WHEN PHIL MAY DREW A SHARK

Hawera Star, Volume LIII, 4 November 1933, Page 11

WHEN PHIL MAY DREW A SHARK

Jbj" AN-EATING sharks visited New YorK-rvew Jersey waters in 1916, when four persons fell victims to their hunger. Shipping had been reduced to zero by the war, and it was conjectured that deep-sea sharks, deprived of the food thrown from ships, were suffering short commons like the rest of the world, writes 11. K. Chambers in •the “Literary Digest." One specimen nosed inland, up a

meadow creek at Mattawau, into a neighbouring swimming hole, where it snipped a boy’s foot off. A man •plunged into that devil’s hole to save the boy, and was killed. The shark, marooned by the outgoing tide, was slaughtered with frantic enthusiasm, and human bones were found in its stomach. An old swimmer had rewritten one of the newspaper accounts of that imbroglio. He recalled each vivid detail, and then his mind drifted back to earlier casual glimpses of the maneater family, lie had grown up on a shark-infested shore, that of the east coast of Australia. Some of his earli-

est swimming had been in the shark proof baths of Sydney harbour,, otherwise Port Jackson, famed for its beauty and its man-eaters.

At Lavender Bay, across the harbour from the city proper, were Cavill’s Baths, run by a fat Frenchman who used to promote swimming races and give exhibitions with his large and amphibian family. ‘His eldest son, Ernest Cavill, a terra-cotta Adonis, became lt‘he most famous swimmer of his time, and revolutionised the art with his invention of the crawl stroke. And the man-eaters used to bump against the palisades which shut in so much appetising flesh. Out. in the harbour, with its picnicking, yachting, and weekly regattas for all kinds of sail-boats, hardly a week passed without a few shark horrors. In one case a man-eater knocked a young man off a low landing-stage with a blow of its tail, then turned and seized him, and bore him to the bottom in two fathoms of water, Avhilc eight feet of the shark’s rear emerged erect for half a minute, as described at the inquest by the victim’s chum.

And yet the old swimmer, who was then a young swimmer, never laid his eyes on a shark until he faced the one that awaited him while Phil May sketched it.

That was not in the harbour, but at Coogee Bay, a dent in Sydney’s ocean coast. There the Pacific, in rank oehind rank of shattering combers, assaults a crescent beach between two "rocky headlands. Phil May, coming from 'London to make cartoons for the pink-covered Sydney “Bulletin,” had brought messages from a brother of the

Swimmer in Peril at Coogee Bay

young swimmer in England. They had l been lunching oonviVially with, three other fellows before riding i out to Coogee Bay on top of a steam tramcar. just for a larlc. .It was rather a solitary spot then, on weekdays, in contrast to the little 'Coney Island it has since become, with watch-towers and sirens for shark alarms. There was practically no bathing in Phil May’s time, unless one bobbed up and down in pens attached to -some newfangled bathing machines.

Phil and the other fellows didn’t want to go in, but the young swimmer, having a passion for the surf, and perhaps for showing off, hired a, bathing (machine, got into a pair of red calico trunks, climbed out of the pen, and swam out through one after another of the crashing lines-of combers. In his enjoyment of the buffeting, he didn’t think much about sharks. They were supposed never to conic inside the surf. At the same time lie was rashly doing his best to get beyond it to the open sea.

Turning on his back to ride up one of the outermost parapets- of unbroken indigo, he got a sudden panorama of the beach, and there he saw Phil May and the other fellows vigorously waving their hats and sticks in his direction. He knew they were shouting, but the surf drowned their voices. Then the land was blotted out as he sank into the next valley.

With a troubled feeling, he turned over and faced the sea. Across this valley rose another dune of glassy ocean, and within it, like a fly in amber, liung a shark, its snout towards the top of the wave, its body swaying downward in sensitive attunement with the motion' of the water. Its colour was the precise tawny shade of the wet beach. It seemed to be waiting for him.

How the- young swimmer started hack for the shore, what a tremendous distance it now seemed, how slow his progress, liow dismal the thought that lie might lose a leg at any moment —all this, it seemed to the old swimmer in retrospect, would give enough material for a whole chapter in a strea.m-of-eonseiousness novel. But he got. back at last among the white horses, and worked his wav out to the beach.

Phil May was sitting on the d// sand, fiddling at a sketch-book. Two or three pages were sprinkled with fragments of shark—here a snout, here a dorsal find, here tne sweep of a tapering; body.

“I haven’t got the life in that tail,” he confessed cheerfully. “It had the movement of an eel. If you had only kept on another half-minute, old chap. I’d have caught that bloke alive.”