Unspeakable Horror

by Joseph B. Healy

  Examine your emotional reaction at this moment. How much do you empathise with him? With his fear, pain, and his final despair when he realized that his captors’ laughter and slaps on the back did not mean that they were doing to spare him. How do you feel about the men who tortured and murdered the young soldier? Can there ever be any justification for such heartless cruelty?

  Now consider the following additional facts: the young man was a member of the Waffen SS—the Nazi Party’s elite shock troops, who ruthlessly carried out some of the worst atrocities of the war. The Russians who tortured and killed him had just fought their way across hundreds of miles of scorched earth, and knew of compatriots by the thousand—non-combatant men, women and children—who had been murdered by the retreating Nazis.

  Human nature can be shocking, vengeful, regrettable, puzzling, horrific. We the human race have a particular skill at determining tools or instruments of destruction, and rather than pulling a trigger or thrusting a lance or dagger ourselves, we outsource killing to bombs, poisons—or sharks.

  If you were in Java during World War II you would have witnessed insane cruelty without a shred of remorse. A young Dutch girl, seventeen years old, a survivor as a prisoner of war, wrote in her memoir, “How can you dream when you are locked up in a dirty, over-crowded prison, when you are lying on a filthy mattress full of bugs? How can you dream when your stomach cries for food? How can you dream without music?” And she was fortunate because she escaped the worst. Women in Java captured by the Japanese were often raped multiple times before being disemboweled or beheaded. If they were lucky they were sent to brothels as “comfort women.”

  Behold what follows:

  Put yourself in an occupied village surrounded by an enemy that hated you, an enemy you knew lacked the conscience of a savage beast. They seethed with their own delicious hatred.

  It is July, 1945, and you are one of 150 civilian residents, primarily Dutch nationals, left in North Java. Japanese soldiers have defeated a force of Australian and British troops and have now occupied the territory. They have embedded themselves in your homes, your schools, your factories, your places of business. All adult males and teenaged boys, if they had not been already executed on the spot, have been rounded up and shipped to internment camps. The enemy soldiers have bayoneted your neighbors, shot your relatives, tied the thumbs of your friends together and then tethered them to an automobile or truck that pulled them around in a circle until they dropped. You know the enemy despises you, and they are everywhere. You know that you could be the next to die, and you can only hope—pray—death will come quickly.

  One morning, for no discernible reason, you might imagine, everyone who’s left in your village—you, your family, your neighbors, women, children, old men—are rounded up at gunpoint. Enemy soldiers are screaming at you in an incomprehensible language. People do not obey because they do not understand what they are being told. The person next to you is summarily shot in the head because she did not obey a command she didn’t understand. A person a few feet away is casually bayoneted because the soldier decided he wanted to. Reason has disappeared from the face of the earth. Now, you are marched to the port of Cheribon. You don’t know why. You are scared and confused. What are they going to do to us? What is happening? The only thing you know is that whatever it is will be horrible. That is the modus operandi of your captors. How horrible you do not want to think. You erase all thoughts and allow your mind to be inert. You empty your mind.

  A Japanese submarine is moored at the dock. Uniformed guards are yelling. You still don’t understand what they are shouting, but when they indicate with their rifles, you know. Board the sub. Stand on the deck. Ship’s guns fore and aft are aimed at you. There is nowhere to go, no escape. You know—you accept—any minute now, you are going to die, but why did the soldiers march you onto the deck of a submarine? Submarines hunt enemy warships, but you are not a battleship, not a weapon, just a simple human being. A human being who wants to live with the energy of every cell in your body—but you know they will not allow that. Holy Mary, Mother of God, they will not allow that. Peace to His people on Earth, they will not allow that. Now and forever at the hour of our death, and it is time. You follow the queue onto the submarine. You think how odd it is to be walking atop a boat that spends most of its time underwater. Lurking in the deep, waiting to strike unseen, unleashing terror and death, like a shark.

  Powerful engines fire up. The sleek boat leaves the dock and heads for the open sea. Where are they taking us? If they’re going to shoot us and toss our dead bodies overboard, why don’t they just do it? You are five miles out, maybe a bit more. Ocean. Vast. Deep. Then it happens. The submarine begins to dive. And you know, yes, you know, but still you cannot believe what you know is happening to you right now. Fear grips you in its iron vise. You can’t think, but ice takes your heart. As the sub angles down under the water you are swept off the deck and into the sea. Terrible cries surround you. You scream, too. Why is this happening? You didn’t do anything except have your home in what became occupied territory. There is no holding on. So what if you do? You will still drown.

  Now you are in the water, treading desperately, trying to stay alive. Water invades your nose, your mouth. Your eyes burn from the salt. You are minutes, seconds away from certain death and, yet, your heart forces you to tread water. Your heart is not yet ready to die. You can’t let go until it’s taken from you. And then you see it—a white-tipped dorsal fin homing in on these people splashing, screaming, desperately trying not to die. Some have already drowned—the dead and the lucky. You wish to God you were one of them. You take a deep breath and sink below the surface. Please, you pray, please drown. You are bumped from behind. Oh, dear God, please let me drown! Oceanic whitetip sharks are attacking. You wheel around in the water, bubbles occluding your vision, lost in a swirl of panic …

  You don’t know this because you are no longer alive, but there was one survivor, minus an arm and a foot, of this massacre at Cheribon. He died shortly after being pulled from the water. One of the many executed by the Japanese Kempeitai (as mentioned earlier—military secret police corps, similar to the German Gestapo) in their brutal, inhuman fashion. “Our unit did things no human being should ever do,” said one former member of the Kempeitai and Unit 731, which experimented with biological weapons in occupied China, in an interview decades after the war. “When I think of the people I killed so cruelly … I cannot help apologizing to them.” All much too late, of course.

  We hear of great whites and bull sharks being the primary cause of attacks on humans, but the truth is that the oceanic whitetip shark has killed more humans than any other shark in history. It’s a numbers game, really—they’ve had more buffets served up to them. These are pelagic creatures, which means they only live in deep oceans, temperate waters of sixty-eight degrees, 150 to 450 feet below the surface. They rarely come near to shore, which is why they are not so well known. Their attacks take place in the open ocean on the “survivors” of ships that have sunk and planes that have been shot down. At first there is only one shark, and then there are many, snapping, biting, attacking in a frenzy. Throughout World War II, Japanese submarines and kamikazes made certain the whitetip and tiger sharks did not go hungry.

  Oceanic whitetip sharks have a singular purpose: to eat to survive. Up to thirteen feet long and weighing as much as 400 pounds, with white on the tips of the dorsal and wide pectoral fins—the fin tips almost look luminescent underwater—they are horrific eating machines. They are similar to mako sharks; however, they stay only in the deep ocean. Their long fins, described as similar to airplane wings, allow the whitetip to cruise or glide through the open waters searching for meals—which are scarce in the open ocean, which makes these sharks particularly opportunistic about attacking. Their dorsal fins are rounded, perhaps from their constant prowling with the fin exposed above the water’s surface. Scientists conjecture that the sharks can go weeks or months without food, so they seize
every opportunity to feed, whether it’s an injured fish or a shipwrecked boater treading water. They’re known to be curious or inquisitive sharks, coming directly at divers to inspect them—possibly to determine if they’ve found a meal. They respond to sounds before they’re close enough to detect smells and see motion on the surface. Though they feed on anything, three of their common food items are tunas, stingrays, and sea turtles, large-bodied animals; they also eat sea birds, again larger silhouettes seen from below against the surface light. They are formidable, horrifying, not least because of the mysterious environment in which they live—the vast expanse of open ocean, what scientists call inner space.

  Encountering a whitetip shark means being trapped or stranded in the seemingly fathomless ocean—out in the open, nowhere to hide, completely exposed. The substance of nightmares.

  EPILOGUE

  More shark stories …

  BLACKFISH AND HAMMERHEADS OF BARROUALLIE

  By Stephen H. Foreman

  “Mongoose, mongoose, roll ovah.

  Come out de watah deah. Yeh.

  Dey come out de west, de watah deah. Yeh.

  Come from de west. Yeh.

  Mongoose, mongoose, roll ovah.

  Come out de watah”

  —Chant of West Indian blackfishermen

  Zekiel Millington sat in the stern of his boat, his forearm guiding the tiller, the hand of the same arm on the throttle of the outboard motor. Aaron Moses, the gunner, stood on the bow singing out to the whales below. Words with a West Indian lilt tumbled from Millington’s mouth like a windchime made of bamboo.

  “I see de moon when she high and big ovah de hahbor. De watah calm and de fish comin’. Not so when de moon be low on de watah. Watah rough, too rough. Fish not comin’.”

  But, the water was “not rough today,” he said, and he was certain the “fish be comin’.”

  Millington, with the emphasis on the last syllable, was a tall, powerful man with cocoa-colored skin—tropical cocoa, the kind sold in open-air markets, thick sticks of the deepest brown—long arms and large, expressive hands that swiveled loosely from his wrists when he talked. They reminded me of first-baseman’s mitts. Millington had the force and presence of an actor who is slightly mad and always unpredictable, as if the tropical sun had melted that small portion of his brain that dealt with impulse control. He wore a battered straw hat that might once have been a planter’s. Like the rest of his crew, his shorts had been cut from old trousers. His yellow Lacoste shirt, probably a yachtsman’s castoff, was so ragged you could see the gray nap of hair on his chest. The glare of the morning sun on the sea was already so intense I had to put on sunglasses, yet Millington’s eyes were wide open. He barely blinked as he stared at the horizon line looking for a sign. I sat on the gunwale opposite him and tried to stay out of the way.

  We left the bay at Barrouallie and headed west into the channel between the islands of St. Vincent and Bequia in the Grenadines. This channel as well as the one north between St. Vincent and St. Lucia is one of the waterways taken by the blackfish on its spring migration. The blackfish, which averages twenty to twenty-three feet in length and reaches three tons, is what the descendants of shipwrecked slaves and Caribe Indians, like Zekiel Millington, call the pilot whale. Herring fishermen dubbed it the pilot whale because it led them to huge schools of the sleek, silver fish. Its cousin, a slightly smaller and much more aggressive version similar to the killer whale in temperament and related to it, as is the blackfish, they call the mongoose. Like bats, they echolocate their prey, and they are known to hunt in packs like wolves. The whalers sing it, cajole it, pray it, and curse it to the surface because the blackfish is their livelihood. These waters also hold the great humpback that grows up to fifty feet, and the massive sperm whale that reaches sixty. When Millington was younger and dreamed of having his own boat, the blackfish were the nuggets, the humpback and sperm the mother lode. But he is older now, and he wonders whether he still wants to go against a creature that size.

  “Mongoose, mongoose, me comin’. She down deah. Come up.”

  Millington and his two-man crew are the last of the whale hunters on St. Vincent and among the last in this area of the world. The oldest, Veron, was sixty-nine; the youngest, Aaron Moses, was sixty; Millington himself was nearly sixty-five. There were two other crews still plying these waters: one off St. Lucia, one off Bequia, and these men were as old as Millington’s. Athneal Oliviere of Bequia, acknowledged as the premier whaler and harpooner in the islands, was sixty-eight and had already declared this to be his last season. It was becoming dangerous, he said, because it was harder for him to put away the harpoon. The young men of their villages are interested in easier ways to make a living; and, so, when the old men die, there will be no one to take their place. This will be the last season for Millington and his crew as well, and they will hunt in much the same way his predecessors have for hundreds of years. There are two differences: a hand-made harpoon gun mounted on an iron quadruped on the bow, and an outboard motor. But, most of the time the twenty-three-foot wooden boat is under sail. She has no instrumentation whatsoever, not even a compass, and she has no cabin and no canopy, so the men are totally exposed to the sea and sky. She also leaks. Her sails are ragged. Her paint is chipped away. Everything is either salvaged or handmade, yet Faith (which is what Millington christened her) skips and glides through the water agile as a turtle. Her harpoons are wrought from rusted automobile springs. Her gun is literally the butt, chamber, and trigger housing of a cheap shotgun with the barrel removed, which has been fitted to a pipe banded to a thick slab of wood—the idea of a St. Lucian fisherman who had served in the US army during the Korean War. Once the gun is fired, the rest of the harpooning must be done by hand. The harpoon itself weighs sixty pounds. Regardless of your politics, this is a remarkable feat when you think of a man with a harpoon poised to strike balanced on the bow of a small boat as it plows through the water after a powerful mammal nearly the same size as the boat, or, in the case of the humpback or sperm whale, three times its size. But, it is even more remarkable when you consider the age of this man.

  It was March, 1989. Millington had just agreed to take me to sea with him the day before, but it was a journey that really began nine years prior to that when a friend of mine on the island first told me about the blackfish crew. My friend thought I’d probably be interested in them, and she was right. I was committed to leaving St. Vincent the next day, but the blackfish were running, my friend said, and I wanted to see what I could see before then. We’d been having a beer, but I cut it short because I wanted to go right that minute while there was still light. Barrouallie was all the way up island, and I’d have to flag a van to get there.

  None of the vans on St. Vincent followed a fixed or published schedule, but they departed the Kingston Square with regularity and ran from dawn until just after dark. Either you boarded one at the square or waved it down somewhere on the road. It didn’t matter where. A stop was wherever a customer happened to be standing. Each van was owned individually. I could never figure out, on an island so small and so poor, how there were so many men with so many vans, but the vehicles were all impeccably maintained and emblazoned with hand-painted lettering front and back that declared their names: Have Faith, Wonder Not, Who To Blame, Moment Of Truth, Labour’s Reward, Endurance, Free Mandela, Revelation. Barrouallie was so far up-island, however, and so self-contained (the villagers tended not to come into the city except for market days) that it was difficult to find a van going there. I finally did—Dignity (not The Dignity, just Dignity)—and left the city of Kingston about two-thirty in the afternoon.

  Dignity looped inland at first, but within minutes we were climbing the hills along the coast on roads so narrow that any oncoming vehicle had to pull to one side to allow the other to pass. Not that this slowed anyone down. Dignity hurtled forward fearlessly. She played guts ball. Her driver handled her well, however. I could see this guy driving the presidential limo, so I sat back
and hung on.

  Dignity continued her climb along the narrow road with the coast on the left often hundreds of feet down. We passed hamlets and clearings with names like Redemption Sharpe, Hog Hill, Questelles, and Bamboo Gutter, crossed the Camden Park and the Cane Wood rivers, reached a portion of road that was so steep we stayed in second gear for miles. This was plantation country; and, although most of the large holdings were now gone, I could still see fields and fields of coconut palms sloping to the sea as evenly spaced as pickets in a fence. A woman with a large reed basket balanced on her head plodded slowly up a hill. A man led a small donkey loaded with firewood up the hill beside her. The woman and the donkey walked with the same rhythm, the same sway, the same passive determination. The man carried a cutlass, an item as common in the islands as chopsticks in China, with the same blade design as those carried by the buccaneers hundreds of years before. We passed Anse Cayenne and Rilland Hill, Chauncey, Byahaut, and New Peniston on the Buccament River. The road dropped sharply to sea level, where we suddenly seemed to be hemmed in by bamboo thickets and then banana trees. It was torn and potholed, the result of hurricanes and poverty. When it opened up again, the Buccament Escarpment loomed before us like the Leviathan, like some enormous prehistoric monster. It faced inland with its head a triangular-shaped point of volcanic rock, its humped back covered with craggy plates, and a massive tail that ended in the sea. Its slopes were thickly matted with rainforest, luxuriously green, dense, and dripping wet, as if the beast had stretched out under the sun to dry. Dignity turned toward the sea once more and climbed a pass that cut through the beast’s tail. A schooner had put into a black sand cove below us, and the sun was so bright the white sky weighed upon the water and blinded me. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again we were making the descent into Barrouallie.