No sooner had the pork plashed into the sea than one of the rapacious monsters made a rush for it. The remarkable velocity of this fish was surprising to me, who had never before seen a deep-sea shark in his native element. The water was so beautifully limpid that his every action could be accurately observed. I thought he would gorge the bait immediately, but he did not. When he came up with it, he made a sudden stop. Then he sniffed at it with an air of expectant and suspicious curiosity. The next thing he did was to turn his tail to it contemptuously, and swim away a considerable distance.
"WATCH HIM MAKE A DART FOR IT NOW," SAID THE SKIPPER.
"Watch him make a dart for it now," said the skipper, who was an old hand at shark-catching.
Like a flash the hungry fish went for the tempting bait, turning over so that he might grasp it more conveniently with his wide and cruel jaws. In an instant it was engulfed in his maw. And then there was such a floundering and threshing in the water as I had never before seen. The fierce shark, maddened with the pain of the sharp hook, made frantic but fruitless efforts to escape. He snapped savagely at the strong chain attached to the hook, with the sole result of damaging his own cruel-looking teeth. Meanwhile the fish had been dragged forward to the starboard gangway in spite of his wild struggles. A running bowline was sent down the line that held him, and as the shark was hoisted over the side it was passed over his body and hauled taut round his tail, in order to control the movements of this his most formidable weapon. Instances have been known of a blow from a shark's tail breaking a man's leg on the deck of a vessel immediately after being hauled in over the side.
This fish in question was gigantic. It took eight men to hoist him in-board. "Chips," the carpenter, stood by with a keen axe, and as soon as Mr. Shark's struggling carcass was landed on the deck, with one powerful blow he severed his tail from his body, and thus incapacitated him from mischief. From time immemorial it has been the ship carpenter's privilege and duty to out off the tails of all sharks captured during a deep-sea voyage, and the cook generally despatches him much after the fashion of a Japanese when he performs on himself the queer right of hari-kari.
"Chips," said the skipper, addressing the carpenter, "before you cut that shark up, just pull that rule out of your pocket and measure him. He seems quite a big fellow."
And a big fellow he proved to be, measuring 30 feet 8½ inches long. The Captain said he was the largest one he had ever seen, but the chief mate declared he had once captured one that measured 38 feet, and he had sailed with a skipper who had hauled one in-board that was fully 40 feet in length. As a matter of fact, specimens of pelagic sharks are displayed in museums that exceed 40 feet, but they are very rare. In Florida varieties of fossil sharks have been dug up whose length "over all" averages more than 50 feet, but these are now happily extinct.
Seafaring men are not as a rule a bloodthirsty race, but they look upon sharks as their natural enemies, and against them they wage relentless warfare; and whenever one is hooked they rejoice with an exuberant pleasure, and will sacrifice their watch below in order to see him cut and carved. There is also much curiosity with regard to the contents of his interior. I once had for a shipmate a man who swore hard and fast that he once found in a shark a ship's chronometer that was still ticking. He was quite a truthful man too, but somehow I never believed that yarn. Of course a shark is one of the most ravenous and rapacious of fishes, and queer articles have undoubtedly been discovered in their stomachs.
Inside the one just caught there were two of the Captain's ducks, and not a morsel of anything else, which probably accounted for the greed with which he swallowed the four-pound chunk of briny pork. It is a tradition among sailors that sharks will not bite at a piece of beef, and I never heard of one being hooked with any bovine bait. In this the shark shows excellent taste and judgment, for the "salt junk" served out to seafarers is by no means a succulent or dainty dish. As a matter of fact, I have known a sailor to whittle out of it a fair model of the hull of a ship, and to dry it in the sun for two or three weeks, when it would come out for all the world as hard as a block of mahogany, which it resembled—and this too after the beef had been boiled for hours in the cook's coppers!