Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [81]
The boys scrambled onto the pier and pilings and threw off their clothes, laughing and shouting, the beginning of a daily ritual of roughhousing boys enjoyed like a natural entitlement. Renny Cartan was standing naked on a dock piling, joking with his cousin and friends, when he began to lose his balance. The creek was only thirty feet wide and shallow, but the water was darker than usual with the turbulence of recent rains and Renny couldn't see the bottom, couldn't see what he'd be hitting as he fell. But a naked boy at the lip of a swimming hole in the middle of the placid farm country during the last summer of peace had little to worry about.
Renny Cartan gave in to gravity and the joy of the moment and let himself go, laughing, into the creek.
Alien World
Barely two years old, the young shark was at the beginning of an epic growth spurt. At nearly eight feet and four hundred pounds, it was a seed of what it would become. How large white sharks grow is unknown, but the largest documented was almost twenty feet and several tons. Numerous reports of larger whites—as big as twenty-nine feet, five tons—have been debunked, but some shark biologists believe the goliaths are out there, at twenty-five, even thirty feet, so big no man-made gear or boat could land them. The young shark would simply grow as long as it lived, and no human knew what gigantism it could attain. Its life would be lengthy, half a century or more, and remarkably hardy. It would be free of cancer, infections, circulatory diseases, competition. Its wounds would heal themselves with a speed people associate with science fiction. If the law of nature was competition, it would operate above the law. But there were limits to the great white's power, and in July 1916, the young white moved like a creature raging against those limits.
After days of swimming north along the shore, it came to the northernmost tip of the Jersey coast, the Sandy Hook peninsula. Sandy Hook—with the Rockaways and Coney Island six miles north across the lower New York bays—framed the ocean's door to New York Harbor.
The shark rounded False Channel at the tip of the peninsula. To the east was the open ocean bounded by the fertile southern coast of Long Island, where—unknown to men at the time—dwelled some of the largest great white sharks in the world, and plenty of prey to nourish them. Passenger steamers plied up the Narrows to Ellis Island, passing the Statue of Liberty and its beacon torch, lit by electricity for the first time in 1916. Following its instinct to hug the coast, the shark cruised around the tip of Sandy Hook and left the ocean for good, curling into Sandy Hook Bay. From the deep clean currents of the Atlantic, the big fish now wallowed in five and six and eight feet of bay water. The great white was on a path away from the ocean, toward a coast lined with brackish waterways.
Of the more than four hundred species of sharks, only a few can pass from salt- to freshwater, and only one is a large predator, the bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas. The bull, along with the tiger shark and great white, is part of the “unholy trinity” of proven man-eaters. In the 980 shark attacks on humans and boats recorded by the International Shark Attack File between the year 1580 and October 2000, more than half of the attacks were attributed to only three species of shark: great white (348), tiger (116), and bull (82). The bull shark possesses a unique ability to cross into rivers and lakes. It has been recorded 1,750 miles up the Mississippi River in Alton, Illinois, and 2,500 miles up the Amazon in Peru. It devours the dead laid to rest in the Ganges River in India. The great white could survive in brackish water, but only temporarily. This is one of the few limits of the apex predator,