Free Close to Shore by Michael Capuzzo, Mike Capuzzo Page B

life.” By 1913, the best-known and highest-paid author in the world was Jack London, the adventure writer who believed life was a “testing ground of the strong.” Size, strength, and gusto were paramount—the bigness of bridges and railroads, steamships and skyscrapers, the Standard Oil Company, the big stick of American imperialism abroad. Life was a competition of beasts, a social Darwinist struggle for supremacy, with mankind prevailing over the lower orders and superior men triumphing above all others. Charles and his friends could quote by heart the new naturalist philosophy, from Frank Norris, from Upton Sinclair—and from Jack London's
The Sea Wolf
:

    I believe that life is a mess. It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves or may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.

The Sea Monster
    T he great white shark swimming in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream was adapted to live anywhere in the world, in the Gulf of Alaska and the Mediterranean, off the coasts of Formosa and southern Chile. In cooler waters, its vascular system warmed the blood flowing to its eyes and brain, a genetic response enabling it to live and hunt in waters of widely varying temperature. Its migration north along the eastern seaboard of the United States was a thoughtless, instinctual action, but the shark was not the pea-brained creature it is often portrayed to be. The great white, in fact, possesses a large and complex brain. Theoretically, it could be trained, were the task not unthinkably dangerous. As it swam and grew, the shark adapted and learned by experience, but the ability to reason, suggested some experts, was beyond it. “Reasoning implies the ability
to integrate experience, forethought, rationality, learning . . . into a complex decision-making process,” ichthyologist George Burgess of the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History says. “Sharks, like most animals, simply react in predetermined ways that, from an evolutionary standpoint, are clearly effective—or else they wouldn't be here any longer! That's why white sharks don't hold grudges, and don't spare women and children . . .”
    Most of its brain is given over to enormous olfactory lobes, and thus it has been called a “brain of smell.” It can smell prey a quarter-mile away. Sharks have been observed, writes Thomas B. Allen in
The Shark Almanac
, trailing bathers in the shallows who had scratches on their legs. According to the zoologist A. D. Hasler, “We are concerned here with a sense of such refined acuity that it defies comparable attainment by the most sensitive instruments of modern chemical analysis.”
    Bathers with cut fingers may have been a mild curiosity to most sharks, but the young great white faced more pressing problems now. Competition among the large predators in the Gulf Stream was intense.
    After days, the great current passed on without it. The Gulf Stream plunged north, roiling past the coasts of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, turning east at Nova Scotia to cross the Atlantic to England. Somewhere approximately seventy miles east of New Jersey, a looping wave, a fluke current, whirled the shark out of the mighty stream. Suddenly, the crowds were gone. Even surrounded by prey in the Gulf Stream, it had failed to sustain itself. And now, the crowds had gone. The small pelagic fish, the helpless prey, had disappeared.
    Six hundred feet beneath the shark, the continental shelf was lush in bottom fishes—rake and cod, ling and porgies—a short dive for a great white, but this shark had grown used to hunting the surface, and passed over the bottom feeders.
    The young great white was lost, pulled by a stray plume of the Gulf Stream. Of all the fish in the sea, it was the deadliest, yet,