during the morning of May 4 the weather rapidly improved, and toward noon the Terrier came up alongside a medium bull sperm whale killed by Arvid Nordengen on W-17. Already sharks had begun to gather. The surface was calm and the sky and water reasonably clear, though a big swell was still rolling by from the storms of the weeks before.

Stan Waterman and Peter have since told me that, purely as a spectacle, my own day in the shark cage on April 8 was the most spectacular of all before May 5, but as Peter says, the difference between April 8 and May 5, when he won his gamble, was not a matter of degree but a quantum jump; that this is no exaggeration is evidenced by the fact that more underwater film was shot in thirty hours than had been shot in the previous thirty days.

The first day—May 4—was quiet enough; in fact, Gimbel dismisses it in a few lines: “The sharks did not gather quickly, but there were enough around—perhaps twenty to thirty—to give us the atmosphere we wanted for certain connecting shots.” (Bob Young, the director, who had seen some of the rushes in New York, had cabled that the high points were marvelous but that there was no connecting tissue in between.) Stan and Valerie, who also took notes on these thirty hours, were less casual about May 4. Both mention the sharks’ lack of interest in the whale and close attention to the divers, who were kept so busy fending them off that they failed to obtain the connecting shots they needed. Using her bang stick like a club, as all four had learned to do, Valerie “thumped and whacked as fast as I could . . . Part of Peter’s plan was to film the sharks feeding on the whale but we never made it . . . the sharks beat us back every time. Ron finally killed one that came too close. It died a beautiful death, skidding in ever-decreasing circles . . .” Perhaps because so much meat was available, the surviving sharks paid no attention to the dying one, on this occasion or any other.

Meanwhile, more film magazines were jamming, and Peter became upset and depressed. When camera difficulties were compounded, after dark, by a prolonged malfunction of the lighting system, he lost heart entirely. Lipscomb was still perplexed by this two months later. “Here Peter had the whole thing in his grasp, and he just quit. It was a beautiful clear still night, with a full moon, and Tom Chapin was singing folk songs up on the bow, and everybody was ready, and the lights were finally working, and after everything he had gone through, Peter chose this moment to get discouraged. If Stan and I hadn’t really kept after him, he would have gone to bed.”

“I was feeling exhausted and depressed,” Peter wrote me, “unable to shake a feeling of irritability and the sense of a wasted opportunity from the . . . afternoon, when I had had 2 magazines jam in rapid succession . . . Nevertheless, Waterman and the Taylors were eager and ready and Lipscomb was pushing me, all of which got my fight or my pride—or something—stirring, and we got into the water about 1:00 A.M., May 5. Both cages had two cameras in them: Stan and Ron with 2 Arries, one with a 9.8-mm lens, the other with an 18-mm; and Valerie in my cage with an Arri mounted with an 18-mm and the Aquaflex (Eclair) with a 35-mm.”

In the still night, the wet snuffling of the feeding, the moist slap of meat, was very audible. Sharks are said to be nocturnal feeders—they are equipped with a topetum membrane, also found in certain nocturnal mammals, that reflects and amplifies ambient light—and all the wildest feeding frenzies observed from the Terrier occurred in darkness. But at night they appear to see less clearly, for they blundered into the cages much more often and with greater impact. To judge from the prevalence of shark attacks that occur in turbid water, a person’s chances are improved when the shark can see him clearly: add to this man’s fear of darkness and the ever-present possibility that the lights might fail when the divers were out in the open water, and the nervousness of Gimbel’s companions becomes very understandable indeed.

“Peter might have swum out at night,” Stan Waterman said, looking worried. “We followed him out in the daylight, but whether we would have done it at night is a moot point.” Stan was relieved to be in the cages during the night dives, after the nervous strain of swimming with the sharks during the day. Valerie dreaded above all the failure of the lights, and she spoke sharply to Peter in advance. Gimbel agreed that he would not leave the cage; he climbed out the top hatch instead and sat on one of the static buoyancy tanks to give himself a clear field for filming. “This was the scene,” he wrote. “Scores, perhaps even hundreds, of sharks, almost all enormous . . . swimming not quite lazily but not lashing about, crisscrossing in a stack down to about 40 feet. The sea, illuminated only by the big lamps, contained no trace of blue. There was a remarkable feeling of being within a translucent substance of varying tones of gray—from almost white to light medium—then, at the perimeter, suddenly black, blank (but I hardly ever looked there—I’m too savvy: I know where panic waits). You must remember we were illuminating the sea from within, and one never sees that by day. Besides, we were 9000 feet above the bottom—i.e., no bottom. It was surely the most surrealistic sight of my life: we were encapsulated in molten rock salt, a red-pink-white wound the size of an open rowboat pulsated 10 feet away in rhythm with the swell, and the sharks swirled about and drove into the gnawed-out hollow in the whale, latching on and vibrating like outsized tuning forks gone mad until the gobbet between their jaws would tear loose and they would swim away with a plume of pinkish blood at either corner of their mouths.”

The divers’ estimates of the shark numbers do not vary much, though Peter is an optimist and, as a rule, his figures and Valerie’s tend to be highest, while Ron’s are invariably lowest. “Hundreds of huge sharks crisscrossed in a steady moving pattern,” Valerie wrote in her diary. “Several long, beautiful blue sharks glided between the heavier, uglier white-tips; one or two fat lazy greys completed the picture . . . What peace and tranquillity above, what hell and carnage below.” According to Stan, the shark numbers were hard to estimate, but between a hundred and fifty and two hundred would be an intelligent guess; he too noticed the big blue sharks, which he estimated at about fourteen feet, and several white-tips perhaps twelve feet long that must have exceeded a half ton. Ron Taylor thought about it briefly before speaking: “In excess of a hundred, I should say.” Knowing Ron, it is safe to assert that a hundred sharks was the very minimum.

The pattern of shark species remained constant. The great majority, day after day, were white-tips, but a few blues were always scattered among them, as well as C. obscurus, known as the dusky shark or “lazy gray.” Occasionally a tiger shark appeared, and perhaps a dozen times the divers saw the strange shark with the rolled dorsal that we had first seen on April 8. In most respects this creature resembled the dusky, but whether it was an aberrant form of C. obscurus or a new species, nobody could say: the shark authorities at the museum in Durban know nothing about it.

Peter’s letter continues:

“The sharks were feeding on the whale ferociously and brushing close by me and from time to time bumping me roughly. I looked everywhere for the Great White—as I always do when my eye is not on the viewfinder . . . I would have had no particular difficulty in leaving the cage and swimming among the sharks. I think only lethargy, a leeriness of all the lines and electrical cables in the water and an overwhelming determination not to have anything go wrong before the next day (when I was sure the jackpot awaited us) prevented me from doing it. I regret now that I didn’t; it would have made all the difference in the world to our night sequence. The thing that will really hit an audience like a ton of bricks watching our film is not sharks but people out in the open, surrounded by sharks, brushed by sharks and, above all, swimming with them on their own terms: vulnerable . . .

“Before I went to bed—at about 4:00 A.M.—Jan Moen said he wasn’t sure there would be anything left of the whale by morning. So Tom Chapin fired up some of Jim’s big deck lights, which Moen felt might slow the sharks’ eating down. Maybe it did—who knows? By the light of those lamps Jim shot a roll of the sharks hard at work, and they didn’t seem concerned about the illumination!

“At dawn, May 5th, the sea was even calmer—long, easy ocean swells laboriously heaving under an oily smooth surface. As I peered out the port, it became plain that, in fact, the sea was oily: a heavy slick of blackened clotted blood, pieces of blubber, and oily exudate surrounded the ship. I ran out on the deck with despair welling up in me, sure the whole damned whale had been eaten down to the spine in the couple of hours since I had last seen it. The carcass was still floating off the bow of the Terrier, badly damaged but no more than 15 to 20% eaten. I was astonished because, as we had all heard, the Company has had five or six sperms completely eaten down to the backbone this year within a 6 or 7 hour period. I tried to extrapolate—to imagine what kind of feeding performance could accomplish such a thing if the ferocity and numbers of sharks we had seen in the past 8 or 10 hours could only—Wow! Only!—do this. The sharks were still at it, but in fewer numbers, at least so it appeared from the surface, and certainly less aggressively. I went below, gave up my theorizing, and ate my own measly breakfast . . .

“We were in the water by 9:30—Stan, Ron and I each with a camera, and Valerie with a powerhead riding shotgun. The three of us each had a powerhead looped around our wrists too—just in case of the sudden appearance of Big Whitey, or some other crisis. As we left the cages, which we did immediately, wishing to shoot footage of the group near the whale surrounded by sharks, we came under heavy pressure at once. I realized we had made a tactical error in not having two divers riding shotgun and two filming instead of one and three. But I was unwilling to change plans, being very greedy to roll the maximum film through the cameras and realizing, also, that it would be more exciting this way. Fifteen or twenty big heavy white-tips and duskies, ignoring the whale, closed in on us, herding us into a tight little bunch. I became totally conscious of the sharks and was unable to hold my takes nearly as long as I knew the shots demanded. Valerie was moving gracefully around the perimeter swatting sharks, but we were being continually brushed and bumped from all directions. For a few minutes I felt that we were pinned down, unable to move closer to the whale or back to the cages. And to make matters worse, I knew I wasn’t shooting well: unable to concentrate and lacking the will to pull back out of our herded-in knot to get the overall action I wanted. Our film ran out and the pressure eased almost simultaneously, or so it seemed.

“It’s difficult to be objective. In retrospect, I feel we were no more threatened—very likely less—than we were later in the day; but I felt the pressure; I was alarmed. I think it may be analogous to the first ski run of the day, especially if you pick a challenging trail that turns out to be a little icy: some things call for a warm-up. I shot that first roll cold, and suffered through it. During the rest of the day we exposed ourselves even more boldly, but I was filled with a sense of controlled excitement, exhilaration and dominance—never anxiety. I am sure we all felt the same way.”

This was true. As Waterman noted, “. . . as often as we were bumped and jostled that day, no shark ever proceeded to the bite stage. But the contacts were so frequent that we became inured to them. A wild fatalism overtook us . . . we felt a growing sense of immunity . . .”

For almost six hours, from just after nine until just before three, the divers only left the water to reload cameras and obtain fresh air tanks. For twenty-four hours, the blood and smell of death had been drifting down the current, which the sharks followed upstream like a path. The whale’s viscera had been opened up, and the blubber was slashed through to the meat, and meanwhile the vibrations of hundreds of big avid bodies drew more and more shadows from the sea. The divers swam in a maelstrom of big sharks, and not once was anyone attacked or even seriously threatened; there is always a first time, and they knew it, but it never came. Waterman felt that the sharks, while curious, accepted man as another scavenger. In the gathering of albatross and jacks and sharks, with the attendant pilotfish and remoras, the strange bubbling black creatures were of no significance.

“Because of a shortness of magazines—two had had to be taken out of action for repairs—and the speed with which we were shooting, the surface crew couldn’t keep us evenly supplied with loaded cameras. So we intentionally permitted ourselves to get out of phase with one another. That is, anyone who finished a magazine would hand his camera into the dinghy, get in himself and go back to the Terrier for a reload. It’s interesting that we’d always return to a cage to board the dinghy. I think we all felt cautious about having our legs dangling like sausages into the water while hauling into the boat . . .

“When only three of us were in the water Lake would come in to take stills. Because of the situations I’ve just described he got plenty of chance. As you well know, sometimes quite hazardous situations can be funny: often when I looked at Lake, I would sight him in near trouble with a shark moving in very close and him flicking or pushing at it with his little camera. The sight had about it that unreal feeling, when . . . the passage of a single second will cue a laugh or a moan. Luckily, Peter always came up with laughs.”

For all his experience with such perilous pursuits as auto racing and parachuting, Peter Lake was not yet a confident diver, as he himself was the first to admit, and the expedition had been on the whale grounds for weeks before he brought himself to put a tank on and enter the shark cage. As the still photographer, he felt obliged to do so, quite apart from the galling knowledge that he had been missing extraordinary material. But he had only been underwater a few times by May 5, when, in addition to the sharks, he had an experience that fortunately he did not understand while it was happening. The line securing Valerie’s cage to the whale chafed and parted, and the cage, which was not stabilized, descended rapidly to eighty feet before Valerie realized that the first air tank was exhausted and got the valves switched to draw air from the second. To Valerie’s relief, the cage rushed to the surface, where she discovered that Lake thought she was simply giving him a joy ride. In any case, after May 5, Peter was a certified veteran, and has dived with great confidence ever since.

“As midday approached, the vigor of the feeding ebbed,” Gimbel goes on. “This was a tendency we had seen on other days as well. I don’t mean that the action got slack; it was just distinctly less wild and the sharks were more dispersed.

“By about 2 o’clock things were becoming quite lively again. During the course of the day about 50 albatrosses had gathered around the carcass and any time you liked you could see them pecking at the whale . . . often with their heads only inches away from the jaws of the feeding sharks. Looking up toward the surface, their fat, round bellies looked, as Lake put it, like toilet bowls. They are truly enormous birds. From our rather unusual point of view, they impressed us as utterly revolting. Once I popped my head out of the top hatch of a cage . . . and found myself staring into the beady and fearless eyes of one of those birds . . . Quite surprising. They have a beak about 6 inches long, you know, with a terribly pointed, bony triangular cap at the end of it.”

Allegedly, Ron was more nervous about the beaks of the albatross than about the sharks. “Why, those things could hurt you!” he exclaimed at one point, in genuine consternation.

“A bit past 2 o’clock,” Peter continues, “I was aboard the Terrier getting a fresh air tank and new film load. Valerie was either already on the ship or arrived shortly after me; I forget which. In any case, she was plainly exhausted and I told her she should not rejoin us until she was rested. I didn’t expect to see her in the water any more that day because she wasn’t simply winded; she was worn out.

“The dinghy took me out to the whale and I entered the top hatch of a cage which was at the surface, unoccupied. The other cage, with Ron and Stan in it, was about 20 feet down on the opposite side of the whale. It was about 3 o’clock and I knew this would be my last magazine. I checked the camera settings, looked around for the Great White and opened the side door. The sharks were massing again, as we had always observed them to begin doing at midafternoon. (Don’t forget, we were at 30° south latitude, approaching the winter solstice, and the ambient light underwater begins to fade rapidly after 3 o’clock.) I hesitated in the open door for 2 or 3 seconds, full of strangely mixed emotions: first I felt utterly calm—almost as if I had suddenly been graced with invulnerability—then blissfully happy, luxuriating in the realization that we had actually pulled it off, that no matter what happened to that final roll, we already had in the can footage that was far beyond anything of its kind ever attempted, let alone achieved; then, I felt a kind of self-conscious realization that neither of the first two feelings were nutty—that they were, in fact, quite sound, the latter simply an empirical truth and the former the hard-earned reward for pushing day after day in the face of our uneasiness and our fear to find out for ourselves precisely where the limits were, just how far we could go, how openly expose ourselves in swimming about among these sharks in these maximum conditions—i.e., bloody water, active feeding . . .

“I swung out of the door, swam to the opposite side of the dead whale where the greatest activity was, and began shooting. Stan left the cage below, carrying a powerhead, and joined me . . . Ron was sitting on the top of the submerged cage and filming from there. Then Valerie appeared. I must have been filming when she joined us because I never saw her arrive. Suddenly, I looked up and there she was, rapping the sharks about with Stan. I knew how tired she was, hadn’t expected her back in the water, and I was touched to see her there . . .

“I moved in very close to the whale, maybe 3 or 4 feet from the heads of sharks that were clamped on and shaking out mouthfuls of flesh. Security at my back gave me no concern, with Valerie and Stan there, but at times the surge would carry me so near a vibrating shark that I was worried one of them would hit me accidentally as he came away from the whale. Even moving slowly they hit with great force—500 lbs. of mass, and the front margin of the snout is hard and solid. Once their bite was torn loose they would swing their heads in an arc—this was the move that worried me—and swim away chewing. But clearly it was a day without reason to worry.

“The last magazine ran out. It was the 18th one; we could have made it 20—there was plenty of daylight—but everyone was tired and I knew we had the material with a fair margin to spare.”

For Valerie and Stan, at least, it had not been “a day without worry.” While trying to guard Peter, Valerie had a bad experience when a feeding shark, shuddering with effort, turned up beside her. “His vibrating body next to my back felt terrible,” she noted in her diary, “like some primitive shuddering nightmare.” As for Stan, he considered the free swimming among the sharks “extremely dangerous,” and his own worst moments—unlike Valerie’s dread of the dark and the unknown—usually came about when he felt himself cut off from the other divers: he feels certain that the sharks, with instincts tuned by millions of years as successful predators, can sense the weakness and vulnerability of the single individual cut off from his group. Finally, it seems evident that a man taking extreme chances is also endangering his companions, none of whom was pleased to see Gimbel, on that final dive, swim right into the whale’s wound among the sharks. Waterman deplored his “bold and frightening actions” and Valerie wrote crossly, “Peter Gimbel seemed to like it up there in the gore and blood surrounded by sharks, he took so darn long getting those last few shots . . .”

Subsequently Valerie told me that Ron, too, had kept a diary. The news surprised me, and I asked her what he had thought about May 5. “I don’t know,” Valerie said. “I haven’t read it.” She shrugged her shoulders, looking wistful. “I don’t know Ron,” she said, after a moment. “We get on fine, but I don’t really know what he wants, or what he expects of me. I don’t even know what he likes about me, or even if he likes me!” She laughed, shaking her head. “I don’t know him at all.”

When I asked Ron about his diary, he looked very uncomfortable. “Well, it’s not really a diary,” he said. “It’s only got about thirty words in it.” He acknowledged dutifully that May 5 had been “incredible.”

In the long days of bad weather before May 5, Ron had occupied himself in part by honing both edges of his diver’s knife to a fine edge. Previously he had had poor luck in killing these big sharks with the bang sticks—the ammunition simply was not strong enough—and on May 5, when his camera ran out of film, he busied himself, as Valerie said, in “slitting open every shark in knifing distance.” Because the flanks were too tough to penetrate effectively, he evolved a technique of stabbing the sharks in the throat as they swam by and letting the knife pass down between the pectorals to lay open the belly. “Ron hates sharks,” Valerie has written. “So do I. Many of our diving friends in Australia have been mauled and sometimes killed by these vicious monsters. Ron wanted the personal satisfaction of killing sharks with a knife. He soon discovered the only place the knife would penetrate, so concentrated on throats and bellies with dazzling success.”

At times Ron’s calm seemed so unusual that the last paragraph of Valerie’s diary for May 5, reminding us of the stress he shared with all the rest, comes as a distinct relief:

“I crashed into bed immediately following dinner, an exhausted mess; only sleep eluded me. At 9:30 P.M. I was still fighting in my mind. A thousand sharks plagued me and gave me no rest. Ron was tossing around like he had a shark in his bunk with him. I gave him a call and we both took a tranquilizer. Finally we slept.”