic gadget in the water. Hicks said he and his twin brother, Robert, had spent 6 years developing the shocker, one version of which is contained in an 11-ounce package. He said he hoped to sell the device to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for use by astro- nauts. Representatives of the space agency witnessed the demonstration, which ended when a big shark of unidentified species nearly capsized Hicks’ one-man life-raft with its tail as it rushed away from the raft. Hicks said he had planned to leap into the channel in a rubber suit to demonstrate the device, but Seaquarium officials refused to give him permission, which is a pity, because it looked quite effective. It was August, 1960, when John Brodeur was attacked by a shark in waist-deep water off a resort hotel beach at Sea Girt, New Jersey. One of Brodeur’s legs was so badly mauled that it had to be amputated. A week after the attack, with shark-panic still gripping New Jersey and most of the eastern seaboard, the proprietor of the resort hotel announced that he was going to keep sharks away from his beach with a “bubble fence.” The fence consisted of a perforated pipe laid on the ocean floor between two jetties that jutted out 250 feet from the hotel beach, where the attack on Brodeur had occurred. Compressed air was pumped through the pipe, causing a curtain of bubbles to rise from the holes. The in- ventor of the bubble fence was said to have boasted that “sharks are so terrified by the ‘shark fence’ they will not even cross it to get a juicy steak.” The fence was said to have been tested against “60 large sharks” which “refused to crash past the barrier to reach food on the other side.” Resort owners saw the bubble fence as the long-awaited answer to how to keep sharks from coming to ocean beaches, and how to keep bathers from staying away. Some people were unconvinced by the “tests” of the bubble fence. One of these skeptics was the Shark Research Panel’s chairman, Dr. Gilbert. He noted that reports of the tests did not mention the species of sharks that were reputedly repelled, their length, the distance of the bubble curtain from the wall of the aquarium where the test was con- ducted, or the time of day or night when the tests were held. Gilbert decided to test the bubble fence himself in the special shark pens at the Lerner Marine Laboratory on Bimini Island in the Bahamas. Two pens were built with funds provided by the Office of Naval Re- search. Each is about 40 by 8 feet. They are next to a dock at the laboratory. At high tide, the water in them is 7 feet deep. 122 Man Against Shark a The dorsal fin of a Tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvieri) parts the “bubble curtain” as the shark passes through the bubbles, in tests showing the ineffectiveness of the “curtain” as a shark barrier. The tests were conducted by Dr. Perry W. Gilbert, chairman of the Shark Research Panel. Courtesy, Dr. Perry W. Gilbert Two types of bubble fence tests were conducted in the pens. In one, a bubble curtain was extended halfway across one pen. In the other, a V-shaped curtain was arranged, with an 8-foot gap of quiet water at the apex of the V so that both pens formed an 80-foot “fish trap.” If the V-shaped bubble curtain were effective, the sharks would be fun- neled by it from one end of the pen, through the quiet-water gap, to the other end of the pen. In all the tests, Gilbert used Tiger sharks, ranging in length from 54% to 13 feet and weighing from 95 to 900 pounds. During the first 4-minute period of the first test, two Tigers seemed to be turned away by the bubble curtain that extended halfway across the pen. Ten Tigers passed through the bubbles “seemingly undisturbed,” according to Gilbert. In a second 4-minute test, one Tiger appeared to be turned away and six passed through the bubbles. In a 15-minute test using the V-shaped barrier which would theoreti- cally funnel the sharks toward one end of the pen, the sharks “promis- cuously swam back and forth through the bubble curtain.” To confirm his findings, Gilbert tried a 26-hour test of the V-shaped bubble curtain. Sharks passed through it in both directions, with the number apparently increasing as they became accustomed to the cur- tain’s presence. During one 10-minute period in which a careful count was taken of the number of times sharks passed through the bubbles, the “fence” was breached 77 times. Anti-Shark Warfare 123 “It would appear from these data,” Gilbert reported, “that the bubble curtain is ineffective as a barrier to Tiger sharks . . . It is highly prob- able . . . that some of the sharks which seemingly were repelled .. . normally would have turned in this area of the pen anyway.” Other methods for repelling sharks have been tried but with equal lack of success. Let us take a look at some, starting with the most im- pressive. A great crowd gathered along the waterfront of Margate, South Africa, one day in 1958, for a spectacular show was going on about 1,000 yards from shore. The frigate Vrystaat of the South African Navy was depth-bombing sharks. Geysers of water shot into the sky as the Vrystaat set off 25 depth charges. Seven sharks were counted dead. And, though a score of about 34% depth charges per shark does not sound impressive, a newspaper reported, “There is every reason to believe that the operation will be a great success.” Actually, there is every reason to believe that the unusual naval warfare against the shark attracted far more sharks than were killed. An underwater explosion will kill bony fish over a wide area. Their swim bladders burst from the concussion. Sharks have no swim bladders, and they are impervious to any explosion except a virtually direct hit. The bony fish stunned or killed by an explosion immediately lure sharks to the area. An eyewitness to such a phenomenon reports that sharks converged to feast on the wounded and dead fish within 20 sec- onds after an explosion. The British Shallow Water Diving Unit at Nassau in the Bahamas reported: “We threw TNT blocks into the water, _ and within five minutes of the explosion the area was full of sharks feeding on the dead fish. They averaged about 6 feet, the biggest being 8 feet. It was a remarkable sight.” Survivors of the torpedoing of the U.S. Destroyer-Escort Frederick C. Davis on April 25th, 1945, during World War I, told of sharks appear- ing and attacking survivors after two depth charges on the sunken ship had gone off underwater. The muffled explosions, not strong enough to cause much injury among the men in the water, indirectly killed many of them because the explosions brought more sharks to the scene—and the scene was the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The chemical shark repellent was born as a wartime weapon to be used not only against sharks, but also against fear of reputedly shark- infested waters. Anxious mothers wrote their Congressmen about the sharks, and even the President received similar worried letters. Service- men who should have been worrying about survival in combat were being unnerved by dread of an enemy more horrifying than a man with a gun. Fear of death by bullet or bomb did not seriously weaken morale, 124 Man Against Shark but fear of death in the jaws of a shark could not be driven off by brave words. “Reports of shark attacks on members of our combat forces have created a wartime sea-survival problem that cam no longer be neglected,” an Army Air Corps bulletin warned. “The possibility of attack is a growing hazard to morale.” Dr. Harold J. Coolidge, on leave from Harvard to work in Washing- ton on high-level public information problems arising from the war, also believed that worry over shark attacks was having a bad effect on morale both at home and overseas. Coolidge took the problem directly to the White House level and suggested that a scientific investigation be made into the feasibility of a chemical shark repellent. President Roosevelt himself reportedly ordered that the top-priority project be started im- mediately. There were grumbles from some military leaders who apparently felt that the diverting of any manpower or money into the shark-re- pellent project was a waste of resources vitally needed for activities more directly concerned with the fighting of the war. Navy officials argued that, since shark attacks were rare, it was a psychological mistake to overemphasize the menace, and make sailors and others even more aware of it. But proponents of the shark repellent won out with the argument that the lessening of anxiety was an important factor in survival, and, if a man in the water knew he had some kind of protection against sharks, he could devote more of his strength and wit to keeping himself alive. The job of finding a way to deter shark attacks was handed to W. Douglas Burden, president of the Marine Studios in Florida. Because the war had forced the closing of the Marine Studios, Burden conducted his first experiments at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Three Smooth Dogfish (Mustelus canis), each about 3 feet long, were placed in laboratory tanks. They were killed with poisoned food. But this did not have much significance. What was needed was something that would drive sharks away from food. The successors to the first three Dogfish were subjected to supersonics, stink bombs, chemical irritants, and a variety of ink clouds. Nothing worked. Seventy-eight different substances—including several poison gases— were tried out before the scientists experimented with one that was literally right under their noses. It was nothing more than “essence of dead shark.” As one of the authors and other shark fishermen long be- fore had discovered, if they left sharks hanging on their hooks long enough for the bodies to decompose, live sharks avoided their odorous brethren. The Woods Hole sharks also turned tail when the scientists confronted them with an offering of very dead shark meat. Anti-Shark Warfare 125 But a 3-foot Dogfish in a laboratory tank is not a 20-foot Great White shark charging a man in the open sea. So the experiments were shifted to Florida, where the researchers hoped to test their potential repellent against real man-eaters. They couldn’t find any sharks! The scientists, aided by local fishermen, scoured the Florida coast from St. Augustine to Jacksonville. No sharks. Navy and Coast Guard submarine-chasers were assigned to hunt sharks in Cuban waters. No sharks. Ernest Hemingway offered his services, and gave the frustrated shark hunters some locations where he had caught sharks. There were no sharks to be found, at least in the numbers the repellent project needed. The problem became a matter of international diplomacy. On De- cember 1, 1942, Secretary of State Cordell Hull cabled the American Embassy at Quito, Ecuador. After briefly describing the shark project, Hull ordered: “,. . You are requested to secure permission from the Ecuadorian government for the . . . necessary investigation of the territorial waters of Ecuador .. . You are also authorized to transmit reports from the investigators via diplomatic pouch. Please take up this matter on an urgent basis and report by telegraph.” Even with the aid of the United States Department of State and the government of Ecuador, the shark hunters could not find sharks. Near the island of La Plata, 25 miles off the coast of Ecuador, sharks had dis- rupted a dolphin-hunting expedition two years earlier by massacring | all the dolphins the hunters caught. This would seem to make La Plata a good place to find sharks. But the frustrated shark hunters got only an occasional one there. They moved on, from one place to another, and the sharks still eluded them. They finally found a spot, near the mouth of the Guayaquil River, and there, for 16 days, the scientists tried out their “dead shark” re- pellent. Actually, the repellent was the chemical equivalent of what seemed to be the ingredient in decomposed shark that was so repulsive to live sharks. This chemical—copper acetate—produced startling re- sults. Sharks struck again and again at baited lines unprotected by the repellent. But they avoided the adjacent baited line, identical with the others except for the repellent, which was suspended in a bag directly above the bait. Convinced that the repellent worked on individual sharks, the ex- perimenters next tried it on a pack of sharks in a feeding frenzy. Samples of the repellent were dispatched to St. Augustine, Florida. The shrimp fishermen who work off the St. Augustine coast throw away as “trash” small fish that have been scooped up with the shrimp, and the cleanings 126 Man Against Shark from the shrimp. As the shovelfuls of trash are dumped into the sea, schools of sharks gather behind the boat and excitedly feast upon the fishermen’s largess. In a classified report on the use of the repellent against shark packs, one of the researchers said: “Sharks were attracted to the back of the shrimp boat with trash fish. The sharks appeared as a slashing, splashing shoal. We prepared a tub of fresh fish and another tub of fish mixed with repellent powder . . . I shoveled over the plain fish for 30 seconds while the sharks, with much splashing, ate them. Then I started on the re- pellent fish and shoveled for 30 seconds, after which I shoveled plain fish for 30 seconds, repeating the procedure three times. “On the first trial the sharks were quite ferocious in feeding on the plain fish right at the stern of the boat. They cut fish for only about five minutes after the repellent mixture was thrown over. A few came back when the plain fish were put out immediately following the re- pellent. On a second trial 30 minutes later, a ferocious school fed for the 30 seconds that plain fish were supplied, but left as soon as the re- pellent struck the water. There were no attacks on fish while the re- pellent was in the water. On the third trial we could not get the sharks nearer than 20 yards to the stern of the boat.” The repellent appeared to be an astounding success. The government ordered a crash program for manufacturing it in cakes to be attached to lifejackets. Copper acetate was mixed with a nigrosine-type dye, which released a blue-black cloud. Compressed into a cake that was packed into an envelope, the repellent was eventually attached to the lifejackets issued to servicemen. They were instructed to open the envelope and swish the cake around them when threatened by sharks. The repellent would diffuse in the sea and surround the swimmer with a cloud of dye and copper acetate. The shark repellent was classified a military secret, and its produc- tion was not disclosed to civilians who wondered what the awful smell was around the Borden Company’s Shark Industries Division plant in Salerno, Florida. Borden, which had been catching sharks to extract vitamin A from their livers, boiled down shark meat in great vats to extract the essence of the repellent. (The Borden dead-shark repellent manufacturing was soon supplemented by mass production of the chemi- cal repellent.) The repellent, dubbed “Shark Chaser,” was issued as part of all Mae West (lifejacket) and life-raft equipment. How effective it was will probably never be known. Thousands of men were set adrift in seas all over the world during the war, and undoubtedly the repellent provided them with at least an important psychological weapon against sharks. “Beyond question, the greatest value of the Shark Chaser was the mental relief and sense of security it afforded the men who had it on hand,” Anti-Shark Warfare 127 observed Dr. Llano, the Air Force research specialist who made the pre- viously mentioned exhaustive study of wartime survival at sea. After the war, the product was marketed commercially, without great success, by the Shark Chaser Chemical Company of San Pedro, Cali- fornia. Two of the authors made extensive efforts to gather information about the repellent’s effectiveness, both for protecting swimmers and for protecting fishermen’s nets against sharks. Their efforts were notable for their failure to gather any credible evidence whatsoever as to the efficacy of the product. The Presto Dyechem Company of Yonkers, New York, now manu- factures Shark Chaser for the armed services. In 1961, this company, which said it manufactures the product under exclusive license, an- nounced that the repellent had been released for civilian use. (The an- nouncement failed to note the previous public sale of the repellent by the California firm, or the fact that it had long been sold by dealers in sur- plus property who had acquired repellent packets from government stocks.) The company, in 1961, began advertising Shark Chaser in pack- ets for skin-divers, and Shark Chaser in liquid or packet form to protect commercial fishermen’s nets from sharks. Shark Chaser was also sold to protect beaches. In the summer of 1961, Maurice J. Fleischman, city manager of Long Beach, Long Island, an- nounced that the beaches of his town were going to be “sharkproofed.” The sharkproofing would be done in this way: when a shark was sighted, or when the Coast Guard notified lifeguards, in some way, that sharks were in the vicinity, the lifeguards would tow 720-foot lines, to which canisters of repellent were attached, into the surf, and anchor them be- yond the bathing area. They would, as quickly as they could, string the lines along 2,400 feet of the town’s beaches. The repellent would diffuse in the water, and the swimmers would be protected from sharks; or at least that was the hope. “Visitors to Long Beach this summer may be assured they will be protected from the perils of shark attack,” the city manager stated. He did not speculate on the possibility that the repellent line might actually fence sharks within the bathing area. Soon after Long Beach announced its sharkproofing plan, Howard B. Reiffel, the president of Presto Dyechem, appeared in New Jersey to explain the workings of the repellent to 13 New Jersey sea resort off- cials, some of whom, only a year before, had been pondering the erec- tion of bubble fences along their beaches. Reiffel estimated that a dozen canisters of Shark Chaser strung from a line parallel to shore could pro- tect about 200 feet of beach for about 9 hours. The product being sold commercially as Shark Chaser is identical with the repellent issued to U.S. servicemen who fly over, or who may have to abandon ship in, shark-menaced waters. Packets of it are also attached to the lifejackets of astronauts. 128 Man Against Shark How good is Shark Chaser? Like any question associated with sharks, this one has a variety of answers. Developed in a wartime crash program during which there was little time for extensive testing (as it was, the repellent was not issued until late in the war), Shark Chaser was not tried on enough sharks under enough conditions to satisfy careful scientists. When several sharks are in a feeding frenzy, for instance, nothing seems strong enough to repulse them. Burden, one of the developers of the repellent, said: “Let us assume that a lot of blood has gotten in the water prior to the introduction of the repellent material. Let us assume further that voracious sharks are present in large numbers. Under such circumstances sharks have fre- quently been seen biting at oars and boats, with such savage determina- tion that they completely ignored heavy blows. This would seem to in- dicate that at some point in the characteristic shark-feeding program, the olfactory sense no longer plays a dominant role and is superseded by a mob-impulse in which visual and auditory senses both have probably played a part. This mob-impulse might be likened to the stampede be- havior in animals. Under these conditions it is very doubtful if any chem- ical repellent would inhibit their feeding behavior thoroughly.” Burden believed, however, that “the sense of smell initiates the sub- sequent feeding pattern, so that if this behavior can be arrested at the outset through a repellent, the more violent aspects of it could not come into being.” This may have been the case in a test of the repellent conducted by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1945. In a fishing ground off Massachu- setts, shark repellent was spread around the nets of a Gloucester mackerel seiner, the Angie and Florence. The Fish and Wildlife Service reported: “In spite of the abundance of sharks, the Angie and Florence received no damage to its nets, and caught about 58,000 pounds of mackerel. Other boats fishing in the same area, but without protection against sharks, averaged only 5,000 to 25,000 pounds of fish, and suffered severe damage to their nets.” That was in 1945. Only in recent years have marine biologists begun to probe very deeply into why and how a shark responds to food, in- cluding human prey. It has been learned, for instance, that the shark may vary its feeding pattern from a slow, determined assault on the food to an attack consisting of rapid, seemingly wanton bites. But little is known about what triggers these different modes of feeding—or attack- ing. The Shark Chaser repellent consists of about 20 per cent copper acetate, believed to be repugnant to sharks, and about 80 per cent nigro- sine dye, which diffuses in the water as a blue-black cloud similar to the inky fluid ejected by squids when they become alarmed. Anti-Shark Warfare 129 Since the time the repellent was developed, the formula has remained the same. Many marine scientists have suspected that the formula could be improved, their suspicions being based on reports of the repellent’s dubious effectiveness. For example, hie repellent was tried by champion Australian sharker Bob Dyer on packs of sharks in waters bloodied by whales killed by professional w halers. Some of the sharks were repelled; some actually ate the packets of repellent in their frenzy! In correspondence with the authors, the British Admiralty reported that repellent tests the British conducted were inconclusive. The British Medical Journal said that the efficacy of repellents “is rather doubtful.” The Royal Air Force said that repellents are not in general use for RAF fliers. Tests of repellents at the Point Cloates whale station in Western Australia “proved ineffective.” Ward, Brooke and Company, Ltd., the British chemical firm which manufactures the same repellent under a government formula, wrote: “The common Genes is that whilst it bolsters morale its effectiveness is in some doubt.” Stewart Springer of the Shark Research Panel, who worked on the original research that de- veloped the repellent during the war, today doubts whether repellent is even the correct word. “It probably should be called a feeding inhibitor,” Springer says. In its 1958 diving manual for frogmen and helmet divers, the U.S. Navy warned that “shark repellents are useless” when sharks “‘are hunt- ing in packs and food or blood is present.” The British Shallow Water Diving Unit at Nassau tested shark re- pellent under conditions that would be more pertinent to skin-divers. The British reported: “The use by us of shark repellent [copper acetate | _ did not prove anything. It does not seem reasonable to suppose that a shark in the fury of an attack would pause or retreat from its headlong rush for food because it did not care for the smell of the Repellent Again, if the repellent were effective it would be only so down tide.” Dr. Albert Tester, a University of Hawaii zoologist, summed up the reports on shark repellents by saying: “I do not think at the present time that we have a sure-fire repellent of any kind. There are sharks and sharks. One repellent may work with the Tiger shark, but not with the Gray sharks we have here in Hawaii. Another may work with the Gray and not on the Tiger.” Concerned about the skepticism that had been developing over shark repellents, in 1958 the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Tulane University, and the Office of Naval Research called a conference on shark repellents. Shark experts from the United States, Australia, Japan, and South Africa attended. The consensus of the conference, as reported by Lester R. Aronson, a specialist in animal behavior and a member of the staff of the American Museum of Natural History, was: “Reports indicate that under certain conditions it [Shark Chaser] may not be effec- 130 Man Against Shark tive, and many of those who are required to depend upon this preparation for their personal safety do not have the necessary confidence in it.” Shark experts at the conference even suggested that, since strong stimuli generally repel and weak ones attract, a dilute solution of a re- pellent might actually have a reverse action and act as an attractant. This was one of the many puzzling aspects of sharks and repellents which led the experts to realize that research into a new kind of repellent was not enough. The shark itself had to be studied, and attacks on men had to be examined for clues to shark behavior. Thus, out of the quest for a more effective repellent, the Shark Research Panel evolved. Perry Gilbert, the SRP chairman, decided to test Shark Chaser. “AlI- though ‘Shark Chaser’ performed admirably in various tests,” he said, “subsequent accounts of its effectiveness as a shark repellent by airmen and skin-divers have been conflicting, and a re-evaluation and more rigorous testing of this repellent is now needed.” Gilbert, Michael Lerner, and Dr. Evelyn Shaw made the tests at the Lerner Marine Laboratory. The tests, on Lemon and Dusky sharks, “sug- gest that copper acetate may not be as repugnant to the sense of smell of a dangerous shark as was originally believed,” Gilbert reported. In the tests, a lure (usually fresh beef blood in a porous container), suspended from a line on a long bamboo pole, was presented to sharks in the experimental pens for 10 minutes. The sharks “readily” approached a lure “through a cloud of copper acetate.” But, when Shark Chaser was used, “the sharks repeatedly avoided the lure.” “This suggests,” Gilbert said, “that possibly the ‘Shark Chaser’ dye is more repellent to sharks than is the copper acetate ... The value of copper acetate as a shark repellent is open to serious question.” Researchers are now trying to find a better shark repellent. They are experimenting with many substances, such as the poison emitted by the sea-cucumber. Until a better shark repellent is developed, the best that can be said of the combination of copper acetate and nigrosine-ty pe dye is it sometimes seems to repel certain sharks under some conditions. Whether strung along a beach or on a skin-diver’s weight belt, its effectiveness may be conditioned not merely by its ingredients, but also by the mood and hunger and type of shark that approaches. Captain Cousteau, the man who so rightly said that one can never tell what a shark is going to do, once had an opportunity to try just about every piece of advice that has ever been given on what to do when approached by a shark. He and a companion, Frederick Dumas, were skin-diving off the Cape Verde Islands when they were confronted by three sharks, one of which seemed determined to attack them. Cousteau and Dumas flailed their arms, released bubbles from the air tanks, yelled underwater, and released shark repellent. The shark came ever closer. Finally, Cousteau banged the shark on the snout with his Anti-Shark Warfare 131 camera. The shark swam past, and began circling again. The other two sharks approached. The three sharks continued to menace the divers until their boat approached and apparently frightened the sharks away. From then on, Cousteau and Dumas carried “shark billies,” clubs 4 feet long, studded with nails at one end. They planned to use them because, as Cousteau says in his book, The Silent World: “After seeing sharks swim on unshaken with harpoons through their heads, deep spear gashes on their bodies, and even after sharp explosions near their brains, we place no reliance in knives as defensive arms.” At the time he wrote, Cousteau had never used the billy, so he had no way of knowing its effectiveness. “It may,” he wrote, “prove to be merely another theoretical defense against the creature which has eluded man’s understanding.” All defenses against the shark are theoretical. But some defenses that have been suggested by self-proclaimed experts are not merely theoreti- cal; they are virtual incitements to suicide. Item, from a skin-diver magazine: “You can actually swim up to a Nurse shark and kick it without eliciting harm to your person. Try it some time.” Item, by the author of a book on skin-diving: “If a shark comes too close, put your head under water and yell as loud as you can, ‘Go away, you bum! Get lost!’ He can’t hear you, but he can feel the vibrations. If he still comes on, hit him on the nose . . .” Item, from a skin-diver magazine: “. . . If hand-to-shark combat be- comes necessary (a most remote possibility), avoid those snapping jaws by stiff-arming. the brute’s long nose. Use your knife in the gill slits or slash him across the back of the neck . . . If you are caught without a knife, jam your fingers into his nostrils or gill slits, if possible, hang on to the pectoral or side fin as long as you can hold your breath.” If the survival of swimmers confronted by sharks depended on gross misinformation such as this, there would be few survivors. The man who provokes a shark—any shark—does so at peril of his life and/or limbs. Men have provoked, ridden on, stabbed, and hit sharks—and lived. So, too, have men lived after hurling themselves from tall buildings, throw- ing themselves under the wheels of trucks, and shooting themselves in the head. Hitting or stabbing a shark is suicidal unless it is the last, desperate act of a man fighting to live at the moment that comes when he is facing death. Captain Jonathan Brown, commander of an Air Force C-124 Globemaster which crashed in the Pacific in 1958, was one such man. He and two other members of the crew of nine survived the crash. The three men fashioned a raft out of a piece of wood and buoyed it up with mail sacks. They clung to this during the night. At dawn, the sharks appeared. For a while, shark repellent seemed to keep them away. Man Against Shark 132 ENSeICIINE dye Jo saiseds 193eM YSo1y BILITY 3S9 Aq [eIIdo13 ‘BUI][OIeD YON 0} [1ze1g Usa -You ‘due U19}SaM VIOYSUT a10ys -JJO puke a1oysul ‘sueado {|e Jo sqjeq jesido1qns pue jeoido1y puryeaz MON pue ‘eiyessny ‘oyloeg you ESCO PEM CUA aN UIIYIIOU JO SI9JCM [e}UIUTIUO-) s}eq 93e10duI94 w4eMm pue ‘yeoido1 ‘o1ueI0G si19jzeM uUeRITeIIsNY UT AT]eIO -adsa ‘s}jaq 9}e10du10} WaIeEM ‘qeo1doqns ‘jeo1do13 ‘o1ueadG punoy aay A JayeM MOTeYS UT punoy spunos pure ‘sAeq ‘syao10 19]eM j[eS UT punoy [njtamod pue sno10s1A 9q ues Aoid Suinsind uayM ydaoxe ysissnjsS aBPALS DAISSIIS3e ‘ABPALG 4ouDyag yorq uo Avis yIeGq ynous papunol A[peoiq :yoerq uo UMOIQ YSIMOTIA A ea pequrod Ayjdieys ‘ynous 4104S yorq uo Aeis ysinjq xieq yoeq uo Aevis-an|q daap ‘ui10j 1apusys yorq uo xdeTq 0} UMOI ARIS WOT AyTt ‘FF OF +? aC +7 yareys ENZeILIIN' dye] yreys vole] se aye) aitasten(a yareys Jas y "** "yreys aseaqi0g | aaunavadd y dS UNUAXD , 4asUuDqg IUD AT (‘syreyS—eyrq aurseyy :dumig fo sajqwutg jpsauay W014) SONILVY ,.AXONVG WUVHS,, AAVN ‘S'Q 133 Anti-Shark Warfare ‘apis Japun 9y} UO a}1YM Jo apeys aulOs Jo are pajst] syseys [TY | ‘Jasuep WNuIxew suvaW + fF ‘JaduUep UNUTTUIW Suva +] , atoysul 9SO]D IO Bas 3B 4NO ‘vag UPOUI -IayIpeyy «= sulpnpour suess0 [J@ jo 9uoz ajeisduia} Wie SIDALI I9}eM YSo1j spusose ‘uedef 0} ueadQ ueIpuy eryerjsny eulqUuasIy ‘jIze1g ‘epr “JOT OF OUTLAY JO IND “OLY yNosg ‘voy JsaAQ [eordo33 ‘URIUPIIOIIPIP, yloeg-opu] $19}@M 910YS]jo dsaq “uveueiioyIpeyy pur I17 -uepy [eordo1jqns pur jeoido1y, o1]UR] -1V jo sapis yIOq uO sia}eM ezye1sduia} Wa4eM pue jeodo1y JOWIUWIMS [NJIIMOg Si9y}eq Syoe}}e ‘sno19019 4 aBPAPS PUL IJIMG W10}}0q 0} asOJD SARIS ssajieay ‘JUsIayIpuy JoJveM MOT]TeYS UT punov peay apim ‘yey :yxoeq uo Aei3-Aysy yorq uo Avi yorq uo Avis ajeg yorq uo uMoIg-AeI3 WY SIG Ped uo anjq Ajeys 0) Avi3 yy SIT yorq uo Ae13 uapeay Jo ysin[g ST yieys peoyiowwepy yieys JAY saduery ** *yreYS SIN Aeirny is ered were 3zeYys pues yaeys peddip-a71y M4 @ (aia) a) sisente yareys Aysnq 134 Man Against Shark Then they came closer. “We’d do a lot of yelling and the sharks would back off and look the situation over,” Brown said later. ‘““We don’t know how many there were. I don’t know how big they were. They seemed to be attracted to anything of light color. We were wearing black socks and our flight suits, which was a help.” One of the sharks seemed to single Brown out. It charged him. “The shark had me by the shoulder and was shaking me,” Brown said. “We yelled, thrashed and kicked about in the water trying to get rid of it. “Finally, I beat on its head with my fist and it let go.” Brown’s Jast act of defense worked. The shark swam off, though it remained nearby in the water, along with others, until, after 12 hours amid the circling sharks, the three survivors were rescued. The desperate yet purposeful defense Captain Brown and his com- panions put up shows the only kind of thinking that gives a man a chance in the water against an attacking shark. No defense guarantees survival, for the odds are against a man who is facing an onrushing shark. Shadows beneath the surface are what we most often see when we are privileged to see a shark or a skate or a ray. When you see a shark’s dorsal fin cutting a wave above the surface, beware! That shark is hunt- ing and he may be looking at you for a meal. Unless it is the fin of a Basker sunning himself and lazily straining plankton, it is probably one of several species of sharks that are known or suspected to be aggressive hunters. It may be wary in its approach or it may be direct in its attack. Do not be lulled into security if you see no fin. Many shark attacks have been made by a foraging shark that was not seen until the moment of its at- tack—and often not until after it attacked. The authors subscribe to the beliefs of some of the leading explorers of the underwater world who have made long observations of the be- havior of sharks in their own habitat, that all must be considered as individuals. This does not preclude the observation that there are species that are peaceful in their way of life and species that are more aggressive. But, it does imply that individuals of amy species should be treated with respect and caution. In its instructions to its frogmen and divers, the U.S. Navy gives a “dan- ger rating” on 12 large sharks. The ratings range from “minimum danger” to “maximum danger.” As long as you remember that amy shark can be dangerous, especially when provoked, the Navy guide is not a bad index to the relative known ferocity of the larger sharks. But the index should not leave the implication that sharks not on it are harmless.’ With the admonition, then, that the Navy is describing only how dan- gerous some sharks can be, we reproduce the guide on pages 132 and 133. 1 The sharks mentioned in the Navy guide are described in Chapters 11 and 12. Part 3 ‘ Man and Shark + i] f + pay x’ i ) “tr = - ' - y wb Mi A 4 ke Pays » & wee wen (aire GU.) ss q 22 wn i ‘i mr ag ijede Anis Mithe's Sam ae We . v, - ar eas. re me Ont F : a i. a 5hbet be iki a(t Ata nei Nomis) es & bv hed . _ is ) =o Pei od) oe ae inte . rouse Sat a | i a a. w Pi veges poh Diy ee r 7 we... : - 4 eS = 7 a Mare Ady Ca, at, é ee SO, "ea of tim J) Viable eet erp meg Nh se) an Pee Cel Se + eed et top Sh dale name tat ita ire we Viti tt obits EA i GA Re ae Nimes A a ; eh Pee at elie ol tay io tm pete olin tbat el ener oe arratat ore... sees m1 a pAatig® i @ 7 ” 65 pl ke . - 7 re gl ules Be a ; r +s a Ss or S| a j ro iy Ae , ie a . + - _ - - " : s Chapter 6 Shark Devils —and Gods As the Greeks wrote their myths in the constellations, Orion, the mighty hunter, wheeled across the winter sky in eternal, futile pursuit of Taurus, the great bull, and Leo, the couchant lion. But long before the Greeks looked skyward and evolved their myths, primitive men discerned in the flickering patterns of the stars cosmic enactments of their fearsome struggles with their own devil-god—the shark. The stars the Greeks saw as Orion’s Belt were to the Warrau Indians of South America the missing leg of Nohi-Abassi, a man who had got rid of his mother-in-law by inducing a murderous shark to devour her. As legions of men were to learn in the ages to come, Nohi-Abassi learned that it does not pay to provoke a shark—or a mother-in-law. His leg was cut off by his sister-in-law, apparently playing the role of a shark, and Nohi-Abassi died. His leg wound up in one part of the heavens; the rest of him in another. To some primitive men, the shark was a vengeful god; to others, the shark was a cunning devil. In many primitive religions, the worship of the shark grew so complex that the shark had several roles: sharks be- came men, men became sharks. On many a Pacific island, the awesome deity could not be satiated by the occasional man, woman, or child he snatched from the sea in his inscrutable forays. The shark-gods then demanded the ultimate homage: human sacrifice. The chief or the high priest of some islands went among the people at this fateful time. An acolyte accompanied him, carrying a noose similar to a shark snare. At a signal from his leader, the acolyte hurled the noose at a crowd. The person—whether man, woman, or child—around whom the noose fell was immediately seized and strangled. The body was ritualistically cut into pieces and flung i into the sea for the ravenous shark- -gods. In the Solomon Islands, deified sharks lived in sacred caverns built for them near shore. In front of these caverns were erected great stone altars upon which were placed the bodies of chosen victims. After mystical ceremonies, the bodies were then given to the sharks. Some sharks in the 137 138 Man and Shark Gilbert Islanders brandish swords studded with sharks’ teeth. Pacific islanders fashioned several types of weapons using shark teeth. Islanders in the photo are wearing helmets of porcupine fish skin and coir armor. Courtesy, Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Co. from The Fishes of Australia by G. P. Whitley, 1940 Shark Devils—and Gods 139 Solomons were regarded as incarnations of dead ancestors. These were good sharks, which would help their relatives. Alien sharks, who ven- tured into the islands on evil missions, were thought to be malevolent. But fishermen could supposedly drive these evil sharks away by brandish- ing before them small wooden statues representing the native sharks. Vietnamese fishermen still refer to the Whale shark as Ca Ong, or “Sir Fish.” Small altars imploring Ca Ong’s protection can be seen on sand dunes along the central and southern Vietnamese coast. Woven into the rich tapestry of Hawaiian legends are many tales of sharks—tales still told by venerable kanakas, repeating the words heard from the lips of their fathers’ fathers, who lived when myths shrouded the islands, as the mists still shroud the Hawaiian dawn. I will tell you, the storyteller will begin, of Kamo-hoa-lii, the king of all the sharks .. . Kamo-hoa-lii, so the old, old tale goes, fell in love with a maiden, Kalei, whom he saw swimming in the sea. Kamo-hoa-li transformed himself into a man, married Kalei, and fathered a child. Kamo-hoa-li then returned to the sea as a shark. The child, Nanaue, looked like any other child—except that on his back he bore the mark of his shark-father, the mouth of a shark. Although Kamo-hoa-lii had warned that the child must never be fed the flesh of an animal, the taboo was broken, and Nanaue thus learned the magic of making himself into a shark. As a shark, he devoured many islanders. Finally, he was caught and his body— in the form of a great shark—was taken to a hill in Kain-alu. “And even today,” the old storytellers say, “the hill they took Nanaue . to is’ called Puumano, theShark “Hill ':*y . "Phe people ‘took bamboos from the sacred grove of Kain-alu and made sharp knives from the bam- boo splits, and they cut pieces from the body of the shark-man. But the gods were angry, and they took the sharpness from the bamboos in the sacred grove, and to this day the bamboos of Kain-alu are not strong and they cannot cut.” When the Navy made a major sea base at Pearl Harbor, the dredging operations destroyed the remnants of an ancient shark pen. There, un- known ages before, Hawaiian kings had hurled living men to the royal sharks, and gladiatorial contests had been staged between starved sharks and native gladiators. In his invaluable study of South Sea islanders, missionary William Ellis told of shark worship he had witnessed in the Society Islands in the early nineteenth century. He said that the natives deified the Great Blue shark (Prionace glauca), though they killed and ate other species. “Rather than destroy the Great Blue sharks,” the missionary said, “they would endeavor to propitiate their favor by prayers and offerings. Temples were erected in which priests officiated, and offerings were presented 140 Man and Shark to the deified sharks, while fishermen and others, who were much at sea, sought their favor.” Just as half a world away, in other times, Roman gladiators entered an arena to battle to the death with lions for imperial entertainment, so did Hawaiian warriors enter the shark pen in duels with sharks. The war- rior’s only weapon was a shark-tooth dagger, a short length of wood shaped like a stout broomstick, gripped in his hand. Protruding from the stick was a shark’s tooth, which stuck out between two fingers of the man’s fist. Unlike the matador who can make a misstep and live to face a charging bull again, the shark-warrior had but a single life-or-death chance. He had to let the onrushing shark charge him. Then, at the last instant, the warrior dived beneath the shark and tried to rip the shark’s belly with his crude weapon. It is said in Hawaiian legends that the warriors sometimes killed the shark. If they did, they must have used much akua, or magic. Perhaps it was stipulated by royal edict that if a warrior drew blood he was allowed to leave the pen, providing that he was able to escape the shark. But it seems impossible that the duels be- tween man and shark ended any other way than in victory for the shark, which, after all, had a maw of teeth to use against the one tooth gripped in its antagonist’s fist. The shark pen was a circle of lava stones, enclosing about a 4-acre area at the edge of a bay in the harbor. The circle of rocks had an opening on its seaward side so that water could flow into it. Fish—and human bait—were thrown into the pen to lure sharks through the passage. When a contest was to take place, the passage was closed so that neither op- ponent could escape. Close to the shark pen, on the bottom of the harbor itself, lived the Queen Shark, regally guarded by two stalwart sharks from each of the Hawaiian Islands. The Queen condescended to allow the shark jousts near her royal lair. But she had to be propitiated with offerings which were undoubtedly human, for it was an economic fact of life in old Hawaii that people were cheaper than pigs. As mentioned previously, some of the stones that formed the shark pen were still in place when the dredgers began tearing up the harbor bottom in the early 1900’s for the construction of Pearl Harbor Naval Base. As part of the harbor project, a big drydock was built at a cost of more than $4,000,000. The foundation suddenly collapsed under the pres- sure of an underwater eruption, and the drydock was destroyed. Navy inspectors and construction men scurried around trying to find the cause, but the natives knew what had happened. “Queen Shark is huhbu—angry —and humps her back,” they said. Belief in shark myths has persisted for years, even in modern Hawaii. Less than a century ago, many Hawaiian women wore tattoos on their ankles in remembrance of an ancient chieftainess who had been bitten on Shark Devils—and Gods 141 the ankle by a shark but had escaped. Apparently, the tattoos were con- sidered good luck against shark bites. In 1956, the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, repository of a matchless collection of Hawaiian artifacts, acquired an ancient relic known as Kapaaheo, the “Shark Stone.” It took a bit of shark akwa to get it, though. The sorcerer was Heloke Mookini, a 71-year-old kamaaina (an old-time islander is called a Ramaaina; a newcomer is a malibint). Long ago, according to Heloke, maidens of the Big Island—the Island of Hawaii—would go swimming in a cove that sheltered them from the sea. Many times, however, a swimmer would disappear and never be seen again. Coincidentally, a mysterious stranger was always in the vicinity when a disappearance occurred. Fishermen near the cove were suspicious of the stranger, but they could not prove that he had anything to do with the girls’ disappearance. One day, armed with their spears, they went swimming with the girls. A shark attacked the group, but the fishermen stabbed it several times with their spears, and the shark fled. A short while later, the mysterious stranger was found on the shore, dying of spear wounds. And when he died, his body turned into Kapaaheo, a large stone shaped like a shark. When the Bishop Museum decided to ship Kapaaheo from Hawaii Island to Honolulu, Heloke Mookini had a dream in which his mother visited him and told him of Kapaaheo, and asked him to help with its re- moval to Honolulu. “So I went to the stone,’ Heloke recounted, “and saw three bull- dozers that were damaged from trying to lift the stone on a sled. I hit _ the Shark Stone with a rock, and the sound was like a dull thud. I knew the stone was unhappy. So I told it that to go to the Bishop Museum and be with all its old friends of Hawaii would be the best thing.” Heloke said he tapped the stone again, and “the sound was now like a Clear, ringing sound which meant that the stone was happy.” Kapaaheo was no longer stubborn, for, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, ‘““The next cay a single bulldozer seies the stone onto a sled without any difficulty.” Mythological sharks were not always malevolent. They often guided lost fishermen to land, and even saved swimmers from other ill-mannered sharks. Nei de Tuahine, a goddess in the form of a sting ray, was a one- woman Coast Guard in Tahiti, according to the old tales. Her specialty was saving people lost at sea. She’d load them on her broad back and go skimming off to land with them. In the Cook Islands, the tale is told of Hina, a nasty young lady who wanted to journey to the sacred island of Motu-tapu. Hina did not have a canoe, but that didn’t stop her. She rode a relay of fishes, leaving each one permanently scarred by her rough-riding habits. She lashed one fish 142 Man and Shark so hard that welts covered its body, and so it became a striped fish. An- other she beat, producing black-and-blue spots, and that is the way its coloration remained. A third she battered so thoroughly it wound up forever blackened. She stepped on the obliging sole so hard that it has been flat ever since. By the time she boarded a shark, she was hungry. She cracked a coco- nut on the shark’s head, raising a bump which has been on sharks’ fore- heads ever since and is known as “the bump of Hina.” Incidentally, the shark proved itself far less docile than the other poor fish Hina abused. When she cracked that coconut, the shark dived, leaving Hina in the middle of the ocean, and it is a matter of some doubt whether she ever did make it to Motu-tapu. Rays were similarly looked upon as benevolent among the Norse men. An ancient account of the ray’s kindness—and the Dogfish’s malevo- lence—written by Olaus Magnus says: “There is a fish of the kind of Sea-Dogfish . . . that will set upon a man swimming in the Salt-Waters, so greedily, in Troops, unawares, that he will sink a man to the bottome, not only by his biting, but also by his weight; and he will eat his more tender parts, as his nostrils, fingers . . .” When this happens, however, the account goes on, the ray rushes to the rescue, and, “with some violence drives away these fish that set upon the drown’d man, and doth what he can to urge him to swim out.” Out of the mists of legends in the Torres Strait, between the northern- most tip of Australia and the coast of Papua, comes the tale of the won- drous deliverance of Mutuk, a man who was swallowed by a shark. The details of Mutuk’s sojourn in a shark’s belly are not as well known as Jonah’s stay in what is generally thought to be a whale. But the two stories are basically similar. Countless religious paintings to the contrary, there is support for the claim that Jonah was swallowed by a shark, not a whale. The Bible says that Jonah was swallowed up by “a great fish,” and, though the biological distinction probably was not known to Biblical scribes, the whale is a mammal, not a fish. Bishop Erik Pontoppidan of Norway, a prolific writer on denizens of the sea, in 1765 wrote a long and learned paper which proved, to his satisfaction at least, that Jonah had been gulped down by a Basking shark. Anatomically, this would be difficult for a Basking shark, whose diet is restricted to plankton and whose gullet would have trouble passing a prophet. For this reason, supporters of the Jonah-was-swallowed-by-a-shark theory favor the Great White shark (Carcharodon carcharias), which certainly is a man-eater. The regurgita- tion of a man—alive—would be far more miraculous on the part of a Great White than a whale. The notion that Jonah was swallowed by a whale may have been inspired by the fact that Joppa, whence Jonah was Shark Devils—and Gods 143 going when the sailors tossed him overboard, was an ancient whaling port. The western Pacific is not the only ocean whose sharks have been worshiped or made the heroes and villains of mythology. Many American Indian tribes were awed by sharks. Laurence M. Klauber, an outstanding herpetologist and an authority on the rattlesnake, was surprised to dis- cover that some tribes of Indians, though not very familiar with the sea, called rattlesnakes “‘the little sharks of the woods.” The Tlingit Indians of southern Alaska divided their tribes into tus, or “shark,” lodges. The chief of one of the tribes was called Ha yeak, an Indian term for the hol- low left in shallow water by a swiftly swimming shark. To the Tlingit Indians, the skate was known as “the canoe of the land otter.” Shark crests marked the carved emblems of tribal clans, and the sticks the Indi- ans used in playing a gambling game, vaguely similar to dice, were named after several animals, including the tzs. In South and Central America, images of sharks appear on ancient Indian pottery, and figurines depicting swimmers being devoured by sharks have been unearthed. Archaeologists have found sting ray barbs that were probably used as sacrificial knives on Indian altars where human victims were offered to the gods. Along the Honduran coast, even today Indian children play an old, old game in which the child who is “ain? dives into the water and tags other children by pinching or biting them. The game is called “playing at shark.” The Kojiki, the oldest Japanese history book, has a tale of shark to tell. Once, long ago, the story goes, a white hare on the Island of Oki _ called to a shark near shore. “Isn’t it interesting to compare the number of your fellow creatures and that of mine?” the hare asked. “If you would let your fellow creatures lie in a row from this island to the Cape of Keta, I should step over them, counting their number.” The shark agreed, and the hare began hopping, shark by shark, toward what is now the main island of Lieteen Just as the hare reached the cape, it taunted the sharks by shouting: “You foolish sharks, you have been deceived. I only wished to come to the mainland.” The shark which lay nearest the hare caught it and angrily skinned it alive. The naked hare was lying on the cape, weeping with pain, when the god Yasokami came along. Yasokami told the hare to bathe in the sea and lie down on the hill in the wind. The hare took the god’s advice, but the salt and the wind only intensified the pain. As it lay there, weep- ing even more, another god, Okuninushi, passed by. Okuninushi, Yaso- kami’s brother, was carrying Yasokami’s baggage. The brothers were on their way to visit the goddess Yakami in Inaba, they were both in love with her. Okuninushi kindly told the hare to bathe in river water and lie down on a bed of cattails. The hare recovered, and, in gratitude, 144 Man and Shark The “Festival of the Shark” used to be held annually in some parts of the New Hebrides. The ceremony lasted for a week. The body of a shark was placed in a sort of native altar and was buried. A native artist, with white pigment, painted the figure of a shark upon the grave, which for a time was constantly guarded. Courtesy, Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Co. from The Fishes of Australia by G. P. Whitley, 1940. From Pacific Island Monthly prophesied that Okuninushi, not his brother, would win the hand of the goddess. And, as the hare had foretold, the goddess Yakami did marry Okuninushi. One of Japan’s mythological deities is a god of storm, known as the Shark Man. In fact, the shark is so terrifying in Japanese legends that when the Chinese sought a talisman to be painted on war planes raiding the Japanese, they chose the evilly leering face of the Tiger shark. The American pilots who flew these shark-invoking planes were known throughout the world as the “Flying Tigers,” but actually they should have been called the “Flying Sharks.” Wars are not new to shark-gods. On some Pacific islands, such as the Marshalls, tribes fought religious wars over sharks centuries ago. These battles were caused by members of one tribe defying the shark or sting ray taboos of another. What usually happened was that a member of a tribe which did not worship a certain kind of shark or sting ray would catch one of the sacred creatures. When word of the sacrilege reached the tribe that did worship that specific shark or sting ray, a delegation would be sent to the tribe whose member had committed the sacrilege. If that tribe refused to heed the worshipers’ pleas to desist from the desecration, a holy war would begin. The coming of Christianity lessened shark worship among the Pacific islanders, but the white man’s religion did not completely stamp out de- votion to the shark. On Samoa, for instance, the Great White shark was Shark Devils—and Gods 145 looked upon as an emissary of Moso, the god of the land. To protect his coconut or breadfruit trees, a Samoan would fashion from coconut fiber an image of the shark, and suspend the idol in the tree. Similar images were placed in gardens to protect them. If a thief stole from a shark-guarded tree or garden, he risked being devoured by a Great White the next time he went fishing. The story is told on Samoa about a native, newly converted to Christianity, who showed his contempt of this superstition by mockingly thrusting an arm into the mouth of one of the shark idols. Shortly thereafter, so the story goes on, the native went on a fishing trip and was seized by a shark which bit off both of his arms. India has its snake charmers, and the Pacific has its shark charmers. According to newspaper reports, a Catholic priest, the Reverend A. J. Laplante, witnessed shark charming in the Fiji Islands during the decade he spent as a missionary there between 1928 and 1938. Father Laplante said the islanders subdued sharks by kissing them. “It’s some occult power they have which I can’t define,” the priest reported after returning from the islands in 1938. “But once the native kisses it, that shark never moves again.” Twice a year, when the natives made a drive for food for tribal feasts, or when they wanted to make their swimming areas safe from sharks, shark-kissing ceremonies would be held. Father Laplante said, The night before the drive, the man who wants the shark fishing done goes to the house of the chief, who is also the sorcerer or medicine man. There they enact a ceremony which survives from their oldest superstitions and beliefs. This ceremony always includes the presentation of kava—a mildly narcotic beverage made from juice extracted from finely ground root—and the sacrifice - of an animal. The kava is drunk and some of it is sprinkled on the important main post of the house, where the spirit lives, and the animal is strangled, cooked and eaten. The next day, the natives drive the sharks into a large net, the shark-kissers wade out, seize the man-eaters, kiss them on their up-turned bellies and fling them on the bank. I don’t know how they do it, but, among the natives, it is taken for granted that once a shark is kissed—upside down—that is the end of it. Shark-kissing suddenly cropped up as an occult collegiate ritual in 1960 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when cavorting college boys on Easter vacation there procured a 4-foot shark named Freddy and forced coeds to kiss it. Fort Lauderdale police, long inured to college pranks, arrested one of the shark’s owners, but Freddy, apparently dead, was thrown into the sea and was never seen again. Pearl divers off the coast of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean have long relied upon shark charmers to protect them from sharks. Sir J. Emerson Tennent, who studied the customs of Ceylon pearl divers, reported in 1861 that the “mystic ceremony of the shark charmer” was “an indis- pensable preliminary” to every pearl hunt. Sir Tennent noted, 146 Man and Shark His power is believed to be hereditary; nor is it supposed that the value of his incantations is at all dependent upon the religious faith professed by the operator, for the present head of the family happens to be a Roman Catholic. At the time of our visit, this mysterious functionary was ill and unable to attend. But he sent an accredited substitute, who assured me that, although he himself was ignorant of the grand and mystic secret, the mere fact of his presence, as a representative of the higher authority, would be recognized and respected by the sharks. Shark superstitions and shark tales followed in the wake of the sailing ships that touched the exotic isles and strange lands where the shark was a god or an instrument of the gods. And civilized men themselves often used this deity for their own ends. When the British maintained prison colonies on Tasmania, in the early nineteenth century, fierce dogs and armed guards patrolled the prison encampments. But hardy prisoners were managing to escape from one of the settlements, located at the end of a narrow peninsula. The captives slipped into the sea, swam past the patrolled area, then waded ashore and crept through the under- growth to eventual freedom. The governor of the colony ordered that garbage be dumped every day in the waters along the peninsula. Lured by the daily promise of free meals, sharks began congregating in the waters of the escape route. After a few screams in the night, and after the prisoners learned about their hungry new watchers, the escape at- tempts stopped. Sharks were a similar menace to prisoners attempting to escape on frail floats from Devil’s Island in the tropical Atlantic off French Guiana. Even today, on Ile Royale, a prison island next to Devil’s Island, one can see the moldering coffin in which the bodies of prisoners con- demned for killing fellow convicts or guards were placed after they were guillotined. Only one coffin was needed, for the executed men were not buried in the earth. The coffin was loaded aboard a boat which guards rowed a short way off land. The body was there consigned, not to the sea, but to the sharks that swarmed in the blood-stained waters. How many dead or dying slaves were thrown to the sharks will never be known. Whispered tales of these evil deeds inspired this anony- mous poem in The Book of Fishes, published in London in 1835: . here dwells the direful Shark, lured by the scent Of reeking crowds, of rank disease and death. Behold! he rushing cuts the briny flood, Swift as the gale can bear the ship along; And from the partners of that cruel trade Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons, Demands his share of prey . . . Shark Devils—and Gods 147 “A master of a Guinea ship informed me,” the British naturalist Thomas Pennant wrote in 1776, “that a rage of suicide prevailed among his new bought slaves, from a notion the unhappy creatures had, that after death they should be restored again to their families, friends, and country. To convince them at least that they should not reanimate their bodies he ordered one of the corpses to be tied by the heels to a rope, and lowered into the sea, and, though it was drawn up again as fast as the united force of the crew could be exerted, yet in that short space the sharks had devoured every part but the feet, which were secured at the end of the cord.” In Sharks Are Caught at Night,’ Frangois Poli recounts a story still told around the shores of Lake Nicaragua about the greedy Dutchman who fished for the sharks which consumed the bodies of Indians hurled into the lake. After elaborate funeral ceremonies, the corpses, bedecked in jewels and gold ornaments, were consigned to the sharks, apparently to appease them, for their man-eating habits were—and are—notorious. The Dutchman, the natives told Poli, fished for the sharks, ripped them open, and stole the sacred sacrificial jewelry and gold. He had harvested a fortune, so the story goes, by the time the Indians discovered his desecrations and killed him. His body was not thrown to the sharks, of course; he wasn’t good enough for that. “So then,” Poli quotes his tale- teller as saying, “they set fire to the house. And ‘cut the Dutchman’s throat.” In the days of sail, many ports of call were reputed to be the homes of sinister sharks whose evil deeds were luridly recounted to wide-eyed apprentices by old salts, who familiarly referred to the sharks by name. _ Two of the most infamous were Port Royal Jack, who guarded the en- trance to the harbor of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shanghai Bill, who prowled the waters of Bridgetown Harbor, Barbados, West Indies. Shang- hai Bill gobbled down many a sailor in his time, but it was a shaggy dog that did him in. Bill, it seems, seized in his great jaws one day a big brown sheep dog that had fallen into Bridgetown Harbor. The dog’s hair got caught in Bill’s teeth, and he finally choked to, death. This may be the world’s first shaggy dog story. Then there were the two sharks that became an island. What their names were isn’t known, but they were certainly the laziest sharks that ever inhabited the sea, or a seafarer’s tale, the seafarer being Captain B. J. Whip, once an officer on a cable ship in the Red Sea. According to his tale, the two sharks, then only a few feet long, discovered a fine dining area in the middle of the Red Sea. The fish were so easy to get that all they had to do was stay there, motionless, and let the fish swim into their 1 Francois Poli, Sharks Are Caught at Night (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959). 148 Man and Shark mouths. Gradually, they became anchored by the seaweed that attached itself to them and, like two great hulks, they remained moored at their eatery, ever growing and ever becoming encrusted with barnacles. When last reported on by the captain, which was back in 1916 during the shark scare, when he told his whopper to the New York Times, they were each about 50 feet long, and hardly looked like sharks at all, so barnacle- covered were they. Some day, perhaps, they will have grown so large that they’ll become a menace to navigation and will have to be sunk. Or maybe some enterprising fishermen will colonize them and make a fortune fishing those very fishy waters. Many sharks that followed sailing ships were neither jokes nor tall tales. A steady diet of galley garbage flowed in the ships’ wakes, and any shark that picked up the scent of such an easy meal would follow a ship for weeks. Sharks even bit off the brass rotators of the “patent logs” ships trailed behind them to register their speed. One of the earliest English-language references to shark attacks occurs in a 1580 Fugger News-Letter, which gives this eye-witness ac- count of how a seaman virtually fell into the jaws of a shark, somewhere between Portugal and India: When a man fell from our ship into the sea during a strong wind, so that we could not wait for him or come to his rescue in any other fashion, we threw out to him on a rope a wooden block, especially prepared for that purpose, and this he finally managed to grasp and thought he could save himself thereby. But when our crew drew this block with the man toward the ship and had him within half the carrying distance of a musket shot, there appeared from below the surface of the sea a large monster called Tiburon, it rushed on the man and tore him to pieces before our very eyes. That surely was a grievous death. Ships’ logs recount many similar tragedies, but there were some close races which the mariners won. The captain of the Ayrshire fell overboard during a cruise in 1850. His valiant Newfoundland dog leaped into the sea to save him. A shark headed for them, but, according to the log, both the captain and the dog were saved. The captain was unscathed. The dog’s tail was bitten off. Many a sailor who died aboard ship and whose body was buried at sea found his tomb in the belly of a shark. The superstition grew that sharks somehow knew when a man was about to die, and the appearance of sharks in the wake of a ship came to be considered an omen of death. When an epidemic of yellow fever or cholera broke out aboard a ship, the superstitious believed that sharks would stay with the accursed ship until the epidemic had claimed its last victim. One skipper who sailed out of San Francisco many years ago added to the legend. He often carried an unusual cargo—the bodies of Chinese who died in the United States, and, according to ancient custom, had to be buried in China. Shark Devils—and Gods 149 A painting which one critic says “stands alone in its age,’ Brook Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley, was painted in 1778. Watson, who later became Lord Mayor of London, lost a leg in the attack, which occurred in Havana Harbor. It is said that when, as Lord Mayor, he was asked about his leg, he delighted in mystifying his friends by simply saying, “It was bit off!” Copley’s painting was commissioned by Watson himself. He also commemorated the accident in his family crest, which shows a shark being repelled as it seizes its prey. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts. Boston The skipper swore that on voyages when he carried corpses his ship was followed by a pack of sharks, which were able to detect the corpses even though they lay in lead-lined coffins deep in the hold. The shark pack, he insisted, never appeared when he carried a less funereal cargo. The seaman’s dread of sharks, oddly enough, has not spawned a superstition against naming ships Shark. Six United States Navy ships, in fact, have been called Shark. The first, a 198-ton schooner of 12 guns, was launched in 1821 and had for her first commanding officer a young lieutenant named Matthew Calbraith Perry. Three decades later, as Commodore Perry, he would lead the first American mission to Japan. During his rather undistinguished career aboard the Shark, Perry took epumal: possession for the United States of what was to become one of the country’s best-known shark-fishing spots: Key West, Forida. The other five vessels named Shark by the Navy were all submarines. 150 Man and Shark The first two, pioneer underwater craft, were retired without having achieved much of a record. The next two Sharks vanished on patrol dur- ing World War II. The sixth Shark, an atomic-powered submarine, was launched in 1960. Sharks appear in several British coats-of-arms.? Sir Brook Watson, Alderman of London, lost a leg from the bite of a shark in the harbor of Havana. The incident was magnificently portrayed by the painter John Singleton Copley in his famed “Watson and the Shark.” But that wasn’t enough for Watson. Created baronet in 1803, he assumed for a crest a demi-triton, grasping a trident and repelling a shark in the act of seizing its prey. The crest of the family of Molton has a shark’s head regardant, swallowing a Negro. A similar crest was granted to the Garmston family. A shark issuant regardant, swallowing a man, is the crest of the family of Yeates of Ireland. Argent, three dog- fish in pale sable, are the arms of the family of Gesse. Dogfish also appear in the arms of the family of Malvish. A demi- (or half) dogfish sable is the crest of the family of Meer of Dorsetshire. A shark posing as a mermaid guards the little town of Bregenz, Aus- tria, on the shore of Lake Constance. How it got there, no one knows. The mermaid hangs in an archway. Legend says she has been hanging there since the thirteenth century when Bregenz was suffering from al- most constant sieges by German armies and an almost continual series of plagues. One day a fisherman drew in his net at Lake Constance and found a mermaid. He was going to throw her back when a voice from the lake cried out: “Take my daughter and hang her in the Arch of Martinster. She is begat of a land woman and is of no use here.” Fearing to disobey the Spirit of the Lake, the fisherman followed the eerie command. The next morning, the mermaid was found dead. In her struggles, she had twisted into a grotesque shape. Her death, ac- cording to the legend, resulted in a century of peace and prosperity for Bregenz. The mermaid, still frozen in her death throes, hangs in the archway today. She is a shark. Dr. Denys W. Tucker, formerly of the British Museum (Natural History), in correspondence with one of the authors, tentatively identified the mermaid, from a photograph, as a mummified Porbeagle shark. Did it come from Lake Constance? That possibility is as unlikely as the mermaid legend. But to this day no one knows how a shark, and a mummified one at that, came to be hung from an arch in an Austrian town so far from the sea. * Sharks and rays also are found on postage stamps of French Somaliland, Ifni, Eritrea, Tristan da Cunha, Gibraltar, Spanish Guinea, and Kenya. Hanging in an archway in the Austrian town of Bregenz is this “Mermaid of Bregenz,” whose appearance after being hauled from nearby Lake Constance saved Bregenz from a plethora of perils, according to a thirteenth-century legend. The “mermaid” actually a shark, but how it turned up in a lakeside town is a 700-year-old mystery. The original mummified shark has been replaced by a stone replica, so that the town’s guardian will remain in perpetuity. Courtesy, R. B. C. Twidale Apparently there is nowhere that a shark—or a tale of a shark—can- not find its way. For centuries, sailors’ imaginations, fired by superstition, terror, and a yen for a good yarn, have spun tale after tale about sharks. Some of these tales die hard, so it should be made a matter of record that sharks do not nurse their young, produce ambergris, or beat whales to death with their tails. Nor, sad to relate, is there any basis for Mark Twain’s great story that, by catching in Australia a shark that had swallowed a newspaper in London 10 days before, Cecil Rhodes fortuitously obtained advance information about the wool market and thus began to amass his vast fortune. 152 Man and Shark But stranger than all the tall tales inspired by sharks, more incredible than any sharky yarn told by a fibber of the foc’sle, are the true stories that have starred sharks. Crimes have been revealed and mysteries raised from the deep by the shark’s habit of gulping down whatever passes before its mouth. Shark-delivered mail of a grim sort was reported by Italian fishermen in 1952. They said they had found a bottle in a shark they had caught, and in the bottle was a letter a French fisherman, dying alone on a life- raft, had written as a farewell to his wife and children. Sharks have three times ferreted out crimes which undoubtedly would never have been detected without their aid. Each of these true stories is well documented, and each is based, not on rumor or legend, but on the chronicles of courts and the footnotes of history. Truth from the Jaws of a Shark: On July 3, 1799, the Nancy, a brig of 125 tons, slipped out of Baltimore and into the Chesapeake, bound south for forbidden waters. The Nancy, an American ship, was barred from where she was going, the British West Indies. But her owners had hit upon a scheme to disguise her true identity. She sailed first to Curagao, a Dutch colony in the West Indies, where she obtained fraudulent ownership papers indicating that she was owned by a Dutchman. With these papers, she sailed on. But, on August 28th, she was overtaken by a British cutter, H.M.S. Sparrow. The cutter’s cap- tain, Lieutenant Hugh Wylie, was unimpressed by the Dutch papers. He put a prize crew aboard the Nancy and ordered it taken to Port Royal, Jamaica, where the case could be settled in the Court of Vice-Ad- miralty. Meanwhile, the crew of another British vessel, the Ferret, caught a shark, in whose jaws were found the papers of an American ship—the Nancy. By chance, the captain of the Ferret invited Lieutenant Wylie aboard for breakfast around the time the shark was captured. Wylie examined the shark-produced papers and immediately perceived the fraudulence of the Dutch “ownership” papers he had sealed with his own hand when he sent the Nazcy to Port Royal. The “Shark Papers,” as they came to be called, were introduced into court in time to prove the true ownership of the Nancy, and, on Novem- ber 25th, 1799, she and her cargo were condemned as a prize. When the case ended, the shark’s jaws, which measured 22 inches at their widest point, were set up on shore in Kingston as a warning to perjurers that the truth can be found, even if it is sunk in the sea. And with the jaws was a sign that said: “Lieutenant Fitton recommends these jaws for a collar for neutrals to swear through.” The “Shark Papers” are still on exhibit in the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. Shark Devils—and Gods 153 The Witness Was a Shark: In November, 1915, the U.S. Government brought to trial, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, four executives of the Hamburg-American Steamship Com- pany. They were charged with violation of U.S. customs laws. But, in effect, they were being tried to put on record Germany’s use of neutral American ports by falsely registered freighters that were used to carry supplies to German U-boats and raiders. In his opening statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert B. Wood told how a Norwegian ship, the Gladstone, had been given a provisional registry as the Costa Rican ship Marina Quesada and, on December 16, 1914, had sailed from Newport News, Virginia. Ostensibly, she was headed for Valparaiso, Chile. Actually her mission was to rendezvous with German raiders. Early in January, 1915, Wood said, the ship’s Costa Rican flag was hauled down and a Norwegian flag was run up. The name Marina Quesada was painted out, and Gladstone was once more painted on her bows and counter. And, as the Gladstone, after some minor adventures and misad- ventures, she anchored in the harbor of Pernambuco (now Recife), Brazil. “And there,” Wood recounted, “the customs authorities demanded the ship’s papers, and the Captain, after giving several excuses, put the papers in a leather pouch and got in a small boat and dropped the papers overboard. “Now, gentlemen, I do not vouch for this story, but one of the wit- nesses says that the crew of a Brazilian warship lying alongside the Marina Quesada killed a shark, and in the belly of the shark ‘they found the ship’s ee At all events, we have not been able to get hold of the papers.’ The witness was John Olson, chief engineer of the ship. He told, on the stand, the story of the ship’s masquerade and its arrival in Brazil. He said that the captain of the ship had dropped the papers as he entered a small boat that was to carry him to shore. Later, Olson testified, the captain told the first mate about the incident and said: “Did you see the trick I done?” “Did you see any of the ship’s papers again? Olson was asked on the stand. A. I seen the handbag; yes, sir. . Whereabouts? In a news office in Pernambuco. . Did you ever see any of the papers? No, sir. . Did you leave the ship there? Yes, sir. FO FOD PO 154 Man and Shark At this point in Olson’s testimony, according to the New York Times account of the trial, Olson seemed about to say more. But, “to his evident great disappointment,” the Times reported, “Olson was not allowed to tell of the ship’s papers being found on the inside of a shark.” Thus, the mystery of the shark of Recife was never cleared up, at least publicly. There is no record of it, so far as the authors’ researches could determine, in newspaper files in Recife today. And there is no record, other than the scant remarks in Wood’s opening statement, in the transcript of the trial. But, even with the shark as only a phantom witness, the story of the Gladstone-Marina Quesada was put into the record, along with many details of the German government’s flagrant violations of U.S. neutrality—and the four Hamburg-American executives were found guilty. The Shark Arm Mystery: A Sydney, Australia, fisherman named Al- bert Hobson hauled up his fishing line, and lifted the curtain on the weird- est murder drama Australia had even known. Hobson had set his bait about a mile off Coogee—a popular Sydney bathing beach—on April 17th, 1935. Now it was the following morning and, when he pulled in his line, he saw that he had caught not one, but two sharks. A small shark apparently had taken the bait during the night. Then, not too long before Hobson arrived in his boat, a 14-foot Tiger shark had nearly devoured the smaller one, whose remains were still on the hook. The Tiger, still dangerously alive, had entangled itself in Hob- son’s line. Hobson and his brother Charles managed to get the big shark ashore. With the help of spectators who had watched the capture from the beach, the two brothers dragged the shark across a stretch of sand to the Coogee Aquarium. By the time it was placed in the aquarium pool, the shark looked more dead than alive. For 24 hours it lay in the pool, apparently lifeless. Oxygen was pumped into the pool. This seemed to help. By April 20th, two days after its capture, it was eating all the fish thrown to it. Even in Sydney, where sharks have never been uncommon, the Tiger in Coogee Aquarium was a mild sensation, and the exhibit was crowded every day. Like a terrestrial tiger in a cage, the shark “stalked” from one end of the pool to the other in an unceasing search for escape from its prison. Then, on April 24th, the shark stopped eating. It began to languish; it hardly moved. On April 25th, while 14 persons stood at the pool watching the list- less shark, it suddenly came to life. It lashed the water with its tail. It charged into the side of the pool. It rushed to the shallow end of the pool and whirled about in eccentric circles. A brown, foul-smelling scum en- veloped it. One of the spectators was standing about 10 feet from the Shark Devils—and Gods 15) shark when this happened. He saw the dark cloud erupt around the shark. And he saw, emerging out of the cloud and slowly rising to the surface, the remains of a rat... the body of a sea bird that eerily floated to the surface on dead wings . . . and, disembodied, seemingly beckoning to the gasping spectators—a human arm, with a rope tied around its wrist. The arm was taken to the city morgue, where Dr. Arthur Palmer, the government medical officer, examined it. The arm—the left arm of a muscular man—was intact and remarkably well preserved. On its fore- arm was a tattoo of two boxers confronting each other, one in blue trunks, the other in red. A 6-inch rope was tightly knotted about its wrist. The knot was a seaman’s knot, a clove hitch. Dr. Palmer called in Dr. V. M. Coppleson, a Sydney surgeon, for consultation. Coppleson, who had been making a detailed study of shark- bite wounds, saw immediately that the arm had not been ripped from the man’s body by a shark. It had been cleanly severed at the shoulder by a knife, wielded by a skillful butcher. No surgeon had done it, for the usual procedures in surgical amputation had not been followed. A medical student could have severed the arm from a cadaver and, either the arm had somehow been dropped in the sea, or a prankster with a grisly sense of humor had thrown it into the aquarium pool. Both possibilities were quickly ruled out. Spectators at the pool recounted their story of seeing the shark regurgitate the arm, inquiries at medical schools established that no cadavers or portions of cadavers were miss- ing. The shark was killed. A few fish bones and part of a small shark were found, but there were no other human remains, not even a shred of clothing. So the arm was the only clue to the man’s identity. A Sydney police fingerprint expert was given the assigment of identi- fying the arm. It was a ghoulish task. The shriveled fingertips could yield no prints. The skin was peeled off the hand, treated chemically to remove its wrinkles, and fashioned into a kind of glove, from which prints could be made. The prints matched those of James Smith, a former amateur boxer who ran a billiard parlor in Rozelle, a Sydney suburb. Smith’s prints were on file in Sydney because he had been arrested three years earlier for illegal betting, a not particularly unusual offense in Australia. Smith was known to be a friend of several criminals, but he himself was not considered to be a criminal by the Sydney police. Smith’s brother, Ed- ward, identified the arm by the tattoo. William Prior, superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the New South Wales police force, knew he was looking for a murderer, but he could not even prove that a murder had been committed. A shark 156 Man and Shark had disgorged the arm of a man named Smith. Smith had disappeared. The arm, carefully preserved as the Crown’s only evidence of a crime, was not enough to warrant an inquest. The coroner could not assume that Smith was dead until other parts of his body were found. In a quiet way (he was called “William the Silent” by reporters), Prior enlisted the aid of Gilbert Percy Whitley, shark expert of the Australian Museum in Sydney, and probably the first ichthyologist ever called into a murder investigation. Whitley was asked to gather all possible scientific data on the food and physiology of digestion of sharks, particularly the Tiger. Prior knew that, if the case ever came to court, the Crown prosecutor would have to tell an incredible tale. Only the scientific evidence Whitley was gathering could make the tale credible to a jury. While the ichthyological phase of the murder investigation was pressed by Whitley, detectives went about the more familiar job of look- ing for a killer. The detectives soon unearthed a series of interesting facts: (1) Smith, a pool-hall operator, had been involved in some seemingly shady business deals with one Reginald William Holmes—a wealthy Sydney boat-builder. When questioned by the police, Holmes admitted knowing Smith and giving him money for business purposes. That was all. (2) Smith had last been seen in the company of Patrick Brady. The two men had stayed in a cottage in the fishing town of Cronulla. The landlord reported that after they left the cottage, a trunk, a mattress, some rope and sash cords were missing. (These articles were never seen again.) He also stated that he had found a can of evil-smelling liquid in the cottage, which he thought was blood. An alarm went out for Patrick Brady. After questioning him, the police charged him with the murder of James Smith. Four days later the police received a startling phone call: Reginald Holmes was racing his boat around Sydney Harbor with a bullet in his head. When they caught up with Holmes he was babbling incoherently—“‘Jimmy Smith is dead. I’m nearly dead, and there is only one other left.”” But Holmes did not die—then. An x-ray picture show ed that a .32-caliber bullet had flattened itself against the unusually thick frontal bone of his skull. He was re~ leased from the hospital several days later. That same night he was found murdered in his car. Now the police had two murders to deal with. The Crown’s case was shaky in each instance. It was almost impossible to make the charge against Brady stick: there was no body; there was no known date of death; there were no clues as to how Smith was murdered. Fingerprints found in Holmes’s car belonged to a business associate who admitted using the car many times. Each man was tried and acquitted. To get a clearer idea of what happened to Smith and Holmes we must return to the “avenging arm” disgorged by the shark. What the arm told was interpreted in this way: Shark Devils—and Gods See Smith had been killed. His body had been disposed of, somehow . . all but the arm. Either it had eluded the oblivion to which the rest of Smith’s body had been consigned (his body was never found), or it had been used as gruesome proof of the deed to the man who had wanted Smith killed. Then, a rope knotted about its wrist and a weight tied to the other end of the rope, it had been hurled, probably from a boat, into the sea. The arm floated near the sea bottom at the end of its tether, gro- tesquely beckoning a relatively small shark which smelled the fresh blood. The shark circled warily, then seized the arm as it would have seized a fish—with one, swift lunge. If the arm had been floating on the surface, the shark would probably have snapped at it, tearing it and obliterating the fingerprints and the tell-tale tattoo which disclosed the arm’s identity. But, tethered as it was, the arm was scooped intact into the shark, whose jaws clamped down on and parted the rope that held the arm. Soon after finding the arm, the shark discovered Albert Hobson’s bait, lunged for it, and was hooked. The shark’s struggles were detected by a 14-foot Tiger shark, which immediately sensed easy prey. Again, the wary approach, again, the swift thrust; again, huge jaws scooped instead of seizing. This time, however, the shark meets resistance as it attempts to bolt down its meal intact. The Tiger’s prey is held by the big hook. The Tiger’s jaws rip and tear near the hook. (Perhaps the Tiger itself is temporarily snared by the same hook—as often happens.) It begins thrashing, entangling itself in the slackened line. And it is held fast. Fortunately, before the Tiger’s own struggles draw other _ sharks to the scene, Hobson arrives, captures it, and brings it ashore. Why didn’t the first shark’s potent digestive secretions disintegrate the arm? Why was the arm so remarkably well preserved? The theories are many. Perhaps the sudden death of the first small shark suspended its digestive process and, when it in turn was devoured, its own body may have acted as a protective casing, shielding the arm from effacement by the Tiger shark’s digestive system. Smith was murdered, apparently, some time around the middle of April. (He arrived in Cronulla on April 7th and was last seen by the landlord “a few days” later.) The shark was caught on April 18th. The arm was disgorged on April 25th. Australian physicians and police have authenticated several cases of preservation of human remains in sharks for even longer periods than this. Thus did investigators recount the bizarre odyssey of Smith’s aveng- ing arm. But the arm that had revealed a murder was never to lead justice to the murderer. Instead, the arm led justice down a laby- 1) a There are some who say that the shark disclosed the murder of 158 Man and Shark James Smith in vain, for no man was ever convicted of the slaying, and no court of law ever learned the true story of how and why James Smith was killed. But those who have studied the incredible case have raised the question of whether Reginald Holmes was behind the murder. And, when the arm fatefully appeared, mutely demanding justice, was it like a wraith clutching at Holmes? He tried to still the torment in his soul by killing himself. But it was not to be that easy. Murder had conjured up the arm, and, when Holmes left his home on the night of his death, murder—a propitiating murder—may have been what he sought. Perhaps he kept a tryst with murder. No matter who actually killed the haunted Holmes, the arm from the shark brought about his death just as surely as if its accusing hand had pulled a trigger. Chapter 7 Shark-Eating Men Sharks as food? Yes! Salted, smoked, kippered, flaked, or shredded, the flesh of many species of shark is delicious. Fresh shark meat often has an offensive odor, because of the large quantities of urea in it. This can be removed by soaking the meat in brine. Shark has a tendency to spoil more quickly than many other fish. With proper prepa- ration, however, spoiling can be prevented. Skates and rays also yield good food, and are considered a delicacy in some countries. The Barndoor skate (Raja laevis) is sold as food along the U.S. Atlantic coast. A close European relative, the Common skate (Raja batis), is an important European food fish. The California skate (Raja inornata) is eaten on the Pacific Coast. In 1961, an English translation of Larousse Gastronomique—the epic book of French cuisine—was published in the United States (by Crown Publishers, Inc.). This encyclopedic book, which lists 8,500 recipes— including some for bear claws and lapwing eggs—all but dismisses shark. But it devotes considerable space to such skate dishes as jellied skate, skate liver fritters, and foie de rate. Compared to other fishes, shark is not a very popular food in the United States. In 1959, for instance, 6,202,000 pounds of shark, worth about $162,000, were landed at public fish markets in the United States and sold as such. This may sound impressive, until compared with, say, cod. In the same year, 59,809,000 pounds of cod worth $3,976,000 were landed in the United States. And cod accounted for barely 1 per cent of the more than 5 billion pounds of fish landed in the United States in that year. On the other hand, seven sharks, including the dreaded Great White, and three rays, including a sting ray (Dasyatis sabina), are regularly caught and eaten in Texas, according to the Texas Fish and Game Com- mission. Statistics tell only part of the story. Some of the shark eaten in this country does not appear on the dinner plate as shark. When a commercial fish marketer is offered, say, some Mackerel shark, he may be seized by a temptation to bestow disguised shark upon his customers. He need only chop off the shark’s head, tail, and fins, then cut it into steaks. These 159 160 Man and Shark A skate is visible in front of the lobster in this eighteenth-century painting, The Fish Merchant, sometimes ascribed to Hogarth, but probably painted by Joseph van Aken. Courtesy, The Clerk to the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, London steaks can be sold as swordfish steaks, and few people will know the difference. Similarly, some fish marketers wield a device like a cookie-cutter on the pliable, fleshy wings of skates. The disk that is punched out looks, to an untrained eye, very much like a scallop. A true aficionado of scallops would detect the counterfeit, although it tastes good. (It must be labeled “Deep Sea Scallop,” or by some other name, to be of- fered legally.) In some U.S. fish markets, dogfish are sold as “grayfish” and skates are sold as “rajafish.” Mako sharks and possibly other species may be legally marketed as “swordfish” in some areas, but the extent of these laws is not clear. One day in the summer of 1944, a patron in a Long Beach, California, restaurant, looked coldly at some fish being sold as white sea bass, Cali- fornia halibut, barracuda, and salmon. The salmon looked particularly suspicious, but all of the fish, the patron knew, was actually Soupfin shark Shark-Eating Men 161 (Galeorhinus zyopterus), sliced into fillets. The customer happened to be William Ellis Ripley of the California State Bureau of Marine Fisheries. “Upon questioning,” Ripley later reported, “the owner of the es- tablishment admitted that the fillets sold for salmon had been treated with food coloring to simulate the color of salmon tissue. Elsewhere throughout the state, shark has been misrepresented as various other species . . . Even in a fishery port such as Santa Barbara, entrepreneurs have been known to pass off Bonito, Thresher and Soupfin shark as halibut, rockfish, cod, etc.” Ripley emphasized in his report on the misnamed sharks that “there is no sound nutritional, esthetic, or scientific basis for the reluctance at- tached to the consumption of sharks.” But he pointed out that connois- seurs of other kinds of fishes, while not able to tell that they are eating shark, may feel that the halibut, say, is not quite up to par. “A few such experiences and the halibut customer is lost to the trade,” Ripley said. “Therefore, if for no other reason than to maintain their integrity before the fish consuming public, the industry should attempt to restrain these perfidies.” For many years, Italian and Chinese immigrants and their descendants have for all practical purposes been keeping the U.S. shark market alive. Of the 70,000 to 80,000 pounds of dogfish (generally Squalus acanthias ) sold each year in New York City’s sprawling Fulton Fish Market—larg- est wholesale fish market on the Atlantic Coast—almost all are sold to customers of Italian extraction. On both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, customers of Chinese extraction support a shark market with their demands for fins for their cherished sharkfin soup. In recent years, according to U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries statistics, the annual receipts of dogfish and rajafish have been increasing at the Fulton Fish Market, and no one knows why. In 1950, dogfish landings totaled 54,800 pounds; in 1960, the dogfish catch amounted to 88,600 pounds. During the same period, rajafish receipts rose from 71,500 to 120,600 pounds, while fish sold as just plain shark * dropped from 69,800 pounds in 1950 to 23,500 in 1960. Why did shark sales drop while dogfish and rajafish sales increased? One possible answer is given by T. J. Risoli, supervisory market news reporter of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries: “We do not know the specific reasons for the sharp drop in shark receipts here, but we believe it is probably due to the unfavorable light the shark has been seen in as a result of injuries to swimmers.” That, of course, is the major reason people do not eat shark in the 1 The Bureau of Commercial Fisheries does not include species designation in its report. 162 Man and Shark United States. Sheep, cows, pigs—and dogfish and skates—do not attack living people (though both dogfish and pigs will eat corpses). So no one feels queasy about eating them. As a matter of fact, the sharks which can and do occasionally attack bathers are not especially good as food. The notorious Great White shark, for instance, is rwmored to be poisonous; and so are others. Reports of poisonous sharks are recorded as far back as 1758 in France, and to the earliest times in some Pacific islands. But the basis for many of these reports is difficult to find. On Saipan, because of a taboo on all black fish and most red fish, the Black-Tipped Sand shark (Carcharhinus melanopterus) is not eaten, yet, on Guam, where no such taboo exists, it is eaten. The Six-Gill shark (Hexanchus griseum) is sold as food in California, but is eaten in Germany not so much as food but as a strong purgative! Mantas (Mobula) are eaten in tropical American ports, but some Pacific islanders believe that he who eats the Manta sups with the Devil—and they won’t touch it. We may look patronizingly upon such quaint superstitions, but the fact is that an equally irrational prejudice is keeping shark off American tables. Attempts to make Americans shark-eaters have usually gone aground on the shoals of such prejudice, or have been scuttled by bad timing. The U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, for instance, was readying an elaborate sharks-are-good-for-you campaign in 1916. Then came the New Jersey shark attacks. After the panic touched off by four killings and one non-fatal attack in rapid succession, apparently no one wanted to contemplate a shark on his dinner table. After America’s entry into World War I, another campaign was launched. At the request of the War Food Administration and the still willing Bureau of Fisheries, the well-known fish cannery, Gorton’s of Gloucester, was asked to try canning dogfish. According to F. M. Bundy, president of the firm, “The product looked good and apparently was satisfactory until, a short while after the canning, the fish developed a strong ammonia odor when the cans were opened. This resulted in more being returned than were shipped. Naturally, we have steered away from it since.” Teddy Roosevelt thought that sharks tasted bully, and said so pub- licly, to try to get people to eat shark meat during World War I. Roose- velt called for an endorsement from one of his friends, Russe!l J. Coles, long-time watcher and catcher of sharks in the Carolinas. Coles boasted that he had sampled no less than 18 varieties of shark and ray. At Roose- velt’s behest, Coles replied to the inevitable question—What does shark taste like? —with the following enthusiastic answer: “Nurse shark, fairly good for food, although tougher than most species; Smooth Dogfish, one of the most delicious fish that exists, Cub Shark-Eating Men 163 shark, of strong odor, but, when specially prepared, suitable for food; Hammerhead shark, a crowning dish for dinner; Bonnet-Nosed shark, ranks well up as food; Sandbar shark, most desirable for food; Barndoor skate, excellent for food; Clear-Nose skate or Brier ray, good eating, similar to shrimp; Small Electric ray, flavor delicious; Large Sting ray, good for food; Sand skate or Butterfly ray, good, Spotted Sting ray, ex- cellent, flavor similar to bluefish, Cow-Nosed ray, flavor similar to scal- lops; Eagle ray, excellent, with the flavor of scallops; Small Devilfish, delicious.” But the combined efforts of Cole’s eulogy of cooked shark, Roose- velt’s fervent defense of it—and even sheer patriotism—did not get Americans to eat shark. It seems to take something as colossal as a world war to get Ameri- cans even to think about eating shark. In World War II, once again the Bureau of Fisheries called upon the meat-rationed public to build up their protein intake by eating all kinds of fish, including shark. One of the authors, Captain Young, was delegated to catch a batch of sharks to start the nation’s second wartime sharks-are-good-for-you campaign. Captain Young recalls, I had an order to send a thousand pounds of fresh shark to a New York corporation for distribution to their customers. I went shark fishing on the Gulf of Mexico, off Biloxi, Mississippi, and caught Duskies, Black Tip and Sharp-Nose by hand line from shrimp boats. The shrimp men throw millions of pounds of what they call “trash fish” into the water when they sift through their catches for shrimp. The sharks were abundant. When I caught the sharks, I used a trick I knew to make their flesh whiter. I cut their tails off as soon as they were hauled aboard. The blood drains out of their bodies through two big arteries that lead to the tail. As soon as we got ashore, I shipped the sharks to New York by express, on dry ice. They arrived in perfect shape, and, I found out later, most of the customers liked what they tasted. But, knowing that there was a prejudice against the word “Shark,” the com- pany decided to sell the fish under the name of “Grayfish.” But the government ordered the company to sell the shark as shark, and that was the end of that. The camouflaging of shark with another name is a ruse that has been used—and is still being used—in many parts of the world. The British have been eating shark and skate for centuries, at times under disguised names. An anonymous Elizabethan poet, chronicling the fish “‘that’s eata- ble to us,” rhapsodizes the herring, cod, mackerel, sole, and whiting; then, in a wretched rhyme, says: The haddock, turbet, berb, fish nourishing and strong; The thornback and the scate, provocative among. 164 Man and Shark That last line, which mentions the Thornback skate (Raja clavata) and presumably the Common skate (Raja batis), may not be very poetic, but it is candid. And it establishes that Elizabethans called a skate a “scate.” Shakespeare also referred to sharks, though not in ways that complimented them as food. The recipe for witches’ stew in Macbeth calls for Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark. And dogfish found its way into Henry VI, Part One, though only as an ingredient of a complex pun. When Talbot is speaking angrily about the slaying of Salisbury before Orleans, he vows revenge: Frenchmen, lll be a Salisbury to you: Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish, Your Hearts I'll stamp out with my horse’s heels And make a quagmire of your mingled brains. Dogfish was used commonly in Shakespeare’s time as an opprobrious epithet. Dolphin was a pun on the Dauphin of France. Elizabethans ate a variety of selachian dishes, and, when the export- ing of fishes to the Continent drove domestic prices up, British fish eaters became angry men. In 1578, a group of them drew up a stirring petition which began: Whereas divers kinds of sea fishes, as congers, hakes, pilchards, skates, rays, thornebags [Thornback skates], papillions [Butterfly rays], and dogs [ dogfish } being necessary victuals for the people of this realm . . . now of late altered from their kinds by curing without salt or otherwise converting them into gross oils, for the contention of foreign realms and to the great increase of dearth and lack and penury of this realm . . Some of the methods of preparing skates and dogfish in the British Isles in the old days would paralyze a modern palate. In the Shetland Islands of Scotland, skate was buried in the ground to cure it, and it was said to have an unusual flavor after its resurrection. In the Highlands, “sour skate” was produced by simply hanging skates up to dry for a few days in the open air. Dogfish was also skinned, to prevent identifica- tion, then cut open, dried outdoors, and sold as a special kind of salmon! Perhaps because of sour skates and phony salmon, the eating of sharks and skates eventually became unpopular in Britain. The modern emergence of shark as a British food fish came around 1904, during an industrial depression. Fried fish retailers, looking for a cheap fish they could sell to the poor and still make a profit, discovered that they could buy dogfish for as Shark-Eating Men 165 A Fishmonger’s Shop, painted by Alex Fraser in 1812, shows two skates in the fore- ground, proving then—as now—that skates were on the British menu. Courtesy, Lord Leverhulme little as two shillings for 140 pounds. The fried fish sellers dubbed the dogfish “Rock Salmon,” and, with a side order of fried potato chips, sold portions of it for one and a half pence, which is about as cheap as a meal could be. Dogfish—the Rock Salmon pseudonym did not fool people very long—failed to catch on, especially when better times came to the poor and a man could afford more than a penny and a half for a square meal. 166 Man and Shark By the eve of World War I, dogfish had become victims of prosperity. Cursed as trash, they were thrown away by the fishermen unlucky enough to land them. But, just as grass is always greener in the yard next door, so, ap- parently, are sharks more tasty from foreign waters. For, around 1922, the English began importing dogfish from Norway, even though British waters abounded with them. The Norwegian dogfish, well packed and in prime condition, again found a ready market among the fish ’n’ chips merchants. The merchants claimed that the dogfish were fine for frying because they absorbed less oil. Put a mess of dogfish in a deep-fat fryer, the merchants said, and the dogfish would use up less fat than a comparable weight of bony fish. Today, more than 17,000,000 pounds of dogfish and 24,000,000 pounds of skates and rays are landed in Great Britain each year, much of the catch finding its way into London’s Billingsgate Market, the acre of fish and fishmongers which has been noisily supplying Englishmen with their fish for centuries. A single boat in a single day may land as much as a ton of salable dogfish. In official publications and in fishery reports, the catches are frankly described as dogfish, skate, and ray. The old habit of disguising the selachians with fanciful names still persists, however. Good old “rock salmon” is still used, along with “nursehound,”? “flake” and “huss.” No longer fashionable, probably because it was just a bit too much, is “Folkestone beef.” Calling upon Britishers to face the dogfish name problem squarely, a Member of Parliament recently went on record with a plea for stand- ardizing shark nomenclature. He lamented the habit of calling all species of sharks by the same name, dogfish. Spur dogfish, he orated, is “sweet and nutritious”; Sandy dogfish is “quite good to eat.” But some kinds of dogfish, he thundered, “smell like a polecat.” The honorable MP’s confusion is shared by many an Englishman, for no less than six species of vaguely named sharks are eaten in Great Britain, and some of them, at times, do smell like polecats. The pungency of one has led to its being nicknamed “Sweet William,” after a British flower that has a pleasant scent. The British common and scientific names of the dogfish regularly marketed as food in England are: the Pinked dogfish (Squalus acanthias), Lesser Spotted dogfish (Scyllium canicula), and Greater Spotted dogfish (Scyllium catulus). Today, in the more than 17,000 fish ’n’ chips shops that flourish in Britain, dogfish and skates are among the most popular fish. But sharply distinguished geographical zones have somehow sprung up to 2 This is a “popular” name for all dogfish in the British Isles. Shark-Eating Men 167 separate one area’s “fish” in fish ’n’ chips from another area’s “fish.” Cod seems to cut across all geographical lines. Hake is used in the shops of Lancashire and South Wales; haddock is preferred in Leeds and in the industrial areas of Yorkshire; small haddock appears in Scottish shops. In London and the south of England, skate and dogfish still reign supreme, however. In Ireland, the fleshy “wings” of skates and rays are the mainstays of fish ’n’ chips shops. For many years, Italy imported Porbeagle sharks from Scandinavia. When Benito Mussolini rose to power, however, he forbade the import- ing of alien sharks, apparently because he did not want Italians disparaged as shark-eaters. Despite I] Duce’s edict, Norwegian and Danish sharks were smuggled into Italy. Nowadays, although some 60 species of sharks, skates, and rays can be found in Italian waters, the Italians are once more importing Scandinavian sharks. Most of the Norwegian and Danish catch of Porbeagle shark (Lama nasus)—over 1,000,000 pounds a year— is iced and shipped to Italy. Norway, which has solved the problem of preserving fresh shark, has a long list of customers for its millions of pounds of sharks, skates, and rays. Norwegian exports of selachians for January to June, 1961, included more than 4,000,000 pounds of dogfish to Great Britain and Northern Ireland and about 2,000,000 pounds more to Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, France, Italy, and West Germany. Another 5,000,000 pounds of frozen dogfish were sold to most of these countries, along with East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Norway also exported some 500,000 pounds of skates and rays during that six-month period. Norway has perfected a process for preserving dogfish and keeping them in nearly perfect condition for long periods of time. The sharks are cleaned and the belly walls are cut away. They are then packed in boxes in an alginate jelly and placed in refrigerators at a temperature of —15°C. for 24 to 36 hours. The fish are frozen solid, but the jelly is not. The jelly forms a protective coating in which the fish may be preserved indefinitely. The fish can thus be removed singly from the packing boxes as they are sold. This is the first process that has enabled packers to preserve shark in a fresh state. In Norway, the eggs of the dogfish (Squalus acanthias) and of skates are used in puddings as a substitute for hen’s eggs. As a matter of fact, the eggs of this dogfish contain more yolk than do hen’s eggs. More than 2,500,000 pounds of shark were landed in Germany in 1959. Porbeagle sharks are sold in the markets at prices more than twice as high as those for plaice (a flounder) and nearly four times higher than cod. Other species of shark are among the cheapest fish, selling for about the equivalent of a penny a pound, or slightly above the going 168 Man and Shark price for herring. Some sharks are marketed under the trade name “Sea Belk? Norway ships iced belly-walls of dogfish to Germany, where they are prepared by smoking. During the smoking, they curl up. These are a delicacy called Schillerlocken, after the long, flowing curls affected by the poet Schiller. Usually sold packaged, they are a popular food in thousands of homes. In Denmark and Sweden, the tender meat of the Thornback or Thorny Maid skate (Raja clavata) is savored as a substitute for lobster. About 500,000 pounds of Thornbacks are caught each year in Denmark alone. The Common skate (Raja batis), which also ranks with lobster as a seafood on Danish and Swedish tables, is hauled in at the rate of 220,000 pounds a year by Danish fishermen. Such statistics are feeble, however, when the world-wide catch of sharks, skates, and rays is compared to the catch of fishes that are not saddled with prejudice. A United Nations survey of food fish in 1956 showed that selachians accounted for a bare 1 per cent of the world’s total marine and fresh-water harvest. Herring, sardines, and anchovies, by comparison, accounted for 24 per cent. These UN statistics are not wholly reliable, however. Some countries, perhaps because of a piscatorial form of nationalism, do not report any landings of sharks, skates, and rays. One of the authors has seen all these unmentioned selachians on sale in markets of countries whose fisheries reports to the UN are sharkless. In nations where common sense has won out over prejudice, sharks have become a dietary staple, and an extremely nutritious one, too. Analyses of the flesh of a lowly dogfish (Squalus acanthias) have shown that it contains more protein and more energy value per pound than eggs, milk, oysters, mackerel, lobster, or salmon. Yet, in the United States and Canada, this same dogfish is labeled a predator and marked for execution, not for use as food. Since 1956, the Canadian government has been posting a bounty on dogfish in an attempt to eradicate them as a pest. In 1958, President Eisenhower signed a bill authorizing the U.S. Department of the Interior to spend up to $95,000 a year to find new ways to exterminate dogfish or to find some use for them. The fact that some countries have found a use—as food—has been almost totally overlooked in the United States. Driven by an obsession to ex- terminate sharks instead of utilizing them, American fishermen annually destroy tons of dogfish. At a time when a burgeoning population is exhausting traditional food supplies, such wanton destruction of a cheap, abundant, nutritious maritime resource is absurd. The world’s 2,900,000,000 population has almost doubled in the past 70 years and is expected to redouble every Shark-Eating Men 169 42 years from now on, if the current explosion continues at its present phenomenal rate. Population experts believe that only by more efficient exploitation of the riches of the sea can the new mouths be fed. A study of the catch per unit of effort for long-line-caught sharks made during cruises by Pacific Oceanic Fisheries research vessels during 1956 showed that six species are captured commonly and are abundant over wide areas. The White-Tip and the Brown are equatorial; the Mackerel shark less abundant but wide-ranging; the Great Blue very abundant in colder waters; the Bonito shark, scarce; and the Thresher, not uncommon but subject to unknown factors causing it to appear only in certain longi- tudinal belts and nowhere else. All of which indicates that (a) the sharks are there and (b) we know almost nothing about their habits. In the 90 billion acres of ocean that girdle our crowded planet, an incredibly bountiful crop is often unharvested. That crop is fish, a food rich in protein and containing—unlike some forms of protein on land—all the amino-acids essential to the human diet. Yet, while an estimated two out of every three persons on earth are not getting even a minimum protein diet, one of nature’s finest and most readily obtained sources of protein is virtually ignored. Some one billion tons of fish— about 30 times the current world catch—could be landed each year, and not from depleted fishing grounds such as the North Sea. But the technology of fishing remains for the most part on the level of primitive hunting, not on the level of modern farming. But we are awakening, at last, to the fact that more fish must be harvested to feed a famished world. In its Freedom-from-Hunger Campaign, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is seeking ways to catch and use more fish. And among them is the shark. Fortunately, in some countries where the population explosion is particularly critical, sharks are being caught and used for food. Cen- turies ago, Arab fishermen introduced shark fishing to natives along the East African coast. Not until a few years ago, however, was shark fishing carried on as a large-scale commercial venture. To meet the de- mand for a low-priced protein food among Africans in Kenya, the Fish Division of the Kenya Game Department began teaching native fisher- men modern fishing techniques. Hand-made nets of the lowest grade of cotton, quick to tear and rot, were replaced by tough, rot-resistant nylon nets. Modern marketing procedures were introduced. Now a native fishing boat proudly pulls into a port such as Malindi with perhaps 30 or 40 sharks and a couple of Mantas. Some of the flesh is cut into small chunks that are sold for a dime each. And each Friday in Malindi, after midday prayers, the fish auction beings. In a babel of a dozen African and Arabic tongues, dealers bid excitedly for salted 170 Man and Shark A big Hammerhead shark is weighed in Malindi, Kenya, before being cut up for salting and selling. Sharks are sold in a fish auction in Malindi, where tons of sharks are marketed annually. Virtually every bit of the shark is used in some way. The liver oil, for instance, is used in the tanning of leather and also as a wood preservative for native dhows. Courtesy, Veld & Vlei Magazine shark meat. So great is the demand for the food that local waters cannot supply enough, and shark meat is imported. Meat is not the only shark product Kenyans are using. They have learned to use other products from the shark’s ample “larder.” Oil, used for leather tanning and wood preservation, is extracted from the sharks’ livers, fins are exported for sharkfin soup fanciers; from the gelatinous fibers in the fins comes an ingredient for luxury soap; the skin is shipped off to European tanneries to be made into leather; the teeth are sold for novelties; and fertilizer is made out of virtually all that is left. Sharks have made a boom town out of the little South African fishing village of Gansbaai, 115 miles east of Cape Town, on the tip of the great continent. For generations, the fishermen of Gansbaai have been ignoring the sharks off their shore, and Gansbaai remained a sleepy little village. Then, in 1950, a shark industry was begun. Now, on some days, more than 2,000 sharks are delivered to the Gansbaai Fishery Cooperative. The sharks are mostly the familiar Soupfins also found in California waters, and, as once they were in California, the Soupfins (called Vaalhaai in Gansbaai) are tapped for their “gray gold.” Shark-Eating Men 171 The cooperative sells the livers to a pharmaceutical manufacturing company which operates a small oil-extraction plant in the village. About 2,800 pounds of oil are processed each day during the shark-catching season, which runs from April to September. Shark meat, for which many African natives have developed a taste, is shipped to the Congo, Ghana, and Mauritius. Dried fins are exported directly to China. Some fishermen make as much as $56 a day catching sharks—and they are caught the hard way, on hand-lines! With the shark came prosperity. Fishermen’s tiny cottages gave way to larger, more comfortable homes. Big power boats replaced the traditional cockleshell skiffs. Electricity and telephones appeared for the first time in most Gansbaai homes. All because of the shark. The Pacific Ocean teems with sharks. American fishermen using long- lines to catch Pacific tuna have cursed the thousands of sharks that were caught on hooks intended for tuna. In Australia long-lines are used to catch sharks. Out of Melbourne harbor and into Bass Strait, which separates the mainland of Australia from Tasmania, sails a 50-foot boat, especially A huge Sawfish, taken off Malindi, Kenya, is part of the catch which African fishermen hauled in during a regular shark-fishing voyage. The Sawfish broke through the nets, which are usually strong enough to hold the sharks which make up most of the Malindi catches. The nets are of nylon, which are said to be three times more effective than nets made of cotton. One advantage of nylon, besides its strength, is its tendency to blend with the color of the sea. Cotton nets cannot be used in bright moonlight because they show up and the sharks bypass them. Courtesy, Veld & Vlei Magazine 2 Man and Shark designed to catch shark. When the boat reaches the sharking grounds, a winch unwinds the long-line, which has 300 to 500 hooks strung from it. Buoys mark the ends of the lines. This one boat may sow as many as 2,000 hooks for the shark harvest. When the hooks are pulled in by the winch, a three-man crew works with assembly-line speed. As each 4- or 5-foot shark is hauled over the stern, it is swiftly gaffed, unhooked, and beheaded by one man. Another man is working the winch. A third is cleaning the beheaded sharks as they are tossed to him. This is not a pleasant job, for fresh sharks develop an ammonia-like odor and, on a warm day, the odor is so overwhelming that the crewmen often suffer headaches, stiffness of the jaws, and nausea. But the suffering pays off. A catch of 160 sharks is not unusual. Each averages about 22 pounds, dressed. That adds up to 3,520 pounds of fish, and in Melbourne, where more shark is sold than any other variety of fish, the catch would be worth more than $300. Shark was once discreetly called “flake” in Australia, but in recent years it has been sold openly as shark, in both Australia and New Zealand, and the demand has been great enough to produce large-scale commercial shark fishing. So unrestrained did the shark fishing become, in fact, that the Commonwealth Fisheries Office began a campaign to protect certain sharks from extinction—and this in a country where bathers have been trying for years to protect themselves from the shark! Sharks classified as ““man-eaters” are not sold in Australian markets, but this is the only commercial notice paid to those sharks that reverse Australians’ shark- eating habits. The Fisheries Office tried to educate shark fishermen in the ways of conservation by circulating a film whose title, These Sharks Need Pro- tection, must have struck Australian bathers as rather ironic. Finally, strict conservation laws had to be passed, despite the opposition of some fishermen. The two principal protected sharks used for food in Aus- tralia are the Schnapper, School, or Sharpie shark (Galeorhinus australis), which grows to about 5 feet, and the Gummy shark (Mustelus antarcti- cus), which usually grows to about 3 feet. The Gummy gets its name from its “toothless” appearance. Actually, it has pavement-like teeth. Because of its tendency to stink after it has been out of the water a while, it is called by a name imported from England: “Sweet William.” Government-sponsored studies of the School shark have shown that a strict conservation program is necessary if Australians are going to enjoy eating shark for many years to come. Although females usually carry about 28 young, it takes 12 years for the smallest female School shark to give birth to her first brood. And the smallest male does not mature until it is at least 10 years old. For some reason, only about half of the adult females carry young each year. All these facts add up to Shark-Eating Men 173 an unusual situation in the usually fecund sea, for they indicate that there is never a population explosion among School sharks. For generations, Australians hated all sharks, and certainly any preju- dice against the shark there had a better basis than in most other coun- tries. But when species of sharks were found that provided tasty, nu- tritious, and abundant food, Australians began eating shark. Australian mothers even discovered a dividend—shark meat is boneless, and can be fed to small children without risk. Australia’s acceptance of sharks, as shark, on the dinner table is rare among so-called civilized countries, however. Prejudice against the shark has been traced back to the Bible: “These may ye eat of all that are in the waters: Whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them may ye eat. . . . What- soever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that is a detestable thing unto you” (Leviticus 11:9-12). In the opinion of Isaac Ginsburg, zoologist of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to whom this Biblical admonition was submitted for a modern interpretation on ichthyological grounds, sharks are not under the ban. Ginsburg points out that sharks and, presumably skates and rays, have both fins and scales, though the scales, in the form of denticles, are technically placoid scales, and differ markedly from the usual scales found on fish. Ginsburg extends his opinion to cover shark liver oil. But, whether for religious reasons or not, Israel consumes but little shark. The followers of Mohammed are split on the shark issue. In the Per- sian and Oman Gulfs, the eating of fish without scales—both sharks and catfish are included—is forbidden by the dietary laws followed by the Shiah Mohammedans who predominate in Iran. The Sunni Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula, who consider themselves orthodox and the Shiahs heretics, do eat the sharks they catch in the Persian Gulf. In the Philippines, researchers of the Fish and Wildlife Service were surprised to learn that Christian Filipinos rarely eat shark, but Muslim Filipinos eat shark with gusto. Status-building may inspire abstinence from shark. Until recent years, shark was the usual ingredient of fish cakes made and sold in Hawaii. Perhaps it was merely coincidental, but, as Hawaii edged toward state- hood, the territory’s ‘selachian dietary habits started falling in line with those of the mainland United States. Marlin and swordfish gradually took the place of shark in fish cakes. The average Honolulu shark landings fell off from an average of 21,000 pounds a year to 200 pounds in 1954 and twelve pounds in 1955. The shift in diet has touched off a marine chain reaction. Sharks have begun building up in ever-increasing num- bers. Federal fisheries experts predict that more and more food fish will be devoured by Hawaiian sharks. This, the experts say, will result 174 Man and Shark in poor fishing for both commercial and sports fishermen around Hawaii. It probably could increase the danger of attacks on Hawaiian bathers. And all this may be due to Hawaiians not putting shark meat in their fish cakes! In Latin America, the eating of sharks is a custom that varies from nation to nation, and often from village to village. In Peru, for instance, sharks are eaten by people of all classes, as is the Guitarra, or Guitarfish, (Rhinobatos). But the skate—considered an epicurean dish in some coun- tries—is looked upon as a dish fit only for the very poor. In Mexico, shark is one of the principal food fishes, and the annual catch is measured in millions of pounds. In Venezuela, both Sawfish (Pristis pectinatus) and shark are eaten. The sharks of several unspecified species are called simply cazon. A 1948 U.S. survey of the Brazilian fishing industry showed that 16 selachian genera, from Alopias (Thresher sharks) and Ginglymostoma (Nurse sharks) to Sphyrna (Hammerhead sharks) and Try gon (Sting rays) were included among commercial fishes. No statistics are available on shark consumption in Communist China, but it is known that the importing of shark fins has been forbidden. Shark fin soup, an epicurean dish of Old China, is looked upon by the Peiping Communist régime as decadent and bourgeois—a luxury that has no place in a People’s Republic. In Old China, shark fin soup was part of the delicate filigree of protocol and manners that entwined an ancient culture. The ingredients of shark fin soup included, most of all, time and contemplative labor. Only a fine chef would dare attempt to make shark fin soup, and only the finest chef would risk his reputation on the almost sacred task of creating the supreme repast, The Shark Fin Dish. Chinese hosts in Old China were often judged by their chef’s ability to make shark fin soup and The Shark Fin Dish. And the host needed a finely tuned sense of tact as well as a sensitive palate. To provide a banquet with shark fin soup for an honored guest and to fail to serve shark fin soup to a guest of equal social rank—this was the grossest gaucherie. The serving of shark fin soup could be used to show favor, and the withholding of it could show contempt. The Shark Fin Dish was reserved for the especial guest, a man who would have few or no social rivals. Twenty or more dishes—thousand-year egg, bear’s claw, frog, turtle, snail—might have been served at a banquet. The cost of them all hardly equaled the cost of The Shark Fin Dish. People in Korea, China, and Japan have been eating shark since earliest recorded times. In 1956, according to a United Nations survey, South Korea landed nearly 15,000 tons of sharks and rays. About the same amount was landed by Taiwan’s fishermen. In Hsinchu, on the Shark-Eating Men 175 west coast of Taiwan, shark fishermen have developed a kind of per- petual-motion system. They catch sharks, use the flesh for food, and then feed the shark offal to cultivated eels, which, in turn, are used as bait to catch more sharks. Probably nowhere on earth are sharks consumed as avidly as in Japan, whose annual landings of sharks, skates, and rays are measured in the thousands of tons. The lower grade sharks are made into fish cakes, called kamaboko. About 420,000 tons of kamaboko are produced in Japan each year. Shark is also sold both fresh and canned. Smoked shark, marinated in soya sauce, is one of the canned products of the large Japanese shark fisheries industry.* This product, sold as smoked shark- meat, is exported, in relatively small quantities, to the United States as a gastronomic oddity. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization —UNESCO-has described the virtually untapped fishing resources of the Indian Ocean as one of the most vital food-harvesting areas on earth. Some 726,000,000 people live in the tropical and subtropical regions around the Indian Ocean, and the very survival of millions of them, a UNESCO report says, depends on the fish in the Indian Ocean. These fish, says UNESCO, appear to be the only readily available food for combating the “prevalence of diseases attributed to protein starva- tion” that are common in India, Ceylon, Indonesia, Malaya, and parts of the east coast of Africa. And among the many abundant fish found in the Indian Ocean are sharks. Surveys in the Seychelles Islands, which lie in the western portion of the Indian Ocean, have shown an astounding abundance of sharks, many of which seem to be species peculiar to those isolated islands. Fishing explorations aimed at developing a viable fishery in- dustry in the Seychelles have had shark-catching experiences reminiscent of the tuna long-lining explorations in the Pacific. One expedition, for example, boated 15,287 pounds of various fish—and 24,326 pounds of shark. “It is possible to fish exclusively for sharks, but it is rarely possible to fish for bony fishes without catching sharks as well,”’a survey report notes. Sharks, skates, and rays are eaten by most nations whose shores are washed by the great Indian Ocean. Indians, for instance, eat shark. On the west coast of India, sharks and rays are a favorite food of all classes. In the eastern coastal districts of Madras, only the very poor eat sharks and rays. Under a government-sponsored program, shark-liver oil is dis- tributed to hospitals and sold at low prices to the public to increase the vitamin A in their diet. *For more about Japanese and Chinese shark-eating customs and recipes, see the Appendix. 176 Man and Shark In the Chagos Archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the eating of shark, oddly enough, has led to an increase in the consumption of pork. After sharks have been butchered for meat, their carcasses are fed to pigs, which would otherwise find little to eat on the islands. The pigs grow fat on the protein-rich diet, and produce enough progeny to keep pork in the islanders’ diet. UN-sponsored research has also found another use for meal made from shark meat: flour. Actually, fish flour is so nutritious compared to wheat flour that its developers feel “flour” is an inferior word to describe it. Flour produced from fish meal (virtually any kind of fish can be used) contains 85 per cent animal protein as compared with 15 per cent protein found in fresh meat and fish. This is one of the highest con- centrated protein substances yet developed by man. United Nations researchers say that the development of fish flour may mark a major victory in the battle to supply the mass of the world’s people with adequate amounts of animal protein. Fish flour now can be produced at little more than the cost of flour made from wheat or maize. Further research will drive the cost down even further. Fish flour can be used any way wheat flour is used, from making bread to making spaghetti. In World Sea Fisheries,* a comprehensive world survey of the fishing industry, Selachians are recognized as important food fish from Europe to Japan. It will no doubt come as something of a surprise to most people to learn that thousands of tons of sharks, skates, and rays are caught annually by the fishermen of many countries. World Sea Fisheries gives these approximate 1951 tonnage catches of sharks and rays in leading shark-eating countries: Japan, 85,000 tons; Norway, 66,000; United Kingdom, 35,700; Spain, 11,600; Belgium, 4,700; United States, 3,400; Denmark, 2,900; Eire, 2,- 400, West Germany, 1,500; Iceland, 300; Canada, 200. These figures, probably derived largely from the Yearbook of Fishery Statistics,® are incomplete. As indicated earlier, some countries do not keep any reliable figures and others, for one reason or another, do not report their com- mercial catches in standard classifications. But, as the accompanying table shows, the landings of sharks and dog- fish from commercial fishing are sometimes accurately reported. This table shows the 1961 Selachian landings in Denmark, in toto. The eating of shark has been going on since men first started catching oceanic fish. Some of the earliest Americans, shore-dwelling Indians in southeastern Florida, ate shark. Ancient Greeks and Romans not only *Robert Morgan, World Sea Fisheries (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1956). ® Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Yearbook of Fishery Statistics (Rome, Italy, annual). Shark-Eating Men 177 DanrIsH LANDINGS, VALUE, AND EXPORTS OF SHARKS AND DoGFIsH, 1961 * - Herring Shark or Porbeagle } Piked Dogfish 2 Tor Quantity Value Quantity Value Metric 1,000 USES Metric 1,000 UrSe$ Tons Kroner 1,000 Tons Kroner 1,000 Landings 425 1,443 209 191 165 24 Exports: Fresh—to: Italy 378 1,401 203 — — = West Germany 15 48 7 o — = Other 3 7 25 4 aS #2 = Total fresh 400 1,474 214 — 4 — Frozen—to: Italy 82 338 49 — 4 == 1 Lamna cornubica. 2 Acanthias vulgaris. 3 Individual countries not available in 1961, but in 1960 Belgium—Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Sweden imported almost 4 tons from Denmark. 4 Quantities of piked dogfish exported were so small they were lumped in an “‘Other”’ category and unavailable as to amount or value. * Herring sharks are taken in the North Sea and Skagerrak mostly by vessels fish- ing with long lines. Dogfish are taken incidentally in trawls and Danish seines. There is a fishery for Mackerel sharks in the Northwest Atlantic off the New England and Canadian coasts by a Faroese company utilizing three vessels. The sharks are frozen on board and sold in Italy under a current contract amounting to about $580,000. (Report of April 5, 1962, from the Regional Fisheries Attaché, United States Embassy, Copen- hagen.) From Commercial Fisheries Review, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Vol. 24, No. 6, June 1962. ate them, but also brought them into their arts and writings. Authors frequently discuss the eating of shark in the midst of learned essays. Epicharmus remarks that skate goes well with cheese. Lynceus of Rhodes twits the proud Athenians by writing that none of their fishes can com- pare in taste with the Rhodian fish supreme, the Thresher shark. The Roman satirist Petronius makes a comment on how men determine their values, noting: What must be sought, and dearly bought, Scari and Swans, we prize; While skate and goose, in vulgar use, Men utterly despise. 178 Man and Shark Soon after Plato’s Republic became famous in Greece, the satirical playwright Aristophanes wrote a play, The Ecclesiazusae, in which he lampooned Plato’s idea of an ideal republic founded on the principles of communal living, and he used the shark in his satire. In The Ecclesiazusae, Aristophanes has written of a communal state ruled by a council of women. Since there is no private property, the citizens eat in public halls at public expense. It is difficult to serve every- one what he wants, but the women valiantly try by offering a single meal that has everything on the Greek menu. The meal is described in what is probably the world’s longest word, a word that runs to 77 syllables in Greek, and when translated into Latin contains 179 letters. And right in the middle of it, along with the leek, the oyster, the wine sauce, and the pullet’s wings, are the skate and the shark! Chapter 8 Shark Treasures The sharks are there—uncountable mil- lions of them—for any maritime coun- try whose people will eat shark and whose fishermen will catch them. But the hunting of sharks is a frustrating, hazardous, and usually not too profitable enterprise. And the capture of a shark can be an exploit— the duel of a solitary man in a rowboat against a thrashing, maddened shark often bigger than he or his boat. Sometimes shark-hunting methods are downright incredible. Around the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, a crude shark fishery has been built up. A six-week expedition in Seychelles waters has brought in 170 tons of sharks. Aboard some of the boats, the fishermen depend on “shark callers”— sea-going, self-proclaimed sorcerers. A shark caller drums his feet in a wild tattoo on the deckboards of the pirogue, then slaps the surface of the water with one hand and the hull with the other. Finally, he lets out a loud, spine-tingling wail. Fishermen swear that the antics of the shark caller do bring in sharks. Perhaps the fishermen of the Seychelles have found, at last, a socially useful purpose for rock ’n’ roll troubadours. But they haven’t found a way to make shark-catching commercially profitable. Only time, pa- tience, and some kind of government subsidy could do that. William Travis, an entrepreneur of shark fishing in the Seychelles, gave it up after two years. The logistics of commercial fishing called for more money than he had. Like many shark hunters, he managed to salvage an interesting book (Shark for Sale)* out of the debris of his failure. He earned little else from sharks, however. If all the many by-products of the shark are tapped; if markets are developed for all of these by-products; if modern methods of catching, preserving, and utilizing these products are employed—then, and only then, can a shark industry be made profitable. On paper, at least, these profits are possible. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife study showed that $15 to $20 could be earned on a good-sized shark, if it were utilized as thoroughly as the meat industry utilizes pigs or cattle. The study esti- William Travis, Shark for Sale (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1961). 179 180 Man and Shark mated that a 400-pound Tiger shark would produce 112 pounds of edible meat, 20 pounds of dried meal, 8% gallons of liver oil, 3 pounds of salable fins, $1.50 worth of teeth suitable for sale to curio dealers, and a hide worth at least $3. The trick is to catch enough sharks and then prepare them for market. Set your net or your line and you get only whatever species happen by. Shark meat spoils quickly. Livers begin turning bad as soon as the shark is dead. Hides can go sour if skinning is delayed as little as 6 hours. And after a full day’s shark fishing—or, in the lairs of nocturnal sharks, a full night’s fishing—the fishermen are too tired to put in another day’s work immediately after they land. So they hire a work crew, thus driving up expenses. Though sharks may be abundant in a given area, they are known to become will-o’-the-wisps and vanish inexplicably from the places where, theoretically, they should be prevalent. Take the Basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) for a bankrupting example. This huge, potentially valuable, and relatively easy-to-catch monster can afflict fishermen with acute economic anemia. Basking sharks run to at least 30, and perhaps 40 or more, feet in length, they weigh up to several tons. They are too colossal to be weighed accurately. They have immense livers, heavy with oil, and it is this oil that men have sought for centuries. For many years, the oil of the Basking shark played a part, with the oil of the whale, in lighting many of the lamps of the Western world. Most Basking sharks caught were stumbled upon by whalers, who were equipped to handle gigantic carcasses and would take on a Basker if it happened by. Not until modern times did single-minded men go after Basking sharks with any hope of making a living from them. One of these men was Gavin Maxwell, a British Army officer who set up a shark fishery on Soay Island in the Gulf of the Hebrides in 1947. Maxwell planned to get from the Basking shark liver oil, liver residue, fish meal, king-sized fins for shark fin soup, fertilizer, and chemical products from the great shark’s enormous load of plankton. He caught a good number of Baskers and even sent some samples of the flesh to Billingsgate. But, as Maxwell later reported, the flesh merely appalled the dealers, for they found it “twitching in a disgusting way when the cases were opened in London.” The twitching chunks of Basking shark were somehow symbolic of Maxwell’s venture. He found the sharks hard to kill, hard to find a use for, and generally eerie, in an enormous sort of way. The venture failed. Another seeker after Basking sharks in Scottish waters was Anthony Watkins, a London clerk who put down his pen one day and took up a harpoon. Watkins usually harpooned Baskers from an open dinghy. Shark Treasures 181 He and a companion would row up to a Basking shark—often so close that the dinghy was actually directly over the shark’s huge back. Then Watkins would plunge a harpoon into the shark, leap nimbly out of the way of the whistling line attached to the harpoon, and let the shark tow the dinghy until it tired enough to be hauled up and lashed along- side a bigger boat that accompanied the dinghy. Once a shark towed Watkins’ dinghy for 24 hours. The shark, harpooned in Kilbrannan Sound near the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, set a course due west when it left the Sound, and all that stood between Watkins’ 8-foot dinghy and the United States of America was the open sea. When a rescue boat finally found Watkins, after the shark had towed him 100 miles, he had to cast off his indefatigable shark, which swam away with a 9-foot steel harpoon sticking out of its back and was never seen again. Watkins said he did eventually make some money on his Basking shark venture. He quit the business shortly before the price of shark oil plummeted. P. Fitzgerald O’Connor, a British writer turned sharker, also had a short-lived fling at catching Basking sharks. He said he broke even. Basking sharks produced for these three men an unusual by-product: books. O’Connor, Watkins, and Maxwell each wrote a book? about his adventures, and each man’s experiences and observations added much to the previously scanty scientific knowledge of the Basking shark. Today, on the small island of Achill off the western coast of County Mayo, Ireland, a group of hardy fishermen are pitting the luck of the Irish against the Basking shark. The great sharks—the Irish call them muldoans—appear out of nowhere around St. Patrick’s Day, but not until the end of April, when the winter weather dies in Achill’s Bay of Keem, can the fishermen go after the mzldoans. Great nets are stretched across one side of the bay, and shark after shark blunders into them. Then men set out in small boats called currachs to battle the sharks, stabbing them with hand harpoons, and wrestling them out of the nets. As many as 30 sharks a day—most of them 25 to 35 feet long—are captured in the bay during the season, which ends in July or August. From 60 to 70 gallons of oil are produced from the average shark, but the value of oil fluctuates wildly, and the market price is rarely stable. Low in vitamin content, the oil is used primarily for industrial purposes, such as in some tanning processes. The liver of the slaughtered sharks is usually all that is used; their carcasses are dumped at sea. Attempts have been made to induce Irish farmers to use pulverized shark meat in cattle feeds, but the farmers will have no muldoans, ground up or not, upsetting the dietary traditions of their 2 Maxwell’s was Harpoon at a Venture (London: Rubert Hart-Davis, 1952); O’Connor’s was Shark-O! (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953), and Watkins’ was The Sea My Hunting Ground (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958). 182 Man and Shark fine Irish cattle. The sharks’ tremendous hides have defied efforts to make them into leather. Even the sharks’ teeth, minute and very unter- rifying, are commercially worthless. American attempts to cash in on the goliath Basking shark have often shown a spectacular flair. In 1924, two men began harpooning Baskers for sport in Monterey Bay, California. Eventually they discovered that the big sharks could be turned into money. Meal made from the carcasses was used in livestock feed and dog biscuits, and a spiritual descendant of the old frontier snake-oil salesmen bottled and sold “Sun Shark Liver Oil” as “Nature’s Own Tonic.” The industry all but died out around 1938. After World War II, a new generation of California sharkers attacked the Basking sharks with a combined air-sea-land operation, using war surplus equipment. A shark-spotting aircraft patrolled the California coast around Monterey. When the pilot saw a school of sharks living up to their name by basking on the surface, he began circling the sharks and radioed a crew standing by in an amphibious “Duck” vehicle parked on the beach. The Duck raced along the beach until it came opposite to the circling plane. Then it plunged into the surf and headed for the sharks, which were usually a quarter to a half mile offshore. As the Duck neared the school, a shark was selected and the sea- going truck bore down on it. The harpooner, in a “pulpit” rigged to a bowsprit, leaned down over the shark and plunged his 65-pound weapon into it. Attached to the harpoon were several hundred feet of %4-inch manila rope. The heavy rope smoked as it ran out, pulled by tons of writhing energy plunging toward the bottom. Usually, 500 feet of rope ran out before the shark seemed to be tiring. A sealed oil drum was often tied to the line at about the 250-foot mark. This drum was intended to act as a drag on the fish, but frequently it was towed so deep below the surface that the pressure caused it to collapse. If and when the shark was finally subdued and pulled to the surface, it was shot with a 30/30 rifle. Only a shot through an eye or between the eyes could possibly kill a Basking shark, so it sometimes took hours to administer the coup de grace. After the shark was killed, it was tied to a buoy, and the Duck returned to shore to await another radio message from the plane. Meanwhile, another man of the group phoned processing plants until he found a customer. When a shark was sold, the Duck would return to the buoy, untie the shark and tow it to shore, where a winch hauled it up a ramp and into a truck. One hundred sharks were killed in one year at one beach by the shark commandos, and one champion harpooner killed 7 in a single day—with the same harpoon. The sharkers got 7 to 9 cents a pound for the sharks’ livers, which weighed from 700 to 2,000 pounds. Nothing was paid for the carcasses, though the processing plants sometimes con- verted them into meal for chicken feed. One of the plants that handled Shark Treasures 183 the huge fish was designed for a fish somewhat smaller. It was a sardine plant! The price for livers eventually dropped to a point where the am- phibious sharkers were getting less than $35 for a 5-ton fish that took an airplane, a Duck, and a crew of men to land. And finally, if not inevitably, the great Basking shark adventure collapsed. By 1953, Basking shark fishing in California was described by the State Department of Fish and Chie as sporadic. Sharks are often enemies of man, but the brigand can yield bounty, too. For the shark is a valuable fish. Locked in the livers of some sharks are oils often more potent in vitamins than cod liver oil, and a chemical found in the liver is leading medical researchers down promising new avenues in the search for ways to destroy two enemies of man far deadlier than the shark—cancer and heart disease. The denticle-armored skin is stronger than cowhide. Though the shark is a cornucopia of the sea, many attempts to bring this treasure to shore have ended in failure. When the stakes have been high enough, men have sought the shark, and the shark has made some of them rich. But, even when man’s avarice is pitted against the shark, the odds of survival are on the shark. In 1938, sharks accidentally caught by U.S. fishermen were con- sidered worthless predators of useful fish, whose destruction of nets cost fishermen much more than they could ever make by selling the sharks’ carcasses. The top price was $10 a ton. Most carcasses were ground up and used for fertilizer. Then the war in Europe began. German troops overran Norway, and abruptly a major source of a vital commodity was cut off from Great Britain and the United States—cod liver oil. Millions of pounds of cod liver oil had been exported for many years from Norway to the United States and England. Vitamin A was extracted from the oil and added not only to human diets but also to the diets of livestock and poultry. In both countries, a search began for new sources of the vitamin. In San Francisco, Tano Guaragnella, a wholesale fish broker, heard about the hunt for a substitute source of vitamin A. On a hunch, Gua- ragnella took some fresh shark liver to a chemist for analysis. The liver, from a dogfish (Squalus acanthias), produced an astonishing assay. There was ten times more vitamin A in the dogfish’s liver than was usually found in the liver of the cod (Gadus morua). Guaragnella went back to the docks and, as casually as he could, dropped the word to fishermen that he would pay $25 a ton for dog- fish. The fishermen thought he was crazy, but they started landing the “worthless” dogfish, of which there had never been a shortage on their fishing grounds. Soon after he made his discovery about the dogfish liver’s vitamin 184 Man and Shark potency, Guaragnella happened to see some fishermen dressing a Soupfin shark (Galeorhinus zyopterus), whose colloquial name derived from the Chinese gourmet’s preference for its fins in shark fin soup. Guaragnella noticed that the Soupfin’s liver was immense. Again, he had a hunch. This time the chemist’s report was fantastic. The liver of the Soupfin was ten times more potent in vitamin A than the liver of the dogfish, which meant that the Soupfin liver oil was 100 times richer in vitamin A than cod liver oil itself! Guaragnella announced that he would buy all the Soupfin sharks the fishermen could bring in, and that he would pay $40 a ton for them. Word of his startling offer flashed through the waterfront of San Fran- cisco and up the West Coast as far as Alaska. Soon, too, other whole- salers learned the secret of their competitor’s sudden desire for shark livers. And the bidding for shark livers began. Another California “Gold Rush” was on! The new El Dorado was called “gray gold,” and the fishermen who set out to mine the California seas were as wild with “gold” fever as their prospecting predecessors had been. Prices, set by daily bidding in fishermen’s exchanges, shot up from Guaragnella’s original $40 a ton to $60... $80... $100. From Alaska to Mexico fishermen deserted their usual commercial fishing banks to seek a bonanza of Soupfins. The price kept rocketing. By September, 1941, it was hitting $1,200 a ton! The attack on Pearl Harbor was only three months away, but the Japanese suspended their growing belligerency toward the United States long enough to profit from the shark-oil boom. Tons of frozen shark liver were shipped out of Japan to meet the insatiable demands of the United States. And the bidding kept on. By the time the United States had entered the war, the price had hit $1,500 a ton. The average Soupfin was worth $25. Some of the larger ones were worth $200 each for their livers alone. Never before had fishermen earned so much money so quickly. A San Francisco fishing boat went off on a four-day Soupfin hunt and came back to the wharf with $17,500 worth of shark. One fisherman made $40,000 in five months. The professionals weren’t the only ones making money. Students at the University of Washington skipped classes to fish for shark in Puget Sound. Farm boys who had never been to sea were recruited by shark fishermen and earned as much as $800 for a week’s work. Most of the sharks were caught in gill nets, which are either suspended from the surface, like great curtains a half mile or more in length, or dropped to the bottom, where floats along their top and weights along their bottom keep them vertical. The sharks, pursuing smaller fish, such as sardines, swam into the diamond-shaped openings of the net’s Shark Treasures 185 SET or DIVER NET 35-50 FATHOMS PER SECTION, 300 —400 FATHOMS FOR WHOLE SET : ANCHOR SQ 45 To 75 LBS. A shark gill net as used in shark fishing on the U.S. Pacific Coast. Once the shark’s gill slits are snagged in the net, it cannot get away. When shark fishing was at its _ zenith during the Soupfin shark bonanza, gill net vessels fished the entire coast from Washington to southern California. Courtesy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service weave and were trapped when their gills or fins became snared by the net. Unable to back up, the sharks hung there. In their death struggles, the sharks often ruined the nets. Or hagfish (Myxine), a relative of the lamprey, provided with a rare opportunity to turn from prey to predator, attacked the enmeshed sharks. Like the fishermen, the hagfish were after the sharks’ soft parts, and many a net was hauled up with liverless sharks. So many sharks were being taken and so great was the price, however, that the cost of damaged nets or damaged sharks could be absorbed by the West Coast fishermen, when as many as 200 sharks were pulled in with one haul of a net. While the frenzied, every-man-for-himself shark rush was going on along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, a more systematic assault on the shark was being organized in Florida by an organization known as Shark Industries, Inc. It had been found that other types of 186 Man and Shark sharks also had livers rich in vitamin A. In 1944, this company was taken over by one of the best-known brand names in the country, a firm whose trademark was a happy, personable cow named Elsie—the Borden Company, largest processor of dairy products in America. Probably be- cause they did not want to get their customers’ image of gentle Elsie confused with the fierce visage of Jack Shark, officials of the Borden Company did not ballyhoo their connection with sharks. It will un- doubtedly come as a surprise to many a milk-drinker to learn that sharks as well as cows provided him with his vitamin-enriched milk. The Borden Company is reputed to have invested at least a million dollars in the enterprise. Its shark fleet grew to 40 vessels, many of them equipped with refrigerated holds and capable of staying at sea for periods as long as six months. Instead of nets, the Borden ships usually relied on long-line fishing. Steel cables stretching out almost two miles were unwound from the bigger ships. Strung from the cables were large baited hooks about 40 feet apart. The cables, marked with buoys, were set out one day and hauled in the following day—and so were the sharks. As a power winch slowly brought in the cable, a man stood at the bow of the boat with a big wooden mallet. If a shark were still alive when gaffed, it was clouted on the snout and stunned, and a boom swung it into the hold. It could then thrash in the hold until it expired. It was arduous but profitable work. Off Salerno, Florida, where Bor- den’s shark-catching eventually was concentrated, as many as 341 sharks were caught in a single day by four boats. The weights of in- dividual sharks ranged as high as 1,500 pounds. In one month, 1,972 sharks were brought in. One boat brought in a single catch of 182 sharks. Borden also joined in the West Coast shark boom. But from the relentless overfishing of sharks there soon resulted a dramatic decline in Soupfins. In 1944, almost 53,000,000 pounds of shark were caught. That was the peak. Soupfins became more and more scarce. The price of their livers held up, though, finally reaching a giddy summit of $14.25 a pound. At a small fish-marketing and processing firm in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the production of oil from livers had been a minor side- line. Suddenly, the company was turning out more than $2,000,000 worth of shark oil a year. Borden opened its own plant for the ex- traction of shark-produced vitamin A, which was added to dairy prod- ucts. By 1946, three cents of every dollar Borden earned came from non-food products and, for most of this, Borden’s stockholders could thank the maligned shark, not Elsie. During the war, shark liver oil supplied approximately 75 per cent of the vitamin A produced in the U.S. Though shipyards were re- Shark Treasures 187 stricted to turning out war vessels, the rule was lifted to permit the building of boats to go after sharks. And, as more and more sharks were caught under the inspiration of war and profit-making, more and more was learned, not only about vitamin A but also about the shark family itself. Vitamin A came close to being labeled a panacea. It was found to stimulate growth, increase resistance to infection, aid in combatting fever and colds, and prevent excessive dryness of the skin. Not every shark’s liver was packed with vitamin A. The potency, measured in U.S. Phar- macopoeia units, varied from 35 units to 43,000,000 units. The variance ranged from shark to shark and from species to species. West Coast fishermen, for the most part, threw away all but the liver, though canny Chinese traders usually managed to get the fins, which they sold at premium prices. Under Borden’s aegis, however, a profit was made on virtually every ounce of the shark. The fins were cut off and sold to shark fin buyers for as much as $6 a set. On this sideline alone, Borden sometimes made $3,000 to $5,000 a month. The teeth of some sharks were sold to costume jewelers. The entire jaws of big sharks were sometimes dried, preserved, and sold to would-be game fishermen. These jaws, as a Borden spokesman diplomatically put it, “found their way into trophy rooms on plaques with brass plates which could be inscribed at will.” Some of the sharks’ hides were tanned into leather. Prime shark meat was cut into steaks, frozen, and shipped to countries, primarily in South America, where there was, and is, no prejudice against eating shark. Less palatable meat went to Borden’s Special Products Division, where it was used in poultry and livestock feed preparations. What was left of the shark was ground up for commercial fertilizer. The abundance of sharks in the Caribbean, and the profits that could be made from the shark’s many products, soon came to the attention of the U.S. Department of State, which, as World War II neared its end, was concerned about the post-war economic problems of underdeveloped countries. The Anglo-American Caribbean Commission published and distributed to Caribbean fishermen a handbook on shark fishing. The booklet told fishermen how to identify and catch sharks, how to skin and process shark hides, and how to make a profit on shark liver, meat, fins, and even teeth. ““Good-sized, sound sharks’ teeth and sharks’ jaws and backbones, either cleaned or made into movelsy items,” the booklet said, “have always been in demand by tourists.’ Cojimar, Cuba, the setting of Hemingway’s classic, The Old Man and The Sea, was one of many places on the Gulf of Mexico where small “shark factories” sprang up. Most of the money came from liver oil, which was distilled in the factories by a simple method. Livers, 188 Man and Shark chopped into fist-sized chunks, were rendered down in big vats. The oil was skimmed off, cooled, canned, and shipped to U.S. dealers for about $4.75 a gallon, depending on its vitamin potency. The process re- quired little skill and paid big dividends. From Ketchikan to Monterey on the West Coast of America, in the little towns of the Caribbean, in fishing ports where the shark had been a feared and hated enemy for generations, suddenly it was a boon. The shark was giving men profits instead of stealing them. But the intensive research into vitamin A was to have an ironic twist. Thanks to the abundance of vitamin A provided by the shark, scientists came to know the vitamin so well that they discovered how to make it. Vitamin A was synthesized. By 1950, the shark boom was over. It took some time for production of the man-made vitamin A to supplant the natural vitamin obtained from shark liver oil but, one by one, the shark fisheries folded up. In California, where nearly 53,000,000 pounds of shark had been landed in a single year, shark catches shrank to a little more than 1,000,000 pounds and finally dropped to the insignificant pre-boom level. In Washington State, where as much as $3,000,000 worth of sharks had been caught in a single boom year, dogfish livers began selling at 10 cents a pound, and the total value of shark livers plummeted in 1953 to $3,000. Borden’s Elsie no longer had competition from any shark. In 1950, Borden went out of the shark business. Cojimar managed to hold out until 1958, when the little shark-oil factory shut down, and, once more, the shark became a nuisance or an enemy. A 1956 survey of California waters showed that the Soupfin, whose ranks had been thinned by the shark-oil boom, was again abundant. By careful fishing of all the shark species, the survey showed, from one to two billion pounds of shark could be caught a year within the range of California’s fishing fleets. All that was needed was a market... But a market was no longer there. The menhaden is a prolific fish used almost entirely for processing into feed rather than for human consumption. It is a valuable commercial fish in the United States and is sought by fleets of boats. But it is also sought by sharks, and, as the great schools of menhaden sweep up and down the East Coast or through the Gulf of Mexico, they are inevitably accompanied by sharks, which take a heavy toll. In a letter to one of the authors, Harvey W. Smith of the J. Howard Smith Company, a major menhaden fishery, reported that his boats sometimes net as many as 70 to 800 sharks a day in the Gulf of Mexico. These 4- to 6-foot sharks do damage which, Smith said, “is beyond one’s imagination.” He added that the company spent $20,000 to repair or replace shark-ravaged nets in a single five-month season. Shark Treasures 189 NORTH AMERICA Tuna-fishing explorations by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revealed the presence of great numbers of sharks in the central Pacific. The map shows some regions where various species predominated. Courtesy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service In the Pacific, tuna fishermen often haul in more sharks than tuna. And the tuna that are pulled in frequently are mutilated by hungry sharks. In 1950, the Pacific Oceanic Fishery Investigations research vessel John R. Manning trolled for tuna around the Line Islands. Tuna were found—and so were sharks. “They would follow the boat in schools of one hundred or more,” during trolling, the researchers later reported, “frequently striking the lures even at 8 knots.” The Blue shark (Prionace glauca) was the commonest catch. Fishing surveys have shown sharks to be as prevalent as most of the commercial fish being sought—and sometimes more so. Commenting on the incalculable abundance of sharks in the Pacific, Donald W. Stras- burg, fishery research biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 190 Man and Shark Pacific Oceanic Fishery Investigations, said: “We are . . . faced with the problem of controlling shark numbers to protect our sport and com- mercial fisheries, or, better yet, of devising some means of utilizing this potentially valuable resource to the benefit of us all.” | Italics ours. | Strasburg’s statement is buttressed by many reports of shark abun- dance. One stretch of long-line hauled in by a tuna fisheries research vessel had on it 21 tuna and 73 sharks. Another long-line had strung upon it 169 tuna—66 of which had been gouged by sharks—and 222 sharks. An exploratory fishing expedition along the North Pacific coast, about 800 miles off Oregon and Washington, reported the capture of 25 tuna—and 225 sharks. Similar reports have been made by exploratory fishing expeditions in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. One Gulf Saas " BuO 137 Buoy 2 i ee —_———_ = —— ———— tw 5 ——a — — z SSS ——y zr, —— = > == ce ° = —<—— — 2 =Z - cf 5 P 2n¢ GearPLe af i a er Ef ae ee = i*} = ————— z - —— r == < u ° nw & o. ae —————t ——_— f ae 2 ; } 2a é We é « - > gq Z> — CA 7g: a epee a SS carpe The sketch shows the Australian method of commercial shark fishing, which interested South Africans enough for a story about it to be published in the South African maga- zine Veld & Vlei. A line, with baited hooks, is payed out (left). The buoys it is attached to are anchored and left overnight. On the following day, the line is hauled up, usually with plenty of sharks on it. Courtesy, Veld & Vlei Magazine Shark Treasures 191 expedition for tuna found one-third of its catch “badly mutilated” by sharks; another fixed the shark damage at 19 per cent. Reporting on a 1953 Gulf of Maine long-line exploration for tuna, J. J. Murray of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries said: “Shark catches totaled 493 individuals (13 times the tuna catch) with an estimated round weight of 90,000 pounds.” Yet, most of these sharks are being wasted. Almost invariably, they are thrown away as trash, when the fact is that they are not. For the most part, as we have seen, they are tasty, nutritious food, eaten in many parts of the world and in some areas of the United States. They are also the source of a wide variety of useful and amazing products. Since ancient times, the shark has been a source of magical potions. The Greeks of Aristotle’s day believed that the ashes of a‘shark’s tooth rubbed on a child’s gums relieved teething pains, that shark brains boiled in oil and applied to an aching tooth eased the pain, that the flesh of the flat-bodied Monk or Angelfish prevented swelling of the breast, that the liver of the skate was a remedy for earache; that the brain of the Torpedo ray could be used as a depilatory; that the liver of the Sting ray cured scrofula, relieved itching, and cleared up skin diseases. Fishermen have insisted for years that shark oil is practically a panacea, equally good externally as a balm for rheumatism, an ointment for burns, or an antiseptic for cuts—and internally as a cough medicine, a laxative, and an all-around tonic. Sir Samuel Garth, a physician, in 1699 mocked British apothecaries for using such outlandish pharmaceuticals as dried crocodiles and sharks’ heads, but the use of selachian remedies persists to this day. A recent advertisement for “the most expensive facial preparation in the world” boasted that one of the beauty cream’s priceless ingredients was shark oil, “‘so vital to skin health.” Among some primitive peoples, the shark’s claspers are regarded as exceptionally effective aphrodisiacs, and one of the charms of shark fin soup, according to some Chinese, is its aphrodisiac quality.* The uses of other shark products are often more practical than fanci- ful. Some Eskimos in Greenland make knives from the teeth of the Greenland shark (Sommniosus microcephalus) and cut their children’s hair with the shark-knives, for iron is considered taboo for hair-cutting. The Eskimos also cut long strips from the hide of the Greenland shark, join the strips together, and use the tough shark hide as rope. Some American Indian braves lucky enough to encamp near fossil grounds used fossilized shark teeth—still sharp after millions of years—as razors. In the Sandwich Islands, now our fiftieth state of Hawaii, when the 8 Maidens of ancient Rome who read their Pliny carefully would know how to counteract shark fin soup’s amorous effects; all they had to do was eat the liver of a Torpedo ray, which Pliny said was an antaphrodisiac. 192 Man and Shark men of a village went on a fishing trip, the women were left unde- fended, and warriors from neighboring villages often swooped in. The women needed a weapon with which to defend themselves at close quarters. They invented a Hawaiian version of the knight’s mailed gauntlet—a glove whose back was studded with rows of shark teeth. The shark-tooth gauntlet transformed a lady-like slap into a blow that could scar a man for life. In his monumental study of Pacific folkways, Polynesian Researches, missionary William Ellis told in 1830 of the strange use shark teeth were put to in funeral services among the natives of the Georgian and Society Islands—the best known of which is Tahiti. The Reverend Ellis observed many of these practices at first hand during his stay in the islands in the early 1800s. He wrote: Almost every native custom connected with the death of relations or friends was singular, and none perhaps more so than the otohaa, which, though not confined to instances of death, was then most violent. It consisted in the most frantic expressions of grief, under which individuals acted as if bereft of reason. It commenced when the sick person appeared to be dying; the wailing then was often most distressing, but as soon as the spirit had departed, the individuals became quite ungovernable. They not only wailed in the loudest and most affecting tone, but tore their hair, rent their garments, and cut themselves with shark’s teeth or knives in a most shocking manner. The instrument usually employed was a small cane, about four inches long, with five or six shark’s teeth fixed in, on opposite sides. With one of these instruments every female provided herself after marriage, and on occasions of death it was unsparingly used. With some this was not sufficient; they prepared a short instrument, some- thing like a plumber’s mallet, about five or six inches long, rounded at one end for a handle, and armed with two or three rows of shark’s teeth fixed in the wood, at the other. With this, on the death of a relative or a friend, they cut themselves unmercifully, striking the head, temples, cheek, and breast, till the blood flowed profusely from the wounds. Otohaa, the missionary reported, was also performed as “an expression of joy, as well as grief.” To celebrate a homecoming or a narrow escape from some danger or calamity, he wrote, “loud wailing was uttered, and the instrument armed with shark’s teeth applied, in proportion to the joy experienced.” A shark-tooth club, called the paeho, was also used in combat. It was “more frequently drawn across the body, where it acted like a saw,” the missionary wrote. “Another weapon of the same kind resembled a short sword,” he further reported, “but instead of one blade it had three, four, or five. It was usually made of a forked aito branch; the central and exterior branches, after having been pointed and polished, were armed along Shark Treasures 193 the outside with a thick line of sharks’ teeth, very firmly fixed in the wood.” Still another selachian weapon was the aero fai, a Sting ray stinger, “which being serrated on the edges, and barbed towards the point, is very destructive in a dexterous hand.” In the Ellice Islands of the Pacific, natives have found a more con- structive use for shark teeth. A tooth is lashed to a stick and used as a scalpel in crude surgery. The Maoris of New Zealand call the Seven-Gilled shark (Noto- rynchus cepedianus) that lives in their waters a twatini. From its teeth they once made a saw-like instrument, the mira tuatina, which reputedly had one special use: cutting human flesh. The Maoris associated sharks with blood, war, and death. They mixed shark oil with red ocher and painted it on their war canoes and the funeral monuments erected in memory of their greatest chiefs. They also used shark oil as a cosmetic, a hair dressing, and for the anointing of bodies in their elaborate funeral ceremonies. Some Pacific islanders once used shark skins as drumheads; the skins were strong, did not stretch, and thus gave an unvarying tone. In Su- matra, the skin of the Cowtail ray (Dasysatis sephen) is used for making drums and tambourines. In Bermuda, natives have used shark oil to make a crude but, accord- ing to them, dependable barometer. They extracted oil from a shark’s brain and liver and put it in a sealed bottle. When a storm approached, they claimed, the oil became cloudy. Eric Sloane, the historian of weather lore, tells in his Almanac and Weather Forecaster of an advertisement he found in an old Connecticut newspaper. The advertisement offered an “absolute weather predicter for one dollar... A magic liquid that clouds up when it is about to rain.” Sloane wonders if the magic liquid could have been shark oil. For several months, one of the authors kept a sealed bottle of shark oil in a window in his study. He cannot vouch for the oil’s dependability as a weather “predicter,” but it did cloud in cold weather and clear in warm. And, at the approach of a rainstorm, when temperatures usually drop, it also sometimes clouded. The cloudiness was caused by the solidifying of the oil. An hour in the refrigerator turned the oil into a semi-solid with the consistency of butter. Other authorities have vali- dated this statement, such as Dr. H. B. Moore of the University of Miami. When Australia was first settled in 1788, it was the oil of the shark that fended off the hostile darkness from most of the colonists’ homes. David Collins, writing on Australia in 1794, said: “Nothing was lost; even the shark was found to be a certain supply; the oil which was procured from its liver was sold at one shilling the quart; and but very 194 Man and Shark few houses in the colony were fortunate enough to enjoy the pleasant light of the candle.” In more modern times, shark oil has been used in the tempering of high-grade steel, the manufacture of margarine, in pharmaceuticals, the currying of leather, the making of soap and cosmetics, as an oil in paints, as a lubricant of purest quality, and to clean the delicate works of watches. But it is the adamantine hide of the shark that man has best learned to utilize in a variety of intriguing and serviceable ways. Sharkskin began its long career in the Occident at the hands of ancient Greek artisans who discovered that the hide could be used to smooth hard wood to a high polish. In the age of sail, mariners caught sharks, skinned them and dried the skins to use for holystoning the wooden decks. Pieces of sharkskin were wrapped around oars to cut down wear on the wood in the oarlock. Eventually, sharkskin came to be called shagreen, a word apparently derived from the Persian saghari and Turkish sagri, words which, oddly enough, have nothing to do with sharks. Saghari or sagri is the tough skin of the rump of a horse, which was made granular by imbedding hard seeds into the softened skin, then drying it. The seeds fell out, leaving permanent indentations in the skin. Sharkskin, with its pattern of denticles, resembled saghari or sagri, though in sharkskin the denticles were permanent fixtures. The Persian saghari, with its rough, granular surface, was found to be ideal for sword hilts, for it gave swordsmen a good purchase on their weapons. The Japanese are believed to have been the first to use sharkskin and ray skin for this same purpose. The favorite sword hilt of the Japanese came from what they call the Pearl ray, the same ray (Dasyatis sephen) that provides the Sumatrans with their tambourines. The Pearl ray produced a beautiful sword hilt, for the Japanese used the skin from the center of the ray’s upper side, which bears three large, distinctive denticles that give the appearance of a row of inlaid pearls. The sword hilt had a grimmer utilitarian purpose, too—even when blood-smeared, the rough-textured skin provided a dependable grip. Some other Japanese uses of shark products include Shark-amino, an “elixir of life’ made from shark cartilage; a gelatinous glue made from cartilage or skin too “stale” to be tanned as leather; shark-liver oil; and, from the shark’s pancreas, the drugs insulin and pancreatin, an extract used as a digestive aid. Although shark leather was made during World War II in Japan, its quality was not good, and hardly any shark tanning is being done commercially today. However, Professor Wataru Shimizu of Kyoto University says that the skin of the Aizame (Centro- phorus atromarginatus), a member of the family Squalidae, is still used on sword hilts “to prevent them from becoming slippery.” Shark Treasures 195 The skin of the Cowtail ray (Dasyatis sephen) is used for making drums and tam- bourines in Sumatra, and for making sword hilts in Japan, where it is called the Pear] ray because of the pearl-like dermal denticles in the middle of its back. When used for decorative purposes, the denticles are highly polished and left in the hide. Courtesy, Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Co. from The Fishes of Australia by G. P. Whitley, 1940 In the seventeenth century, when shagreen-covered objects, such as jewel cases, were brought out of the Orient by travelers, word of the beautiful, durable leather spread all over Europe, and shagreen artisans began an art which has been almost forgotten today. By the eighteenth century, the art had become so developed that a guild of segrnywerkers (shagreen workers) sprang up in Holland, and in France a skilled pair of shagreen artists won lingual immortality. This rare honor—for France guards her language with a fierce pride—was bestowed upon Jean-Claude Galluchat and his son Denis-Claude. Their exquisite shagreen was called galuchat, a term still used in France for polished shark and ray skin. Ink stands, portrait frames, cases for silverware, spectacles, and watches were made of galuchat. Fine editions of books were bound with 196 Man and Shark shagreen, and instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes, were cov- ered with it. In the nineteenth century and in the early years of this century when pince-nez were popular, shagreen was used to hold them in place on the nose—often with disfiguring results. Possibly because they simply cannot believe that a shark or ray could yield such an exquisite leather, or because they are not aware of what they are handling, antique dealers today often describe shagreen- covered objects as being covered with snake, lizard, or seal skin. Shagreen—shark or ray skin with the denticles still in it—is a leather of lasting beauty. The denticles are usually polished down by hand to remove the sharp points or, in the case of some species and the uses to which they are put, the denticles are ground down on carborundum wheels. But shagreen is still not an all-purpose, practical leather. It has limited use, mostly as a decorative covering. One use was a “pickpocket- proof” wallet, one side of which was covered with shagreen. The den- ticles prevented its removal by acting as so many tiny thorns that snagged against the pocket. It could be removed only by slipping the hand between the wallet and the pocket. The removal of the denticles without injuring the natural grain of the sharkskin remained a problem for many years. The denticle roots beneath the surface are firmly imbedded in the epidermis of the skin. The use of potent chemicals either failed to dissolve the roots, or, if too strong a solution was used, the grain of the skin was destroyed in the process. Imperfect removal of the denticles produced a leather so weak or so hard and brittle that it was virtually unmarketable. A way had to be found to gently “lift” the denticles out of the epidermis, leaving a leather with the beautiful markings of the natural grain; flexible, yet still tough and strong. Shortly after World War I, the Ocean Leather Corporation engaged an American industrial chemist, Theodore H. Kohler, and assigned to him the seemingly impossible task of removing the denticles by a satis- factory commercial process. Kohler, working with a consulting leather chemist, Dr. Allen Rogers of Pratt Institute, spent many long hours on this assignment, making many tests and experiments—and failing. Finally, after a few years and endless expenditures, they developed a chemical process that could be used on a commercial scale to remove them and, at the same time, meet all of the requirements for excellent leather. This process was promptly patented in the name of Kohler. This was the breakthrough. Leather from the sea—sharkskin leather —could now be marketed for use in practically all articles for which there is no substitute for leather. It could be—and was—promoted as a rival of the long-established exotic leathers. Thereafter, the Ocean Leather Corporation launched a new industry that is still unique. Shark Treasures 197 Samples of shark leather show how it can be dyed in various colors. Black, brown, tan and natural (smallest sample) are shown here. Courtesy, Ocean Leather Co. Jealously guarding the denticle-removal process through the years, Ocean Leather has remained virtually unchallenged by competitors. It is the only shark-leather tannery in the United States that has consist- ently produced excellent quality shark leather, and, except for a few foreign firms not considered serious rivals, it is the only large-scale sharkskin tannery in the world. Attempts have been made by other tanneries to produce a durable leather from the hides of sharks. The results have always been disappointing, although some success has been reported in Europe, Mexico, and Japan. For decades now, hundreds of thousands of shark hides have been arriving at the tannery in Newark, New Jersey, and shark leather has been emerging, to be transformed into luxury articles—men’s shoes, belts, wallets, watch straps, and other fine leather goods. It is an ideal leather for cowboy boots, ski boots, shoes, and practically anything else that can be made from leather. Many years ago sharkskin leather was found to be ideal for the highly vulnerable tips of children’s shoes. The laces will inevitably break; the counters will collapse; the soles and heels will wear out with appalling speed. But the shark tips will not even 198 Man and Shark scuff. A small boy’s destructive energy, tameless as it may be, is simply no match for the impregnable hide of the shark! A cross-weave of strong fibers runs through the thick epidermis of sharkskin, forming a sinewy network that resists great strain, yet re- mains pliable. Tests have shown that shark leather has a tensile strength of about 7,000 pounds per square inch. Cowhide’s tensile strength is about 5,000 pounds per square inch. Sharks are hauled in principally from the waters off the coasts of Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the west coast of Mexico. The supply is subject to sudden curtailment by hurricanes and revolution (pre-Castro Cuba was a key shark hide source). The whims of both sharks and fishermen also continually affect the irregular flow of hides to the tannery. But, somehow, hides usually come in every month of the year, and every hide represents the personal triumph of a man over a shark. Individual fishermen hauling in handlines still supply Ocean Leather with many of the nearly 50,000 shark hides it receives each year. But most of the sharks are being caught nowadays by special shark-fishing boats operating out of Florida and other well-established shark-fishing stations. The sharks are caught on mile-long lines strung every 25 feet with 2%-inch hooks. About 300 hooks dangle on 7-foot leaders from each line. The lines are set in from 20 to 200 fathoms. The hides arrive at Ocean Leather’s odoriferous tannery in neatly folded piles in burlap wraps and bundles about as beautiful as bundles of old grocery bags. After a complicated tanning process that takes about 4 weeks and involves seemingly endless baths and batterings in great vats and tumbling drums, the hides become a luxury leather whose beauty and durability have engendered a demand that has never been matched by the supply. And it is this simple economic fact that explains why all-sharkskin shoes cost about $40 a pair. Texas oil millionaires once commandeered most sharkskin shoes. Lately, however, with the spread of the affluent society beyond the boundaries of Texas, that fief has lost its near-monopoly on shark leather. Shark-hide tanneries have existed in many parts of the world for centuries—possibly the first recorded instances are from China and Japan. In recent times, there have been tanneries in Norway, Germany, France, Italy, India, Australia, Cuba, Mexico, and elsewhere. So far as is known, however, none of them enjoyed any great success. Tiger, Dusky, Brown, Sand, Blacktip, Mackerel, and Nurse sharks are the most desirable species for leather. Each species has its own peculiarities. The Nurse, for instance, yields a hide that produces a very desirable leather, but its fins are no good for shark fin soup and its liver oil is low in vitamin A potency. The Hammerhead’s hide and fins are not very desirable, but Hammerhead liver oil is usually rich in vitamin A. Shark Treasures 199 Ocean Leather Corporation experts have tried to tan samples of the colossal hide of the Basking shark and the huge hide of the Giant Devil ray, but their attempts have so far been unsuccessful. The insatiable demand for sharkskin has inspired few fishermen to give up their regular fishing and concentrate on sharks alone, for sharking 1 is usually a very undependable way to make a living. Though there is a practically unlimited supply of sharks in the sea, catching them, skinning them, and preparing them for shipment is work that is always hard and frequently frustrating. An expert at one of the world’s rarest professions—shark- skinning— can separate a shark from its hide in about 15 minutes. It’s a job that tires the strongest man and dulls the sharpest knife. (One advantage of the shark’s sandpaper-like hide, though, is that the knife can be honed on it!) After a shark has been flayed, the hide is fleshed and then cured in salt for four or five days. The hides must be protected from the sun and the rain, for, at this stage, they are relatively perishable and can be spoiled by dampness or burned by the sun. After the curing, the hides are packed in bundles or barrels and sent to the tannery. Fishermen are paid on the basis of the hide’s size and condition and the species of shark. In skinning the shark, the tail, part of the head, and the area around the gill slits are lopped off, so the over-all length of the shark’s body is not what the fisherman is paid for. His payment is based on the length of the hide. The basic price for a first-grade hide runs from $1 for a hide 35 to 39 inches long to $9 for a first-grade hide 110 inches or more long. There is a premium on Tiger shark hides. The Tiger commands a price of from $2 for the smallest size to as much as $14 for the large sizes. For a hide to be first grade, it must have no sour spots ( caused by rotting of the hide); no butcher cuts (caused by slips of the skinner’s knife); no harpoon holes—and no fighting scars, so called because they are believed to be the result of encounters with other pugnacious sharks. (Some shark experts believe, however, that since the scars are so PRE= quently found on adult females, they result from encounters with over- amorous males.) Second- and third-grade hides are relatively lower in price. Enterprising fishermen can also make money on such odd but mar- ketable shark products as canes and “petrified pups.” The canes are made by stringing shark vertebrae along metal rods; they sell for as much as $20. A “petrified pup” is made by preserving fully formed shark embryos in formaldehyde. The mummified result is a shark model, suitable for display on a mantelpiece. (A similar embalming process has been used—so help us—to make earrings out of shark eyeballs! ) The denticles are not removed from the hide of certain small sharks. 200 Man and Shark Instead, the diamond-shaped ones are polished to a dazzling gloss. Though dificult to stitch because of its armor, this hide—called boroso—has been made into such fashion accessories as evening slippers. It may be the world’s most expensive leather since it sells for $1 a square inch. The denticles are also left in an industrial type of sharkskin, whose abrasive qualities are put to such unusual tasks as the fluffing of nap in the felt used to make men’s hats. In Italy it is used for polishing marble. Another type of industrial sharkskin is used in looms, where a flexible yet indestructible material is needed for the straps that control the darting shuttle. Modern science has resurrected the shark as the bearer of a strange chemical which the ancients once believed was a potent potion. The drug is called squalene (the name comes from the Latin word for shark, squalus), an organic chemical that is today still only an oddity in the medical researcher’s laboratory. Several years ago, a chemical company bought a large supply of squalene distilled from the liver oil of the Basking shark. The firm made the purchase mostly out of scientific curiosity since the shark-originated chemical intrigued some researchers, who began tinkering with it. One of the tinkerers was Dr. John H. Heller, director of the New England Institute for Medical Research and one of the nation’s out- standing research scientists in organic chemistry. Convinced that squal- ene would be a valuable research tool in the study of heart disease, Heller wanted to use “marked” squalene as a tracer in observing chemical activity in animals. The tracer Heller used was radioactivity. He proposed injecting radioactive material directly into live sharks to obtain his squalene tracer, since squalene was elusive and was produced in relatively minute amounts in every other known creature except the shark. With the help of Dr. Eugenie Clark, the marine biologist, Heller caught and injected sharks, often getting into the water with them. Though the sharks were snared, with hooks and lines, there was always danger. The hazardous experiments proved to be a failure. But some researchers are still tinkering with squalene, in the hope that radioactive- tagged squalene may some day be used as a research tool in the study of both heart disease and cancer. Squalene from shark liver oil once was profitably put to work—but by crooks, not scientists. They put out an alleged vegetable oil for cook- ing and on the label they stated, “20 per cent olive oil.” But experts who sniffed and sampled this oil said it was obviously not a blend of olive oil and another vegetable oil, as claimed. Further, these experts— legitimate olive oil merchants—strongly suspected that the olive oil racketeers were back in business again. It was not too long after the end of World War II when olive oil from Europe was still scarce. Shark Treasures 201 Samples of the suspected olive oil blend were turned over to a Food and Drug Administration laboratory. The FDA, long the nemesis of the olive oil racketeers, had developed an irrefutable test to prove the percentage of olive oil in a blend. The test had been devised by Dr. Jacob Fitelson, chief food chemist of the FDA’s New York laboratories. Fitelson’s test was based on his knowledge of squalene, that odd organic chemical found in shark liver oil. Squalene is also found in animal and vegetable oils—especially olive oil. Fitelson determined that there was more squalene in olive oil than in any other oil with which it was blended.* So, by testing for the squalene present, the actual olive oil content could be discovered. The test had exposed several frauds and had been upheld in court, where convictions had been obtained. Yet, when the olive oil blends that did not taste or smell of olive oil were now brought into the FDA labs, the scientists were startled to find that the blends were passing the test. “Exactly as labeled, a blend of 20 per cent olive oil,” said a chemist’s report. The report added pri- vately: “That’s what the analysis shows, but we can’t believe it.” FDA chemists, swamped by complaints from legitimate dealers, were baffled. Then Fitelson, while talking to a former colleague at a scientific convention, picked up a clue. The ex-FDA chemist told Fitelson that the chemical and drug firm he worked for was extracting vitamins from shark liver oil. A by-product—squalene—had been considered worthless. Suddenly, however, a demand had started for squalene. That was it! Fitelson surmised that the racketeers, taking advantage of the squalene test, were simply mixing the squalene with cheap vegetable oils. By adding the precise amount of shark-originated squalene into the blend, the oil would test out as if it contained 20 per cent olive oil. The fact that the squalene came from a shark and not an olive made no difference; it appeared to be the same under the Fitelson test. Fitelson realized that the only way he could prove his theory was to mark the squalene in some way before it found its way into the blend, and then seek the marked squalene again in labeled products on the market. The marker Fitelson needed was a chemical that was harm- less, stable, and soluble in squalene, and not obviously detectable to anyone who looked at, smelled or tasted the oil. Also, it had to be able to show up in dilutions of one part to ten million parts of oil. The chemi- cal used was anthranilic acid, a white crystalline powder used industrially as a starting point for the manufacture of dyes. The squalene supplier allowed the FDA to put this marker in his product. Then the FDA just waited. Shortly after the next large purchase of the marked squalene, hun- 4 The average squalene content of olive oil was about 330 mg./100 Gm. of oil, while the average squalene content of other edible vegetable oils varied from 11 for soya bean oil to 28 for peanut oil. 202 Man and Shark dreds of samples of blended oil under different brand names were picked up throughout the Middle Atlantic states. They were all tested, and many sample showed the marked squalene. The FDA spread out farther . . . from the dealers to the packers . . . to the shadowy leaders of the racket . . . to an olive oil dealer who refused to talk because, he told an agent, “If I talk, I'll get splattered all over the street.” It was a big and vicious racket. Using powerful persuasive techniques, the racketeers terrorized many packers and dealers. G. S. Goldhammer, director of the FDA’s Division of Regulatory Management, Bureau of Enforcement, estimates that the racketeers had perpetrated a nearly $1,000,000 fraud before the racket was smashed. And a top-level racke- teer had been caught in the shark-baited trap. He was Joseph Profaci, reputedly “untouchable” crime boss. He rarely appeared in public, let alone in a courtroom. But the FDA brought him in. He pleaded guilty and was fined $8,000. When Profaci. died of cancer in 1962, U.S. At- torney General Robert F. Kennedy assessed the FDA’s catch. Profaci, the Attorney General said, had been “the most powerful” figure in the U.S. underworld. Part 4 B—~ Shark and Company Chapter 9 Whence the Shadows? Eons before man or his works appeared on earth, the shark was the monarch of the primordial seas. Our greatest mountains—the Andes, the Alps, the Rockies, the Himalayas—thrust upward from the earth some 60 mil- lion years ago. Man, as Homo sapiens, is believed to have appeared barely a million years ago. While the evolutionary forces of life spawned countless forms that lived briefly in the crucible of the awakening earth and then expired forever, sharks have lived on. As prehistoric era after era passed—as amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals came forth— the shark remained. The pterodactyls, flying reptiles which coursed the skies during countless millennia, disappeared. The dinosaurs—Bron- tosaurus, Allosaurus, Triceratops, and a thousand more-—stalked the earth in ponderous supremacy and vanished into extinction. But, the shark lived on. In the vast spectrum of life, each creature finds its place, from the “humble protozoan to the reigning vertebrate. The spectrum begins with a faint glimmer out of the void—a small packet of protein. Almost im- perceptibly, the spark of life flickers next in the ultrafiltrable virus, the bacterium, the protozoan, then the multiple-celled sponges, jellyfishes and corals. Then, more strongly, in the starfish and the worm. Now, its glow brightening, it passes through the snail, the clam, and the squid. Next the light bathes the spider, the scorpion, the lobster, and the insect. Finally, in a burst of brilliance, the spectrum ends with the vertebrates —fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. And there, among all these species of the modern animal kingdom, are two creatures. One, man, newly arrived; the other, the shark, which has passed through some 500 million years of existence, but still persists, and in some cases with but very little change. In the Devonian Period, which spanned the time between 320 and 265 million years ago, millipedes, mites, spiders, and wingless insects ap- peared on an earth turning green with the first land plants. In the times that preceded the Devonian Period, fish dwelt only in inland waters. Some barely resembled modern fish, for they were jawless and heavily 205 206 Shark and Company armored. Others had jaws, and among these jawed fish appeared a new breed. These had developed “lungs” and paired fins strong enough to perform a function that changed forever the course of life. For, in times of drought, when tidal rivers or estuaries dried up, some of these fish were able to crawl, and so move to new and undried ponds, or else bury themselves in the mud—and breathe air. From them came the primitive amphibians with their tenuous grasp on the land. The Age of Fishes apparently dawned in the sea, but it is at the beginning of the Devonian Period that the first records of shark-like creatures appear. These ancestors of the shark were already highly developed, and their progenitors had doubtless been spawned in the previous Silurian Period, for some Silurian rocks contain faint evidence of shark-like fishes. Since fossils provide the only tangible clues to prehistoric life, the shark’s origin is a matter of some speculation. But fossils themselves are but perplexing pieces of a gigantic puzzle that seems destined to remain forever unsolved in its entirety. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, an outstanding authority on fossils, wrote in 1898 of the difficulties in gleaning knowledge from fossils. There have been great paleontological discoveries since he made his observations, but what he said is still true: We may, in fact, without exaggeration declare that every item of knowl- edge we possess concerning extinct plants and animals depends upon a chapter of accidents. First, the organism must find its way into water where sediment is being deposited and there escape all the dangers of being eaten: or it must be accidentally entombed in blown sand or a volcanic accumulation on land. . . Lastly, man must accidentally excavate at the precise spot where entomb- ment took place, and someone must be at hand capable of appreciating the fossil, and preserving it for study when discovered. The oldest fossil records of sharks were found in what are known to paleontologists as the American Middle Devonian beds—limestone deposits in Ohio, rich in marine fossils. The beds gave up a few specimens of the type of tooth known as Cladodus. These primitive teeth, amazingly similar to the teeth found in some species of modern sharks, are out- standing for their dagger-like points. Another American fossil-hunting ground, the Cleveland Shales, has given posterity one of the most valu- able records of a prehistoric shark. These late Devonian fossils show, in delicate traceries, not only the bodily outline of a shark, Cladoselache, but also the imprints of its muscles—and even its kidneys. From these dim outlines, more than 265 million years old, paleontologists have been able to reconstruct a shark from 11% to 4 feet long. The Cladoselache and another primitive shark with similar characteristics, the Ctenacan- thus, are believed to be close to the source of the shark’s earliest an- cestors. Whence the Shadows? 207 In this restoration of life in a Devonian Period shallow sea, a prehistoric shark (Cladoselache) swims toward a large coiled cephalopod crawling about amid several types of primitive sponges growing on the sea floor. The form of the modern shark can easily be seen in this ancestor of eons ago. (This Devonian sea model was prepared by George Marchand, under the direction of Irving G. Reimann. ) Courtesy, Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences From more indistinct clues than the Cladoselache skeleton scientists have reconstructed prehistoric sharks of astounding size. In Devonian deposits and in strata of the next geologic period (the Carboniferous of 210 to 265 million years ago), fossil spines called ichthyodorulites have been unearthed. These are dart-like quills found in the dorsal fins of various fishes. These quills are similar to the strong, sharp quills found in some present-day sharks, such as the Spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias), one of the most prolific species of shark in today’s seas. The modern Spiny dogfish is a small shark; it is no longer than 4 feet, and its spines, or fin-quills, are usually only 1 or 2 inches long. Some fossil spines, how- ever, are 3 feet long, and may even have carried venom. Shark skeletons, for the most part, have vanished from the geologic record because their skeletons contain no true bone. Shark skeletons were—and are—cartilaginous, and usually the relatively soft cartilage is obliterated due to its being soluble. The fascinating ichthyodorulites, made of tougher dentine, often survive, however, as the only remains of some gigantic shark-like creatures. The Cladoselache disappeared during the Permian Period, from 185 to 210 million years ago, leaving the continuance of the evolutionary drama to the Hybodonts, from which can be drawn almost direct lines to the 208 Shark and Company wee SSRIS NS wy Say Syyeesh SS YL, WOASMAL SNS Seal BEETS Ah on x ; * Sye sya ‘~ > eke SN AS eens ‘ LOST 9 Dn : Sou HE “ wR A iS a. I wa ye ee PTLEDIUDIO i Successive types of prehistoric Elasmobranch fishes are shown in this series. (A) Clad- oselache, of the Devonian Period, with fins supported by simple parallel rods of cartilage and the paired fins serving merely as balancers. (B) Pleuracanthus, typical of the Permo-Carboniferous, with paired fins used as paddles. (C) Hybodus, of the Jurassic, with paired fins for swimming, a persistent notochord and simple vertebral arches. (D) Chlamydoselache, which exemplifies the Cretaceous and Tertiary types, but which is still in existence today as the Frilled shark. Courtesy, American Museum of Natural History Whence the Shadows? 209