148 Man and Shark 



mouths. Gradually, they became anchored by the seaweed that attached 

 itself to them and, like two great hulks, they remained moored at their 

 eatery, ever growing and ever becoming encrusted with barnacles. When 

 last reported on by the captain, which was back in 1916 during the shark 

 scare, when he told his whopper to the Ne^w York Times, they were each 

 about 50 feet long, and hardly looked Hke sharks at all, so barnacle- 

 covered were they. Some day, perhaps, they will have grown so large 

 that they'll become a menace to navigation and will have to be sunk. 

 Or maybe some enterprising fishermen will colonize them and make a 

 fortune fishing those very fishy waters. 



Many sharks that followed sailing ships were neither jokes nor tall 

 tales. A steady diet of galley garbage flowed in the ships' wakes, and 

 any shark that picked up the scent of such an easy meal would follow 

 a ship for weeks. Sharks even bit off the brass rotators of the "patent 

 logs" ships trailed behind them to register their speed. 



One of the earliest English-language references to shark attacks 

 occurs in a 1580 Fiigger News-Letter, which gives this eye-witness ac- 

 count of how a seaman virtually fell into the jaws of a shark, somewhere 

 between Portugal and India: 



When a man fell from our ship into the sea during a strong wind, so that we 

 could not wait for him or come to his rescue in any other fashion, we threw 

 out to him on a rope a wooden block, especially prepared for that purpose, and 

 this he finally managed to grasp and thought he could save himself thereby. But 

 when our crew drew this block with the man toward the ship and had him 

 within half the carrying distance of a musket shot, there appeared from below 

 the surface of the sea a large monster called Tiburon; it rushed on the man and 

 tore him to pieces before our very eyes. That surely was a grievous death. 



Ships' logs recount many similar tragedies, but there were some close 

 races which the mariners won. The captain of the Ayrshire fell overboard 

 during a cruise in 1850. His vaUant Newfoundland dog leaped into the sea 

 to save him. A shark headed for them, but, according to the log, both 

 the captain and the dog were saved. The captain was unscathed. The 

 dog's tail was bitten off. 



Many a sailor who died aboard ship and whose body was buried at 

 sea found his tomb in the belly of a shark. The superstition grew that 

 sharks somehow knew when a man was about to die, and the appearance 

 of sharks in the wake of a ship came to be considered an omen of death. 

 When an epidemic of yellow fever or cholera broke out aboard a ship, 

 the superstitious believed that sharks would stay with the accursed ship 

 until the epidemic had claimed its last victim. One skipper who sailed 

 out of San Francisco many years ago added to the legend. He often 

 carried an unusual cargo— the bodies of Chinese who died in the United 

 States, and, accordinor to ancient custom, had to be buried in China. 



