Free Demon Fish by Juliet Eilperin Page A

ensure that this supply of food would continue for years to come. 35
    At times, sailors boasted about their narrow escapes from such sea monsters. Julius L. Esping, a sailor who struggled with drink and women early in his life before becoming an ardent Christian missionary, wrote in his memoir that he skirted death on a trip from Brazil to New York City:
On our return passage I went into the sea to bathe, and while swimming near the ship, the captain, who was walking on deck, noticed a large shark approaching the vessel, and enquired of one of the crew if any of the men were in the water. On receiving an affirmative reply he ran to the stern of the ship and told me of the shark, barely in time for me to make my escape. Being informed of my danger, I looked around and saw the monster coming with lightning speed directly toward me. With a desperate effort I made for the martingale, and just cleared the water to save myself. All who witnessed the operation concluded that if the shark had closed its jaws on my body, “the New York harpies would have been heavy losers.” 36

    In certain instances, sailors on whaling ships came into conflict with sharks because they were competing for the same prey. Once sailors managed to harpoon a whale, they still faced the task of hauling their prey up on board, often in the midst of the shark feeding frenzy that would inevitably ensue from such an attack. One of the best accounts of this sort of contest comes from George Barker’s 1916 self-published memoir, Thrilling Adventures of the Whaler Alcyone: Killing Man-Eating Sharks in the Indian Ocean, Hunting Kangaroos in Australia . Barker, a Boston native who headed to sea on a whaler as a sixteen-year-old, describes how safety precautions for carving up whales in the water were nonexistent:
The mate tied a rope under his arms and he jumped into the sea and slipped down between the whale and the side of the schooner and worked his way along until he came to the head. Fastening the rope securely, he shouted to the boys on deck to haul him up.
When near the deck of the vessel he noticed that one of the crew was standing on a staging with a long lance in his hand, while another held a lantern, and all wore a scared look on their faces. Upon landing on the deck he asked the meaning of this, and was told that the water around the whale’s body was filled with sharks and that several times the lances were thrown close to him to ward off these man-eating monsters.
He then looked over the side of the schooner and by the aid of the lantern could see several sharks swimming about. He was then convinced that the officers of a whaler cared but little for a man’s or a boy’s life. Nothing further was done that night. 37
    While Esping and Barker were little-known American seamen whose brushes with sharks went largely unnoticed, the Englishman Brook Watson made sure to immortalize the 1749 attack that cost him his right leg just below the knee. At the time Watson was a fourteen-year-old orphan traveling on a trading ship in the harbor of Havana, Cuba: he went on to become a successful London merchant and eventually mayor of London and a baronet. John Singleton Copley’s iconic 1778 painting depicts Watson, in a state of shock, while three of his shipmates try to pull him from the water and another prepares to harpoon a vicious shark, its jaws agape. The painting ranks as one of the most famous shark attack scenes of all time: the animal is a hulking menace, with a glowing yellowish eye and serrated teeth.

    But the painting, which Watson presumably commissioned himself after meeting Copley in London four years before, was not enough for the survivor. When he was crowned a baronet more than half a century later, Watson asked for a coat of arms alluding to his attack. The design includes the Latin motto Scuto Divino (“Under God’s Protection”) and features Neptune, the god of the sea, using a trident to repel an attacking shark. The upper-left corner