Shark Life: True Stories About Sharks & the Sea

by Peter Benchley

  “Depends where you cut it,” he said. “Cut it above the air sacs, the lower half will float. Cut it below the air sacs, the upper half will float.” He paused, then asked, “What're you up to?”

  “Trying to tell a story about a shark.”

  “That's some shark.”

  “Yup,” I said. “I don't imagine anything'll come of it, but I figure, why not?”

  “Sure. Nothing to lose.”

  What I was doing, in fact, was making one final attempt to stay alive as a writer. I was scratching out a few days’ work each week from a division of Newsweek, and I was writing articles, on anything, for anyone who would pay for them. I wrote book reviews, movie reviews, travel pieces, and—most enjoyably—reports from Nantucket, Bermuda, and New Zealand for National Geographic magazine.

  I tried to save a couple of days each week for work of my own. The results were mostly short stories and film scripts that didn't sell. Since there was no room to work at home and I couldn't afford a proper office, I rented an empty back room in a furnace supply company. The manufacture and repair of furnaces isn't the quietest of businesses, and it wasn't a great place for the flowering of the creative imagination. But since the garden of my imagination appeared to be producing only weeds, little seemed to be lost to the music of sledgehammers against sheet metal.

  I was very lucky to have a literary agent. As a favor to my father, one of his agents, a kindly and generous woman named Roberta Pryor, had taken me on when I was sixteen. She had even sold a short story of mine when I was twenty. Roberta refused to give up on me and encouraged me to have lunch with editors from publishing houses. I kept two ideas ready for those lunches. One idea was for a nonfiction book, a history of pirates, who had always interested me. The other was for a fictional book about a great white shark that terrorizes a resort community. Folded in my wallet was a yellowed 1964 clipping from the New York Daily News that reported the capture of a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island. I would show it at the first hint of disbelief that such an animal could exist, let alone that it might attack boats and eat people.

  I believe that everyone on earth is, at some period in his or her life, fascinated by sharks or dinosaurs or both. Most of us outgrow our obsession. A lucky few are able to indulge it throughout our lives. When I was a boy, I spent my summers on the island of Nantucket, whose waters were well populated by sharks: sand sharks, blue sharks, and, once in a great while, a mako. I fished frequently, and on hot and windless days the Atlantic Ocean surrounding Nantucket sprouted shark fins like asparagus spears. To me they spoke of the unknown, the mysterious, of menace and adventure— and (when I'd get carried away) of ancient evil.

  I had read most of the available literature about sharks— there wasn't much. I had seen Blue Water, White Death, the 1971 feature film that, for me, remains the finest documentary ever made about sharks. So I knew as much as any amateur about sharks. Editors went away from our meetings interested and armed with a vague pledge from me to write an outline—sometime, about something to do with sharks— and I went away and didn't write the outline.

  Then one day I had lunch with Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, and when he returned to his office, he called Roberta and offered to pay me one thousand dollars for the first four chapters of an untitled shark novel. That one thousand dollars would be part of an overall advance of seventy-five hundred dollars, which would be paid when— and if—I delivered a complete and acceptable manuscript.

  Of course, I fell headfirst into the trap. I signed the paper, took the money, and cashed the check. I didn't write the four chapters until Roberta told me I'd have to either write them or return the money (which, naturally, had vanished). Then I did write the four chapters, and Tom didn't like them because I had tried to write them funny. (Writing a funny thriller about a shark eating people is, I soon realized, nearly impossible.) I rewrote the pages, and Tom liked them. So I continued with the story, which did, at last, get done, after more than a year of writing and rewriting.

  There was a problem with the title: we didn't have one. Half an hour before the book was to go into production, there was still no title. Tom and I reviewed some of the hundred plus titles we had tried. I had come up with titles like A Stillness in the Water and The Silence of Death. There were monster titles: Leviathan, Leviathan Rising, The Jaws of Leviathan. There were White Death and The Jaws of Death and Summer of the Shark. My father contributed Wha's That Noshin’ on My Laig?

  Finally I said, “Look, there's no way we're gonna agree on a title. There's only one word we both like, so let's make that the title. Let's call it Jaws.”

  Tom thought for a moment, then nodded. “At least it's short.”

  I called my father and told him the title.

  “What's it mean?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But at least it's short.”

  I called Roberta and told her the title. “That's terrible,” she said. “What's it mean?”

  “Beats me,” I replied. “But it sure is short.”

  Though no one liked it much, no one had a better idea, so no one protested. After all, they reasoned, what we have here is a first novel, and nobody reads first novels, anyway. Besides, it's a first novel about a fish, for God's sake, and who cares? At least it's done.

  Furthermore, we all loudly agreed that there wasn't a chance that anybody would ever make a movie out of the book. I knew it was impossible to catch and train a great white shark. Everybody else knew that Hollywood's special-effects technology was nowhere near sophisticated enough to make a believable model of a great white shark.

  So we called it Jaws, and that, for the time being, was that.

  The book was published in the spring of 1974, to generally good reviews. Jaws was not, in hardcover, the huge bestseller that legend has made it. It climbed slowly up the list of the New York Times Book Review, and though it lingered for forty-four weeks, it never made it to number one. An obstinate book about a rabbit, Watership Down, refused to give up the number one slot. Nor did Jaws sell anywhere near the number of hardcover copies a bestseller would today. Nowadays, novels like J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books sell millions of copies. Jaws sold about 125,000 copies.

  The story in paperback was entirely different. Jaws was number one for months on lists all over the world. In the United States alone it sold more than nine million copies. But that success had to do in part with the release of the movie.

  Film rights to Jaws had been bought by Universal Pictures. They permitted me to write a couple of the early drafts of the screenplay, and—knowing that in the heart of many writers lives a secret ham—they actually cast me in the film. The movie went into production not long after the book was published. I visited the set, played the role of the TV reporter on the beach on the Fourth of July, and, meanwhile, tried unsuccessfully to live a normal life.

  Sometime during that hectic spring and summer of 1974, John Wilcox, producer of ABC's television show The American Sportsman, contacted me. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in traveling to Australia to do a show about going into the water (in a cage, of course) with great white sharks. The American Sportsman, which ran for twenty years, from 1966 to 1986, was among the first and best of the TV sports shows. Each week it ran three or four segments that featured celebrities participating in an outdoor sport. Thus far, Wilcox hadn't produced any scuba-diving segments because there hadn't been any demand for them. Where was the excitement or entertainment in taking a movie camera underwater, where the celebrity couldn't talk, and filming fish swimming around on a reef?

  Jaws and all the attention it was getting led Wilcox to believe that sharks—unseen, dangerous, and, best of all, man-eating—could produce … well, I have to say it … monster ratings.

  I was a certified diver, though by no means a confidently experienced one. Years earlier, while earning my certification in the Bahamas, I had seen a shark in the distance, minding its own business. My reaction had been a common one: I panicked. I
grabbed my instructor by the arm, pointed at the shark, and gestured that it was time for us to surface. When he calmly refused, I breathed so deeply and so rapidly that I sucked my tank dry.

  Yet I agreed to journey to Australia for ABC—on one condition: I wanted to bring with me one of the handful of people who had ever been in the water with white sharks: Stan Waterman. Stan was a cameraman and an associate producer on Blue Water, White Death and a pioneer in scuba diving. Most important, Stan was a neighbor and close friend whom I would trust with my life.

  It sounded like fun. After spending the previous year and a half locked up in a room alone, writing, I thought it would be a welcome relief, an adventure. As with the writing and publishing of Jaws and the writing, shooting, and subsequent release of the movie, I hadn't the faintest idea what I was about to get myself into.

  3

  South Australia, 1974

  Part 2

  The journey for The American Sportsman had not begun in that cage in the home range of the great white sharks: the cold, dark waters near Dangerous Reef in the Neptune Islands. Rather, the shooting schedule had been designed, wisely, to introduce me gradually to diving with sharks in the wild. The TV crew wanted me to get used to seeing sharks underwater. They hoped I would learn from swimming with some of the less imposing species that while sharks are indeed powerful and efficient predators, they know that human beings are not desirable prey.

  No one—I least of all—wanted me to be so frightened that I'd refuse to participate in the “money shots.” Those were the moments of peril with great white sharks that TV viewers would tune in to see. In the past, some celebrities had frozen at critical moments and refused to go on. Sometimes they invented elaborate excuses that included suddenly being called to meetings with Hollywood moguls. Somehow these calls had mysteriously made their way to places so remote that they were unreachable by phone, wires, or radio. (There were no faxes back then, no cell phones, no satellite dishes, no pagers.)

  We began on the Great Barrier Reef, where there was no danger of seeing a great white shark because, supposedly, great whites didn't exist on the Barrier Reef. The water there was considered too warm; white sharks preferred the cool seas of South Australia (and California, New York, and Massachusetts). Also, the Barrier Reef was well charted, well known, and visited year-round by thousands of divers. The ports along the East Coast were populated by knowledgeable seamen who could choose specific parts of the reef to dive in, depending on what the clients wanted to see.

  The Great Barrier Reef is one of our planet's largest living organisms, an interconnected complex of creatures that is fifteen hundred miles long. It's the longest, the biggest, the richest reef system in the world. It has wild areas, restricted areas, populated areas, tourist areas, and conservation areas.

  It was decided that I should learn how to dive with sharks by beginning with what Australians call bronze whalers. Bronze whalers are relatively small sharks (five to seven feet long) that tend to gather in schools. They are generally regarded as controllable by people experienced in dealing with them, although they can be dangerous when their territory is threatened or when they're fighting over food.

  Our first morning on the reef, Stan Waterman had assembled the underwater housing for his 16mm movie camera. He had decided to take the empty housing into the water first, to make sure it wouldn't spring a leak and flood his camera with salt water.

  He strapped on a scuba tank and I followed him, eager to get as much experience as possible under safe conditions (as I had been assured they were). We sat on the swim step at the back of the boat—the gaudy reef and sandy bottom were clearly visible through no more than thirty feet of clear water—rinsed our masks, and rolled forward into the sea.

  The first couple of seconds of every dive are discombobulating. When you're surrounded by bubbles escaping from your regulator and your equipment, you're blind and deaf. Up feels like down, down like up. Very quickly, though, your eyes adjust, and your inner ear orients you in this new space. You hear the comforting sound of air being inhaled and exhaled through your regulator.

  When we regained our senses, Stan and I nodded to each other and started down.

  He saw it first and recognized it immediately. I might have seen it, too; I don't remember. But I do remember noticing its peculiar features: the pointed snout, the blue-gray upper body and stark white underbelly, the perfect triangle of pectoral fins and dorsal fin. And one of the dead giveaways I would soon learn to recognize: the apparently toothless upper jaw, lip rolled under, concealing the rows of sheathed daggers.

  It was angling up toward us, slowly, as if idly curious. Stan touched my arm and looked into my eyes. There was something so earnest in his gaze—the eyes that normally shone and sparkled were as flat as slate—that I knew instantly what he was saying: Stick with me, do what I do, for we are being approached by a Great … White … Shark.

  My first instinct, of course, was to turn and flee, but by now the shark was within ten or fifteen feet of us. Even in my terror I knew that flight would send a one-word message to the animal: food. So I followed Stan.

  Holding his camera housing before him, Stan swam slowly down, directly toward the shark. I could see that this was not, in fact, a big great white, though part of my brain registered it as the size of a rhinoceros. It was about ten feet long, a young male. It was probably still adapting to its world, learning about water temperature, hunting grounds, feeding methods—and now, analyzing prey.

  I found myself wondering what we looked like to the shark. Large, loud, bubbling creatures, similar to seals or sea lions in our black wet suits, but with one big difference: we were unafraid (after all, we weren't running but were actually approaching). We might even look aggressive. Still, nothing to be feared. The only things this animal would fear would be larger versions of itself and killer whales.

  Quietly, we descended. Even more quietly, it ascended. Are you crazy? Why are you playing chicken with a great white shark?

  When we were no more than five feet apart, the shark blinked. Without seeming to flick its tail or alter the pitch of its fins or move a muscle, it changed direction from up to down and passed beneath us. We stopped and turned, and watched the shark disappear into the gray canyons of the deeper reef.

  Once safe back aboard the boat, I protested. “I thought … you said … you promised …”

  “I know,” Stan said with a grin. “Amazing, isn't it? Can you believe the luck? And I didn't even have my camera!”

  “But what about—”

  “The first law of sharks,” he said, “is this: forget all the laws about sharks.”

  For the next nine days we waited and watched and baited and dove—day and night, hour after hour—and we saw no sharks of any species. We set out chum slicks of fish guts and oil; the crew speared fish and we hung the corpses off the stern of the boat. We prepared savory baits and tied them to brain corals and then hid quietly in crannies in the reef until, one by one, we ran out of air and surfaced. Then we put new tanks into our backpacks and descended again to resume our posts.

  We swam free, without cages. Back then most divers thought you needed cages only when you were dealing with great white sharks, or when you were filming large numbers of big sharks that might be aggressive. Now we know better.

  The water was warmer than eighty degrees, and our wet suits kept us comfortable for a long time. But eventually the hardiest of us got chilly and began to shiver, and, again one by one, we gave in to the cold and surfaced for good.

  With one day to go in this first half of our schedule, we had no film, not a single frame of any shark in the water, with or without people. None of the experts could imagine where the sharks could possibly have gone. Bronze whalers were always around this area. The local crew had been here, all told, for more than fifty years, and they had never seen anything like this. If only we'd been here two weeks before; the sharks had been jumping everywhere. And so on—every excuse ever uttered by every fishing guid
e and boat captain who has ever struck a dry hole in the ocean.

  Our tenth and last day began exactly like the others: clear, hot, flat calm, no breeze, and very little current. The corpse of a big stingray was tied to a brain coral as bait. I dove down and took my position in the sand. I was kneeling (as instructed) exactly thirty-one inches from the stingray. This was the distance needed for Stan to capture, in the same picture frame, me and any shark that might show up.

  After about an hour I had emptied my tank of compressed air. So I surfaced, stretched, warmed myself in the sun for a few minutes, changed tanks, and dove down again. Almost weightless, rocked gently by what current there was, snug and cozy in my rubber suit in the warm ocean, I fell asleep. At least, I must have, for I have no memory of time passing or of seeing or hearing anything until I felt Stan tap my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw, less than an arm's length away, a shark the size of a school bus about to assault our stingray bait.

  It was a tiger shark. There was no mistaking the stripes on its flanks, the peculiar catfish-like protrusions from its nasal passages, the broad, flat head, and the curved, serrated teeth in its top and bottom jaws. A tiger is one of the few species of shark that has well earned the title man-eater. Its mouth was open, and the upper jaw had dropped down and rolled its teeth into the bite position.

  The nictitating membrane—a defense mechanism in many sharks designed to cover the eyeball and protect it from the claws or teeth of struggling prey—had slid up and over all but a tiny slit of the yellowish eye. That was a sign that the shark had decided to bite—had, in fact, begun to bite. I thought the tiger looked like a maniac.

  Startled as much as afraid, I must have flinched backward, for I felt Stan's hand pushing me forward.

  Thirty-one inches, I thought. That thing is thirty-one inches from my face.

  The tiger shark was enormous, at least thirteen feet long. It grabbed the stingray and began to shake it. The huge body writhed, stirring up a cloud of sand and generating pressure waves that rocked me backward. I looked for something to hold on to, to steady myself. But the only solid structure within reach was the brain coral to which the ray was tied. Somehow I thought that to put my hands into the shark's mouth might be … a bad idea.