Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [51]
The great white in 1916 moved inexorably forward in its investigation of potential prey. Robert E. Dowling was four miles out to sea now, laboring to turn around, his strokes growing fatigued and sloppy, matching the profile of a fish in distress.
For its prey there would be no escape at this point. The shark's systems were designed to guarantee its death. Were the shark's eyes damaged or its hearing impaired, lateral lines beneath its skin would detect vibrations from any movement in the water—a frightened fish, a ship's propeller, a diver's flippers—and the shark would attempt to hunt down its quarry without hearing or seeing it. Given such faculties, Xavier Maniguet writes, “It is easier to understand how it is impossible for man to escape any determined investigation by a shark in the neighborhood.”
In the daylight hours of July 6, 1916, the shark's sonarlike capabilities were not necessary. At sixty feet, the shark could see a man in the water long before the man could see the shark. Using its ampulla of Lorenzini, a small organ under its nose, the shark could detect the man's faint electric field. At the last moment, when the great white unhinged its jaw and rolled its eye backward for protection, its ampulla of Lorenzini would locate the prey's beating heart.
Robert W. Dowling swam unaware of the crude yet brilliant appraisal of him as potential prey, the silent, unanswerable judgment by judge-jury-executioner. His movements were erratic, like a wounded fish's, yet the ocean was gentle and accommodating as he stroked four miles to shore and soon climbed out of the sea to handshakes and applause. Farther south, Leonard Hill returned too, from the direction of the shark—to land, to safety, and to kudos of his own.
Neither man had a clue, until later, that they had swum through the territory of a stalking, man-eating shark. Perhaps these long-distance swimmers were judged unpalatable, or too large to attack. It is not known why the shark bypassed either man or precisely why it kept hunting humans, only that it did.
When Dowling and Hill received the news later how close they had come to a man-eater, the endorphin euphoria of a long swim dissolved in chilled sweat. It is on record that both men immediately made new vacation plans. Separately, they vowed to abandon their careers as long-distance swimmers. Leonard Hill, the wholesale druggist from New York, swore he'd never swim beyond the lifelines again. Dowling, the flamboyant New York scion and celebrity swimmer, was more emphatic. Of the two men, he had swum closer to the path of the shark, quite near it, there seemed no doubt. He swore he would never swim in the ocean again.
“Never again,” he repeated. “At least, not here.”
The Red Canoe
The sun crossed the coast road that afternoon in a declining arc, laying planks of shade under the entrance of the Essex and Sussex. From Ocean Drive, men in hats climbed stairs toward the columns and disappeared, small figures swallowed by the portico, leaving women on the porch in wicker-backed Morris chairs, glancing now and again from books propped on their knees out over the railing to the sea. The women angled the chairs in patches of sun, and occasionally the scrape of a wooden chair fled the nibbling shade. Across Ocean Drive, men and women were returning from the beach for the afternoon siesta, and beneath the hum of roadsters along the coast road came the hissing and sighing of the waves as if calling them back. Slowly, the hotel descended into afternoon slumber. Like clockwork, the hotel received the retreating bathers, porters and bellboys directing them to changing rooms near the elevators. The bathing costumes, smartly cleaned and ironed, would be returned to guests' rooms for tomorrow's swim. Meanwhile, no sandaled feet traversed the