Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [64]
Some Spring Lake residents and fishermen stubbornly continued to claim that there were far more likely man-killers than sharks. They swapped stories of giant mackerels and huge, swift swordfish that could run a man through with their long, steel-hard blades. Whatever was out there concealed by the waves, for the first time in American history people en masse were afraid to enter the water. The four hundred to five hundred bathers who swam in the waters off the South Pavilion on Thursday dwindled on Friday to half a dozen brave souls drifting in and out of the surf. Finally, the surf emptied for good.
That afternoon, guests at the Essex and Sussex who elected to stay must have had second thoughts. The sounds of distant muffled gunshots reached the hotel, followed by an anxious account from the surfmen at the South Pavilion, on the water's edge. A large shark had been spotted perilously close to the beach. The armed men of the shark patrol had raised their rifles and opened fire across the waves, shooting at a large fin. The fish eluded the spray of bullets and, apparently frightened, disappeared out to sea. No swimmers were injured by the rifle fire; none were in the water. The pool at the Bath and Tennis Club grew uncomfortably overcrowded that afternoon. There were so many people in the pool, it would have to be emptied and refilled several additional times, in the days ahead, for sanitary reasons. Eventually, the club would petition the township for permission to lay a larger pipe to fill the pool. Nobody would go back into the ocean.
Myths of Antiquity
Forty-five miles north of Spring Lake, New York City was a sea of buildings Henry James called “extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted.” Looming over Broadway was the tallest building in the world, the fifty-eight-story Woolworth Building, the new cathedral of commerce that symbolized New York's spirited modern ascension over Paris, trailing only London as the world's largest city. Everything in New York seemed new and modern in 1916—revolutionary words blowing through the city then. Penn Station and Grand Central, Gimbel's and Ebbets Field, were all new to the feverish teens. At the Biograph Theater, D. W. Griffith launched the motion picture industry; Picasso, Matisse, and Picabia introduced modern art at the Armory Show; Emma Goldman and John Reed, anarchists, and New Women in Greenwich Village, swept away Victorian sexual prudery in a tide of free speech and free love. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in New York, after going to jail for writing about the subject. The Lusitania never returned to New York harbor, and the Titanic never arrived. The triumphal voyages of the ocean liners nonetheless extended the spell of the modern and new.
Rising over the Upper West Side like a castle, the American Museum of Natural History was another icon of the new, for under its ten-acre roof the museum had mounted the most painstaking effort in the modern world to illuminate the shadowy myths of the past with the lamp of scientific investigation: to acquire and transmit, for the first time in history, scientifically documented information about the animals, plants, and minerals of the earth's surface.
Late that July afternoon, a group of newspapermen presented itself at the grand entrance of the museum on Central Park West with a characteristic urgency. Hurrying past a gallery of marble busts—Benjamin Franklin, Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, John James Audubon, Edward Drinker Cope, Robert E. Peary—the gentlemen of the press were dispatched to the office of the director of the museum and head of the scientific staff, Dr. Frederic Augustus Lucas.
Dr. Lucas was one of the preeminent scientists and “museum men” in the world, an authority in the fields of taxidermy, osteology (the study of bones), geology, and comparative anatomy. Once a lean New England sailor of clipper ships, Dr. Lucas at the age of sixty-four had attained a corpulence that to the late Victorians signified