142 Man and Shark 



so hard that welts covered its body, and so it became a striped fish. An- 

 other she beat, producing black-and-blue spots, and that is the way its 

 coloration remained. A third she battered so thoroughly it wound up 

 forever blackened. She stepped on the obliging sole so hard that it has 

 been flat ever since. 



By the time she boarded a shark, she was hungry. She cracked a coco- 

 nut on the shark's head, raising a bump which has been on sharks' fore- 

 heads ever since and is known as "the bump of Hina." Incidentally, the 

 shark proved itself far less docile than the other poor fish Hina abused. 

 When she cracked that coconut, the shark dived, leaving Hina in the 

 middle of the ocean, and it is a matter of some doubt whether she ever 

 did make it to Motu-tapu. 



Rays were similarly looked upon as benevolent among the Norse 

 men. An ancient account of the ray's kindness— and the Dogfish's malevo- 

 lence—written by Olaus Magnus says: "There is a fish of the kind of 

 Sea-Dogfish . . . that will set upon a man swimming in the Salt- Waters, 

 so greedily, in Troops, unawares, that he will sink a man to the bottome, 

 not only by his biting, but also by his weight; and he will eat his more 

 tender parts, as his nostrils, fingers . . ." 



When this happens, however, the account goes on, the ray rushes 

 to the rescue, and, "with some violence drives away these fish that set 

 upon the drown'd man, and doth what he can to urge him to swim out." 



Out of the mists of legends in the Torres Strait, between the northern- 

 most tip of Australia and the coast of Papua, comes the tale of the won- 

 drous deliverance of Mutuk, a man who was swallowed by a shark. The 

 details of Mutuk 's sojourn in a shark's belly are not as well known as 

 Jonah's stay in what is generally thought to be a whale. But the two 

 stories are basically similar. 



Countless religious paintings to the contrary, there is support for 

 the claim that Jonah was swallowed by a shark, not a whale. The Bible 

 says that Jonah was swallowed up by "a great fish," and, though the 

 biological distinction probably was not known to Biblical scribes, the 

 whale is a mammal, not a fish. Bishop Erik Pontoppidan of Norway, a 

 prolific writer on denizens of the sea, in 1765 wrote a long and learned 

 paper which proved, to his satisfaction at least, that Jonah had been 

 gulped down by a Basking shark. Anatomically, this would be difficult 

 for a Basking shark, whose diet is restricted to plankton and whose gullet 

 would have trouble passing a prophet. For this reason, supporters of the 

 Jonah-was-swallowed-by-a-shark theory favor the Great White shark 

 (Carcharodon carcharias), which certainly is a man-eater. The regurgita- 

 tion of a man— alive— would be far more miraculous on the part of a 

 Great White than a whale. The notion that Jonah was swallowed by a 

 whale may have been inspired by the fact that Joppa, whence Jonah was 



