Somewhere the day is longer,
Somewhere the task is done;
Somewhere the heart is stronger,
Somewhere the guardian won.
His walks always took him back to the creek. The captain had been born in Matawan in 1857, when it was still called Middletown, named for its position on the creek, once plied by steamers and paddleboats. As a young man, he had moved to Brown's Point at the mouth of the creek, where the Cottrell clan had built the first boats on the bay. He was of a prideful, seafaring family, and if a drawback of a garrulous old sea captain was a want of fresh stories, Thomas Cottrell would presently have that problem solved. For as he took his constitutional on that morning, walking over the new trolley bridge spanning Matawan Creek, he saw something for which neither man nor God, tide nor typhoon, had prepared him.
Rippling up the muddy waters of the creek, toward the bridge, was a large dark-gray shape trailing a long, pointed dorsal fin. In the moment it took for shock and disbelief to subside, Captain Cottrell recognized it as a shark, a big one, no different from the many he'd spied in the Pacific and Atlantic and Indian Oceans, winding slowly up the tidal creek past fields of oat and barley, chickens and dairy cows.
As the shark swam closer to him, it loomed bigger still, a wide, gray-brown fish, possibly nine or ten feet long, until it passed directly under Cottrell and slipped under the bridge. He turned to watch the fin disappearing up the creek. Thomas Cottrell realized with an incredulous shudder that the shark was headed unswervingly toward town.
If the retired captain shook his head over the ribbing the Cartan boy had taken, the musing lasted only a moment, and he was on the move. The town of Matawan could not have placed a better sentinel for the approach of the shark than Thomas V. Cottrell. The captain had brine in his veins and was accustomed to thinking under pressure. He had taken note of the newspaper stories about two recent shark deaths on the Jersey coast, and wondered if it was the same shark. Captain Cottrell was of the lot of seafarers who took shark legends seriously. He'd seen what they could do to living things, if not men. Furthermore, the captain knew well, since his own boyhood after the Civil War, the delights of swimming on summer days in Matawan Creek. And so Captain Cottrell, pumping new life into his aging seaman's legs, turned around on the bridge and raced toward town, breathing hard and walking fast, hoping to reach town before the shark did.
In minutes he had climbed up from the creek onto Main Street, his eyes wild, his face reddening, pushing his blood pressure to perilous levels. As he hurried past motorcars and horse teams and old colonial houses, trying to balance the skittering of his heart with the urgency of the moment, he saw everywhere men he knew, but he saved his message for the man who counted. Next to the small post office at 129 Main—where the postman that morning carried his usual bag of letters with no street addresses—stood a small white house with a spinning red and white pole out front. When Thomas Cottrell pushed open the door of John Mulsoff's barbershop, the men gathered there fell silent, for the old sea captain was gasping for breath, his face animated with a crazed look.
The burly German-born Mulsoff, the barber who moonlighted as the town constable, was one of the most admired men in town, personable and humane yet a tough cop who commanded attention as he strode Main Street with authority, a longtime resident remembers. Mulsoff had to have been a formidable man to have earned such respect as a German-American in a small American town in 1916, in a country allied with England against the kaiser. Yet Mulsoff retained such high regard that in 1917, when young men from Matawan went to war against Germany, the doughboys wrote letters home in care of John Mulsoff on Main Street. As townsfolk gathered in the barbershop, Mulsoff in his German accent read the letters from the boys at the front in a way that gave hope to mothers and fathers, friends and wives.
Now the stout constable turned his competent, compassionate eye toward Cottrell. Yet the old sea captain's story about a shark from the ocean, headed up the creek toward town, sounded mad. John Mulsoff considered it for a moment, tipped back his head, and laughed incredulously. Disbelieving chuckles rounded the barbershop. Flushed with anger and embarrassment, Cottrell stumbled out of the shop and took his story urgently to the sidewalk, where a cluster of merchants met him with more skepticism and puzzled looks. A shark in the creek? Old Cottrell must have been in one too many nor'easters. With growing frustration, the sea captain pressed his case up and down Main Street, to men who'd known him for years and admired his sea stories, but “everywhere the captain was laughed at,” The New York Times reported. This was not going over like a tale of plying thirty-foot seas at night. “How could a shark get ten miles away from the ocean, swim through Raritan Bay, and enter the shallow creek with only seventeen feet of water at its deepest spot and nowhere more than thirty-five feet wide?” the Times inquired. “So the townfolk asked one another, and grown-ups and children flocked to the creek as usual for their daily dip.”
Thomas Cottrell had not survived forty years at sea by distrusting his own instincts. Ignoring his ragged breath, his quickening heart, he hurried down to the docks by the creek and climbed in his small motorboat, the Skud. Coaxing the motorboat to a hiccuping start, he gave it some gas. He was soon chugging up the creek, cruising the center channel, on the water, where he'd felt in command all his life, but perhaps never so out of control as now. Shielding the sun with his hand, he scanned the narrowing distance for a fin and the boyish heads of swimmers. As he motored, he shouted warnings of a shark, shouted out over the creek until he was hoarse. It was hot and humid and his collar was beading up in sweat. Soon there was only the sound of the old man's ragged breathing under the rumble of the engine, loud and trembling in the midday air.
Under a Full Moon
A great dorsal fin sliced the middle of the brown creek as the shark swam along prairies of sedge grass and wound slowly past deserted banks, undetected by anyone. The air was warm and ripe with the sulfuric rot of the marsh. The water was rising under the shark, and it was attuning itself to new atmospheres. It passed easily through changing water temperatures, and the rising tide was protecting its salt balance.
Also unseen, in the bright afternoon sky, the moon's orbit was on a course that would put it in the earth's shadow two days later. The coming lunar eclipse of July 14, 1916, held no interest for scientists then, but the phases of the moon were fundamental to the shark. The hidden moon was waxing, three days from full, radiating near maximum gravitational pull, and the great white was growing excited and vibrant in reaction to the moon's surging power. Around the world, ocean tides were rising and the tide was coming up Matawan Creek now, swelling the banks and lifting the shark, bracing it with life-giving seawater.
The shark was moving upriver no faster than a walking man, swaying its body from side to side, smelling the water and processing information with great rapidity. As the fish swam, its huge olfactory lobe was evaluating the smells and sounds in the water for potential prey.
Streaming onward in the creek, the shark began to whip powerfully, picking up speed until it was sending water rolling toward the banks. No one saw the shark moving then, nor would anyone have understood the pull of the hidden moon like a trigger on the jaws of the shark, although a man may have felt something different in his blood as well.
The citizens of Matawan in 1916 would not have laughed at the idea that the full moon exerted a powerful effect on people, plants, and animals. It was well known at the time that “lunacy” gripped the residents of jails and mental hospitals during the full moon. In the old German, French, and Scot folk cultures brought to Matawan, evil preyed on human beings under a full moon. If by 1916 lunar superstitions were the fodder of emerging modern entertainment (Dracula was a popular novel), “moon farming,” following the cycles of the moon when planting or harvesting crops, and other myths continued to flourish. Moonlight is harmful to the health, the not-yet-old wives' tales said; fleece will be lighter if sheared when the moon is waning; pork from pigs killed in a new
moon will shrink when cooked; rail fences built in the light of an old moon will sink into the ground; wood cut in the waxing of the moon will be “sappy”; fish will bite more on the night of a full moon.
Scientists were dismayed by the persistence of popular myths. “Scientific men devote a deplorable amount of time felling Antaeus, in the shape of one or another of a host of irrepressible superstitions,” Charles Fitzhugh Talman wrote in 1913 in Scientific American. “Whether the giant happens to be the equinoctial storm, or unlucky thirteen, or the climatically impotent Gulf Stream, or the super-moon, the Hercules has not yet arisen who shall crush him conclusively in mid-air.”
The moon held little mystery for science in the early 1900s. Though study of the heavenly body continued, the work was quantitative—the distance from the earth, the strength of the reflected light, the size of the satellite. Scientists believed they understood the moon, and each experiment served only to further prove already established ideas. During the lunar eclipse of that July 14, thousands of New Yorkers would crowd rooftops and towers to watch with fascination the passage of the earth's shadow across the face of the moon, one of the clearest lunar eclipses seen in years. Yet Professor Harold Jacobi of the Astronomical Department at Columbia University declared “it was of no material interest to scientists because it could not possibly reveal anything that was not already a matter of positive knowledge.”
Later, scientists would find evidence that sharks attack more frequently during very high tides, caused by the gravitational pull of the full moon. A preliminary study by researchers at the International Shark Attack File has found a worldwide correlation between “the phases of the moon, the height of tides and the frequency of shark attacks.” Researchers are studying the phenomenon, according to George Burgess, “from a practical standpoint” to “cut down on the number of attacks by warning people of an increased risk.” While there is yet no conclusive proof the white shark fits the pattern, “a study of white sharks near South Africa shows a peak in attacks at the highest of high tides.”
There are several possible explanations for lunar-related shark attacks. The folklore about lunar effects on animals may be true. “There is no doubt that an animal could be more on edge or more active in looking for food due to the phases of the moon,” Burgess says. Sharks could be reacting to the effect of the moon on other ocean species. The reproduction of coral and many types of fish coincides with the cycles of the moon. High tides also reduce beach space, drawing prey such as seals into the water and sharks nearer shore.
Whatever the reason, as the juvenile great white shark cruised through the murky waters of Matawan Creek under a weakening sun and a waxing moon, the waters of the creek were rising. It was nearly two o'clock on the afternoon of July 12, 1916, and the moon would soon be at its most luminous, the creek tides rising to the highest recorded levels of the month.
Like a Cat Shakes a Mouse
In the low gloom of a factory by the railroad tracks, the hammer blurred as if trailing sparks, and in less than a minute the battered hands of William Stilwell held a delicate but sturdy round basket. Swiftly, Stilwell struck another basket into existence and stacked it with the others. The shouts of the line boss and the thudding of hammers wielded by men and boys along the bench filled the scorching, humid air. Bill Stilwell's chest and arms dripped with sweat, but the line boss paid fifty cents for a hundred baskets and Stilwell worked with the speed of a man who had a young wife and five young children to feed and could take home three dollars that day if he raced.
There were worse jobs along the creek than making baskets. Hauling tile and clay in the baking yards; breathing paints and varnishes or cooking scalding columns of flaked rice, which was invented in Matawan. The basket factory and its long, low line of wooden warehouses lettered ANDERSON'S BUILDING MATERIALS & BASKETS had its own sawmill, a huge and dangerous blade that sent rafts of logs to the Chesapeake. Basketwork was comparatively safe and paid well. Occasionally, Frank Anderson himself came through the basket factory, and the men were glad to see him, for Frank upped the pay to seventy cents for a hundred baskets at the peak of the summer market. Fashionable ladies preferred their summertime bouquets of flowers in lovely baskets, like Anderson's, and New Yorkers used them to carry home the season's Jersey peaches and tomatoes.
Bill Stilwell's work wasn't easy, but despite the labor struggles of the era, the good, honest workman was widely romanticized. “William Stilwell is of the sturdy type of American workman,” the New York Herald wrote, “with a large and happy family, occupying their own cottage, surrounded by a pretty garden.”
Now and then Stilwell watched his oldest son, Russell, getting the hang of it at age sixteen, and kept an eye down the line on Lester, his youngest boy. When he saw Lester, small and struggling, he could only hope the boy wouldn't get the shakes and hurt himself. Bill worried about Lester especially. His youngest boy did well in school and was ambitious, not only making peach baskets but selling a weekly magazine as a “subscription agent”—saving enough money to keep himself in clothes and books for a year. But the boy seemed weak and suffered from epileptic fits Doc Reynolds couldn't do much about. Stilwell also worried because President Wilson was talking about a child labor law setting a minimum work age of fourteen, and what would the Stilwell children do for extra money if they couldn't make baskets?
As the sun slanted over the creek and Bill Stilwell had passed a couple of hundred baskets, he saw the line boss give a nod, and the younger boys dropped their hammers and made for the door, Lester with them. Bill hated to lose the money, but Lester had already earned seventy-five cents making peach baskets that morning. Besides, it was brutally hot, and it was a tradition for the boys to sneak away to the creek on summer days. It was a break Bill Stilwell had enjoyed himself on many a lazy summer afternoon thirty years before. Lester dutifully ran up to his father to say good-bye, and Bill told him to be careful and stay near the dock in case the shakes came.
Shortly before two o'clock, Lester Stilwell, who wore knickers and suspenders to school and a cap over his Dutch boy, was running free on Main Street. Lester was one of the youngest and poorest boys who played in the creek, but soon all confinements and distinctions would disappear. In the waters of the creek, noted the New York Herald, Stilwell swam with boys who were “all of the same age and types of the best kind of American boys. They spend their school vacations working in a basket factory mornings and playing in the afternoons.” Near the small library, Lester met Albert O'Hara, eleven, and Anthony Bublin, thirteen, whose older brothers also worked in the basket factory. Another thirteen-year-old, Charles E. Van Brunt Jr., joined the group.
On Main an older boy joined them—Frank Clowes, nineteen, taking time off from his work at his father's gas station, the first in the area. Frank was a mechanic and a carpenter and moved with a knowing swagger.
Young Johnson Cartan, from Cartan's Department Store, trailed along, and the boys moved quickly now, since their fathers and bosses cut them only a few minutes. If Johnson was afraid of going in the water after what had happened the previous day, he didn't show it to the other boys. Everyone agreed that his cousin Renny was as crazy as old Captain Cottrell, whose story of a shark in the creek had made its way around town.
The six boys went down Main to Dock Road, cutting behind the barn to the creek. It was bright and hot and the boys threw their clothes on the banks and began diving off the dilapidated docks at the old Wyckoff steamboat landing. One by one, Clowes, the older boy, then Cartan and O'Hara and Stilwell, dived and stroked to the middle of the creek and swam back to the docks and dived again in a ragged chain.
Some two hours earlier, unknown to the boys, Captain Cottrell had sailed through Matawan warning of the shark he had seen. A few swimmers had been warned away. But that had been during the noon hour, when most people along the creek were at luncheon, and Captain Cottrell did not spread the alarm far enough. Convinced Matawan was safe, Cottrell had motored down the creek to warn others.
Now as boys took turns diving and swimming back to the docks, Albert O'Hara had taken the lead in the chain. He was swimming ahead of Johnson Cartan, Frank Clowes, and Lester Stilwell back to the dock to make another dive. O'Hara was about to climb out of the water when Lester Stilwell cried, “Watch me float, fellas!” Lester gingerly laid his body on the surface of the creek and achieved the small miracle of floating, a proud moment for him, for the boy was so weak that he usually had trouble staying afloat. In the next instant, Charlie Van Brunt saw what he called “the biggest, blackest fish he had ever seen,” streaking underwater for Lester. Lester screamed, and Charlie saw the shark strike, twisting and rolling as it hit Lester, exhibiting its stark white belly and gleaming teeth. To Johnson Cartan, the sight was something he found words for only later. Something huge, something that looked like “an old black weather-beaten board,” rose up out of the water high over little Lester Stilwell. As the boys looked on in horror, they saw Lester's arm in the mouth of the shark and “Lester, being shaken, like a cat shakes a mouse, and then he went under, head first.” Both Lester and the shark disappeared. As the shark jerked the boy underwater, it gave such a mighty swish through the water that its tail hit Albert O'Hara and knocked him against the pilings supporting the pier. Too shocked to feel the painful scrape, O'Hara stared at the reddening circle on the creek and cried, “Oh, Lester's gone!” For a horrific second, Lester Stilwell reappeared, rising out of the water screaming and waving his arms wildly. Then, in an instant, he was pulled back under and disappeared for good.
Small waves had upset the waters of the creek, but they were smoothing and the water was crimson where Lester had been. Suddenly, boys cried, “Oh my God, he's gone!” and swam and stumbled and scrambled out of the water and up on the muddy banks, crying, “Shark! Shark!” Rushing in a group past their heaped clothes, the five boys ran naked down Dock Road and turned right on Main. Frank Clowes was leading them, for he was the oldest, but they were all running dripping wet and wild-eyed into the heart of town, shouting that a shark had taken Lester Stilwell.
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