Shark Devils— and Gods 147 



"A master of a Guinea ship informed me," the British naturalist 

 Thomas Pennant wrote in 1776, "that a rage of suicide prevailed among 

 his new bought slaves, from a notion the unhappy creatures had, that 

 after death they should be restored again to their families, friends, and 

 country. To convince them at least that they should not reanimate their 

 bodies he ordered one of the corpses to be tied by the heels to a rope, and 

 lowered into the sea, and, though it was drawn up again as fast as the 

 united force of the crew could be exerted, yet in that short space the 

 sharks had devoured every part but the feet, which were secured at the 

 end of the cord." 



In Sharks Are Caught at Night,^ Francois Poli recounts a story still 

 told around the shores of Lake Nicaragua about the greedy Dutchman 

 who fished for the sharks which consumed the bodies of Indians hurled 

 into the lake. After elaborate funeral ceremonies, the corpses, bedecked 

 in jewels and gold ornaments, were consigned to the sharks, apparently 

 to appease them, for their man-eating habits were— and are— notorious. 

 The Dutchman, the natives told Poli, fished for the sharks, ripped them 

 open, and stole the sacred sacrificial jewelry and gold. He had harvested 

 a fortune, so the story goes, by the time the Indians discovered his 

 desecrations and killed him. His body was not thrown to the sharks, of 

 course; he wasn't good enough for that. "So then," Poli quotes his tale- 

 teller as saying, "they set fire to the house. And cut the Dutchman's 

 throat." 



In the days of sail, many ports of call were reputed to be the homes 

 of sinister sharks whose evil deeds were luridly recounted to wide-eyed 

 apprentices by old salts, who familiarly referred to the sharks by name. 

 Two of the most infamous were Port Royal Jack, who guarded the en- 

 trance to the harbor of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shanghai Bill, who 

 prowled the waters of Bridgetown Harbor, Barbados, West Indies. Shang- 

 hai Bill gobbled down many a sailor in his time, but it was a shaggy 

 dog that did him in. Bill, it seems, seized in his great jaws one day a big 

 brown sheep dog that had fallen into Bridgetown Harbor. The dog's 

 hair got caught in Bill's teeth, and he finally choked to death. This may 

 be the world's first shaggy dog story. 



Then there were the two sharks that became an island. What their 

 names were isn't known, but they were certainly the laziest sharks that 

 ever inhabited the sea, or a seafarer's tale, the seafarer being Captain B. J. 

 Whip, once an officer on a cable ship in the Red Sea. According to his tale, 

 the two sharks, then only a few feet long, discovered a fine dining area 

 in the middle of the Red Sea. The fish were so easy to get that all they 

 had to do was stay there, motionless, and let the fish swim into their 



1 Francois Poli, Sharks Are Caught at Night (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959). 



