“Now we’ll cut its stomach open, Skipper,” said Stitches and he slit up the upper stomach of the mutilated shark. I bent over him, carefully watching everything he did, for wonders never ceased to come from it.
Stitches reached his hand and wrist into the opening and felt inside. Then he let forth a “Jesus!”
“What’s the matter, Stitches?”
“Skipper,” he replied, his face crestfallen, “this is a mother shark. Look, she has young ’uns in her.”
I looked, and there in a pouch in her stomach were six baby sharks, about eighteen inches long. He reached in deeper and brought out a second pouch with another litter of six young in it.
“Is it bad luck to kill a she-shark, Stitches?” I asked, puzzled at his sudden grief.
“Bad luck? No sailor ever kills a female thing, because they give life. Givin’ life is part of the Creator’s job, and no man would willingly kill a mother thing.”
There is an old superstition that to kill any female thing at sea will bring a curse on the ship. If a female bird is killed, its wing is nailed on the mast head as an offering against a curse. When Stitches saw we had killed a mother shark in young, he took the tail and nailed it on the end of the jib boom. That is the reason why ships returning from deep sea voyages are often decorated with parts of birds or fish.
After Stitches had put up the tail on the jib boom, he came back to the shark. “Maybe we can save these young ’uns, Skipper.” Carefully, and almost tenderly, he took the baby fish out of the pouch and broke the cords that bound them to the mother shark. Then he took some twine that he had been using to sew sails with, and tied up the end of each cord, and threw the little fish overboard. They probably never lived but Stitches did everything in his power to save them.
I didn’t know that sharks bore their young. I supposed they laid spawn as any other fish did, but Stitches explained to me that a shark bears her children like a human, and suckles them from a teat until they can forage for their own food. The reason that shark had fought so viciously was to protect the young in her. A male shark is much easier to land, and much more stupid than a female.