the evening weather report forecasts marginal weather. Since most of the days have been much worse than marginal, we decide to lie to at sea, and try to work again tomorrow.
April 8 is a clear blue day. Great swells of vanished storms persist, but the breeze is light. Overnight the Terrier has drifted shoreward, and daylight finds her forty-five miles off the coast.
By 7:00, two whale-catchers are in sight down to the south, and the Terrier VIII is headed southeast to cross their bows. Then Willy Christensen comes on the air: W-29, forty miles to the northeast, has sighted whales. Our ship alters course, rolling northeastward at 12 knots. Off the starboard beam, a solitary albatross bends the sky in hard black-and-white arcs. In the morning light the mist from the bow wave makes small fleeting rainbows: the boat’s wash is pale turquoise where the white foam pours across the deep stone blue.
At midmorning, W-29 and W-18 rise on the skyline; the spotter plane crosses the Terrier’s mast. The flat voice says that W-29 has whales on her sonar; she is barely making headway, ploughing a soft furrow in the sea. Ahead of her the ocean parts, and eight whales, glinting, blow together and subside before their spume has settled on the waves. But the winded animals soon surface, and now W-29 has picked up speed, her big stack shooting filth into the sky. She rides down upon the whales so fast that after the shot the one struck falls immediately astern; the ship throws her engine into reverse, and the boiling wake turns red. The whale, wallowing, is hauled in by the big winch and given a killer harpoon; the harpoon with the air-hose point pulls out before the crew can noose the churning fluke. A third shot resounds, then a fourth—the explosion smoke is pink—and finally the whale is still.
Quickly the blood spreads until an acre is reddened, then much more, and just as quickly the sharks come, attracted as much by the repeated explosions and the thrash of the dying whale as by the blood; low-frequency vibrations picked up by the nerve endings in its lateral-line system may bring a shark from hundreds of yards away, and even a very small amount of blood, spreading out through millions of gallons of water, may be scented a quarter of a mile down current.
The first shark appears before W-29 has released her marker buoy, and in minutes there are six in sight, then nine. Before the Terrier comes alongside and hauls the yellow flag aboard, there are twenty or more tawny white-tips gliding in. At first their attack is tentative; a vulnerable wound has not been found. Staring down from the bridge, Jan Moen remarks, “That sperm hide is tough; if that was a baleen whale, now, you’d see big chunks out.” Moen, a decent man with a sudden boyish smile, once served as mate for Torgbjorn Haakestad. Because he doesn’t have full master’s papers for ships operating offshore, the Terrier also carries a licensed master named Knut Paulsen, who is rarely seen; perhaps he has confined himself to quarters. Officially Moen is the mate, though it is he who operates the vessel.
Sharks bite and churn, rubber bodies twisting, and fall away again; the fins flop on the surface. Then a big hole is opened up behind the head and a brief frenzy takes place, eight or more sharks rolling in the wound; this awful motion, in which the shark fills its jaws, then rolls completely over on its back to twist the gobbet free, is known as “coring,” as in coring an apple. But the rest do not join the frenzy, which soon subsides; there is plenty for all. The sharks attack in twos and threes, hour after hour, feeding steadily at the widening trough.
Birds come too: the wandering albatrosses and a smaller albatross, with black bill, dark mantle and dark edges fore and aft on its underwing—probably the yellow-nosed albatross (Diomedea chlororhynchos), named for the tip of its beak—and sooty shearwaters and storm petrels. A jaeger goes hawking past, too wild and shy to settle on the whale. In the ocean emptiness, far off to the south, a great fish leaps high against the sky, standing on end, and falls back into the sea—a marlin, or a mako . . .
* * *
On the foredeck, the men rushed to get the equipment overboard. The haste was precipitated by the horde of sharks, which filled the whole ship with nervous energy, and the most energetic of all was Phil Clarkson, who was responsible for getting the operation under way. Clarkson is a small, well-knit man, very handy and quick and impetuous, with a sharp hectoring voice (“I hate my voice,” he announced once at breakfast—the kind of bare candor for which one forgives anybody anything), and his difficult job was made more difficult because he has not learned how to give orders to his peers. (“Phil still thinks he’s talking to those poor migrants on his tree farm,” one man grumbled.) Though the two are long-time friends, Clarkson clashes frequently with Gimbel, who is painstaking and methodical and easily distracted by details; Clarkson feels that if he does not keep the heat on Peter, the operation would never get under way at all. Today, however, Phil was being efficient to the point of inefficiency, and in hurrying everybody else, went off half-cocked. Efficiently, both cages were launched without having their systems checked—all the more serious because both were new, and one had never been in the water. The other did not even have its air cylinders hooked up, and had to be efficiently hoisted out again.
When this was discovered, Clarkson was out in the rubber dinghy, and Gimbel, wrench in hand, stalked over to the rails. Peter is tall and balding with a big open generous face and a big chest and shoulders scarred by operations, and when he is angry, his voice, which is soft and husky, resounds like a foghorn. “Look!” he yelled. “I can’t make it with this hustling! You hustle in this game, Phil, and somebody is going to get killed! What’s your hurry, anyway? It’s not even noon yet, we have good light, and those sharks aren’t going any place—if they do, they’ll be replaced by two to one!”
Clarkson took this very well, and after that, considering all the things that could go wrong, preparations proceeded smoothly. The main impediment was sharks, which were milling in such numbers that in the rough surge the transfer of divers from rubber boat to cage was a nervy business. The sharks nipped and brushed the boat repeatedly, and Phil later reported that the outboard had been stalled four times by sharks biting the propeller.
Rather than take any more time, Gimbel decided to check out the unchecked cage in action: this was not foolhardy, since the cage would remain tethered to the whale by a twenty-foot line. Ron Taylor ran the cage on the first descent, and Peter took one of the wide-lens Arriflex cameras fitted to a Mako submersible housing: the action was so fast that a ten-minute magazine was burned up almost as fast as he could shoot. Since the South African government had not yet issued ammunition permits for the “bang stick”—short clubs like police billies, tipped with powerheads that discharge a twenty-gauge shell into a shark when jammed against it—Ron carried his sling gun that fires a .303 bullet. “I reckon this might even stop one of them whyles,” he said, “if I put it in the proper place.”
Ron came back aboard the ship while the camera was being reloaded, and I went down with Gimbel for a look. In the transfer from dinghy to cage—we were entering through a small emergency hatch in the roof of the cage, which at the surface is awash—the boat slid down the back side of a wave, and I found myself stretched between cage and boat; I chose the cage, attaining it in a single violent motion. To judge from the cheering aboard ship, no one had thought that a man in a heavy scuba tank could be so agile.
Shark tails flopped like lily pads on every side as the cage sloshed up and down, jarred by the black gleaming carcass of the whale. As Peter bubbled impatiently below, I sat in the warm water for a moment, adjusting my gear, then opened the hatch and slid into the limpid 79-degree water. Gimbel, who hates the surface motion of the cage in a rough sea, took it down immediately to twenty feet, and the contrast between the glare and slosh and bang and clamor at the surface and the blue stillness beneath was as sudden as the thermocline at the Blue Hole.
Looming overhead, the black oval of the sperm whale broke the mercurial silver sheen of the ocean surface. On the surge of passing seas, the tail fluke waved in the wet sun, graceful in death, and the long jaw that had once seized giant squid deep in the abyss hung slack, teeth silhouetted. By hauling on the line tied to the jaw, the cage could be drawn beneath the wound back of the chin. Into this great cave of flesh the sharks bored in twos and threes, tails lashing in the bursts of gore that flowered in the sea; the shredded flesh, a bright dead-white, rippled like soft corals in a current. The cage itself was shrouded in red murk in which shadows thickened and dispersed; then the water cleared again, and a jellyfish glistened in the sun shafts a hundred feet away.
The cage had entered a blue realm of dream. The water glistened as if filled with its own light, and the utter silence made the scene more awesome, a nether world of open-mouthed dead staring forms that moved in slow predestined circles: having no air bladder to buoy them and lacking a true breathing apparatus, most sharks must draw oxygen from the water pouring through their opened jaws and washing over their gill surfaces, and are doomed to keep swimming, open-mouthed, from birth to death. Because they do not weigh much more than the water they displace, their movements seem effortless; they glide forever through the seas like missiles lost in space.
In the blue void the big shapes were so numerous that one could not turn fast enough to count them; they moved in concentric circles and in opposite directions, smooth as parts of a machine. There were certainly more than forty sharks—the divers estimated fifty—none of them smaller than ourselves and many ten feet or better: blues, duskies, white-tips and a mustard-colored species with a strange curled dorsal fin that looked from a distance as if the whole top part of it had been sheared off. Just beneath the flat edge was a distinct lateral ridge that ran the whole length of the fin. None of us had ever seen or heard of such a shark.
Some of the white-tips and duskies were twelve-footers, heavy, businesslike brutes with glazed yellow eyes, a tawny hide and long backswept pectorals tipped with luminescent white; the blues are thin, with pointed snouts and small black eyes in which the pupils are quite visible. These three species and the tiger shark seen the day before are requiem sharks, Carcharinidae, and all four are included in the list of nine established man-eaters (among 250 known species of sharks) that is one of the few things agreed upon by shark authorities. One ten-foot blue nosed repeatedly at the cage; when I kicked it in the side, it slid away. Valerie stroked a passing white-tip and Ron punched one in the throat; like the blue, they fled. Another thing shark authorities agree on is that sharks should never be provoked, but probably the exact reverse is true. As Gimbel says, a shark has no mammalian responses. “This idea that you mustn’t provoke them is nonsense. If you really hurt one, he’ll go find something easier to eat.” (This was also the belief of Pliny the Elder, but the theory has fallen into disrepute in the twenty centuries since.)
Some of the sharks carried brown remoras, which attach themselves to larger creatures by means of a disc on the top of the head, and all were accompanied by pilotfish, a small member of the jack family with vivid striping, blue on black. The visibility was well over one hundred feet, and the pilotfish shimmered like striped petals as far away as one could see the sharks, which formed and vanished in the ocean mist. From below, the long-winged white-tips were surreal, silhouetted on the silvered sun like ancient flying beasts.
When water and body temperatures are so nearly the same, the skin seems to dissolve; I drifted in solution with the sea. In the sensory deprivation of the underwater world—no taste, no smell, no sound—the wild scene had the ring of hallucination. The spectral creatures came and went, cruising toward the cage and scraping past with lightless eyes. Then I remembered the great shark we were awaiting, and peered past the coasting forms to the region, three whales’ lengths away, where the blue gathered into mist, or down where the blue turned to night, awaiting the colorless heavy shape with eyes like black holes in a shroud and a slack smiling mouth. I too sought as well as dreaded a confrontation with this dispassionate unblinking death which is part of life.
* * *
“I have never seen so many sharks in my life,” Valerie wrote later in her diary. “All big ones, too . . . without the cages, we would not have lasted 10 minutes.” At one point Valerie tugged at Peter, who was leaning out of his cage to photograph: a big white-tip had gone into a glide straight at him, veering off only when Gimbel whirled. “I have a healthy respect for the old white-tip,” Gimbel commented. “He’s a good strong husky shark, and he’s the first shark that ever attacked me.” Like most pelagic sharks, these requiem species are widespread, and both blues and white-tips are common off Montauk, where Peter’s first experiments with the cage were carried out.
Already Peter was wondering if the divers should try to leave the cages. “Off Montauk,” he told Jim Lipscomb, “those blues would bump into you while you were filming and never bite, but I became convinced that they would bite a moment after the bump if they didn’t get a strong reaction to show them that there was still life in what they had their eye on. I think that these open-ocean sharks here in the Indian Ocean will behave the same way. I’m not a big enough fool to jump right out of the cage with the certainty that I’m right, but we’ll watch them and see how they behave. Eventually we’ll get a feel for them, and if they behave in the same pattern as the blues, we’ll work them the same way.”
* * *
By 4:30 it was too dark for underwater filming, and W-29 was already on the horizon, coming to fetch her whale. W-29 taking the whale in tow would make a fine end to the day’s sequence and I went to alert Lipscomb, but Jim, seasick, had been lugging his heavy rig since dawn and he was exhausted; he sat wall-eyed on his bunk, unable to move. A little later, however, he made it out onto the bridge, shooting the whale-catcher in a marvelous dramatic twilight as she hauled in the big bull with the yawning wound where the left flank had been and steamed away westward toward the coast.
On deck, we lashed the cages down, hosed the salt water off the diving gear and stored the cameras. None of the divers had ever seen such an aggregation of sharks, and the talk was excited; in the old-fashioned speech that he favors when in fine spirits, Stan Waterman called out to me how lucky I was—“You are in luck, sir!”—and I agreed. I was delighted by the experience and delighted it was over, and when Valerie brought whiskies around, I took mine up onto the gun platform, already drunk with exhilaration. The death of the day was beautiful, and as the Terrier came up with W-29, my spirits soared with the great white birds crossing her wake, lifting and falling, tipped on end, dipping their stiff black wing tips into the sea.
* * *
Ashore, the publicity people made the most of the shark packs that had surrounded our “intrepid divers” on April 8, and one paper had a story about how Ron Taylor became “terrified” when a ten-foot shark became entangled in the line that tethered the cage to the whale: “I thought the cage would break up,” he was quoted as saying. The story annoyed Valerie very much—“I’ve never known Ron to be terrified in my life!” she exclaimed at supper—but her husband was unruffled. “I’ll sue them for character assassination, I will,” he murmured, to nobody in particular.
“Ron’s always under control,” Valerie says. “He’s never lost his temper with me, and I’ve never seen him show excitement. It’s his temperament and his philosophy: whatever you do, you’ll get it back, you reap what you sow; if you hurt someone, you’re going to be hurt, and the same thing about honesty and everything. Oh, Ron’s a beautiful person, and he’s intelligent. He can turn his hand to anything, except my garden; if I ask him to prune a bush, he looks like he’s been struck by lightning.
“Anyway, his calm is what makes him a great skin-diver. He’s got a big lung capacity and he knows his fish too, but it’s that calm that makes him a champion. But winning never meant much to Ron after the first time.
“Now, I’m quite different. As a diver, I have to get by on nerve, because I’m not even a good swimmer. I have a good lung capacity now, but I had to work on it. I don’t win competitions because I’m a good diver; I win because I’m still going at it like a mad dog when the rest have been hauled out panting. I’m not even calm; I weep when I get frightened.” She described how once, during a night-filming trip on the Great Barrier Reef, she went in first and had descended the face of the reef when her light went out. “I just clung weeping to the wall. Ron never came and never came, and I thought he had abandoned me. Finally I got up courage and crept up the wall—it was pitch-black, I kept bumping into unknown shapes—and finally I got to the side of the boat. And Ron says, ‘Here, just hold on a minute, Valerie, and I’ll fix that light for you.’”
* * *
Ron Taylor and Valerie Heighes met at St. George’s Spearfishing Club in Sydney when she was twenty-one. Ron’s interest in diving had begun at the age of fourteen, when he found a face mask in a Sydney tide pool; Valerie had been brought up along the coast, and had been married briefly to a skin-diver. She was a commercial artist and an actress, and had once starred in a production of the Seven Year Itch that ran for nine months. “I was never a great actress, but I had heart. I’d drop everything and go anywhere to get a part. Also, there’s a shortage of scriptwriters in Australia, so I started writing TV shows that had great parts for myself, like being thrown into a shark tank at night by the villain. Then I’d go in and apply for the part of Paula Howard, and they’d say, ‘You’ll have to play it—nobody else would touch it.’
“But Ron paid no attention to me at all. He was a photo-engraver then, very shy and quiet—he’d never had a girl friend. I tried everything. I’d challenge him to ping-pong and then turn out in a bikini, jumping around to get his eye. And when we were diving with the club, I’d always sneak around ahead of him; every time he came around a rock, why, there’d I be. I was always right where he could see me, and I wasn’t the only one, either.”
In 1961, when Valerie was twenty-five, they started working together, and they were married three years later. “I finally said, ‘Either marry me or I’ll marry that folk singer in two weeks!’ And to everyone’s surprise, he married me.”
After their wedding, Ron and Valerie went into diving and underwater photography on a full-time basis. “I was always willing to try anything, I used to drop jobs right and left, but for Ron, making the break was harder—he’d always been very careful, and he wasn’t used to change. And it was hard at first—we had to peddle the fish we speared to pay for our film. But now things are better. Ron’s made some beaut films and we have our own boat and we give talks—oh, and that’s where we’re different too: I’m always champing to get out there and get at the audience, but he gets very nervous. He thinks I’m a show-off. Like when I shot sharks for Vogue wearing false eyelashes.” She shook her head. “No good asking Ron what makes me a good diver—he’d just laugh. He thinks I’m not a good diver because I’m too emotional, I just rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Valerie left, but in a little while she turned up again with a magazine article about herself. The article, which described her adventures with sharks, portrayed Valerie standing beside her own paintings of a clown, flowers, fish. “That’s what I really am,” she said, “a painter.”
Valerie’s near-perfect face is almost invariably intense, with an anxious shadow at the eyes; she touches Ron every little while for reassurance. The Taylors are childless and, more than most people, they pronounce each other’s names—Ron? Yes, Valerie? Don’t you think so, Ron? — like children keeping track of each other in the dark.
* * *
One reason for the Terrier VIII’s return to port was the need for the portable powerheads. Gimbel wants his divers to carry a bang stick on each descent, because if a big shark attacked the cage, or a cameraman was caught outside it, this protection would be crucial. But two days later, when the Terrier put to sea again, the permit for powerhead ammunition had not come through. South Africa is very nervous about permits for firearms, even underwater ones. “Rumors of unrest are exaggerated,” an article in one paper stated, “but in any case, whites control all the centers of power: revolution is inconceivable . . .”
Except to swim in the surf and walk the beaches, I rarely left the hotel; I even gave up the idea of visiting the famous Kruger Park. I was content at sea, beyond the territorial limits, and depressed upon each return to shore, and was therefore especially sorry when, on April 9, the northeast wind, “the bluebottle wind,” set in again, keeping the Terrier in port; it brought white swatches to the dirty sea and a plague of small blue jellyfish onto the shore. Like everything else in Durban, the beach is segregated into “white,” “Asian and colored,” and “Bantu” segments of very different size and desirability, but below the tide line the people cross the barriers, hurrying across the desolate gray flats. On the day of the bluebottle wind, the tide line was littered with the elevated air bladders, like tiny blue balloons, and dark figures, crying out to one another, danced from jellyfish to jellyfish, popping the balloons with hard small angry stamps of their hard heels.
* * *
On the strength of the successful shake-down cruise, the Durban papers published a new article on Gimbel, in which it was said, among other things, that his abandonment of Wall Street for a life of adventure had begun with the death of his twin brother, David, in 1957; the New York millionaire realized that life was short and decided to live it “to the hilt” from that point forward. The truth is that before David died Peter had already made his adventurous dive on the Andrea Doria, and after the death he had remained an investment banker for three more years. “I was on Wall Street for nine years,” he told me, “and while I was doing it, I really thought I liked it.” But the challenges of Wall Street are well charted, and he did not want to go into business with his father. “I wanted to be a success,” he says, “on my own terms.”
In his Wall Street years, I did not know Peter well, though I saw him occasionally in New York. I lived far out on eastern Long Island, writing in the winters, working as a commercial fisherman in fall and spring, and running a charter fishing boat out of Montauk in the summer. On a July day in 1956, Peter had chartered my boat; he and his party were to be at the dock at 6 A.M. By 6:30 his friends had come, but at 7:30, Peter was still missing. Later we learned that, the night before, he had flown up to Nantucket, where the Andrea Doria had just gone to the bottom; he had hired a boat and made the dive that made his reputation as a diver.
Another year, in the spring of 1959, I think, we both went parachuting in Massachusetts; this was the first wave of the sport of skydiving that has since spread across the country. Alone among my friends who tried it, Peter applied himself seriously to parachuting and later put it to good use; in 1963, he and three others (one of them was Peter Lake) made a risky jump into the wild highlands of the Peruvian sierra and worked their way down to the Rio Picha, in the headwaters of the Amazon, in an unsuccessful attempt (later described in the National Geographic) to find some ancient ruins that he had read of in The Cloud Forest, a journal of South American exploration written a few years earlier by myself.
At the time of his Peruvian journey, Peter had already left Wall Street. To the great disappointment of his father, who was proud of his son’s adventures but refused to take them seriously as a way of life, Peter enrolled at Columbia University, intending to study for a degree as a biologist. In 1964, with Carleton Ray, he dove beneath the Antarctic ice to film the Weddell seal. He was still caught up in the mystique of sharks and, in 1966, invited me to a screening of his excellent short film on blue sharks. By this time he had lost interest in the biology degree, his marriage was in disrepair, and his life, which seemed so colorful to others, had begun to strike him as directionless. He was desperate to find a living which combined his interests—science, diving, film-making, adventure—and what evolved not long thereafter was the project that became the search for the great white shark.