Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [67]
Dr. Lucas's authority on sharks was supported by a lifetime of scientific study. Frederic Augustus Lucas was one of the last of the old-time Victorian naturalists who relied on love of nature and a keen mind in lieu of a university education. Armed with an introductory letter from his nineteenth-century sea-captain father—“Do you have any use for a boy who seems mostly interested in skinning snakes?”—he studied at the Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, where he absorbed the broad training of one of the last of the “all-around naturalists.” Of all things modern, what rankled him most was scientific “specialization,” which struck him as narrow and unmanly; he failed to understand how the new men of science could not clean skeletons, do taxidermy, and mount and build their own exhibits like carpenters, as he once did.
He was troubled by the lack of passion in young museum men: “Old-timers like Hornaday, Akeley and myself grieve over the helplessness of the modern preparator, his dread of working overtime . . . his readiness to make up for being late by quitting early. We worked a dozen hours a day and then went home to work for ourselves or took our best girl to the theatre. We heard nothing in those days of the artistic temperament—we heard more of laziness or general cussedness.”
Dr. Lucas's knowledge spanned the whole of the animal kingdom. During his fifty-year career, he wrote 365 scientific journal articles—many in longhand, before the typewriter was invented—ranging “in the old-fashioned way from insects to dinosaurs through the whole gamut of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.”
He had been first fascinated with sharks while sailing around the world with his father. By the time he was eighteen, Lucas had sailed to Europe and Asia and around the Cape of Good Hope. The persistent myth of the man-eating shark fired his skepticism, for nowhere in the world could he find documented evidence of such a fish. As was said of William Beebe, the “father of oceanography,” whom Lucas employed as a young man and who later went down in the first bathysphere: “He was not prepared to take anyone's word for anything. He had to see for himself.” And so in the 1880s, when he joined the United States Museum (later the Smithsonian), the Brooklyn Museum, and finally the American Museum, he continued his inquiries firsthand on the Atlantic Coast.
Again and again, his investigations of reported man-eating sharks on the East Coast turned up fabricated stories of large but harmless species. While Lucas allowed that “two really dangerous species, the white shark and the blue shark,” wander up from the tropics, he maintained that “there is no record of any fully grown individual ever having been taken within hundreds of miles of New York.” Furthermore, “ordinarily a shark is a very cautious animal, and it is difficult to get a big one to take a bait to which he is not accustomed.” Thus, the danger of being attacked by a shark on the Atlantic Coast was “infinitely less than that of being struck by lightning.”
As a recognized authority, Lucas was often called to set the record straight. He had watched from a distance the previous summer the ongoing shark debate in The New York Times. The director was dismayed when a spate of local “shark scares” revealed that an unreasoning fear of attack still existed, and later cheered when The New York Times published its August 2, 1915, editorial, “Let Us Do Justice to Sharks,” declaring that Hermann Oelrichs had been right and “that sharks can properly be called dangerous, in this part of the world, is apparently untrue.” But when a subsequent rash of letters to the editor of the Times purported to describe dozens of gruesome man-eating shark attacks around the world, Dr. Lucas could not let pass what he regarded as unscientific, unsubstantiated anecdote or rumor. Dr. Lucas had not changed his opinion since 1905, when, as editor of Young Folks Cyclopaedia of Natural History, he classified the great white shark,