Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [114]
Time, however, favored the young Dr. Nichols. Unknown to Lucas, Nichols, and their contemporaries, great whites live not only in the tropics but all over the world, and one of the largest populations is off the New Jersey–New York coast. This population is mostly juveniles, however, who take smaller prey and seldom stray close to shore.
On August 8, 1916, Hugh Smith wrote Frederic Lucas: “The excitement in this matter appears to have died down, much to the relief of this office, and I hope nothing will occur to resuscitate it.”
By the end of that summer of 1916, the last summer before America entered the Great War, the great white shark had fallen from the front pages of the Times and the Sun and the World. The next spring, Woodrow Wilson told Congress: “The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth . . . the world must be made safe for Democracy.” Even in the era preoccupied with “Over There” and “Lick a Stamp and Lick the Kaiser!” on to the time of flappers and radio, through the Great Depression and the Second World War and beyond, the shark would live on as an enduring presence in the American imagination.
On July 10, 1917, the one-year anniversary week of the attacks, President Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to raise food production for the war effort, yet bigger news was that five hundred bathers fled screaming from the waters of Rockaway Park after swimmers spied a large fin near shore.
Over the next few decades, New York newspapers sounded what became an annual alarm, and the parents of Matawan forbade their children from swimming in Matawan Creek. The grand Engleside Hotel in Beach Haven was demolished for wood during World War II and, later still, the New Essex and Sussex Hotel in Spring Lake was converted to condominiums.
Today all evidence of the great white shark of that long-ago summer is gone. The carcass of the fish disappeared shortly after it was displayed in the window of the Home News, and some years later, a scientist spotted its jaw hanging in a window of a Manhattan shop at 86th and Broadway before it disappeared forever. Yet it was the legacy of this young, aberrant, perhaps sickly or injured great white to frame the way people perceive sharks. In 1974, Peter Benchley invoked the 1916 shark as the role model for his fictional white shark in Jaws.
By the end of the twentieth century, the deadly predator of 1916 immortalized by Benchley would begin to fade from popular culture. By the 1990s, the concept of the rogue shark had fallen out of scientific favor for lack of proof other than anecdotal material. Shark researchers even began to doubt Nichols's conclusion that the killer of all four victims in 1916 had been a single shark—or even, in all cases, a great white shark. Some suggest that a bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, was the killer of Matawan Creek, as it is the only man-eating species that routinely passes into freshwater, whereas for Carcharodon carcharias, the trip would be extraordinary.
Indeed, by the twenty-first century, Carcharodon carcharias had assumed a new status as magnificent yet misunderstood sea creature, rare and accidental killer of man, and endangered species protected by the laws of numerous countries, including the United States. So radical was the change in attitude that in 2000 Peter Benchley pleaded with Australians not to destroy a great white that had killed a young swimmer. “This was not a rogue shark, tantalized by the taste of human flesh and bound now to kill and kill again. Such creatures do not exist, despite what you might have derived from Jaws.