Shark Page 5

  This great city of Tenochtitlán is built on the salt lake, and no matter by what road you travel there are two leagues from the main body of the city to the mainland . . . The city itself is as big as Seville or Córdoba. The main streets are very wide and very straight; some of these are on the land, but the rest and all the smaller ones are half on land, half canals where they paddle their canoes. All the streets have openings in places so that the water may pass from one canal to another. Over all these openings, and some of them are very wide, there are bridges . . . There are, in all districts of this great city, many temples or houses for their idols. They are all very beautiful buildings . . . Amongst these temples there is one, the principal one, whose great size and magnificence no human tongue could describe, for it is so large that within the precincts, which are surrounded by very high walls, a town of some five hundred inhabitants could easily be built. All around inside this wall there are very elegant quarters with very large rooms and corridors where their priests live. There are as many as forty towers, all of which are so high that in the case of the largest there are fifty steps leading up to the main part of it and the most important of these towers is higher than that of the cathedral of Seville . . . 30

  The hidden irony in this enthusiastic description is that it was written by Hernando Cortès, soon to lead his Spanish conquistadores to bloody victory over the Aztecs, destroying Tenochtitlán in the process. Mexico City rose gradually over its ruins. In the late 1970s, a large and sophisticated pyramid—the Aztec Great Temple—was discovered beneath the very centre of the modern city. Among the many artefacts were remains of aquatic predators—sawfishes, sharks and crocodiles—and it is likely that these were a core feature of religious ceremonies. An Aztec creation myth held that the world was born through the violent tearing in half of a titan called Cipactlí. Humans lived on top of her floating lower half and her upper half was the heavens. Cipactlí’s upper half required regular feeding in the form of human sacrifice, a perfect instrument for which was a large sawfish rostrum:

  In Aztec religion, they [rostrums] were powerful symbols representing the connection between the fecundity of the landscape and warfare . . . The use of sawfish snouts in ritual is detailed in a text written soon after the conquest of the Aztecs . . . In certain heart extraction sacrifices, the neck of the victim was crushed with the snout of a sawfish, preventing any inauspicious cries. Presumably, this action also allowed Cipactli to symbolically ‘bite’ the offering before the heart and blood were offered to the sun . . . these ‘swords’ of Cipactli were potent symbols of the Aztecs’ obligation to fertilize the predatory, devouring earth with blood and bodies, so that she could in turn nourish mankind.31

  Sharks and sawfish have less violent roles in other creation myths, as illustrated by this Tongan folktale:

  There is this shark-spirit who lives in the sea around Niuatoputapu who is named Seketoa. The descendants of Maatu, the chief of Niuatoputapu have the right to call on Seketoa and Seketoa will help them. When Maatu wants to speak with Seketoa he sends out his matapules (assistants) and they throw some kava root into the sea. Then two remoras will come to the kava roots. (Remoras are fish that live and will even ride on sharks.) These two remoras are the matapules of Seketoa. After the two remoras come they will go away, then a small shark comes and goes away. Then a larger shark comes and goes away. Finally a great big shark comes. This is Seketoa. Then Maatu, the chief, will speak with Seketoa.

  One night some Samoan ghosts stole the mountain from the island of Niuafo’ou. There is now a lake in the middle of Niuafo’ou where that mountain was at. These ghosts were taking the mountain by pulling it to Samoa. When they passed Niuatoputapu, Seketoa saw what they were doing. He sent his matapules to go near the ghosts and crow like roosters. Seketoa’s plan was to fool the ghosts so that they would think it was almost morning. Then they would leave the mountain where it was at and hurry home to Samoa. When the Samoan ghosts heard the matapules of Seketoa crowing they said to themselves, ‘Hurry, it is almost morning’ and then they started to pull the mountain even harder.

  When Seketoa saw that his trick was not working, he swam to where the ghosts were pulling the mountain. He showed them his anus (mata tuungaiku) which was red. When the ghosts saw it, they thought that it was the sun coming up, so they put down the mountain where it was at and hurried back to Samoa. When they discovered that they had been tricked by Seketoa, they were so embarrassed that they never returned. The mountain that they left in the sea has now become the island of Tafahi which is several miles north of Niuatoputapu.32

  Many Pacific Ocean island cultures recognised sharks as potent spiritual forces. In prehistoric Hawaii the importance of fish as the staple diet (edible land resources being limited to native bats and birds) elevated fishing to a sacred art. The capture of a shark, an intelligent, inquisitive creature of admirable strength, size and occasional ferocity, became the highest expression of that art. There were many Hawaiian shark gods, one of the better known being Nanaue—the offspring of a human woman and a shark king who could take human form. Nanaue had a shark’s mouth between his shoulderblades, and an insatiable appetite for human flesh. (The legend of Nanaue perhaps bore some reference to cannibalism, or was a warning of the dangers of unnatural procreation.) A less voracious Hawaiian shark god, Kane’ae, took on human form to satisfy his love of dancing.

  In what might be described as the Hawaiian equivalent of the Australian creation time, ‘aumakua are the benevolent spirits protecting individuals and families:

  ‘Aumakua belonged to and protected families, or a group of kinsmen, and passed from generation to generation. They were thought to be ancestors of these kinship groups . . . The early Hawaiians regarded certain sea animals, such as turtles, eels, squids, porpoises, and most notably sharks, as the physical embodiments of personal gods . . . If a species of shark were ‘aumakua, any of its members received offerings for special favors, such as good luck at sea and protection from drowning, prior to embarkation of a fishing expedition. Many fishermen, however, regularly fed a shark at a special spot along the shore or from a canoe and came to recognize them as individuals and even as pets.33

  Such intimacy with the natural world—with sharks in particular—may seem hard to believe. Hawaiian author and publisher John Dominis Holt was born in 1920. As a young boy, he experienced sharks up close with a local elder:

  Off we went to the place in the reef where the sides slanted sharply to the bottom. Here we had to dive much deeper than before. Kai’a was old but extremely strong. He had dived all of his life and knew how to get down to the bottom quickly, with little exertion. I clung tightly to my old friend and kahu, and we passed through layers of sunlight in the water . . . It was darker down there, with shafts of light slipping through the cracks in the coral above and illuminating the sand in a dim glow. Then I saw these great living things lying on the bottom, rolling slowly from side to side in the lolling current. The sharks, apparently satiated by a previous feeding, were resting. We hovered about six feet above them for some time. They looked like tiger sharks and sharks with long tails . . . They all had names, odd names, personal names that he had given them. One in particular he called Haku nui, the Big Boss. He also told me of one that had been young when he was just a boy himself. As we dove down again and again, I would learn to recognize these sharks as he had . . . Sometimes, with me on his back, Kai’a would go down and come up close to the older sharks and reach out slowly with a hand to pick off barnacles that had encrusted their eyes. Such a build up of barnacles could eventually blind the old animals. They somehow trusted him and allowed him to do the cleaning. The great yellow eyes stared at us, floating inches from us as Kai’a picked away at the hard material that was often covered with limu. It must have hurt the sharks at least a little. They moved around slowly like a herd of cattle in a corral. Kai’a jabbed at them and pushed them away in order to stay with the shark he was working on. It was quite unreal, hanging onto this white-bearded
man shoving these large, dark creatures glaring at us . . .34

  George Augustus Robinson, a government appointee in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land between 1829 and 1834, attempted to persuade the island’s diminishing numbers of Aborigines to resettle on Flinders Island in Bass Strait. His controversial ‘friendly mission’ did not have the desired effect of Christianising and ‘saving’ the indigenous people from European diseases and debauchery, but his diaries have become a major source of information about the era. Regarding sharks he recorded that:

  Numbers of black women have been killed by sharks . . . When the black women see the shark in the water they dive down and remain at the bottom and cover themselves over with kelp until their formidable enemy has left . . . They say when the black man is sulky it makes the shark come to the women. It was in consequence of lullemoode’s being sulky (he was then quite young) and pushing the crawfish away that the shark came and killed his mother. One young woman was swimming and diving for fish when a shark came and bit at her, and caught her basket and pulled her down, when she remained at the bottom, covered herself with kelp and after some lapse of time when her aqueous region was free of danger she went to shore. Her sister had been looking at her and wondered she did not come out; thought she was killed. Asked where was her basket. Said a shark pulled her down by the basket. Some time after they found the basket and fish in it all bit to pieces. Some natives were swimming at Port Arthur when a shark bit at a woman and cut off all the fingers on one hand. She jumped on the catamaran. The sharks kept swimming round. 35

  Many European missionaries considered it their duty to destroy the so-called superstitions and ignorant beliefs of the indigenes they were ‘civilising’. The sharks of the tropical Pacific were a particular target because shark worship, in one form or another, was the de facto religion of many of the peoples of New Guinea, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. Early in the twenty-first century a young Canadian journalist, Charles Montgomery, travelled extensively across Melanesia, revisiting the islands where his missionary great-grandfather had proselytised in an earlier century. Montgomery found evidence that the traditions of shark worship remain, albeit under constant threat. In his quest to speak to a keeper of a shark stone—a thing of real power to the people of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands—he was told that

  . . . the men who keep the kastom stones are scared. Today, I went to see the man blong shark stone, to see if he could bring you a shark in the bay. He refused. I told him that you would write a bigfala story about him . . . But he was afraid tumas. He said if he played with the stone, the tasiu [Christian priest] would kill him . . . The church wiped all the sacred fish from Langa Langa [Lagoon] . . . It’s tabu for people to try to talk to sharks. Dangerous for the soul. We are Christians now.36

  The demise of traditional societies through aggressive European intervention is well symbolised in the case of The Shark King versus the French Empire. The Republic of Benin, a small country on the Slave Coast of West Africa, had for centuries been the powerful economic, military and cultural kingdom of Dahomey. In the late nineteenth century colonial expansionism erupted in an orgy of greed, and the African continent was arbitrarily carved up into colonies—British, French, Italian, Belgian, Portuguese and Spanish—and shared around at a Berlin conference.

  Crown Prince Kondo of Dahomey became king in 1889, on the death of his father, Glele. The Fon people of Dahomey believed that their kings were akin to gods. On his accession, a king assumed a symbolic power-name to reflect his divine mission. Kondo saw it as his duty to keep Europeans out of Dahomey and his symbolic name—Gbehanzin Hossu Bowelle—can be translated as ‘the Shark King’, ‘the Angry Shark’ and ‘the shark who made the ocean waters tremble’.37 Voodoo divination was of central importance to the Fon and their high priests, who claimed a direct link to the spirit world, and they had predicted a difficult reign for Gbehanzin: perhaps the awesome power and attributes of the shark would assist him in his struggle against the French. Initially, Gbehanzin inflicted heavy defeats on the French (tales are still told of his heroic female military brigades), but within five years his reign was over and he died in exile in Algiers. His defiance of colonial might earned Gbehanzin the Shark King his place in the pantheon of great African leaders.

  Finally, in respect of—and for—such traditions, comes this tribute and lament, written by Glenys Köhnke and published in 1974 (the year of the publication of Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws):

  Today, to the best of my knowledge only one village remains where sharks are called and snared. The village is on the remote west coast of New Ireland. There exists in this village only one old man who knows all the magic and secret rites pertaining to shark fishing. He is very old. He has witnessed the colonising by the Germans, the war with Japan, and the administration of the Australians. As is traditional, he has passed on much of his knowledge to his nephew. This nephew has no one to whom to pass the knowledge. All his sister’s sons have left the village and gone to live in other parts of Papua New Guinea. It is more than probable that the traditions of this last remaining shark calling village will also be lost except for the record of them in this book and others in which shark fishing is mentioned . . . The shark callers have a superb knowledge of the sea and its creatures, especially sharks. It is sad that the shark callers and their knowledge and traditions are disappearing on the eve of the Western world’s awakening awareness of sharks and their habits.38

  3

  ‘THIS STRAUNGE & MERUEYLOUS FYSHE’

  Sharks and Europeans

  Third Witch:

  Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

  Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf

  Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,

  Root of hemlock digg’d ’ i’ the dark,

  Liver of blaspheming Jew,

  Gall of goat, and slips of yew

  Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse,

  Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,

  Finger of birth-strangled babe

  Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,

  Make the gruel thick and slab:

  Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,

  For the ingredients of our cauldron.

  All:

  Double, double toil and trouble;

  Fire burn and cauldron bubble.1

  William Shakespeare was hardly the first European to equate sharks with grim tidings. He wrote Macbeth in about 1605. One of the earliest known European depictions of a shark is on a piece of pottery found on the island of Ischia near Naples; dated to c. 725 BC, the shark is shown devouring a shipwrecked fisherman. Ancient Greek mythology tells us that Zeus, father of the gods, fell in love with Lamia, daughter of Poseidon who was god of the sea. This so angered Zeus’ wife Hera that she stole Lamia’s children, driving Lamia mad and turning her into an ugly sharklike creature who became addicted to eating children. (The Greek word laimos is translated as ‘gullet’.) So distorted was Lamia’s shark-face that Zeus, out of pity, gave her the power to take out her own eyes so as not to see her reflection. The word ‘lamia’ is still used in some Mediterranean languages to refer to the great white shark, which has in the past been classified as Carcharias lamia. It is also the root word for the lamnid family of sharks.

  Lamia also spawned Skylla, a beautiful young woman transformed by malign fate into a sea monster with six shark-heads, who lived high up in a sea cave and regularly devoured sailors. In the words of Homer’s narrator Circe:

  Therein dwells Skylla, yelping terribly. Her voice is indeed but as the voice of a new-born whelp, but she herself is an evil monster, nor would anyone be glad at sight of her, no, not though it were a god that met her. Verily she has twelve feet, all misshapen, and six necks, exceeding long, and on each one an awful head, and therein three rows of teeth, thick and close, and full of black death.2

  Such brutally negative press wasn’t universal, however. In the fourth century BC the Greek Sicilian Archestratus, considered by many to be the father of gastronomy, scorned those who we
re afraid to sample the culinary delights of elasmobranchs. ‘There are not many men who know how heavenly is this dish or who accept to taste it. Those men are stupid like gulls and are paralysed because they say that dogfishes eat men . . .’3 Archestratus also had a recipe for the electric ray: ‘Stew it in oil, wine, fragrant herbs, and a little grated cheese’.4

  At about this time Aristotle was compiling his monumental The History of Animals. He closely observed elasmobranch mating behaviour and correctly noted that the young are nurtured in eggs or live in the womb—not that he got everything right. Sharks don’t breed every month, nor do any species have their young swim into the mother’s mouth for safety (apart from the likelihood of their being eaten, there is no parental care of live young). But Aristotle wasn’t as exaggerated in his descriptions as Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History, written some 400 years later, referred to whales covering three acres and sea turtle shells so large they were used as roofs and boats. Pliny’s record of the ray family is closer to the mark:

  The sting-ray acts as a freebooter, from its hiding place transfixing fish passing by with its sting, which is its weapon; there are proofs of this cunning; because these fish, though the slowest there are, are found with mullet, the swiftest of all fish, in their belly . . . There is nothing in the world more execrable than the sting projecting above the tail of the sting-ray which our people call the parsnip-fish; it is five inches long, and kills trees when driven into the root, and penetrates armour like a missile.5

  An English medieval writer, Lawrens Andrewe, wrote beguilingly of the angel shark: