Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [104]
Thus one of the most profligate shark hunts in history swept the coast. Fishermen slayed dozens of purported man-eaters and hauled their bloodied corpses to shore, where crowds watched the gigantic stomachs of the monsters slit open, revealing immense quantities of fish—but not the prize that paid: human flesh.
By that same Friday, swimmers were afraid to enter the waters of Chesapeake Bay for fear of man-eaters. The news on the front page of the Washington Post was presented as being as significant as the British assault on the Germans at the Somme. In headlines larger than those announcing the Mexican revolt, the Italian assault on the Austrians in Lagarina, the rush of Americans to join the army, or President Wilson's appointee to replace Charles Evans Hughes on the Supreme Court, the Post crowed: “Sharks cause panic. Man-eaters seen at numerous points along the Atlantic. New York and New Jersey shores guarded by armed men.” That morning, a Baltimore swimming club made plans to hire a shark patrol for their Sunday race on the Chesapeake, and the Maryland State Police schooner May Brown confirmed that it had spied “big sea monsters” in Annapolis harbor. The “shark scare . . . threw fright into the many persons . . . who frequent the nearby shores of Chesapeake Bay and Severn River for bathing purposes,” the Baltimore Sun reported.
Hysteria spread, afflicting the lowly and the mighty, as a single shark prevented people from entering the water along more than a thousand miles of the East Coast, from New England to Florida. Fishermen off Connecticut steered clear of Atlantic “monsters,” and a Tampa, Florida, boater said the Gulf man-eaters were so thick he'd returned to port. A neighbor of Teddy Roosevelt said he saw a shark off the beach in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and called upon him to do something about it.
The shark became an American cause célèbre. Giant toothy sharks grinned from front-page photographs. Ruthless cartoon sharks stalked human prey on the women's pages, and editorial writers wagged about the death of the myth that sharks were harmless.
People signed up for special swimming courses that, according to Allen, were supposed to teach bathers how to outwit sharks. Swimming star Annette Kellerman offered her advice in both The New York Times and the Washington Post that one must simply keep an eye out for sharks—“you can always see them and dive under them if they rush up at you.” Since the shark attacks “upside down,” she explained, “you have a chance to get away, if the distance to shore . . . is not too far.” A captain from Key West, Florida, who would later tutor Ernest Hemingway in deep-sea fishing, offered to kill the shark for free. The vice president of the Autocar Company on the Main Line of Philadelphia, who sported at Zane Grey's fishing camp in Long Key, Florida, said sharks, “not being very astute fish,” would go for baited kegs every thousand feet. Letters to the editor advocated that Washington send the entire United States submarine fleet to destroy the shark. Another suggested the bait of a dummy stuffed with explosives and dressed like Lester Stilwell. Frank Claret, master of the Atlantic Transport liner Minnehaha, just arrived that week from London, said the largest of man-eaters were easy to scare away “by shouting as loud as possible, and by striking the water with one's feet and hands.