Demon Fish

by Juliet Eilperin

  Apparently, American readers at this point still needed to be convinced that these animals posed a threat. As Young travels the world finding different ways to make money from sharks, he repeatedly tells people he meets that these fish can actually kill humans. In one instance Young spears a shark whose stomach contained the remnants of a blue serge jacket and human bones, the remains of a wealthy man whose plane had crashed in the ocean. Young tells the tale of the man and his jacket frequently during his travels, sometimes offending his listeners in the process.

  Young’s effort to stoke the public fear of sharks dovetailed with a new literary trend, where a group of contemporary writers were constructing an entire body of literature around hunting and fishing. As writers including Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway penned books about this American subculture, they did their best to portray sharks as brutes. Both Grey’s and Hemingway’s writing glorifies men for taking on these animals in physical contests. A few species, like the mako, earn their respect, but most are like the shovel-nosed sharks Hemingway derides in The Old Man and the Sea, “hateful sharks, bad smelling, scavengers as well as killers.”43

  Just as Hemingway describes hand-to-hand combat in graphic detail, Grey revels in the battle he faces with a fish weighing more than a thousand pounds. In his book An American Angler in Australia, Grey recounts how he fought a tiger shark off Sydney as a group of onlookers watched from a nearby ship. He recognizes the fish’s beauty—“Pearl gray in color, with dark tiger stripes, a huge rounded head and wide flat back, this fish looked incredibly beautiful. I had expected a hideous beast”—but he takes pains to ascribe the worst possible motives to the animal he had lured to its death.

  I had one good long look at this tiger shark while the men were erecting the tripod; and I accorded him more appalling beauty and horrible significance than all the great fish I had ever caught.

  “Well, Mr. Man-eater, you will never kill any boy or girl!” I flung at him.

  That was the deep and powerful emotion I felt—the justification of my act—the worthiness of it, and the pride in what it took.44

  From Grey’s perspective, he had done a public service by killing an animal that could have conceivably hurt some innocent swimmer. But Grey, Hemingway, and others wrote of deliberately battling fish with the skills they had honed over a lifetime; they were not amateurs venturing into the water.

  Still, it was nearly three decades after the attacks of 1916 before the United States as a whole focused once again on a massive shark strike. While both world wars featured horrific attacks on ships that exposed sailors to these ocean predators, the single worst incident stemmed from the sinking of the USS Indianapolis on July 30, 1945. That incident—in which 880 of the nearly 1,200-man crew died in the water, many of them devoured by sharks during the four days it took for a rescue mission to mobilize into action—ranks as the single worst loss of life at sea in the U.S. Navy’s history.

  While the exact number of shark attacks during this episode is still not known, it’s clear from both survivors’ accounts and autopsies that these ocean predators played a major role in boosting the death toll: 88 of the recovered bodies had been bitten by sharks, and many of the survivors suffered damage from shark attacks as well.45 The commanding officer of the USS Helm, the vessel that eventually rescued the remaining 316 survivors, wrote a report that not only described the carnage the animals had caused but also documented how they continued to feed on sailors even as their colleagues sought to save them.

  At that point, sharks largely receded from public view for another three decades. But when the writer Peter Benchley reminded a worldwide audience why they had reason to fear going into the water, he unwittingly did more to instill the intense fear and hatred of sharks than anyone else in the twentieth century.

  Peter Benchley’s home lies just a few blocks away from the main drag in Princeton, New Jersey, a precious university town where even fast-food and coffee outfits must post their names in faux-British wrought-iron lettering above their doors. A beautiful gray manse with white columns, the late writer’s house most closely resembles the eating clubs in town where F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Princeton luminaries used to socialize.

  The third floor of the house truly captures the reach of Benchley’s work. Pasted to the walls are a series of letters—some handwritten, some typed—from Benchley’s fans. The paper has yellowed, and cracked in some places, and some of the ink has faded. But the intensity of the missives—along with that of the black-and-white and color photographs of nubile young women who wrote the author of Jaws in the hopes of scoring a date—remains unchanged. One woman writes that she’s heard Benchley has a “freaky fetish” for not wearing anything below the belt during his television appearances, adding she and her girlfriends think it would be “really groovy” if they could all meet up sometime. Another admirer simply asks, “What is God’s last name?” (Wendy Benchley explains drily, “That’s from one of the schizophrenics.”) Even the movie star Burt Reynolds gets into the act, writing to Benchley on demure gray stationery with a New York City letterhead, “Now that I’m unemployed and have lots of time, why don’t we get together for some drinks.”

  Benchley didn’t start his writing career with the intention of producing a terrifying cult 1970s classic. The son of the author Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of the humorist Robert Benchley, one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table, Peter struck a deal with his father during his teenage years that he could write during the summers and collect the same salary he would have if he had done more mundane chores such as mowing grass or working in a restaurant. He didn’t need to show anyone what he produced, but he had to write.

  When he started writing his first book, Benchley decided to draw upon the time he had spent in Nantucket—he had gone fishing there with his father, and had met Wendy there while sitting in a restaurant puffing on a Lucky Strike cigarette—to provide an eerie and compelling look at how small-town life is transformed when a man-eating shark starts preying on summer beachgoers. Nowadays the word “jaws” immediately brings to mind the ominous yet catchy John Williams musical score that accompanied the 1975 movie (DA-duh-DA-duh, DA-duh-DA-duh), but Benchley’s book is more cerebral than that. Benchley described the shark in its most primordial state, with a scientific accuracy that holds up more than thirty years later.

  Published in 1974, Jaws was an instant success. It rocketed up the best-seller lists, where it stayed for nearly a year. It didn’t just sell on America’s East and West coasts: it sold in landlocked countries like Tibet. Fidel Castro read it and raved about it, saying it offered a compelling critique of U.S. capitalism. The New York publisher sent giant packets of fan letters to the Benchleys’ New Jersey home; eventually the couple tired of reading them and simply asked the publisher to stop.

  Hoping to capitalize on this phenomenon, a young Hollywood director, Steven Spielberg, decided to make a movie based on the book, and when Benchley’s agent called to say it would make it onto the big screen, the author was elated. Wendy Benchley, however, felt differently: “He was thrilled and I cried, and I figured my life was ruined.”

  The film didn’t ruin the Benchleys’ lives, but it did change their everyday existence. Released in the summer, a traditionally dead time for theater releases, it became the first movie to gross $100 million at the box office. (Ultimately, it grossed $450 million worldwide.) It created what Americans now think of as the inevitable annual summer blockbuster, before Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark made it to the screen. It made the cover of Time magazine, spawned three movie sequels, a video game, and two unofficial musicals. (A producer has approached Wendy Benchley about creating a Broadway musical based on Jaws, but she seems even more skeptical about that than she did about her husband’s initial book idea.)

  Everyone involved in Jaws knew that it would come to define them. Benchley joked before his 2006 death that no matter what else he did in life, “When I die, the music that will be played at my funeral will
be ‘DA-duh-DA-duh, DA-duh-DA-duh.’ ” (He was right: it played at the start of his New York City memorial service.) Roy Scheider, who portrayed the police chief Martin Brody in the movie, felt exactly the same way: one of his obituaries noted that he once confessed before his February 10, 2008, death that he feared the role “will be on my tombstone.”46

  Benchley’s book is both more sophisticated—it explores the sharp class divisions that help define summer vacation towns—and less frightening than the movie that stemmed from it. The film’s terrifying nature stems, in part, from what amounted to a technical glitch in the course of making the movie: mechanical problems with the movie’s fake shark (nicknamed Bruce) prevented the filmmakers from showing it too often.47 As Wendy Benchley recalls, “They had all these days where the shark didn’t work, weeks, months. They had to fill in.” But that made Jaws all the more terrifying. It’s the unseen, rather than the seen, that scares us the most.

  For all its nuance, the book still includes a heavy dose of vengeance. At one point Brody and Matt Hooper, a scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, get in an argument about whether it’s rational to, in Hooper’s words, “get out a contract on him,” and it becomes clear that the shark’s demise is inextricably linked with the town’s survival.

  Brody was growing angry—an anger born out of frustration and humiliation. He knew Hooper was right, but he felt that right and wrong were irrelevant to the situation. The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives. Most of all, Brody needed it dead, for the death of the fish would be a catharsis for him.48

  One of the striking things about the shark in Jaws is that, like the one that launched the 1916 attacks off the Jersey shore, it kills several people within a matter of days. By definition, this makes the fish a mass murderer and suggests a sort of conscious strategy on the shark’s part that doesn’t exist in real life.

  Jaws highlighted the obvious: anytime a person enters the ocean, he or she is vulnerable to a shark bite. The fact that these attacks were rare did nothing to calm the public’s nerves; it was their unpredictable nature that mattered. People were scared, and there was little scientists or statisticians could do to ease their fears.

  The film does point out that sharks don’t intentionally hunt people, though it also portrays great whites as lethal predators. Richard Dreyfuss, playing Hooper, manages to both pay tribute to sharks and freak viewers out as he explains how they operate. In an argument with the mayor over whether to close the beach in light of the recent attacks, Hooper explains, “What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim, and eat, and make little sharks.”

  The film also exaggerates the size of great whites swimming off the New England coast, saying the shark is twenty-five feet long. When the gigantic shark emerges from the water for the first time, Brody turns to Quint, the boat’s captain, and deadpans, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

  In writing Jaws, Benchley tapped into humans’ natural terror of sharks. In their essay, “When Humans and Sharks Meet,” Erich Ritter, Kai Lutz, and Marie Levine argue there are a number of reasons we are inclined to be afraid of sharks, something they characterize as “the ubiquitous selachophobia” that permeates modern society. Even though the number of strikes against humans is relatively small in comparison to sharks’ abundance, they are still visibly threatening predators. Just as important, the authors argue, they play into humans’ fear of the dark. All of this taps into our “biologically prepared fear acquisition,” triggering a less-than-rational reaction.49 Every new report of a shark attack—the random, vicious strike from below, out of nowhere—reinforces this fear.

  But by making the attack as vivid as it did—and bringing this message to such a broad audience—Benchley’s work had a disproportionate effect on the public psyche. It was as if by bringing a nightmare to life, Benchley gave it a credibility, a sense of concreteness, it had never had before. As a result, we became convinced that sharks were a far graver threat to us than they actually are.

  One of the oddest things about our view of sharks is that we’re convinced they are everywhere. Several years ago Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, a Democrat, was having lunch in the Members’ Dining Room when the talk turned to sharks. Nowadays, lobbyists who have served in Congress are prohibited from snacking in this exclusive establishment, but for years it was a huge draw, which is why Blumenauer found himself sitting with South Carolina’s Robert “Robin” Tallon, a former House Democrat turned lobbyist. After discussing news of a shark attack, Tallon speculated that sharks must cover the seas, outnumbering humans. Blumenauer—an environmentally minded lawmaker who represents Portland and founded not just the Congressional Bike Caucus but the Livable Communities Task Force to boot—would have none of it. The ocean’s food chain couldn’t sustain that many top predators, he reasoned.

  “This fellow thought I was crazy,” the congressman recalls, sitting in his office. “You know how banter can escalate, even without alcohol.” The two bet $100 on the question. (“I wanted to up the ante, I was so confident,” Blumenauer says now.)

  It seemed like a simple question at the time of the bet, but Blumenauer soon discovered it was almost impossible to pin down. For years, the long-standing wager amounted to an unofficial research project for Blumenauer’s office. Summer interns would make inquiries; sometimes even full-time staffers delved into the question. No one could find the answer. One night, at a Washington dinner party, I learned about the bet. The next day, I endeavored to figure it out.

  I called the Dalhousie University marine biologist Boris Worm, who has spent his career seeking to quantify how many fish are in the sea, in Halifax. “Well,” he offered, “there are nearly seven billion people on earth now, right? There are five hundred species of sharks, so in order to have more sharks than people, you’d have to have ten to twenty million per population. That seems like a lot. My guess would be there are more people than sharks in the world, but it’s hard to say because there are some shark populations we don’t know anything about, like deepwater sharks.

  “Humans are now the most abundant large vertebrate on earth, by far,” he continued. “Once you take out cattle and sheep, which come in roughly second and third, since we raise them, the next most abundant large vertebrate may be the crabeater seal in the Antarctic, which numbers somewhere between ten and fifty million. The worldwide wolf population, to put it in context, numbers only about 150,000. Brown bears are maybe half that.”

  A decent answer, but not definitive enough. So I e-mailed Sarah Fowler, who co-chairs the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Shark Specialist Group, in England. She responded with a more precise guesstimate, along the following lines. About half of the known shark species live in one bioregion of the world, such as tropical Africa and Indo-Malaysia. A significant proportion of them live in restricted areas, so Fowler posited that of these 150 species, they wouldn’t number more than 150 million total. “However, the most fecund and abundant small coastal and shelf shark species that are more widely distributed in a single ocean or region (e.g., regional species of smooth hounds and cat sharks) could number in the tens of millions,” she wrote. “Let’s say about 7 million each on average for ~250 species that are moderately widely distributed. That brings the running total up to 2 billion individuals of ~400 species. Five billion individuals and 100 species to go.”

  Many of those remaining species, she explained, have a more global distribution, while others are rare. She assumed that about thirty are relatively rare or patchily distributed, boasting between 5 and 10 million individuals. Another fifty more common species might have about 40 million individuals, adding 2.2 billion to the total.

  The last twenty species on the list are widespr
ead and abundant. Fowler decided to give these species an average of 100 million each, adding another 2 billion. And then she noted the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the spiny dogfish, despite its substantial depletion through fishing, has a global population of 1 billion.

  “OK, I cheated quite a bit to get to a figure very close to 7 billion,” she wrote. “Total is highly dependent upon a few of the most abundant species, regardless of quality of estimates for the rarities and endemics.”

  In other words, there is no precise way at this moment to calculate whether sharks outnumber humans, or vice versa. It will take research for years to come.

  But details like that don’t bother Blumenauer, who considers Fowler’s answer a “stamp of approval” for his position: “I think there is a super shark specialist who acknowledges reality, and I’m running with it.” Sharks are the subjects of such intense myth, he reasons, it only makes sense that we’ve inflated their numbers out of proportion.

  While it might not provide much comfort, sharks almost always attack humans by accident, rather than on purpose. The classic shark attack follows a pattern of “bite and spit”: the fish will take a bite out of a person to determine if it’s suitable prey, and more often than not it will then spit it out after the shark realizes human flesh is not its snack of choice. What bite it takes is critical, since sometimes a shark can deliver a devastating blow by severing an artery, while other times it may inflict a manageable flesh wound. When Deborah Franzman was swimming in the midst of sea lions off central California’s Avila Beach Pier in 2003, a shark bit into her leg and severed the femoral artery: while it released her after pulling her briefly below the water’s surface, she had bled to death by the time lifeguards reached her minutes later.