The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (10 page)

We rounded the islands and then traveled a few miles farther west, until we were straddling the edge of the continental shelf. On one side of
Superfish
was a relatively easy-to-envision one-hundred-foot depth of ocean; on the other, a long and vertiginous drop of two miles. It was probably a good thing that the seasick people didn’t realize this. The wind had whipped the ocean into towering swells, and I became chilled and went into the wheelhouse to sit with Mick. Even this far out, hanging over the shelf, there were no whales to be watched. Mainly because, he confided to me, whale season had been over for two weeks. The onboard naturalist, an overenthusiastic woman who made people clap when a lone dolphin passed by, was reduced to walking around the deck holding a plastic model of a humpback.

On the trip back to San Francisco the water became even snarlier, and by the time
Superfish
hit the Potato Patch, a shallow spot in the channel where outgoing currents collide with incoming swells, the waves were cranky mountains. Mick had to pull the throttle way back so he didn’t bury the bow. When we finally pulled into the marina at Fort Mason, it was almost dark and nearly everyone was huddled in the cabin.

The marina was crammed and congested, filled with people in a hurry and the din of civilization: traffic humming, metallic machine noise, the constant background buzz of human voices. Ringing cell phones. Slamming doors. An endless line of cars trolled impatiently for nonexistent parking spots. Looking across four lanes of frantic road at a bustling shopping center, I wondered how a place as primitive as the Farallones could possibly survive sharing a zip code with seven million people. I was afraid that it couldn’t.

BACK IN MANHATTAN THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS ORDINARY LIFE
. September 11 was barely two months old, and the city was still in shock. A pall hung over everything, and a numbness, and it wasn’t uncommon to see people walking on the street with tears streaming down their faces. My office in Rockefeller Center was bristling with guards, soldiers carrying automatic weapons patrolled the subways, and almost every day Fifth Avenue traffic was halted for memorial services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The city had turned inward to heal its wounds, life seemed darker and more fragile than anyone could bear, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the day when all the sharks came up to us in the whaler, like chiaroscuro visitors from another planet.

JANUARY
10, 2003

Point Reyes smelled like leather and eucalyptus and moss and wood and smoke when I pulled onto the main street in my rental car, looking for a diner called the Station House. I knew it wouldn’t be hard to find—there were only about a dozen buildings in the entire commercial district. This was a rugged, Northern California beach town, a place of woodstoves, balky plumbing, and artisan cheese, nestled into folds of low coastal hills and edged by a finger of ocean called Tomales Bay. Tomales Point, at its mouth, was a popular place for surfing, kayaking, and abalone diving, despite the fact that more people had been attacked by great white sharks there than anywhere else in the world. From the point, it was only twenty miles to the Farallones.

The 2002 shark season had just wrapped up, and I was here for a recap. Though I’d intended to make a day trip or two to the island with Ron this past fall, magazine work had kept me pinned to Manhattan. I had no idea how the year had played out in terms of sharks: who’d been back and who was AWOL; how many tags had been deployed; what fresh discoveries had been made. In emails, Peter had offered hints of difficulties, with tensions from the cage-diving feud affecting everything they did. I wanted to hear about all of it. I still, as Scot would say, had sharks on the brain.

By now I was a sort of cocktail-party expert on great whites and could hold forth about them for any amount of time. I often found myself thinking about the Farallon sharks during long sets at swim practice, and they continued to populate my dreams, sometimes even waking me at night. Unlike most memories, soon relegated to the brain’s discard pile (even the sentimental favorites) the sharks occupied prime real estate in my head. And as the months passed, my intrigue about the islands themselves intensified, too. Whenever I had a spare moment between deadlines, I’d dig deeper into my Farallon research. My apartment filled with nineteenth-century newspaper clippings set in metal-and-wood type, with headlines like “Marooned on the Farallones” and “Frisco’s Strange Outpost,” melancholy sepia-toned pictures of people who had lived—and died—on the islands, buildings that no longer existed, and the two houses that remained, their facades morphing unhappily over the decades. A few leads paid off, and each clip of information became a clue that pulled me to the next source. As the pieces fell into place, I began to see the outlines of a haunting story that dated back to the sixteenth century. Bit by bit, the islands’ lost history became clearer. And stranger and stranger and stranger.

FROM THE BEGINNING THE FARALLON ISLANDS HAVE HAD AN IMAGE
problem. Sailors referred to them as “the devil’s teeth,” in testament to both the nautical dangers they posed and their sublime appearance. In a nineteenth-century magazine article, the islands were compared, unfavorably, to prison. “God has done less for it than any other place,” griped one early visitor.

In 1579, Sir Francis Drake became the first European to set foot on the islands, visiting just long enough to stock up on seal and seabird meat. He christened the Farallones the “Islands of St. James,” but the name didn’t stick. I could see why; it was indefensibly fancy, like naming California “Sussex” or Colorado “Devonshire.” Or saddling rugged Point Reyes with the precious name “New Albion.” (Which Drake also did. That didn’t catch on either.) Seventeenth-century coastal Miwok Indians called them the “Islands of the Dead,” considering the place a kind of offshore hell: “An island in the bitter, salt sea, an island naked, barren and desolate, covered only with brine-spattered stones, and with glistening salt, which crunches under the tread, and swept with cursed winds…. On this abhorred island bad Indians are condemned to live forever.”

Or rapacious fortune hunters. The first wholesale effort to convert the islands’ abundant wildlife into cash took root in 1807 when a Yankee fur trader named Jonathan Winship, captain of the Boston-based trading vessel
O’Cain,
noted “a vast number of fur and hair seal” on Southeast Farallon. Three years later the
O’Cain
returned, and over the course of two years managed to kill seventy-three thousand animals. At the time, Winship was involved in a joint venture with a group of Russians, who’d been doing a brisk business trading seal and sea otter pelts with China, hunting their way across the Bering Strait and then down from Alaska, eventually establishing their southernmost base at Fort Ross, one hundred miles north of San Francisco. The Russian American Fur Company’s hunters were Kodiak, Aleut, and Pomo Indians, some of whom were slaves condemned to this duty on murder charges. This operation remained on the Farallones for nearly thirty years, cleaning the place out of everything from seabird feathers, eggs, and meat; to sea lion oil and meat; to seal skins; to the ultimate prize—sea otter pelts.

To run your fingers through a sea otter pelt, with its millions of hairs per square inch, is to viscerally sense its doom. This is one plush animal, richer than ermine, silkier than mink. Even back in the preinflationary early 1800s, a single hide fetched forty dollars in China. Fur seals had coarser coats and were far more common. They sold for only two dollars per skin. But there were few otters at the Farallones, and furthermore, the seals were easy to catch. While crack teams of Aleut hunters were imported to snag sea otters from the water, zipping around in small, agile kayaks called
bidarkas,
when it came to the seals, skill was not required—anyone with a club could do it.

Living conditions were beyond wretched: there was little shelter from the elements, plenty of disease, no freshwater, no way of getting back and forth to the mainland. The relentless damp brought on skin rashes and sores that quickly became infected. Ships dropped off provisions at long and random intervals, but most of the time there was nothing to eat but sea lion meat, abalone, and seabird eggs. Deaths were numerous. In his euphemistically titled book
Adventures in California, 1818–1828,
a Russian teenager named Zakahar Tchitchinoff recounted his time on Southeast Farallon:

By the late 1830s, even the Russians had decided that conditions were too harsh. Plus, there were no more seals. Within thirty years, the number taken per season had dropped from forty thousand to fifty-four. In December 1841, the Russians packed up Fort Ross and left California for good.

And then came the literal gold diggers. Within a year of the monumental 1848 discovery in the gravelly sand of the American River, San Francisco’s population had swelled from eight hundred to forty thousand, with four thousand newcomers surging in every month, relegated to tents and shacks. As the population exploded, so did the anarchy. Infrastructure was nonexistent and justice was administered, often brutally, by vigilante groups. The general idea was this: Lay claim to anything you could get your hands on and then keep it by means of force. And during the early, scrambling days of the new metropolis, there wasn’t enough of anything to go around.

Women and food were in particularly short supply. While an enterprising businesswoman named Eliza Farnham attempted to import females from the East aboard the jauntily named
Eliza Farnham’s Bride Ship
—all a woman needed was $250, a character reference from her clergyman, and nothing to lose—an arrival from Maine named Doc Robinson noticed that there were not many chickens in California. Therefore, no eggs. And without eggs there could be no cakes, no pies, no breakfast rolls, no omelette brunches. Robinson had heard rumors of an island just outside the Golden Gate, home to an enormous population of common murre, a duck-sized seabird with tuxedo markings like a penguin and the sleek head of a loon, that laid eggs every bit as edible as a hen’s. What’s more, a murre egg was the size of a softball.

So in spring of 1849, Robinson and his brother-in-law, Orrin Dorman, chartered a boat and sailed to the Farallones. Immediately they realized that, if anything, the estimate of how many murres were on this island was wildly understated. There was nothing
but
birds here, jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, packed onto the rocks in unfathomable numbers. Trying to count the birds on Southeast Farallon Island was like counting grains of sand on the beach or blades of grass in a field. It simply couldn’t be done.

And everywhere they looked—eggs. Hundreds of thousands of murre eggs lay on the rocks, out in plain sight rather than tucked away in nests. The eggs had leathery, speckled shells that ranged in color from pale taupe to ivory to soft green or turquoise. They were covered in black scribbles, like writing in a secret murre language. Tapered on one end, the eggs were well designed for the terrain; they wobbled in circles on ledges rather than rolling off the side.

For baking, everyone agreed, this was a perfectly fine substitute. When cooked straight up, however, the seabird eggs were less appealing. A fried murre egg had a bloodred yolk, clear whites, and a fishy aftertaste. And if you ate a bad one, it was rumored to take three months to get the taste out of your mouth.

Robinson and Dorman loaded their boat with eggs and headed back to San Francisco, coming up against a nasty storm and dumping half their cargo into the ocean just to stay upright. Nonetheless, they sold the remaining eggs for a dollar a dozen and pocketed three thousand dollars, serious money in those days. Robinson opened his own burlesque hall—another big growth segment of the fledgling California economy—and neither man ever went back to the Farallones. But others did. Within a week of the successful egg sale, Southeast Farallon was swarming with “eggers.”

In keeping with the land-grabbing ethos, six men immediately staked their claim, declaring that the islands belonged to them exclusively due to “rights of possession,” and incorporating as the Farallon Egg Company. Egging, though lucrative, proved a tough way to make a living. The season spanned eight flurried weeks between May and July, during which time it was man against murre, and both parties against the gulls. Climbing near-vertical rises of crumbling granite, the eggers carried clubs in their free hands to fend off the attacking birds, at the same time stuffing the eggs into specially designed “egg shirts”—giant gunnysacks with multiple pockets. Scalp wounds were common.

By day’s end, the shirts were filled with as many as eighteen dozen eggs, and the eggers would be staggering under the bulk like a troupe of drunken, lumpy Santas. The rocks were slick from guano and fog, and it was ridiculously easy to fall. While the eggers wore rope-soled shoes studded with railroad spikes for traction, injury and death were only a slipped foot or a loose rock away. During the gathering season there were approximately twenty-five men on the Egg Company’s crew and sometimes, at the end of the day, an egger was simply entered into the logbook as “missing.”

MEANWHILE, IN 1851, THE YEAR THE FARALLON EGG COMPANY PLANTED
its flag on the islands, there was not a single lighthouse on the Pacific Coast. Ship traffic was on the rise, and captains from all over the world complained about America’s untended western edge. Realizing the dangers of two thousand miles of unknown, unmarked coastline, the federal government set out on a massive project to build sixteen lighthouses from San Diego to Seattle. And, given that the Farallones posed the most notorious obstacle out there, it was one of the first lighthouses to be commissioned.

The Farallon light flashed across the water for the first time in December 1855. It would have been operational two years earlier except the architects’ measurements were off, and the lens didn’t fit into the lighthouse tower. It cannot have been a happy moment when the error was discovered—the entire structure had to be knocked down and rebuilt. As with all Farallon things, this wasn’t easy. The heavy construction supplies couldn’t be landed, and the stone for both tower building attempts had to be quarried from the island itself. Workmen were forced to crawl up the side of Lighthouse Hill carrying the bricks on their backs, a handful at a time. After a few days of this, there was a quiet but firm mutiny and a mule was delivered.

Bad blood arose immediately, it seems, between the Egg Company and the lighthouse building crew. The government, which did not recognize the company’s claim to the Farallones, had deeper concerns than who got to rob the murres, and let it continue its business so long as it didn’t get out of hand. But the Egg Company owners believed that they—and not the government—owned these islands, and they were almost always out of hand. So began thirty years of a bitter marriage.

Four men were stationed permanently at the lighthouse. A spartan stone house with a sleeping loft was built at the base of Lighthouse Hill for their residence, companion to the two Egg Company dwellings that had been erected in the 1850s. Even during the months when they weren’t sharing the island with mafioso eggers, the job of Farallon lighthouse keeper amounted to an exercise in hardship. Theirs was an isolated, lonely existence, and the weather made it worse, pounding them with storms and shrouding them in fog. And each year, the egging season itself became increasingly traumatic. There were nonstop dustups as rival gangs battled the company for the rights to harvest the eggs; on more than one occasion, soldiers were summoned to calm things down. The battles often lasted for weeks, involving threats, fistfights, barricades, and small arms, and during those interludes San Franciscans would go eggless once again.