At 2:30 that afternoon, the grande dame had settled into her room for a respite before the social requirements of evening, when she heard, with a keen acuity for her age, disturbing noises floating through the windows over the sea. Her curiosity aroused, Mrs. Childs called to her maid to bring the field glasses, and stepped out on her private balcony, where she raised her glasses to the panorama of the sea. Far below and to the south was a scene of great confusion. Men and women were running toward the hotel in panic, their voices carried upward by the wind. Scanning south of the hotel, Mrs. Childs saw a small boat had breached the shore. Two men—in the bathing costumes of surfmen—lifted a man out of the boat and set him down on the sands. A small crowd had gathered at water's edge. Mrs. Childs's view was partially obscured by the shifting crowd, but presently she saw, to her astonishment, that the man lying on the beach was covered with blood.
Although born to wealth and security, Mrs. Childs was not unfamiliar with the idea that life could present not only disappointment and tragedy but horror—her husband had owned the original manuscript of The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, a writer who certainly chilled her. In her Victorian salon the intellectuals discussed the sublime thrill, then in vogue, of observing nature's terrifying displays from a posture of safety: a stirring view of mountainous waves from the cozy warmth of one's seaside cottage, for instance. Yet it is not likely Mrs. Childs had ever had an encounter quite equal to the feeling that swept through her as the field glasses revealed that the man's legs were missing. Mrs. Childs was a strong woman in crisis, and by then perspiration on her temples and her own beating heart sharpened her determination to learn what was happening. On either side of the fallen man, mothers hurried children out of the water as if it were boiling. On the sands, women in long dresses swooned. Men rushed to assist them. From her distant balcony the grande dame heard as if from the wind and sea itself faint but unmistakable cries of “Shark!” She had seen all she needed, and heard quite enough.
Putting down the field glasses, Mrs. Childs rushed for the telephone and called the hotel office. F. T. Keating, assistant manager of the hotel, picked up. Keating, alarmed, went straight to the hotel manager, David B. Plumer, who—without time to consider the uniqueness of the situation—put into motion the first coastwide shark alarm in the history of the United States. Plumer instructed Keating to call every physician booked in the hotel, or anywhere in Spring Lake. Moving urgently to the E & S switchboard, he ordered the operators to notify every “central” operator on the north and central coast. The first central switchboard operators had been men, but they fought constantly and were unruly with customers, so they were replaced by women. So it was women who sounded the alert that the shore was in chaos. Within minutes, the E & S operators reached every major hotel on New Jersey's Gold Coast, from Atlantic Highlands, sixteen miles north, to Point Pleasant, six miles south.
For the first time in memory along the East Coast of the United States, a tranquil beach day was interrupted by surfmen running to the edge of the sea to frantically wave swimmers out of the water; by bathers thrashing and stumbling madly to shore for reasons that were urgent if not clear. Within half an hour, thousands of bathers fled more than thirty miles of beaches in a shark panic without precedent.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the first appearance of the great white shark as twentieth-century man-eater harkened back to apocryphal stories such as St. George and the dragon and foretold all appearances, in fact and fiction, of the great white to come. Men and women fled the water for sound and practical reasons, and they also fled their nightmares, long quiescent, of a creature buried so long in myth and rumor and repressed fear that when released expanded beyond any known and reasonable bounds. A simple act of nature in a few square feet of ocean sent a cloud of fear along vast stretches of coastal water and far inland. The crowds fled a sea monster, with its weight of evil, threat, and retribution.
Moments after dialing the assistant hotel manager, Mrs. Childs ordered her servants to bring around her automobile. She had tried to ring her niece on the telephone, but there was no answer. Within minutes, Mrs. Childs was speeding to Deal Beach, seven miles to the north, to personally stop her niece from entering the water for her afternoon swim.
Just one block south of the New Essex and Sussex on the Spring Lake oceanfront, the switchboard jangled urgently at the New Monmouth Hotel. The enormous New Monmouth boasted a central Palladian dome flanked by polygonal towers from which unfolded vast wings that embraced the sea. Within minutes, the sumptuous ritual of afternoon tea at the New Monmouth was sundered as Drs. William W. Trout and A. Cornell, the house physicians, sprinted through the lobby, carrying their heavy black bags.
Rushing south on Ocean Drive and down to the beach, the doctors pressed through the small crowd that had gathered around the body in the wet sand. “A morbid crowd had gathered, intent on seeing the remains,” the Asbury Park Evening Press reported. The bell captain, or what was left of him, lay on his back in a welter of blood that was already crusting and drying on his bathing costume and diffusing on the sand. Trout and Cornell, the first physicians to reach Bruder, summoned their full professional composure, but jellyfish stings, crab pinches, and sunburn were the usual toll of the beach. In their combined years, the physicians had not seen such wounds from an animal attack. Bruder's left leg was bitten off clear above the knee; his right leg, just below the knee, was gone. A huge gouge was ripped from his torso, the wound edged with large teeth marks. The bell captain was already dead from massive blood loss. There was nothing to do but arrange for the body to be taken to autopsy and to calm the crowd.
Eyes full of questions turned to Trout and Cornell as they examined the remains, as though a doctor could explain what had happened, or promise it would not happen again. Facing gasps and muffled sobs, women shooing away the wide eyes of children, men sputtering anger that was the flip side of the coin of fear, Trout and Cornell were relieved to see the large, loose-limbed figure of Dr. William G. Schauffler, the governor's staff physician and surgeon of the New Jersey National Guard, ambling across the sands.
At the tender age of twenty-five, Schauffler was something of a local wunderkind—the highest-ranking medical doctor in the state. Tall and broad-boned, rugged yet affable in a small-town way, Dr. Schauffler was a born leader of men, trailed often by a group of youths “who were ready for anything, and afraid of nothing,” a family friend remembered. Within a year, in World War I, Schauffler became an American hero, a captain commanding the legendary 90th Aero Squadron under Brigadier General Billy Mitchell. In the 1930s, he organized men into a pioneering sea and air fire rescue squad that responded to the fiery wreck of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Now, as Colonel Schauffler kneeled to inspect Bruder's corpse, a troubled expression creased his youthful features. It was fifteen minutes after the attack and blood still oozed from the bell captain's tattered limbs. Schauffler's appraisal was that of a doctor who was also a skilled fisherman. He was a part-time charter captain who took his boat out of nearby Point Pleasant. A compulsive student of fish and their habits, he designed and sold his own line of rods for deep-sea fishing, and was credited for innovating a fighting chair where a man could strap in to battle big fish like marlin and tuna. Now, studying Bruder's partially devoured torso, the legs that ended in torn and bloodied nubs, Schauffler reached what he considered the gravest possible conclusion. The wounds were without a doubt the work of a large shark. Later, Schauffler filed the first detailed medical report of a shark attack victim in the United States. “The left foot was missing as well as the lower end of the tibia and fibula,” he wrote. “The leg bone was denuded of flesh from a point halfway below the knee. There was a deep gash above the left knee, which penetrated to the bone. On the right side of the abdomen low down a piece of flesh as big as a man's fist was missing. There is not the slightest doubt that a man-eating shark inflicted the injuries.”
Schauffler's report anticipated the cla
ssic study of shark attack victims by South African doctors Davies and Campbell half a century later. In the later terminology of Davies and Campbell, Bruder suffered the severest shark-inflicted injury possible, a grade-one. Grade one injuries involve major damage to the femoral artery in the area of the femoral triangle, or multiple artery severing. Had Bruder suffered the same attack in the early twenty-first century, he still would have died, even with instant and advanced medical response. In a grade-one shark injury, wrote Davies and Campbell, “the victim usually dies within minutes after the attack.”
As Schauffler rose from beside Bruder's body, he was convinced of what had to be done. He was already forming plans to organize a patrol, armed men and a fleet of boats, to protect bathers and capture and kill the shark. The shark, he believed, was a confirmed man-eater, a large and deranged animal that would continue to threaten swimmers until it was destroyed.
Word preceded Dr. Schauffler to the lobby of the Essex and Sussex that the bell captain had been torn to pieces by a shark. Panic, like a billowing ether, occupied the grand room. Troubled guests had gathered in knots of conversation, and manager David Plumer found himself dealing with the matter of Bruder's body and comforting the stricken. “The news that the man had been killed by a shark spread rapidly through the resort, and many persons were so overcome by the horror of Bruder's death that they had to be assisted to their rooms,” The New York Times reported. “Swimmers hurried out of the water and couldn't be induced to return.” With the coming of twilight, local residents were drawn irresistibly to the hotel to make sense of the tragedy, but sense dissolved in a babel of opinion. Old-time fishermen insisted a shark attack was too far-fetched to believe, that swordfish, giant sea turtles, and big mackerel were more likely man-killers than a shark. No one could recall a shark attack in Spring Lake since the pioneers built homes on the beach in the 1880s. Townfolk recalled, with knotted stomachs, the shark caught by a Spring Lake fisherman in 1913. In the fish's stomach was the foot of an unidentified woman, the foot still encased in a fashionable tan shoe. But it was concluded then that the shark had scavenged the body of a drowned woman. Sharks were considered too timid to threaten a live human being.
That evening, as dark waves brushed the beach and moist winds blew through the high windows of the lobby, Mrs. Childs moved with a quiet dignity under the cottony shadows thrown by electric chandeliers, collecting donations from the summer colonists for Charles Bruder's mother in Switzerland. Mrs. Bruder had only one other son to support her, Mrs. Childs explained. In addition, the Philadelphia grande dame hoped to raise money to send the young man's remains home to his mother, across the Atlantic, to be buried.
The Scientist
Late on the afternoon Charles Bruder died, a balding man with a bemused professorial air, thin and ruddy as a stalk of rhubarb, strolled through the lobby of the Essex and Sussex in a crisp blue serge suit with three buttons, his ever-present pipe on his lips or not far distant. The suit was identical to the size and style he had worn a decade earlier at his Harvard graduation and would remain his trademark for another thirty years.
John Treadwell Nichols was impressively tall, with a stooped frame and preternaturally long head and wry manner that made him appear older than his thirty-three years. There was about his wide-set eyes and cheekbones a certain fishlike quality that seemed entirely appropriate, as he was one of the most distinguished ichthyologists of the day. Dr. Nichols had been rousted from his specimen-crowded basement office at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he was the assistant curator of the Department of Recent Fishes (those in the sea, rather than fossils), by the director, Frederic Augustus Lucas. Dr. Lucas had instructed the younger man to commence what would be the first scientific investigation of a man killed by a fish in American history. Dr. Nichols, along with his young colleague, the ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy of the Brooklyn Museum, were two of the more respected “shark men” in the country, but both utterly deferred to their aged mentor, Dr. Lucas.
Three months earlier, in April 1916, Nichols and Murphy had collaborated on a major journal article for the Brooklyn Museum Science Bulletin, “Long Island Fauna. IV. The Sharks (Order Selachii),” in which they used thirty-three pages to portray nineteen different species of sharks. After describing tiger sharks, blue sharks, thresher and dusky sharks, hammerhead sharks, and ten other species, the authors took the unusual step of removing themselves from their own article when they reached species number sixteen, “great white shark: man-eater.” Nichols and Murphy yielded the next five pages to Dr. Lucas, who had “very kindly written for this bulletin the subjoined account relating to the status of sharks as man-eaters.” Dr. Lucas's “long experience, coupled with his repeated critical investigations of ‘shark stories' that arise perennially along our seacoast, eminently fit him to write with finality upon a subject so generally misapprehended.”
Now, appearing in Spring Lake to investigate Bruder's death, Dr. Nichols, like Dr. Lucas, was not inclined to think of it as a shark-attack inquiry. Such attacks on man were rare, if not nonexistent.
Nichols had examined the torn and badly bitten body of Charles Bruder that afternoon, shortly after Dr. Schauffler's examination. Crouching over the body, he was likely appalled, perhaps sickened or angered, yet eerily fascinated by nature in its rawest form. He restrained his sympathy for the young man, to objectively consider the wounds as the quite natural acts of a fish or mammal species. But which one?
John T. Nichols would not have found it difficult to push aside distraction and plunge into the question, for he shared with his Victorian mentors a deeply romantic love of nature in all its variety. In 1890, when he was seven years old, Nichols had taken a steamship voyage across the Atlantic, and was so moved by the sight of an iceberg, he could not fall asleep that night aboard ship. “There was,” he wrote, “a first tangible, permanent picture etched in memory, to which others were to be added, and spell the beauty and romance of the vast, impersonal, omnipotent, ever-changing, but eternal sea.” After returning from a voyage around Cape Horn many years later, Nichols observed: “Once more in from the deep sea, the same old sea, deep blue out there beyond the reefs, difficult and fascinating as ever, guarding its mysteries. Back into the world, but days, weeks, months must go by before this world would seem altogether real again. . . . No, it did not seem real, some day one must wake again to contend with a world of sails and winds and rolling seas.” But Dr. Nichols was more than a quixotic dreamer; he was a modern man with a Victorian passion to learn everything.
“J. T. Nichols was a self-taught ichthyologist of the old, old school,” a colleague remembered. “He was enthusiastic about many different aspects of natural history, not just fish.”
To illustrate the life of an ichthyologist of the old school, Dr. Nichols liked to tell the story of a gentleman who, in 1907, boarded a Long Island Rail Road train with a small box containing a turtle. When the conductor came to collect the fare, he inquired what was in the box. That brought up the question of extra fare, and after a brief discussion with the passenger the conductor rendered this historic decision: “Cats and dogs is animals—but turtles is insects. Insects ride free.” That ruling was right in line with the American Museum of Natural History when Professor Nichols went to work there in 1908, fresh from Harvard. Fish were part of the Department of Insects. It wasn't until 1910 that fish won a department of their own, and Nichols became assistant curator of the Department of Recent Fishes.
Dr. Nichols spent most of his time in his large, cluttered office at the museum, bent over his rolltop desk, pipe in his teeth, pulling fish out of hundreds of jars of alcohol to measure their length and count their scales under a magnifying glass. (The alcohol, he noted, sank mysteriously low during Prohibition and was apparently sipped from.) “As I recall it through a small child's eyes,” his grandson, novelist John Nichols, remembered, “my grandfather's office at the Museum was a magical and chaotic place featuring stacks of books and papers, mess
y ashtrays full of burnt pipe tobacco, and countless bottles and jars of pickled fish . . . as Grandpa . . . revealed to me the secrets and mysteries of the natural world.”
By 1916, Nichols was emerging as one of the nation's most distinguished ichthyologists. Three years earlier he had founded the journal Copeia, named after the nineteenth-century scientist Edward Drinker Cope, which would survive into the twenty-first century as a prestigious ichthyologic journal. That year he was busy founding what later became the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) with famed New Jersey fish scholars Henry W. Fowler and Dwight Franklin. It was the first group dedicated to the scientific study of fishes, amphibians, and reptiles, their conservation, and their role in the environment. Nichols was obsessed with box turtles, which he marked with his initials on his Long Island estate for thirty years in a private habitat study. He was a respected ornithologist, an expert in weasels and bats. He banded birds, wrote the important Freshwater Fishes of China, and was an ardent fan and student of flying fish. But he was awed by and frightened by the big sharks. If he had ever seen the rare great white shark in his life, he knew little about it except its reputation as being the ferocious man-eater of the ancients.
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