Denizens of the Deep

by Philip Wylie

  That’s the point I was driving at!

  Here is everyman’s marine angling. Here is a chance at such sport as old Ike Walton knew, times ten—and then squared.

  In the Florida Keys, the Ten Thousand Islands, the Bay of Florida—there is fishing of this sort. It can be found in the Bahamas, the West Indies. I suspect that wherever the land meets any ocean, some fine top-water casting may be found. One never knows till one’s tried.

  That’s the great thing about ocean fishing:

  There are always bigger fish. Always new fish. Always new ways to fish. Always new places.

  The unlikeliest things can happen.

  Not many moons ago, up in Peconic Bay, I went fishing with a man and a small boy. Bottom-fishing, for porgies. Hardly, you will say, much of a sport for a man who holds a club record for white marlin, or for a v.-p. of the IGFA (which you will hear all about). Okay. We pulled up, started the motor, and went out for blues. Bluefish, that is. Bluefish fishing, as all Long Islanders know, is better than porgy fishing, sports-wise.

  The boy—let’s call him Dan, since his name is Dan Lindner—had never caught anything as big as a bluefish. He was ten, then. Well, we didn’t catch any bluefish either. It rained We got wet. Then the motor conked out—you know how it is—and we got wetter. It seemed the water bottle had been left ashore—and maybe you know how that is. We got thirsty. We’d already eaten the big bar of chocolate I had in my jacket. So we also hungered. We rowed—miles. And finally we started the motor and headed for home—keeping in near shore because we didn’t want to row any more, if that — — motor failed again.

  It wasn’t bluefish water. It wasn’t any kind of fishing water, so far as Dan’s father or I knew. But I put a yellow feather over, anyhow, to troll, and I handed the rod to the boy.

  Note the above. This is fishing wisdom. It represents Wylie at his best, as an angling authority. For there is one thing—and one thing only—I know for sure about angling: you have to do it in the water.

  As long as there’s water around, unless it’s in a jug or a glass, you might as well offer a bait. There could be something—even something you never heard of, or saw.

  Well, pretty soon Dan got a strike.

  It wasn’t any porgy—I could see that. It took line against his drag, a lot of line in haste. It darned near pulled him off the boat seat. And when he reeled, that fish fought. We stopped the motor. The fight became thoroughly classic, and thoroughly amazing—since we hadn’t expected a strike at all. It couldn’t be a bluefish, we argued, because the water was only about shoulder deep. So what was it?

  Dan at last brought it to boat. There it was, a foot down, whizzing around, still full of war. I heaved it in. And it was not a fish I’d ever seen—alive. It was a striped bass. A striper. And a darned nice one, too! In those parts, a striped bass is tops amongst sports fish. So here sat a kid, ten years old, who’d taken his first striper, while the high executive of the International Game Fish Association (me) could only stare in awe, having never caught one! Until my dying day I shall not forget the joy, the pure elation, on young Dan’s face.

  Turned out—to my surprise—that toward the end of every summer a few stripers enter Peconic Bay and a few very lucky anglers catch some. Not trolling, though, as a rule. Very rarely have I had a bigger kick from fishing than that day. Vicarious? Well, I’m not so sure. . . .

  It’s nice to be able to take a powerboat to the Red Sea or to Tasmania and drag whole mackerel baits to find out what will “come up.” But you can have darn near as much excitement, on a rainy afternoon, in many a local bay, with a boat rod and a yellow feather. If you have Dan Lindner along, you can, anyhow.

  People tell you pretty odd things about sea fish. I hear, now and again, of sailfish in the Indian Ocean that weigh five hundred pounds, or are supposed to. Over in Bimini, the ichthyologists at the Lerner Lab are hooking something so big they cannot pull it up—hooking it half a mile deep, or more. Soldiers stationed in the Pacific islands tell me of two-hundred-pound wahoo out that-a-way. And my brother Max recounts throwing rocks at big octopi that walked on the beach—of Ceylon, I think it was. But all those matters—and a million more—will have to be looked into by other anglers.

  Me—I’ll settle for lesser game—for a striper magically caught on a rainy afternoon—for a medium tarpon, any day, on a plug. I haven’t years enough, energy enough, money enough, to go on high adventures.

  I merely have—high adventures where I am.

  And write about them.

  Indeed, I am a little ashamed to have complained at all in this preface—or so violently and publicly elsewhere, as you will learn from what follows—of my bad luck. For what I truly feel is this, that anyone who can fish at all is lucky to be doing it, irrespective of his catch. Besides that, I’ve had a kind of luck that many of my casting cronies envy loudly: I’ve earned more writing about fishing than ever I spent to do it. To them that seems unjust, a double-gain that should be outlawed by honest fates.

  And so it is. It is more. For I also enjoy the writing!

  It is my hope you will admire it.

  This volume is my publisher’s idea. Stan Rinehart is a fisherman—an angler of many degrees. He takes trout in Wyoming. He sits with me, bonefishing in Florida, where I live and where he has a home. He goes out in the Gulf Stream with me, sometimes, after big ones. “People,” he recently said, “will like a collection of your fishing pieces. Reading about it is the next best thing to doing it.”

  Maybe so. Maybe so.

  But, much as I like writing of it, much as you may want to read, I’m sure we’d both rather fish!

  For I cannot say to you here:

  “Turn to page so-and-so. Put on a Leaping Lena. Maybe one with yellow rings on it. Now. See that oölite outcrop? See the shadow of that submerged mangrove root? About in a line between them, I just saw something boil. Could have been a tarpon. Might have been a snook. Looked like a redfish to me. But whatever it is, it’s big. Cast easy and let your plug float dead a second or two. Then give it a few little jumps. Then let it lie again. And be ready all the while for about half a stick of dynamite to let go under it!”

  I can’t say that, in a book.

  You can’t feel the wind, see the contours of the bottom as they are disclosed by the colors of the sea. You cannot hear the soft sounds we make in the boat, the jingle of hooks, the dribble of water from the oars; you can’t smell the palmetto blossoms on the bank or hear the bees in them, or see the pileated woodpecker that had holed yonder dead palm trunk, or the roseate spoonbills flying against the azure sky. You can’t spot that dark fin out on the shimmering water, can’t squint and try to decide whether it’s the caudal of a feeding permit or the dorsal of a shark, seen edge-on.

  None of that—reading, writing.

  Like me, you’d rather fish.

  So this is just stopgap stall till vacation rolls around. Hope you go soon, then. And, tight lines! I won’t wish you a full creel, though, because where the fishing in this book occurs, a creel wouldn’t do. You might not be able to cram into a creel even the tail of the first one that hit.

  Go see.

  PHIL WYLIE

  Some fish

  That misunderstood fish—the shark

  Dread of sharks is a universal human fear. Landlubbers who have never seen the sea have a horror of it because the sea is full of sharks. Sailors, whose lives have been spent on salt water, are seldom cured of the sensation. On the contrary, they collect hundreds of shark legends from other maritime men and their fears are increased. No tale of a castaway or of a rueful party adrift in a lifeboat is complete without its “attack” by a shark or many sharks, its narrow escape, or its gruesome loss of a member to the ravening jaws of those formidable fishes.

  The average citizen, then, thinks a shark synonymous with death or at least, dismemberment. And there is nothing about the shark himself or his eerie cousins, the rays, to disappoint the observer. They are the most frightful-looking of a
ll big creatures, with the exception of giant squids and octopi. The ghastly gape of a shark’s jaw, the double semicircle of mighty teeth or sets of teeth, the malignant stare of fishy eye is awesome to behold. And any angler who has had a hooked fish assaulted by a shark knows the beast is capable of speed and fury; he knows also that the teeth and jaws are fully as destructive as they seem to be. A single bite of a big shark may take out of a tuna as much as a hundred pounds of meat!

  The shark, moreover, like a death-dealing submarine and its raised periscope, often heralds his approach with the ominous cutwater of a dorsal fin. The sight of such a fin has frozen the hearts of men the world over, for thousands of years. On certain Australian beaches, lookouts are posted for sharks, and when one is sighted whistles summon all bathers from the water. During the Second World War, shark-repellent chemicals were issued to and worn by men liable to find themselves swimming. And all such facts make it appear that sharks are truly tigers of the sea, a horrid menace, greatly to be feared.

  The trouble with such belief is that the more carefully it is checked the less absolute it proves to be. As a menace to man the shark, like the barracuda, has a reputation several thousand per cent bigger than his performance justifies. People have been bitten by ’cudas, beyond doubt, but not often. Live men have been destroyed by sharks. But how often?

  In the forty-four years since it has kept official records of such events, the United States Navy has authentic accounts of at least two cases of sure shark bite, one followed by death, and a third “probable” case. There have been no fatal instances in the past eighteen years, according to these records, even though a great many thousand Americans spent untold man-hours in life jackets or merely swimming—in tropical, definitely shark-infested waters. The figures might be somewhat larger were it possible for every man seized by a shark to report the fact; some men so seized may have been presumed merely drowned. But the total would still be quite small! And too many thousands survived to leave room for the existing legends.

  Technical Note Number 89 of the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery has this to say: “The shark is a wary fish, suspicious of noise, movement, and unfamiliar forms.” In a booklet called Shark Sense, the Navy’s Division of Aviation Training is more succinct: “There is very little danger from sharks.” “People suffer more from shark fright than shark bite.” “Don’t believe anybody’s shark stories, even if he can show you the ocean in which it happened.” And it adds, for the benefit of men who actually find themselves in the sea, face to face with a shark, “If the truth were known, the shark probably is more frightened of you than you possibly can be of him.”

  A little reflection by the thoughtful reader will tend to indicate a basic validity in this official attitude. For, if sharks were as reckless and rampaging as they are imagined to be, deep-sea diving would be out of the question. No bubble-stream would scare the monsters. The diver’s suit would be no obstacle to teeth that can rend the toughest of all hides—the shark’s own. Yet, somehow, divers don’t seem to be devoured. Goggle-fishermen, furthermore, who wear no rubber suit and trail no bubbles, always come home for supper. Years pass without a report of shark bite from our summer seacoasts, though there are millions of bathers in the water—and millions of sharks. The classes in marine biology at the University of Miami, young ladies along with the young men, regularly descend in diving helmets to the coral reefs off Florida where lurk all manner and all sizes of sharks. Not even one lush co-ed has been lost.

  This author has, on occasion though not by design, swum cheek by jowl with various sharks of various weights and, to date, has suffered greater injury from mosquitoes. Yet I know, of what lawyers call “my own knowledge,” which means directly, of three people who have been bitten by sharks. None was killed. One had to have an arm amputated. The other two recovered without permanent injury. In every instance, however, the sharks involved were of the so-called harmless variety and of small size—not “man-eaters” but fifty or sixty-pounders. And in every case, the man bitten had first shoved, socked, swatted, stuck or tried to harpoon the shark! A little shark, a black-tip or a nurse shark, assaulted by a human being, can and sometimes does turn around and bite his assailant. A mouse does the same thing, exactly.

  It would be useful, indeed, to be able to say what sharks would bite what people under what conditions. For small sharks, the answer seems to be, if you start the argument. For the monsters, however, perhaps the real “reason” for the attack on a live human being may never be entirely clear. It may be, simply, an individual matter. Biologists used to think animals of each species followed rigid behavior patterns; only in recent years have they come to know that even amongst such lowly life forms as insects, behavior varies enormously from bug to bug. Here and there among mankind are to be found homicidal maniacs; here and there among the great white sharks, the tiger sharks, and others, may be a “homophagic” individual, a brute with a taste for you and me.

  The unusual rapacity of the sharks off Australia is probably owing to the abundance of sharks and the comparative scarcity of food. One doubts that Australians taste better than other people. It is even barely possible that some Australian sharks have “learned,” locally, a bit about the edibility and defenselessness of a swimming person. And there is cause to suspect that an individual shark, having once dined on a human corpse (and sharks are scavengers), may try a livelier sample.

  A series of shark attacks along the New Jersey and New England coasts some years ago was thought to be the work of a single animal. A corpse, since it does not move or make a noise and since, in time, it exudes the evidence of its decayed condition, is natural prey for a shark. Men, having assumed from time immemorial that they are the favored meal, open the bellies of such sharks as they catch. When they find human bones therein, their horrors are “confirmed” and they do not even wonder whether the human being was taken alive or not. From that day on, they “know” sharks are man-eaters; the slender fact is padded with what is, nearly always, myth.

  From the point of view of statistical danger it’s undoubtedly far safer to swim in “shark-infested” waters than, say, to go on playing golf in a thundershower. A man who fell overboard amongst a pack of madly feeding sharks might easily be out of luck. It is hazardous to attack sharks when in the water with them—even very small sharks. The Navy, taking no chances, still puts nets out when swimming parties are held alongside a ship. So the fundamental rule, I think, is to avoid sharks if you can; but, if you encounter them while swimming, to remain calm. For, as the Navy booklet suggests, more people have doubtless suffered a greater aggregate of heart and nerve damage from fear of sharks than the total loss of man-years in shark dinners. A corollary might be added: The “shark-repellents” used during the last war do not appear to be especially effective; what keeps the sharks away seems to be not the chemical but the innate dread sharks have of live people.

  To the average person, then, the question concerning sharks is the one of people-eating. That morbid and vastly exaggerated concern is most unfortunate because sharks and their relatives are amongst the most fascinating of living things. They are “living fossils,” to begin with. They appeared some three hundred and fifty million years ago and are not much changed in that long reach of time although, before there were men on the earth, sharks were bigger—sometimes a hundred and fifty feet long! Sharks are amongst the toughest and most viable of living things. As a marine “crop” they have countless uses—and could have more than they do. They are good to eat. And at least one member of the vast family—the sting ray, of all things—makes an interesting pet! Because of fear and loathing, we have neglected sharks. Suppose, because bulls gore people, we had done without beef, milk, cowhide, cheese and ice cream?

  It often seems to me that the attitude toward sharks is a good example of the way people form all sorts of prejudices. Sharks look different from other fish and are sometimes dangerous. Gradually, perhaps because sharks can be identified by people who cannot tell apart
any other breed of fishes, sharks have been given the blame for all the fish-biting in the seven seas. It’s not fair! During the war, bathing was prohibited for our troops stationed on Asuncion Island; two men had been eaten alive by a school of trigger fish—little fellows of a pound or two apiece. The bite of the coral-reef eel, the moray, is well known amongst anglers. Men working on marine construction in tropical waters—and divers—fear the blind, bone-cracking lunge of the jewfish. The barracuda and the freshwater pirahna can bite. Fishermen know that almost any caught, toothed specimen, if it gets a chance, will sink its teeth in human tissue; that goes for a pike or a snapper or a wahoo—one of which last species took a large chunk out of the forearm of a charterboatman known to me. But, though sharks don’t bite nearly as often or as readily as is assumed, and though other fishes bite oftener and with less provocation, sharks get the worst reputation which, as I say, is the way all prejudices are formed.

  Sharks are not only personally tough and rugged but they are durable from the evolutionary point of view. They were around back in the dinosaur days and probably earlier—and are here still, though the dinosaurs long since gave way to possibly rougher species, such as men. Some sharks lay eggs; others produce live young; in either case, the instant a new shark emerges in its watery world it is all set with the suitable instincts and bodily tools to hunt, fight, eat and generally survive.

  The shark might be said, in fact, to be Nature’s most “all-out” experiment with teeth. A shark is a biological engine behind teeth. Many sorts, perhaps most, have several rows of teeth in their mouths. The front row is vertical, the rearward rows slant toward the gullet. Let a front tooth be lost and a tooth behind moves up to take its place. Shark teeth are set in cartilage and the loss of one incurs no bleeding, perhaps no pain. The whole creature, furthermore, is boneless in the technical sense of bone. His bonelike tissue is really cartilage—and a shark can survive more terrible injury than nearly any other living thing. He can, that is, take it as well as dish it out.