336 Shark and Company 



Brunswick. The bottle was one of many thrown in to get information 

 on ocean currents. The shark that took to the indigestible bottle was 

 landed by a fisherman about 150 miles off the western tip of Nova 

 Scotia. 



Australia's sharks have consumed what Whitley calls, with considera- 

 ble understatement, "curious meals." Some of the meals he describes 

 include a half-dozen hens and a rooster, apparently from a coop that 

 had washed into the water; the brass casing of an 18-pound shell, and, 

 in one shark: a full-grown spaniel with the collar on, a porpoise's skull, 

 and the remains of sea birds. 



The list of human remains found in sharks is long and grisly. In 

 1949, a young woman in western Australia was attacked by a shark 

 which tore off her left arm above the elbow. Several days later, a large 

 shark was caught near the scene of the attack. In it was found the wom- 

 an's arm, with a ring still on one of its fingers. The ring was returned to 

 her, and she resumed wearing it on her remaining hand. 



Author-explorer Adrian Conan Doyle tells of seeing a shark in Zan- 

 zibar that had within it a bag of money and a human skull.* Usually, 

 the identity of such victims is never determined, nor can it be learned 

 whether they were consumed as corpses or as living men. But sometimes 

 bathing suits, dental work, bits of clothing or fingerprints can lead to 

 the discovery of who they were, at least, if not how they died. 



The story is told in Pensacola, Florida, of a shark that was caught 

 there many years ago. In it was found a man's leg, the foot of which 

 still wore a new shoe. A fisherman had left port a few days before and 

 never returned. Before he went to sea he had bought a new pair of 

 shoes. The shoe on the leg in the shark was one of them. On this evi- 

 dence, the leg— and the shoe— were buried as the only remains of the 

 vanished fisherman. 



There are at least two well-verified stories of sharks gulping down 

 explosives. One dynamite dinner was reported by two Puerto Rican 

 fishermen in a shark they caught shortly after several mysterious bomb- 

 ings in San Juan. A $500 reward had been posted for information leading 

 to the capture of the bombers. The shark-catchers claimed the reward, 

 but they didn't get it. What the shark had swallowed was an explosive 

 charge used two months before in blasting operations around the entrance 

 to San Juan harbor. Another explosive-fancying shark gulped a depth 

 charge released by a U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey ship which was 

 making soundings in the Pacific. The charge, about the size of a coconut, 

 was fixed to explode some seconds after it entered the water. Several 

 seconds after it entered the shark, it went off, establishing for all time 

 that there is at least one sure way to kill a shark. 



■* Adrian Conan Doyle, Heaven Has Claws (New York: Random House, 1953). 



