"SHARKS"
"Man-eaters on land, man-eaters in the water; for God's sake steer
clear of the Fijis!" was the way in which trading captains of forty
years ago epitomized their warnings to those who expressed a desire to
visit Taviuni or Levuka.
Though man-eating on land has become a languishing if not a lost art
in this neck of the tropics, that the practice by the denizens of the
deep is still carried on is attested by the number of stump-armed and
stump-legged natives that one meets in all parts of the Fijis. Yet
in spite of the swarms of sharks that exist there--"You can throw a
stuck pig over in the bay and five minutes later walk ashore dry shod
on black dorsal fins," the mate of a trader at Suva told me--they are
exceedingly whimsical in their appetites and keep one at his wit's end
devising baits that will tempt them.
They had told us in Samoa that Suva Bay was a sharks' nest, and graphic
verification was furnished on the morning following our arrival. It had
been the practice of the Commodore and myself, in all the harbours we
had visited up to this point, both in the North and South Pacific, to
begin the day with a morning plunge over the rail, a practice which,
though not recommended by the old residents, we had never deemed
sufficiently hazardous to warrant denying ourselves the refreshing
pleasure of. Neither of us had been threatened by a shark, and only
three or four lurking black fins had been seen around any of the
yacht's anchorages. So it was with no misgivings that I, drowsy with
sleep, pulled on my bathing suit the first morning in Suva and plunged
over the rail in a deep-eye-opening dive. I will let the Commodore's
journal tell what followed, my own recollections being somewhat
confused.
"Three or four seconds after the Weather Observer dived, I saw him
come sputtering up through the water, gain the starboard gangway in
a succession of wild lunges, come clambering aboard and collapse,
speechless with consternation, on a cockpit transom. Simultaneously, a
great shaft of greenish white shot like a meteor under the stern, and
an instant later a chorus of excited yells broke out on the deck of the
_Wanaka_, the Australian mailboat which had come in during the night
and anchored half a cable's length beyond us. The commotion was caused
by the hooking on a line dangling from the steamer's stern of a huge
'tiger' shark, a monster so heavy that it required lines from two steam
winches to land its floundering twenty feet of length upon the deck.
"The Weather Observer could never explain anything beyond the fact
that, on approaching the surface, he suddenly became aware of a round,
greenish blur, lighter in colour than the water, increasing in size at
a prodigious rate, and forthwith, being seized with terror, got back on
the yacht with the loss of as little time as possible. We have always
supposed that the shark, balked in its rush for a bite of man, sought
solace in bolting the hunk of salt beef on the end of the _Wanaka's_
line, as not five seconds elapsed between one event and the other.
A sailor on the poop of the _Wanaka_, who was about to shout a
warning to us regarding the danger of bathing overside, followed the
course of the shark from where it shot under the stern of the yacht to
the hook which brought it to grief." The rest of our bathing in Suva Bay
was done with the aid of a sailor and a water bucket.
It was in a spirit of revenge for the fright given me on this occasion
that I spent a good portion of our stay in Fiji on punitive expeditions
against sharks, incident to which I learned a good deal regarding the
ways of the "tiger of the sea" that otherwise would not have come under
my observation.
_De gustibus non est disputandum_ is a truth of wide application,
holding good no less generally in the animal kingdom than in that
of man, and in neither more forcibly than in sharkdom. What is one
shark's meat is quite likely to be another shark's poison, and because
a certain bait is sauce for the voracious "man-eater" of Suva Bay, it
does not follow that it is sauce for his epicurean cousin of Pago Pago.
Regarding the tastes of sharks of any one locality, it is usually
possible to speak more definitely, but still with no degree of certainty,
and even the likes and dislikes of a single known individual cannot be
pinned down and charted as with square and compass. This latter fact was
well borne out by the action of a grizzly old fifteen-footer--identified
by the rusty stump of a harpoon planted just aft his dorsal--which I
chanced to observe one day while fishing on one of the reefs that hem in
Suva Bay. The natives pointed him out to me as he nosed his way about
among the other sharks that were nibbling gingerly at the outside corners
of tempting hunks of salt beef lowered for their delectation, and said
that this was the seventh year that they had fished for him, using
everything from "charmed" coconuts and shiny tomato cans to plucked gulls
and live sucking-pigs, without ever coming near to landing him.
"No one has ever seen him so much as smell the bait," said one of my
fuzzy-headed companions, "and from that we know that he must be _tabu_.
Now we no longer give him notice, for we understand that he must be fed
and protected by the Evil Ones."
Hardly were these words spoken before the great harpooned tail
of the wily monster in question gave a vigorous swish, a smooth,
mouse-coloured body shot up through the water, and two triple rows
of gleaming ivory opened and closed upon--nothing more or less than
a bare hook that its owner was pulling up for rebaiting after it had
been dextrously stripped by the "sleight-of-mouth" performance of some
member of the ruck down among the pink coral.
Yet the general trend of the gastronomic preferences of the sharks
of any single bay, or island, or even group of islands, is usually
understood sufficiently well for all practical purposes, and if the
natives or old European residents advise against bathing in certain
localities, it is best not to take the chance. In few parts of the
South Pacific are sharks more plentiful than around Mbau, the old
native capital of Fiji, but in spite of the fact that the natives,
whether engaged in fishing or turtle-catching, or merely swimming
for pleasure, expose themselves constantly in the waters infested
by these monsters, loss of life from that source is rarely heard of.
It was while I was "convalescing" from the effects of the field-day
with the natives of Mbau, of which I wrote in the last chapter, that
I was sitting in the shade of the veranda of the Roku's bungalow,
watching with no little enjoyment the antics of a big band of
supremely happy youngsters who were disporting themselves in
the limpid waters that lapped the sea-wall at that point. Presently
a number of men came down to the wall, straightened out the coils
of some heavy lines, baited up a lot of big chain-leadered hooks,
and began hurling them into the sea but a few yards from where
the boys were swimming.
"Wake up!" I shouted to my young friend, Tom B----, giving his
hammock a vigorous shake. "Isn't it rather a risky business throwing
shark-hooks in where a lot of naked boys are swimming? What if they
should snag one of the youngsters?"
"Boys'r' all right," came in a muffled yawn from under B----'s
palm-leaf hat. "Those chaps aren't fishing for boys; only fishing for
sharks."
"Sharks!" I scoffed. "Sharks in there where those boys are swimming!
Wake up, young man; you're talking in your sleep!"
Thus admonished, B---- sat up, yawned, stretched himself, cracked a
coconut, took several long draughts of its cool contents, and finally
explained that, as a rule, sharks along the windward shore of Vita Levu
did not care much for boys, especially near those localities, like
Mbau, where it was the custom to fish for them daily with succulent
hunks of salt pork.
Sharks are fairly numerous in all of the ports visited by the ships
which carry the mail from New Zealand and Australia to the islands
of the Southwestern Pacific, and it is rarely that one of these
steamers is seen at anchor without from one to half a dozen lines
dangling from its stern. Watching a shark line is a tedious business,
but it is strictly necessary in order that the fisherman may know
when the monster is hooked. Otherwise, its frantic rushes, if
allowed to go unchecked, are pretty sure to cause some part of the
line, leader, or even a portion of its own anatomy to give way,
resulting in its escape. The school-boy's scheme of tying the line
around the big toe and going to sleep would probably work all right
as far as rousing the fisherman was concerned, but the sequel might
not leave him in a condition to give undivided attention to landing
his prize. To this end the sailors of the mail-boats have hit on an
ingenious plan. Instead of taking in their lines when the dinner
gong sounds or when, for any reason, they are on duty elsewhere,
they run a stout piece of marlin twine from the shark-line up to the
steam whistle, leaving it for the "man-eater" himself to announce
the event of his being hooked by sounding a toot.
[Illustration: SHARK ON THE BEACH AT MBAU]
[Illustration: FIJIAN BOYS BOXING]
I regret to have to tell that the inventor of this clever time-saving
expedient, a purser of the steamship _Taviuni_, came near to losing
his position as the result of his first experimental trial. This came
about through his faulty judgment in running the main line--instead of
the comparatively light twine now employed for that connection--up to
the whistle. The latter gave forth a brave toot in response to the jerk
of the big "tiger" at the other end of the line, but the blast was in
the nature of a swan-song. An instant later, with a parting shriek of
agony, the whole of the whistling mechanism was wrenched from the
funnel, and, carrying a string of hammocks and the binnacle-stand
along with it, vanished overboard, spinning like a taffrail log in the
wake of the flying shark. The _Taviuni_ did most of her whistling
with a fog-horn during the remainder of that voyage.
The natives seem to swim about in comparative safety in the shoal
waters of Suva Bay, but the Europeans prefer to keep on the safe side
by taking their dips in "bathing pens." An amusing story is told at
the Fiji Club of a certain visiting naval officer who took a dive into
one of the bathing enclosures at a time that it was occupied by a
fourteen-foot "man-eater." The "pen" was a thirty-by-thirty railed-in
space on the shore of the bay near where a small river came down, and
was built with the ostensible purpose, not of keeping sharks in, but
of keeping them out. The combination of a flood and an unusually high
tide, however, covered the top rail to a depth of a couple of feet or
more, and during the period of submergence the big shark in some
manner nosed his way in, to be left a captive when the water subsided.
The water of the pen was murky from the flood discharge of the river,
but there was nothing in its dull translucence to awaken suspicion in
the minds of the half-dozen officers of a visiting gunboat who, hot and
tired from a ride into the interior, were preparing for a dip.
The officer in question--a man noted for his nervous haste in doing
things--was well ahead of the others in stripping for his plunge, a
circumstance that was entirely responsible for his having to bear
alone the shock of the discovery that the pen was already occupied.
With a snort of contempt for the slowness of his companions, he
sprang from the rocks and disappeared under the cool water in a
long, deep dive. An instant later the pen was a vortex of foam, in
the midst of which whirled the white shoulders of the commander,
and through which cut with lightning flashes the black dorsal and
tail fins of the threshing shark.
Yelling like a Fijian war-dancer, the frightened swimmer reached the
outer palings at the end of half a dozen desperate overhand strokes,
clambered over the barrier, tumbled into the water beyond, and,
wide-eyed with terror, started lunging right off toward the open
sea. When he was finally recalled to shore, he declared that the pen
was literally alive with sharks, and not even after the luckless
"man-eater," riddled with bullets and bristling with the wooden
harpoons of some Fijian fishermen, was hauled out on the beach, could
he be made to believe that the score or more of its fellows among which
he imagined he had plunged had not escaped. Inasmuch as a frightened
shark has never been known to touch even a piece of raw beef, the
impetuous officer was hardly in real danger of anything but heart
failure and a slap or two from the monster's tail.
The fact that the popular observations of the ways of sharks are
largely limited to their dilly-dallyings around baited hooks is
responsible for the very general belief that it is necessary for them
to turn on their backs before taking food into their mouths. Eating
from pieces of meat suspended on a line does not represent the normal
condition under which the shark feeds, and to regard as characteristic
the attitude he assumes in such circumstances is as unreasonable as
similarly to class the antics of a man trying to take a bite from an
apple on a string at a Hallowe'en party. Even when a piece of meat is
free from the hook, and the shark is satiated or suspicious, he will
often roll over and let it settle down gently in his mouth, but this
is not because he is physically unable to do the trick otherwise.
Throw a piece of red beef between three or four hungry "tigers," and
you will be pretty sure to see the quickest of them snap it out of
sight with only the slightest listing of his body to one side or the
other. Sharks turn slightly in feeding for exactly the same reason
that people turn their head slightly in kissing--because their noses
would get in the way if they didn't--but to claim that the one must
turn on its back to eat is as absurd as to maintain that the other
must stand on his head to kiss.
Shark skin, shark teeth, shark oil, shark meat, and several other
by-products of the dead shark are articles of greater or lesser
utility, but I heard an old trader in Fiji tell of where the living
shark was once put to a practical use. This was when they used him as a
prison guard in the old days when British convicts were transported to
Australia, the monsters serving this purpose for many years at the Port
Arthur settlement, ten miles south of Hobart, the present capital of
Tasmania. The prisons at this point, some of which may still be seen,
were situated upon a peninsula whose only connection with the mainland
was by a long, narrow strip of sand called, from its configuration, the
"Eaglehawk's Neck."
The convicts were allowed considerable liberty upon the peninsula,
but to prevent their escape to the mainland half-starved bloodhounds
were chained all the way across the narrowest portion of the "Neck."
Several prisoners having avoided the "bloodhound zone" by swimming,
the prison authorities adopted the gruesome but effective expedient of
feeding the sharks at that point several times a day. In a few weeks the
place became literally alive with the voracious "man-eaters," and from
that time on the only convict who ever escaped accomplished his
purpose by rolling himself up in kelp and working along, inch by inch,
timing his movements to correspond with those of the other heaps of
seaweed that were being rolled by the surf.
Like all other leviathans of the deep, animate and inanimate, the shark
occasionally suffers from barnacles and similar marine parasites which
attach themselves to his hide, and during my stay in Fiji I witnessed
the phenomenon of a number of these monsters, like so many warships,
going into "drydock," as it were, to have their bottoms scraped.
On one of the outer reefs of Suva Bay there is a broad, flat ledge of
coral, washed at low tide by only a foot or two of water. To this place
the sharks that are troubled with barnacles are wont to resort, and,
after picking out a spot where their bodies are just awash, lie for
hours while the gently-moving waves rock and rub them backwards and
forwards against the rough coral of the reef. This "nature treatment"
is said to be most efficacious, and the spectacle of a dozen or more
big "man-eaters" dozing contentedly as the warm waters sway them lazily
to and fro--every now and then squirming in a pleased sort of way,
as a dog does when his spine is rubbed--is something calculated to
awaken, for the moment, at least, a feeling almost akin to sympathy
for these most universally dreaded and detested of all God's
creatures.
Speaking of sympathy for sharks, it may be interesting to note that
there does exist one such monster that may fairly be characterized as
popular. This is the famous "Pelorus Jack," who lives in one of the
great southern sounds of New Zealand, and who has not failed to come
out to meet a single steamer visiting that locality in the last twenty
years. He invariably joins the ship at the same point in the passage,
follows in its wake during the trip about the sound, taking leave of it
again at the identical spot where he picked it up. His regular habits
have made him the subject of no small amount of preferential treatment,
not the least remarkable of which is the greeting and taking leave of
him by the passengers with such hearty old British choruses as "We All
Love Jack," and "When Jack Comes Home Again." Tourists always refer to
him as "Good Old Pelorus," but his "goodness" is a thing which none
of them ever appears to try to cultivate at closer quarters than from
behind the rail of the poop.
The story of the officer who jumped into the bathing pen while it
was occupied by a shark is equalled by another, which I also heard
in Suva, but which occurred at Port Darwin, Northern Australia. The
bathing enclosure at the latter point was supposed to be shark and
alligator-proof. A tremendous spring tide, however, had raised the
water for several feet above the tops of the piles of which the
enclosure was constructed, and during this period two "man-eaters"
and a huge alligator were carried inside. There were no witnesses to
the hostilities that followed, but the next morning early bathers
found several sections of shark floating about the surface of their
plunge, together with a slightly scared, but apparently uninjured,
sixteen-foot alligator.
Mark Twain's story of the shark that swallowed a newspaper in the
Thames and carried it to Australia in advance of the steamer--this was
supposed to have happened in the days before the cable--there to be
caught and opened by Cecil Rhodes, who promptly made his start in life
as the result of an advance tip on the stock market that he culled from
the journal, may be, like the newspaper itself, a little "far-fetched";
nevertheless those monsters have been known to perform gastronomic
feats quite as remarkable as "swallowing" everything contained in a
London daily. "Nobody knows what the knife will bring forth" is an
old sailor's expression often heard when one of these explorative
operations is about to be performed, for a shark's stomach is as full
of surprises as a "grab-bag," and as uncertain as a lottery.
The most remarkable instance I recall in this connection is that of
an enormous "man-eater" that the sailors of _Lurline_ hooked the day
before we sailed from Suva. Besides a very considerable assortment of
other "indigestibles," they took from the stomach of this leviathan
the skull, still bearing the stubs of horns several inches in length,
of a full-grown steer. The grisly object had undoubtedly come from the
slaughter-house dump farther up the bay, but how the act of swallowing
was accomplished was more than we could figure out. The sailors even
went so far as to cut away the jaws of the monster and carry them
along when we sailed, and during the first week of our voyage to
Honolulu they spent most of their time "off watch" in vain endeavours
to force the skull between the shining rows of back-curving teeth. The
jaws broke and fell to pieces at the joint without the puzzle being
solved, but the consensus of opinion, in the forecastle, at least,
appeared to be expressed by the yacht's negro cook when he said "dat
blessed head must ha' done bin swallered when it wuz a littl' ca'f, an'
then growed up inside!"
In the Samoan islands the natives have a legend about a man and a
maid who eloped from Savaii, fled to Tutuila, and were there turned
respectively into a shark and a turtle by the god or devil into whose
hands they chanced to fall. As a proof of this story, the natives claim
that if you go out and sing on a moonlight night at the end of a point
near the village of Leone, Tutuila, the shark and the turtle will
appear to you.
When they told this story to a young American naval officer and myself,
the former said that he was quite ready to believe the transformation
part of it because his outrigger canoe had "turned turtle" that very
morning, while a native dealer who had sold us curios was nothing if
not a "shark."
In the matter of the power of music being able to call up the loving
pair, however, we were both agreed that we would like a demonstration.
That night, therefore, a party of a score or more of the villagers
escorted us out to the point, and started up a good lively Samoan
_himine_. They had finished a swinging native rowing song, and were
just getting under way with their beloved "Tuta-pai, mai Feleni," when
the unmistakable dorsal of a "man-eater" began to cut backwards and
forward across the glittering moon-path. Simultaneously a black hump
began to show above the water immediately in front of us, and presently
the natives called our attention to the fact that it was slowly rising,
adding that the turtle was getting ready to swim over and meet the
shark. It was at this juncture that my observant companion noted that
the tide was rapidly falling, and after ricochetting a round of bullets
from our revolvers off the back of the quondam maiden without stirring
her up to the point of keeping her tryst, we went back to the village
fully convinced that the story was a fabrication, the shark a
coincidence, and the turtle a black rock.