Free Demon Fish by Juliet Eilperin

Holland), where, he wrote, “There are Abundance of them in this particular Sound, that I therefore give it the Name of Shark’s Bay.” (The name persists to this day.) The sailors not only munched on sharks there; they dissected them in gruesome detail: in one eleven-foot-long shark, they “found the Head and Boans of a Hippopotomus; the hairy Lips of which were still sound and not putrified, and the Jaw was also firm, out of which we pluckt a great many Teeth, 2 of them 8 Inches long, and as big as a Man’s Thumb, small at one end, and a little crooked; the rest not above half so long. The Maw was full of Jelly which stank extreamly: However I saved for a while the Teeth and the Sharks Jaw: The Flesh of it was divided among my Men; and they took care that no waste should be made of it.” 31 At times sailors even sought sharks out for their own amusement, as the log of the Leopard , a ship that sailed the Gulf of Maine’s Frenchman Bay in 1861, makes clear. “Catch a shirk with pork had some fun,” it recorded. From Dampier’s utilitarian perspective, sharks were a marine resource like any other, which could help his crew survive. While the captain was not above saving part of his catch as a keepsake, laying claim to one shark’s teeth and jaws, he neither glamorizes nor demonizes the animals. And with enough vinegar and pepper, they made for decent rations.
    But most sailors came to view sharks with hostility, seeing them as a mortal threat. It’s not an accident that the first detailed eyewitness account of a shark attack—which now ranks as the earliest record in the International Shark Attack File—involved a sailor. The 1580 Fugger News-Letter report describes a seaman falling off his ship somewhere between Portugal and India in vivid detail. While he grabbed a line his shipmates tossed him, “there appeared from below the surface of the sea a large monster, called Tiburon; it rushed on the man and tore him to pieces before our very eyes. That surely was a grievous death.” 32 For Westerners who had been largely shielded from sharks for centuries, these animals suddenly emerged as an unseen threat that could hurt them without warning, and this fear only grew as ocean exploration intensified.
    Historical accounts make it clear those riding on slave ships were particularly vulnerable to attack because these overcrowded ships released their waste—and even some of their slaves—into the ocean, which drew sharks to the vessels. Samuel Robinson, a Scottish teenager who worked on his uncle’s slave ship at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote a memoir decades later in which he recalled the sharks that would follow the trail of waste and trash thrown from the vessel on which he sailed: “The very sight of him slowly moving round the ship, with his black fin two feet above the water, his broad snout and small eyes, and the altogether villainous look of the fellow, make one shiver, even when at a safe distance.” 33

    While Robinson was able to keep his distance, not all the slaves aboard the ships did. Sailors frequently discarded the bodies of dead African captives overboard, and occasionally threatened to do the same to their live cargo. At times slaves who jumped into the ocean to escape their captors fell prey to an equally gruesome fate. 34 These seafaring tales were so grim that an abolitionist named James Tytler used the prospect of this watery grave in the late eighteenth century to bolster his antislavery argument, submitting a document to the British House of Lords titled “The Petition of the Sharks of Africa.” Written tongue in cheek from the sharks’ perspective, the petition recounted how they had prospered at the expense of the slaves they picked off during these transatlantic crossings, which gave them “large quantities of their most favourite food—human flesh.” These “sharks” wrote they were confident the British lords shared sufficient “wisdom and fellow feeling” to