"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.

Shark on the beach at Mbau

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.