The Shadows Attack 5 



yond the end of the piers. At Asbury Park, with a flourish of publicity, 

 a motorboat shark patrol was begun and workmen were set to enclosing 

 the bathing area with "shark-proof" wire netting. A net was not neces- 

 sary, according to a sea captain interviewed as a "shark authority." 

 Sharks scared easily, he said. "The best thing to do when a shark comes 

 along," he advised, "is to shout as loud as you can and splash the water 

 with your hands and feet." 



The Atlantic seemed alive with sharks and tales of sharks. At Spring 

 Lake, a lifeguard told of battling a 12-foot shark with an oar some 50 

 feet offshore. At Bayonne, New Jersey, 20 boys were swimming off a 

 yacht club float when they saw a shark. A policeman heard their cries 

 and emptied his revolver at an ominous black fin. The shark, he said, fled 

 to the open sea. In shallow water off Eldred's Bar near Rockaway Point 

 in Brooklyn, eight men digging for sandworms saw a shark driving a 

 school of weakfish toward shore. With eel-tongs, oars, spears and spades, 

 they said, they slashed at it and killed it. All along the coast, shark vigi- 

 lantes were firing their rifles at anything that looked big and moved in 

 the sea. 



Finally, out of this hysterical war on sharks, porpoises, and any other 

 shadows in the sea, came the sobering voice of academic authority. Dr. 

 John Treadwell Nichols, curator of the Department of Fishes in the 

 American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Dr. Robert 

 Cushman Murphy of the Brooklyn Museum, declared that there was 

 very little danger that a shark would attack anyone. Dr. Frederick A. 

 Lucas, director of the Museum of Natural History, added his agreement. 

 No shark, he said, could snap off a man's leg "like a carrot." A shark's 

 jaws were simply not powerful enough to do the kind of bodily damage 

 Dr. Schauffler described. Dr. Lucas insisted. 



The experts had spoken. The shark scare abated somewhat. New 

 Jersey bathers believed that they could once more enter the water un- 

 afraid. But the shark panic had cost New Jersey resort owners an esti- 

 mated $250,000 in lost tourist business. In some areas, bathing had fallen 

 off more than 75 per cent. Six weeks of summer still remained, and, 

 with plenty of hard work, the resort owners assured each other, the loss 

 could be made up. 



"Tiger sharks will hold but little terror for bathers in the waters 

 hereabouts within a few days," the Nezv York T'nnes reported from 

 Asbury Park on July 10th. "Today the final work was being rushed on 

 the net protectors about the Asbury Park beaches, and in Ocean Grove 

 the contractors who received the job of erecting steel nets began work. 

 At Fourth Avenue, where the grounds had been enclosed by the steel 

 nets, a record-breaking crowd of bathers enjoyed the surf." 



The dispatch was not entirely optimistic, for it reported that a fishing 



