chapter 2 



More Shadows 

 Attack 



The hazardous creatures of the sea are 

 many, but there is one that man fears 

 above all others: the ominous, stealthy shadow— The Shark. 



The fear of sharks is older than the recorded history of man, for 

 tales of terrible encounters between sharks and men go back to pre- 

 historic times. In recorded history the Greek poet, Leonidas of Taren- 

 tum, told of Tharsys, a sponge diver, who was being pulled into a boat 

 when a shark attacked him, tearing away the lower portions of his body. 

 Tharsys' companions took his remains to shore, and thus, the poet wryly 

 noted, Tharsys was buried "both on land and in the sea." 



Since the time Europeans first sailed the open sea, they carried back 

 to port tales of fearsome fishes— "cruell devourers, the ravenous tiburon,'" 

 man-eating monsters. They were sharks. Yet, skeptics ashore doubted 

 the tales, ^nd the doubts grew as sea voyages became more commonplace. 

 By relatively modern times, the skeptics were insisting that no adequate 

 proof existed to show that sharks truiV attacked living men. 



In 1916, when the first New Jersey shark attack occurred, the skeptics 

 were shaken, but they still clung to their claims. Even after five suc- 

 cessive attacks in New Jersey waters that summer, alleged experts held 

 out against the belief that a shark, unprovoked, would devour a living 

 man. The evidence occasionally found in the bellies of sharks, they 

 said, proved only that sharks would eat bodies, and this was really no 

 proof that the persons were aUve when the sharks found them. This was 

 and is a perfectly valid statement. 



Ten years after the New Jersey attacks, a businessman named Louis 

 J. Crossette announced that he was going to start a shark fishery in the 

 Caribbean. He wasn't worried. "Sharks do not eat human beings," he 

 explained. "The shark is one of the worst cowards in the sea." Crossette 

 pointed out that no less an authority than William Beebe, the famed 

 underwater explorer, also scoffed at stories of shark attacks. 



Beebe, in his bathysphere at the bottom of the ocean, had peered 

 through the thick windows and had seen sharks. He had observed them 

 close at hand while in a bathing suit and diving helmet, in fairly shallow 



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