Shark Read online

  The most unusual traditional indigenous form of preparation, and one famous for being infamous, is the Icelandic skyrhakarl, the origin of which is centuries old and may have come about by trial and error, as a way of rendering palatable the meat of the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus), a huge and common animal in a region of scarce edible resources. The flesh of many shark species has to be purged of its foul-tasting and smelling ammonia (from uric acid) before it can be eaten. The flesh of the Greenland shark is doubly toxic, in that it contains high concentrations of trimethylamine oxide, a protein stabiliser and anti-freeze. (An Inuit legend has it that long ago an old woman washed her hair in urine and dried it with a cloth which then floated out to sea and became the Greenland shark.) The traditional recipe for skyrhakarl:

  Take one large shark, gut and discard the fins, tail, innards, the cartilage and the head . . . Cut flesh into large pieces. Wash in running water to get all slime and blood off. Dig a large hole in coarse gravel, preferably down by the sea and far from the nearest inhabited house—this is to make sure the smell doesn’t bother anybody. Put in the shark pieces, and press them well together . . . Cover with more gravel and put heavy rocks on top to press down. Leave for 6–7 weeks (in summer) to 2–3 months (in winter). During this time, fluid will drain from the shark flesh, and putrefaction will set in. When the shark is soft and smells like ammonia, remove from the gravel, wash, and hang in a drying shack . . . Let it hang until it is firm and fairly dry: 2–4 months . . . Cured shark smells worse than it tastes. The texture is somewhat like a piece of fat, the colour is a dirty white/beige, and the taste reminds some people of strong cheese with a fishlike aftertaste . . . skyrhakarl has been known to cause an involuntary gagging reaction . . . 10

  The patience required to render the Greenland shark edible was matched in the southern hemisphere by a degree of ingenuity required to catch large sharks. Oceania comprises three island groups: the northernmost Federated States of Micronesia (from Palau in the west to Kiribati in the east); Melanesia (including the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji); and Polynesia, best described by its geographical descriptor the Polynesian Triangle, being New Zealand in the southwest, to Hawaii in the northeast, to Easter Island in the southeast.

  Indigenous seafarers navigated this vast region of many languages and cultures for thousands of years, their paths crisscrossing, one result being similar methods of shark fishing. In 1927, the American Museum of Natural History published an exhaustive, 158-page paper by a noted ichthyologist, E.W. Gudger, which describes in detail nearly 100 types of wooden shark hooks used by the peoples of Oceania.11 Gudger drew on many sources, including museum collections in Australia, Hawaii and the continental United States: ‘In addition to all these collections of hitherto undescribed material with which I have had the pleasure of working, the literature has been thoroughly researched and all known and many hitherto unknown descriptions and figures have been brought to light and incorporated herein’.12 He also described hooks collected by ‘Salem sea captains during more than one hundred years past in their rovings through the South Seas’.13

  A hardwood and cord shark hook, collected from either Tonga or the Society Islands during one of James Cook’s Pacific voyages undertaken between 1768 and 1780. The unevenness of the shank, showing marks from off-shoots, indicates that it is made out of a rhizome, typical of a hook used to catch sharks. (Georg-August University, Göttingen, reproduced by kind permission of Dr Gundolf Krüger)

  These wooden hooks, in societies lacking metal, were manufactured with the same precision and wisdom lavished on the best modern trout flies. As well as sharks, wooden hooks were used to catch the oilfish (Ruvettus pretiosus), a large deep-sea teleost with quality flesh, whose liver is still valued for the purgative qualities of its oil. The shank leg and barb leg of these hooks were either carved from a V-shaped fork of a tree limb or, ingeniously, grown from saplings of trees such as mangroves and casuarinas:

  The fe or shark hook was made from a shrub, the tiere, which when it reached the height of about three feet, was twisted into an open knot, with a diameter of about 5 inches; it was then allowed to grow for about two years before being cut. The hook was then shaped, and a piece of hard wood spliced on as a barb projecting inwards. The bait was tied on over the barb; the fish working at this, as the wood was springy, gradually got its jaw between the barb and the stem of the hook. On being struck the barb caught in the gills, and the fish was hauled up sideways.14

  The shark hook barbs were made from elements such as bone and teeth. The snood, or cord of attachment, was frequently made of coconut sennit—braided strands of fibre. Some of these hooks were huge: Gudger records one at Milne Bay, New Guinea, which was nineteen inches long.15 The Hawaiian makau mano, ‘used by their old kings to catch sharks . . . was not infrequently baited with human flesh for shark fishing, a slave being sacrificed for the purpose’.16 Stone sinkers were attached to catch bottom feeders. The practical importance of these artefacts, and their value to their owners, is evident in this 1888 observation: ‘Fishing, moreover, seems to be one of the principal industries of Trobriand, shark fishing in particular being practiced. This is shown by the large foot and a half long wooden hooks . . . which the natives are extremely reluctant to part with’.17

  Other shark fishing methods practised across the Pacific region were spearing, trapping, hand catching, darting, netting and poisoning.18 The most amazing, though, was shark calling: the art of luring a shark to a canoe by use of sound and then coaxing it into a snare. There can be few more artful methods of harvesting creatures from the wild and, not surprisingly, the practice had considerable religious and cultural significance. In the early 1970s, Australian-born artist and author Glenys Köhnke spent time with an elderly man known only as the ‘Old One’, who lived in a remote village on the west coast of the Papua New Guinean island New Ireland, and was possibly the world’s last shark caller. She described the process of ‘the one who knows the way of the shark’:

  The shark caller’s equipment is simple but very effective. He has a dugout canoe with outrigger for stability and a wooden float carved from light kapiak wood to resemble a two bladed propeller. This has a hole burnt through the centre part through which a plaited cane rope passes to form a noose on the underside and a handle on the top side. This float called kasaman and noose is used to snare the shark. He has a cane lure stick, lenantulus, to which he attaches the lure fish. The lure stick is short and light and easy to manage with one hand. He also takes larung, the rattle made from half coconut shells threaded onto a cane hoop . . . the sharks are attracted to the side of the canoe with the coconut rattle and lured into an open-plaited cane noose. The noose is attached to the wooden propeller-shaped float. The shark caller holds the float above the surface with the noose underwater. The man passes a lure fish on a pole through the noose and offers it to the approaching shark. As the shark advances, the man draws the fish through the noose and the shark follows. When the shark is through the noose up to his pectoral fins, the shark caller drops the float onto the shark’s back and tightens the noose by jerking the cane handle on the top side of the float, upwards. Then he casts the shark away to fight the propeller float. The float does not spin, but offers a great deal of resistance to the shark which tries to dive or scrape it off along the surface of the water. This tightens the noose around the shark. When it is exhausted the light kapiak wood float will bring the shark to the surface. The shark caller will paddle up to it. With some species of shark he first spears the eyes, but the actual killing is done with a solid wooden club.19

  This illustration in Abel Janszoon Tasman’s Journal, dated April 1643, depicts a scene off the west coast of New Ireland. It is captioned, ‘A view of a vessel of Noua Guinea, with the natives living there.’ Note the propellor float across the middle of the boat. (From The Shark Callers, Glenys Köhnke, Yumi Press, 1974)

  Furthermore, the shark callers’ intimate knowledge of sharks and the sea allowed t
hem to make use of shark roads. In the words of the Old One:

  There are shark roads in the ocean in the season of lamat [calm season of the dry reef] when men go to call the sharks. The roads are broad, calm tracks of water in which man may see his face looking back up at him. It is only on these special roads that the sound of larung [coconut rattle] will carry great distances . . . When larung is shaken just under the surface of the water and knocked slightly against the side of the canoe it sends out many tiny waves which travel like the rays of the sun, out along the smooth surface of the shark roads. The song which larung makes travels far along the roads to where the shark is swimming. He will come to investigate the call of larung. No one knows what the shark thinks larung is. Ah, he may think it is the rush of tiny fish jumping out of the path of a larger fish. He may think it is the diving of the tarangau [sea bird] into the water to feast on a school of fish . . . There is magic too . . . Without the magic, larung could call all day and the shark would not come to it.20

  Teeth, tools, saws and other practical applications

  Indigenous societies valued sharks and rays for much more than their meat. At least eight distinct body parts had separate, practical functions in traditional societies. Shark teeth come in every conceivable shape and size, so can be put to a great variety of uses. Single teeth set into handles became tools for tattooists and surgeons, for piercing, drilling, sawing and carving. Shark teeth dating from the earliest civilisations have been found hundreds of kilometres from their place of origin. Teeth sourced to Red Sea sharks indicate early trade links between the peoples of the Nile and Mesopotamia. In prehistoric south Florida, shark teeth were used for cutting, carving, hafting and engraving in place of the hard metals and workable stone that were scarce in the area. The coastal Calusa Indians traded them inland, particularly bull and tiger shark teeth.

  Shark teeth set into spears or clubs made formidable weapons, as did shark-tooth-studded gloves. In the 1830s, William Ellis, an American missionary, recorded Tahitians using a small cane studded with sharks’ teeth to flagellate themselves in times of grief. He also described a short fighting sword: ‘instead of one blade it had three, four or five. It was usually made of a forked aito branch; the central and exterior branches, after having been pointed and polished, were armed along the outside with a thick line of sharks’ teeth, very firmly fixed in the wood’.21

  One elasmobranch, the sawfish (Pristis spp.), has a ready-made sword. (There is no known cultural use by pre-industrial societies of the much smaller sawshark (Pristiophorus spp.) rostrum, presumably because its deepwater benthic habitat put it out of reach of fishers.) The sawfish rostrum contains sets of evenly spaced, long, narrow teeth. Archaeological studies of midden sites along the coast of Brazil indicate that local hunter–gatherer tribes used these rostral teeth as arrow tips and harpoons. They modified the teeth for a particular purpose, either by drilling holes in them, abrading their surfaces, or filing or cutting their roots to get sharper and more slender instruments.22 A large sawfish rostrum can exceed 1.5 metres in length—a formidable weapon. Northern Australian Aborigines used them as fighting clubs. Another favoured weapon was the long, sharp and poisonous ray spine. In Australia’s Top End, spear hafts were tipped ‘with a bristling bouquet of venomous stingray spines. Wounds caused by this fearsome weapon were nearly always fatal’.23 And Cape York’s Wik peoples ‘would sometimes cut rings from the tails of thorny rays, creating spiny “brass knuckles” which made punches more dangerous during fighting’.24

  British-born Walter Roth, a physician and anthropologist who was appointed the protector of Aborigines in Queensland in the late nineteenth century, travelled widely in northern Queensland recording Aboriginal cultures. He also collected many artefacts, including shark-teeth knives, now in the Australian Museum, that he took from the Gulf of Carpentaria coastline between the Mitchell and Staaten Rivers. These knives

  . . . were made of an elongate piece of ironwood with a slot in one side where eight to nine shark teeth were inserted and fixed with adhesive. Adhesive also was found on the rounded and grip ends of the knife. It was at the grip end that looped handspun bark fibre string was wound round and attached with adhesive. Roth said that when a man used this weapon, he first hid it from view, either in his left armpit, or hung it by a loop over his forehead so that it hung behind his neck and out of sight of his opponent. At close quarters the knife was brought out, and hacked into the victim’s flank or buttocks. Roth reported seeing some of these weapons up to 20–23 cm long. He first saw one on the Palmer River, where it had been obtained from a man Roth identified as being a Kundara man living around the mouth of the Mitchell River. He said the man called it a Kulkong which he took to mean tooth. The knife was only used for hacking purposes, never for sawing meat. Roth said the Gunanni people called it kappatora. Roth noted that P. B. King had reported a similar weapon being used at King George Sound, Western Australia, in 1839.25

  This shark-teeth knife is 20 × 3.7cm. Its formal description notes that ‘a piece of white European cloth’ has been wound round the knife. (Courtesy of the Australian Museum, citation [AMS391:M4080])

  But shark products weren’t only used for violent ends. The Anindilyakwa people of the island of Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria, west of Cape York, used small sawfish rostrums as hair combs. The calcified centra of the vertebral column made charming necklaces the world over. The beneficial effects of shark liver oil, rich in vitamin A, were recognised, and the oil was also used as a cosmetic. Some societies considered the claspers, the male shark’s sexual organs, to have aphrodisiac qualities.

  Curing shark and ray skin is a fairly basic drying process which results in a leather-like product. Most shark skins are studded with dermal denticles, and cured skin functioned effectively as sandpaper, although the denticles themselves could be sanded away to give a smoother finish. Cured sharkskin, although less flexible than mammal leather, could be shaped into rudimentary footwear. The Hawaiian pahu drum and the Sumatran tambourine were made of ray skin.26 The Inuit wove durable ropes from the skin of the Greenland shark.

  Shark teeth were not only used as weapons. According to the official description accompanying this image, shark teeth were so valuable that Māori traded them throughout the country. Furthermore, sharks were lassoed by the tail to avoid damaging the teeth, which were used to make necklaces. These are great white shark teeth. (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, negative number ME015858)

  Some of the teeth that were traded or bartered were used as tools rather than weapons or adornments. Bull and tiger shark teeth set into wooden boards formed prehistoric graters used for processing staple foods such as manioc and other tubers.27 Charles Darwin recorded a similarly innovative use of the skin, in Tahiti. Darwin and members of the crew had enjoyed a convivial meal with their hosts, after which

  . . . a curious snuff was observed by Mr. Stokes, and from the method of using or taking it, I am inclined to think it an old custom, not imported by the white men. A substance, not unlike rhubarb in its appearance, but of a very pleasant fragrance, was rubbed on a piece of shark’s skin, stretched on wood; and much it appeared to please an old man, who valued this snuff-stick so highly, that he would not part with it.28

  In Japan a traditional and still preferred wasabi grater is made from shark skin stretched over a small wooden paddle—it is called samekawa oroshi ki, which translates as ‘shark-skin grater tool’.

  Spiritual, social and political applications

  Australian Indigenous beliefs state that across the Australian continent in the period before creation, primal spirits interacted with one another to form and shape the land, sea and sky. Once their work was done they themselves became landscape features or animals and they handed down their sacred knowledge to mortal people, to nourish them and provide them with laws and norms. These creation beliefs are at once spiritual, cultural, social and political, and their legends explain the work of the creator beings. Across the vast continent
, clans became associated with specific creator ancestors, and shark and ray totems are common among coastal Aboriginal clans. A number of the clans of the Yolngu people have as their totemic link to the creation time the whaler (bull) shark known as Mäna:

  According to the public version of the story, this ancestral being began his journey along the coast of northeast Arnhem Land. While sleeping on the beach, Mäna was speared by an ancestor from another clan who did not want other creator beings near him. Enraged by this stealthy attack, Mäna charged inland from the sea, exploding into the landscape. The ancestral shark gouged his way inland using his teeth to carve out several river systems. As he journeyed onward, his teeth broke off on the hard riverbanks; these lost teeth became the pandanus tree which line rivers today. The leaves of these trees are dagger-shaped with serrated edges, like shark teeth. These trees represent both Mäna’s anger at being speared and the stingray-spine tipped spear that Mäna carried to avenge his death . . . This ancestral event explains why modern whaler sharks are dangerous and why some sharks still enter freshwater . . . The travels of this shark ancestor carried him through the lands of several related Yolngu clans. If these clans are on good terms politically, they may acknowledge that a single shark traveled through all the lands during a single journey, linking them. Alternately, when the clans wish to express their distinctive identity, they will explain that each clan’s shark was a different ancestor, each starting its separate journey from the spearing incident.29

  Thousands of kilometres to the east, across the Pacific Ocean, the Aztecs, a tribe of North American origin, had created a great civilisation in the Valley of Mexico, the heart of which was its capital city Tenochtitlán, the ‘place of the prickly pear’: