Shark History
Devil Sharks and God Sharks:
The Greeks wrote their legends from the constellations, but
well before them primitive humans projected various representations of their own
devil-god, the shark, on the stars. The stars that the Greeks saw as the
belt of Orion were for the Warran Indians of South America the missing leg of
Nohi-Abassi, a man who had got rid of his mother-in-law by training a murderous
shark to devour her. As legions of men have discovered since then,
Nohi-Abassi learned to his cost that it was not safe to provoke a shark or a
mother-in-law. His leg was cut off by his sister-in-law, apparently
playing the part of the shark, and Nohi-Abassi died. His leg wandered into
one region of the skies, and the rest of his body into another. For some
primitive tribes the shark was an avenging god, for others a two-faced devil.
In many primitive religions, the status of the shark became so complex that it
had several roles: sharks became men, men became sharks. On many Pacific
islands, the insatiable god could not be satisfied by the men, women or children
which it occasionally gulped down in the depths of the sea - so it claimed the
ultimate homage: human sacrifice. The head of the high priests then made
his way among the people accompanied by an assistant wearing a nose similar to
the long snout of the shark. At a signal from his chief, the assistant pointed
his nose towards the crowd. The person, man, woman or child, at whom the nose
happened to be aimed was immediately seized and strangled. His body was ritually
cut up into pieces and thrown into the sea for the shark-gods.
In the Solomon Islands, the deified sharks lived in sacred caves
constructed for them near the coast. Opposite these caves, large stone altars
were erected, on which the bodies of the chosen victims were placed. After
mystical ceremonies had been performed, the bodies were offered to the sharks.
Certain sharks in the Solomon Islands were considered to be incarnations of
deceased ancestors; these were the good sharks. Other estranged sharks, which
roamed between the islands on fiendish missions, were considered malevolent. The
fishermen could, however, drive out these evil-minded sharks by brandishing in
front of them small wooden statuettes representing the familiar sharks.
AU these appalling rites and traditions still existed only a few
decades ago in certain isolated islands, and the more 'civilized" among them
still persist. The Vietnamese fishermen still refer to
the Whale Shark in its capacity as Ca Ong or "Mister Fish". Little altars
beseeching the protection of Ca Ong can be seen on sand dunes all along the
central and southern Vietnamese coast, close to wrecked tanks and other relics
of the war. When the US Navy built the enormous base
at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the remains of an enclosure where the Hawaiian
kings used to make local gladiators fight with captive sharks were found.
The sharks represented the ancestors, and were fed with live humans. The
only weapon the gladiatorial warrior could use in his defense was a single
shark's tooth mounted on a short wooden handle held tightly in the fist.
Only the tooth showed between the two fingers firmly closed around the
handle. The difference between this and the matador, who can dodge a charge
by the bull, was that the warrior was only allowed one chance and that, to
win, he had to let the shark charge him. He was supposed to wait until the
last moment before diving beneath his assailant and trying to disembowel it
with his weapon. Legend has it that sometimes, on rare occasions, the
warrior got the better and killed the shark. Perhaps a royal edict
stipulated that if the warrior drew blood from his adversary he could leave
the infernal arena, failing which it seems impossible that such duels could
have been terminated in any way other than in victory by the shark, which
after all did have a mass of teeth to set against the single one held in the
fist of its opponent, to say nothing of its swiftness of maneuvering in the
water. The shark arena was a circular enclosure of about one hectare, made
up of lava rocks. It had an opening on the seaward side to allow water to
enter. Fish and human bait were thrown into the enclosure in order to
attract sharks into the opening, which was of course shut at the time of the
"battles". The queen of the sharks was supposed to live next to the arena,
at the bottom of the bay. The queen condescended to permit battles near her
refuge, provided that she was seduced by offerings. These offerings were
once again human, for one of the economic realities of life in Hawaii in
former times was that people cost less than pigs.
In 1900, when the U5 Navy had completed
the construction of an enormous dock at Pearl Harbor, at a cost of four
million dollars, the foundations suddenly collapsed under the pressure of an
under-sea eruption, and the whole dock sank under the waters. The engineers
looked into all the hypotheses to no avail, but the natives knew what had
happened: "The queen of the sharks is angry and flexing her back." Even
today, numerous beliefs persist with regard to sharks, not only in Hawaii
but also in Tahiti, the Cook Islands in the Torres Strait, the Marshall
Islands and Samoa, and even among the Alaskan Indians and in Latin America,
where many ancient pieces of pottery have been unearthed depicting swimmers
being devoured by sharks.
In Japan, one of the mythological gods is
the storm god, known as the "shark-man". In fact, the shark is so terrifying
in Japanese legends that when the Chinese thought about a talisman to paint
on their aircraft to fight the Japanese, they chose the demon head of the
Tiger Shark. The American pilots who did the same were known throughout the
world as the "Flying Tigers", when in fact they should have been called the
"flying sharks".
In the Torres Strait, between Papua and
Australia, Mutuk is a legendary man who was delivered from the stomach of
the shark which had swallowed him. His "gastric adventure" naturally brings
to mind Jonah, who was swallowed by a "big fish". As the biblical scribes
were unlikely to distinguish between a fish and a mammal, it was thought
that a whale was probably involved, and most religious representations of
the event stick to that animal. Anatomically, however, it is difficult to
see how a prophet could have passed through the whalebone of a whale, and so
it must indeed have been a big fish, and probably the biggest of all fish,
the shark. Moreover, this shark could not have had a mouth filter like the
Whale Shark, but it would have had to have been large enough to swallow a
man whole. Therefore it could only have been the Great White Shark
(Carcharodon carcharias). And let readers of the bible be reassured,
whale or shark, the regurgitation of a live man is even more miraculous from
the inside of a Great White Shark than from a whale.
During the colonial
period, sailors learned how to catch sharks. The capture was always a
major event on board, and even Napoleon was invited to the spectacle on
board the Bellerophon after his defeat in 1815.
If sharks are legitimately the origin of many myths, they can also, in
certain circumstances, be a brutal means of debunking. In 1776, the
naturalist Thomas Pennant wrote: "The master of a slave ship from Guinea
told me that a wave of suicides had taken hold of the recently bought
slaves, for the poor wretches thought that after their death their bodies
had to be returned to their family, their friends and their country. To
convince them that their bodies would not be condemned to perpetual
wandering, he ordered that one of the slaves be tied by the ankles to a rope
and lowered into the sea. He had scarcely been underwater a minute when the
crew pulled up the body, but only the ankles and the feet protected by the
rope remained intact. All the rest had been devoured by sharks." Thus it was
bluntly demonstrated that the mortal remains would not have to be returned
to the families since they would be fed to the sharks.
If India has its snake-charmers, the Fiji Islands have their
shark-charmers. Twice a year, to avert the sharks from attacking them, the
Fijians would indulge in the 'ceremony of kissing the shark". Father
Laplante was a missionary in these islands up to 1938 and told how the
sharks were captured in a large net, turned over on to their backs by the
slightly drugged officiating ministers, before being kissed on the stomach.
The missionary was astonished that on each occasion the sharks, once kissed,
stopped moving, 'as if the men had an occult power that I wouldn't know how
to define". This custom experienced a renewal of interest in 1960, at Fort
Lauderdale in Florida, when students made it an initiation rite for new
pupils. The police put an end to this very unusual ragging by putting a
close guard on the shark they named "Freddy", before returning it to the
sea. Although it measured only 1.5 meters, it was a Tiger Shark.
The pearl-fishers of Ceylon likewise resorted to shark-charmers to
protect them. The powers of these charmers were hereditary and mystical in
the extreme, as Sir Emerson Tennent reported in 1861, since even if the
charmer was ill and incapable of moving about, it was sufficient for him to
delegate anybody in his place for the sharks to remain placid. Without
wishing to deny this highly mythical power, I shall say that the same
officiates would certainly not have had the same results on the Great
Barrier Reef of Australia. We shall in fact see that, curiously, and despite
its latitude in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka has always remained relatively
safe from attacks.
The mystique attached to sharks has managed to make a
fortune for some, if we believe Franqois Poli's book Les requins sont
captures la nuit (1959, Chicago). Lake Nicaragua is well known in
Central America for the numerous 'man-eaters" it harbors, and the book
concerns an event that prompted the resident lakeside Indians to attempt to
appease the 'lord of the waters". They had very elaborate funeral
ceremonies, at the end of which the bodies, covered in jewels and weighed
down with gold ornaments, were committed to the sharks of the lake in order
to appease them. The latter of course devoured the bodies together with the
jewels, to everyone's satisfaction. Until the day when a Dutchman interfered
by hunting the sharks, opening their bellies and retrieving the gold and the
sacred jewels. He very quickly amassed a fortune, but forgot to leave in
time. Informed of his sacrilegious thefts, the Indians set fire to his house
after having slit his throat. His corpse being unworthy of the sharks, it
had to be carbonized.
Certain myths have given rise to real events, like that
we have just mentioned, and certain events could have given rise to myths
had their improbability not been far too gross. For instance the story told
by Marc Twain, and regarded as a true fact for some years. According to him,
a certain Cecil Rhodes was said to have caught, close to Australia, a shark
which had swallowed a newspaper in London ten days previously; the lucky
fisherman thus learned before everybody else that the wool market had shot
up considerably and he invested considerable sums risk- free, which turned
out to be the beginnings of an enormous fortune.
Certain shark attributes, alleged but not proven, easily become
superstitious beliefs. For example, the ability that sharks are supposed to
have to 'smell death". Many seamen who died aboard ships and whose bodies
were committed to the sea in fact did find their graves in a shark's
stomach. But the superstition grew with time until sharks were believed to
be able to know when a man was on the point of dying, and the appearance of
a shark in the wake of a ship became a sign of imminent death on board.
When a cholera or yellow fever epidemic broke out on board a ship, the
superstitious believed that the sharks would remain behind them until the
epidemic had delivered its final victim. A skipper who sailed from San
Francisco added to the legend. He often carried an unusual cargo: the
corpses of Chinese people who had died in the United States, and who,
according to ancient custom, had to be buried in China. This skipper was
categorical: when transporting bodies, his boat was followed by an army of
sharks as if they were able to detect the corpses encased in plated coffins
down in the hold. The sharks never appeared when his cargo was less macabre.
This illustration from the 19th century
represents the shark as an exotic curiosity rather than a "killing machine".
It is curious to note that in the brotherhood of seamen,
so respectful of traditions and even of superstitions, there has never been
a prohibition on naming a ship Shark, Tiburon or Requin. When one
knows the price to be paid for uttering the mere name of the "animal
with big ears" (the rabbit) on board a ship, it is surprising that the
shark, which has nevertheless terrified generations of seamen and castaways,
is not put in the same category. In the United States alone, six ships have
been named Shark: the first, in 1821, was a twelve-gun schooner, and the
other five were submarines, the last of which, launched in 1960, was a
nuclear-powered submersible.
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