Crimson Tide Unlocking the Killer Shark myth
The cultural demonisation of the shark may be rooted in centuries of lore and irrational fear, but the threat it poses to the species, says Miles Masterson, is very real indeed.
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Sharks. Conjure up, if you will, a world without them. It seems hard to do. Even if you have never swum in the ocean, you’ll be aware of their killer instinct. You’ll be able to visualise your spilled blood, colouring the water around you crimson, as the shark’s scythe-like grill sinks into your soft edible flesh. You can imagine the excruciating agony as those rows of impossibly sharp teeth clamp down and slice into your limbs or torso; envisage your own mad panic as those cold, unfeeling eyes bore into your soul, and sense the plunge of despair as the beast, thrashing around like a deranged gothic monster, unleashes its magnetic, prehistoric power and pulls you under the surface to a manifestly painful, lonely doom.
I have a friend who won’t surf at a certain beach. He’s resolute. Miles long, and covered in acres of crispy bleach-white dunes, it has the best sandbars within a half day’s drive, arguably among the finest in the world. Epic A-frame peaks, to rival Hossegor’s La Gravière, offer tube rides up to ten seconds long. But he simply won’t surf it. You won’t catch him dead there, he says.
Why? Because the beach, at Noordhoek in Cape Town, South Africa, has been the location of a frightening number of great white shark attacks and close calls. Most notably, a fatal one on a nineteen-year-old Capetonian bodyboarder, David Bornman, who in 2003 was taken across the chest and stomach and bled to death in minutes, as his distraught fellows tried to gather his intestines on the shore. And another in 2005, when a British surfer, Plymouth school teacher Chris Sullivan, was bitten on the ankle and, hanging by a ligament onto life, was fortunate enough to be airlifted to a nearby hospital for a life-saving blood transfusion.
Though the local authorities limply banned surfing here for a few weeks following the two incidents, these days more than one hundred surfers can still be seen at the wave on a Saturday afternoon. But not my mate. And he’s not alone. Many Cape Town surfers won’t go near the place.
The fear of sharks – selachophobia or, more popularly, galeophobia – is an irrational dread that manifests itself as uncontrollable anxiety. Many humans who will never set foot in the sea have an inexplicable tendency to urinate involuntarily in response to the always-evocative word. Say, ‘Shark!’ (better yet, shout it on a crowded beach) and see the reactions. Terror. Screaming. Tears. Wee.
So the question begs: Why have humans always been so afraid of sharks? It’s not as if most folk, besides surfers and divers perhaps, will ever encounter one in its natural habitat. Shark experts will reiterate that almost all attacks on humans are due to them mistaking us for natural prey. Number nerds will confirm that you have considerably more chance of meeting your maker digging for a lost crust in your toaster. “People get sick of statistics, but we know through science that sharks are not targeting us,” says Alison Kock, chief biologist at the South African Save Our Seas Shark Institute.
Unsurprisingly, it is Peter Benchley’s notorious novel and subsequent blockbuster movie franchise, Jaws, that is widely regarded as being responsible for most modern shark prejudice. “Jaws very cleverly touched on three basic fear patterns,” agrees UK shark expert Richard Peirce, Chairman of the Shark Trust UK. “The fear of being out of your natural element, so you haven’t got your feet on land; the fear of the unknown, the fact your feet are dangling; and the fear of being eaten alive... and that film hit all three of those buttons in the first two minutes.”
Peirce is a vocal critic of the way the media – daily newspapers especially – portray sharks. Tabloid headlines blast the five-letter noun at us in 80-point type whenever there is an attack or – as was the case in Cornwall, England – alleged sightings of great whites. Peirce says that thanks in part to the negative publicity in movies and newsprint, our mindset towards sharks is very different to the one we have in relation to land-based predators, such as alligators, hippos or big cats. “We have this kind of weird thinking that we might be able to outrun [land-based predators], but unfortunately with sharks this ain’t the case,” he says. “But I honestly believe this irrational fear of sharks in many cultures goes way back before Jaws, and they just capitalised on it.”
The ancient Greeks of 600 to 300 BC were among the first to contribute significantly to both nascent shark lore and documented shark science. Like most classical stories, many of which are referenced in the Dictionary of Roman and Greek Biography and Mythology, the origins of their fables are often contradictory. Yet, considering the fact that many larger species, including blue and white sharks, would have been plentiful in the region at the time, they may well have seemed supernatural enough for the early Greeks to demonise. “The source of many of these fantastical tales could have been sharks,” agrees Marina Pearson, a South African classics scholar, “as whales, octopuses and mythical monsters were widely feared.”
Sharks also appear in the verbal history and superstitions of scores of other cultures throughout the world, from the Australian Aboriginals to the South African Xhosa tribes. Unlike the early Greeks, their perspectives towards sharks were not necessarily based on a fear of ‘monsters’, but rather on respect for the inherent power of these predators, often depicted on pottery and tribal emblems. Shark teeth have been found in ruins of the Aztec and Inca cultures, and throughout Central America, the Caribbean and the middens of North American Native Indians as far inland as Illinois. “White and bull shark teeth with their triangular shape and serrated edges held value in trade as well as presumably some spiritual significance in ceremonial use,” says George Burgess, a leading US shark academic and director of the International Shark Attack File.
Europeans held an entirely different view of sharks. Though historical references to shark-like creatures after the classic civilisations are sporadic, as most of the continent entered a period of warfare and cultural regression, shark tales resume with a vengeance at the end of the Middle Ages, when exploration became de rigueur once again. As South African shark hunter Theo Ferreira puts it: “Ever since the 17th century, the only good shark was a dead shark.”
To add to the stigma, zoologists called the subspecies of mostly larger, predatory sharks (such as hammerhead and white sharks) ‘requiem’ sharks which, in the Roman Catholic Church, denotes the Mass for the repose of the dead. To this day negative connotations continue in rapacious terms such as ‘loan shark’ and ‘card shark’.
It is estimated that more than 100 million sharks are removed from the oceans worldwide every year.
To find out how the ‘Killer Shark!’ myth is contributing to the shark’s plight, read this mammoth story in full in HUCK#016, out now.
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Crimson Tide (text) by Miles Masterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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from Selachophobia