I asked Stitches if all children were born the way the sharks were and he answered, yes.
As there were eleven children in our family I thought that we came in batches of six like the sharks.
“But how do we get in the pouches?” I insisted.
“The guy that created you put the seed of you under your father’s and your mother’s heart, then when they fell in love you was born.”
I have since learned that some modern naturalists who evidently never have traveled further south than Sandy Hook, have expressed a doubt as to whether there really is such a beast as a man-eating shark and whether it will actually attack a man unprovoked. Evidence, they claim, has always been at second-hand and the testimony of seafaring men they reject. Well, without wishing to lock horns with the learned, you may be interested in firsthand evidence of man-eating sharks.
I saw a nurse shark, perhaps the deadliest species of the shark family, attack a sailor from our ship, one Eric Johanssen. Johanssen dived off the ship for a swim against the express command of my father that no member of the crew leave the vessel. We were anchored in Paramatta River in Sydney Harbor. Johanssen hadn’t been in the water five minutes before two sharks began circling about him.
“You bloody fool, swim for the ship,” called Swede to Johanssen. Johanssen turned to strike out for the Jacob’s ladder, but he wasn’t swift enough. The tri-cornered fin of the biggest shark followed in his wake. Johanssen struck out wildly with his arms and legs. He evidently thought that by making a big splash in the water he would confuse the shark, but the disturbance Johanssen kicked up only served to make an accurate target for the shark’s pilot fish.
The man had about reached the ship when the triangular fin following disappeared. Watching, the men on board knew what that meant. The brute was turning on its back. It came up below its prey and turned open its huge maw to bite.
There came a short shriek of pain; the water bloodied, and Johanssen’s body doubled up. The shark’s jaws had set about his stomach. With a sinuous motion of its tail the shark drew away taking in its jaws the middle of Johanssen’s body almost through to the backbone.
There had been no time to lower a boat, but Swede was on the Jacob’s ladder; Father and the mate above, all the boathooks fighting to save at least the body from the man-eaters. They caught the body with their hooks and brought it out, but not until another hunk of flesh had been torn from the thigh. Then the vicious monsters, balked of their complete meal, swam along the sides of the ship, scraping against it and slapping their tails against the hull as though in a frenzy of rage. Finally they drew off, but for hours they swam close by, waiting for another victim.