More Shadows Attack 29 



friend who was standing on the bank and who said that the shark was 

 easily eight feet long." 



Drayton Hastie recovered. Possibly confirming his story, within a 

 week after the attack, an 8-foot Cub shark {Carcharhimis leiicas) was 

 caught less than a hundred yards from the scene of the previous attack. 

 It may well have been the same culprit. 



A little more than a month after the attacks on Miss Megginson and 

 Drayton Hastie, Kenneth Layton and a friend were swimming at Paw- 

 ley's Island, about 75 miles north of Charleston. They were far from 

 shore, although the water they were in was only about 4 feet deep. 

 Suddenly, a man on the beach shouted: "Shark! Shark!" 



Layton heard the w^arning at about the same instant he saw what had 

 inspired it: a large dorsal fin about 50 yards away from him and bearing 

 toward him fast. Layton and his friend frantically began swimming to- 

 ward shore. But the shark veered and seemed to be trying to cut the 

 swimmers off before they could reach shallow water. It did not attack 

 immediately. Almost as if it were toying with the swimmers, or singling 

 one of them out, it held ofiF until the swimmers were in waist-deep water. 

 Then, in a flash of movement, the shark struck Layton, seizing his right 

 heel and ankle. Courageous friends splashed through the sea to his side, 

 and, by sheer tugging, pulled him from the shark's jaws. The shark 

 disappeared. Several tendons of his right ankle were severed, but Layton 

 survived— and eventually regained use of his crippled foot. 



These were not the first shark attacks South Carolina had known. In 

 1924, for instance, a man was attacked by "a large fish" while standing 

 near the shore of Folly Island. Alore than 100 stitches were taken in 

 wounds in his left leg. Two months after the attack, he went back to 

 the hospital, complaining about intense pains in his left knee. The knee 

 was operated upon, and a remnant of a tooth was removed. The tooth 

 was immediately mis-identified as a barracuda's. This, presumably, re- 

 lieved people around Folly Island, for, when faced with some seemingly 

 incontestable piece of evidence proving an attack, the believer in the 

 benevolence of the shark always somehow finds solace in blaming a 

 creature other than a shark. (When Burton was assembling his evidence 

 of South Carolina shark attacks, he had the tooth-from-the-knee clue 

 examined by two ichthyologists who positively identified it as having 

 come from the jaw of a shark! ) 



Competent research such as Burton's could have turned up numerous 

 shark attacks along United States coasts. But the public, to the delight of 

 concessionaires and chambers of commerce in coastal resort towns, asked 

 for no revelations about shark attacks. They preferred to continue to 

 ignore the shark. 



Skepticism about shark attacks persisted up to the advent of World 



