Free American Angler in Australia (1937) by Zane Grey

having gotten him and adding that terrible white-fanged jaw t o my collection. I made a reluctant and secret observation, too, and it wa s that I was going to be scared of a giant shark of his class.

    Chapter VIII
    Fascinating places to fish have been a specialty of mine; and I hav e record of many where no other fisherman ever wet a line. This alway s seemed to be a fetish of mine. New and lonely waters! My preference ha s been the rocky points of islands where two currents meet.
    Fishing off Sydney Heads, Australia, is as far removed from this as coul d well be imagined.
    Great scarred yellow cliffs, like the colored walls of an Arizona canyon , guard the entrance to Sydney Harbor, which, if not really the larges t harbor in the world, is certainly the most wonderful. These bold walls , standing high and sheer, perhaps a mile apart, look down upon the mos t colorful and variable shipping of the Seven Seas. I passed through thi s portal on the S . S . Mariposa, gazing up at the lofty walls, at th e towering lighthouses and the slender wireless stands black against th e sky, never dreaming that the day would come when I saw them above m e while fighting one of the greatest giant fish I ever caught.
    At the end of three months fishing on the South Coast of Australia , during which my party and I caught sixty-seven big fish, mostl y swordfish, weighing twenty-one thousand pounds, we found ourselve s at Watson's Bay, just around the corner of the South Head, within sigh t of all Sydney, and in fact located in the city suburbs, for the purpos e of pursuing further our extraordinary good luck. I hoped, of course, t o catch the first swordfish off Sydney Heads, and incidentally beat th e shark record.
    I was introduced to this Sydney fishing by Mr. Bullen, who held th e record, and who had pioneered the rod-and-reel sport practically alone , and had been put upon his own resources and invention to master th e hazardous and hard game of fishing for the man-eating tiger shark.
    In angling, my admiration and respect go to the man who spends much tim e and money and endurance in the pursuit of one particular fish. Experimen t and persistence are necessary to the making of a great angler. If Mr.
    Bullen has not arrived, he surely is far on the way. For three years h e fished for tiger sharks from boats which in some cases were smaller tha n the fish he fought. His mistakes in method and his development of tackl e were but steps up the stairway to success. I want to record here, in vie w of the small craft he fished out of and the huge size and malignan t nature of tiger sharks, that, after a desperate battle to bring one o f these man-eaters up to the surface, he was justified in shooting it.
    This shooting of sharks, by the way, was the method practiced i n Australia, as harpooning them was and still is prevalent in New Zealand.
    In America we have sixty years' development back of big-game fishing; an d all the sporting clubs disqualify a harpooned or shot fish. Th e justification of this rule is that opportunity presents very many time s to kill a big fish or shark before it has actually waked up. This is no t fair to the angler who fights one for a long time.
    In Australia, however, the situation is vastly different. There ar e thousands of terrible sharks. In the book I am writing, Tales o f Man-eating Sharks, I have data for three hundred tragedies an d disasters. I expect this book will be a revelation to those distinguishe d scientists of the United States who do not believe a shark will attack a human being. Certainly it would be better to fish for sharks and shoo t them on sight than not fish at all. For, every shark killed may save on e or more lives. While I have been in Australia there have been severa l tragedies, particularly horrible. A boy bathing at Manly Beach was take n and carried away for moments in plain sight. Somewhere in South Australi a another boy was swimming near a dock. Suddenly a huge blue pointer shar k