Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [44]
On July 3, 1916, however, Van Anda's prescience failed him. The two-day-old story portrayed the death at sea as a freak accident. The Times did not report the speculation of local baymen that a sea turtle or shark had killed the young swimmer, for the facts were murky and such attacks were unheard of. What fish was capable of tearing a man to pieces the Times story did not say.
Fears Only Thinly Veiled
Along the bottom of the night sea, the shark moved in cold thirty-foot indigo depths unilluminated by the light of the moon. Careful to avoid big predators, it dipped low in the water column while hugging the shore, the home of living things. The shark had killed and failed to feed, and discipline and wariness ruled its every movement. The spoiled attack on a large mammal, the noisome counterattack by many other mammals, deepened its preternatural caution.
As the shark swam, tiny organs, distributed all along its body, constantly “tasted” the chemical composition and salinity of the ocean water. These sensors possessed cells analogous to the taste cells on a human tongue and sensed, now, lower salinity in the coastal waters. The shark was reading the dilution of coastal waters caused by the rains of June 1916, so torrential the Ledger lamented, “There cannot be much more rain left in Heaven.” Water had coursed from the mountains in the state's northwest, through central and southern farmlands, into lakes and underground streams and finally to the sea. With the swollen freshwater runs came masses of organic matter, myriad fish flowing into the channels and bays. For eons, lower salinity had pointed the shark and its ancestors toward new hunting grounds, and so the big fish moved now without thought toward prey. Fish sat at the head of the inlets, snaring other smaller fish that came from the creeks and bays. Just north of Little Egg Inlet, the great white had found prey fish from Great Bay and Little Bay. And it had also stumbled upon Charles Vansant.
Along with the shark's gifts of detection and concealment was the quality of anonymity, the gift of being unknown to man. By 1916, hundreds of men in the deep ocean and on the wastes and fringes of continents and in the prehistoric backwater of time had been devoured by sharks. But sharks attacked far from cities and civilization. Shark attack was an otherworldly story swapped by sailors and fishermen, a tale seldom reaching beyond cabin or dock or the range of a man's last desperate cries. It was a story, when filtered to a city, that was scarcely believed.
The Edwardians believed God had given them dominion over the fish of the sea and science had given them evolutionary supremacy over the earth. “In the course of evolution man became supreme and mastered all the other animals,” said a letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer early in the summer of 1916. “Those he could not use he exterminated.”
But there had always been a fish that man could not master, that at will exterminated him. After the long silence of prehistory, a story of anonymous human prey, Herodotus, the first great historian of the Greeks, wrote of a “marine monster” seizing a helpless man at sea in 492 B.C. Documentation is scattered over centuries. Seven hundred years before Christ, a potter working on the Italian island of Ischia, at the entrance to the future Bay of Naples, carved a vase with a representation of a man being seized by a