Despite the town's traditional ways, many of the citizens of Matawan considered themselves modern and sophisticated, for they had time—freed at last from plowing and planting—for leisure. Matawan happily shared the new American craze for sports and clubs and entertainment. It would be thirteen years before the Rivoli Theater dominated entertainment by showing talkies. For now the domino tournament was the talk of the town. On the Fourth of July, men played the ladies' baseball team wearing long Victorian dresses and women's broad-brimmed hats festooned with flowers—all except the mayor, who dressed like Uncle Sam. People were proud of the town library, which boasted more than three thousand volumes. If a man wasn't interested in James Joyce's new Dubliners or the new poem by Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” there were dime novels and westerns, and the new magazine, Detective Story, and the pulps Argosy and All-Story, whose editors vowed to “give the ordinary guy what he wants, that is . . . action, excitement, blood, love, a little humor, a taste of sex, a pepper of passion, a lot of escape.” “Tarzan of the Apes” was a new adventure in All-Story.
Yet the industries that gave men and women the money and time for leisure in Matawan—the town made not just tiles but matches, candy, pianos, baskets and bottles, waxes, asphalt, and copper castings—crowded portions of the creek and the land beyond Main with factories and tainted the air. By 1916, the creek was dotted here and there with manufacturers but still wound through vast tranquil prairies of spartina grass and sky. And so it was that by July of that year Matawan Creek flowed as an increasingly sentimental link to the rural and Romantic past, a place where “overcivilized man,” as Roosevelt called the urbanizing masses, could retreat to the quieter stretches. A woman could be courted in a natural setting, and a man could seize his last chance to be a boy or at least remember what it was like. Behind Main Street, sixty feet down a muddy embankment, was a place where boys went fishing and snared turtles for soup. The Matawan Journal was filled with poems and odes and remembrances of Matawan Creek—the gentle waters where friends picnicked on the banks, where lovers idled in moonlit canoes. The creek was the beloved heart of the town.
That afternoon of July 11, a hot summer day, Rensselaer “Renny” Cartan Jr., a dark-haired boy unusually athletic and broad-shouldered for fourteen, left the Cartan Lumber and Coal Company, his father's business, and walked down the street to find his cousin, Johnson Cartan. Johnson, a smaller, quieter boy of thirteen, stocked shelves at Cartan's Department Store at 92 Main, owned by Renny's uncle, A. J. Cartan. The Cartans were one of the most prominent families in town. A. J. Cartan had started as a telegraph operator before opening A. J. Cartan Furniture, Dry Goods, Shoes, Groceries, Hats, Western Union Telegraph Service, where folks got almost everything they needed. In recent years he'd dropped the telegraph service and put in one of the new telephones for the whole town to use.
Renny and his cousin Johnson cut down a bank to the creek, winding through tall grasses toward the swimming hole. Skinny-dipping in the old swimming hole was a Matawan tradition going back generations, and all the businessmen along Main let their sons and hired boys go to cool off for a few minutes every afternoon. Back behind the houses on Main was a barn, and beyond it the old brick limeworks stood on the bank of the creek. The limeworks, which crushed oyster shells into lime, had closed recently, as industry along New York's lower bays killed the oysters and the oysterman's trade. Yet the old warehouse shaded a lovely wide bend in the creek. Sheltered by the limeworks and a thicket of trees was a natural cove, the most popular swimming hole in town, framed at one end by the old Wyckoff propeller dock.
The boys scrambled onto the pier and pilings and threw off their clothes, laughing and shouting, the beginning of a daily ritual of roughhousing boys enjoyed like a natural entitlement. Renny Cartan was standing naked on a dock piling, joking with his cousin and friends, when he began to lose his balance. The creek was only thirty feet wide and shallow, but the water was darker than usual with the turbulence of recent rains and Renny couldn't see the bottom, couldn't see what he'd be hitting as he fell. But a naked boy at the lip of a swimming hole in the middle of the placid farm country during the last summer of peace had little to worry about.
Renny Cartan gave in to gravity and the joy of the moment and let himself go, laughing, into the creek.
Alien World
Barely two years old, the young shark was at the beginning of an epic growth spurt. At nearly eight feet and four hundred pounds, it was a seed of what it would become. How large white sharks grow is unknown, but the largest documented was almost twenty feet and several tons. Numerous reports of larger whites—as big as twenty-nine feet, five tons—have been debunked, but some shark biologists believe the goliaths are out there, at twenty-five, even thirty feet, so big no man-made gear or boat could land them. The young shark would simply grow as long as it lived, and no human knew what gigantism it could attain. Its life would be lengthy, half a century or more, and remarkably hardy. It would be free of cancer, infections, circulatory diseases, competition. Its wounds would heal themselves with a speed people associate with science fiction. If the law of nature was competition, it would operate above the law. But there were limits to the great white's power, and in July 1916, the young white moved like a creature raging against those limits.
After days of swimming north along the shore, it came to the northernmost tip of the Jersey coast, the Sandy Hook peninsula. Sandy Hook—with the Rockaways and Coney Island six miles north across the lower New York bays—framed the ocean's door to New York Harbor.
The shark rounded False Channel at the tip of the peninsula. To the east was the open ocean bounded by the fertile southern coast of Long Island, where—unknown to men at the time—dwelled some of the largest great white sharks in the world, and plenty of prey to nourish them. Passenger steamers plied up the Narrows to Ellis Island, passing the Statue of Liberty and its beacon torch, lit by electricity for the first time in 1916. Following its instinct to hug the coast, the shark cruised around the tip of Sandy Hook and left the ocean for good, curling into Sandy Hook Bay. From the deep clean currents of the Atlantic, the big fish now wallowed in five and six and eight feet of bay water. The great white was on a path away from the ocean, toward a coast lined with brackish waterways.
Of the more than four hundred species of sharks, only a few can pass from salt- to freshwater, and only one is a large predator, the bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas. The bull, along with the tiger shark and great white, is part of the “unholy trinity” of proven man-eaters. In the 980 shark attacks on humans and boats recorded by the International Shark Attack File between the year 1580 and October 2000, more than half of the attacks were attributed to only three species of shark: great white (348), tiger (116), and bull (82). The bull shark possesses a unique ability to cross into rivers and lakes. It has been recorded 1,750 miles up the Mississippi River in Alton, Illinois, and 2,500 miles up the Amazon in Peru. It devours the dead laid to rest in the Ganges River in India. The great white could survive in brackish water, but only temporarily. This is one of the few limits of the apex predator, a niche filled by another species. In brackish water a great white loses the salt balance between its body and the water. To restore the equilibrium, the shark's flesh loses salt to the water, and slowly its basic physiological functions shut down. For a short time only, the shark's huge mass would protect it from feeling the deadly effects.
The young white meandered west, winding around the mouths of creeks and rivers and harbors, hugging the tortuous shore, traveling farther from the life-giving sea. Familiar prey was gone, and the shark became further weakened. Sluggishness heightened its urgency to feed. Confusion or sluggishness was certain death.
The shark was neither the first nor last sea creature to become disoriented on the labyrinthine shore of Sandy Hook Bay. Seventy-eight summers later, in 1994, a pod of dolphins left the Atlantic side of Sandy Hook just as the shark had done, and, rounding into Sandy Hook Bay, instinctively following the coast, swam up the Shrews
bury River. All summer they frolicked and fed in the shallow waters of the river, but come January, as temperatures dropped to freezing on the Shrewsbury, three of the dolphins were trapped, desperately hurtling their gleaming gray bodies through the ice to make breathing holes. At last a Coast Guard vessel enticed them to swim to within two miles of the mouth of the river that led to the bay and then to the freedom of the sea. But the dolphins circled in confusion and, instinctively heading south, turned back up the ice-choked river, where they perished.
The great white swam west, instinctively trying to find its way back to the sea but traveling ever more distant from it. It passed the Shrewsbury River, the dolphin's downfall, and then Ware Creek and Belford Harbor and Pewes Creek as it sluiced from the marsh. The coast was swampy and quiet and strung with the small towns of Atlantic Highlands, Port Monmouth, and Keansburg. Two hundred feet above sea level, at Atlantic Highlands, shone the double lights of the Twin Light of Navesink, the country's most powerful lighthouse, beaming twenty miles across the bay.
Around the promontory of Point Comfort, the shark dropped south into a broad natural harbor of windswept marshland, climbed northerly out of the harbor past tiny Flat Creek and East Creek, and swam around another promontory, Conaskonk Point, into Raritan Bay. Conaskonk Point opened wide to Keyport Harbor approximately half a mile across, and the shark followed the line of the harbor south, past the town of Keyport, following the coast. But the coastline of Keyport Harbor did not sweep around seamlessly back to Raritan Bay. Keyport Harbor funneled into a cut some seven hundred and fifty feet wide, narrowing again to the mouth of Matawan Creek, a wide tidal creek, two hundred feet across. Matawan Creek was wide enough for a fish inclined to follow the coast to mistake it for the shoreline, and so on that morning, the great white shark hewed to the coast and turned into the creek, surely unaware it had left Raritan Bay.
The shark swept into the creek on the high tide, surging in on currents of saltwater. Yet not far from the mouth of the creek, the inland waterway dramatically narrowed like an inverted telescope, tapering down from two hundred feet across to a hundred to fifty to barely twenty. Within a few sweeps of its powerful tail the shark entered a diminishing world, murky and sluicing with fresh water, and it grew unsettled.
The big fish was forced to swim in the deeper middle of the creek, a narrow navigable channel, a tighter trap. The creek was only eight feet deep at high tide and sank to one foot at low tide, when the local farmers and fishermen went clamming. This was a situation it had never encountered before. The world it was born into had no walls or edges. The sea was forever. There were only two corners, two boundaries: the beach and the bottom. In brackish water, with the bottom and sides closing in, the shark may have experienced a kind of claustrophobia, shark biologists speculate. By the time the shark became aware of its mistake, it found it difficult to escape the small waterway. Perhaps it tried, and failed to return to the sea, redoubling its frustration. In alien environments, sharks become weakened, desperate, highly agitated.
South African researcher Campbell has suggested “petulance, possibly induced by environmental conditions” as a leading cause of shark attack. But Campbell's theory refers to a normal shark exposed to stress. The big fish that entered Matawan Creek was profoundly disturbed before it became trapped, already on a rare and fragile edge of violence, even for its species—“like a person,” ichthyologist George Burgess says, “who goes off the deep end and starts shooting.” Yet as it swam with slackening thrusts of its tail, the shark detected signals that washed about its lateral line through the brown and clouded water, signals of interest, thrumming with sonic and then olfactory cues and then explosions, signals of prey. A mile and a half ahead, as the creek wended in a lazy S shape through the sedge marshes, lay the town of Matawan.
The Creek
In the cool, shaded embrace of the swimming hole, the other boys leapt into the creek. The sun was high, and a breeze stirred the grasses on the opposite bank, rousing warm odors of decay. Their legs disappeared in darkness toward the bottom, mucky and cool between their toes. Silvery fish wriggled on the edge of the muck, and there was the small thrill, different from anything else, of being part of the creek. The light that speckled through the trees afforded privacy as the naked boys splashed and shouted echoes off the old limeworks. The noise of their play momentarily obscured the wailing pitch of a scream, a sound absorbed by the spartina grass on the opposite bank.
Moments after Rensselaer Cartan entered the water of Matawan Creek, it betrayed him. He was in almost up to his neck, and the pleasing sensation of a refreshing dip gave way to a searing warmth ripping across his chest. It was a strange sensation that fourteen years of experience couldn't process. He was bleeding and he didn't know what was in the water, what was tearing him, and in an instant the knowledge of what was happening turned to a long, high scream.
With a rush, unseen in the murky water, the shark came like a torpedo and hurtled past Cartan. The splashing in the swimming hole, barely a mile from the mouth of the creek, had drawn the great white shark to investigate. The creek teemed with life, but none of it large enough to sustain a great white shark. So when the shark spied the whirling porcelain limbs of the boy underwater, it grew excited and charged. In the view of some researchers, the shark's pass may have been investigative or even a form of play. There are numerous accounts of sharks bumping surfboards and surfers and not attacking, frolicking in a rather one-sided game only the apex predator understands. But the great white's true motive that afternoon was likely ominous. Its thick skin was so abrasive that shark hide, called shagreen, was once used by carpenters to smooth the hardest woods. Shark attacks on man are often preceded by a bump that causes gashing wounds. The purpose of the bump seems to be to determine size and strength of possible prey.
Renny Cartan had no idea he had been bumped and scraped by a great white shark. He knew only that it didn't hurt at first, then the pain was like hot needles, and larger than the pain was the loss of control and the unknowing. In that instant he saw something dark moving in the water, something larger than any fish he had ever seen. And then it was gone. The water was washing against his chest, sharpening the focus on the pain and the surprise.
Renny Cartan scrambled out of the creek, screaming. His chest was bloodied, as if raked by the tips of knives. The other boys, streaked with mud, crowded around, trying to calm him. Cartan would not be calmed. He said he had been hit and wounded by something in the creek, something huge. None of the other boys had seen it. Renny's wounds looked painful but not serious, as though he had scratched himself on a branch. His friends listened as long as boys do when play has been interrupted and awaits and is calling them back. Soon Renny's cousin Johnson and the other boys scurried onto the dock and leapt back into the creek.
As Renny Cartan left the creek to get his wounds bandaged, he shouted at his friends to get out of the water, but his warning fell on deaf ears. After Renny left the swimming hole, Johnson Cartan was swimming happily along the surface of the creek, his friends nearby. They shouted and splashed and jumped from the dock, unaware that sonic cues were now exploding along the narrow banks of the creek to a great white shark, a shark that had taken the measure of the noisy mammals and was slashing now through the brackish water, highly stimulated.
The next morning, Wednesday, July 12, as ketches and small craft moved slowly on the creek, Thomas V. Cottrell, a retired sea captain, set out from his house at the mouth of the creek for his customary walk.
Captain Cottrell strode the creek with a prodigious energy for his fifty-eight years, making a pace that was the envy of his contemporaries, the few still above sea level. But that morning he was a bit more excited than usual, and excitement wasn't good for him. The old captain was an incorrigible storyteller and jokester, a man of a hundred friends and a thousand tales, who never troubled his wife or his seven children with his heart disease. It was known he wasn't well, but the captain had plenty of years left, everyone figured, and
he kept his health problems to himself. He had the redoubtable strength of a man who made friends easily and was an admired local citizen.
As the captain strolled along the creek that morning, the sun was high and water lapped softly on the banks, and he found himself staring at the brown water more intently than usual. The captain had heard of the boy who cried wolf the day before, about something in the creek that bit or scratched him—the boy's aunt was Sarah Cottrell Johnson—and he felt bad for the boy, and a bit curious over what manner of fish Renny Cartan had seen.
No one monitored the waterway like Captain Cottrell. He lived in Brown's Point at the mouth of the creek, in the handsome old port town of Keyport, whose Victorian homes overlooked the bay. His walks took him out of town and over hill and meadow and down dusty roads bordered with split-rail fences and views of silos and horses and cows. He strode as if people were too numerous and the world too small, as if, having spent the prime of life sailing the seven seas in clipper ships, he couldn't shake the urge to stretch his legs, whistling as he went his favorite song, “Beautiful Island of Somewhere”:
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