Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [69]
As evidence, Dr. Lucas noted that his protégé, Robert Cushman Murphy, during an expedition to South Georgia Island, witnessed “the difficulty of sharks in tearing meat from the carcass of a whale.” And Lucas recalled his own “disappointment at witnessing the efforts of a twelve-foot shark to cut a chunk out of a sea lion. The sea lion had been dead a week and was supposedly tender, but the shark tugged and thrashed and made a great to-do over each mouthful.”
Given the weakness of even the largest sharks' jaws, Lucas reasoned, a man would lose a leg only “if a shark thirty feet or more in length happened to catch a man fairly on the knee joint where no severing of the bone was necessary.” A shark was not capable of biting cleanly through the bone and therefore could not have been the animal that bit off Charles Bruder's legs below the knee. What animal was capable of the attack, Dr. Lucas couldn't say, but “certainly no shark recorded as having been taken in these waters could possibly perform such an act.” According to Lucas, the best scientific data concerning the question of the East Coast shark attack remained the uncollected wager Hermann Oelrichs made in 1891. Twenty-five years had substantiated the tycoon's position, Lucas concluded, that there is “practically no danger of an attack . . . about our coasts.”
A Long-Range Cruising Rogue
As the motorboats rumbled and bloodied the waters of Spring Lake, not far offshore the great white swam with growing urgency. Never straying more than a half mile from shore, it swept north and south, fronting the coast, stalking the two-mile-long beach of Spring Lake and the coastline a few miles north toward Asbury Park. The shark moved with increasing expectancy, for it had hunted with success, and prey was very close now, abundant prey; it could sense it with numerous electrical, sonic, and olfactory systems. Wary of boats and oars, the shark safely tracked its prey from a distance, with no need to approach the shore. Its lateral lines tingled with the distant vibration of motorboat engines. Gasoline engines for boats were a new invention, and men then could not have known the acoustic chorus they sang over time and space for sharks. The shark detected the sonic pulses of swimmers under and beyond the blockade of the boats like a submersible receiving coded signals beneath an antiquated navy. Molecules of blood in the water, carried on currents from miles away, moved in and out of the shark's flapped nostrils, firing its cerebellum to adjust its fins for a new direction. As the shark haunted the coast that afternoon, the men of New Jersey were growing edgy enough to shoot at anything that swam. It is likely the rogue great white was among the targets that the Spring Lake patrol fired at, for there is compelling evidence that it remained in the area after killing Bruder. The shark, like its pursuers, was growing increasingly edgy, attacking oars and boats and anything that moved.
There is scant science on the matter of a rogue shark, a deliberate man-eater, while skepticism persists that such a creature exists. As people are not a regular prey for sharks, a purposeful hunter of humans like a rogue lion or elephant must be injured, crazed, aberrant. Furthermore an oceanic “serial killer” is nearly impossible to catch and convict, its work concealed, the evidence eradicated by the enclosing sea. But the late Dr. Sir Victor Coppleson, a distinguished Australian surgeon knighted by the queen, tracked the global movements of rogues across the twentieth century, beginning in 1922, when he began treating shark bites as a young doctor at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney. In 1933, Coppleson coined the term “rogue shark” in the Medical Journal of Australia. “A rogue shark,” he wrote, “if the theory is correct,