Close to Shore (26 page)

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Sources and Acknowledgments

Close to Shore
was distilled during a period of two years from dozens of interviews; hundreds of contemporary newspaper accounts; turn-of-the-century diaries and letters, medical and scientific journals, birth and death records, census records,
theses, films, and academic transcripts; research in more than twenty museums and libraries; and information from several hundred books on sharks, the oceans, tides, the history of science and medicine, man-eating animals, shipwrecks and sea monsters, Victorian love poems, Philadelphia, the Jersey shore, novels and plays of the era, and every aspect of American history and culture that I imagined would have affected the lives of people in 1916. These lives were shaped in the period shortly after the Civil War through the end of the Victorian period to the last days of the Edwardian era. Researchers April White in Philadelphia, Kelly Caldwell in New York City, and Melody Blake of
The Washington Post
were of invaluable help during the last few months of writing.

This would have been a book-out-of-water without George Burgess, ichthyologist, shark biologist, and Coordinator of Museum Operations of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. To George goes my endless gratitude for helping make sense of a shark that swam in 1916. As director of the International Shark Attack File (ISAF), administered jointly by the Florida Museum and the American Elasmobranch Society, George studies contemporary and historic shark attacks as closely as anyone in the world. Anyone seeking information about shark attacks, or with serious information to impart about a shark attack anywhere in the world, should look at the ISAF Web site,
www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/sharks.htm
. Those familiar with George's wisdom, humor, and state-of-the-science authority in the media will recognize it in this book; in the inflammatory sea of shark attack stories, he is the island of sense. Any mistakes or distortions in my descriptions of shark behavior are mine.

With George Burgess, I rode a boat up Matawan Creek, reconstructing the path of the shark, and attempted to fix the location of the steamboat dock attacks by global positioning
system. George Burgess and I examined the sites of all four shark fatalities of 1916; his on-site estimate of the salinity of Matawan Creek was part of the evidence that led him, and me, to believe a great white shark could have passed up the creek. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration provided computer projections of the tide in Matawan Creek in July 1916, which confirmed that on the afternoon of July 12 the tide was nearing its highest level of the month, making possible the scene describing the moon's effect on the shark.

For my understanding of the cool coastal New Jersey currents that may have drawn the shark, I am grateful to Kenneth W. Able, director of the Rutgers University Marine Field Station in Tuckerton, New Jersey, the institution that overlooks the coast where Charles Vansant was killed. Ken's book, co-authored with Michael Fahay,
The First Year in the Life of Estuarine Fishes in the Middle Atlantic Bight
, was useful in helping me gain an understanding of the world in which the shark roamed. In an interview, Michael Fahay—a fisheries biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory at Sandy Hook, New Jersey—helped me understand the movement of the Gulf Stream off New Jersey.

Among the many texts I relied on to understand the behavior of sharks, I would like to recognize a few here:
Great White Sharks: The Biology of Carcharodon carcharias
, edited by
A. Peter Klimley and David G. Ainley;
Great White Shark: The Definitive Look at the Most Terrifying Creature of the Ocean
, by Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker; and
Sharks and Survival
, edited by Perry W. Gilbert. Although his rogue shark theory is now out of fashion, Victor M. Coppleson's
Shark Attack
provided a fascinating historic survey of shark attack. I am greatly in debt, as well, for my understanding of the variety of shark attacks to H. David Baldridge, author of
Shark Attack
. My thanks to Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, of Allenhurst, New Jersey, for his tireless devotion to this story over the years. His text,
In Search of the Jersey Man-Eater
, was especially illuminating in my study of the shark-attack wounds.

There are many books on sea monsters but none as good as
Monsters of the Sea: The History, Natural History, and Mythology of the Oceans' Most Fantastic Creatures
, by Richard Ellis, whom I owe thanks for my understanding of great white sharks in the lore of sea monsters.

My understanding of the ichthyologists and other scientists in the early twentieth century came from many sources, a few of which I would like to acknowledge here. I gained an understanding of Frederic Augustus Lucas, director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1916, as a Victorian scientist grudgingly moving into the modern world from
Fifty Years of Museum Work: Autobiography, Unpublished Papers, and Bibliography
, published by the museum in 1933. The respect accorded Lucas as a museum administrator and “all-around naturalist” was evident in the introduction by Henry Fairfield Osborn, a distinguished scientist who named
Tyrannosaurus rex.
Numerous contemporary newspaper accounts contributed to the profile of Dr. Lucas, and they also helped shape my portrayal of John Treadwell Nichols, the museum's curator of Recent Fishes. In describing John T. Nichols, I also relied on his desk diaries at the Museum of Natural History in New York, as well as his book, co-authored with Paul Bartsch,
Fishes and Shells of the Pacific World
. A rich portrait of Nichols exists in
A Gathering of Wonders: Behind the Scenes at the American Museum of Natural History
, by Joseph Wallace. Nichols's Romantic relationship to the sea is evident in his journal articles, press clippings, and also his 1922 book of poetry,
Sea-Rimes II.

The ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy's eminence
is evident in numerous sources, including his obituary in
The New York Times.
I gained a sense of his personality from his classic books,
Logbook for Grace: Whaling Brig
Daisy,
1912–
1913
and
Fish-Shape Paumanok: Nature and Man on Long Island
; his wife Grace Barstow Murphy's book,
There's Always an Adventure
; as well as his introduction to an edition of
The Swiss Family Robinson.
His conservation efforts on Long Island are discussed in Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring.

The article on the sharks of Long Island that Nichols and Murphy co-authored in April 1916 for the
Brooklyn Science Museum Bulletin
was instrumental in establishing both men's knowledge about sharks and their relationship to each other. The journal article also established both younger men's respect for Dr. Lucas as a mentor, as Nichols and Murphy invited Lucas to contribute comments in the article on the great white. From Robert Cushman Murphy's papers, 1907–1973, and journal in the archives of the American Philosphical Society in Philadelphia, I learned of his especially close relationship with Dr. Lucas, his mentor, who sent him on the whaling brig
Daisy
with a letter “to be opened the day the first Albratross is seen.” Lucas's moving role as a mentor to young scientists is well established by his letter: “. . . while I am too far on the wrong side of fifty to wish to be with you
all
the time, yet I would like mightily to be with you for a part of the time to see the Sea Elephants, the Penguins, and the glaciers of South Georgia. You will feel cramped and uncomfortable for a time, but you will soon harmonize with your environment and—what an experience for a young man!”

My deepest thanks to John Dillon of Sanibel, Florida, nephew of Charles Epting Vansant, the first known swimmer killed by a shark in American history. During several delightful days at his home, John and his wife, Jill, and brother, Larry, opened to me the private world of the Vansant family of Philadelphia. John Dillon's energy and scholarship as a genealogist have kept the Vansant story, and his uncle's place in history, alive. In particular, I relied on the
Condensed Vansant Geneaology
as well the family histories of the Eptings and Dillons. John's voice and love of family inform all the Vansant pages.

For my characterization of Charles Vansant's years at the University of Pennsylvania, I owe thanks to Mark Frazier Lloyd, director of the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, archivist Martin J. Hackett, and also James Curtiss Ayers. The Penn archivists tolerated my presence for weeks, and their expertise informs the Penn history in this book. The archivists gave me special access to Charles Vansant's Penn yearbooks—
The Records
of 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1914. My brief description of Vansant's years at Penn and the assertion that
This Side of Paradise
is an accurate reflection of those years is based on extensive research of turn-of-the-century university life as well as a reading of every page of the campus newspaper,
The Daily Pennsylvanian,
published during Vansant's four years. The mentions of Charlie, or “Van,”as his classmates called him, were few, but the feel of the times was abundant.

For Charles's academic record and school experiences before college, I would like to thank Tony Brown, Director of Alumni of the Episcopal Academy of Merion and Devon, Pennsylvania for access to the academy's archives.

For my understanding of Philadelphia society, I am greatly indebted to
The Perennial Philadelphians
by Nathaniel Burt, which paints a loving, incisive, and utterly convincing portrait of Old Phildelphians.

My descriptions of Beach Haven, Engleside and New Baldwin hotels, and the Engle family are drawn substantially from
Eighteen Miles of History on Long Beach Island
and
Six Miles at Sea: A Pictorial History of Long Beach Island.
Both volumes are by John Bailey Lloyd. My thanks to John for showing me
his beloved island, the new Engleside Motel, and the site of Charles Vansant's death.

My portrayal of Dr. Eugene LaRue Vansant's medical practice is based on his papers contained in the archives of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and I wish to thank the curator of the Historical Library, Charles Greifenstein, and the reference librarian, Christopher Stanwood, for their assistance.

To fix Dr. Vansant's place in the medical history of the United States and the storied medical history of Philadelphia—necessary, I thought, to understand the moments he watched his son die despite the best “modern” medical knowledge—took wide-ranging research.

My thanks to Gretchen Worden, director of the Mutter Museum, the museum of medical history and education at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, for an afternoon explaining the practice of turn-of-the-century medicine and showing me a typical doctor's office of the period as well as a variety of laryngological tools that Dr. Vansant would have used.

Louisa Vansant's personality shines through her letters from sailing ports around the world, especially her touching letter to Eugene from New York City dated Feb. 18, 1891. I obtained copies from John Dillon.

For my descriptions of turn-of-the-century Spring Lake, the New Essex & Sussex Hotel, and the New Monmouth Hotel, I would like to thank the librarians and curators at the Spring Lake Historical Society, who gave me access to their archives and exhibits. My description of Mrs. George W. Childs requires a special thanks to Dan Rottenberg, the Philadelphia writer who shared research on his forthcoming book,
The Man Who Made Wall Street: Anthony J. Drexel and the Rise of Modern Finance
, to be published in the fall of 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Woodrow Wilson's cabinet meeting about the shark was front-page news across America, and it is from these accounts the scene is derived.

My research in the small town of Matawan was made delightful by Ruth E. Alt of nearby Morganville, New Jersey, who with her husband Joseph runs something of a single-stop genealogical resource for the area that is truly remarkable. Ruth Alt's research and personal recollections of the boys at Matawan Creek—Lester Stilwell, Rensselaer Cartan, Johnson Cartan, Anthony Bublin, Charles E. Van Brunt Jr., Albert O'Hara, and Frank Clowes, as
well as Constable John Mulsoff and retired captain Thomas V.
Cottrell—were invaluable in creating the swimming-hole scenes. In addition to interviews and personal recollections, the sketches of the people in Matawan are drawn from stories in
The Matawan Journal
and
Keyport Weekly,
as well as Monmouth County census, birth, and death records. I am grateful to Helen Henderson for her interview about Matawan and for her fine pictorial book,
Around Matawan and Aberdeen
, which was extremely useful in its descriptions of the merchants, shops, and feeling of Main Street in the small town. Special thanks are due the librarians of the Matawan Aberdeen Public Library on Main Street for help with their archives, especially Virginia Moshen, for sharing her knowledge of the shark case; and Sarah Ellison, head docent of the Burrowes Mansion Museum in Matawan, home of the historical society, for showing me her town.

In my attempt to create a portrait of cultural life in early twentieth century America, the America of the Vansants and Bruders, the Fishers and Stilwells, I drew upon numerous sources. They include the first five volumes of
Our Times
by Mark Sullivan.
Our Times
was especially useful for my portrayal of the “Robber Baron” era, but it was a constant browsing companion as well for songs, schooling, automobiles, and a sense of being alive then. I also consulted
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s
, by Frederick Lewis Allen, which begins in May 1919 with elements of life, like the hazards of driving a tin lizzie, still germane to 1916;
A History of American Life
, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., and Dixon Ryan Fox, which was the sturdiest of companions on social matters; and the book
1919
by John Dos Passos, which, though fiction, inspired fresh passes at the facts.
Remember When: A Loving Look at Days Gone By: 1900–1942
, by Allen Churchill, is a fine way for a reader, or a researcher, to acquire a glow of nostalgia.