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By Root 301 0

he died, at age fifty-six, of a dissipated liver. He was eulogized on the front page of The New York Times as a major figure in the city's life for a quarter century, who might have contributed far more to society. Yet the Gilded Age mogul-sportsman went to his grave knowing he had won his wager. Indeed, his position on man-eating sharks had grown more convincing to the scientific community with each passing year. By 1906, the Wright Brothers had flown, the newly invented marvel of neon lights lit Broadway (where George Bernard Shaw opened with Man and Superman), Jack London had written The Sea Wolf. Yet scant more was known about the true nature of sharks. No one since 1891 had come forward with proof of a shark attack on man in the temperate waters on the East Coast. As the widowed grande dame, Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs, and an aging William K. Vanderbilt, met Hermann's body at the port of New York, the shark wager had fully outgrown its vaudevillian beginnings as a feature in New York's yellow journalism wars, a summer diversion for the Four Hundred who graced Mrs. Astor's and Mrs. Oelrichs's ballrooms. It was now respected scientific data. Ichthyologists at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, a world leader among the new and serious museums, were quoting Hermann Oelrichs's bet as compelling evidence that man-eating sharks did not exist. On the question of shark attack in the new twentieth century, it was the best science there was.

By the summer of 1915, when Bell in New York spoke to Watson in San Francisco in the first long-distance call, and Ford developed the marvel of a farm tractor (and made his one millionth car), the editors of The New York Times adjudged it time, long overdue, for society to acknowledge the modern and scientific view of sharks.

In an August 2 editorial, “Let Us Do Justice to Sharks,” the Times decided it was “time to revive the controversy . . . [Hermann Oelrichs] excited” and put the issue to rest once and for all. Almost a decade had passed since Hermann Oelrichs's death, the Times noted, a quarter century since his famous wager, and no verifiable shark attacks on man on the East Coast had yet been reported. The editors were puzzled at the persistence among modern people of an irrational fear of sharks.

“To this day there is nothing that will so quickly set a crowd of swimmers scurrying for our beaches as the sight of a shark's fin in the offing,” the Times lamented. Such fears were baseless and unreasonable, the newspaper's editors wrote. While the Times allowed that “the bitter hate that every sailor feels for the whole shark tribe can hardly be wholly baseless, for hate is always the exact measure of fear, and all fears have reason of one sort or another,” the only evidence of such an attack was a single photograph, reportedly taken from a steamer in the Red Sea, “seeming to be a shark in the very act of closing his jaws on a man.” Given Oelrichs's uncollected reward and the paucity of other evidence, the Times concluded “that sharks can properly be called dangerous, in this part of the world, is apparently untrue.”

In the spring of 1916, the great white swam on the surface of a world that perhaps knew less about its nature than it had in several centuries. Even in the twenty-first century, the white shark remains largely a mystery. The force of its bite has never been measured. The bite of a six-foot lemon shark has been calculated at seven tons per square inch. The great white, at nearly twenty feet, three thousand pounds, will not submit to dental examination, and will not accept confinement. The fish is too big, too violent, beyond control. Man has never been able to keep the great white in captivity. When this has been attempted, the giant shark batters its head against its prison, unable to accept boundaries, hammering at the metal stays in the concrete that it senses electromagnetically. All that is known about the jaw power of the great white is that it must be immeasurably stronger than a small lemon shark's.

In 1971, Jacques Cousteau postulated that the white