Aug. 25, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
301 
The blue pointer is an exceedingly handsome 
shark, with a gracefully tapering body, long, pro¬ 
jecting snout, and an underneath mouth provided 
with razor-sharp, non-serrated teeth. It is very 
swift in its movements, turning with lightning- 
like rapidity. The skin on the back and head is blue, 
growing lighter on the sides, and the belly a dead 
white. This shark is more dreaded by the Aus¬ 
tralian line fisherman than any other, for when 
two or three of them make their appearance, it 
is almost impossible to draw a fish to the surface. 
On many occasions I have witnessed one of these 
monsters seize half a dozen hooked fish upon as 
many lines, and then, finding that he was hooked 
himself, roll the lines round and round his body 
in his rage and efforts to escape, and unless the 
tackle is very strong, such as that used for 
schnapper, the brute will get away, carrying the 
greater part of it with him. It is always best 
when not more than two or three blue pointers 
show themselves and begin to persecute to at 
once bait the shark tackle, hook them in success¬ 
ion, haul them alongside, and sever the spine at 
the junction of the tail with a hatchet; then, if 
the boat is large enough and will stand the severe 
shaking, club them on the head, cut out the hook, 
and let the carcasses sink. This, however, is not 
easily done unless the boat is manned by at least 
three men used to the danger of having an angry 
blue pointer alongside in a lumpy sea, lashing 
the water into foam and snapping his jaws franti¬ 
cally in the hope of getting something between 
them on which to vent his fury. But, even after 
having rid themselves of their tormentors, the 
fishermen must up kellick and move to a fresh 
ground—other pointers, and perhaps a dreaded 
“gray nurse” or two, would be pretty sure to be 
on the scene before long, and, disdaining for the 
time being the mutilated bodies of their brethren, 
devote themselves to the boat and fishing lines. 
As far as I can remember, I know of only three 
instances in which human beings have been taken 
by blue pointers on the Australian coast. One 
case occurred long years ago. A man-servant of 
a Mr. Benjamin Boyd, seeing several pointers 
cruising about the base of some slippery rocks, 
foolishly baited a heavy shark line and lowered 
it down. It was at once seized, and the un¬ 
fortunate man actually tried to drag a 14-foot or 
15-foot shark, weighing hundreds of pounds, up 
on to the rocks. He slipped, fell in, and was torn 
to pieces in a few seconds. In another instance 
almost the same thing happened. A fisherman, 
furious at losing so many fine schnapper by 
several voracious pointers which were hanging- 
round his boat, made a thrust at one with a lance. 
He overbalanced himself, went over the side, and 
was at once seized and devoured. In the third 
case a poor half-caste lad, in endeavoring to sever 
the tail of the shark (which was on a bowline 
alongside), was knocked overboard by a sweep¬ 
ing blow of the tail, and was quickly carried off 
by a second pointer, which had previously torn 
out a huge piece from the belly of the first shark 
as it was being hauled alongside. 
During the summer months, when the so-called 
“sea salmon” swarm into the tidal rivers in count¬ 
less thousands, the blue pointers and a small 
kind of tiger shark create havoc among their 
serried masses, and for days and days the beaches 
are strewn with salmon bitten in halves in sheer 
wantonness. 
The “gray nurse,” like the white shark, is noted 
for its daring and ferocity. Other names for the 
gray nurse are the “long toother,” the “wolf 
toothed,” and “bull shark.” In a large specimen 
of, say, twelve feet the mouth is of a terrifying 
capacity, and the long awl-like and non-serrated 
teeth appear to be fixed separately ( in the jaw 
bones. The first three or four at tine nose end 
on either side of the upper jaw are placed straight 
up and down, the remainder all curve inward; 
but immediately between the straight and the 
curved teeth there are on each side two, some¬ 
times three, very small fangs, looking, in fact, 
as if they were of recent growth. 
. The gray nurse is of such an atrociously fero¬ 
cious nature that whenever I have been alone in 
a small boat and seen one following, I have made 
for the shore as quickly as possible, for it, like the 
pointer, has an unpleasant trick of darting at the 
blade of an oar and tearing it out of the rower’s 
hand. It frequents muddy water as much as it 
does the open sea, or the boiling surf at the bases 
of rocks, or the long, breaking rollers of a sandy 
beach, and is always to be watched for and 
dreaded. 
An instance of the savagery of this pest was 
witnessed by a number of people in Sydney a 
few years ago. In one of the most traffic-con¬ 
gested parts of the harbor, just under Pyrmont 
Bridge, where the water is thick and foul, a 
number of street arabs were bathing inside a 
string of logs of cedar, connected with each other 
by a chain passed through staples, and forming 
a sort of dock. Inside this barrier of heavy, 
squared timber, some of which was aground on 
the muddy bottom and some of which was well 
afloat, the boys were disporting themselves. Sud¬ 
denly a gray nurse leapt out of the water over 
one of the stranded logs, seized a boy, and swam 
off with him, escaping into the open under the 
floating portion of the line of timber. The 
presence of a shark in such foul waters could 
only be accounted for by the fact that the public 
abattoirs were still further up the harbor, a mile 
or so, and there at all seasons of the year sharks 
could be seen feeding upon the offal from the 
slaughter houses. 
Many people in Sydney maintain that the fatal¬ 
ities that occasionally occur on the Parramatta 
River are the work of a so-called “ground shark.” 
It is the gray nurse who is the murderer. The 
aborigines have often told me that the alleged 
ground shark, “with jaws large enough to swal¬ 
low a big man,” is merely a (now very seldom 
seen) lengthy variety of the wobbygong, which 
frequents the deeper pools of tidal rivers, a noc¬ 
turnal feeder on the octopus and flat fish, non- 
man-eating, and exceedingly timid. And I must 
confess that in my boyhood’s days I had every 
reason to trust the statements of the Australian 
coastal “blackfellow,” who knew, against the poor 
knowledge obtainable by the white fisherman. 
The gray nurse has a wide habitat. It is, to my 
own personal knowledge, met nearly everywhere 
in the tropical and semi-tropical waters of the 
North and South Pacific (I do not know any¬ 
thing about the Atlantic), and is everywhere 
dreaded by both natives and whites. The only 
thing in its own element that it fears is the 
“killer”—that valorous little and well-toothed 
minor whale known to science as Orca gladiator 
—the bulldog of the ocean and the friend of the 
whaleman in the Pacific. Concerning the “killer,” 
I may mention that there are hundreds of in¬ 
stances where whaleboats have been stove in or 
underclipped by the flukes of a sperm whale, and 
the crews have either to swim for their lives, or 
cling to bits of the broken boat, that the attending 
“killers” have actually swam up to the men and 
smelt, or, as the American whalemen say, “nosed” 
them, and then started off again in pursuit of the 
wounded whale, intent upon getting some share 
of the delicious blubber before a second boat 
made fast to the great creature, killed and towed 
it to the ship. If it were a “right” whale, the 
“killers” would be satisfied with tearing out and 
devouring its tongue and taking their modicum 
of blubber, but the great sperm whale, with his 
mighty, toothed mouth and enormous strength is 
a different customer, and Orca fights shy of him 
until the deadly lance thrust or the fateful bomb 
has sent him into his “flurry.” 
But to all sharks Orca is a deadly enemy, and 
attack's them fiercely as they endeavor to tear off 
mouthfuls of blubber from a killed whale. And 
it is also a strange fact that whenever whale¬ 
men have been, when capsized or stove in, sur¬ 
rounded by hundreds of “blue sharks” (the Aus¬ 
tralian blue pointer) they have very, very rarely 
been molested. Perhaps the prospective and 
delicate blubber outweighs in value the tough 
sailorman. Chacun a son gout. In the mid- 
Pacific and about the Great Barrier Reef of Aus¬ 
tralia, the blue pointer may be seen in droves, 
the gray nurse only in parties of two or three, 
unless attended by some of their own undevoured 
young. 
On one occasion I was landing in a whaleboat 
a load of provisions for a trader on Palmerston’s 
Island, in the South Pacific. When within a 
hundred yards of the beach, two large gray 
sharks swept up from astern, and each tore away 
an oar from a native seaman. It was nearly 
dark; the boat was so deeply laden and the surf 
so - heavy that I was thankful when we touched 
the beach. Returning to the ship we lost another 
oar from a shark, and two huge brutes kept 
alongside of us to the ship. When the boat falls 
were lowered, and the bow one, with its block, 
was swaying to and fro, one of the sharks, in¬ 
credible as it may seem, sprang up, seized it in 
his jaws, and held on some minutes until the 
mate sent a dozen Winchester rifle bullets 
through its head. So ’much for the habits of the 
long-toothed gray nurse. 
Of the white shark, not many examples are 
captured, or even seen, along the Australian sea¬ 
board. The term “white” is a misnomer, for this 
terror of the seas is not white, though it may 
be described as being of a dirty yellowish-white. 
It is probably, with the exception of the great 
“tiger shark” of the Indian Ocean and the “bone 
shark” known to whalemen (which may be one 
and the same fish), the largest of all the shark 
family. The Indian Ocean tiger shark I have 
never seen, but I can quite believe that it (if it is 
some tropical species of the basking shark) does 
attain a length of forty feet or even fifty feet, 
for I have seen a white shark (skin dirty yel¬ 
lowish blue-gray) of twenty-eight feet and with 
a girth around the shoulders as much as that of 
a full-grown bullock. The teeth were two 
inches long, and one and a half inches in width 
at the base. This monster was killed by a bomb 
lance from an American whaleship close to the 
reef of Pingelap (MacAskill’s Island), in the 
North Pacific. It sank in ten fathoms of water, 
and the carcass was not recovered until the fol¬ 
lowing day. I was present when the stomach 
was opened. I11 it was a large green turtle, partly 
digested, and weighing 150 pounds, two small 
hawkbill turtles, and some fish. 
If I am not mistaken, the Challenger Deep Sea 
Sounding Expedition brought up in the dredge 
in the mid-Pacific teeth of the white (or some 
other) shark, which were five inches to six inches 
long, four inches wide at the base, and nearly 
one inch thick at the inset in the jaw. It was 
very reasonably suggested by scientists that the 
monster which once used these fearful teeth must 
hav been from eighty to ninety feet in length. 
Furthermore, these Challenger teeth were of no 
great age, and it is not at all unlikely that at the 
present time there are still similar monsters of 
the shark family in existence, as yet unseen by 
man, or, if they have been seen, it has been by 
men—sailors—who merely looked upon them as 
unknown and very big fish, and the incident not 
worth recording in the log book—perhaps for fear 
of being chaffed as promulgators of the sea ser¬ 
pent story. 
And yet at this present day, when a sperm 
whale is struck by the harpoon or pierced by the 
lance, it will in its agony frequently vomit forth 
huge pieces of octopus tentacles three or four 
feet in length and two feet in circumference. Feet, 
not inches. And I, and hundreds of other men, 
have seen floating upon the surface of the Pacific 
even larger pieces of octopus tentacles, with cusp 
arrangements *of semi-osseous teeth as large as 
a saucer. All those who have made a long cruise 
in a sperm whaler will bear this out. 
The “bone shark” of the Australian seas, so 
often seen by whalemen, I believe to be a species 
of basking shark, like that met with off the west 
coast of Ireland, but larger. Although it has 
sometimes been harpooned by whalers, it has 
dived to such a depth that the line has had to be 
cut, and so far as I know, not one has ever been 
secured to prove or disprove the assertion that 
it is entitled to the name of “bone shark” by rea¬ 
son of its possessing a series of plates of baleen 
similar to those of the “right” whale.—Louis 
Becke, in London Field. 
Yorkshire alone has record of no fewer than 
twelve drowned towns and villages. There was 
Ravenspur, for instance, which was constituted 
a free borough by Edward I. at a cost of £300, 
and became a seaport of almost national im¬ 
portance. There it was that Edward Balliol em¬ 
barked with a force of 2,500 strong in order 
to win the Crown of Scotland. The town, big¬ 
ger and more important than Hull, had five 
churches, a capacious harbor, and a number of 
buildings befitting its rank and importance. 
Where are they now?—London Pall Mall Gazette. 
