Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [68]
So the director was understandably disturbed when J. T. Du Bois, an American diplomat, began the broadside of evidence on August 15, 1915, with a grisly letter to the Times, “The Man-eating Shark.” Even carefree New York and New Jersey swimmers must have shuddered as they read the report of the diplomat, then consul general in Singapore, British Malaya, of the collision and sinking of French and British passenger steamers in the Straits of Rhio in November 1907. “The panic stricken passengers threw themselves into the water and were instantly attacked by some man-eating sharks, and the waters were reddened by the slaughter. About ninety people lost their lives. When the news of this disaster reached the United States, I received several letters asking if it were true that such a thing existed as a man-eating shark.”
Intrigued, Du Bois immediately dispatched fifty letters to diplomats around the world, from the Philippines to the Red Sea, “asking for verified incidents of the work of the man-eating shark.” The response astonished him: “I received sixteen affidavits from American Consuls, Philippine officials, and one Indian official, reciting interesting incidents of the man-eating sharks attacking and wounding or killing and eating human beings.” He was sent a photograph of a Tomali boy, coin-diving on the Gulf of Aden, being “seized by a man-eating shark and dragged back into the waters, never to return.”
Eight days after the diplomat's letter, another letter in the Times, signed cryptically “N.S.W.,” denoting the Australian state of New South Wales, gave convincing and gruesome details of three cases of sharks devouring humans, adding that “any one who doubts that sharks in temperate waters do attack human beings will visit Sydney, N.S.W. . . . and . . . his doubts will be speedily resolved.” The letter reported the case of a boy dangling his legs off a wharf at Ryde, on the Parramatta River, which feeds the harbor, when “a shark came up, seized a foot, and disappeared with the boy, whose body was never seen again.” The very next day, Herbert MacKenzie, a native of Sydney, Australia, capital of New South Wales, published in the Times a letter confirming to the last detail his memory of the three cases reported by “N.S.W.” “As a native of that beautiful city, I can with authority corroborate the statements . . . and know of others where lives and limbs have been lost as a result of these sea monsters in the beautiful waters of the harbor.” In the late 1880s, MacKenzie reported: “I distinctly remember a young man losing first an arm, then, just as rescue was at hand, the entire body disappeared, leaving only a blood path in the water. This happened in Rushcutters Bay.”
If readers of the Times were unsettled by these accounts, they must have found reassuring the rebuttal from Dr. Lucas, the famed expert who had investigated alleged shark attacks on the East Coast for forty years and verified none as authentic. In his letter to the editor, “The Shark Slander,” Dr. Lucas announced he knew of only “two fairly reliable references to such cases” in the world—one in Bombay, where a man lost his leg, another in the Hawaiian Islands, where a human victim was surely mistaken for offal dumped in the water.
Those who believed a shark had killed Charles Bruder, Lucas declared, had made one of the commonest errors in such cases, “that the shark bit off the man's leg as though it were a carrot.” Such a feat was not possible, Lucas said, and the mere statement “shows that the maker or writer of it had little idea of the strength of the apparatus needed to perform such an amputation.” In his contribution to Nichols's and Murphy's journal article for the Brooklyn Museum Science Bulletin, published three months before Bruder's death, Lucas described the common sense behind his theory. “The next