Denizens of the Deep

by Philip Wylie

  Sharks, as a rule, are also covered from snout to tail with what are called “denticles” and amount to small teeth. Such minutely toothed skin is known as shagreen; and shark leather is the toughest in the world.

  Sharks, furthermore, have adapted themselves to all sorts of conditions—varying water temperature, countless sorts of food and, as few people know, even to fresh water. There is a body of fresh water known as Lake Nicaragua which contains not only sharks but skates and rays. The lake was once probably a part of the sea; volcanic action closed it off; tributaries gradually diluted its salt content until today it is entirely fresh. But the dilution was slow and the shark population had time to adjust. It did. So it’s hard to kill a shark even by geological means!

  How hard it is to kill one by hand and in person is testified by Captain Art Wills of the Sea Queen—a charterboat berthed at Miami Beach. On a Bimini fishing expedition, the Sea Queen “raised” a mako shark. The big fish gave the angler the fight of his life but, after something over two hours, was brought to gaff.

  “We got a tail rope on the mako,” Captain Wills once told me, “and heaved him aboard. He was a big one, well over four hundred. Still full of fight. I clubbed him with a heavy billy—often and hard enough to kill a dozen blue marlin. He still had a wiggle left. So I broke out an ice pick and stabbed him, by actual count, twenty-three times, in what I thought was the brain at every clip—and what I was sure would be the brain, in twenty-three tries. Then I lashed him with new rope across the stern. His head hung overboard on one side of the boat, his tail on the other. We started in. And all of a sudden I saw that mako begin to tense himself against the rope.”

  Captain Wills is a sanguine man, as a rule. I’ve seen him merely chuckle when two hundred and fifty pounds of blue marlin (on my line) charged into the stern of the Sea Queen and drove his bill deep in the mahogany. At this moment, however, Art Wills admits he was excited:

  “One of the rope strands snapped! I couldn’t believe it! Luckily the mako had swallowed the bait and we’d left the hook, leader and line where it was. Nobody in his right mind would reach into even a presumably dead mako’s mouth to get back a hook! I yelled at the passenger who’d caught the mako to grab his rod and get back in the fighting chair—just in case. Good thing. The ‘in case’ was fact, seconds later. That beat-up, stabbed, ‘dead’ mako gave one enormous heave, snapped all the line around it and went overboard.” Captain Wills paused here and shook his head as if he hardly believed it himself. “We had to fish the fish all over again. It took another hour before the angler could bring him to gaff a second time. When he did, we made doggone sure we wouldn’t lose him overboard again. We lashed him under the canopy and we not only disconnected his brain from the rest of him with a knife, but we sat on him all the way in!”

  That’s a pretty high score in viability—the sheer power to stay alive.

  Until quite recently, nobody understood how to do a good tanning job on a shark’s hide. But in 1920, a Dane in Copenhagen named Brodo Bendixen discovered a method. Later that same year an American, Theodore H. Kohler, found a chemical solution that would dissolve the flinty denticles without ruining the leather underneath. Properly tanned, shagreen is very beautiful; it is flexible and resists wear and scuffing as does no other animal material. As far as I can find out, no great amount of shark leather is in common use—though it ought to be. Perhaps it is a matter of public education. Certainly anybody who has raised a child wouldn’t mind a good-looking, much tougher leather than any present sort for those schoolday shoes!

  The “wily” Orientals, who have been ahead of us “civilized” Westerners in so many things, knew about shark leather long ago. They used it, denticles and all, to cover the grip of sword handles. It was a very practical idea since handles so covered never got slippery—no matter how much blood was spilled on them.

  Shark meat is, of course, edible. Probably millions, even tens of millions of Americans have eaten the meat of sharks or related fish without knowing it. “Grayfish,” for example, is a commercial term for such meat—usually the meat of the small dog shark. In times when scallops were scarce and the price high, commercial fishermen have been known to bang out little cylinders of meat from the flippers or “wings” of rays and skates with a gadget like a cooky cutter. This meat, crumb-dipped, fried in deep fat, covered with tartar sauce, is eaten for scallop by myriads who can’t tell the difference. And of course, the Chinese consider shark-fin soup amongst the world’s major table delicacies. In taste, the meat of a mako shark is said to be a dead ringer for swordfish—high praise, indeed. And the fairly recent discovery that shark liver is rich in vitamins has led to a whole new fishing industry. A shark’s liver, incidentally, is about a quarter of the beast, by weight—so the vitamin hunters get an excellent return on every specimen they take.

  An informal, lunch “club” of anglers to which I belong (in the sense that any fisherman who drops by is a “member” for that day) was used some years ago as a test group in the matter of shark edibility. Somebody in the crowd had caught a small hammerhead. The baleful-looking critter was carefully butchered, filleted, and served one noon for everybody’s lunch. When the members had finished the meal, all expressed themselves as pleased with the anonymous fish course and one even went so far as to say it was the “best damn fish” he’d ever eaten in that particular restaurant—which may or may not have been the highest possible praise for the meat of hammerhead sharks. The “members” were then told what they’d eaten and, being fishermen, weren’t distressed. They’d enjoyed their lunch; but the prejudice still holds even among such salty people: no one ever brought in and ordered up hammerhead fillets again.

  The habits and seaways of sharks are still mysterious. Vast, technical volumes have been published on the subject by brilliant ichthyologists, yet whole departments of shark conduct still remain unknown. The same region of the sea will sometimes abound in sharks and at others, under what appear to be identical conditions, sharks will be harder to find there than pileated woodpeckers in big timber. Nobody knows why. That fact, during the last war, once occasioned me intense embarrassment.

  People who write a great deal about fish and fishing are logically presumed to know whereof they speak. Wherefore, early in the war, along with Michael Lerner of the International Game Fish Association, Erl Roman, the noted angler and present sole instructor in angling in a university, various officers and enlisted men, OSS personnel, boats, a blimp and tons of gear, I joined an expedition designed to study the best means of survival for men cast adrift from sunken boats and for plane crews in the same predicament.

  One of our projects was to demonstrate for photographic illustration how, if sharks began to swarm around your lifeboat, life raft or rubber boat, you could drive them off by banging them in the snout with oars. We figured that all we had to do to get suitable pictures for the proposed training manual was to go where sharks were thick, chum them up with chopped fish, row out in various types of life craft, bait a few sharks in close—and smite them, before the cameras. So we fared forth in Coast Guard vessels to a site on the reefs off the Florida Keys where, ordinarily, it was difficult to catch a fish on hook and line owing to the prevalence of hungry sharks which would swipe your fish before you could reel it in.

  To make absolutely certain that our life rafts and rubber boats would be pictured amidst veritable swarms of big sharks, we took along twelve milk cans full of steer blood—brought to the Keys by jeep from Miami’s slaughterhouses.

  We anchored in a spot selected by myself, by Buddy Carey—then in service and now a fine charterboatman—and by the late Bill Hatch, a world-famed fishing guide, as ideal “shark grounds.” We began to pour chum into the current along the edge of the Gulf Stream. In addition, we slowly poured the blood. Messrs. Lerner, Roman, Wylie and Carey rowed out into this baited region in a variety of vessels. I cannot speak for the others, but my own state of mind was faintly apprehensive, to understate it. A rubber boat makes you feel th
at between you and the sea and its steam-shovel-jawed inhabitants is a bit of fabric no thicker than one side of a hot-water bottle. And a meat-filled, gory sea is supposed to drive sharks crazy.

  We waited. The crimson slick stretched out behind the Coast Guard vessel—for yards, rods, half a mile, a visible red mile. But no sharks appeared. Hours went by. Down below were the coral caverns and pinnacles where sharks had always been. Out at sea was the purple Gulf Stream which is known to be shark-infested. But nary a shark did we lure that day by our overwhelming methods. Why? Too much blood? I doubt it. Some “condition”—such as a prior abundance of food—which made them refuse to “show”? I doubt that, also. They just weren’t around that day, in my opinion. They were elsewhere. They were having a shark convention in some other part of the ocean. It was their day off. It was something, anyhow, which the ichthyologists and the old-timers couldn’t explain—but it happened.

  Nobody knows completely and for sure, even within a single breed of some sharks, where they go or when or why. Makos, for example, are presumed to be migrants that travel enormous ranges, alone, perhaps at times in groups. But I have a keenly observant friend named Ralph Ruhl who is, professionally, a nurseryman, horticulturist, hibiscus-hybridizer and landscape architect. By temperament, he is a naturalist; by hobby, an angler. Several times, over a period of years, he has seen what he swears to be the same mako shark in the same spot and he has somewhat proven that claim by twice hooking (and twice losing) that “same” mako, from a small boat. So it is with considerable confidence that I state a theory of my own: When everything is known about sharks, what we know now will seem like a few drops in a very big bucket.

  One kind of knowledge we have in fair abundance—knowledge about sharks as game fish. Some are; some aren’t. In the earlier days of fishing, sportsmen tangled with sharks (and all sorts of other “monsters” and “devils” of the deep, from mantas to spiny lobsters) with whatever gear they considered appropriate. Lances, harpoons, steel cable, rifles and elephant guns, super-gaffs, harpoon guns and the like were commonly used. If a man could have mounted a cannon on his boat, he would have employed that. In his book Battles with Monsters of the Sea, a doughty Englishman named F. A. Mitchell-Hedges describes graphically any number of such lurid encounters.

  As time has passed, however, and as sports fishing has grown up, more and more men have begun to catch bigger and bigger sharks on standard marlin tackle and the like. A rod, that is, a big reel, a fairly heavy line and plenty of it, a large hook, a metal leader and a whole fish for bait. It was found that, under such conditions, the sharks which most closely resembled other game fishes in fighting tactics were the mackerel sharks—the mako and the porbeagle, also the white, the black-tip and perhaps the thresher. The mako, when hooked, is a leaping fish and some claim it can outjump any other fish in the sea. A small black-tip shark—say a thirty-pounder—hooked on a plug and fought on black-bass tackle, will give any expert a handful of lunging, leaping, surging trouble. I have seen a white shark of enormous size “greyhound”—leap in long drives, that is—twenty feet at a time and over and over, as if some more formidable sea monster were pursuing it. But I’ve never hooked one.

  Erl Roman, the angling “professor” and author mentioned above, reports he once fought a three-hundred-pound white shark for more than three hours on twenty-four-thread line with a stout rod and a 10/0 reel and broke it off when the shark showed no signs whatever of tiring. The rest of the party on board began to grow weary of standing by doing nothing! “To catch that shark,” Earl said, “might have cost them all a whole day’s fishing. I didn’t want it that badly so I broke the line.” Now there, I submit, is a real sportsman!

  In the opinion of the late Zane Grey, an angler with a world of almost world-wide experience (and also, I believe, in the opinion of my friend Ernest Hemingway, who is a rare fisherman), the mako is the top game fish. A mako shark is not a tawny, gray, gray-brown or greenish-brown shark; its back and sides are blue and its belly is white. Its nose is sharply pointed, its teeth are horrendous. And from the description given here of its “viability,” the stamina of the mako as a fighting fish can be estimated. Many an angler with marlin and tuna experience behind him has been forced, at long, reluctant last, to give up on a mako.

  In Bimini waters (off the British Bahamas) mako sharks commonly attack hooked, giant bluefin tunas. Along with multitudes of anglers I’ve brought whopping tunas close to the boat—within a minute or two of gaffing—only to have the cobalt torpedo of a mako sluice into view, bite a huge hole in my tunas and so disqualify them as a “fair caught” fish. And many an old-timer, upon discovering a mako in the vicinity of his hooked tuna, has abandoned the tuna in an attempt to catch the shark.

  In the spring, tunas cruise past Bimini in huge schools; they look like fleets of baby submarines; how many millions go by each year, nobody knows. But they are plentiful in their season and mako sharks are always rare. So numerous anglers will gladly give up a tuna for a shot at a mako. How scarce makos are may be gathered from the fact that in all my twenty-odd years as a deep-sea angler, in all the hundreds and hundreds of days I’ve trolled in mako ranges, I’ve never caught one and was never certain that I’d even hooked one.

  The thresher shark is even rarer in those ranges. So far as I know, only one has ever been taken on rod and reel near Bimini.

  Thresher sharks have an upper caudal fin, or tail fin, about as long as their bodies. This fin is strong, flexible and equipped with an oval enlargement at the tip, so it somewhat resembles a limber club. The thresher uses its tail to kill fish, swimming into a school and flailing furiously—from which habit comes its name. The fish in question, brought in at Cat Cay, had struck a trolled bait with its knobbed tail! The hook had been imbedded in the tail; and the thresher was fought backwards as a result—the “hard way.”

  There is one report, by a credible angler, of the hooking of a thresher shark from shore. The angler was casting out from a tiny rock emergence in the sea—hardly big enough to be called an island. He states that the thresher he hooked swam in close to the rock and tried, by wild swings of its tail, to knock him and his rod and reel off the rock and into the water where, presumably, the thresher planned to deal with its dilemma under conditions more favorable to sharks than anglers.

  Any shark, if he is big enough, will give the rod-and-reel angler a workout. The hammerhead, common off Miami and greatly though unduly feared, probably owing to the frightful look of his eye-stalks and the protruding eyes at their ends, is neither especially fast nor particularly aggressive. Nevertheless, if a big one takes a bait, the angler is in for some fast runs, some hard lunges and a long, dogged scrap. In taking out a novice who would like, eventually, to get a marlin, I often try to spot the fin of a basking hammerhead. A couple of hours with one, on marlin gear, is excellent practice.

  The sum of all we know about sharks suggests most of all that we have much more to learn. They can and do bite and even devour human beings under conditions that are never quite predictable. Yet the fear of sharks is disproportionate. A statistical examination of the millions of us who swim in the sea and the millions who walk on city streets makes it quite evident that, if we were logical, we’d be several hundred times as afraid of automobiles as of sharks.

  In all the great groups of fishes, sharks, among the oldest, are among the most varied and interesting. The sea is full of them—as the plains were once populous with buffalo; sharks would be far harder to exterminate; and we have only begun to find their uses as drug sources, as food, as leather, as fertilizer. Many more uses will be exploited in the great ranges of the sea; some day, no doubt, shark ranching will be a solid business enterprise.

  We who go down to the sea in ships (and rowboats) to fish know that many a kind of shark is a gamester worthy of the most skillful angler’s mettle—and that goes for little black-tips on fly rods as much as for the great mako, on marlin tackle. But our human aversion to the breed has prevented us from gett
ing as well acquainted with sharks as we might. And, with acquaintance, our feelings could change.

  There used to be, in Key West, an impounded arm of the sea, a salt pond, fixed up as an aquarium by the proprietors of a restaurant and night club. Here many ocean fish were kept alive and fed by hand for the entertainment of customers. Among them was a shark—a little one of perhaps forty pounds. The son of the proprietor had grown fond of the shark and, after feeding it for many weeks, had discovered the beast liked to be scratched. It would swim up to shore when the ground was rhythmically stamped. It would then lift its head out of water and rest it on a stone. The young boy would feed it and scratch it as if it were a kitten. In due course, the boy discovered the shark had such confidence in him that he could seize it bodily, drag it out of water, hold it in his arms, or scratch it while it lay on the ground. By and by, of course, the shark would want to return to the water—but only after several minutes of being a “pet shark.”

  At the Lerner Marine Laboratories, in Bimini, it was found not long ago that stingarees, the touchy and terrible cousins of sharks, responded in a similar way to similar treatment. Here, for the purposes of scientific research and observation, hundreds of large ocean fish are maintained alive in big “pens” built in the pellucid harbor. Sting rays, which live well and take food readily under such conditions, would, ordinarily, if you touched them, drive the barbed, needle-sharp, six-inch “stinger” clean through your arm—and leave it there as a dangerous and agonizing surgical problem. But, nowadays, when feeding time comes at the laboratory stockades, the stingarees—monsters as broad as an oriental rug—swim placidly up to the vertical wall where the man with their bucket of small fish stands and flap themselves two-thirds of the way out of water to be fed directly by hand—and to have their backs scratched!