Shark Treasures 193 



the outside with a thick line of sharks' teeth, very firmly fixed in the 

 wood." Still another selachian weapon was the aero fai, a Sting ray 

 stinger, "which being serrated on the edges, and barbed towards the 

 point, is very destructive in a dexterous hand." 



In the Ellice Islands of the Pacific, natives have found a more con- 

 structive use for shark teeth. A tooth is lashed to a stick and used as a 

 scalpel in crude surgery. 



The Maoris of New Zealand call the Seven-Gilled shark (Noto- 

 ryjjchjfs cepediainis) that lives in their waters a tuatini. From its teeth 

 they once made a saw-like instrument, the mira tuatina, which reputedly 

 had one special use: cutting human flesh. The Maoris associated sharks 

 with blood, war, and death. They mixed shark oil with red ocher and 

 painted it on their war canoes and the funeral monuments erected in 

 memory of their greatest chiefs. They also used shark oil as a cosmetic, 

 a hair dressing, and for the anointing of bodies in their elaborate funeral 

 ceremonies. 



Some Pacific islanders once used shark skins as drumheads; the skins 

 were strong, did not stretch, and thus gave an unvarying tone. In Su- 

 matra, the skin of the Cowtail ray {Dasy satis sephen) is used for making 

 drums and tambourines. 



In Bermuda, natives have used shark oil to make a crude but, accord- 

 ing to them, dependable barometer. They extracted oil from a shark's 

 brain and liver and put it in a sealed bottle. When a storm approached, 

 they claimed, the oil became cloudy. 



Eric Sloane, the historian of weather lore, tells in his Alvmnac and 

 Weather Forecaster of an advertisement he found in an old Connecticut 

 newspaper. The advertisement offered an "absolute weather predicter 

 for one dollar ... A magic liquid that clouds up when it is about to 

 rain." Sloane wonders if the magic liquid could have been shark oil. 

 For several months, one of the authors kept a sealed bottle of shark oil 

 in a window in his study. He cannot vouch for the oil's dependability 

 as a weather "predicter," but it did cloud in cold weather and clear in 

 warm. And, at the approach of a rainstorm, when temperatures usually 

 drop, it also sometimes clouded. The cloudiness was caused by the 

 solidifying of the oil. An hour in the refrigerator turned the oil into a 

 semi-solid with the consistency of butter. Other authorities have vali- 

 dated this statement, such as Dr. H. B. Moore of the University of 

 Miami. 



When Australia was first settled in 1788, it was the oil of the shark 

 that fended off the hostile darkness from most of the colonists' homes. 

 David Collins, writing on Australia in 1794, said: "Nothing was lost; 

 even the shark was found to be a certain supply; the oil which was 

 procured from its liver was sold at one shilling the quart; and but very 



