642 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 





MAN-EATER SHARK 



body at the expense of its brain, for it is 

 a sluggish, stupid glutton, about six 

 times as long as an average man. At 

 home in the Arctic regions, it sometimes 

 makes visits as far south as Cape Cod, 

 the British Isles, and Oregon. It is most 

 often observed lying quietly on the sur- 

 face, apparently dozing and easily ap- 

 proached, but at times, when hungry, it . 

 rouses itself and fiercely attacks whales, 

 biting huge pieces out of their sides and 

 tails, and when feeding on the carcass 

 of a whale which has been killed by 

 hunters it is so voracious that it permits 

 spears and knives to be thrust into it 

 without seeming to take any notice. 



One of the most prodigious and per- 

 haps the most formidable of sharks is 

 the "man-eater" (Carcharodon carcha- 

 rias). It roams through all temperate 

 and tropical seas and everywhere is an 

 object of dread. Its maximum length is 

 40 feet and its teeth are 3 inches long. 

 While there are few authentic instances 

 of sharks attacking human beings, there 

 have undoubtedly been many cases where 

 sharks simply swallowed people who had 

 fallen overboard, just as they would 

 swallow any other food. How easy it 

 would be for a man-eater to devour a 

 person whole may be judged from the 

 finding of an entire hundred-pound sea- 

 lion in the stomach of a 30-foot shark on 

 the California coast. A certain man- 

 eater 36*^ feet long had jaws 20 inches 

 wide, inside measure, and teeth 2 l / 2 



inches long. This may have been the 

 "great fish" of the scripture narrative, 

 and it is possible that at that time much 

 larger man-eaters existed than are now 

 known, as shark teeth with cutting edges 

 5 inches long have been found on the 

 sea-bottom, and these are believed by 

 naturalists to have belonged to sharks 

 not long dead. The phosphate beds of 

 South Carolina yield very large fossil 

 teeth of a shark which was related to the 

 man-eater of the present day; judging 

 from the comparative size of these teeth, 

 Professor Goode thought that sharks 70 

 or 80 feet long must have been common. 



the "great eish" which swaeeowed 



JONAH 



Many years ago a Norwegian bishop 

 in a learned paper brought to the at- 

 tention of the scientific and theological 

 worlds a shark which he attempted to 

 prove must have been the "great fish" 

 that swallowed Jonah. This was the 

 basking shark (Cctorhinus maximus), 

 known also as the elephant or bone shark, 

 which is an inhabitant of the polar seas, 

 but occasionally strays as far south as 

 Virginia and California, and in former 

 years was not rare on the United States 

 and British coasts. The species has the 

 habit at times of collecting in schools at 

 the surface and basking in the sun with 

 its back partly out of the water. It 

 reaches a maximum length of 50 feet 

 and is exceeded in size by onlv three or 



