Demon Fish (3 page)

Ancient myths about sharks are fascinating, mainly because they reveal how we—rather than the animals—have changed over time. They underscore how we used to be closer to the natural world, and were more invested in it. We have doggedly viewed sharks through our own prisms, immune to the revelations that have emerged in recent years, and our popular view of them has become more, not less, simplistic over time. This book looks at how humans began by worshipping sharks and grew to hate them, then started to hunt them en masse, before deciding it might be worth fighting to keep them around. This evolving relationship between humans and sharks illuminates how we have sought to submit wildness to our will, with varying degrees of success. But these beasts themselves, and the subterranean world they inhabit, are affecting human society even as it seeks to shunt them aside.

Sharks’ power over us has always stemmed from the fact that they are largely unseen. They can strike at any time and can disappear just as easily as they can arrive at the surface. This book is an effort to explore the mystery that surrounds them and decipher it. It attempts to discover what these sea monsters are at their core, the complex and contentious community they help rule, and whether they can continue to exist alongside us. If we pay attention, sharks can tell us about their watery world and its implications for the land we inhabit. How we negotiate sharing the planet with sharks could help determine what our own future looks like, not just theirs.

1

THE WORLD-FAMOUS SHARK CALLER

Sun come up, my shark come up.

—a shark caller’s chant in Dennis O’Rourke’s 1982 film,
The Sharkcallers of Kontu

F
or a brief moment, I despair that we’ll ever get to Tembin.

Three of us—myself, my friend Laura Berger, and our driver, Paul Vatlom—had successfully made the trek from Kavieng, the biggest city in the Papua New Guinean province of New Ireland, to the outskirts of Tembin, one of the three most renowned shark-calling towns in the world. The problem: a storm had washed away the bridge to Tembin several years ago, and no one had ever bothered to fix it.

Some of the villagers had heard we were coming, so they decided to pile onto the back of our white Toyota 4×4, further complicating our task. Now we are facing crossing a river and navigating a swamp, all without tossing several uninvited hitchhikers over the side.

Luckily, Vatlom happens to be one of those people who manages to be fearless, deft, and cheerful at the same time. “We will do it,” he says, nodding, speaking as much to himself as to Laura and me. And then by shifting gears, gunning the engine a bit, and weaving back and forth, he manages to coax the truck through first water and then mud. The truck rocks slightly, but no one falls off, and within minutes we have arrived in a settlement that looks like a throwback in time, the sort of village in which a Peace Corps volunteer would have arrived in the 1960s.

As the hitchhikers leap off the truck, our welcoming committee comes out to meet us. It is led by Selam Karasimbe, a lean, wiry man sporting a broad smile, a single piece of cloth wrapped around his hips, and a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “New York.” Trailed by a few women, several small children, and an assortment of pigs, Karasimbe looks like the kind of man who has answers. He is the strongest living connection to the way humans used to see sharks hundreds of years ago. And despite an array of modern-day pressures, he has kept this worldview intact, in a place that seems much closer to our past than our present. It is one of the best ways to understand how the worlds of sharks and humans intersect, and what happens when this relationship is thrown off balance.

Karasimbe is, in his own words, “the world-famous shark caller” of Kontu. “World-famous” may be a bit of an overstatement: most people have never heard of either shark calling or the remote island province, New Ireland, where it is practiced. But the Australian filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke did feature Karasimbe in his 1982 documentary,
The Sharkcallers of Kontu
, an anthropology cult classic. And when it comes to Papua New Guinea, that qualifies for global exposure.

In a world where most humans view sharks with a mix of fear and loathing, Papua New Guinea is one of the few places where people embrace them. For the villagers in Tembin, Mesi, and Kontu—the three towns that still practice shark calling—sharks are an integral part of their creation story, a religious faith that has endured for centuries.

In many ways, New Ireland—the province that is home to shark calling—is a microcosm of Papua New Guinea itself. At least seventeen distinct languages are still spoken there, and while humans have lived on the islands for at least thirty-two thousand years, it was only colonized by the West when Germany claimed it as a colonial protectorate in 1885. Charted in 1767 by the British navigator Philip Carteret, who named it on the basis of its relationship to another, larger nearby island (New Britain), New Ireland served as a port for American whaling ships in search of water and provisions during their voyages.

Missionaries have worked relentlessly to make Papua New Guinea into a Christian country: according to the 2000 census, 96 percent of the populace identifies itself as Christian. While missionaries are a rare sight in much of the South Pacific at this point, they are still ubiquitous in even the most isolated of Papua New Guinean villages. They often provide basic services, including schooling. And in exchange, they demand fealty to a Christian god.

Many Papua New Guineans have reconciled this Western religion with their traditional ancestor worship. In this traditional faith, the spirits of their ancestors inhabit the current natural world, offering them a way to connect to those who preceded them in their everyday surroundings. These spirits communicate to them, watch over them, and guide their choices: it’s a much more immediate connection than the one that typically defines Christian faiths.

But faced with this contrast to Christianity, Papua New Guineans like Karasimbe have deftly fudged the difference. Going to church while also maintaining ties to his ancestors through shark hunting, Karasimbe reasons, is not contradictory. He and others can do this in part because the traditional Papua New Guinean faith has a creator, Moroa, who is from their perspective essentially synonymous with the Judeo-Christian God. While the myth of Moroa predates Papua New Guineans’ contact with missionaries, it bears a strong similarity to Christianity. Moroa created the world in a series of steps just like the Judeo-Christian God did, for example, but his instructions are a bit more detailed than some of the early guidance contained in the Old Testament.

Take sharks, for instance. According to legend, Moroa made Lembe the shark before he made man but after he had made the sun and the moon and put fish and dolphins in the sea. Moroa made Lembe “in the time of
tulait
, the time between the end of the night and the beginning of the new day,” and in doing so, he divided the shark’s belly into two parts.
¹
The left side of the belly could sense danger, but the right side would let the shark approach a canoe without fear.

After creating this divided creature, Moroa held Lembe by his tail (Papua New Guineans say you can still see the mark of Moroa’s thumb and forefinger on every shark in the sea) and explained to the shark the conditions on which he could approach man. He said he would tell man to catch the shark, and that if man broke any of the
tambus
(taboos) set out for him, Lembe must listen to the left side of his belly and stay away.

As one might imagine, at this point Lembe was getting tired of Moroa’s lecture. So he jumped in the sea, just as Moroa was going to tell him about the bait fish man would use to try to lure him. In retaliation, Moroa threw white sand at Lembe, which has given him rough skin until the end of time. “Moroa threw his hands in the air and yelled after the disappearing shark he was truly stupid,” Glenys Köhnke recounts. “For now that his skin was rough man would be able to snare him in a specially prepared noose which Moroa would show him how to make.”
²

When Moroa created humans, he went through the elaborate rules for catching sharks and the mechanics of making special equipment for the task, such as the coconut rattle Karasimbe uses today. And when he was done, Moroa had given the shark callers of Papua New Guinea something no one else on earth possesses: the ability to communicate with the scariest creatures in the sea. On a certain level, shark calling is a form of resistance against Western colonizers, since these authorities told Papua New Guineans they could not worship Moroa any longer. The missionaries tried to discredit locals’ traditional beliefs altogether, telling them they needed to renounce their old faith and accept Christ instead. But many Papua New Guineans see no reason to abandon ancestor worship. Karasimbe wears a rosary with white disks and black beads and considers himself a Christian, but he points out that when the missionaries argued ancestor worship was essentially godless, they failed to grasp the fact that villagers viewed Moroa as an overarching deity the same way Christians view their own God. Missionaries, he recalls, suggested that the faith traditions they had practiced for centuries were contrary to Christianity and were “fucking up people” because “they don’t know about God.” But they overlooked an obvious point, he says: “Moroa is God.”

At this point many Papua New Guineans see shark calling as a divine right, one of the few skills they boast that no other civilization can offer. They argue that their ability to lure sharks from the deep—and catch them by hand using snares—represents a unique culture that should not be snuffed out by either colonization or modernization. Just because outsiders might not understand the practice, they say, doesn’t mean it lacks value. Henry Bilak, a retired soldier living in Mesi, says outsiders don’t fully appreciate what his people can do when it comes to connecting with sharks. “This is the oldest form of human communication with sharks,” he says, sitting in a village garden blooming with yellow, white, red, and pink hibiscus. “The bottom line is this is what human beings can do. This is what God has given us.”

Spending time with Karasimbe, I realize that he and other shark callers hold on so tightly to this part of their faith because it differentiates them from their colonial conquerors. The Germans and the Australians may have brought currency, modern goods, and other advances to Papua New Guinea, but shark calling is something that cannot be replicated by the West. It delineates roles within Papua New Guinean society and anchors these people’s conception of the universe.

Not everyone in New Ireland has the divine power to catch sharks. It’s an elite club. Only men can practice the tradition—legend has it that the scent of a woman prompts sharks to flee. And these select shark callers pass their secrets on to their sons and nephews. Like most things in Papua New Guinea, a person’s
wontok
, or clan, allegiances are paramount: clans zealously guard their particular shark-calling practices, and sometimes men end up as shark callers by virtue of whom they married. While men hold the upper hand in Papua New Guinea, it remains a matrilineal society, so land and other privileges are passed through women rather than men. While this sometimes appears contradictory, given how much influence men wield in Papua New Guinean society, it is the one form of power reserved to women.

Aeluda Toxok, a veteran shark caller in Mesi, took on the calling when he married a woman belonging to the Nako clan. Now in his late sixties, Toxok still goes out regularly in search of sharks. In a given season, he may go out to sea thirty times. Toxok was thirty when he first learned shark calling. By practicing the same rituals as those before him, he sees himself as a sort of shark tamer who calls upon his ancestors for aid in order to corral such a fierce predator. Even with his frizzy white hair and well-lined visage, Toxok is an impressive figure, lean and ready for battle.

One of the most striking aspects of shark callers is their supreme sense of confidence. When I happen on Toxok on the beach, he is preparing his canoe because he has an instinct that he is poised to catch a shark for the first time this season. “Because I have prepared myself, I can go out there and do it. I’ve got a feeling when the shark is coming. I’m going to catch it,” he says. “It’s like a game, because I have prepared all the rituals. I have caught sharks, and I know every time I will go out, I will catch a shark.”

Toxok’s surety is particularly impressive given that once he lures a shark to his outrigger canoe, he must subdue the fish by hand. Shark calling is practiced in three sets of islands along the Bismarck Archipelago—New Ireland, the Duke of York, and the Tabar islands—and in each case they use a contraption to catch sharks that is used nowhere else. To trap a shark, the caller submerges a noose made of plaited cane, which is attached to a wooden propeller float. When the shark is through the noose up to its pectoral fins, the fisherman jerks up on the propeller’s handle, which in turn tightens the noose around the shark. At this point, the shark struggles to break free, and the shark caller must resist the animal’s force to keep it from escaping. Once the shark is exhausted, the fisherman can relax for a few moments and let the float bring it to the surface. At this point the caller stabs the shark in the eyes, to debilitate it further, clubs it into submission, and brings it aboard his canoe.