SOME SHARK STORIES.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 8335, 11 April 1889, Page 3

SOME SHARK STORIES.

Shark storiw have so long formed the (staple of sailors' "yarns" that, like the proverbial legends regarding snakes, they have in most cases come to be regarded 1 by nntravelled people as somewhat mythical. Indeed, in the recently issued history of American fishes, prepared by a Government commission, the. writers gave it as their deliberate opinion that the cases in which men have been' attacked by these sea wolves are. extremely rare. This, we fear, observes a writer in the Standard, will not be the verdict of those who have a familiar acquaintance with the tropics. A few weeks ago a sailor engaged in scraping the sides of a troop-ship in the harbor, of Sierra Leone was dragged into ■ the water and promptly devoured by one of the swarm of sharks which infest that locality. A boatman has been bitten in the snort time it took him to dip up a pitcher of water while his craft was under full .sail, and we are assured that it is nothing uncommon fur these ravenous fish to spring a foot out of the sea in order to secure their prey. For miles they trill" follow a vessel, on the outlook for any stray nn/prtnnate that may tumble 01 be thrown overfward, and yet so deeply do ."they swim under the surface that it requires the eyes otihe natives to. deteel their presence. Many of the West Indiai harbors are so haunted by the white anc hammer headed shark— tue least amiab!< ,' of; the 150 different kinds known t( ' geologists — that it is dangerous to bathi .even a* few, yards from the shore withom an outlook being posted. Hence the well ■worn tradition of "Port Royal Tom" beinj on the. pay-roll of the flagship in that bar \ . bor may be founded on fact; for as m seaman would dare to swim ashore with i -watch-dog of this kind in the vicinity, i few pieces" of junk might have- beei '-' • ' judiciously expended to keep- such ade terrent against desertion around, Hi Tessels. Escape is almost impossible ' . .clumsy as the fish is, and once- in th ■' - grasp of its lancet-like teeth the victir who purchases life with the loss of a: atsi or a lee may regard himself asur Viwually . lucky. • '■'* '-'* ■ ■' " TettheT^vest African negro has bee % ' (known; to. face .the brute, not only wit - * ' .f^mjj^tjwbtft'eVonto.cbmeoff asvictc ! >>,.j. '-'■ ■B~;&6 3 i6'ndJJ;*Atl' J??t' amphibious, th

and then, just at the moment when the great lish turns over to seize him— its mouth being so pl-acral that I his U necessary—the daring black plunges his knife into its white belly. The pearl divers a-e also sometimes successful in their attacks on sharks which try to seize them, though it is needless to add such a niodu of combat is possible, only when the monsters do not come in numbers, and, under the most favorable circumstances requires coolness, a dexterity and a courage which are not to be acquired except by long experience in such perilous encounters. As a rule, however, it is seldom that; a man who is so luckless as ti) drop among sharks ever appears again. There is a shriek, a white outline is seen under the surface and a fin above it, a reddened c-esfe tops the next rwcll which breaks against the ship's side, and the horror-stricken seamen know that ttieir messmate will be seen no more. Bnt the shark does not vanish. On the contrary, the appetite thus sharpened encourages it to follow iv the wake of the vessel, so that the tales of man ■ eating monsters liaviug been hooked weeks after such a tragedy as that noted with the remains of the missing men still in their stomachs are not to be dismissed as lictions. It is a well-ascertained fact that the skeletons of sheep, pigs, dogs, and cattle which have fallen or been thrown overboard have been recovered, iv the manner indicated many days subsequent to their being swallowed, and ie is on record that in the stomach of a shark killed in the ludian Ocean a lady's work-box was found, while in another the incriminatory papers which had been throwu away by a hotly-chased slaver were recovered from the "maw of an involuntary witness thus curionslv brought into Court on the barb of a porkbaited hook. Ruysch, one of tbe most trustworthy of the old naturalists, affirms that a man in mail— homo loricalus lie calls. jiim— was found in tbe stomach of a white shark ; and it is recorded by Blumenbach that in one shark a whole horse was found. It is undeniable that many have been killed with ample capacity for such undesirable contents, and Basil Hall tells of one out of which was taken the whole skin of a buffalo, besides a host of other trifles which had been dropped astern in the course of the previous -week. A sailor serving on board Her Majesty's troop-ship Tyne met very recently with a horrible death in the harbor of gierra Leone. The poor fellow was eugaeed in cleaning the side of the ship, with his naked feet dangling in the water, and solacing himself by singing snatches of a song, when he vanished without any warning from the view of his astonished comrades. They were far from suspecting the cause of his disappearance, and efforts made to recover the body by dragging were of no avail. The harbor of Sierra Leone is infested with sharks of a very voracious species, and two days after the loss of the sailor a monster one was captured. In drowning the shark, before hauling it on board, it vomited from its maw the right arm of the unfortunate mon who bad disappeared. The limb was frightfully torn, and it is probable that, after being dragged down into the sea, the ravenous creatures had waged a fierce light over the poor fellow's remains. Every kind of horror and sickening torture is lidded to these details of the light-hearted sailor's death. His snatch of snng at the very moment of his disappearance proved his inclill'erence to a danger common to all tropical seas ; and the carelessness hy which it was brought about is typical of the dare-devil courage of the British tar. For several days after the man's death the harbor swarmed with sharks, and the sailors working on the ships were forced In use the greatest precautions. Some 25 years ago, . when the last "yellow Jack"plagne was raging along the coast, New Calabar and Bonny rivers teemed with the scourge, and to put one's linger in the water was quite sufficient to draw a " snap." Canoes were frequently oapsized, so wild were the man eaters after prey. A great deal of uncertainty exists as to the minimum depth of water a shark will attack in. In New Calabar an Accia carpenter was fishing with a small circular net, as is their castom in the evening. He was a few inches over his knees, when, without a word, he disappeared before the eyes of onlookers. The water surged and whirled for a moment, then all was quiet as before. We may, perhaps, exercise a large amount of judicious scepticism over the tale of the marine, on a sudden lurch o! the ship, tumbling overboard, and being found two days afterwards— fixed bayonel and all — in the stomach of a captured Carchctrias. Bnt the cases in which skeletons have been recovered are toe many to be doubted. In the old times oi the contraband slave trade, when a cargo iikely to consign the captain to the yard arm was mercilessly tossed into the sea, and when pirates of the Teach type compelled their captives to walk the plank, such gruesome memorials of man's inhumanity to man were terribly frequent. To this day even, in the Australian seas, the incautious swimmer has more than once been snapped np, and at some of the Antipodean summer haunts it is dreadfully suggestive to observe the pallisade of stakes around the bathing •places, and still more so to notice "the ugly countenances of the greedy ' ' terrors of tho ocean " eagerly regarding the tempting titbits on the other side of the fence. Of the mauy species of shark we have in the British seas— including the dog fishes, which have all the instincts of their big relatives, though, owing to their tize, they are not so powerful for cvil — i-nn.e 17, among which is the terrible white shark, and the scarcely less ferocious hammerhead, are numbered as ioviug members. Yet we cannot recall a ciiee of a serious mishap ever befalling iir.y one from these wanderers from more Southern seas. The truth seems to lie that as they approach our shores the coldness of the water numbs their s:nses, until, by the time the Arctic Ocean is reached, the only representative of the family found there, though ravenous enough after blubber, is <o little endowed with the man-eating propensity of its tropical consins_ that the ••eamen "flense" the whale within a foot of its nose, driving it off with' lances and boat hooks, without any dread of its misiaklng their legs for the cetacean's fattened Hanks. No such liberty could lie taken with the white shark. It will follojiv b«ats for days, and, as we have seen, has been known to spring ont of the water to grasp its intended victim. Thrre ;ire, indeed, gruesome stones of the wild rushes of sharks Lo grasp the crew as> a r.hip went down, and of the survivors '.icing snatched one by one off the spars, hencoops and rafts on which they had taken refuge. YetvKlian was well aware of the dangers which the Mediterranean coral divers underwent in the encounters with " the monstrous balance lish of ugly shape,'' which is easily recognised as the hammerhead, or Zygoma, the audacity nf which is vouched for by many credible witnesses, and by incidents still more convincing. Perhaps the most substantial testimony to the ferocity of the shark family is to' be found in the terror with which it lias inspired almost every people. Sailors are full of superstitions which touch the superhuman sagacity and incarnate liendishness of this fish— liow, its senses being acute far beyond what we can have .my idea of, it will follow ships tor. days when a death is likely to occur, and ile?ert the wake of the vessel when no such good fortune for it is in tbe wind. Vatea, tbe shark god, is the lord of the ocean in Hervey Island mythology, and it is whispered that even the Christianised llawaiians will still, when in the direst extremity, iavoke Mooaru, the shark demon, to whom their pagan foretubers erected temples and offered sacrifice. The pearl divers of Ceylon employ shark charmers to protect them while engaged iv their dangerous work. Marco Polo speaks of these officials under tlie name of Abroemania, who received os wages a twentieth of the divers' gains. At the present day they are called Halbandi or shark binders, and as the divers would not enter the water without being certain of their services, the chief operator receives a Government subsidy of 10 oysters per diem. The lahitian9 deified the blue shark— under the name of "Akua maoo"— dedicating to it shrines and priests, and in West Africa rabbitß are sacrificed to " Jonyou," while, if not sharply watched, it has been affirmed that some of the tribes about the Niger Delta will at fixed limes bind a child, decorated with flowers, to a post on the beach at low tide, and leave it to be devoured by the sharks which come in with the flow, drowning the cries with the noise of drums. These and 100 similar facts and fancies afford eloquent testimony to the horror which the shark has inopjred ; a horror which is doubtless on the • whole well founded, although some of the • legends are a little exaggerated,

of about five feet, and the streets became veritable canals, up and down which numerous canoes might be seen plying, their occupants endeavoring to save their household goods from being swept to sea. For thirty-six hours the town was under w ater, the official records giving the depth in the Beaux Artes, dv Marche, and Petit Pologne — the principal business streets, which suffered most— as 1.60 metres (about five feet). The magnificent avenues of trees which lined the streets, and which have been tha boast and pride of the French residents, were uprooted and swept away, though they had crowned the city with beauty for years, defying many severe hurricanes. Though the loss of property in the town was very great, the combined effects of the gale nnd floods were even more markedly felt in the country districts, the damage being described as tremendous. Thirty-nine bridges on the approaches to the town are reported to be carried away, and to replace them it is estimated that 140,000 francs will not more than snffice. Many roads have heen choked up, or swept away, and several heavy landslips in the hilly districts, involving considerable loss of life, are reported. In the neighboring island of Morea the greatest devastation lias occurred. The villace of Papetoa, situated in a valley, was completely overborne by the rushing Unods which came down from the hills, and the mass of waters swept the frail humleb bodily into the ocean. So sudden was the coming of the deluge that the inhabitants had no warning of its approach, and in the struggle to escape 26 natives lost their lives, while every vestige, of their property was washed away, so much so that all traces of the site of the village have completely disappeared. The whole of the native plantations, orange groves, &c.,on the island are also destroyed, and the natives are altogether destitute, in factGovernorLeCascade in a proclamation stated "La cent neuf personnes sont sans gilt; sans nourrilure; sans resources." With the humanity and kindness which always distinguishes the French administration here whenever the natives are concerned, the Government has taken these unfortunate homeless people into its care, and probably they will in the end be better off than before their recent misfortune. After the hurricane on Saturday the town presented a terribly desoltte appearance, mounds of silt and mud lay piled against the doors of houses, hundreds of trees were scattered across the streets, many buildings were unroofed, while the frail tenements of the Chinese quarter were shattered, and in many ease? piled in ruins. A disaster of such extent is quite unprecedented there, and many hundreds of thousands of francs will require to be expended before the roads, which have always been kept in magnificent condition, will be again passable. In consequence of the dire effects of the storm and floods upon the plantations and orange groves, the Richmond had the greatest difficulty in procuring her usual cargo of fruit.