Jaws

by Peter Benchley

  “A SUPER-THRILLER!…

  If you have any imagination at all, the book will give you the shivers.”

  The New York Post

  “From the opening chapter when a young woman plunges into the surf … and meets the 20-foot shark … the reader is hooked.”

  Newsday

  “Benchley keeps it moving, fulfills all expectations.… JAWS is lean, all sinew, everything directed toward a climax that is implanted on the retina from the very first sentence.”

  New York Magazine

  “To read the first few pages of Peter Benchley’s book is to be compelled to read them all as quickly as you can turn the pages.… A stunning book.”

  Book World

  “An eminently successful combination of adventure story and moral fable … The narrative is tense and absorbing, the characterization excellent, and the climactic shark hunt as exciting a sea story as one could want.”

  Library Journal

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1974 and copyright renewed 2002 by Winifred W. Benchley

  Introduction copyright © 2005 by Winifred W. Benchley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  This work was originally published in hardcover by Doubleday & Company in 1974 and in paperback by Bantam in 1975.

  Fawcett Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  PETER BENCHLEY is a registered trademark of Winifred W. Benchley. Purchase of this book should not be construed as granting any right or license to use the trademark without prior written permission.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82866-8

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  eBook Bonus Content

  Original Title Page of Jaws

  Title Idea Brainstorm List

  Letter from Peter Benchley to David Brown, Producer of the Film Version of Jaws

  Photos from the Jaws Movie Set

  “Great White: Deep Trouble”

  “Gift From the Sea”

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Jaws was the offspring of a childhood passion.

  Like millions of other children, I developed, early on, a fascination with sharks. Because I spent my summers on Nantucket, an island thirty miles out in the Atlantic, I was able to indulge my passion on a regular and continuing basis. In the 1940s and ’50s the waters around Nantucket were rich in wildlife, including sharks of many species: sand sharks, blue sharks, makos, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, great white sharks. When my father, my brother, and I would go fishing on windless days, we’d see the dorsal and tail fins of sharks crisscrossing the oil-calm surface. To me they spoke of the unknown and the mysterious, of invisible danger and mindless savagery.

  Throughout my teens and early twenties, I read most of the accessible literature on sharks—there wasn’t much—and in 1964, I read an item in a newspaper about a fisherman who harpooned a 4,500-pound great white shark off Long Island. I remember thinking at the time, Lord! What would happen if one of those monsters came into a resort community and wouldn’t go away? I tucked the item into my wallet and, for the time being, forgot about it.

  Then, in 1971, a documentary feature film called Blue Water, White Death was released. It told the story of an expedition led by Peter Gimbel, a department-store heir and professional adventurer, to find and film a great white shark. Blue Water was then and, in my opinion, remains today the finest film ever made about sharks. In the same year, Peter Matthiessen’s wonderful book about the expedition, Blue Meridian, was published, and the two events not only affirmed (in bronze) my fascination with sharks but also set storytelling wheels turning in my brain.

  I had no interest in writing a one-note horror story: Shark eats people. I concentrated on the question of what would actually happen if a huge predator laid siege to a resort community. The first reaction of the authorities, I thought, would be to try to cover up the problem in hopes that it would go away. Some resort communities earn 80 or 90 percent of their annual income during the three months of summer, and a shark-attack panic could destroy a summer’s trade. Of course, by the time of the second or third fatal attack, the cover-up would be impossible to sustain.

  Who would be the authorities? A police chief, probably, and wouldn’t it be interesting if he was a man who feared and hated the water? Who would his wife be? Would they have children? Wouldn’t they seek help from an authority on sharks? A marine biologist, say, whose ambition would be to study the shark, not to kill it. And how would the town react to the outsider?

  All these questions, and ten thousand more, assailed me as I began to tell the story to myself. Soon, the story began to tell itself, and once in a while, the characters would run away from me, dashing off in different directions. I would rein them in and talk to them and determine whether or not their destinations were appropriate.

  At the time I was writing Jaws, the environmental movement we know today didn’t exist. Yes, there was a constituency building to save whales; yes, people were aware that pollution of air and water was a problem; yes, pesticides and other toxins were being recognized as dangerous to birds and fish. But to the general population, the oceans remained as they had always been—eternal, invulnerable, capable of consuming and rendering harmless whatever mankind threw at or in them. As for sharks … well, only a handful of people on the planet knew anything about sharks. To most people, and especially to fishermen and divers, the hoary canard about sharks was gospel: The only good shark is a dead shark.

  I prided myself on knowing more about sharks than the general populace, but I succumbed nevertheless to anecdotal evidence and accepted it—or them, for the anecdotes were legion—as truth. Did sharks attack boats? Of course they did. Did they target humans? You bet. I had read about dozens of shark attacks. Did they stay in one area, killing and killing again, until either they were caught and killed or they finished off the food supply? Darn right. Remember the shark that went up a New Jersey river in 1916 and killed four people? Time and again, I confidently assured interviewers that every single incident of shark behavior described in Jaws (the book, remember, not the movie) had actually happened—not all at once, not by the same shark, but over the years and in some sea somewhere in the world. I was correct, too; every episode described in the book had happened … just not for the reasons I had posited, nor with the results I had imagined.

  It would be years before I would learn the biological and behavioral truths about sharks in general and great whites in particular. I learned them slowly, firsthand, often in company with scientists or fishermen or divers, and each discovery was fascinating, albeit humbling. One of the first lessons I learned was that sharks not only don’t seek out and attack human beings, they avoid humans whenever possible—we are, after all, large, noisy, ugly aliens that, for all a s
hark knows, may pose mortal danger—and bite them very rarely. They don’t even like the taste of us, and great whites often spit humans out because they’re too bony and fat-free (compared to seals, that is).

  With knowledge accumulated from dozens of expeditions and hundreds of dives and countless encounters with sharks of many kinds came the realization that I could never write Jaws today. I could never demonize an animal, especially not an animal that is much older and much more successful in its habitat than man is, has been, or ever will be, an animal that is vitally necessary for the balance of nature in the sea, and an animal that we may—if we don’t change our destructive behaviors—extinguish from the face of the earth.

  As Jaws was being readied for publication, my ambitions for it were modest, to say the least. I knew it couldn’t possibly be commercially successful. For one thing, it was a first novel, and, with rare exceptions like Gone with the Wind, first novels tended to languish, unread, on bookstore shelves. For another, it was a first novel about a fish, and I couldn’t think of any novels about fish that had achieved critical or commercial success. Furthermore, I knew for certain that no one would ever make a movie from the book because it was impossible to catch and train a great white shark, and moviemaking technology was nowhere near good enough to create a believable model or mechanical version.

  The book was published in the spring of 1974, to generally favorable reviews. A few readers and reviewers went delightfully overboard. Fidel Castro told an interviewer for National Public Radio that Jaws (Tiburon in its Spanish editions) was a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism. Other critics described it as an allegory about Watergate and a classic story of male bonding.

  Not long after publication, Jaws landed on the hardcover bestseller list of The New York Times and took up residence there for forty-four weeks. Never, however, did it make it to number one. (A pesky book about a rabbit, Watership Down, refused to budge from the top spot.) The story in paperback was entirely different. It was number one for months on lists all over the world. In the United States alone it sold more than nine million copies. But that success had to do, in part, with the shooting, preparation, and release of the movie, with brilliant cross-promotion by the paperback publisher and the movie company, and with phenomenal good luck.

  I’ve derived great gratification over the years hearing from readers that Jaws was the first grown-up book they had read and that it taught them reading could be fun; that Jaws sparked an interest that led them to careers in marine biology (I’ve heard from a couple of college professors that they attribute the increase in graduate students in marine science in general and the study of sharks in particular directly to the book and the movie); or that Jaws taught them that sharks are so cool, they wanted to become conservationists. Every year, more than a thousand youngsters who weren’t alive when the book was published or the movie released write to tell me how worried they are about the decline in shark populations around the world and to ask me how they can help save these awesome animals that they discovered in Jaws.

  Jaws has also given me a second career. For the past decade or so, I’ve been working in marine conservation pretty much fulltime, though I still find diving with big critters in remote locales irresistible and I’ll abandon almost anything for the chance to visit with great white sharks under water. I don’t know how much I can accomplish—I don’t know how much anyone can accomplish—but I do know that after all I’ve received from sharks, I’d feel like an ingrate if I didn’t give something back.

  In 1973, before the book was published, I met with Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, the producers for whom Universal Pictures had bought the movie rights to Jaws. Though I had no way of knowing it at the time, I was enormously lucky to be in their hands. (Later, we would all find ourselves lucky to be in the hands of a twenty-six-year-old genius named Steven Spielberg, but nobody had any way of anticipating that at the time.) Not only were Richard and David charming, gracious, and brilliant, with decades of movie-business savvy and experience, but they also were in the habit of violating two of Hollywood’s most time-honored clichés: They didn’t lie and they did return phone calls.

  I had never written a screenplay, but I had asked for and been given permission to write the first couple of drafts of Jaws. At our first meeting, after an exchange of pleasantries, Richard Zanuck said to me (I’m paraphrasing here), “This picture is going to be an A-to-Z adventure story, a straight line, so we want you to take out all the romance stuff, all the Mafia stuff, all the stuff that’ll just be distracting.”

  You who have never read Jaws, you who have only seen the movie, I can see you frowning, I can hear you saying to yourself, “Romance? Mafia? What’s he talking about? Where’s all that stuff?”

  Read on, please, and discover for yourselves.

  PART

  ONE

  1

  The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills. There was little other motion: an occasional correction of the apparently aimless course by the slight raising or lowering of a pectoral fin—as a bird changes direction by dipping one wing and lifting the other. The eyes were sightless in the black, and the other senses transmitted nothing extraordinary to the small, primitive brain. The fish might have been asleep, save for the movement dictated by countless millions of years of instinctive continuity: lacking the flotation bladder common to other fish and the fluttering flaps to push oxygen-bearing water through its gills, it survived only by moving. Once stopped, it would sink to the bottom and die of anoxia.

  The land seemed almost as dark as the water, for there was no moon. All that separated sea from shore was a long, straight stretch of beach—so white that it shone. From a house behind the grass-splotched dunes, lights cast yellow glimmers on the sand.

  The front door to the house opened, and a man and a woman stepped out onto the wooden porch. They stood for a moment staring at the sea, embraced quickly, and scampered down the few steps onto the sand. The man was drunk, and he stumbled on the bottom step. The woman laughed and took his hand, and together they ran to the beach.

  “First a swim,” said the woman, “to clear your head.”

  “Forget my head,” said the man. Giggling, he fell backward onto the sand, pulling the woman down with him. They fumbled with each other’s clothing, twined limbs around limbs, and thrashed with urgent ardor on the cold sand.

  Afterward, the man lay back and closed his eyes. The woman looked at him and smiled. “Now, how about that swim?” she said.

  “You go ahead. I’ll wait for you here.”

  The woman rose and walked to where the gentle surf washed over her ankles. The water was colder than the night air, for it was only mid-June. The woman called back, “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” But there was no answer from the sleeping man.

  She backed up a few steps, then ran at the water. At first her strides were long and graceful, but then a small wave crashed into her knees. She faltered, regained her footing, and flung herself over the next waist-high wave. The water was only up to her hips, so she stood, pushed the hair out of her eyes, and continued walking until the water covered her shoulders. There she began to swim—with the jerky, head-above-water stroke of the untutored.

  A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm. It did not see the woman, nor yet did it smell her. Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibrations and signaled the brain. The fish turned toward shore.

  The woman continued to swim away from the beach, stopping now and then to check her position by the lights shining from the house. The tide was slack, so she had not moved up or down the beach. But she was tiring, so she rested for a moment, treading water, and then started for shore.

  The vibrations were stronger now, and the fish recognized prey. T
he sweeps of its tail quickened, thrusting the giant body forward with a speed that agitated the tiny phosphorescent animals in the water and caused them to glow, casting a mantle of sparks over the fish.

  The fish closed on the woman and hurtled past, a dozen feet to the side and six feet below the surface. The woman felt only a wave of pressure that seemed to lift her up in the water and ease her down again. She stopped swimming and held her breath. Feeling nothing further, she resumed her lurching stroke.

  The fish smelled her now, and the vibrations—erratic and sharp—signaled distress. The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss. A series of tremors shook its body.

  For the first time, the woman felt fear, though she did not know why. Adrenaline shot through her trunk and her limbs, generating a tingling heat and urging her to swim faster. She guessed that she was fifty yards from shore. She could see the line of white foam where the waves broke on the beach. She saw the lights in the house, and for a comforting moment she thought she saw someone pass by one of the windows.

  The fish was about forty feet from the woman, off to the side, when it turned suddenly to the left, dropped entirely below the surface, and, with two quick thrusts of its tail, was upon her.

  At first, the woman thought she had snagged her leg on a rock or a piece of floating wood. There was no initial pain, only one violent tug on her right leg. She reached down to touch her foot, treading water with her left leg to keep her head up, feeling in the blackness with her left hand. She could not find her foot. She reached higher on her leg, and then she was overcome by a rush of nausea and dizziness. Her groping fingers had found a nub of bone and tattered flesh. She knew that the warm, pulsing flow over her fingers in the chill water was her own blood.

  Pain and panic struck together. The woman threw her head back and screamed a guttural cry of terror.