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By Root 374 0

from then on the Tuna would be fishing for sharks to keep them away from the populace. The crew of the Tuna had its own reasons, he said. Earlier that day the Tuna's passengers had been alarmed by the sight of blue sharks playing about a buoy about a mile from Asbury Park. The mayor had spied blue sharks like this before, far from shore, but the sight of the fins appearing and disappearing from the surface and vanishing south to points unknown upset and frightened his paying passengers. The captain of the Tuna, A. A. Thompson, had experience with sharks in southern waters, the mayor said. As if to prove his readiness, Captain Thompson boasted that “should the monsters of the deep remain in this vicinity they are liable to find their ranks depleted.”

That afternoon, Harold Phillips, a member of the Asbury Park Fishing Club, joined the mayor in spirit, declaring he would tow the carcasses of horses and cows to a remote area a quarter mile off Sandy Hook, “the idea being that the sharks would all be attracted to the spot and done away with.” The idea caused an uproar in the club. There was no shortage of sportfishermen eager for a try. The carcasses would attract “the greatest roundup of sharks ever seen,” Phillips promised, sketching it out right in front of them, and then the fellows from the Asbury Park Gun Club would train their rifles “for what would no doubt prove most exciting sport, shooting the big game of the seas.”

But Asbury Park officials were not reassured by plans to eradicate all the man-eaters in the ocean. By the end of the day, they announced that both the Asbury Avenue and Seventh Avenue beaches would remain closed because of the “shark menace” until they could be surrounded by the steel-wire nets. In the hotels on Grand Avenue, and in trolley car 32 that ran from the train depot to the beach, the talk was of a killer shark. Whether the shark that attacked Everingham was the great white that killed Bruder didn't seem to matter; fear was growing general on the coast at the pace that hysteria outruns reason. One shark now represented all sharks, white or blue, near or far from shore. Two days after the death of Charles Bruder in Spring Lake, declared the Asbury Park Press, “The shark scare in Asbury Park has become a reality.”

Late that evening, a newlywed woman spending her honeymoon in Asbury Park mailed a postcard to a friend in Ludlow, Massachusetts, titled “Bathing Scene, Asbury Park, N.J.” The photograph of the beach showed crowds of people in the water behind rope lines, and a beach dotted with sunbathers and umbrellas. The woman, whose name was Mona, wrote on the back in small Palmer script compressed to fit: “This card is the picture of the beach where we go bathing. They have screened it in and it is patrolled by boats since the scare of a shark biting off the legs of a man a few beaches above here the other morning. The man died. Since then a great many bathers are rather scarce.”

The news of Bruder's death flew that summer from Manasquan to Massachusetts to Virginia and across five hundred miles of coastline. The news held sway in billiard parlors and smoking rooms and on carriage rides until men and women looked out to sea and saw in the fins that had been there summer after summer new and alien shapes. Everyone along the shore was thinking about sharks during the summer of 1916: an Edwardian matron watching a child's first swim, a man folding back the front page—both legs are bitten off just below the knees—to find the sports, a traveling Victrola scratching out Irving Berlin's “When I Lost You” under the blowing sand of a beach picnic. Whether borne by word of mouth or by printing press, the story traveled the shortest distance to the frightened heart, for it was the oldest suspense story of all—man killed by monster. And if this once-truest tale was forgotten and denied or polished up by the sweet civilized shine of metaphor, the story stirred latent yet hot in the veins of the moderns, raw, antediluvian, real. “Killed by Shark,” the Press said. “Boy, Legs Bitten Off by Shark,” Pulitzer's