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By Root 352 0

blood. On the prows of the boats stood groups of men, faces hard and pointed down toward the water, long rifles and harpoons angled high against the delicate blue sky. Roped to the boats were chunks of lamb slaughtered by the butcher that morning, bait for the man-eater. Dr. Schauffler had organized the patrol to catch and kill the shark, and also to protect bathers, so those who wished could swim with peace of mind. Yet before long, as the sun tipped toward the hotel, young men, one at a time, left the water, returning to the hotel, or the pool at the Bath and Tennis Club, fed by the sea it faced. Shortly, the line of blue-green breakers rolled in uninterrupted, gulls swooped and called to a high and empty sky, and the beach at Spring Lake was bereft, for the first summer day in many years, of human presence—except for the men with the guns, and the sharp metallic smells of gasoline and lamb's blood.

In the lobby of the Essex and Sussex that morning, the white-haired figure of Mrs. George W. Childs moved through the crowds, emboldened by purpose, spreading news of the bell captain's funeral. Her plan to ship the young man home across the Atlantic had been refused by the Swiss counsel as too dangerous during wartime, with U-boats prowling the shipping channels. The bell captain would be buried the next morning in nearby Manasquan, and the management of the E & S vowed to cover all expenses, as if by doing the right thing—and doing it quickly—the hotel and its guests could put the tragedy behind them. But David Plumer, the manager, found himself patrolling the lobby that morning, calming nerves, and coaxing people to stay as the roar of motorboats drifted from the sea. Small lines of summer colonists stood at the front desk, shortening their vacations, making plans for the mountains. Word had reached the hotel that Asbury Park and towns up and down the coast were barricading their beaches from a man-eating shark. Yet the history of shark attack is footnoted by denial, and Spring Lake, perhaps inevitably, was opposed to such an alarming view.

Oliver Hush Brown, the mayor of Spring Lake and president of the First National Bank, possessed numerous public and private reasons to pray all talk of a shark would simply disappear. As mayor for thirty-two years, Brown was the town's prime mover; he led Spring Lake's comeback from the great fire of 1900, which destroyed whole blocks of businesses, and nurtured it as a tourist resort that would “cater to people of refinement and culture.” His O. H. Brown variety store, filled with tasteful fineries from the mayor's buying trips to Europe, provided furnishings, floor coverings, china, and objets to the wealthy summer cottagers and hotels. The lobby of the E & S that morning was filled with O. H. Brown furnishings. In 1914, in fact, when the New E & S opened, the mayor had become a stockholder.

By midmorning, a commotion swept the lobby of the E & S as colonists crowded around copies of the day's New York Times, smudging their fingers with ink as they passed around the broadsheet pages. “Shark Kills Bather Off New Jersey Beach,” the front page blared. “Bites Off Both Legs of a Young Swimmer. Guards Find Him Dying. Women Are Panic-stricken As Mutilated Body Is Brought Ashore.” Even the habitually restrained Times could not report the arrival of a man-eating shark without sensation. There was no other way to tell the story. Men and women studied the newspaper with audible gasps. Dispatches by Times correspondents from the Battle of the Somme and the Russian front and the British sinking of twenty-one German ships seemed somehow tame and distant in comparison. With its headlines and stories of July 7, 1916, the Times introduced the great white shark to American culture as a source for general fear, the twentieth-century sea monster. As guests folded back the front page, the previous night's bold assertions that a shark could not have killed Bruder evaporated in the daylight. Some guests locked themselves in their rooms, others simply packed to leave. It was as if the horrors of the previous