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.”Intrigued, Du Bois immediately dispatched fifty letters to diplomats around the world, from the Philippines to the Red Sea, “asking for verified incidents of the work of the man-eating shark.” The response astonished him: “I received sixteen affidavits from American Consuls, Philippine officials, and one Indian official, reciting interesting incidents of the man-eating sharks attacking and wounding or killing and eating human beings.” He was sent a photograph of a Tomali boy, coin-diving on the Gulf of Aden, being “seized by a man-eating shark and dragged back into the waters, never to return.”Eight days after the diplomat's letter, another letter in the Times, signed cryptically “N.S.W.,” denoting the Australian state of New South Wales, gave convincing and gruesome details of three cases of sharks devouring humans, adding that “any one who doubts that sharks in temperate waters do attack human beings will visit Sydney, N.S.W.and.his doubts will be speedily resolved.” The letter reported the case of a boy dangling his legs off a wharf at Ryde, on the Parramatta River, which feeds the harbor, when “a shark came up, seized a foot, and disappeared with the boy, whose body was never seen again.” The very next day, Herbert MacKenzie, a native of Sydney, Australia, capital of New South Wales, published in the Times a letter confirming to the last detail his memory of the three cases reported by “N.S.W.” “As a native of that beautiful city, I can with authority corroborate the statements.and know of others where lives and limbs have been lost as a result of these sea monsters in the beautiful waters of the harbor.” In the late 1880s, MacKenzie reported: “I distinctly remember a young man losing first an arm, then, just as rescue was at hand, the entire body disappeared, leaving only a blood path in the water.This happened in Rushcutters Bay.”If readers of the Times were unsettled by these accounts, they must have found reassuring the rebuttal from Dr.Lucas, the famed expert who had investigated alleged shark attacks on the East Coast for forty years and verified none as authentic.In his letter to the editor, “The Shark Slander,” Dr.Lucas announced he knew of only “two fairly reliable references to such cases” in the world—one in Bombay, where a man lost his leg, another in the Hawaiian Islands, where a human victim was surely mistaken for offal dumped in the water.Those who believed a shark had killed Charles Bruder, Lucas declared, had made one of the commonest errors in such cases, “that the shark bit off the man's leg as though it were a carrot.” Such a feat was not possible, Lucas said, and the mere statement “shows that the maker or writer of it had little idea of the strength of the apparatus needed to perform such an amputation.” In his contribution to Nichols's and Murphy's journal article for the Brooklyn Museum Science Bulletin, published three months before Bruder's death, Lucas described the common sense behind his theory.“The next time the reader carves a leg of lamb, let him speculate on the power required to sever this at one stroke—and the bones of a sheep are much lighter than those of a man.Moreover, a shark, popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding, is not particularly strong in the jaws.”As evidence, Dr.Lucas noted that his protégé, Robert Cushman Murphy, during an expedition to South Georgia Island, witnessed “the difficulty of sharks in tearing meat from the carcass of a whale.” And Lucas recalled his own “disappointment at witnessing the efforts of a twelve-foot shark to cut a chunk out of a sea lion.The sea lion had been dead a week and was supposedly tender, but the shark tugged and thrashed and made a great to-do over each mouthful.”Given the weakness of even the largest sharks' jaws, Lucas reasoned, a man would lose a leg only “if a shark thirty feet or more in length happened to catch a man fairly on the knee joint where no severing of the bone was necessary.” A shark was not capable of biting cleanly through the bone and therefore could not have been the animal that bit off Charles Bruder's legs below the knee.What animal was capable of the attack, Dr.Lucas couldn't say, but “certainly no shark recorded as having been taken in these waters could possibly perform such an act.” According to Lucas, the best scientific data concerning the question of the East Coast shark attack remained the uncollected wager Hermann Oelrichs made in 1891.Twenty-five years had substantiated the tycoon's position, Lucas concluded, that there is “practically no danger of an attack.about our coasts.”A Long-Range Cruising RogueAs the motorboats rumbled and bloodied the waters of Spring Lake, not far offshore the great white swam with growing urgency.Never straying more than a half mile from shore, it swept north and south, fronting the coast, stalking the two-mile-long beach of Spring Lake and the coastline a few miles north toward Asbury Park.The shark moved with increasing expectancy, for it had hunted with success, and prey was very close now, abundant prey; it could sense it with numerous electrical, sonic, and olfactory systems.Wary of boats and oars, the shark safely tracked its prey from a distance, with no need to approach the shore.Its lateral lines tingled with the distant vibration of motorboat engines.Gasoline engines for boats were a new invention, and men then could not have known the acoustic chorus they sang over time and space for sharks [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]