78 DAHLAK 



film (from the gaol-bird on 'Shark Island' to the ship- wrecked 

 heroes of the South Seas), all these have served to produce 

 together in the popular mind a conception of the poor fish as 

 arbitrary as it is unfounded. Few people could say offhand if 

 lions were to be found in Asia, but most people consider 

 themselves well briefed on the shark and would be amazed, 

 not to say offended, if they were told that the shark they knew 

 so well simply did not exist. 



The word 'shark' is in the same category as 'feline' or 

 'rodent'. Among felines there is the cat and the tiger, and so 

 among sharks there is the 'sea cat' and the 'sea tiger'. There 

 are several hundred species of sharks, only eight or nine of 

 which have been proved to be anthropophagous. The rest are 

 mostly just ordinary fish, enormous fish maybe, as in the case 

 of the whale-shark, perhaps the largest in existence (whales 

 and sperm-whales are cetaceans, not fish), but innocuous to 

 man. Some of them — those without sizable teeth — are even 

 harmless to other fish. Their food consists of plankton, crus- 

 taceans and molluscs. If an underwater fisherman tells you 

 one day with eyes a-sparkle that he has killed a shark, ask him 

 its species, and if it is not on the list of anthropophagous 

 sharks in the next paragraph, tell him he's a clever chap but 

 not a hero. 



The only anthrophagous sharks are the great white shark, 

 the tiger shark, the great blue shark, one kind of hammerhead 

 shark, the brown shark, the maneater, and the grey nurse 

 shark. Other sharks (black-fins, white-fins, mackerel sharks, 

 dusky sharks) will probably attack man when he is in grave 

 diflBculty ; ship-wrecked, abandoned wounded and bloody in 

 mid-sea, exhausted or already a corpse. Horror at the word 

 'shark' is therefore justified only in relation to the above- 

 mentioned. And even these are not consistently anthro- 

 pophagous. 



