Frederic Augustus Lucas combined broad training in science with the Victorian naturalists' love of nature. Verging on childlike joy, he thrilled still to the gleam of enormous teeth appearing out of the shadows of vast halls, the gargantuan prehistoric forms reaching the uppermost ceilings. A brilliant popularizer of science in the new century, it was Lucas's unerring instinct to exhibit nature in its most spectacular and colossal forms. An eighty-foot blue whale swam silently behind a darkened glass window, the tentacles of a giant squid wrapped around its head. The Hall of Dinosaurs was the envy of the world, especially the tyrannosaurus skeleton—“mightiest of all animals that have walked the face of the earth,” Dr. Lucas wrote, “for apparently nothing could have withstood the attack of this monster beast of prey.”
Yet Dr. Lucas was uncharacteristically agitated as he strolled the cavernous stone hallways that afternoon. In his own estimation he had devoted far too much time to shining the cool lights of science and reason on the feverish public perception of sea monsters. The hullabaloo over a man supposedly killed by a shark in Spring Lake reminded him of the uproar over the “giant blob” that had washed ashore on Anastasia Island, Florida, in November 1896, causing an international sensation over the “Florida sea monster.” Then, too, Dr. Lucas, at the time a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, was required to step in and disappoint the masses with scientific fact, identifying the “blob” as no more than decayed whale blubber. These hubbubs interfered with Dr. Lucas's real work, the careful, loving shaping of the museum, his research, writing, and scholarship, and the nurturing of young scientists.
He had been pressed into extra duty by the hullabaloo over the shark, and Dr. Lucas didn't tolerate work as he once did. “The ideas do not come so quickly, nor the pen record them so readily as of yore,” he lamented in the seventh edition of Animals of the Past. “Worst of all his brain has joined with the labor unions in demanding an eight hour day and refuses to work nights.”
An avowed Victorian gentleman, Frederic Lucas was rankled by much of the modern world. A disciplined and orderly man, he grew weary that week as newspapermen interrupted him with queries about the young man in Spring Lake supposedly killed by a shark. What kind of shark was responsible? Are sharks man-eaters? Should swimmers be afraid? The names and faces of the men from the Post and Times, the Herald and World, the Journal and Inquirer and Bulletin, were different but the questions were endlessly the same. Dr. Lucas was in touch with his esteemed colleague Hugh M. Smith, director of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in Washington—the government's top fish scholar—about the so-called “shark attacks.” Dr. Smith seemed equally perplexed by the Spring Lake incident, and shared Dr. Lucas's private sentiment that he wished the whole matter of the shark would simply go away.
A stickler for accuracy in educating the public, Lucas wasn't impressed with newspapermen's record in disseminating scientific knowledge. He ruefully recalled how the newspapers reported a colleague's discovery that the brain of the prehistoric creature was located near the posterior—dinosaurs were thinking with their pelvis! When Georgia newspapers had trumpeted the discovery of a “Giant Cliff Dweller Mummy,” Dr. Lucas dispatched an investigator to Atlanta to see if it belonged in the museum. The mummy was sitting in the sheriff's office, made of paper skin and the teeth of a cow.
The director could imagine few myths as archaic and misguided as the myth of the sea monster, and particularly the weak-minded belief in a man-eating shark. The man-eating shark was a hysterical product of the myths of antiquity, but such a creature, as far as Dr. Lucas's thirty years of personal scientific investigations could determine, simply did not exist, or most certainly not in New York or New Jersey waters.
Asked by the New York press to comment on Bruder's death, Dr. Lucas declared: “No shark could skin a human leg like a carrot, for the jaws are not powerful enough to induce injuries like those described by Colonel Schauffler.” The esteemed scientist was adamant to the point of “finality” that sharks were not capable of inflicting serious injury to man.
Dr. Lucas's authority on sharks was supported by a lifetime of scientific study. Frederic Augustus Lucas was one of the last of the old-time Victorian naturalists who relied on love of nature and a keen mind in lieu of a university education. Armed with an introductory letter from his nineteenth-century sea-captain father—“Do you have any use for a boy who seems mostly interested in skinning snakes?”—he studied at the Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, where he absorbed the broad training of one of the last of the “all-around naturalists.” Of all things modern, what rankled him most was scientific “specialization,” which struck him as narrow and unmanly; he failed to understand how the new men of science could not clean skeletons, do taxidermy, and mount and build their own exhibits like carpenters, as he once did.
He was troubled by the lack of passion in young museum men: “Old-timers like Hornaday, Akeley and myself grieve over the helplessness of the modern preparator, his dread of working overtime . . . his readiness to make up for being late by quitting early. We worked a dozen hours a day and then went home to work for ourselves or took our best girl to the theatre. We heard nothing in those days of the artistic temperament—we heard more of laziness or general cussedness.”
Dr. Lucas's knowledge spanned the whole of the animal kingdom. During his fifty-year career, he wrote 365 scientific journal articles—many in longhand, before the typewriter was invented—ranging “in the old-fashioned way from insects to dinosaurs through the whole gamut of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.”
He had been first fascinated with sharks while sailing around the world with his father. By the time he was eighteen, Lucas had sailed to Europe and Asia and around the Cape of Good Hope. The persistent myth of the man-eating shark fired his skepticism, for nowhere in the world could he find documented evidence of such a fish. As was said of William Beebe, the “father of oceanography,” whom Lucas employed as a young man and who later went down in the first bathysphere: “He was not prepared to take anyone's word for anything. He had to see for himself.” And so in the 1880s, when he joined the United States Museum (later the Smithsonian), the Brooklyn Museum, and finally the American Museum, he continued his inquiries firsthand on the Atlantic Coast.
Again and again, his investigations of reported man-eating sharks on the East Coast turned up fabricated stories of large but harmless species. While Lucas allowed that “two really dangerous species, the white shark and the blue shark,” wander up from the tropics, he maintained that “there is no record of any fully grown individual ever having been taken within hundreds of miles of New York.” Furthermore, “ordinarily a shark is a very cautious animal, and it is difficult to get a big one to take a bait to which he is not accustomed.” Thus, the danger of being attacked by a shark on the Atlantic Coast was “infinitely less than that of being struck by lightning.”
As a recognized authority, Lucas was often called to set the record straight. He had watched from a distance the previous summer the ongoing shark debate in The New York Times. The director was dismayed when a spate of local “shark scares” revealed that an unreasoning fear of attack still existed, and later cheered when The New York Times published its August 2, 1915, editorial, “Let Us Do Justice to Sharks,” declaring that Hermann Oelrichs had been right and “that sharks can properly be called dangerous, in this part of the world, is apparently untrue.” But when a subsequent rash of letters to the editor of the Times purported to describe dozens of gruesome man-eating shark attacks around the world, Dr. Lucas could not let pass what he regarded as unscientific, unsubstantiated anecdote or rumor. Dr. Lucas had not changed his opinion since 1905, when, as editor of Young Folks Cyclopaedia of Natural History, he classified the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, under its popular name “the man-eater shark.” “This, the most voracious of sharks, does not hesitate, it is said, to attack a man, but practically few or no authentic cases are on record of such a thing having taken pla
ce.”
So the director was understandably disturbed when J. T. Du Bois, an American diplomat, began the broadside of evidence on August 15, 1915, with a grisly letter to the Times, “The Man-eating Shark.” Even carefree New York and New Jersey swimmers must have shuddered as they read the report of the diplomat, then consul general in Singapore, British Malaya, of the collision and sinking of French and British passenger steamers in the Straits of Rhio in November 1907. “The panic stricken passengers threw themselves into the water and were instantly attacked by some man-eating sharks, and the waters were reddened by the slaughter. About ninety people lost their lives. When the news of this disaster reached the United States, I received several letters asking if it were true that such a thing existed as a man-eating shark.”
Intrigued, Du Bois immediately dispatched fifty letters to diplomats around the world, from the Philippines to the Red Sea, “asking for verified incidents of the work of the man-eating shark.” The response astonished him: “I received sixteen affidavits from American Consuls, Philippine officials, and one Indian official, reciting interesting incidents of the man-eating sharks attacking and wounding or killing and eating human beings.” He was sent a photograph of a Tomali boy, coin-diving on the Gulf of Aden, being “seized by a man-eating shark and dragged back into the waters, never to return.”
Eight days after the diplomat's letter, another letter in the Times, signed cryptically “N.S.W.,” denoting the Australian state of New South Wales, gave convincing and gruesome details of three cases of sharks devouring humans, adding that “any one who doubts that sharks in temperate waters do attack human beings will visit Sydney, N.S.W. . . . and . . . his doubts will be speedily resolved.” The letter reported the case of a boy dangling his legs off a wharf at Ryde, on the Parramatta River, which feeds the harbor, when “a shark came up, seized a foot, and disappeared with the boy, whose body was never seen again.” The very next day, Herbert MacKenzie, a native of Sydney, Australia, capital of New South Wales, published in the Times a letter confirming to the last detail his memory of the three cases reported by “N.S.W.” “As a native of that beautiful city, I can with authority corroborate the statements . . . and know of others where lives and limbs have been lost as a result of these sea monsters in the beautiful waters of the harbor.” In the late 1880s, MacKenzie reported: “I distinctly remember a young man losing first an arm, then, just as rescue was at hand, the entire body disappeared, leaving only a blood path in the water. This happened in Rushcutters Bay.”
If readers of the Times were unsettled by these accounts, they must have found reassuring the rebuttal from Dr. Lucas, the famed expert who had investigated alleged shark attacks on the East Coast for forty years and verified none as authentic. In his letter to the editor, “The Shark Slander,” Dr. Lucas announced he knew of only “two fairly reliable references to such cases” in the world—one in Bombay, where a man lost his leg, another in the Hawaiian Islands, where a human victim was surely mistaken for offal dumped in the water.
Those who believed a shark had killed Charles Bruder, Lucas declared, had made one of the commonest errors in such cases, “that the shark bit off the man's leg as though it were a carrot.” Such a feat was not possible, Lucas said, and the mere statement “shows that the maker or writer of it had little idea of the strength of the apparatus needed to perform such an amputation.” In his contribution to Nichols's and Murphy's journal article for the Brooklyn Museum Science Bulletin, published three months before Bruder's death, Lucas described the common sense behind his theory. “The next time the reader carves a leg of lamb, let him speculate on the power required to sever this at one stroke—and the bones of a sheep are much lighter than those of a man. Moreover, a shark, popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding, is not particularly strong in the jaws.”
As evidence, Dr. Lucas noted that his protégé, Robert Cushman Murphy, during an expedition to South Georgia Island, witnessed “the difficulty of sharks in tearing meat from the carcass of a whale.” And Lucas recalled his own “disappointment at witnessing the efforts of a twelve-foot shark to cut a chunk out of a sea lion. The sea lion had been dead a week and was supposedly tender, but the shark tugged and thrashed and made a great to-do over each mouthful.”
Given the weakness of even the largest sharks' jaws, Lucas reasoned, a man would lose a leg only “if a shark thirty feet or more in length happened to catch a man fairly on the knee joint where no severing of the bone was necessary.” A shark was not capable of biting cleanly through the bone and therefore could not have been the animal that bit off Charles Bruder's legs below the knee. What animal was capable of the attack, Dr. Lucas couldn't say, but “certainly no shark recorded as having been taken in these waters could possibly perform such an act.” According to Lucas, the best scientific data concerning the question of the East Coast shark attack remained the uncollected wager Hermann Oelrichs made in 1891. Twenty-five years had substantiated the tycoon's position, Lucas concluded, that there is “practically no danger of an attack . . . about our coasts.”
A Long-Range Cruising Rogue
As the motorboats rumbled and bloodied the waters of Spring Lake, not far offshore the great white swam with growing urgency. Never straying more than a half mile from shore, it swept north and south, fronting the coast, stalking the two-mile-long beach of Spring Lake and the coastline a few miles north toward Asbury Park. The shark moved with increasing expectancy, for it had hunted with success, and prey was very close now, abundant prey; it could sense it with numerous electrical, sonic, and olfactory systems. Wary of boats and oars, the shark safely tracked its prey from a distance, with no need to approach the shore. Its lateral lines tingled with the distant vibration of motorboat engines. Gasoline engines for boats were a new invention, and men then could not have known the acoustic chorus they sang over time and space for sharks. The shark detected the sonic pulses of swimmers under and beyond the blockade of the boats like a submersible receiving coded signals beneath an antiquated navy. Molecules of blood in the water, carried on currents from miles away, moved in and out of the shark's flapped nostrils, firing its cerebellum to adjust its fins for a new direction. As the shark haunted the coast that afternoon, the men of New Jersey were growing edgy enough to shoot at anything that swam. It is likely the rogue great white was among the targets that the Spring Lake patrol fired at, for there is compelling evidence that it remained in the area after killing Bruder. The shark, like its pursuers, was growing increasingly edgy, attacking oars and boats and anything that moved.
There is scant science on the matter of a rogue shark, a deliberate man-eater, while skepticism persists that such a creature exists. As people are not a regular prey for sharks, a purposeful hunter of humans like a rogue lion or elephant must be injured, crazed, aberrant. Furthermore an oceanic “serial killer” is nearly impossible to catch and convict, its work concealed, the evidence eradicated by the enclosing sea. But the late Dr. Sir Victor Coppleson, a distinguished Australian surgeon knighted by the queen, tracked the global movements of rogues across the twentieth century, beginning in 1922, when he began treating shark bites as a young doctor at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney. In 1933, Coppleson coined the term “rogue shark” in the Medical Journal of Australia. “A rogue shark,” he wrote, “if the theory is correct, and evidence appears to prove it to the hilt—like the man-eating tiger, is a killer which, having experienced the deadly sport of killing or mauling a human, goes in search of similar game. The theory is supported by the pattern and frequency of many attacks.”
Rogue attacks began, Coppleson believed, with the rising popularity of beaches for recreational use at the turn of the century. Coppleson's ground zero for investigation was Sydney, where rogue attacks were unknown until the sport of surfing arrived in 1919. Then, on February 4, 1922, Milton Coughlan, a surfman, was “cracking a few waves” on Coogee Beach when a large shark “struck with such terrific force that he was lifted from the water,” whereupon a crowd watched a
large pair of jaws snap off Coughlan's arm. He died shortly afterward at a local hospital. Coppleson suspected a pattern when, less than a month later, twenty-one-year-old Mervyn Gannon was struck and killed at the same beach. During the next three years, Nita Derritt, a saleswoman, lost both legs in a shark attack, and Jack Dagworthy, sixteen, lost a leg when a shark leapt out of the water at him, mouth agape. The work of a single deranged shark, Coppleson concluded in such cases, was the only logical explanation. It seemed to him far-fetched to believe that a beach swimming area, free from shark attack for decades, would suddenly be invaded by groups of man-eating sharks, then, just as suddenly, be free of attack for years to come. Often, the “rogue series”—a reign of terror lasting several days or years—ended when a single man-eater was captured.
In a pattern eerily similar to that of great whites in California observed hunting sea lions on or near anniversary days, the rogue sharks in Australia often took human victims in the same area near the one-year anniversary of an earlier killing. What Coppleson considered “the most spine-chilling . . . attack known in Sydney waters” was part of an “anniversary” pattern. Zita Steadman, twenty-eight, was swimming with friends near Bantry Bay in January 1942, standing in waist-deep water, when a friend named Burns warned her not to go too far. Zita had just turned to go back, when she suddenly shrieked, and a huge shark was clearly visible to her friends, mauling the young woman. Burns grabbed an oar from their rowboat and began smashing at the attacker, but to no avail. Burns then rammed the shark, which shrugged off the boat and kept attacking. The shark struck Steadman “with such ferocity that it was throwing itself into the air” and began to draw its prey into deeper water. In desperation, Burns pulled Zita Steadman away from the shark by grabbing her long, dark hair; Steadman had been bitten in two. Less than a year later, while standing in the same waters, fifteen-year-old Denise Burch was torn apart by the same shark that killed Zita Steadman, Coppleson believed.
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