Notwithstanding these short paroxysms of tenderness, taken as a class, it may be safely asserted that nothing in nature is more savage than the whole Dog-fish tribe, the only difficulty being to determine precisely to which of the several species the bad pre-eminence belongs; whether to the White, the Blue or Basking Shark, the Canesca, the Zygæna, the Rough-hound or Bounce, &c., for they are all Red Republicans of the deep; strife is their element, blood their delight, cruelty their pastime. Even the soft sex, which amongst most creatures deserves this winning epithet, in the Squalidæ is so far from being a recommendation, that the females are more ferocious than the males. A Messalina sharkess has been known to dash into a crowd of unhappy bathers, tearing and butchering all one after another, nor, till wearied out and gorged, but still unsated with her victims, leave the spot
Et lassata viris, nondum satiata, recessit.
Well, indeed, do these “fell, unhappie, and shrewd monsters,” as Pliny calls them, deserve the ill names bestowed by man—Lamia the fury, witch or hobgoblin; Anthropophagus, or man-eater, and Requin; so called, in anticipation of the requiems which may certainly be offered up by friends for the soul of any one whose body comes in the way of a shark.
The white shark is one of the largest of the tribe, and measures sometimes from twenty to twenty-five feet; there is however another, the Squalus Maximus, only met with in northern latitudes, which greatly transcends him; reaching, when fully developed, thirty and even forty feet in length. One taken off Marseilles with a whole man in armor, integer et cadavere toto, pouched in his stomach, affords some grounds for supposing that the great fish that swallowed the prophet Jonah was a shark; especially as this case of the warrior is not a solitary instance, for Rondolet relates the story of a man and his dog going down the open mouth of a shark into the stomach, the first to look about him and to say he had been there, the other to prowl round and pick up offal. That Jonah was swallowed by this Piscis Anthropophagus is probable, though only conjectural; that he was not swallowed by a whale is certain, for whales have very small gullets and no internal “accommodation for a single man,” like the shark; their food consists entirely of small narrow creatures an inch or two long, and not thicker round than the barrel of a common-sized quill.
The origin of this mistake, perpetuated by sculptors and painters, proceeds from a misconception of the Hebrew word tannanim, translated whale, but evidently designating large fish generally; just as its Latin equivalent cete, signifies any heavy fish; size, not species, determining the appellation.
Great as are the dimensions of many existing Squali, there can be no doubt that some of the antediluvian period greatly exceeded in size any species at present known. We are indebted to M. Lacepède for this discovery, and the ingenious procedure by which he arrived at it deserves notice. M. Lacepède was one of the first naturalists who applied the since well understood and more fully developed principle of ex pede Herculem to the objects of natural history. Having received from Dax, in the Pyrenees, a shark’s tooth of the very unusual size of four inches and a half in the enamel, or the part visible above the socket, he was prompted to discover, if possible, the size of its original possessor; for this purpose he measured first the teeth, and next the bodies of all the Squali accessible to him in the museums of Paris, and found in every case, that the relative proportion they bore to each other was as one to two hundred, and applying this general scale to the particular tooth from Dax, M. Lacepède found that he held in hand the relic of a creature that in the days of the flesh must have been fully seventy feet long. The proportions between the body and the head being also definite, it was as readily made clear that a Squalus stretching to this length had jaws with a bow above thirteen feet, and a mouth capable of gaping more than twenty-six feet round. In comparison with such a Squalus, those chronicled by Rondolet requiring two horses to drag them, and even one mentioned by Gillius, weighing four thousand pounds, dwindle into mere minnows and gudgeons.
Cruel as all Squali undoubtedly are, reasons perhaps might be suggested, if not wholly exculpatory of their conduct, sufficient to obtain them an acquittal before either a French or an Italian court of judicature. The French verdict would be meurtre, avec circonstances attenuantes. An Italian jury would at once pronounce a shark criminal, arabbiato—in a passion—consider this sufficient excuse, and summarily dismiss the case. Such lenient judgments might be based on the grounds of their having teeth unusually numerous, efficient, and long; and on temperament; but sharks possess also, enormous abdominal viscera; full one-third of the body is occupied with spleen or liver, and the bile and other digestive juices secreted from such an immense apparatus, and poured continually into the stomach, must be enough to stimulate appetite prodigiously, and what hungry animal was ever tender-hearted? We read in the Anabasis, that the Greeks would not treat with the Persians about a truce till after dinner; and every one knows that to be the time most propitious to charity and good neighborhood; a hungry man is ever a churl, and ventre affamé n’a point d’oreilles. A shark’s appetite is never appeased; for, moreover, in addition to his bilious diathesis, he is not a careful masticator of victuals, but hastily bolts a repast, producing thereby not only the moroseness of indigestion, but a whole host of tænias, which goad and irritate the intestine to that degree, that the poor Squalus is sometimes quite beside himself from the torment, and rushes like a blind Polyphemus through the waves in search of any thing to cram down his maw and allay such urgent distress; he does not seek to be cruel, but he is cruelly famished, and must satisfy, not only his own ravenous appetite, but the constant demands of these internal parasites, either with dead or living animals; so, sped as from a catapult, he pounces on a quarry, and gorges, like a boa constrictor, a meal sometimes so great as to press upon and protrude a large portion of the intestine, which, after one of these crapulous repasts, may not unfrequently be seen trailing several feet from the body.
It is an interesting fact in the history of sharks—and one by no means without precedent in our own—that violent passions, parasites, and indigestions, do not seem to ruffle the equable current of the blood, and that the pulse continues regular, and averages only sixty beats in a minute. As with us a good digestion, (the common accompaniment of a quiet pulse) may be and often is connected with a bad disposition, who knows but that Heliogabalus and Nero, those admirable human types and representatives of the genus shark in so many other particulars, may have resembled them in this also, and in the midst of their orgies and atrocities have enjoyed a calm circulation.
Sharks are sometimes eaten, but more out of bravado and revenge than because they afford a desirable food. Athenæus indeed records that the Greeks were Squalophagi, but they would eat any thing. Archistratus, the bon-vivant of his book, will not allow men to object to a shark diet, merely because the shark sometimes diets upon men. Galen, on the other hand, denounces shark’s flesh, but only from its supposed tendency to produce melancholy. We do not know whether the Latins ever ate them. Among modern nations, Italians and Sicilians cook only the belly of the old fish; and fœtal sharks not much bigger than gudgeons, whenever they can procure a dish. In the still less dainty Hebrides, the Squalus vulgaris is consumed entire; in England they are not relished; but in Norway and Iceland the inhabitants make indiscriminate use of every species that they capture, hanging up the carcases for a whole year that the flesh may mellow. Though no part of the shark is really wholesome, one part, the liver, very valuable in a commercial point of view from the abundance of oil squeezed from it, is highly prejudicial for food, as we learn, on the evidence of the following case of an obscure French cobbler, recorded by an eminent French physician:—
Sieur Gervais, his wife and two children, supped upon a piece of shark’s liver; in less than half an hour all were seized with invincible drowsiness, and threw themselves on a straw mattress; nor did they arouse to consciousness till the third day. At the end of this long lethargy their faces were inflamed and red, with an insupportable itching of the whole body; complete desquamation of the cuticle followed, and when this flaying process was concluded, the whole party slowly recovered.