Close to Shore (21 page)

The eyewitnesses excited Nichols's scientific curiosity, although he was careful to temper his enthusiasm around men experiencing the trauma of a tragedy. Nichols presumed all the attacks were the work of a single creature. It defied logic that more than one marine animal was suddenly stalking human beings. For the first time, he seriously countenanced the possibility that the man-eater was a shark. As he climbed into his car for the trip upcreek to Matawan, the ichthyologist remained doubtful, however. He counted himself among the “many scientists who have doubted tales of their [sharks'] ferocity toward humans.”

Curving right with the trolley and motoring up along the creek, Nichols thumped across the tracks at Matawan Station and proceeded down Main Street. The rain continued as he reached the old Matawan House Hotel. The three-story wooden building was ablaze with gaslights. Loud and agitated men crowded the long front porch under a painted sign:
TREFZ FINE LAGER BEER
. Men with guns and drinks in their hands held court with newspapermen and newsreel photographers, and Nichols heard wild talk of sea monsters. Bounty hunters with rifles drifted through the lobby along with fishermen, merchants, and friends and families of the victims. Knowledgeable men insisted the idea that sharks were in the creek “was a myth, pure and simple.” That afternoon a U.S. Weather Bureau report caused an uproar: The man-eater had been captured five miles up the coast. A fisherman in Keansburg had caught an eleven-foot, three-hundred-pound shark with human remains in its stomach, the remains of Fisher and Stilwell. The report turned out to be a hoax.

On the front porch of the hotel, wind and rain stirred a set of empty rocking chairs as men took cover, and Nichols could see the storm building to a fury. Main Street was blanketed by black clouds that extended up the Jersey coast and across to Long Island. A storm was prowling the region with thunder and lightning that would fell trees that evening and set houses afire and strike and kill two horses and three men working on railroad tracks, miles away. Leaning into the wind, John Nichols hunkered through the darkness and the rain and the booming thunder toward the shouts at the creek. The muddy bank trembled with percussions of the thunder and dynamite. Nichols saw illuminated by lightning the shadowy figures of men along the creek with rifles and heard the shouts and the explosions that filled him with woe.

No shark had been spotted, but men continued to kill anything that stirred. Dynamite blasts rent the creek to cries of “Shark!” whereupon bubbles appeared that were mistaken for signs of the shark's presence, leading to more shouts of “Shark!” and more dynamite until “the excitement became intense” and “many believed they saw sharks moving after each blast,”
The
New York Times
reported. Patiently, Nichols moved among them, explaining that dynamite would never find the man-eater, and as for bullets, “a shark's thick, tough skin would hardly take an impression from buckshot and would probably turn the .32-caliber bullets fired off them.” He also warned that the fish being killed in the creek could attract sharks. But men proceeded as if Nichols were a specter.

If John Nichols had hoped for better cooperation for his investigation as he trudged back toward town and a room at Matawan House, he received it later that evening as the creek made him a grisly prophet. Ralph Gall, one of the hunters riding a motorboat downcreek, claimed to have seen not one but four large sharks heading upcreek toward Matawan. Shouting wildly and firing warning shots into the air, Gall motored up-creek to give the alarm, but by the time he reached town, the sharks had vanished with the supple mockery of phantoms. Gall's alarm triggered panic up- and downcreek as everywhere people saw sharks or apparitions of sharks. Three big sharks were reported near the old steamboat docks. Men plunged heavy pig-wire into the water to trap them, and the firing began anew, hitting nothing now but currents and tides.

By five-thirty the next morning, the storm had blown over and the sun warmed the tranquil waters of Matawan Creek. The muddy banks dried and the tide came in clean, as if the rage from men and heavens was spent or had never happened. One by one, the dozens of shark hunters had gone home; William Stilwell had at last retired. Edward Craven was walking like a dead man along the creek, his rifle crooked in tired arms, about to turn in himself to get some sleep when he saw something large moving in the creek. It was right behind the old bag factory, and it must have just surfaced, for other shark hunters had recently passed behind the bag factory on their way home and seen nothing.

Craven gripped his rifle and hurried closer, charged with adrenaline. He was one of the last of the armed men who'd spent the night without having glimpsed one of the monsters, and he must have felt pressure now to be a hero. If it was the shark, Ed Craven wanted to blast it out of the water. But the thing in the creek was rocking listlessly with the lap of the tide. If it was a fish, it was a big one and already dead. If it was the shark, the village's worries were over and he would deliver the good news. Scrambling down the muddy bank to get a closer look at the floating mass, he realized with a lurch in his gut that the thing was a body.

Wary of touching the body himself, Craven ran to get Constable Mulsoff, who called the Monmouth County coroner in Freehold. Shortly thereafter the body was lifted easily onto the dilapidated dock from which Lester Stilwell had dived two
days earlier. The small face was badly swollen but smooth and clearly belonged to Stillwell. The face was unmarked, but the rest of the boy was scarcely recognizable. The left side of the abdomen, the left shoulder, and the right breast had been eaten away. The left ankle had been chewed off. The flesh between the hip and the thigh had been mangled, and the stomach had been ripped open as if by giant claws. Authorities decided to bring the remains of the boy to Arrowsmith's Undertaking in Matawan. But first they carried Lester Stilwell to his home on Church Street to confirm his identity. Bill Stilwell must have been sleeping after his long nights at the creek, for his wife, Luella Stilwell, answered the door, and when she saw what the men had brought her, she screamed and collapsed. “The body had been horribly chewed by the sea wolf,” the
Asbury Park Evening Press
reported. “When it was taken to the Stilwell home, the lad's mother swooned. She was revived only to relapse into unconsciousness.”

As soon as Lester Stilwell's body reached Arrowsmith's that morning, the undertaker, alarmed by the “terrible” condition of the body, rushed to prepare the boy for burial, which took place that afternoon after a small service in the Stilwell home.

That same afternoon, most of the village gathered at Rose Hill Cemetery to pay their respects to W. Stanley Fisher. Standing by the open grave, the Reverend Chamberlain eulogized the tailor as a hero who had “immortalized himself.” According to the
Shore Press,
“Scarcely an eye was undimmed by tears. The whole town was in mourning, for young Fisher was known and liked by nearly every man, woman and child in Matawan.”

Numbed by grief, the shark hunters would return to the creek with their boats and guns and hooks that day and the next, trolling for the man-eater, but on the third day a carnival atmosphere prevailed. Extra-large charges were set to push white geysers dramatically high above the creek for the benefit of the newsreels. It was a fine, clear day for pictures, and with newspaper photographers lining the banks, the young shark hunters, cigarettes drooping from their lips, focused angry gazes at the camera lens instead of at the water. Women in day dresses posed grinning for photographers, while angling rifles toward their own toes instead of the creek. “It is to be hoped that she did not discharge this shotgun while holding it in this position,” read one photo caption. The earnest shark hunters seemed a ragged and quixotic bunch to the crowds from miles around that now appeared on the banks, for the shark and the suffering of the small town had become a novelty. “Society turned to shark hunting as the latest wrinkle in summer pastimes,” the
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported. “Almost 100 automobiles were packed along the bank of the creek today, and fashionably dressed women and girls from Jersey coast resorts tripped down to the water's edge to watch the shark hunters
at work.”

That afternoon, as Stilwell and Fisher were eulogized, a newspaperman from New York City rode a motorboat down-creek to the mouth at Raritan Bay and inspected the steel nets erected to contain the shark. Shortly afterward, he reported that Matawan had lost its battle with the sea monster. A large hole had been chewed in the steel nets, and the chunks of meat set as bait were gone.

Intense with Need

T
he great white shark moved free in the wide curve of the bay between New Jersey and Staten Island. Matawan Creek was miles away.

Against considerable odds, the shark had survived battles with men, withstood and escaped the brackish, shallow creek, and sought the freedom of the sea. Yet the shark was weaker than it had been when it entered the creek, and hardly satisfied by five attacks on human beings. The bays below New York City were a great melting pot for the Atlantic seaboard, where freshwater and industrial flows from the city mixed with oceanic water from the continental shelf that curled down from Georges Bank around Cape Cod and Long Island. Raritan and Sandy Hook bays formed a rich estuary that generated marine life for the entire coast from the Gulf of Maine to Chesapeake Bay, hosting more than a hundred different species as diverse as dogfish sharks and moray eels.

But this womb of the sea was a hostile place as well—subject to extremes of temperature, salinity, and chemical degradation as profound as any estuary in the world. In this degraded environment, the great white somehow failed to capture the fish that abounded, its normal prey. With human flesh in its stomach, it continued on a strange and aberrant course.

Precisely because of that course, the lower bays of New York bristled with greater threat for all manner of sharks. Armed men were on the bay that day, killing sharks in unprecedented numbers. Bloodied hooks baited with meat and fish trailed boats, steel shark hooks dangling and glinting. In Raritan Bay, some ten miles from the mouth of Matawan Creek, a nine-and-a-half-foot shark had taken one of those baits and been captured by a New York fishing party after what a newspaper called a “terrible battle.”

The large shark possessed a huge jaw and teeth, and the fishing party believed it to be the man-eater that had consumed Stilwell and Fisher. With great excitement, they towed it back to Belford, New Jersey, eight miles from Matawan. New York and Philadelphia journalists and local residents crowded the docks to witness the shark being opened, to see if the bounty had been won. The shark was indeed a man-eater—a female bull shark,
Carcharhinus leucas
. But the men who cut open the bull were in for a surprise—twelve dead
Carcharhinus leucas
pups, each eighteen inches long and perfectly formed miniature adults, spilled out. While the capture of a gestating shark was notable, it held no value for the bounty hunters.

As the great white swam in the lower New York bays among the baited hooks, it was attracted to other lures. Fishing boats and sailboats and yachts, skiffs and steamers, trawlers and liners, plied the channels to the city. The shark had probably never shared the water with so many boats, large shadows that bewitched it with sonic and scent signals. Sharks are drawn to boats, scientists believe, by electromagnetic impulses emitted by ship equipment, by the metal flashing of propellers, by the skipping of oars across the surface, the leather workings on oars. Sharks crash into boats with exploratory bumps; and they are drawn by bait fish or recently caught fish. There is a contemporary account of an eight-foot blue shark leaping entirely out of the water and landing square on the snoozing form of an astounded young charter fisherman lying on the bottom of a boat, sleeping off seasickness while his friends fished for sharks. The young man awakened, fainted straightaway, and recovered to help his friends beat the shark to death.

Yet of all shark species, the great white is most notorious for attacks on boats, given its size and aggression and unique ability to crush a large hull. Shark researcher Xavier Maniguet refers mostly to the great white when he writes, “It is clear that a shark heading, even at a slow speed, for the hull of a boat can shatter it like a walnut. No wooden or plastic hull can withstand such a ‘snoutbutt.'”

In Australia, sharks have long been known to bite gaping holes in hulls, rip off pieces of a boat, and leave large teeth embedded in the hull. In a particularly famous case from April 1946, a man and his son were fishing from a boat off the coast of New South Wales, when a twenty-foot shark took the line and then for no apparent reason charged the boat. According to the fisherman, the shark tore off the rudder, flung it high into the air, and “savaged it like a mad dog.” In a final flourish, the shark made off with the rudder between its teeth.

Many men in boats have not been so fortunate. In June 1923, four miners were fishing from a reef on the south coast of New South Wales, when a school of sharks passed under the boat. “The boat shuddered, and the next instant a gaping hole was ripped in the bottom,” the one surviving miner recalled. The boat heeled, filled with water, and wallowed, with the men struggling to cling to its side. One of the miners volunteered to swim two miles to shore for help. He had gone only about sixty feet, then he gave a cry and disappeared.

L
ate in the evening of July 14, a fisherman in the bay returned to shore with a battered boat and an eerie story. He had been cruising along when a big shark attacked his boat and tried to sink it. After a prolonged struggle, the fisherman prevailed in escaping from the shark, but not before he saw it close up: a great dark fish approximately eight feet long.

The great white that had escaped Matawan Creek, the big fish that had attacked five men in unprecedented frenzy, is as likely a suspect in that boat attack as the ocean could produce, yet it cannot be proven. What is known is that on that Friday the moon was nearly full, and the shark was intense with need, and as it cruised Raritan Bay there sounded a rich and confusing cocktail of scents and sonic bursts, boats and mammals.

North and east lay all the bays and harbors and beaches of New York City.