The Shadows Attack 15 



Theories abounded, too. One was that heavy cannonading in the 

 North Sea had driven sharks across the Atlantic to more tranquil seas. 

 Another theory held that sharks were feeding on swimmers because 

 they had been deprived of their usual diet of refuse from passenger 

 liners, whose sailings were being curtailed by another kind of shark, 

 the U-boat. The European war also spawned the idea that sharks had been 

 feasting so well on war dead floating down rivers into the sea that they 

 had undergone a change of dietary habits. One New York Times letter- 

 writer gravely calculated the figures: more than 12,500 war casualties 

 had been gobbled up by sharks, he claimed. 



By stoking their imaginations a little more, some of the theorists 

 concluded that the ghoul-sharks of European waters had deserted their 

 bountiful feeding grounds in the war zone for the far less ample larder 

 ofi^ered by New Jersey bathing beaches. 



Logic and reason fell victims to the shark scare. A neighbor of Teddy 

 Roosevelt's said she saw a shark off the beach in Oyster Bay, Long Island, 

 and called upon him to do something about it. A long-distance swimmer 

 announced that he would brave the terrors of the lower bay of New 

 York Harbor in a round trip from the Battery to Sandy Hook— in a wire 

 basket. In the New York Times, America's leading woman swimmer, 

 Annette Kellerman, advised bathers to dive under an onrushing shark. 

 "As he is coming at you upside down," she explained, "you have a 

 chance to get away, if the distance to shore or safety is not too far." 

 A chorus girl rushed into print with the exciting news that she had es- 

 caped a shark by frightening it off with an impromptu ballet of splashes 

 and kicks. Human sharks profiteered from "special swimming courses" 

 to teach bathers how to outwit sharks. Arguments broke out over whether 

 the shark attacks weren't rather the doings of giant turtles! 



After losses estimated at $1,000,000 in canceled reservations, the 

 mayors of 10 New Jersey resort towns met at Beach Haven, where the 

 first shark attack had occurred, and pleaded for an end to the panic. They 

 asked newspapers to refrain from publishing stories that "cause the public 

 to believe the New Jersey seacoast is infested with sharks, whereas there 

 are no more than in any other summer." The resort men thus went on 

 record that there were sharks in their waters every summer! 



The mayors' plea went unheard. Shark stories continued for a few 

 more days to push news of the war and the infantile paralysis epidemic 

 to secondary positions on newspaper front pages. 



"Sharks are the undisputed masters of the Atlantic coast," one New 

 York newspaper exclaimed. "The federal government yesterday aban- 

 doned its proposed campaign of extermination along the New Jersey 

 beaches. The enemy was too numerous for the Coast Guard to tackle, it 

 was said." 



