All stories copyright © 2017 by Joseph B. Healy
Except, printed with permission: “The Pig Basket Atrocity” © Stephen H. Foreman, 2016; “MV Dona Paz and Requiem Sharks” © Stephen H. Foreman, 2016; “Murder by Shark at Cheribon” © Stephen H. Foreman, 2016; “Blackfish and Hammerheads of Barrouallie” © Stephen H. Foreman, 2016; “Sharkman” © Jerry Gibbs, 1990, originally published in Steel Barbs, Wild Waters, used by permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Tom Lau
Cover photo credit: iStockphoto
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1935-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1936-1
Printed in the United States of America.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: CONTEMPLATING MASS DEATH AT SEA
FROM “THE HEATHEN”
By Jack London
A MAN EATING SHARK: THE STORY A MISSISSIPPI RIVER PILOT TELLS OF HIS OWN SEEING
WHAT I-58 CAUSED: THE SINKING OF THE USS INDIANAPOLIS, 1945
THE WRECK OF HMS BIRKENHEAD, 1852
THE SINKING OF LA SEYNE, 1909
TERROR AT THE NEW JERSEY SHORE, 1916
HMS VALERIAN, 1926
PRINCIPESSA MAFALDA, 1926
RMS NOVA SCOTIA, 1942
THE PIG BASKET ATROCITY, 1942
By Stephen H. Foreman
MV DONA PAZ AND REQUIEM SHARKS, 1942
By Stephen H. Foreman
SS CAPE SAN JUAN, 1943
MURDER BY SHARK AT CHERIBON, 1945
By Stephen H. Foreman
EPILOGUE: MORE SHARK STORIES
BLACKFISH AND HAMMERHEADS OF BARROUALLIE
By Stephen H. Foreman
SHARKMAN
By Jerry Gibbs
“The shark is nature’s perfect design for survival in the sea.”
—Robert Reid, in Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths
“It wasn’t the jaws that mesmerized me, it was those protrusions on either side of its head. They belonged to a creature to whom I was nothing but an easy kill.”
—Stephen H. Foreman, describing a hammerhead shark in “Blackfish and Hammerheads of Barrouallie”
INTRODUCTION: CONTEMPLATING MASS DEATH AT SEA
Thoughts on Unspeakable Horror: The Worst Shark Attacks in Maritime History
—By Joseph B. Healy
The story of the USS Indianapolis from World War II is well known and gets a fair representation in this book. Captain Quint delivered a suspenseful soliloquy in the below-deck galley scene of Jaws, before the movie’s climactic great-white attack that crippled the Orca and sent Quint sliding into the shark’s jaws, and he disappeared spitting blood. The story of the Indianapolis: After delivering crucial components of the atomic bomb that would destroy the Japanese city Hiroshima in 1945, the Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine near the Philippine Sea. Of the nearly 1,200 men aboard, 900 survived the torpedoing, spilling into the sea. Whitetip sharks began attacking the next morning, and after four days only 317 sailors remained alive for the rescue operation.
Less famous are the many stories of ships sinking in shark-infested waters with gruesome results. Such as the Cape San Juan, a US troop transport ship that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the South Pacific Ocean near the Fiji Islands. Or the HMS Birkenhead, which sunk off Danger Point, South Africa, in 1852. In 1927, the luxury Italian cruise liner Principessa Mafalda sank ninety miles off the coast of Albrohos Island while heading to Porto Seguro, Brazil. More than 300 who initially survived the wreck were killed, many by sharks. In 1909, the French steamer La Seyne collided with British India Steamship Co. liner Onda near Singapore, twenty-six miles from land. One hundred and one people were eventually killed by sharks. These and more tragedies and disasters are detailed in the pages of this book.
In the water, human intelligence is no match for a shark’s instincts to feed. Sharks are born to kill and eat. Eating and mating—surviving and procreating—is about all they do. They are all muscle and flexible cartilage, streamlined with nature’s design for fleet swimming and fierce attacks, mouths of razor teeth, and heightened senses. They detect distress, smell blood—and attack. Marine disasters such as those mentioned above result in humans becoming prey, floating in inner space as sharks like haunting specters swim below, staging to attack, kill, and eat. Helpless to save yourself—floating and waiting, watching the malevolent creatures circle, knowing what will happen … a sudden swirl of water, a cloud of blood, the searing pain … until there is no more. This is unspeakable horror.
We shudder when we think about sharks, and just as with a scary ghost story, we revel in the fear. We don’t think too much about sharks when we’re at the beach; that would ruin our day. But we know they could be there, looking for a meal.
In classic literature, we find sharks, on some occasions. The novel Jaws by Peter Benchley is perhaps the most famous, though more so the movie version directed by Steven Spielberg. But let’s not forget Santiago fighting the sharks in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—and his lesson that man can be destroyed but not defeated. The master of outdoor adventure Jack London also brings sharks into his work, in one of his stories that’s lesser known than his Klondike wolf stories called “The Heathen.” London sailed quite a lot, lived on the sea, and knew his subject well. I’ll let him tell the rest.
FROM “THE HEATHEN”
—By Jack London
Stranded after a hurricane-caused shipwreck on an island in the South Seas with a native man who saved him from drowning in the wreck, the narrator of Jack London’s classic story “The Heathen” becomes his savior’s friend for life. They “perform the ceremony of exchanging names,” and we learn the narrator is Otoo and calls the native man Charley. The narrator says of the title character, “And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices.” For seventeen years, they stayed together in a brotherhood—until, as London writes: “… the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.” The end for Otoo/Charley, the heathen, was a horrible shark attack during which he sacrificed himself to protect his now compatriot or brother. What follows is an excerpt from the story, first published in Everyman’s Magazine in 1910.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days, and where we were once more—principally on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now, Savo is alive
with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The schooner was a hundred yards away.
I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.
The three remaining n*****s tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the n*****s elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks. The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me.
He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of the water all the time, screeching in a heart-rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.
I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear, and began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same maneuver. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from elbow to shoulder.
By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred feet away. My face was in the water, and I was watching him maneuver for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.
“Swim for the schooner, master!” he said. And he spoke gayly, as though the affair was a mere lark. “I know sharks. The shark is my brother.”
I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
“The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls,” he explained, a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another attack.
By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but they continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course, Otoo could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.
“Goodbye, Charley! I’m finished!” I just managed to gasp. I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw up my hands and go down.
But Otoo laughed in my face, saying: “I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!”
He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.
“A little more to the left!” he next called out. “There is a line there on the water. To the left, master—to the left!”
I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.
“Otoo!” he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice.
Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that name.
“Goodbye, Otoo!” he called.
Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the captain’s arms.
And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora.
It’s curious that Bora Bora is a setting in London’s story, as so-called primitive cultures such as those in French Polynesia or the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific are known for deifying sharks. Sharks can inspire devotion among human cultures—though these beliefs are often grounded in violence and brutality. A story in the Washington Post from 1909 tell us more:
In view of the wide distribution of sharks and their strength and ferocity, qualities which appealed to the savage mind, it is not strange that the cult of shark worship should have arisen. This worship is especially common in the South Seas, where sharks are very numerous.
In the Solomon Islands, living sacred objects are chiefly sharks, alligators, snakes. Sharks are in all these islands very often thought to be the abode of ghosts, as natives will at times before their death announce that they will appear as sharks. Afterward any shark remarkable for size or color which is observed to haunt a certain shore or rock is taken to be some one’s ghost, and the name of the deceased is given to it.
Such a one was Sautahimatawa at Ulawa, a dreaded man-eater, to which offerings of porpoise teeth were made. At Saa certain food, such as cocoanuts from certain trees, is reserved to feed such a ghost shark, and there are certain men of whom it is known that after death they will be sharks. These, therefore, are allowed to eat such food in the sacred place. In Saa and in Ulawa when a sacred shark had attempted to seize a man and he had escaped, the people would be so much afraid of the shark’s anger that they would throw the man back in the sea to be drowned. These sharks also were thought to aid in catching bonito, for taking which supernatural power was necessary. In the Banks Islands a shark may be a tangaros, a sort of familiar spirit, or the abode of one. Some years ago Manurwar, son of Mala, the chief man in Vanua Lava, had such a shark. He had given money to a Manwo man to send it to him. It was very tame and would come up to him when he went down to the beach at Nawono and follow along in the surf as he walked along the shore. In the New Hebrides some men have the power, the natives believe, of changing themselves into sharks.
The Samoan native believed that his gods appeared in some visible incarnation, and the particular thing in which it was in the habit of appearing was to him an object of veneration. Many worshiped the shark in this way, and while they would freely partake of the gods of others, they felt that death would be the penalty should they eat their own god. The god was supposed to avenge the insult by taking up his abode in the offender’s body and causing to generate there the very thing which he had eaten until it produced death…. A shark named Moaalli was famous as the marine god of Molokai and Oahu. Many temples were built on promontories in his honor, and to them the first fruits of the fisherman’s labors were dedicated. When victims were required to be sacrificed in honor of this dog, or he was supposed to be hungry, the priests would sally forth and ensnare with a rope any one they could catch. The victim was immediately strangled, cut in pieces, and thrown to the voracious animal.
Ukanipo was the shark god of Hawaii. He seems to have been of a compassionate nature at times, as there are extant several tr
aditions showing kindnesses he had done to certain of his devotees, especially loves in distress.
All the shark gods were not beneficent, however. Apukohai and Uhumakaikai were evil shark gods who infested the waters of Kauai, and the fisherman were compelled to propitiate them with offerings.
Should a fisherman, by an unlucky accident, injure or destroy a shark held sacred by his family, he was bound to make a feast to the god.
Several of the African coast tribes worship the shark. Three or four times in the year they celebrate the festival of the shark, which is done in this wise: They all row out in their boats to the middle of the river, where they invoke, with the strangest ceremonies, the protection of the great shark. They offer to him poultry and goats in order to satisfy his sacred appetite. But this is nothing; an infant is every year sacrificed to the monster, which has been feted and nourished for the sacrifice from its birth to the age of 10. On the day of the fete it is bound to a post on a sandy point at low water; as the tide rises the child may utter cries of terror, but they are of no avail, as it is abandoned to the waves and the sharks soon arrive to finish its agony and thus permit it to enter into heaven.
Humanity’s fascination with sharks sometimes leads us in inexplicable directions with our beliefs and myths.
Several types of sharks are known for their frequent human attacks. Of course, these sharks live and inhabit areas where people swim, dive, vacation, and frolic in the ocean, so it’s usually a case of people invading their seascape, and the shark has a relatively easy target. The triple threat, or unholy trinity, of great white, bull shark, and tiger shark are the most common culprits of attacks on humans, according to research compiled through decades; a close fourth is the oceanic whitetip. They each belong to the family known as requiem sharks and are written about in some detail in this book. In many cases, the shipwrecks covered here happened in the deep ocean, the prime hunting ground of oceanic whitetips.
Unspeakable Horror Page 1
