Demon Fish (6 page)

Together, the boy and I walk across the road, back to the hut of Karasimbe’s sister. I ask him if he wants to be a shark caller when he grows up. Solen’s son hesitates for a moment, and in that instant Karasimbe places his hand on his arm. The boy’s father has already been instructing him on how to carve a canoe, how to paddle, and how to spear fish in the river. Karasimbe is confident the tradition will survive him.

“I will learn him, and he will be a shark caller,” the shark caller says, smiling.

From my perspective, it’s hard to believe that Karasimbe actually exercises magic over the sea. Despite my inherent skepticism, before setting out, I was rooting for him to prove me wrong and summon a shark. But our fishing trip did not produce one, underscoring the real-world factors that determine what happens at sea. It could have been anything from current weather conditions to the increasing number of foreign fishing vessels that now cruise Papua New Guinea’s waters. It is the sort of moment when scientific realties clash with magical beliefs, and over time these differences could prove irreconcilable. If the sharks here become so scarce that shark callers come up empty time after time, a faith tradition that has sustained these communities for centuries will begin to unravel.

That would represent a loss of enormous proportions. Karasimbe may be overhyping his abilities at times, but he remains gifted nonetheless, and he’s worked for years to maintain a practice that came under assault from colonizers that saw dismantling local culture as a path to economic and political domination. It seems incredible to think that the simple act of overfishing may be able to succeed where colonial powers have failed, robbing Papua New Guineans of the spiritual legacy they’ve held on to for generations. It is one of the most ancient human traditions connected with one of the world’s oldest creatures, and it now teeters on the precipice. If it disappears, it will not only cut off a handful of isolated tribes’ connections to the past. It will destroy one of the last bastions of a unique culture and advance in human understanding, where we figured out how to coexist with sharks.

2

AN ANCIENT FISH

The sharks were around before almost everything … It was probably pretty lonely for them when they were king.

—Stephen R. Palumbi, Stanford University marine biologist

I
f you ask anyone to imagine the world’s most ancient creatures, the image of dinosaurs automatically leaps to mind. In fact, sharks predate dinosaurs by roughly 200 million years. Their fossils are buried as far north as Montana, where a tropical sea once stretched for more than ten thousand square miles. And unlike dinosaurs, this species has managed to survive despite the massive changes that have occurred to the ocean over hundreds of millions of years: only a handful of creatures on the earth today are as old as sharks.

The chimpanzee and prehuman line diverged just 6 million years ago, according to genetic and anthropological evidence. The
Australopithecus afarensis
skeleton known as Lucy, which many think of as one of our most ancient ancestors, walked on the ground of what is now Ethiopia 3.18 million years ago. The first toolmakers appeared 2.5 million years ago in Gona, Ethiopia, but even these human ancestors don’t classify as
Homo erectus
. The humans that can be classified as “anatomically modern” only emerged 200,000 years ago, judging by skulls found near Kibish, Ethiopia, in the 1960s.
Homo sapiens
may have coexisted with Neanderthals until 20,000 or 30,000 years ago.
¹

By contrast, sharks emerged nearly 400 million years ago in the Devonian period, when they diverged from bony fish, evolving without swim bladders and lungs. They enjoyed a prolific burst in the Carboniferous period, between 360 and 286 million years ago, when an array of different shark species evolved. While several decades after the end of this age intense volcanic activity wiped out many of them along with most other marine life, two groups of sharks came out of this period. Between 200 and 145 million years ago the first modern sharks emerged, at the same time that dinosaurs began roaming the earth.
²

From a historical perspective, we’re the new arrivals, not them.

In our current era, when sharks are viewed as “the other,” it’s important to recognize that during earlier periods of human civilization, they were seen as more intimately connected to us. While some communities simply viewed them as a part of the natural world to be observed, several coastal societies saw them as either playing a critical role in their creation or serving as ongoing arbiters of human activities and disputes. One of the remarkable aspects of shark calling in Papua New Guinea is that it has preserved this sort of worldview to this day, where other traditions have collapsed. But in the overall context of human history, Karasimbe and his cohorts are not unique.

From the earliest moments in which humans developed language, art, and other forms of communication, they began to chronicle the presence of sharks in their surroundings. Phoenician pottery dating back to 3000
B.C
. displays images of sharks,
³
while a vase from 725
B.C
., discovered at Ischia, Italy, shows a fish resembling a shark attacking a man.
⁴
The ancient Greeks wrote and painted images of Ketea, sharklike creatures that the Greek poet Oppian described as a species that “rave for food with unceasing frenzy, being always hungered and never abating the gluttony of their terrible maw, for what food shall be sufficient to fill the void of their belly or enough to satisfy and give a respite to their insatiable jaws?”
⁵
A few hundred years later, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder made his own lasting contribution to the popular scientific conception of sharks when he described their attacks on pearl divers and named them, as a group, “dogfish.” This term—a classic example of how humans defined sharks in relation to themselves—started as a generic label for sharks and persisted that way in Europe and America for hundreds of years. For centuries fishermen have cursed dogfish, seeing them as worthless: the July 26, 1864, log entry from the ship
Rozella
, sailing in Broken Ground on Frenchman Bay in the Gulf of Maine, reports, “Dogfish plags us much.”
⁶
Now, however, dogfish refers to a specific set of species.

While most ancient thinkers provided anthropocentric accounts of sharks, Greeks such as Aristotle also studied the animals, and their close relations, for themselves. Aristotle dubbed them, collectively,
selache
, a name that still defines these animals more than two thousand years later. In one of his most vivid accounts of shark behavior, Aristotle described their mating rites: the cartilaginous fishes in copulation “hang together after the fashion of dogs, … the long-tailed ones mounting the others, unless the latter have a thick tail preventing this, when they come together belly to belly.”
⁷

The Islamic world offered its seminal account of sharks in 1270, when the Iraqi judge Zakariya Qazwini compiled an illustrated compendium titled
The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence
. The book, which was popular reading for hundreds of years, described how some residents lived in fear of the freshwater sharks that swam in the Tigris River. Matthew McDavitt, who practices law for a living in Charlottesville, Virginia, but spends much of his free time documenting how ancient cultures viewed sharks and other elasmobranchs, commissioned a translation of the book’s folio 71v, its section on the Persian Sea:

This is a great evil in the sea. It is like the crocodiles in the Nile River. Also it comes at a specific time mainly into the Tigris River. Some [other fish that ascend the Tigris River] are well-known: Al-Arabian, Al-Dahi, Al-Adaq, Al-Barak, and Al-Kubrij, all different species of fish. Each type comes at certain times, known to the people of Basra. One of them is known as Al-Tin [literally, “the dragon”; also known as Tinin]. It is worse than Al-Kusaj [shark]. It has teeth like spearheads. It is as long as a palm-tree. Its eyes are like fires of blood. It has an ugly shape; all other species run away from it.

While these early scientific accounts by Greeks, Romans, and Iraqis detail the real-world interactions between sharks and other species, many ancient island and coastal cultures elsewhere focused on sharks’ more mythical aspects. They constructed elaborate and abstract belief systems in which the animals represented different core values: sharks and rays symbolized law and justice to tribes and clans in Australia, Papua New Guinea, and central Africa, while they embodied aquatic fertility and warfare in the Yucatán. These stories portrayed sharks with greater complexity and helped explain the world in which these people lived. While aboriginal Australians developed very different beliefs about sharks compared with the Mayans, native Hawaiians, and men and women living on the Niger Delta, all of these societies saw their lives as intimately connected to sharks and their close relatives rays.

McDavitt became interested in ancient societies’ perceptions when he was an undergraduate anthropology major at the University of Virginia in the early 1990s and he saw sawfish snouts depicted repeatedly in Aztec art. “No one could explain what they were,” he recalls. He decided to learn the Aztec language in order to delve into the question, but it took years of research to unravel the puzzle.

McDavitt focused on a little-known figure in Aztec mythology called Cipactli, a sea monster who wrestled with four gods who were busy creating the world. The gods ripped the monster in half, according to Aztec lore, making the heavens from her upper body and the earth from her lower half, leaving Cipactli in a paralyzed state where she took on the identity of Tlaltecuhtli, or Earth-Lord. Cipactli is depicted in a number of ways in Aztec art: while the monster’s body resembles a crocodile, it boasts a sharklike tail, and at times what McDavitt calls “a strange, toothy appendage” that conjures up a sawfish’s rostrum. The sawfish rostrum frequently represents a sword in Aztec iconography, and in the case of Cipactli it was known as the monster’s “sword” or “striker.”

In the late 1970s archaeologists discovered the ruins of the Aztec Great Temple underneath Mexico City’s central plaza, unearthing the remains of sharks, swordfish, and crocodiles among their finds. Piecing together the images he had seen as an undergraduate, McDavitt hypothesizes these remains represent “the personified earth, at once fertile and destructive.” The sharp objects could have belonged to ritual implements that were used in human sacrifice, he notes, or could have been offerings to the gods in themselves. Either way, he writes, they show that Cipactli—part shark, part sawfish—clearly played a central role in Aztec cosmology by providing a transition between sea and land. “By cyclically defeating
Cipactli
and entombing her beneath the Great Temple, perhaps the Aztecs hoped to ensure that their living, hostile earth never again found the strength to submerge.”
⁸

Sharks and rays also played a key role in the way Australian aboriginals living along the coast viewed the creation of their world and their own ancestors. The Yolngu peoples—who live in northeastern Arnhem Land—are divided into some clans, but many of these clans claim to have descended from a whaler shark known as Mä
n
a. (“Whaler shark” is an Australian colloquialism for sharks they believed attacked whales; in this case the Yolngu are referring to freshwater bull sharks.) Mä
n
a plays the role of an avenger: attacked by the ancestor of another clan, he left the sea and invaded the land, carving up rivers with his sharp teeth and leaving the teeth behind to take the form of pandanus trees that line these rivers’ banks. The leaves of these trees have serrated edges. According to McDavitt, “These trees represent both
Mä
n
a’s
anger at being speared and the stingray-spine tipped spear that
Mä
n
a
carried to avenge his death.”
⁹

A consistent theme of intimate connection emerges across several shark-worshipping cultures: the shark gods take a tribal approach to picking winners and losers, rather than bestowing their largesse over a broad population. In this sense they operate as an extension of family, just more powerful. It’s a parochial vision of a deity, where a supernatural shark is akin to a Mafia godfather, to whom individuals can appeal for favors as long as they have paid regular dues to the don over time. Loyalty and familial ties matter above all; it is not a question of the gods making an impartial judgment about what is right.

Native Hawaiians took this practice to the extreme, creating a series of traditions based on the belief in supernatural helpers who are half-human, half-god, and use another medium to communicate their advice. Known as ‘
aumãkua
, these spirits had a single human keeper
(kahu)
who tended to them, and they would pass on their service from one generation to the next. Not all these ‘
aumãkua
were sharks: some were birds or even plants. But many Hawaiians were proud to claim a shark ‘
aumãkua
as part of their familial heritage, and these supernatural beings had a clear, practical purpose: they were supposed to help fishermen haul in significant catches and protect them from drowning.