the expedition sailed from the Comoros that same evening in the hope of working the St. Lazarus Bank the following day. From St. Lazarus, the ship would steam southward along the coast of Mozambique. I had no visa for Mozambique, and my passport was checkered with entry and re-entry stamps of Tanzania, with which the Portuguese colony is engaged in an undeclared war. From the shore crew at Lourenço Marques we had already heard that the Portuguese were even more nervous about subversion than the South Africans, and as I had to be in Hawaii in ten days, I decided not to risk incarceration; I would stay behind in the Comoros.

We had a fine dinner at the Kathala Hotel, and I walked the film crew to the quai. There we were overtaken by three French plongeurs who had heard of the presence in the Comoros of some American and Australian confrères, but they barely arrived in time to wave farewell. These men were so upset by the departure of Ron Taylor, whom they had read about in diving magazines, that after the ship’s sailing they honored me instead, inviting me out for drinks that I did not need.

The three assured me that big sharks occurred on the Récif Vailheu, sharks as big as the sofa that we sat upon, and as many as thirty at once; they themselves had encountered big marteaux and tigres, which were especially common. But the sharks came in calm weather, following pelagic fish that circled the sea mount when the sand was not roiled by surge and current; one must come in September or October, they said, and not be in such a hurry.

The three knew little of the great white shark, but became excited when I told them what the Taylors had said about the white: how it raised its head out of the water like an orca to look into a boat, and how it was said to attack boats to get at the occupants. One day, they said, some local pirogue fishermen of a village not far from Moroni had been towed out to the reef by motor launch and left there to fish; according to the survivors, a “large sharklike creature” had reared its head out of the water, then attacked the pirogues, in the course of which seven men had drowned or disappeared. Since that day, no fisherman of that village had ever returned to the Récif Vailheu.

The Frenchmen spoke of a gigantic sea bass that was readily seen in a wreck off Juan de Nova, three hundred fifty miles to the southward; I got off a letter to Peter about this fish next morning. They also spoke of a former habit of fishermen in the Comoros of eating coelacanth, a delicacy they can no longer afford now that specimens of this archaic fish bring such a price. That day, two of the kindly plongeurs, Jean Nicholas and Charles Pouchet, showed me four of the big black fleshy-finned creatures; they lay in tubs of formalin in a shed near the quai, awaiting shipment to the outside world.

On two days of the week, one can fly out from the Comoros to Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania: I looked for the Terrier in what I calculated to be the region of the St. Lazarus Bank, which lies a hundred and twenty miles from Grande Comore. At one point the plane passed over a ship that was anchored or lying to—there was no wake—but the ship was half hidden by low scud, and I could not be certain that it was the Terrier. Whitecaps were visible, but the sea was not nearly so rough as it had been in the Seychelles, as I could see clearly from the low altitude that Air Comore’s two-engined Piper had attained. A Piper is not a very big plane in which to make a 200-mile open-ocean crossing, and I was glad to see Mafia Island and the coast of Africa.

*    *   *

The Terrier, arriving in the region of the St. Lazarus Bank at daylight on July 11, had located the sea mount by midmorning. Not long thereafter a small plane passed over to the northward. Gimbel thought, I’ll bet that’s Peter! perhaps at the very moment that, on high, I was thinking the same thing.

A submerged mountain fifty miles off the Mozambique-Tanzania coast, St. Lazarus rises a mile or more out of the deeps to an uneven summit or plateau that ranges from twenty to ninety feet below the surface. It has always excited fishermen and divers who have seen it on the charts, but the ocean that rolls over it is rough, and no one has ever dived it. Gimbel had heard that Cousteau had wished to try it in 1968 but was “weathered out,” and now the Terrier wallowed disagreeably in seas that ran ten to fifteen feet before a 25- to 30-knot wind. “We were weathered out too,” Peter wrote later, “but we were desperate, so we dove it anyway.”

There was little or no current on the bottom, and big groupers and snappers (cod and hind to the Australians) were present in abundance to bait sharks. But the bank itself, which tapered off quite gradually at the edges, lacked striking contours and was generally a disappointment. Its flat, amorphous surface was studded sparsely with low corals, and there was a broad bed of green algae, but essentially it resembled the Récif Vailheu. A number of fish were speared and slashed, until blood drifted like smoke across the bank, but no sharks came. The ocean sky was dull and the bank was gloomy, and the next day the dull weather continued. But that day two more dives were made on a shallower region of the bank, and in the afternoon the effort was rewarded. The sun came out, bringing the bank to life, and a thick four-foot barracuda with a striking black base to its heavy tail was photographed being fed by hand.

Valerie’s description of this creature is beautiful:

“There was a stillness in that great silver fish that made him stand out stark and aloof. Down there everything moved—the water, the sand, the smaller fish, even we moved, but not that barracuda. He just hung there, still as stone, watching and waiting. I had never seen so much power so contained. Even holding against the current seemed effortless. While we clung on with fingers and toes fighting clumsily to retain our position he just watched. A million generations of selective breeding had produced this perfect fish, and he seemed to know it . . .

“The Saint Lazarus bank had paid off, finally really paid off. Barracuda are considered as dangerous as sharks in most parts of the world. What a great sequence it will be in the film having one of these fellows feeding from the hands of the divers. It was almost as good as filming a hammerhead, and will have a great impact on the general public and skin-divers alike.”

On the 13th of July, the Terrier took on water in Porto Amélia, a taut little colonial town on the north coast of Mozambique. Here she was met by Philip Clarkson, who flew in with good news about Mozambique Island, farther south: on a reconnaissance flight in a light plane, he had seen big sharks, as well as a good number of manta rays.

In Porto Amélia, a dive made outside the harbor revealed chiefly that the water clarity was poor, and since the port captain had commanded Gimbel not to snoop beneath the sea until permission to do so had come down from higher authorities, the Terrier sailed southward on the second day, arriving at Nacala at dawn on the 15th. A lovely day for diving was spent at the fuel dock, and that evening the ship put to sea again, bound for Mozambique Island. There the authorities were nervous because a dive had been made on the way into port, even though this region was well south of the country’s borders with hostile Zambia and Tanzania, and the next day the port captain, a bitter, timid man who had been demoted from his former post as governor of the province and did not intend to be demoted further, refused the crew permission to enter the water, much less take photographs, as a precaution against undersea subversion. Subsequently the ship carried a green-shirted security policeman on every trip outside the harbor.

That night Gimbel flew to the capital, Lourenço Marques, eight hundred miles south, to try to straighten matters out. There he was told that permission to film the underwater territories of Mozambique would have to come from the Foreign Ministry in Lisbon, and he went to the U.S. Consulate for help. The American authorities were more than obliging, and sent off batteries of cables, but meanwhile the Terrier lay idle.

“We are presently in the doldrums,” Stan Waterman wrote from Nacala, where Gimbel had cabled that the ship should proceed in his absence. “This is the first colony established by the western world in eastern Africa. It is also the last to survive. The fact that in more than five hundred years this colony has achieved no greater affluence than it has today will tell you something of the stultifying effect the Portuguese mind and government has had here. We soon discovered that special permission is required to film along the coast. It seems that Zambian agents may lurk like compressed genies in our aqualung tanks. No official is willing to take a chance and make a decision in this matter. So we vegetated in the harbor at Mozambique Island while Peter flew to Lourenço Marques to muster the forces of good in our behalf. Now coded cables have gone from our consulate to the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, and the ether is filled with urgent messages to Washington, CBS, and others.”

On the way north to Nacala, a big bull sperm whale had been sighted, lazing on the surface. An attempt was made to head him off in the dinghy in the hope of obtaining some underwater film that might be cut into the footage on the whaling grounds, but the beast proved just as obdurate and flighty as the bureaucrats in Mozambique. “Poor Peter, I feel for him, I really do,” Valerie noted. “We sure are having some rotten luck.”

To add to Peter’s frustrations, word had come that Durban’s beaches had been closed, due to the shark hordes that were pursuing great shoals of mackerel close inshore; the nets off the beaches were catching as many as seventy-two sharks in a single day. In Natal it was the southern winter, and the water was colder, and among the species in the nets was the great white shark.

*    *   *

A letter from Peter:

“I know that I was going into a decline at the time you were with us at Astove and Aldabra: the consistent absence of sharks and other big fish combined with the shortness of time remaining in the schedule, our budget position, and certain harassing communications from the studio were grinding me down. It got worse after you left, and I remember once at midday, after a particularly uneventful dive, plunking down heavily on one of the banquettes in the messroom where Valerie was having a cup of tea alone. ‘I feel drained out,’ I told her. ‘I’ve run out of gas.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve been watching it happen and it hurts me very much.’ About that time, I remember wandering into Jim’s cabin, sitting down with my head literally in my hands and saying, ‘Is there any way we can still salvage this thing?’

“For the first time since before we left on location, I seriously considered the possibility of failure; not just the chance of a mediocre rather than an excellent outcome, but the possibility of a dead loss, going home without an acceptable film.

“It became starkly clear that I had better begin taking pretty seriously your advice to distribute more of the load and to save all my energy for thinking about the film. My discouragement must have been plain to see because as I passed along the responsibility for some of the things I had been attending to, it was grabbed up almost gratefully by Waterman, Lipscomb and Lake.

“Of course Waterman is probably the most generous, gracious person I’ve ever known. His generosity goes way beyond the material domain; he seems determined to see to it that credit is recognized where it’s deserved. But his style is graceful and funny, not heavy-handed, and when anyone tries to give him a gold star he laughs it off.

“Sometimes I’ve been furious at Stan, and I regret it. My constant fear of losing a vital piece of equipment (much of which was made up specially), and my preoccupation with avoiding any waste of time, have made me thin-skinned and irritable, and I’ve taken out most of my tension on Stan, who is not as technically or mechanically proficient as Ron or me. Once I asked him to assemble and lubricate all the stainless-steel powerheads. These items were custom fabricated at $40–$50 each, and at the rate we were losing them we would run short long before the end of the trip. But, most important, when we were swimming clear of the cages, they were our only effective weapon against sharks. He returned in about an hour, saying that all the powerheads were ready except one that had given him trouble. The shaft that screws into the handle was scratched and wouldn’t pass through the hole at the base of the chamber.

“‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll file the shank smooth and run a die over the threads. It’ll be fine.’

“‘But I threw it overboard,’ he said. ‘I figured we had plenty.’

“I think the look of utter disbelief and anger—though, God knows, I tried not to show it—that passed across my face must have been awful. Stan apologized soulfully. Later during the trip when I would ask him to perform some task with a piece of equipment he would sometimes say, ‘I promise not to heave it overboard!’ But there was never any recrimination in it, nor in anything that he ever said; he never needed to save face.”

*    *   *

While awaiting an answer to the cables, the Terrier reconnoitered the Mozambique coast and ventured two reconnaissance dives in remote places; the water was murky everywhere, and the fish life sparse. No word from Lisbon arrived at Porto Amélia, and Gimbel could wait no longer. On the night of July 24, after twelve days of pure frustration, he sailed for Grande Comore by way of the St. Lazarus Bank. On the sea mount, conditions were much the same as they had been two weeks earlier: the seas were rough and no sharks came to the cut fish, despite a quantity of whale oil dripping steadily over the stern. Even so, an action sequence was obtained.

As usual, the current did not run clear to the bottom; in the last fifteen feet above the sand, there was no current at all. Working in sixty feet of water, in full view of the Terrier’s hull, the divers had only to swim along the bottom until they were well up current of the Terrier before starting their ascent. But one day Peter Lake, ascending too soon because he ran out of air, missed the ship and was carried off the edge of the bank into the open sea. His bobbing head was spotted by Sam Lloyd, who also had spotted lost divers ten days before, when the dinghy lost track of them in choppy seas off Porto Amélia. Since no boat was ready, Gimbel and Waterman dove into the water and swam toward the drifting Lake; for all they knew, he was in trouble, and in any case he was in the oil slick, which was there to attract sharks.

In her diary Valerie wrote, “Peter Lake, probably due to his lack of experience, was swept away in the strong current and had to be, with much drama, rescued. He didn’t seem to mind; but I worried a bit as we had whale oil dripping and he was in the slick. Peter and Stan, to my amazement, both leapt over to save him and had to be rescued also. Peter L. had about 500 yards’ start on them and they never even saw the person they were trying to rescue. Peter L. was wearing his vest so was quite okay. Ron, Anson, and Sam lowered the dinghy and picked the three of them up.

“Previously Stan and I had a drama of our own. Stan surfaced too soon, as his air ran out. I looked up and saw him swimming like mad but going backwards anyway. I still had 500 lbs. The safety rope was somehow wrapped around the hull of the ship. I moved up current and headed for the surface, only just managing to get the rope which I dragged over to Stan. He then pulled himself in only to find no one there to take his camera. We both crashed up and down bellowing for help. Somehow the rope trapped one of my legs against the hull of the ship and I became stuck fast, hanging onto the lowest rail and rising up and down with tremendous ferocity. Meanwhile Clive, the new messboy, came and helped Stan. Lars, the chief engineer, came to me but it was some struggle, and I couldn’t be moved until Peter Gimbel surfaced and freed my leg. Jim Lipscomb filmed the whole thing, never once lending a hand or calling for someone to help. It would have been all the same if one of us was drowning. Poor Stan must have been terribly exhausted after his desperate swim without air, and once he was on the ladder, to receive no help with his camera for over a minute, I thought was a bit much.”

A resentment of Lipscomb’s single-mindedness at the viewfinder seeps out here and elsewhere in Valerie’s diary, and was shared by other members of the crew: at times we tended to forget that documentary film-making has to be a dispassionate job, that as a professional cameraman, Jim must be aggressive or he wouldn’t be any good. Operating under difficult conditions, he felt obliged to conserve his energy and attention for his own work, which was made all the more exhausting by chronic seasickness. And finally, he was encouraged in his attitude by Gimbel, whose relationship with Lipscomb was excellent. Before the expedition left New York, Jim had said to Peter, “If somebody gets hurt or something, the camera doesn’t stop; I’m going to keep right on rolling.” And Peter had said, “That’s just the way I want it.”

Valerie: “Today they reenacted the drama of Peter L. being swept away. All cameras jammed including Jim’s. Things just get worse and worse. I feel this showing Peter L. being swept away and Peter G. getting the bends makes us look like amateurs but am keeping this to myself, as we need some excitement in the film.

“We are leaving here tonight and going to the Comoros again. Peter Matthiessen wrote Peter G. some interesting news about the place. Anyhow, we haven’t much choice. Mozambique is out of bounds, so we must try other places. Peter G. must be nearly out of his mind.”

That the divers were not amateurs is evident from the fact that no one was ever seriously hurt; there were close calls, and there was luck, but luck alone would not have carried them for five months of dangerous work. In any case, Gimbel had no fear of filming the mistakes. Lake’s emergency, he felt, would make an exciting sequence:

“Lake is not a careless diver. For example, he is the only person who has never gone into the water on any occasion without an inflatable jacket and it did him yeoman’s duty then and on one other dive off Porto Amélia. He didn’t lose his poise as a result of this incident even temporarily; luckily there were no big oceanic sharks around. But it’s ironic that he got into trouble at this stage of the trip because his work has been so very good since leaving Ceylon, where, after weeks of agonizing . . . I finally told him bluntly that I was unhappy about his performance, that I felt he hadn’t been putting out. I think it was painful for both of us; I know it was for me. But Lake has the capacity for learning, and from that day—I think it was June 19—to this, he has been a different man. The diving cylinders are blown up almost before they’re dry; the air compressors are well maintained; he has helped me in many thoughtful ways; and—most important—I would bet (I can’t know because I haven’t seen the results) that his own photography has improved. I have the greatest admiration for the way he reacted to talk that can’t have been very pleasant to hear.”

*    *   *

On Saturday evening, July 26, the Terrier sailed eastward to Moroni, and the next three days were spent mostly at the Récif Vailheu. On Sunday the divers were joined by the French plongeurs, Jean Nicholas and Charles Pouchet, who were to depart the following day on a trip to Juan de Nova and Europa; in the shadows of the sea the Frenchmen saw the only shark that the reef produced, but the cameras were nowhere near. On Monday, however, another unforeseen event provided footage.

From Valerie’s journal: “I received the biggest fright of my life today. Jan wanted someone to check his anchor, which hung over a vertical drop-off. Ron agreed to go down. Peter Lake was supposed to watch from the surface, but for some reason stayed in the dinghy instead and lost Ron’s bubbles on the choppy surface. After he had been down ten minutes I started to worry, and after fifteen minutes I was completely panicked. Stan, who had gone down to check on Ron, hadn’t returned either. Cursing Peter L. (I used a swear word) and cursing Jim, who was filming my distress, I donned a tank and leapt in, only to discover I couldn’t descend due to my cold. I swam back and got a snorkel, by this time sobbing with fright. Fortunately Peter L. met me and told me Ron was okay. Peter was very distressed at my upset and was very sweet and comforting. We bobbed around in the choppy seas hugging each other. I was sorry I had been so harsh with him.

“While checking the anchor at around 150 feet Ron had spotted a big grouper, and as we had been having trouble getting chum, he decided to stalk and spear it. This he did without much trouble, only the grouper thundered in under the coral. Stan arrived to see Ron struggling with his fish, so, like any interested spectator, he stayed to watch. Meanwhile, back on the boat, poor me. I was nearly out of my mind. I imagined Ron trapped and mangled under the anchor chain, which was swinging about on the cliff face in a most alarming manner. Stan, of course, must be trying to drag out the corpse. All I could think was that I had lost my husband, my wonderful beautiful husband. It was pretty awful and I have not forgiven him yet for giving me such a fright.”

Ron accepted a public chastisement from his wife in silence. When she was done, he remained silent for a while, looking out to sea, and then he said, “What’s the matter, Valerie? Do you think I’m some sort of amateur diver who can’t be left alone?”

Morale on the ship was not getting any better. Because of the frequent moves from place to place, Peter Lake had not heard from his wife, who was in Nairobi, and his usual sunny manner was interspersed with fits of red-faced rage. Stuart Cody was upset that a night dive at the Récif Vailheu had been aborted by new malfunctions in the lighting system; furthermore, he had burned out two expensive amplifiers in the shark attractors in an attempt to raise the volume. Finally, a pet monkey that he had bought at Porto Amélia had been washed overboard and lost—“a foregone conclusion,” according to Valerie.

On the 29th of July, the Terrier returned to Nacala to bunker and water. Because no official at Nacala would accept responsibility for being efficient, a whole day was lost taking on fuel and water. There was still no word from Lisbon, and Gimbel wrote off the entire Mozambique location as a disaster. The ship sailed for Juan de Nova on the morning of the 31st.

“The combination of political difficulties in Mozambique plus your note about Juan de Nova may have saved our bacon,” Peter wrote in mid-August. “In any case, the combination of the two convinced me that we should clear out of Mozambique and head for the islands in mid-channel. When we reached Juan de Nova, luck finally broke in our favor.”

Juan de Nova, a French possession lying three hundred and fifty miles south of Grande Comore, extends east and west for two and a half miles and is half a mile across; forested by mangrove and casuarina and surrounded by steep fringing reef, it is very beautiful. The reef is littered with wrecks, several of which emerge in the fifteen-foot tide, and the celebrated jewfish, estimated by the Frenchmen at six hundred pounds, was said to inhabit a steamship wreck on the northwest reef, in the island’s lee. Apparently the fish had moved, because the divers could not find it, nor were they able to get close to a great barracuda, the biggest yet encountered, that was seen in another wreck.

At the southwest point the Terrier found an anchorage near the wreck of a freighter, and here the action was immediate. The divers had scarcely begun the spearfishing when they were besieged by small black-tip sharks and by the larger white-tipped reef sharks, of a different family than the oceanic white-tips. The black-tips—striking creatures with a bright-white iris in a wild protruding eye, black pelvic and pectoral fins, and a handsome black border to the tail—were extremely quick, perhaps because their natural prey has access to the innumerable shelters of the reef, and they were also very aggressive. Repeatedly they darted in to seize fish from the divers, and Stan Waterman, for one, seemed much more nervous with these creatures than he had been with the cruising man-eaters off the coast of Natal. When Taylor speared one in the head, the volatile fish shot straight out of the sea and crashed on the shallow corals of the reef.

The water at Juan de Nova was glistening clear, with a striking drop-off as a background, and it fairly swarmed with unicorns, jacks, butterflyfish, and other regal creatures of the reef. Water clarity and a calm sea made it possible to devote two days to continuity shots for the Hermes decompression sequence, as well as “tight shots,” or close-ups, for the action on the whaling grounds. But Gimbel was especially delighted with the reef-shark sequence, which provided a prelude for the film’s climax, whatever that turned out to be.

*    *   *

After midnight on the 5th of August, the Terrier sailed three hundred miles due south for another French possession, called Europa, arriving there at daybreak on the 6th. Four miles long and a mile across, Europa enclosed a classic lagoon, but the island was considerably less beautiful than Juan de Nova. Underwater, however, the sea cliffs were even more impressive, and in addition to the reef sharks there were great numbers of big bony fishes, including grouper, snapper, jack and moray eel; a hammerhead was seen, well out of camera range, and also an extraordinary snake-shaped jellyfish twenty feet long. Green turtle abounded: the upper beaches of Europa were pocked with nests of the great sea reptiles that dragged themselves ashore during the night.

Europa’s sparse terrestrial life included a visiting meteorologist from Réunion, as well as Jean Nicholas and Charles Pouchet, who were assisting a French underwater film-maker named Jacques Stevens; that first evening, the island’s visitors feasted together on barbecued wild goat. Stevens, who was filming the mating and nesting of the turtles, is the man who obtained the pictures of the coelacanth that appeared in Life, and he expressed embarrassment about it. Although informed that the fish had been dredged up from its deep-water haunts and was dying in the shallows when the shot was taken, Life presented his picture as the first ever taken of a live coelacanth in its native habitat.

In East Africa this past winter, the celebrated Life series of a leopard attacking a baboon was a subject of general disgust—the “wild” animals had been cage-starved and drugged, respectively—and the photo story (June 1968) of a “white shark” killing the underwater stunt man of an Italian film crew off Isla Mujeres, in Yucatán, was another phony. It now appears that the shark in Life’s photos is not a white shark at all but one of the requiem species, possibly dead (though white sharks doubtless occur off Yucatán: in 1946, on a sand flat not far from Tampico, one was found stranded, apparently choked to death by the human body that protruded from its mouth). Anyway, the port captain, mayor, and doctor in charge of the hospital at Isla Mujeres could find no evidence of the existence, past or present, of the stunt man, much less of the episode itself, which they first learned about in Life. A diver friend of Waterman and Gimbel named Al Giddings, who was down the coast at Cozumel when the episode is said to have occurred, heard nothing of it from his friends at Isla Mujeres, and in a detailed exposure of the fraud that appeared in Skin Diver Magazine (November 1969) a Life spokesman suggests to the author that Life had been the victim of a hoax. No such admission was ever made to Life’s own readers. Like the coelacanth and leopard articles referred to earlier, the hoax brought considerable financial consolation to its victim.

*    *   *

Underwater at Europa, green turtles were caught and ridden for the cameras—one is shown dragging two divers at once—and moray, jack and grouper were all fed by hand. Personally, I don’t care much for this sort of undersea circus. It detracts from the majesty of these creatures which are, after all, the film’s protagonists, and it dissipates an imminence of menace which is crucial. For me the green turtle is a mystical animal of great beauty, so that my bias here is clear. Nevertheless I am trying to persuade Gimbel that even as spectacle, a man—much less two men—being towed by a panicked turtle is neither interesting nor aesthetic; it is an obvious dull stunt that underwater film-makers cannot seem to resist. Playing water polo with a porcupinefish, or passing an onrushing shark with a red plastic muleta would be comparably stupid, if not quite so boring.

The cinema audience is not the same as the lecture or even the TV-adventure audience, which seems to respond favorably to constructed fun. But when the playing is spontaneous, as it is so often with Ron, or when it displays the animal without demeaning it, as in the feeding of the great barracuda at St. Lazarus Bank, it will come as a welcome rest in the search for the great white shark. What would be fatal would be to slacken the tension of that search, which the audience must not be permitted to forget for more than a few frames.

The fish feeding at Europa may also work, in this case because the fish are so unlovable. One jack snapped Valerie’s glove off and consumed it, and the groupers were more persistent than the sharks. Anyone who has ever dealt with a hungry grouper must suspect that a thousand-pounder might be more dangerous than a shark of the same size. Grabbing at Ron’s fish, one big one seized his hand and spear-grip into the bargain, and had to be punched away.

“A funny thing,” Valerie notes. “You can always tell when the cod [the grouper] is going to take the fish. He sort of goes rock steady, pops his eyes madly, then with a quiver of his tail and a flurry of fins, shoots in as straight and true as a torpedo. Once he has set his mind on a piece of food it is difficult to the point of being impossible to discourage him . . .

“I fed my last big cod for Peter G.’s camera. It was . . . the final touch. He hung off in the deep water until finally, overcome by my tantalizing offer, he thundered in and right in front of the camera gulped down the bait. We did a few close-ups in the deeper water for inter-cuts, said goodbye to our French friends, climbed aboard the Terrier and all went home. Home to America. Home to Australia, Home to Africa. Home.”

A last letter from Gimbel:

August 11, 1969

We have finished and are headed for Durban. It reminds me of the afternoon we left New York four and a half months ago. I had been working terribly long hours for about a month, but in the final week it was pretty much day and night and I was exhausted. There were lots of people around packing, making up lists and checking . . . The . . . hammering and moving of cases and yelling never let up. There was continual noise; most of the crew was to catch a flight to Brussels at 7:00 P.M.

At 3:30 P.M. the racket stopped abruptly and everyone stood around bewildered in the stillness. We were ready to leave.

Now we are bearing 218°, full ahead for Durban, then home, and nobody can quite believe that either. I wander around the ship wondering what I ought to do.

We finished strongly and I feel reasonably content with the results . . . There’s no reason to doubt that we have ample footage for a feature movie, and very likely a damned good one. But I am not willing to make anything short of the best film conceivable out of the raw material of the idea: the search for the great white shark . . .