Twelve Days of Terror!

Our book today is Twelve Days of Terror, Richard Fernicola’s 2001 history of the famous series of shark attacks that happened at the Jersey Shore in 1916, when four people were killed in July by a shark – probably a single shark, probably a bull shark, since it was able to travel up-river quite a distance in order to wreak some of its havoc. In fact, it was seen swimming up the Matawan creek away from the ocean, seen in the very act of heading inland, seen by seasoned old mariner Captain Cottrell, who was standing on a bridge over the creek when he saw a shadow he recognized well:

When he arrived at the bridge, the captain was surprised to see Mother Carey’s chickens (stormy petrels) resting on the railing of the overpass. The bridge workmen heard him say that he had never see this particular variety of offshore bird so far inland. Looking down toward the flowing creek water, the captain spotted a shape that forced a double take. His aged eyes refocused, and he was frightened to realize that the heat was not playing tricks on his mind or his vision. Cottrell sighted a formidable dark gray shape, approximately eight feet in length, making its way west, up the creek, with the incoming tide. Cottrell recognized the silhouette immediately because he had seen the same kin in the open sea many times before. The object was a shark, and a large one at that.

He tried to raise the alarm and was told “You have a better chance of seeing an elephant cooling off down there than a shark.” Which effectively doomed young Lester Stillwell, who was swimming with some of his friends at their favorite deep-water channel of the creek and had just taken a big dive into the water when the dark shape Captain Cottrell spotted surfaced among them:

Before the airborne water had a chance to rejoin the brown creek, the boys heard a short screech and an even greater splash behind them. The children were momentarily entranced by what they originally believed to be a dark old plank surge toward Lester. Then they saw the dorsal fin and tail fin of the shark and in unison shouted, “Lester’s gone!” As the phantom engulfed Lester’s slight upper body, Lester’s mouth filled with water. The fear-frozen boys saw at once that the beast was not all black but had a white underside and gleaming teeth. Poor Lester struggled briefly amid the reddening water, gurgled a scream once more, and was dragged beneath the surface.

Fernicola rehearses the whole story (the original inspiration for Peter Benchley’s Jaws) expertly and spends a large chunk of his book placing the Matawan shark attacks in their larger historical context of the Wilson presidency and the looming shadow of the First World War. That larger historical canvassing originally hampered my first reading of the book, mainly because that larger historical canvassing is mostly absent from Michael Capuzzo’s Close to Shore, a far more exciting and slimmer book on the Jersey Shore shark attacks, published at the same time as Twelve Days of Terror. That kind of unholy doubling sometimes happens in the publishing world, and although it can sometimes guarantee a double header-style review (assigning editors being feeble, biddable creatures for the most part), it just as often causes one of the two books to fall into shadow – and I worry that something like that happened in this case.

And if so, that would be quite a shame! In re-reading Fernicola’s book, I was more and more impressed not only with his wider view of things, his consistent decision to avoid mere sensationalism, but also with the vivid way he tells this familiar story – and the sure-handed way he has of grasping the essentials, including the most essential element of all:

Of all the predators implicated in man-eating events, none conjures up more intense dread than the shark. It is certainly terrifying to be confronted by a bear deep in the woods, or a tiger in some remote village in India, but it is, perhaps, of some small comfort to know that a single shot from a rifle can thwart the danger from such a visible terrestrial predator. It is quite another issue, however, to imagine being a shipwrecked sailor, a surfer, or a beach bather about to be attacked, dismembered, and consumed by a dark, black-eyed monster with razor-sharp teeth, viselike jaws, and sandpaper-like skin.

2015 has been another “summer of the shark” – there’ve been several attacks off the coast of Florida, and the number of attacks off the coast of Australia has been quadruple what it was last year. Even sainted Cape Cod has been haunted by record-breaking shoals of great white sharks, one of which had the bad manners to spit out a chomped seal onto shore at the feet of sun-bonneted overprivileged tourists. And when you’re reading Fernicola’s book, you see from his careful study how the whole mental framework, the whole idea of the marauding shark, entered the world’s mind frame.