Close to Shore

by Michael Capuzzo

  That day and the next, Thursday, July 20, the newspaper promised its readers “the monster will be placed in the window of the Home News, at 135 W. 125th St., where everyone will have an opportunity to see what a man-eating shark really looks like.” Next to the man-eater, the Home News promised, would be a display of the large and small bones found in its stomach.

  The box had arrived in the middle of the week at the American Museum of Natural History, addressed to the director, Frederic Augustus Lucas. It was not unusual for the museum to receive a box of dry bones, poison adders, or shrunken heads for that matter. This box received special attention because an accompanying note claimed that the bones the box contained had been retrieved from the stomach of the man-eating shark.

  Lucas would have treated the claim with his usual skepticism had it not come from someone he knew and trusted. Michael Schleisser and Frederic Lucas were close enough that before Schleisser made a major exploration of Brazil, he requested and received a letter of introduction from Dr. Lucas to a curator at the U.S. National Museum. However, much as Lucas respected the taxidermy work Schleisser had done for the museum, the director remained suspicious that Schleisser was not purely devoted to science. “I am giving a letter of introduction to Mr. Michael Schleisser who is about to make a trip to the interior of Brazil,” Lucas had written. “I have known Mr. Schleisser for a number of years and consider him reliable, although I rather feel that his expedition is largely on account of his love of exploration and partly for photographing.”

  The problem Schleisser confronted Dr. Lucas with was typical of the taxidermist: a discovery that was arguably scientific, but questionable, perhaps irresponsible, even sensational. Before him, unquestionably, was a pile of masticated human bones. Although the bones challenged his theory that sharks were unable to bite through human bones, Dr. Lucas was grateful to Schleisser for what he came to regard as a contribution to science, and wrote a note on museum stationery thanking the taxidermist.

  Dear Mr. Schleisser: I am very much obliged to you for your courtesy in letting me see the bones taken from the shark. They are parts of the left radius and ulna of one of the anterior left ribs. There is no doubt about this. They have, as you see, been badly shattered. Can you tell me the exact species of shark from which these bones were taken, or if you are in doubt, I am sure that Mr. Nichols would be very glad to call and determine the species exactly? Again thanking you for your kindness, I am, F.A. LUCAS, Director.

  From Brooklyn and Staten Island and Greenwich Village they came. Thousands clambered aboard the trolleys to 125th Street in Harlem that Sunday. By the time John Treadwell Nichols arrived at the Home News office, a mob of thirty thousand people had gathered in front of it. Americans at the turn of the century were accustomed to behavior in crowds, for parades and public spectacles were commonplace. So that Sunday the mob formed a line, and began to pass before the window in orderly fashion. There were gasps and cries of “Monster!” Adults shuddered and turned away. Mothers pulled children to the side. Many refused to believe what they saw. The shark was monstrous to the point of being scarcely believable.

  John Nichols pushed to the front and lingered, staring at the man-eater. His first glance eliminated all doubt. The preternaturally wide, torpedo-shaped body; the crescent caudal fin and long, narrow pectoral fins; the small second dorsal and anal fins; the bifurcated coloring; the large gill slits, broad conical snout, and black eyes; the huge teeth, distinctively triangular and serrated, and, unlike most sharks, the teeth in its top and bottom jaws almost symmetrical. The jaws were large enough to have taken human life—“yawning jaws and vicious teeth,” a reporter called them. It was unquestionably Carcharodon carcharias.

  Independent experts had determined that the bones taken from the shark's stomach were human. Physicians identified the eleven-inch bone as the shinbone of a boy—presumably Lester Stilwell's—and a section of rib bone as belonging to a young man, perhaps Charles Bruder. Dr. Lucas, however, maintained these judgments were “incorrect.” The bones were certainly human, Lucas agreed, but based on the size of the shark and the condition of the bones, he claimed they were parts of the left forearm and left upper rib taken from the body of a robust man who had been “dead some time and not the result of any active attack.” This was not proof, in Dr. Lucas's opinion, that a shark could bite clean through human bone, or that sharks attack man. This conclusion supported Dr. Lucas's lifework as well as his theory that the species of the attacker was unknown. In a letter to Bureau of Fisheries Commissioner Hugh Smith, Lucas declared that the great white with human remains inside was not the killer and unfortunately his colleague John Nichols “was not able to get any information other than that published in the newspapers.”

  Time, however, favored the young Dr. Nichols. Unknown to Lucas, Nichols, and their contemporaries, great whites live not only in the tropics but all over the world, and one of the largest populations is off the New Jersey–New York coast. This population is mostly juveniles, however, who take smaller prey and seldom stray close to shore.

  On August 8, 1916, Hugh Smith wrote Frederic Lucas: “The excitement in this matter appears to have died down, much to the relief of this office, and I hope nothing will occur to resuscitate it.”

  By the end of that summer of 1916, the last summer before America entered the Great War, the great white shark had fallen from the front pages of the Times and the Sun and the World. The next spring, Woodrow Wilson told Congress: “The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth . . . the world must be made safe for Democracy.” Even in the era preoccupied with “Over There” and “Lick a Stamp and Lick the Kaiser!” on to the time of flappers and radio, through the Great Depression and the Second World War and beyond, the shark would live on as an enduring presence in the American imagination.

  On July 10, 1917, the one-year anniversary week of the attacks, President Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to raise food production for the war effort, yet bigger news was that five hundred bathers fled screaming from the waters of Rockaway Park after swimmers spied a large fin near shore.

  Over the next few decades, New York newspapers sounded what became an annual alarm, and the parents of Matawan forbade their children from swimming in Matawan Creek. The grand Engleside Hotel in Beach Haven was demolished for wood during World War II and, later still, the New Essex and Sussex Hotel in Spring Lake was converted to condominiums.

  Today all evidence of the great white shark of that long-ago summer is gone. The carcass of the fish disappeared shortly after it was displayed in the window of the Home News, and some years later, a scientist spotted its jaw hanging in a window of a Manhattan shop at 86th and Broadway before it disappeared forever. Yet it was the legacy of this young, aberrant, perhaps sickly or injured great white to frame the way people perceive sharks. In 1974, Peter Benchley invoked the 1916 shark as the role model for his fictional white shark in Jaws.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the deadly predator of 1916 immortalized by Benchley would begin to fade from popular culture. By the 1990s, the concept of the rogue shark had fallen out of scientific favor for lack of proof other than anecdotal material. Shark researchers even began to doubt Nichols's conclusion that the killer of all four victims in 1916 had been a single shark—or even, in all cases, a great white shark. Some suggest that a bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, was the killer of Matawan Creek, as it is the only man-eating species that routinely passes into freshwater, whereas for Carcharodon carcharias, the trip would be extraordinary.

  Indeed, by the twenty-first century, Carcharodon carcharias had assumed a new status as magnificent yet misunderstood sea creature, rare and accidental killer of man, and endangered species protected by the laws of numerous countries, including the United States. So radical was the change in attitude that in 2000 Peter Benchley pleaded with Australians not to destroy a great white that had killed a young swimmer. “This was not a rogue shark, tantalized b
y the taste of human flesh and bound now to kill and kill again. Such creatures do not exist, despite what you might have derived from Jaws. . . . Let us mourn the man and forgive the animal, for, in truth, it knew not what it did.”

  Hermann Oelrichs, whose 1891 reward was never collected, would have appreciated Benchley's view.

  Still, in an era of fisheries that would eradicate it, science that would plumb all its mysteries, and global media that would reveal its every move, the great white endures in the depths where it has always reigned: in cautionary tales told by mothers and fathers, in whispers in the unconscious, in offshore shadows, and in ripples on a tidal creek.

  Selected Bibliography

  The following is a partial record of the sources I consulted for the history and ideas in Close to Shore, offered to give a feeling for the range of material used and as a guide for those wishing to pursue the topics discussed in this book. Among the newspapers, circa 1916, I consulted were The Asbury Park Press, The Baltimore Sun, The Home News (Harlem, New York City), The Keyport News (Keyport, New Jersey), The London Times, The Matawan Journal (Matawan, New Jersey), The New York Daily News, The New York Herald, The New York Sun, The New York Times, The New York World, The Philadelphia Daily News, The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Public Ledger, The Sunday Register (Shrewsbury, N.J.), and The Washington Post. Dozens of magazines and journals were consulted, including the April 1916 Brooklyn Museum Science Bulletin article by John T. Nichols and Robert C. Murphy, “Long Island Fauna: The Sharks (Order Selachii)”; Time magazine; National Geographic; Discover; Philadelphia magazine; New Jersey Monthly; and many others, from The Fishery Bulletin to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

  Able, Kenneth W. and Michael Fahay. The First Year in the Life of Estuarine Fishes in the Middle Atlantic Bight. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

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  Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

  Ainley, David G. and Peter A. Klimley, editors. Great White Sharks: The Biology of Carcharodon carcharias. San Diego: Academic Press, 1996.

  Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. 1931. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

  Allen, Thomas B. The Shark Almanac: A Fully Illustrated Natural History of Sharks, Skates, and Rays. New York: The Lyons Press, 1999.

  Baldridge, H. David. Shark Attack. New York: Berkley Publishing Co., 1974.

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  Champlin, John Denison, with editorial cooperation and an introduction by Frederic A. Lucas. The Young Folks' Cyclopaedia of Natural History. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1905.

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  Gilbert, Perry W., editor. Sharks and Survival. Includes Treatment of Shark-Attack Victims in South Africa by David H. Davies and George D. Campbell. 1963. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath & Co., 1975.

  Harris, Kristina. Victorian and Edwardian Fashions for Women, 1840 to 1919. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1995.

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  Hunter, Allan Jr., editor. The Record of the Class of Nineteen Hundred and Eleven, University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania, 1911.

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  Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. 1942. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956.

  Kendrick, A. Clements. Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1999.

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  Kynett, Harold H. Jr., editor. The Record of the Class of Nineteen Hundred and Twelve. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania, 1912.<
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  Lloyd, John Bailey. Eighteen Miles of History on Long Beach Island. Harvey Cedars, NJ: Down the Shore Publishing and The SandPaper Inc., 1994.

  Lloyd, John Bailey. Six Miles at Sea: A Pictorial History of Long Beach Island. Harvey Cedars, NJ: Down the Shore Publishing and The SandPaper Inc., 1990.

  Lucas, Frederic A. Animals of the Past: An Account of Some of the Creatures of the Ancient World. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1929.

  Lucas, Frederic A. Fifty Years of Museum Work: Autobiography, Unpublished Papers, and Bibliography. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1933.

  Lukas, J. Anthony. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. New York: Touchstone, 1977.

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  Mathiessen, Peter. Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark. New York: Random House, 1971.

  Maxtone-Graham, John. The Only Way to Cross: The Golden Era of the Great Atlantic Express Liners—from the Mauretania to the France and the Queen Elizabeth 2. 1972. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1997.

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  Murphy, Robert Cushman. Fish-Shape Paumanok: Nature and Man on Long Island. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1964.