The negroes are admirable swimmers and divers, and they sometimes attack and vanquish the terrible shark, but great skill is necessary.
When Sir Brooke Watson, as a youth, was in the West Indies, he was once swimming near a ship when he saw a shark making towards him. He cried out in terror for help, and caught a rope thrown to him; but even as the men were drawing him up the side of the vessel, the monster darted after, and took off his leg at a single snap.
Fortunately for sea-bathers on our shores, the white shark and the monstrous hammer-headed zygaena seldom appear in the colder latitudes, though both have occasionally been seen on the British coasts.
The northern ocean has its peculiar sharks, but some are good-natured, like the huge basking shark, (S maximus), and feed on seaweeds and medusae and the rest, such as the picked dog-fish, (Galeus acanthius), are, although fierce, of too small a size to be dangerous to man.
But the dog-fish and others, such as the blue shark, are very troublesome and injurious to the fisherman; though they do not venture to attack him, for they hover about his boat and cut the hooks from his lines. Indeed, this sometimes leads to their own destruction; and when their teeth do not deliver them from their difficulty, the blue sharks, which hover about the coast of Cornwall during the pilchard season, roll their bodies round so as to twine the line about them in its whole length, and often in such a way that Mr Yarrell has known a fisherman give up as hopeless the attempt to unroll it.
This shark is very dangerous to the pilchard drift-net, and very often will pass along the whole length of net, cutting out, as if with shears, the fish and the net which holds them, and swallowing both together.