CATCHING SHARKS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 16 May 1912, Page 5

CATCHING SHARKS.

Those old piscatorial pirates, the sharks, often invade the Arctic, no doubt tempted by the carcasses of the whales or seals and walruses left by the w-hite men engaged in their pursuit. Natives angling from their skin canoes in deep water occasionally catch a sluggish shark which has engulfed the bait; but there is no use pulling against such a mountain of flesh and relying upon sheer strength to bring him up; and this the native fisherman knows., and he overcomes the shark's inertia by sagacity. When the shark becomes irritated and pulls briskly, the line is lowered to appease him, but cautiously hauled in again almost immediately, the shark rising to this strategic manipulation until he rests upon the surface of the water, when the fisherman dexterously dispatches him by a well-directed thrust through the spinal cord. Considering their well-known voracity in warmer climes, it seems singular that sharks do not oftener attack the native fishermen in their little skin canoes; but there is not a known instance of such attacks even on the west shore of Greenland, where they are the most numerous, and where the natives catch large numbers of them —from 10,000 to 20,000 a year. The most usual method of catching these fish can hardly* be said to be fishing at all. Near a hole in the ice a lighted torch is placed, and two natives stand on opposite sides of the hole with shark handhooks.' Presently the shark sticks his nose out, when he is hooked and hauled on the ice.— Harper's weekly.