2 Shark Against Man 



swum before. As Ott reached the red blotch on the water, the gray 

 shadow turned menacingly, then darted away for blue water, leaving 

 Van Sant to the man who had come to save him. 



Ott managed to get Van Sant to shore, and there, on the warm sand. 

 Van Sant's life ebbed away. His legs had been horribly ravaged. He died 

 that night from shock and loss of blood. 



The gray shadow glided seaward, unseen and unheralded. No alarm 

 was spread. No one could remember a shark ever having killed a swimmer 

 before. Perhaps it had happened in the South Seas or in Australia. But 

 never in New Jersey. And the experts said that there never had been 

 an absolutely authenticated case of a shark attacking a swimmer any- 

 where in the world. Herman Oelrichs, a wealthy New York banker, had 

 offered a $500 prize to anyone who could prove to him that any bather 

 actually had been attacked by a shark anywhere north of Cape Hatteras. 

 The prize had gone unclaimed for 30 years. 



Only three years before, on August 26, 1913, a fisherman had caught 

 a shark off Spring Lake, New Jersey, 45 miles up the coast from Beach 

 Haven. When the shark was cut open, a woman's foot wearing a tan shoe 

 and a knitted stocking was found in its stomach. But this gruesome dis- 

 covery—like similar ones attested to down the years by numerous sailors 

 and fishermen— was explained away: though sharks might devour bodies, 

 never would a shark attack a live swimmer. 



In Spring Lake on July 6, five days after Charles Van Sant was killed, 

 more than 500 people were lounging or strolling on the beach. It was 

 after lunch; the tide had ebbed. Relatively few swimmers were in the 

 water. Children splashed at the water's edge. A few bathers stood in 

 knee-deep water. 



Life was elegant and tranquil at Spring Lake, one of the favorite 

 resorts of society. The socially prominent of Philadelphia, New Jersey, 

 and New York gathered there. Some lived in fabulous shore homes they 

 liked to call cottages. Others stayed at the New Monmouth Hotel or the 

 Essex and Sussex Hotel. Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo, 

 who was married to a daughter of President Wilson, was one of the lead- 

 ers of Spring Lake society. New Jersey Governor James F. Fielder and 

 former Governor John Franklin Fort spent most of their summers there. 

 And hundreds of wealthy New Yorkers had fled to Spring Lake with 

 their children that year to escape the infantile paralysis epidemic in New 

 York City. Since June 10, 165 persons had died of the disease in the city. 

 On July 5 alone, 24 deaths had been reported . . . And there were rumors 

 that the epidemic was spreading to New Jersey. So the talk on that July 

 6th afternoon in Spring Lake was not about the new Allied oflFensive 

 against the Huns or the neutrality policy of Wilson. It was not about 

 Wilson's chances of reelection or Charles Evans Hughes' chances of 



