Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [110]
Both men believed finding a white shark in the vicinity of New York City would be an epic accomplishment. “So far as we can discover [the white shark], it is throughout its cosmopolitan range in warm seas, a rare fish,” they wrote. “It is occasional on the Atlantic coast of the United States as far north as Cape Cod, but we know of no definite record for Long Island.” Rarer still was any evidence a great white shark had ever attacked a human being on the East Coast—evidence Nichols needed to persuade Dr. Lucas, and himself, that the New Jersey attacks were the work of a shark, a shark that needed to be killed.
Like Frederic Lucas, neither Murphy nor Nichols was inclined to believe any shark was a deliberate man-eater, but the past thirty-six hours had altered their view. In Matawan four days earlier, Nichols had been influenced by his meeting with Captain Watson Fisher, Stanley Fisher's father, the retired commander of the Savannah Steamship Line. Captain Fisher struck Nichols as an intelligent, reasonable man who shared Dr. Lucas's sentiments about sharks. Captain Fisher claimed that, in his fifty-six years at sea, he had never seen a shark attack a man and never knew of an authentic report of such an attack. Yet Fisher emphasized to Nichols his newfound conviction that his son was killed by a shark.
Retreating to the depths of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Nichols had pored over rafts of old documents. By digging deep into the scientific literature of the nineteenth century, he found the proof he sought: documented evidence the great white shark had visited temperate waters and devoured human beings. It was in the 1880s, off the coast of Massachusetts, that a great white attacked and broke apart a fishing boat and proceeded to kill and devour most of the fishermen. Although the attack was far from shore, the white's presence in northern latitudes convinced Nichols. His research led him to believe that not only was Frederic Lucas wrong, but scientific and government assurances about the harmlessness of sharks were both uninformed and dangerous. New Jersey was correct to have “abandoned its swimming,” he had told The New York Times, and now it was “time for New Yorkers to take warning. The garbage in New York Bay and chances of catching unsuspecting swimmers undoubtedly will bring the sea tigers into New York waters.
“It is the white shark which has been at work, and this is the second time in history this type has been seen north of Cape Hatteras,” Nichols continued. “My own belief is that [this] single fish . . . has killed all four of the bathers and that if . . . it is killed the attacks will end.”
Nichols made swift strides in his theory when, after returning from Matawan, he was able to persuade Frederic Lucas the victims were most likely attacked by a shark. Subsequently, in a humbling if not devastating moment, Dr. Lucas admitted on the front page of The New York Times that he had been wrong.
With the headline “Science Admits Its Error. No Longer Doubted That Big Fish Attack Men,” the Times reported that “the foremost authority on sharks in this country has doubted that any type of shark ever attacked a human being, and has published his doubts, but the recent cases have changed his view.”
So Nichols and Murphy set out into the waters of Jamaica Bay