Close to Shore (10 page)

Fears Only Thinly Veiled

A
long the bottom of the night sea, the shark moved in cold thirty-foot indigo depths unilluminated by the light of the moon. Careful to avoid big predators, it dipped low in the water column while hugging the shore, the home of living things. The shark had killed and failed to feed, and discipline and wariness ruled its every movement. The spoiled attack on a large mammal, the noisome counterattack by many other mammals, deepened its preternatural caution.

As the shark swam, tiny organs, distributed all along its body, constantly “tasted” the chemical composition and salinity of the ocean water. These sensors possessed cells analogous to the taste cells on a human tongue and sensed, now, lower salinity in the coastal waters. The shark was reading the dilution of coastal waters caused by the rains of June 1916, so torrential the
Ledger
lamented, “There cannot be much more rain left in Heaven.” Water had coursed from the mountains in the state's northwest, through central and southern farmlands, into lakes and underground streams and finally to the sea. With the swollen freshwater runs came masses of organic matter, myriad fish flowing into the channels and bays. For eons, lower salinity had pointed the shark and its ancestors toward new hunting grounds, and so the big fish moved now without thought toward prey. Fish sat at the head of the inlets, snaring other smaller fish that came from the creeks and bays. Just north of Little Egg Inlet, the great white had found prey fish from Great Bay and Little Bay. And it had also stumbled upon Charles Vansant.

Along with the shark's gifts of detection and concealment was the quality of anonymity, the gift of being unknown to man. By 1916, hundreds of men in the deep ocean and on the wastes and fringes of continents and in the prehistoric backwater of time had been devoured by sharks. But sharks attacked far from cities and civilization. Shark attack was an otherworldly story swapped by sailors and fishermen, a tale seldom reaching beyond cabin or dock or the range of a man's last desperate cries. It was a story, when filtered to a city, that was scarcely believed.

The Edwardians believed God had given them dominion over the fish of the sea and science had given them evolutionary supremacy over the earth. “In the course of evolution man became supreme and mastered all the other animals,” said a letter to the editor of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
early in the summer of 1916. “Those he could not use he exterminated.”

But there had always been a fish that man could not master, that at will exterminated
him.
After the long silence of prehistory, a story of anonymous human prey, Herodotus, the first great historian of the Greeks, wrote of a “marine monster” seizing a helpless man at sea in 492
B.C
. Documentation is scattered over centuries. Seven hundred years before Christ, a potter working on the Italian island of Ischia, at the entrance to the future Bay of Naples, carved a vase with a representation of a man being seized by a giant fish—the first evidence, in art, of a shark attack. The word for the fish didn't enter the English language until 1569, when Captain John Hawkins towed to London a ferocious specimen his crew exhibited as a “shark,” the term evidently derived from the German
schurk
or
schurke
, meaning scoundrel or villain. But with the first use of the word in English came denial of the creature's existence. Thus in 1778, the citizens of London were horrified anew to learn there was such a thing as a man-eating shark, this one in a painting by John Singleton Copley, “Watson and the Shark.” Watson was the lord mayor of London, and he had hired Copley, considered the finest artist in colonial America, to portray the moment in 1749 when he had lost his leg as a boy, when he fell overboard from a ship in Havana harbor and was attacked by a shark. The painting caused a sensation at the Royal Academy, “exposing a previously ignorant segment of the population to the terrors of sharks.”

Denial was a sensible response to the emergence of the shark, according to H. David Baldridge, the U.S. Navy officer-scientist who helped the navy research shark attacks after the death and dismemberment of navy personnel during World War II, and “a significant morale problem among fliers and survivors of ship sinkings.” Baldridge continued:

What could possibly equal being eaten alive by a monster fish? With very few exceptions, man has emerged the master in his relatively short period of competition with the beasts of this earth. Yet, the tidelands of the sea clearly mark the boundary of his supremacy. Beyond that lies an unknown that still conjures up in most of us emotions and fears only thinly veiled by the gossamer of civilization . . . There is no conflict more fundamental in nature, more one-sided in conduct, or more predetermined in outcome than the attack upon a live human being by a shark. In an instant of time, the sophistication of modern man is stripped away and he becomes again what he must have been many times in the beginning—the relatively helpless prey of a wild animal.

F
ollowing the inlets, the shark moved along the thin sandy coast of Long Beach Island, keeping to open ocean along the narrow wastes of Island Beach for many miles. In several days the shark swept north past the whole of Barnegat Bay, the sedge islands, Metedeconk Neck, the river past the Mantolokings, and Bay Head to the Manasquan Inlet, where the barrier islands ended. There it began to hug the mainland for the first time.

Little is known about the migratory habits of great whites. A rare scientific measurement of a great white's travels occurred in 1979 off the east end of Long Island, when a Woods Hole biologist used a harpoon to implant a transmitter in a great white while it was feeding on a whale. In the next three and a half days, the shark averaged only two miles an hour but showed incredible endurance, swimming 168 miles, from Montauk to the Hudson River submarine canyon off New York City, until the boat trailing the shark broke down.

So in July 1916, the juvenile great white covered a third of the Jersey coast, approximately forty-five miles, in five days. The shark followed huge offshore sand ridges. The shadows
of the ridges and the inlets on the coast sang with life, with
normal prey. But the juvenile great white was not behaving normally. Day and night, the water thrummed with mammals, a new and different quarry in unusual abundance. Along the beaches of the Jersey shore that summer was perhaps the largest number in the world, perhaps in any era to date, of human beings in the water. Where a normal great white shark goes, and when or why or what it hunts would remain, for much of the century to follow, a puzzle, a mystery to which the shark of 1916 would add little but enigmas and riddles.

Ahead past Sea Girt, just south of Long Branch and Woodrow Wilson's summer White House, lay the wealthy Victorian seaside resort of Spring Lake, named for a lovely oblong spring-fed lake, three blocks from the ocean, whose banks had recently contributed fresh spring water to the edge of the sea.

Independence Day

T
he New Essex and Sussex, a grand hotel opened in 1914
with colossal white entrance columns that faced the Atlantic Ocean, spread out to occupy an entire seaside block of Spring Lake, forty-five miles up the coast from Beach Haven. Old Glory fluttered high from four turrets above the soaring portico. In the first week of July 1916, uniformed porters attended the parade of chauffeured Pierce Arrows arriving from New York, Texas, the South, and the Midwest to join the summer colony. The sea with its high gull calls and soothing motion seemed a lovely complement to the hotel. By setting and architecture, the New Essex and Sussex had announced itself a capital of the new American empire, an enclave of wealth and power in a bright and optimistic new century. And this, in fact, it was.

Later that summer, President Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Edith Galt Wilson, the newlywed First Lady, arrived to inhabit the summer White House in nearby Long Branch. The President was joined on the shore for the summer by his daughters, his Cabinet, and the entire White House staff, which occupied the top floor of the Asbury Park Trust, a small five-story bank building in nearby Asbury Park. Philosophically opposed to campaigning from the White House—“the people's house,” he called it—Wilson campaigned for the November election from the front porch of Shadow Lawn, the grandiose Victorian mansion the president insisted upon renting in Long Branch, refusing free lodging from a wealthy benefactor. He ran the country from an office in the bank building, where he transacted the business of the presidency, including press conferences.

The gentlemen of the press were assigned a room in the bank, from which they dispatched wires datelined Asbury Park, Long Branch, or Spring Lake. The
Asbury Park Evening Press
claimed to be chronicling “the most important year in the
history of the nation, perhaps of the world, for many decades.” Mindful that the President would be mulling the Great War and the election, the
Philadelphia
Bulletin
was likewise impressed. “New Jersey will have cause this summer to feel more important than ever, for its name will be blazoned all over the world daily, and that without allusion to its mosquitoes . . . [New Jersey's] shore resorts are more or less famous throughout the civilized world, as it stands now, but this summer will be the ‘red letter year,' for President Wilson has . . . decided to establish his summer capital at . . . Shadow Lawn.”

The President's arrival signaled that the New Essex and Sussex Hotel would become the center of the nation's social life. On Saturday, July 1, New Jersey Governor James F. Fielder, a Wilson Progressive who succeeded Wilson when he went to the White House, launched the social season by hosting the Governor's Ball in the grand ballroom of the “E & S,” as it was fondly known. The “glittering throng” sent the newspapers into paroxysms of nostalgia over the Gilded Age when presidents Ulysses S. Grant and then James A. Garfield established New Jersey's “Gold Coast” as the summer capital; when the British actress Lillie Langtry, one of the most beautiful women in the world, frequented the coast as a respite from touring with
She Stoops to Conquer
or
As You Like It;
and when singer and actress Lillian Russell was escorted by the flamboyant and enormous gustatorial tycoon James Buchanan “Diamond Jim” Brady.

Three days after the Governor's Ball, as if to affirm the return of distant glory, a gleaming roadster cruised along the seacoast, turned off Ocean Drive at the New Essex and Sussex, and disgorged William Howard Taft, the ex-President of the United States, all 332 pounds of him. Taft had been only the third American President to ride in an automobile, and thus he was known to make a small ceremony of disembarking, standing regally in the backseat of the open roadster for the photographers, his great girth wrapped in a dark suit crossed at the chest by a gold chain, walrus mustache drooping in the middle distance between enormous jowls and soft, fair eyes. Politicians, socialites, and officials of the Essex and Sussex crowded around their guest of honor. The amiable ex-President was then a law professor at Yale University, greatly relieved to have surrendered the White House to Wilson in 1912. A confused hullabaloo attended Taft's visit to Spring Lake that day, but one fact is eminently clear: Taft was not glad to be there. He had been summoned on July the Fourth, the nation's one hundred fortieth birthday, to make a speech. Giving speeches was something Taft detested nearly as much as being President. He would rather, he often said, be playing golf. More than likely, after a long drive, he desired nothing so much as a good meal, or a nap, which he often took in public.

Taft, famously good-natured, was a well-liked ex-President. That afternoon, as he stood at the podium, magisterial in his dark suit, looking out on the sea of faces in the ballroom of the Essex and Sussex, murmurs of excitement swept the crowd. Emboldened by his enormous girth—a man so big, the pundits said, there was no room for meanness—Taft enjoyed the symbolism of rising and commanding a crowd. He had been the first President to throw out the first pitch of the baseball season—at a Washington Senators–Philadelphia Athletics game on April 14, 1910. Yet many of the summer colony, despite their wealth and position, had never heard Taft's voice. It was an extraordinary and memorable event before radio for an American to hear the President speak.

As the baritone of the ex-President's voice filled the room, however, the thrill quickly diminished. Taft spoke almost mechanically of Americanism and patriotism in the style of an earnest, careful lawyer with the soul of an honest bureaucrat,
a man who began his first inaugural address: “The office of
an inaugural address is to give a summary outline of the
main policies of the new administration, so far as they can be anticipated.”

To polite applause, William Howard Taft concluded his speech, ending with an appeal to a shared faith in “Almighty God,” and the wealthy summer colonists spilled out of the hotel onto the boardwalk to enjoy the remnants of daylight. The
sea was blue-gray and calm with a few swimmers in the water, and roadsters whined along Ocean Drive behind them. It was
at that moment that a crowd on the boardwalk—no doubt
still discussing Taft's speech—spotted a large, dark fin in the ocean. Then there were many fins, rolling in a school parallel to the coast.

“Sharks!” someone in the crowd cried, and near hysteria
rippled through the group. Local fishermen nearby attempted
to calm the crowd by pointing out that the fins were not those of sharks but belonged to porpoises, which commonly moved in schools offshore. But to many in the summer colony who had read in the
Press
about the young man in Beach Haven who was attacked and killed the previous Saturday by a shark, sharks were a subject of worrisome gossip and speculation for days.

Still, the excitement subsided as longtime residents assured guests that sharks never attacked bathers on the Jersey coast. Some insisted that Vansant's death had been fabricated by the newspapers, or grossly misunderstood, as the youth must have simply drowned. Shortly, their confidence restored by knowing skepticism, the summer colonists returned to the hotel to prepare for a graceful evening of music and July Fourth dinner. “The first accident of its kind recorded in the annals of the
Jersey coast created considerable excitement,” the
Asbury Park Evening Press
reported, but “doubt as to the veracity of the dispatches from Beach Haven was frequently expressed.”