Shark!

I first saw sharks some 30 years ago, on the fishing grounds off Montauk Point, Long Island. I was a boy then, awed by the silent fin, the shadow in the sea, and when it comes to sharks, I am still a boy today. Big blue sharks and hammerheads were so common off Montauk that one might see 70 in a single day, and once we caught a 13-foot mako that rose to fasten on a hooked tuna. The mako and the porbeagle shark of cold northern deeps share with the great white shark the stiff crescent tail that distinguishes this family of swift ocean swimmers—Isuridae, the mackerel sharks—from other large pelagic species such as the blue and hammerhead, which have asymmetrical tails with the upper lobe more extended than the lower.

Among man-eating sharks, the great white is much the largest, most dangerous and most mysterious. A 13-foot white would weigh half again as much as that big mako and the species is further distinguished by large black eyes—all black, like holes in a shroud—a conical snout that gives it one of its Australian nicknames, "white pointer" (another nickname is "white death"), and triangular teeth with a serrate edge like that of a saw. These terrible teeth are identical or nearly so to those of its nearest relative, a great shark common in the Pleistocene that attained well over 100 feet in length: This was Carcharodon megalodon, apparently so similar to the white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, that the extinct species and the living one are assigned to the same genus. A few ichthyologists have wondered if the two species are not identical, which suggests in turn the remote possibility that somewhere in the ocean depths, feeding on giant squid, perhaps, as sperm whales do, a few of the great megalodon might still exist.

The first white shark I ever saw—a cadaver-colored 17.5-foot brute weighing well over two tons that was harpooned off Montauk and towed ashore in June 1964—also excited the imagination of a man named Peter Gimbel and gave him the idea for a film, to be released this spring by Cinema Center, chronicling a search for the great white that I was to join.

Gimbel, who got the Life pictures of the Andrea Doria where she lay sunk in the deep ocean currents off Nantucket, was already an established diver when—to the great disappointment of his father, who wanted him in the family company—he left Wall Street a decade ago to make a film on blue sharks, lead a parachuting expedition into the cloud forests of Peru, swim under the antarctic ice to photograph Weddell seals, and comport himself generally in the manner of a man bent on systematic self-destruction. "I have no pride or rules about courage," he says. "I go when I feel dominance over the situation, and not on days when I'm afraid—those are the days that you get hurt." For years he has fought off the suggestion that he is out to test himself, or is ruled by some sort of death wish. "Danger doesn't interest me, but I'm curious and I think everybody's curious to find out just what their limits are under situations that exert a certain amount of stress on them. I would be just as curious, for example, to know what my limits are as a gambler, but I already know that, so I'm not curious: I'm a lousy gambler."

Peter's arguments are invariably well-reasoned and sincere, and yet, sensing that some small piece of self-awareness is missing, one goes away unsatisfied. I have listened to him for years, and I always believe him when he speaks, but still the questions keep occurring. In a careful way, with impeccable preparations, he seeks out ways to test what he calls "the limits," and of course this search has no real end to it but death. Still, I don't think this is a death wish, unless dread of death is the same thing. It is as if, by confronting death over and over, he might end some awful suspense about it, or dissipate it in some way. More than any man I have ever met, Gimbel, now 43, loathes the aging process in himself. "I look into the mirror and I hate what I see there, and it's just happened in the last year," he says, cursing his face lines and gray hair, though in fact his hair turned quite gray several years ago. And this lack of serenity in the face of his own transience seems out of character to the people around him. As Valerie Taylor says, "Peter's so great the way he is, he shouldn't need to suck his tummy in and hide his bald spot when the camera's on him."

Since, in some respects, our explorations have been similar, I am sympathetic with Peter's need to find out what the limits are; the original motivations may be ambiguous, but attacks upon this life style are often ambiguous as well—as if the need to attack betrayed a fear in the attacker that his own life seeps away from him unlived.

• • •

Valerie Taylor was one of four divers who served as principals in Gimbel's film: The others were her husband, Ron—the Taylors are both Australian skindiving champions—Stan Waterman, an American underwaterfilm maker, and Gimbel himself. Ron, Stan and Peter served as underwater cameramen and Peter was also the film's director and producer. These four, with a small surface crew, first met in Durban, South Africa, in April 1969, in the hope that the great white shark would turn upamong the big oceanic sharks attracted to the carcasses of harpooned sperm whales off the coast. The whites never appeared, but the spectacle of 100 or more big sharks seen simultaneously by photographers who eventually swam freely with them in the open water was the subject of the most striking shark footage ever taken by anyone until that time, though its eminence was to endure but a few months. From Durban, in that spring and summer, the expedition went to Ceylon, Madagascar, the Seychelles, the Comoros and islands in the mozambique Channel. Everywhere the great white eluded us.

In New York in August and September, Gimbel assembled a rough cut, or "assembly," of the footage, designed to prove to Cinema Center that the film needed a climax; the assembly was screened in mid-October. Afterward Gimbel persuaded the company executives that the Taylors had invariably located white sharks in South Australia's Spencer Gulf, and that even if his own expedition failed to do so, the material already obtained would be infinitely more interesting with the addition of the Australian footage. Since the extra expense would be relatively small, it would be folly not to pursue the search to the end.

Port Lincoln is Located on the barren Eyre Peninsula of South Australia, which forms the western shore of Spencer Gulf. The foremost fishing port of Australia and a shipping center for the wheat and livestock ranches of this region, it is also a summer resort with a beach front on its broad pale bay. South of the town, toward the uninhabited tip of the peninsula, is a dry rolling scrub of gum and Casuarina and Melaleuca where, at dawn one morning, we saw kangaroo and emu. Westward, the scrub dies away in the dry wastes of the Nullarbor Plain, the never-never country of the aborigines.

The expedition was housed at the Tasman Hotel, overlooking the beach boulevard and the bay; a storehouse-workshop was set up in a shed behind. The original film crew was still mostly intact, but the hard job of production manager had been given to an Australian named Rodney Fox, whose experience in the waters of this region includes a near-fatal attack by a white shark.

Fox, a fair-haired, jaunty man of 30, has been involved in more white-shark attacks than any living person and the pattern of his experiences is weird. In 1961, when he won the South Australian Skindiving and Spearfishing Championship—this isfree diving, without aid of scuba tanks—his chief competitor was his friend Brian Rodger, who had been state champion the year before. Late one afternoon in March, during a "comp" at Aldinga Beach, south of Adelaide, the two were swimming close to each other when a shark seized Rodger by the leg. He wrenched himself free, but the shark came in again, and this time he deflected it with a point-blank shot from his sling spear gun. Though the barb scarcely dented its tough hide, the shark veered off, and Rodger, bleeding badly—his wounds required some 200 stitches—used the rubber sling from his spear gun as a tourniquet on his leg, then struggled on, unaided; he was finally picked up by a rowboat near the shore.

Fox was beneath the surface during the attack and was never aware of it; all he saw was the swift approach of a white shark that came in and circled him closely, so closely at times that he could have touched it with his spear gun. Even as he spun desperately in the water, he had to keep going to the surface to get air. Then he would dive for the bottom, 30 feet down, seeking protection, and creep a little way inshore. Relentlessly, the big shark circled, and Fox is convinced that this was the one that Rodger had driven off, returning now along the trail of Rodger's blood; since both men wore black suits, it might have mistaken Fox for its original prey. This distraction, which Rodney thinks could not have been less than ten minutes, may well have spared his bleeding friend from further attack.

As the minutes passed and the shark persisted, Rodney had to fight a growing panic. He was still a half mile offshore, and was spending his last energies going to the bottom. Even when the shark was gone, he felt certain that it would return, and the day was growing late; he was most frightened of all that dark would fall while he was still alone in the open water. But the shark never reappeared and he got ashore.

Fox became state champion that year and was runner-up the next; in 1963, it was expected that he would regain the South Australian title, and Ron Taylor, who was champion of New South Wales, thought that Rodney was the man to beat for the championship of all Australia. Once again the South Australian competition was held at Aldinga Beach, which is noted for its plentiful fish and is only 34 miles south of Adelaide, and this time Fox was swimming near Bruce Farley, the cook-deck hand on the film-expedition motor ketch, the Saori. That Sunday, there were 40 divers in the competition, which was based on the number of fish species taken as well as total (continued on page 152)Shark!(continued from page 100) weight; all contestants wore black wet suits, and all dragged their fish behind them in a plastic float to minimize the amount of blood in the water.

By early afternoon, when he started his final swim, Fox appeared to be well ahead. On his last trip to the beach with a load of fish, he had noticed two large dusky morwongs near a triangular coral head, about three quarters of a mile offshore. Returning to this place, he parted company with Farley. "He went one way and I went the other," Bruce recalled, making a diving flip with his hand, "and the next thing I knew, the shark had him."

One of the big morwongs was out in the open in a patch of brown algae and Fox was gliding in on it, intent, spear gun extended like an antenna, when he felt himself overtaken by a strange stillness in the water, a suspension of sound and motion, as if all the creatures of the reef had paused to watch him. "It was just a feeling," he says. "I didn't tense up or anything—I didn't have time to." For at that moment, he was struck so hard on his left side that his face mask was knocked off and his spear gun sent spinning from his hand, and he found himself swirled swiftly through the water by something that enclosed him from the left shoulder to the waist. A great pressure made his insides feel as if they had been forced toward his right side—he seemed to be choking and he could not move. Upside clown in the creature's mouth, he was being rushed through the water, and only now did he make out the stroke of a great shark's powerful tail. He was groping wildly, trying to gouge its eyes, when inexplicably, of its own accord, the shark let go.

Out of breath, pushing frantically to shove himself away, Rodney jammed his arm straight into its mouth. For the first time he felt pain, a pain that became terrible as he yanked the flesh and veins and tendons out through the back curved teeth. He fought his way to the surface and grabbed a great ragged breath, but the shark was right behind him. When his knees brushed its body, he clasped it with arms and legs to avoid the jaws, and the beast took, him to the bottom, scraping him against the rocks. Once more, he fled for the surface, and again the shark followed him up. His moment of utmost horror came when through his blurred vision he saw the great conical head rising toward him out of the pink cloud of his own blood. Hopelessly, he kicked at it and the flipper skidded off its hide. At the last second, the head veered toward his float, which contained a solitary small fish, and a moment later, the float raced off across the surface; either the shark had seized the float or had gotten entangled in the line.

Once again, Rodney found himself being dragged through the water; already, he was far below the surface. He tried to release the weight belt to which his float line was attached, but his arms did not work, nor his mutilated hands. It was at this moment, when he knew finally that he was lost—"I had done all I could and now I was finished"—and was on the point of drowning, that the next event occurred in the series of miracles that were to save his life. Presumably, the shark's razorteeth had frayed the heavy line that connected the fish float to his weight belt, for at this ultimate moment it parted. For the third time, he reached the surface, and this time he screamed, "Shark!" There was no need of it; a boat which had brought a young diver from the beach was only a few yards away. "They'd hardly dropped him in the water," Bruce Farley said, "when they had to yank him out again, because there was Rodney screaming in a pool of blood. They hauled out Rodney, then came for me and we headed for shore."

The bones were laid bare on Rodney's right arm and hand—his hand alone required 94 stitches—and his rib cage, lungs and upper stomach lay exposed. "Bruce thought I was done for," Rodney said. "The rotten dog sat up in the bow with his back to me—wouldn't even look at me.

Farley grinned. "I just didn't like the looks of all them guts hangin' out," he said. In the boat, there was nothing he could do for Rodney, and he tried to concentrate on how best to find help on the beach. "I knew everything had to go one-two-three if we were going to save him and I didn't even know how bad he was. Oh, there was a little bit of intes-tine stickin' out, but we never opened his suit up to really see. We made that mistake on the beadi with Brian Rodger, and his leg fell all apart." Fox himself feels that his suit, holding his body together until it could be reassembled, was one of the many things that saved his life.

The first person that Bruce met as he ran down the beach was a policeman who knew just where to telephone and what numbers to call. And someone had happened to bring a car down the rough cliff track to the beach—a very rare occurrence; this car was able to bump out onto the reef to pick up Rodney, and it carried him back up the cliff to the highway and eight miles down the road toward Adelaide, where he was transferred to the ambulance sent to fetch him. Already the police were manning every intersection on the way, and because he was traveling just before the Sunday-afternoon rush he actually reached the hospital within an hour after he was picked up in the boat. His lung was punctured, he was rasping and choking, and it was a miracle that he did not drown in his own blood or bleed to death within that hour. Nor were the miracles over: The surgeon on emergency duty that day had just returned from England, where he had taken special training in chest operations.

While Rodney was being prepared for the four-hour operation, he heard urgent voices. One said that someone should go for a priest, and Rodney realized that they thought he was unconscious and did not believe that he was going to make it. Desperate, he half sat up on the table, saying, "I'm a Protestant!" before they got to him and calmed him down. "He's a bloody mess," the doctor told Rodney's wife after the operation, "but he's going to be all right."

Two reasons for Fox's survival were his excellent condition and the fact that he never went into shock. "It's shock that kills most people in a shark attack," Ron Taylor says, and Valerie agrees. Experienced divers are more apt to survive anattack because they are less apt to go into shock: Sharks are a reality that they must live with, and therefore they are psychologically prepared.

"I guess I just wasn't supposed to go," Rodney says cockily. After two weeks, he was home in bed, though he had to pay daily visits to the hospital. Six months later, he made himself dive again, and he has been diving ever since. In 1964, Ron Taylor's team in the Australian championships was beaten by the team of Brian Rodger, Bruce Farley and Rodney Fox.

The 1963 attack on Fox occurred only a few hundred feet, from the place where Brian Rodger had been attacked; 40 divers were in the water on both days, and on both, it was, the reigning champion who was hit. In 1964 Bruce Farley was state champion. One competition day, he was to drive down to Aldinga with Rodger and Fox. but somehow got left behind. By himself, Bruce drove five miles out of town, then turned around and went home. "I can't account for it," he says, "I just lost interest."

That same day at Aldinga, a year to the day after the attack on Fox, both Rodney and Brian, separately, simultaneously and for no good reason, started for shore. The competition had another hour to run and both men habitually stuck it out to the very end, but today they each had an instinct to leave the water. Perhaps the two had heard that stillness that precedes the coming of the white death because before they had reached shore, someone came yelling down the beach. A young diver named Geoff Corner had been bitten just once, on the upper leg, but the great bite had (continued on page 181)Shark!(continued from page 152) severed an artery and he had died. Geoff Corner was the reigning junior champion. Since that time, Bruce has never dived Aldinga Beach. "We're nice to Bruce," Rodney Fox says, teasing him. "We always decide we'll dive somewhere else, because he can't dive Aldinga with his heart and soul."

Bruce Farley is an honest man with a sad humorous bony face. "I haven't dived anywhere heart and soul," he said, "since Brian got hit in 1961."

• • •

At noon today, the expedition's swift auxiliary boat, the Sea Raider, brought word that an 11-foot white of 1300 pounds had been hooked at Point Donington, where the Saori had anchored two nights before. Psychologically, this news was painful, but the water clarity at Point Donington is awful and we could not have worked there. And at least it was proof that the species was not extinct.

In a letter to a friend this morning, Valerie wrote that no shark had been seen, but that she expected a 12- or 13-footer to turn up at about two P.M. At 2:20, Peter Lake, the expedition's still photographer, and Ian McKechnie, assistant to Jim Lipscomb, the surface photographer, saw a fin in the slick, some 50 yards behind the ship: The spell was broken. We dragged on diving suits and went on watch, but the fin had sunk from view in the still sea. A half hour passed, and more. Then, perhaps ten feet down off the port beam, a fleeting brown shadow brought the sea to life.

Suspended from a buoy, a salmon was floated out behind the boat to lure the shark closer. Once it had fed at the side of the boat, it would be less cautious; then, perhaps, the engine could be started and the cages swung over the side without scaring it away. Delicate structures barred with light aluminum, the photographers' cages are six feet tall by six feet long by three and a half feet wide, with heavy dotation tanks around the roof rim and a central housing for the mechanisms that control its vertical movements. Ordinarily, they are entered underwater through a door in one side, but in South Australia, they were entered always from a skiff, through a small hatch in the cage roof.

An hour passed before the shark was seen again. This time a glinting rusty back parted the surface, tail and dorsal high out of the water as the shark made its turn into the bait—a great wavering blade and a thrash of water as the shark tookthe salmon, two hours to the minute after the first sighting. Stan Waterman cried, "Holy sweet Jesus!"—a very strong epithet for this mild-spoken man. Even the Australians were excited by the massive shark, try as they would to appear calm. "Makes other sharks look like little frisky pups, doesn't it?" cried Valerie with pride. Then it was gone again. Along the reef, a hundred yards away, the sea lions were playing tag, their sleek heavy bodies squirting clean out of the water and parting the surface again without a splash, and a string of cormorant, oblivious, came beating in out of the northern blue.

Gimbel, annoyed that he had missed the shark, came running from the bow; he did not have long to wait. From the deckhouse roof. I could see the shadow rising toward the bait. "There he is," I said, and Rodney yanked at the piece of salmon, trying to bring the shark in closer to the ship. Jim Lipscomb, beside me, was already shooting when the great fish breached, spun the sea awash and lunged after the skipping salmon tail; we stared into its white oncoming mouth. "My God!" Gimbel shouted, astounded by the sight of his first white shark. The conical snout and the terrible shearing teeth and the dark eye like a hole were all in sight, raised clear out of the water. Under the stern, with an audible whush, the shark took a last snap at the bait, then wheeled away; sounding, it sent the skiff spinning with a terrific whack of its great tail, an ominous boom that could have been heard a half mile away.

For a split second, there was silence, and then Lipscomb gave a mighty whoop of joy. "I got it!" he yelled. "Goddamn it, I got it!" There was a bedlam of relief, then another silence. "Might knock that cage about a bit," Rodney said finally, hauling in the shred of fish; he was thinking of the baits that would be suspended in the cage to bring the shark close to the cameras. Gimbel, still staring at the faceless water, only nodded.

Just after five, the shark reappeared. The late sun glistened on its dorsal as it cut back and forth across the surface, worrying a dead fish from the line. There was none of the sinuous effect of lesser sharks; the tail strokes were stiff and short like those of swordfish, giant tuna and other swift deep-sea swimmers. This creature was much bigger than the big oceanic sharks off Durban, but for a white shark it was not enormous. Estimates of its length varied from 11 feet, six inches ("Ron always plays it safe and underestimates," said Valerie) to 14 feet (Peter Gimbel: "I saw it alongside that skiff and I'm certain it was at least as long—I'm certain of itl!"). Much more impressive than the length, however, was the mass of it. and the speed and power. "It doesn't matter what size the bastards are," Rodney said. "A white shark over six feet long is bloody dangerous."

The day was late. In the westering sun, a hard light silvered the water rushing through the reef, and nearer, the blue facets of the sea sparkled in cascades of tiny stars. More out of frustration than good sense, we decided to try filming the shark immediately rather than lure it to the baits alongside, in the hope of keeping it nearby overnight. The motor was started up and the cages swung over the side, and the cameramen disappeared beneath the surface. But the great shark had retreated, and did not return.

• • •

By dark the wind exceeded 25 knots, and went quickly to 30, 40—a whole gale—and finally, toward one in the morning, to 50 or better. On deck, I lay sleepless, rising every little while to check the position of the light on Dangerous Reef. The Reef is too low to make a windbreak, and even close under the lee, the Saori tossed and heaved under heavy strain. But Captain Ben Ranford, who knew exactly what his ship would do, slept soundly below. Toward three A.M., the wind moderated, backing around to the southeast, where it held till daybreak.

By morning the wind has died to a fair breeze. Waiting, we sit peacefully in the Sunday sun. The boat captains handline for Tommy-rough, a delicious small silver relative of the Australian "salmon. "Others tinker with equipment, play chess and backgammon, write letters and read. Peter Lake has put a rock tape on the sound machine and on the roof of the pilothouse, overlooking the oil slick, I write these notes while listening to The Band. On shore, for Jim Lipscomb's camera, Valerie in lavender is baby-talking with baby seals, and I hope that most if not all of this sequence will die on the cutting-room floor. Unless it points up the days of waiting, such material has no place in the climax of the film; it would soften the starkness of this remote reef as well as the suspense surrounding the imminence of the white shark.

• • •

Toward dark, another shark appeared, a smaller one, much bolder. Relentlessly, it circled the ship, not ten feet from the hull. On one pass, it took the buoyed tuna at a single gulp.

Since it passed alongside, the size of this shark could be closely estimated: All hands agreed that it was between nine and ten feet. But if this was accurate, the shark yesterday had been larger than we'd thought. Rodney now said that it was over 12, Valerie between 13 and 14, and Gimbel thought it might have reached 16 feet: "I thought so yesterday," he said, "but I felt foolish, with everyone else saying twelve." I thought 13 feet seemed a safe minimum. Whatever its length, it looked twice the mass of tonight's shark, which was plenty big enough. As it slid along the hull, the thick lateral keel on its caudal peduncle was clearly visible; the merest twitch of that strong tail kept it in motion. Underwater lights were turned on to see it better, but this may have been a mistake; it vanished, and did not return the following day.

• • •

On January 26, the Saori returned to port for water and supplies. There it was learned that four boats, fishing all weekend, had boated between them the solitary shark that we had heard about on Saturday. The Saori could easily have hooked two, but what she was here for was going to be much more difficult. Meanwhile, a sighting of white sharks had been repotted by divers working Fisheries Bay, west of Cape Catastrophe on the ocean coast, where three whites and a number of bronze whalers had been seen schooling behind the surf; the bronze whaler is the ubiquitous bull shark, Carcharodon leucas, which is the chief suspect in most shark attacks on Australia's east coast.

On the chance that the shark school was still present, we drove out to the coast across the parched hills of the sheep country. Over high, wind-burnt fields, a lovely paroquet, the galah, pearl-gray and rose, lifted in weightless flocks out of the wheat; other paroquets, turquoise and black and gold, crossed from a scrub of gum trees and Melaleuca to a grove of she-oak, the local name for a form of Casuarina. Along the way were strange birds and trees in an odd landscape of wind-worn hills that descended again to the sea-misted shore. From the sea cliffs, four or five whalers were in sight, like brown ripples in the pale-green windy water, but the white sharks had gone.

• • •

At daybreak on Wednesday, the Saori sailed for the Gambier Islands on the antarctic horizon south of the mouth of Spencer Gulf. A big ocean swell rose out of the southwest, out of the far reaches of the roaring forties, but there was a lee of sorts east of Wedge Island. The Gambiers are remote, and white sharks had been seen there in the past; occasionally, the sharks would seize a horse when the animals raised there in other days were swum out to the ships. Now the old farm was a sheep station, visited infrequently by man. With Ron, Valerie and Stan, I went ashore, exploring. Gaunt black machinery, stranded by disuse, looked out to sea from the dry golden hills, and the sheep, many of them dead, had brought a plague of flies; only at the island's crest in the southwest wind could one be free of them.

Wedge Island is a beautiful silent place, a great monument like a pyramid in the Southern Ocean. That night, white-faced storm petrels fluttered like moths at the masthead light. Some fell to the deck and I put them in a box; once the deck lights were out, they flitted off toward the island. These hardy little birds come in off the windy wastes of sea just once a year to nest in burrows in the cliffs.

Overhead, shined by the wind, the astral sky was luminous. With the stem of his pipe, white-haired Ben Ran ford pointed at the universe: "Canis Major," he pronounced with satisfaction. "The brightest star in all the heavens." In World War Two, Ben was captain of a destroyer in the Australian navy, and he was still the compleat seaman, clumping here and there about his ship in white coveralls and big black shoes without one wasted motion; he could have stripped the Saori from stem to stern and reassembled her in the dark. No man could do his job better than he, and yet Ben knew that this ship might be his last.

At dawn, the day was already hot and still, the baits untouched, the ocean empty. Only a solitary eagle, white head shimmering in the rising sun, flapped and sailed over the sea, bound for the outermost islands.

Two weeks had passed and there still was no underwater footage; running from place to place was not the answer. A decision was made to increase the volume of bait and chum and concentrate it at Dangerous Reef. The two sharks raised there were the only ones that we had seen, the resident sea lions might attract the beasts and the reef was only three hours from the abattoirs and fish companies at Port Lincoln. The ship sailed north again into Spencer Gulf, rounding the west end of the reef and anchoring off its northern shore at noon; a southwest blow was expected that afternoon, backing around to the southeast by evening.

White shark number three came after dark on January 27, seizing the floating bait with a heavy thrash that brought a bellow of excitement from Gimbel, working on deck. No sooner had a light been rigged than the fish reappeared, making a slow turn at the perimeter of green night water. Then it rifled straight and fast for a carcass hanging at the ship's side, which it gobbled at and shook apart, oblivious of the lights and shouting men. Though not enormous, this aggressive brute was the one we wanted; by the look of it, it would not be deterred by cages or anything else. Then it was gone and a cuttlefish rippled in the eerie light, already thickened with a bloom of red crustaceans.

All baits were hauled in except a small flayed sheep, left out to stay the shark until the morning. At dawn, the unraveled bait line lay on deck. Taking the sheep, the shark had put such strain on the line that, parting, it had snapped back dean out of the water. But there was no sign of the shark and it never returned.

That morning, the Sea Raider came out from Port Lincoln with big drums full of butchered horse; the quarters hung from the stern of the Saori. which was reeking like a charnel house. Buckets of horse blood, whale oil and a foul chum of ground tuna guts made a broad slick that spread northeast toward Spils by Island. The cages, cameras lashed to their floors, were already overboard, floating astern. The sky was somber, with high mackerel clouds and a bank of ocean grays creeping up out of the south, and a hard wind; petrels clipped and fluttered in the wake. The ship was silent.

Vodka in hand, Gimbel came and went, glaring astoundedly at the empty slick that spread majestically to the horizon. About 5:30, I forsook my post on the deckhouse roof and went below. Peter was lying in a berth, face tight. I said, "I'm taking a shower, even though there's still light enough to shoot; there'll be a shark here before I'm finished." He laughed politely. I had just returned to the cabin, still half dry, wrapped in a towel, when a voice yelled "Shark!" down the companionway.

By the time we reached the deck, bound for the wet suits, the sun parted the clouds; with luck, there would be good underwater light for at least an hour. Already, a second shark had joined the first and both were big. I went into the sea with Peter, and Stan and Ron soon joined us in the other cage. Almost immediately, a great pale shape took form in the blue mist.

The bolder of the sharks, perhaps 12 feet long, was a heavy male, identifiable by paired claspers at the vent; a second male, slightly smaller, stayed in the background. The first shark had vivid scars about the head and an oval scar under the dorsal, and in the molten water of late afternoon, it was a creature very different from the one seen from the surface. The hard rust of its hide had dissolved in pale transparent tones that shimmered in the ocean light on its satin skin. From the dorsal fin, an evanescent bronze shaded down to luminous dark metallic gray along the lateral line, a color as delicate as that bronze tint on a mushroom which points up the whiteness of the flesh beneath. From snout to keel, the underside was a deathly white, all but the black undertips of the broad pectorals.

The shark passed slowly, first the slack jaw with the triangular splayed teeth, then the dark eye, impenetrable and empty as the eye of God, next the gill slits, like knife slashes in paper, then the pale slab of the flank, aflow with silver ripplings of light, and finally the thick short twitch of its hard tail. Its aspect was less savage than implacable, a silent thing of merciless serenity.

Only when the light had dimmed did the smaller shark drift in from the blue shadows, but never did it come to the hanging baits. The larger shark barged past the cages and banged against the hull to swipe and gulp at the chunks of meat; on the way out, it repeatedly bit the propeller of the outboard, swallowing the whole shaft and shaking the motor. Then it would swing and glide straight in again, its broad pectorals, like a manta's wings, held in an upward curve. At the last moment, gills rippling, this fantastic great eating machine would swerve enough to miss the cage and, once the smiling head had passed, I could reach out and take hold of the rubber pectoral, or trail my fingers down the length of cold dead flank, as if stroking a corpse: The skin felt as smooth as the skin of a swordfish or tuna. Then the pale apparition sank under the copper-red hull of the Saori and vanished in the gloom, only to reappear from another angle, relentless, moving always at the same deceptive speed, mouth gasping as in thirst. This time, it came straight to the cage and seized one of the flotation cylinders of the cage roof; there came a nasty screeching sound, like the grating of fingernails on slate, before the shark turned off, shaking its head.

The sharks off Durban had probed the cages and scraped past, but never, in hundreds of encounters, did one attack them openmouthed. The white sharks were to attack the cages over and over. This first one arched its back, gills wrinkling, coming on mouth wide; fortunately, it came at cruising speed and struck the least vulnerable part of the cage. The silver flotation tanks, awash at the surface, may have resembled crippled fish, for they were hit far more often than anything else. When their teeth struck metal, the sharks usually turned away, but often the bite was hard enough to break the teeth off. Sometimes, as it approached the cage, one would flare its mouth wide, then close it again, in what looked very much like the threat display of higher animals.

To escape the rough chop at the surface, the cage descended to 15 feet, where Gimbel opened the roof hatch and climbed part way out to film; he was driven back each time. At one point, falling back in haste, Peter got his tank hung up on the hatch, and was still partly exposed when the shark passed overhead, a black shade in the golden ether made by the sinking sun. From below, the brute's girth was dramatically apparent; it blotted out the light.

The shark paid the cages such close attention that Gimbel burned up ten minutes of film in 15 minutes. When he went to the surface to reload, Valerie Taylor and Peter Lake took over the cage. "Listen!" Gimbel yelled at them, still excited. "Now watch it! They're nothing like those Durban sharks, so don't take chances!" Then Stan came out of the second cage and, by the time he was reloaded, Ron was ready to come out; this gave me a chance to go down a second time.

For a while, the atmosphere was quiet, as both sharks kept their distance from the ship; they came and went like spirits in the mist. But emergencies are usually sudden and now there came a series of near crises. First the bigger shark, mouth open, ran afoul of one of the lines; the length of rope slipped past the teeth and hung in the corners of its mouth, trailing back like reins. So many lines were crisscrossed in the water—skiff lines, bait lines, hydrophone cable and tethers to keep the cages near the bait—that at first one couldn't tell what was going to happen and I felt a clutch of fear. Swimming away, the shark was shaking its head in irritation, and then I saw that the line was the tether of the other cage, where Gimbel had been joined by Peter Lake. The line was very nearly taut when the shark shook free. Lake was using a camera with a 180-degree fisheye lens, and was getting remarkable shots, but the close call rattled him considerably. At the surface, he yelled all the obscenities. "To hell with that shit!" he concluded. "I'm going below to hide under my berth." But Lake's trials were not over. A few days later, when the Saori returned to Dangerous Reef for continuity shots and supporting footage, a shark tangled in a bait line bent the whole cage with one pectoral fin; it actually stretched five of the bars, shaking the whole cage like a dice cup before Lake could get his leg knife out and cut the line free. At the surface, he had difficulty joking: "When I saw those bars starting to go, I felt like I had jumped at twelve thousand feet with my parachute eaten by rats."

Often, the larger shark would appear from below, its ragged smile rising straight up past the cage; already, its head was scarred with streaks of red lead from the Saori's hull. On one of these ascents, it seized a piece of meat hung from the taffrail just as the current swung the cage in toward the ship, so that the whole expanse of its ghostly belly, racked by spasms of huge gulping, was perpendicular against the bars. I scratched the belly with a kind of morbid sympathy, but at that instant, we were jarred by a thrash of the tail; the cage had pinned the shark upright against the rudder of the Saori. While Waterman filmed at point-blank range, it lashed the water white. "I wasn't really worried about you guys," Gimbel said later. "I just knew it would knock hell out of you." The cage was swiftly heaved aside, and the shark glided for the bottom with that ineffable silent calm, moving no more rapidly than before. Watching it go, it was easy to believe that this beast might swim for centuries.

I turned to congratulate Waterman on the greatest footage of a feeding white shark ever taken, but Stan's eyes rolled in woe behind his mask and he made a throat-slitting gesture with his finger and smote his rubber brow, then shook his fist at his camera, which had jammed. Gimbel got the sequence from the other cage, 30 feet away, and Lips-comb caught one angle of it from the surface, but Stan was inconsolable.

Gimbel was still trying to film from the roof hatch and now he ducked down neatly at a shark's approach, only to find himself staring straight into its face. The main cage door had opened outward and the shark was so near that he could not reach out to close it. Badly frightened, he feinted with his camera at the shark, which slowly turned away.

The sharks patrolled the cages, the Saori and the skiff, biting indiscriminately; there was no sense of viciousness or savagery in what they did, but something worse, an insatiable need. They bit the skiff and they bit the cages, and one pushed past the meat to bite the propeller of the Saori; it was as if they smelled the food but could not distinguish it by sight and, therefore, attacked everything in the vicinity. Often they mouthed the cage metal with such violence that teeth went spinning from their jaws. One tooth found on the bottom had its serrate edge scraped smooth. It seemed to me that here was the explanation for the reports of white-shark attacks on boats; they do not attack boats, they attack anything.

We had entered the water about six o'clock and the last diver left it after 7:30, by which time all six of us were shaking hard with cold. In the skiff, transferring from the cages to the ship, everyone was shouting. The excitement far exceeded any I had seen in the footage of the greatest day off Durban and, when I mentioned this to Gimbel, he exclaimed, "Christ, man! These sharks are just a hell of a lot more exciting!"

The next morning, a sparkling wild day, the two sharks were still with us, and they had been joined by a third still larger one. Even Ron estimated the new shark as 14 feet, and Gimbel one or two feet more; it was the biggest man-eating shark that anyone aboard had ever seen. Surging out of the sea to fasten on a horse shank hung from a davit, it stood upright beside the ship, head and gills clear of the water, tail vibrating, the glistening triangles of its teeth red-rimmed with blood. In the effort of shearing, the black eye went blind as it rolled its eyeball upward; then the whole horse quarter disappeared in a scarlet billow. "I've watched sharks all my life," Ben Ranford said, "but I've never seen anything as terrifying as that." Plainly no shark victim with the misfortune to get hold of a raft or boat would ever survive the shaking of that head.

Last night in the galley, Ron had suggested to Peter that swimming with one white might be possible, and Peter agreed. But this morning there were three and the visibility was so limited that one could never tell where or when the other two might appear. The talk of swimming in the open water ended, and a good thing, too. Nothing but sensationalism would be gained from a pointless risk that might hurt or kill a diver: Such heroics, I felt, would seem contemptuous of the great white shark and could only blunt the impact of the film.

• • •

The cage will sink a foot or so beneath the surface under a man's weight—a situation to be avoided in the presence of white sharks, which, to judge from their avidity, might well come lunging onto the cage roof—and the next morning, entering it, I performed with ease what I had heretofore done clumsily, flipping directly out of the skiff and down through the narrow roof hatch headfirst. Even before I straightened up, the largest of the sharks loomed alongside, filling the blue silence with its smile. I felt naked in my flimsy cell until Stan joined me. This shark was two or three feet longer than the next in size, but it looked half again as big, between 1800 pounds and a fat ton. In white sharks over ten feet long, the increase in girth and weight per foot of length is massive; the white shark that I saw dead at Montauk, only two or three feet longer than this one, had weighed at least twice as much.

The big shark was fearless, crashing past skiff and cage alike to reach the meat, and often attacking both on the way out. Like its companions, which scooted aside when it came close, it attacked the flotation tanks over and over, refusing to learn that they were not edible. Even the smallest shark came in to sample the flotation tanks when the others were not around. I had seen one of its companions chase it, so probably its shyness had little to do with the Saori: Unlike the sharks in the Indian Ocean, the whites gave each other a wide berth. Occasionally one would go for the air tank in the corner, bumping the whole cage through the water with its snout, and once one struck the naked bars when I waved a dead salmon as it approached. Clumsily, it missed the proffered fish, glancing off the bars as I yanked my arm back. Had the sharks attacked the bars, they would have splayed them. "He could bite that cage to bits if he wanted to," Valerie had said of yesterday's shark, and got no argument; for the big shark today, the destruction of the cage would be the work of moments. From below, we watched it wrestle free an enormous slab of horse, 200 pounds or more; as it gobbled and shook, its great pale body quaked, the tail shuddering with the effort of keeping its head high out of the water. Then, back arched, it dove with its prize toward the bottom, its mouth trailing bubbles from the air gulped down with its last bite. Only one pilot fish was ever seen at Dangerous Reef; we wondered if the white shark's relentless pace made it difficult for a small fish to keep up.

When I left the water, there was a slight delay in getting the skiff alongside and Rodney warned me not to loiter on top of the cage. "They've been climbing all over it!" he called. At one point, Valerie, having handed up her exhausted tank, had to retreat into the cage, holding her breath as a shark thrashed across its roof over and over.

Numbers of fish had come to the debris exploded into the water by the feeding, and the windstorm of the night before had stirred pale algae from the bottom. Visibility was poor, yet the sharks worked so close to the cages that the morning's filming was even better than the day before, and the cameramen worked from nine until 1:30. By then, the ten months of suspense were over.

We were scarcely out of the water when the wind freshened, with the threat of rain. The cages were taken aboard and battened down, while a party went ashore to film the Saori from the reef. Then, in a cold twilight, drinking rum in the galley-fo'c'sle, we rolled downwind across Spencer Gulf, bound for Port Lincoln. Though the sea was rough, the fo'c'sle was warm and bright, filled with rock music. Valerie saw to it that we had a good supper, and wine soon banished the slightest doubt that we all liked one another very much. "Is there anything more splendid," Waterman cried, "than the fellowship of good shipmates in the fo'c'sle after a bracing day before the mast?" After three weeks in a real fo'c'sle, Stan had embraced the 19th Century with all his heart.

Peter Gimbel, sweetly drunk, swung back and forth from fits of shouting to a kind of stunned, suffused relief and quiet happiness. He looked ten years younger. What was surely the most exciting film ever taken underwater had been obtained without serious injury to anybody. The triumph was a vindication of his own faith in himself and, because he had earned it the hard way and deserved it, it was a pleasure simply to sit and drink and watch the rare joy in his face.

• • •

At the end of the week, I flew westward to East Africa. A month later, when I reached New York, Peter told me that the white-shark sequence was beyond all expectations, that the film studio was ecstatic and that a financial success now seemed assured. How sad, I said, that his father wasn't alive to see it. He grinned, shaking his head. "It is," he said. "He would have been delighted."

Already, Peter was concerned about where he would go from here. Meanwhile, he had planned a violent dieting, which he didn't need, and when asked why, he shrugged. "I just want to see if I can get down to a hundred seventy," he said. Perhaps I read too much into that diet, but it bothered me: The search for the great white shark was at an end, but his search was not. I recalled a passage in the letter Peter had written after the 30-hour marathon off Durban, and when I got home, I dug it out:

"I felt none of the dazed sense of awe," he wrote, "that had filled me ten days before, during our first night dive. I remember wondering sadly how it could be that a sight this incredible could have lost its shattering impact so quickly for me—why it should be that the sights and sensations should have to accelerate so hellishly simply to hold their own with my adaptation to them.... Only a week or so after having come out of the water one night to say over and over, 'No four people in all the world have ever laid eyes on a scene so wild and infernal as that,' I wasn't even particularly excited...."

And further on: "I was filled with a terrible sadness that we had indeed determined precisely the limits we sought, that the mystery was at least partly gone because we knew that we could get away with anything, that the story–and such a story!—had an end."