Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [103]
Fortunately, The New York Times reported, Hoffman “had the presence of mind to remember that she had read in the Times that a bather can scare away a shark by splashing, and she beat up the water furiously.” The large fin disappeared and Hoffman retreated to shore, where slowly her heart resumed its normal beat. Later, when she regained composure, the dancer wasn't sure if she had seen a shark or merely imagined it after reading the headlines in the morning paper. She was, the Times reported, “not sure . . . whether she had had her trouble for nothing or had barely escaped death.” In any case, she was not eager to return to the water.
While Gertrude Hoffman's encounter in Coney Island was frightening, it was not at all unusual. Reports of sharks nearing the coast were multiplying. A shark panic unrivaled in American history was sweeping along the coasts of New York and New Jersey and spreading by telephone and wireless, letter and postcard. From the edge of the sea, an alarm sounded by the forces that had turned the sinking of the Maine into war had little trouble transforming a juvenile Carcharodon carcharias into a sea monster. Newsboys chased men down the street, hawking front pages right under their noses, and announced in Irish and Italian and Polish accents and high prepubescent voices to passing motorcars and horse carriages and the stone towers of Manhattan:
“Big, savage sharks infest coast!”
“Shark kills 2 bathers, maims 1, near New York!”
“Whole of Jersey coast infested with man-eating monsters!”
“Ten pounds of his flesh ripped off by sea monster!”
The New York Herald headline trumpeted six columns across the top, a size reserved for war or the “Second Coming”: “Shark glides up shallow creek and kills boy and man, then tears another swimmer.”
“Monster makes way through Raritan Bay and upstream mile and one-half.”
“First little victim only 12 years old.”
“Man who goes to rescue dies soon after being dragged from creature's teeth.”
An average New Yorker in 1916 had seen little more of war than the simulations of the Boer War or the naval battle “War of Worlds” at Luna Park on Coney Island, but the Herald assured its readers, “No more spectacular raid on inland or coast waters ever was made.”
The morning of Gertrude Hoffman's encounter, Thomas Richard, assistant steward of the Beau Rivage Hotel in Coney Island, was bathing in Sheepshead Bay at the foot of Emmons Avenue in Brooklyn, facing the other end of Coney Island, when fifty people breakfasting on the porch of the hotel yelled “Shark!” A group of bathers ran screaming from the water, but Richard was too far out to swim quickly ashore and saw a fin headed in his direction. As the fin closed in, he raced for a nearby motorboat and climbed in, drawing his legs out of the water a fraction of a second before the ripple passed where he had been.
Fear rounded the bays of New York from Gravesend Bay to Great Kills Harbor to the Rockaways. On Staten Island beaches there was a noticeable decrease in bathers—fewer still after employees of the Mount Loretto Home sighted a fin in Princess Bay, and, after a brief struggle, beached the bloodied corpse of an eight-and-a-half-foot shark. At Keansburg on Raritan Bay and Atlantic Highlands on Sandy Hook Bay—both sharing a shoreline with Matawan Creek—the bathers stayed on shore and basked in the sun. By Saturday, July 15, the weekend business of the bathhouse owners at Coney Island and Brighton Beach was in ruins. Police estimated fifty thousand Coney Island bathers had chosen to stay out of the water for fear of the man-eater. “Terror of Sharks Keeps a Million Bathers on Shore,” the New York World reported.
The few who braved the surf could not have been reassured by the company. On long, deserted beaches, crowds frolicking in the water and cooling under umbrellas had been replaced by gangs of men with gaffs and spears, guns and harpoons—men with the high spirits of sportsmen, or the grim aspect of bounty hunters. “Bathing has come almost