Demon Fish (8 page)

The Romans had already labeled sharks generically as “dogfish,” but the English apparently considered the sharks they witnessed in the New World so alien, so vicious, that they classified them as a new species: a
sharke
. According to
The Oxford English Dictionary
, this word emerged in 1569 when Hawkins’s sailors returned from their traumatic expedition with a specimen of what they called a
sharke
to London; one account later described the preserved creature as “a marueilous straunge Fishe.”
²⁸
For years British writers used the words “shark” and “sharke” interchangeably. Over time, as Europeans became more familiar with sharks’ behavior, they came to apply its name to a slew of unsavory human activities. “Shark” became synonymous with the word “predator,” as when in 1713
The Guardian
, in its issue number 73, referred to “the sharks, who prey upon the inadvertency of young heirs.” By 1806 it had become another term for lawyers; in 1828 a writer used it to describe a gang of reporters. Americans picked up these slang terms without hesitation and added a new twist in 1946 by applying the word to anyone who displayed lechery when seeking a liaison.
²⁹
The German word for villain is
Schurke
. In every instance, “shark” has had negative connotations.

For much of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, European and American seafarers were on the front lines with sharks. At times, they were grateful for the sustenance sharks gave them. The British captain William Dampier—who explored parts of what later became Australia as well as Papua New Guinea in the late seventeenth century—delivered several enthusiastic reports about them in his writings. While sailing south of Sierra Leone in 1683, Dampier wrote, “While we lay in the calms we caught several great Sharks; sometimes 2 or 3 a day, and eat them all, boyling and squeezing them dry, and then stewing them with Vinegar, Pepper, &c. for we had little flesh aboard.”
³⁰
Sixteen years later Dampier and his crew found even more eating opportunities off the coast of Australia (then New Holland), where, he wrote, “There are Abundance of them in this particular Sound, that I therefore give it the Name of Shark’s Bay.” (The name persists to this day.) The sailors not only munched on sharks there; they dissected them in gruesome detail: in one eleven-foot-long shark, they “found the Head and Boans of a Hippopotomus; the hairy Lips of which were still sound and not putrified, and the Jaw was also firm, out of which we pluckt a great many Teeth, 2 of them 8 Inches long, and as big as a Man’s Thumb, small at one end, and a little crooked; the rest not above half so long. The Maw was full of Jelly which stank extreamly: However I saved for a while the Teeth and the Sharks Jaw: The Flesh of it was divided among my Men; and they took care that no waste should be made of it.”
³¹
At times sailors even sought sharks out for their own amusement, as the log of the
Leopard
, a ship that sailed the Gulf of Maine’s Frenchman Bay in 1861, makes clear. “Catch a shirk with pork had some fun,” it recorded. From Dampier’s utilitarian perspective, sharks were a marine resource like any other, which could help his crew survive. While the captain was not above saving part of his catch as a keepsake, laying claim to one shark’s teeth and jaws, he neither glamorizes nor demonizes the animals. And with enough vinegar and pepper, they made for decent rations.

But most sailors came to view sharks with hostility, seeing them as a mortal threat. It’s not an accident that the first detailed eyewitness account of a shark attack—which now ranks as the earliest record in the International Shark Attack File—involved a sailor. The 1580
Fugger News-Letter
report describes a seaman falling off his ship somewhere between Portugal and India in vivid detail. While he grabbed a line his shipmates tossed him, “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.”
³²
For Westerners who had been largely shielded from sharks for centuries, these animals suddenly emerged as an unseen threat that could hurt them without warning, and this fear only grew as ocean exploration intensified.

Historical accounts make it clear those riding on slave ships were particularly vulnerable to attack because these overcrowded ships released their waste—and even some of their slaves—into the ocean, which drew sharks to the vessels. Samuel Robinson, a Scottish teenager who worked on his uncle’s slave ship at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote a memoir decades later in which he recalled the sharks that would follow the trail of waste and trash thrown from the vessel on which he sailed: “The very sight of him slowly moving round the ship, with his black fin two feet above the water, his broad snout and small eyes, and the altogether villainous look of the fellow, make one shiver, even when at a safe distance.”
³³

While Robinson was able to keep his distance, not all the slaves aboard the ships did. Sailors frequently discarded the bodies of dead African captives overboard, and occasionally threatened to do the same to their live cargo. At times slaves who jumped into the ocean to escape their captors fell prey to an equally gruesome fate.
³⁴
These seafaring tales were so grim that an abolitionist named James Tytler used the prospect of this watery grave in the late eighteenth century to bolster his antislavery argument, submitting a document to the British House of Lords titled “The Petition of the Sharks of Africa.” Written tongue in cheek from the sharks’ perspective, the petition recounted how they had prospered at the expense of the slaves they picked off during these transatlantic crossings, which gave them “large quantities of their most favourite food—human flesh.” These “sharks” wrote they were confident the British lords shared sufficient “wisdom and fellow feeling” to ensure that this supply of food would continue for years to come.
³⁵

At times, sailors boasted about their narrow escapes from such sea monsters. Julius L. Esping, a sailor who struggled with drink and women early in his life before becoming an ardent Christian missionary, wrote in his memoir that he skirted death on a trip from Brazil to New York City:

On our return passage I went into the sea to bathe, and while swimming near the ship, the captain, who was walking on deck, noticed a large shark approaching the vessel, and enquired of one of the crew if any of the men were in the water. On receiving an affirmative reply he ran to the stern of the ship and told me of the shark, barely in time for me to make my escape. Being informed of my danger, I looked around and saw the monster coming with lightning speed directly toward me. With a desperate effort I made for the martingale, and just cleared the water to save myself. All who witnessed the operation concluded that if the shark had closed its jaws on my body, “the New York harpies would have been heavy losers.”
³⁶

In certain instances, sailors on whaling ships came into conflict with sharks because they were competing for the same prey. Once sailors managed to harpoon a whale, they still faced the task of hauling their prey up on board, often in the midst of the shark feeding frenzy that would inevitably ensue from such an attack. One of the best accounts of this sort of contest comes from George Barker’s 1916 self-published memoir,
Thrilling Adventures of the Whaler
Alcyone:
Killing Man-Eating Sharks in the Indian Ocean, Hunting Kangaroos in Australia
. Barker, a Boston native who headed to sea on a whaler as a sixteen-year-old, describes how safety precautions for carving up whales in the water were nonexistent:

The mate tied a rope under his arms and he jumped into the sea and slipped down between the whale and the side of the schooner and worked his way along until he came to the head. Fastening the rope securely, he shouted to the boys on deck to haul him up.

When near the deck of the vessel he noticed that one of the crew was standing on a staging with a long lance in his hand, while another held a lantern, and all wore a scared look on their faces. Upon landing on the deck he asked the meaning of this, and was told that the water around the whale’s body was filled with sharks and that several times the lances were thrown close to him to ward off these man-eating monsters.

He then looked over the side of the schooner and by the aid of the lantern could see several sharks swimming about. He was then convinced that the officers of a whaler cared but little for a man’s or a boy’s life. Nothing further was done that night.
³⁷

While Esping and Barker were little-known American seamen whose brushes with sharks went largely unnoticed, the Englishman Brook Watson made sure to immortalize the 1749 attack that cost him his right leg just below the knee. At the time Watson was a fourteen-year-old orphan traveling on a trading ship in the harbor of Havana, Cuba: he went on to become a successful London merchant and eventually mayor of London and a baronet. John Singleton Copley’s iconic 1778 painting depicts Watson, in a state of shock, while three of his shipmates try to pull him from the water and another prepares to harpoon a vicious shark, its jaws agape. The painting ranks as one of the most famous shark attack scenes of all time: the animal is a hulking menace, with a glowing yellowish eye and serrated teeth.

But the painting, which Watson presumably commissioned himself after meeting Copley in London four years before, was not enough for the survivor. When he was crowned a baronet more than half a century later, Watson asked for a coat of arms alluding to his attack. The design includes the Latin motto
Scuto Divino
(“Under God’s Protection”) and features Neptune, the god of the sea, using a trident to repel an attacking shark. The upper-left corner of the shield even shows the part of his right leg he lost as a teenager. The coat of arms’ message is clear: Watson faced down the sea monster and, with divine protection, bested the animal.

These attacks on sailors began to permeate the public mind-set. No longer were sharks seen as complex creatures that could provide sustenance as well as mete out justice as part of some higher order. They were perfect, unrepentant killers, enemies in the sea.

Still, even though sailors had recounted horrifying tales of the predators they faced at sea, average Americans had been largely shielded from sharks until the summer of 1916. For one terrifying week a shark—or multiple sharks, it remains unclear—attacked and killed four people off the New Jersey shore. This deadly episode, which helped inspire the movie
Jaws
, was captured brilliantly in Michael Capuzzo’s nonfiction account,
Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence
. From that moment on, beachgoers in America had a reason to fear entering the water.

The attacks of 1916 tell us as much about changes in U.S. society as they do about shark behavior. For years ordinary Americans kept their distance from the sea, but this shifted during the late nineteenth century. It became fashionable to seek respite from the summer heat by heading for the ocean, and for the most part the victims of the Jersey shore attacks were adults and children enjoying the new popular pastime of spending time at the beach. When a great white started attacking swimmers near the New Jersey beach towns of Beach Haven and Spring Lake as well as in Matawan, more than a dozen miles from the ocean, it marked a turning point in Americans’—and by extension the industrialized world’s—relationship with sharks.

On July 1, 1916, Charles Epting Vansant, a young textile salesman and recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, was vacationing in Beach Haven with his family when he entered the water for an early evening dip. He was joined by a dog—whose erratic paddling may inadvertently have attracted the shark’s attention. The shark struck when he was in just three and a half feet of water, chomping his left leg below the knee. Onlookers managed to drag Vansant onshore, and his own father, a Philadelphia physician, tended to him back at their hotel. But Eugene Vansant could not save his son, who died that night.
³⁸

What followed was a terrifying round of shark strikes. Charles Bruder, a bell captain at Spring Lake’s Essex and Sussex Hotel, was torn apart on July 6 during a solo swim around dusk. On July 11 a group of boys took a dip in Matawan Creek—five miles from the nearest bay—and fourteen-year-old Rensselaer Cartan Jr. felt something bump against him, leaving bloody scrapes across his chest. While the boy and a retired sea captain, Thomas V. Cottrell, tried to warn residents of Spring Lake that a shark lurked in the water, few paid attention. A day later the same shark killed both Lester Stilwell, an epileptic teenager, and the town’s tailor, W. Stanley Fisher, who fought to recover Stilwell’s body. That same day, July 12, the shark ripped off the left leg of twelve-year-old Joseph Dunn, before Dunn’s older brother and a man passing through on a boat managed to pull him from the creek.
³⁹
The debate over whether a single great white was responsible for the attacks or whether it was a combination of animals—bull sharks are well-known for entering creeks, since they can survive in both salt water and freshwater—has raged for nearly a century. But the public reaction to the spate of attacks was unanimous: people were scared. An urban population that had just begun to venture out to sea now saw the ocean as harboring a deadly threat.

Ironically, just before that series of shark attacks, prominent U.S. scientists and publications had downplayed the threat these fish posed. On August 2, 1915,
The New York Times
published an editorial titled “Let Us Do Justice to Sharks,” which declared, “That sharks can properly be called dangerous, in this part of the world, is apparently untrue.” The head of the American Museum of Natural History at the time, Frederic Augustus Lucas, did his best to dispel the idea of man-eating sharks in a letter to the editor in the
Times:
there was, he wrote, “practically no danger of an attack … about our coasts.”
⁴⁰