220 Shark and Company 



versal among sailors. Since the age of sail, seamen have usually caught 

 sharks only to curse them and butcher them, though when shipwrecked 

 they have been happy enough to eat them for survival on many occasions. 

 More often they have hacked the shark into pieces, or chopped off its 

 tail and hurled it back into the sea to be devoured by other sharks. In 

 Panama, the natives have devised a fiendish death for captured sharks: 

 crucifixion. They nail the shark's pectoral fins and tail to a board and 

 then launch the board, sending the shark out to death under a glaring 

 sun or into the jaws of other sharks attracted by the victim's bleeding 

 and writhing. 



Native divers in the Red Sea share man's common terror of the shark, 

 though they show it in another way. They give friendly names to the 

 sharks as a means of placating the evil spirits lurking within them. 



Doctors J. T. Nichols and R. C. Murphy, the shark experts mentioned 

 in Chapter 1, witnessed one attempt to kill an almost indestructible shark. 

 They reported: "We have seen one hooked, shot full of lead from a re- 

 peating rifle, then harpooned, hauled on deck, and disemboweled, yet it 

 continued alive and alert for a long while, thrashing its tail and opening 

 and shutting its weird, expressionless eyes by moving the whitish lower 

 lids." 



And a "dead" shark is often very lively. One fisherman, for instance, 

 had a hand bitten off by a disemboweled shark. A naval officer con- 

 temptuously kicked a seemingly dead shark lying on deck; the shark's 

 retaliation was immediate and massive— it tore off most of the calf of 

 the officer's leg. The shark's hold on life is incredible. There is a reliable 

 record of a shark that was cut open, gutted, and thrown back into the 

 sea by a fisherman who then baited his hook with the shark's intestines— 

 and caught the same shark again! 



The shark dies hard. Gavin Maxwell, writing in Harpoon at a Venture 

 of an attempt to kill a gigantic harpooned Basking shark (Cetorhinus 

 TnaxiTfTus)^ reports: 



He was ... a huge bull of unusually black coloring, and ... he was still 

 moving, shuddering and undulating down his entire length, though he had been 

 beached for two days ... At point-blank range I shot the shark between the 

 eyes four times, so that the brain must have been completely obliterated. There 

 was no visible effect; the movement of the body neither accelerated nor slowed. 

 Then, to make certain that the fish was dead, we cut off the entire forepart of 

 the head with axes, but this, too, produced no change. Four days later, when 

 we dragged the carcass off the beach, the body, now headless and disemboweled, 

 was still twitching and jerking over its whole length. 



Yet in some ways, the shark is delicate. A relatively sHght injury to 

 its gills, for instance, will usually cause a shark to bleed to death. If a 

 shark is hoisted out of the sea by the tail, it has little chance of survival: 



