Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [43]
Gertrude Schuyler had been swimming, when suddenly without warning an overpowering force pulled her under. She was in the grip of something unimaginably strong, against which struggle was useless.
In an instant she was gone. She flailed her arms before they disappeared. Resurfacing for a moment, she made one panicked shout for help, and then all one could hear were the frightful screams of men and women whose worst nightmare of the beach was realized.
One of the surfmen must have seen her, because swiftly several surfmen and rescue volunteers rushed to the point where the water had whitened, their lifeboat splitting the waves. The trick was to keep one's head above the waves and break sideways out of the grip of the thing. Whether luck or divine assistance came to Gertrude Schuyler is not known, but momentarily she was free and in the arms of rescuers. Long minutes later she was back on the beach, coughing up seawater and accepting comfort from her husband and concerned strangers. Exciting plans for touring Atlantic City's amusements had given way to the gratitude of being alive. It was a stunning if unflattering story for Gertrude Schuyler to take back on the train: She had nearly drowned.
The pattern was disturbingly familiar to Atlantic City's surfmen. Eleven times that Sunday they heard screams for rescue; eleven times the surfmen and volunteers rushed into the water with ropes and pulled men and women to safety. Drownings were common at the time before learning to swim was a childhood rite of passage. “A burst of panic, a few quick minutes of struggle, a few scattered bubbles, and another casualty was added to the list,” according to beach historians Bosker and Lencek. Undertow was the terrifying shadow on the sun-bright days at the Jersey shore. Bathing expert Dr. John H. Packard, surgeon at the Episcopal Hospital of Philadelphia, believed day-trippers were in particular danger. They “know nothing of the beaches and venture far more than those who do. Often they cannot swim, and are helpless when in danger,” he wrote.
That evening on the train, as Gertrude Schuyler returned with her husband and daughter to New York with hundreds of others, bearing the “badges of pleasure and leisure”—sunburn, windburn, a few hands and faces swollen from jellyfish stings—conversations turned inevitably to the dangerous sea, yet with no reference to a shark, for there was no known shark to fear.
Not until the next day, Monday, July third, was the existence of a dangerous sea creature on the shore publicly known. Readers had to turn deep inside the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin to learn of the death of the son of a prominent Philadelphia family two days earlier in a mysterious attack at sea. Charles Vansant's death was overshadowed by the news that a Philadelphia society woman, Mrs. Florence Burling, had been granted a divorce from the notable Mr. Arthur Burling. It was a scandal beyond the pale as Mr. Burling had rushed about the immigration detention house, waving a gun, threatening to shoot officials who refused to turn over his intended second wife, whereupon Mr. Burling's would-be second wife was deported as an undesirable and Mr. Burling was sent to jail. Quite apart from its scandalous aspects, the story was worrisome to Philadelphians, for the Burling divorce was one of seventy-two granted recently in the city. Divorce, unthinkable to the Victorians, was now becoming the American mode.
The same day, The New York Times, then reaching its first greatness under the great editor Carr V. Van Anda, devoted prominent headlines to local heroes at the shore over the holiday weekend—the men who'd rescued five passengers from a sinking pleasure boat off Manhattan Beach, and the surfmen who prevented eleven drownings in Atlantic City. On the last page of the Times, at the bottom of the page, was a small headline over a brief, four-paragraph story, “Dies After Attack by Fish.”
Van Anda's genius was to turn his “death ray” gaze, as his