Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [109]
The fisherman were taken aback since they traditionally assumed that man-eating sharks were males. In fact, while both genders are capable of devouring humans, females are in some respects more formidable. Equipped with extra girth to sustain and protect its eggs, the female white shark grows even larger than the male.
Throughout history the capture of a large shark has drawn the morbidly curious to witness the opening of the stomach to see if it contains human remains. That day the witnesses' curiosity was more than idle. Those who greeted Schleisser's boat were hoping the taxidermist had captured the man eater of Matawan Creek.
In the following days, while Michael Schleisser investigated the true nature of his trophy, John T. Nichols and Robert Cushman Murphy resolved to undertake their own search for the shark. Among the few men who grasped the identity and true nature of the shark that had terrorized New Jersey, Nichols and Murphy had appointed themselves the task of finding and killing it. On Wednesday, July 20, the scientists set out in their small launch into Jamaica Bay, which they had determined was a likely destination for a hungry shark that had demonstrated a northward progression of attacks—if it had not yet escaped to the sea. Murphy, a lanky six foot three, stood in the bowsprit of the small craft, a harpoon in one hand. At the wheel, John Nichols piloted the vessel and scanned the waters for a caudal fin on the surface—a signature of the great white, for Nichols and Murphy now had no doubt that it was a great white they were hunting. They expected the shark to be immense, thirty or possibly forty feet, and to reveal itself like a wide seam in the ocean. Nichols believed the shark that had killed four New Jersey men was “the only true man-eating shark,” the species that his research had revealed was “according to Linnaeus, the Leviathan which swallowed Jonah.” That the biblical story, apocryphal or not, was plausible impressed Nichols.
Nichols and Murphy were aware that the U.S. Coast Guard's war on sharks had been called off, and they now believed, as did Hugh Smith at the U.S. Department of Fisheries, that the predator was a single great white shark.
Neither man was disposed by nature to pursue the ocean's largest and fiercest predator. Both loved the sea and its organisms passionately. But as Nichols concentrated on the horizon, he scanned the surface for the lone creature that inspired in him no affection, but, rather, a mixture of awe and dread. In the Brooklyn Museum Science Bulletin article that Nichols and Murphy collaborated on in April, they had written:
There is something peculiarly sinister in the shark's makeup. The sight of his dark, lean fin lazily cutting zigzags in the surface of some quiet, sparkling summer sea, and then slipping out of sight not to appear again, suggests an evil spirit. His leering, chinless face, his great mouth with its rows of knifelike teeth, which he knows too well how to use on the fisherman's gear, the relentless fury with which, when his last hour has come, he thrashes on deck and snaps at his enemies; his toughness, his brutal nerveless vitality and insensibility to physical injury, fail to elicit the admiration one feels for the dashing, brilliant, destructive, gastronomic bluefish, tunny, or salmon.
Murphy would become a pioneering conservationist, an inspiration to Rachel Carson in her classic Silent Spring. He shared the Ancient Mariner's admonition of the preciousness of life. “And I had done an hellish thing/And it would work 'em woe: For all