Shark Devils— and Gods 



149 



A painting which one critic says "stands alone in its age," Brook Watson and the Shark 

 by John Singleton Copley, was painted in 1778. Watson, who later became Lord 

 Mayor of London, lost a leg in the attack, which occurred in Havana Harbor. It is 

 said that when, as Lord Mayor, he was asked about his leg, he delighted in mystifying 

 his friends by simply saying, "It was bit off!" Copley's painting was commissioned by 

 Watson himself. He also commemorated the accident in his family crest, which shows 

 a shark being repelled as it seizes its prey. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts. Boston 



The skipper swore that on voyages when he carried corpses his ship 

 was followed by a pack of sharks, which were able to detect the corpses 

 even though they lay in lead-lined cofHns deep in the hold. The shark 

 pack, he insisted, never appeared when he carried a less funereal cargo. 



The seaman's dread of sharks, oddly enough, has not spawned a 

 superstition against naming ships Shark. Six United States Navy ships, 

 in fact, have been called Shark. The first, a 198-ton schooner of 12 guns, 

 was launched in 1821 and had for her first commanding officer a young 

 lieutenant named Matthew Calbraith Perry. Three decades later, as 

 Commodore Perry, he would lead the first American mission to Japan. 

 During his rather undistinguished career aboard the Shark, Perry took 

 formal possession for the United States of what was to become one of 

 the country's best-known shark-fishing spots: Key West, Forida. 



The other five vessels named Shark by the Navy were all submarines. 



