in New York, in 1968, Peter Gimbel had talked about his Blue Water Films expedition, which would hunt large sea creatures at several remote locations in the Indian Ocean, including the whaling grounds off the South African coast. Since I planned to be in East Africa in any case, and had never seen a whaling operation, much less big sharks at close quarters underwater, I accepted his invitation to come along as an observer. How would his film differ from the Cousteau shark films that were currently appearing on television? “I said ‘big sharks,’” Gimbel said. “Those films are fine, but I didn’t see a shark over nine feet. The sharks we want will be dangerous to divers, and the shark we want most is the great white shark—in fact, the film is a search for the great white shark, whether we find him or not.” The great white shark, which may exceed a length of twenty feet, is much the most dangerous creature in the sea.

Since I had no real experience underwater, Gimbel suggested that I come that summer to the Bahamas, where he would be running tests on equipment and crew. There I could make a descent or two in his shark cage, and decide whether I still wished to try it in the Indian Ocean.

In late July, I joined the film crew at Hog Island, across the channel from Nassau, where a house had been rented that had a dock and even a small workshop-laboratory. I was fresh from my first two diving lessons in the Florida Keys, where neither instructor had accompanied me into the ocean, and where I had been forced to go to the aid of a fellow student whose straits were scarcely more dire than my own. My third lesson, which came from Gimbel, was more helpful than the other two put together.

After twenty years of experience, Peter Gimbel is one of the best divers in the business; it is he who obtained for Life the first pictures of the Andrea Doria, lying in 225 feet of water in the treacherous, dark North Atlantic currents off Nantucket. He is also a first-rate teacher, taking the trouble to explain the theory of diving as well as the practice of it; he knows that an extra scrap of knowledge might save your life. More important still, he dives with you and watches you and sets up such small tests and emergencies as pulling out the mouthpiece of one’s air line; these things can happen by accident underwater and may cause an inexperienced diver to panic. (It is panic, not true danger, that kills most divers. Drowning is a far more common cause of death than the celebrated air embolism, which itself is ordinarily a result of panic: a frightened diver decides he must get to the surface now, and grabs a big breath of air which he forgets to expel as he ascends. Near the surface, where ambient pressure is rapidly decreasing, the pressure of the air still in his lungs is no longer equalized, and his big breath, expanding, ruptures his lungs.)

Finally, Gimbel inspires trust. He knows his business and he knows what fear is—one should never entrust one’s life to a fearless man—and in a crisis he is steady; he lets the fear show later, when it doesn’t matter. In short, he is a professional; if he weren’t, I would avoid his shark cage, which adds claustrophobia to the fear of suffocation that causes the beginner, gasping for breath, to burn up so much air. After my first dives with him I had some humbling evidence of my own apprehension and inefficiency; there was half again as much air left in Gimbel’s tanks as there was in mine.

I stayed long enough in the Bahamas to make three descents in the shark cage, and on the last one we went down into the Blue Hole, a huge black well in the ocean floor out eastward of Rose Island, on the Yellow Banks between New Providence and the Exumas. The mouth of the Blue Hole, two hundred feet in diameter, lies forty feet below the surface, and when both sky and sea are clear and the wind moderate, it is plainly visible from a boat’s deck, not only because it looks perfectly round—an unnatural and sinister shape on a sandy bottom—but because the black of it is so much blacker than the cloud shadows that drift across the banks or the scattered beds of turtle grass and coral. The Hole drops 180 feet straight down into the darkness, and at the bottom are two passages that must bring in deep water from the Tongue of the Ocean, twenty miles away, because the lower part of the Blue Hole is very cold indeed.

The shark cage is not mobile horizontally, and the currents carried it thirty feet or more beyond the south rim of the Hole. By injecting compressed air into the flotation chamber in the center of the roof, Gimbel adjusted its buoyancy so that it hovered just above the sand; then we left the cage and wrestled it through the water. The aluminum cage, six by six by three and a half feet, looks delicate and is, but its air tanks, steel fittings and 110 pounds of lead ballast make it unwieldy underwater. The silent struggle was attended by big graceful African pompano with long pale dorsal streamers, flirting and turning at the abyss edge. Then the cage drifted over the rim, magically suspended above the void: with its batteries, pneumatic solenoid valves, amplifiers and power switches all hidden in the choke housing of the flotation chamber, the cage looked weightless, as mysterious in its source of power as a spaceship.

Just below the rim of the Blue Hole were rock gardens of sessile sea life—algae, corals, anemones, hydroids, and the flower-like filaments of fan worms—but I took small pleasure in them. We entered the cage, and I swung the door to behind us; there came a distant underwater click as I shot the bolt. At the control panel Gimbel made his customary sign; he lifted thumb and forefinger together and raised his eyebrows—Everything okay?—behind his mask. When the sign was returned, he pushed upward on the vented pipe that controls the entry and exit of air in the flotation tank over our heads. Escaping through the vent into the sea, the air made a cavernous booming, a sound of doom, or so it seemed to me, and the fragile craft sank swiftly through the sea floor, down the looming cliff face into the darkness.

Watching the needle on the depth gauge and straining to clear my mask and ears, I did my best not to gasp all my precious air away. Over our heads the round mouth of the Blue Hole was taking shape against the sunlit surface of the sea; I felt immersed in a heavy element, like a fly in amber—the surface above appeared liquid.

Abruptly, at seventy feet, the cage was locked in a vault of dark cold water. In the Blue Hole, the thermocline is so well defined that one’s legs may be in the frigid abyss and one’s chest in the tropic sea of the Yellow Banks: Gimbel checked the cage at just this point to prove it. Then, shaking with cold, we continued the descent. Far, far above, the black outline of the rim grew smaller, and the silver ripple of the surface, farther still, was a remote gleam of hope; it was the loveliest and longest no-foot view I have ever had.

Gimbel pulled down on the control pipe, bringing a sensor into contact with the sea water; water is a conductor, and a circuit was made that opened valves connecting one of the twin tanks of compressed air to the flotation chamber. Miraculously, after a shudder, the cage drifted upward toward the light. In an access of joy, I extended my hand—it had a white canvas work glove on it, I recall, and looked rather disembodied—and it is one of the things I like about Gimbel that he understood this impulse that could not be verbally expressed. Like two mad inventors who are testing a weapon of doom, we shook hands solemnly beneath the sea.

On the ascent we left the cage suspended at eighty-five feet and swam out to explore a cave in the south wall of the Blue Hole. The mouth of the cave, which goes back an unknown distance, lies beneath an overhang, and the opening itself is so narrow that one must enter it single file. Gimbel let me go first, the better to see the cave, which he illuminated over my shoulder with a strong underwater beam. My weights were too light, and my tank kept clanging on the cavern roof as I pulled myself forward, and I could not help remembering a story told by a friend who once got stuck for fifteen minutes while exploring a passage like this one in the south cliffs of Grand Cayman. He could go neither forward nor back, and the passage was too tight to shed his harness; also he was all alone, which divers should never be, and he was low on air. He used up some of the remaining air controlling his panic, which would certainly have killed him, and at last contrived to slip his tank and break for the surface.

Ahead of me, on a ledge, I was surprised to see a bright-red squirrelfish—had we driven it into the cave or did it live back here, in the pitch darkness?—but not nearly so surprised as I was a moment later, when something gave a sharp tug at my leg. Seeing nothing behind but the bright eye of light, I thought I had kicked Peter in the face; I waved my hand by way of saying sorry, and started forward again. This time the tug was violent. The light was switching back and forth, its beam on the gray limestone wall, perhaps twelve feet ahead. The whole wall was revolving, and it had a dorsal fin, and as it continued turning I saw the caudal fin of a large shark that we had trapped by accident in the cavern. Already the light was retreating to make room for me, and I backed up clumsily, eyes on stalks, like a crippled lobster.

Awaiting us in the open water, evanescent as a jellyfish in the blue sunrays, the empty cage had the geometrical transparency of a diatom magnified a million times.

Our air almost gone, we went to the surface. The shark in the cave had been turning inward in a tight circle, and as I had not lingered there to inspect its head, I was not sure what species it had been. “A nurse shark,” Gimbel told the men on deck. “Eleven or twelve feet—the biggest I’ve ever seen.” Ordinarily the nurse shark is harmless, but this one, driven deep into the cavern, had been trapped in a small space where it could scarcely turn around. There was much less danger that it would attack than that it would knock us senseless against the coral or cut us up with the placoid scales of its rough hide in a charge to freedom through the narrow passage.

Peter was pleased by my passivity throughout the dive, putting the most generous interpretation on what was probably some weird kind of catatonia. Perhaps I had burned up all my dread on the descent down that darkening shaft into the unknown, because nothing that happened on the way toward the sun could possibly have dampened my euphoria.

“You’re ready,” he said with his usual optimism. “I’ll dive with you anywhere and any time. But when we have a shark frenzy around those whales, the cameramen come first, you know; I can’t promise that I’ll get you in that cage.” I told him not to go to extra trouble over it; I was feeling an ambivalence eight months ahead. Before leaving the Bahamas, I happened to say that to judge from the damage I had seen sharks do to commercial fishing nets, which had plenty of give in them, a big shark that meant business would part that aluminum cage like a bead curtain. Gimbel was annoyed that I said this in front of the others but he did not deny it. Still, I dreaded the sharks much less than drifting down a mile or more in a disabled cage in the darkness of the Indian Ocean, unable to swim upward through the milling sharks, yet unable to stay.

*    *   *

“It’s a funny thing,” Gimbel remarked in Nassau. “A lot of divers, even very good ones with plenty of experience, are spooked by that damned cage—I don’t understand it.” But he himself would have every right to be spooked by his own invention which very nearly cost him his life.

In the summer of 1960, Gimbel had come upon a crude old cage in the backyard of Captain Frank Mundus, whose charter boat, the Cricket II, sails out of Montauk, New York. Captain Mundus specializes in sport fishing for sharks, and the cage belonged to a client who was curious to see what was going on around the baits.

The Montauk device was essentially a steel lion cage that could be lowered on a pulley. Lacking any control of its natural tendency to head straight for the bottom, it remained tethered to the boat like a sort of sea anchor, yanking up and down with the boat’s motion. This was physically disagreeable—Gimbel discovered that one can get seasick underwater—and no help at all in underwater filming, though some still shots he obtained from this contraption were reproduced by the National Geographic.

In the years that followed, while studying mathematics and physics at Columbia and leading an expedition to Peru, Gimbel thought about a self-sufficient cage, and in the fall and winter of 1964–65, with aid in electronics from an engineer named Mitchell Bogdanowicz, he built a prototypic apparatus. The thing had a bottom constructed of chicken wire, and depended for buoyancy on two stainless-steel beer kegs that had to be manipulated separately, but the electronics and the pipe-vent system were essentially similar to those in the present model.

Philip Clarkson, who was a witness to its maiden voyage in the spring of 1965, “never thought much of that cage.” Clarkson had met Gimbel a few months earlier in San Diego, where both were working on a film about gray whales with Bob Young, the cameraman-director; Clarkson, who owns a tree nursery in New Jersey, had plenty of free time in the summers, and had served Young as production manager for Young’s feature film Nothing But a Man. Gimbel asked Clarkson to manage a proposed film on sharks to be shot that summer off Montauk, and one day in May, Clarkson accompanied Gimbel and marine biologist Carleton Ray to a water-filled quarry in White Plains, New York, to observe the maiden voyage of the cage.

In due course, Gimbel’s invention was wrestled into the water, where it was struck with a bottle of champagne. Then, with Gimbel and Dr. Ray aboard, it disappeared from view. Almost immediately it got cocked on a ledge and toppled over, dumping its air, whereupon—still on its side—it continued its journey to the bottom, seventy-five feet below. Ray and Gimbel made good their escape, and the cage was rescued later. Clearly, what it needed most was a stabilizing system, and Ray suggested the permanent flotation tanks that have since been installed on the four sides of the upper rim. The tanks not only gave positive buoyancy—the cage, that is, would go to the surface without mechanical assistance as soon as lead ballast inset in the cage floor had been released—but insured that the cage would remain upright under all conditions.

That summer of 1965, the new cage was used for In the World of Sharks, a fine short documentary on blue sharks shot off Montauk from the Cricket II. Gimbel and Young served as cameramen, and Clarkson as production manager. A year later Gimbel tried to film the Andrea Doria from the cage, but after ten days of wind, fog, dark ocean depths and evil currents, the threat of collision in the steamship lane, leaking camera housings, an overturned skiff, and other mishaps, this adventure was abandoned. The following winter, negotiations with a CBS subsidiary called Cinema Center Films for a feature documentary on sharks encouraged Gimbel to embark on a year of research that concluded, in 1968, with a location trip to Africa and Ceylon, followed by the summer of testing of equipment and personnel at Nassau. By this time the kegs had been replaced by a centrally located control chamber incorporating a cylindrical choke that insured precise control of the volume of the air bubble, thereby reducing rough vertical oscillation to a minimum; these precise controls permitted the cage to be left suspended at any depth while its occupants explored the open water.

Gimbel’s concept of a feature film was already developing when he made In the World of Sharks. In June 1964, the Cricket II had caught a great white shark seventeen and a half feet long that weighed over four thousand pounds, or the equivalent of twenty-five big men. This monster was towed ashore and hauled out on the docks at Montauk, and as I lived not far away I went down one day to see it. Though white sharks vary in color, or lack of it—some are gray-white or brown or even a bruised blue—they tend to pale as they grow older, and this one was a dirty grayish white, like a cadaver. Its length was awesome, and so was its vast maw, but most appalling was its girth, its massiveness: one saw immediately how such a beast could take a seal in a single dreadful gulp.

In nineteenth-century Samoa the white shark was highly thought of, due to its habit of devouring thieves who stole fruit from the people’s trees, but elsewhere in the world it had acquired a very evil reputation. Thomas Pennant, in 1776, noted that it grew “to a very great bulk. Gillius says that in the belly of one was found a human corpse entire, which is far from incredible, considering their vast greediness after human flesh. They are the dread of the sailors in all hot climates, where they constantly attend the ships in expectation of what may drop overboard. A man that has this misfortune perishes without redemption. They have been seen to dart at him like gudgeons to a worm . . . Swimmers very often perish by them. Sometimes they lost an arm or a leg and sometimes were bit quite asunder, serving but for two morsels for this ravenous animal.”

Because of anatomical similarities, notably the symmetrical crescent caudal fin (most sharks have asymmetrical tails, with the upper lobe much larger than the lower), this species is classed with the mako and porbeagle sharks in the family Isuridae, the mackerel sharks, but a closer relative is Carcharodon megalodon, which became extinct in recent times, perhaps no earlier than ten to fifty thousand years ago, and exceeded a length of eighty feet: the extinct form and the modern one are assigned to the same genus because they share the triangular serrate teeth. According to shark literature, C. carcharias, the great white shark, may grow to thirty feet or more; the largest specimen of recent years, found tangled in heavy chain off Port Fairy, Australia, was measured at thirty-six and a half feet overall. The many reported sightings of enormous white sharks have led a few ichthyologists to wonder if C. megalodon might still exist. It has even been argued (see Acknowledgments page) that fossil teeth of small C. megalodon are so similar to those of living C. carcharias that the two may represent a single species. In any case, it seems unlikely that this once cosmopolitan and abundant shark but not its near relative should have disappeared for lack of food, which is the usual cause given for its extinction. A shark will eat virtually anything and can feed sporadically when necessary, storing nourishment in a huge liver that at times comprises one quarter of its body weight. The oceans are still supporting whales, which have a higher metabolic rate than sharks, and possibly C. megalodon, like the sperm whale, feeds in the ocean depths on squid, which have been found in the stomach of the white. A giant shark would not need to surface as whales must do, nor scavenge on the continental shelf, where the smaller whites are mostly seen. The absence of an air bladder in sharks precludes the possibility of meaningful detection in the deeps by sonar, as well as the likelihood that a dead specimen would drift ashore.

In 1918, off Port Stephens on the east coast of Australia, a great pale shark was reported that gulped down several crayfish traps, three and a half feet in diameter, “pots, mooring lines, and all.” The estimates of its size by those who saw it seemed “absurd” to Dr. D. G. Stead, author of Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas (Angus & Robertson, London, 1964), but his questioning of the veteran fishermen involved left Stead convinced that at least a few gigantic Carcharodon still live in reaches of the abyss beyond the probes of man.

*    *   *

The person most impressed by the Montauk shark was Peter Gimbel, who had already seen two smaller whites that were caught from the Cricket II. In early 1965 he made a pilgrimage to the bar at Salivar’s Dock, where the monstrous head resides today in a place of honor on the wall. He stared at the great shark and brooded over it and even dreamed about it, until it became a small kind of obsession. From this time forward, under the sea, he would peer fearfully about him, half expecting the massive shape to materialize in the blue mists. At the same time he longed for the confrontation, if only to exorcise a dread that anyone else would have thought extremely healthy. And in this wish, his film idea was born.

*    *   *

Why does anyone in his right mind go looking for the biggest, most well-armed and aggressive cold-blooded animal in the sea? Because man is by nature curious . . . . it is like every adventure in which man voluntarily pits himself against a challenging aspect of his natural world. Whether the struggle is to reach a mountain peak, to penetrate the most remote chamber of a cave, to explore the planets or space beyond, any explanation of motives is gratuitous. Nearly everyone has some of the curiosity of the explorer; hardly anyone would trade places with him, but nobody needs or wants his motivation explained. They feel it themselves. . . .

This film tells the story of a search. We are after the most dangerous predator in the world, the Great White Shark. But . . . in order to find this creature in his own environment, we must cause him to hunt us. Where do we find him? Where does he find us? What will he do when we do confront him? If he attacks our cages and they yield, will our explosive weapons kill him with a single shot? We fear the thing we seek. . . .

*    *   *

The foregoing passage is from a treatment submitted to CBS by Gimbel for a film with the working title Blue Water, White Death: “white death” is an Australian name for the great white shark. Peter is embarrassed by the redolent prose that is required to excite the appetites of the entertainment world, but without it three long years of risk and research, including location trips to South Africa and Ceylon, would have been wasted for want of financing. As it was, his adventure seemed so speculative to the money people that the threat of withdrawal was held over him until the last frantic weeks before his film crew left New York.