Close to Shore Read online

  There was big money to be made by the right kind of men. Inspired by giants like Henry Flagler, Rockefeller's partner at Standard Oil who opened the Florida wilderness with hotels and railroads, Engle was one of a group of Philadelphians who had invested millions of dollars to develop Long Beach Island into a similar paradise, a Florida of the mid-Atlantic. At the southern tip of the eighteen-mile-long, nearly one-mile-wide island was tiny Beach Haven, which would become known as “the greatest ocean city in the world.” A sea metropolis lined with skyscrapers and humming with trolleys and tens of thousands of wealthy residents, it would outshine Atlantic City, its neighbor to the south, which, being closer to shore, had inferior ocean breezes, Engle claimed. Nothing less would do than a capitalistic conquest of the Jersey shore; men like Morgan, Carnegie, and Harriman set standards that were colossal.

  After the tourist season of 1915, the most successful ever in Beach Haven, Engle could envision his great ocean city taking form, a paradise of comfort and ease for his guests, freed from the annoyances of nature. He could hear it in the roar of the new acetylene plant firing up the sixty-five goosenecked streetlamps that cast shadows on the four dirt roads and two dusty avenues of town; in the stir of the hundreds of newly planted saplings waving under the starlight to shade future tourists; in the rumble of Overland Tourers and tin lizzies plying the first automobile bridge to the mainland, which he had lobbied state politicians to build.

  Progress was in the groan of cranes filling marshes to create land and digging miles of drainage ditches to defeat the mosquito, a notable pest of progress. A born salesman, Engle had what folks said was a “line” for the persistent “Jersey skeeter” problem. “There never was an Eden that the Devil did not try to get into,” Engle said, “and the more perfect the Eden the more he tried to get into it.”

  Mosquitoes and flies buzzed and banged on the doors of the cottages facing the ocean, and flew straight in the open hotel windows, for there were no screens in those days. Another blemish on Engle's paradise that Saturday was the weather. The morning air clung like a limpid cheesecloth, a phenomenon the best scientific minds on the East Coast couldn't explain; the heat just wouldn't quit. White-clad figures on the tennis courts by the sea, where a youngster named Billy Tilden would play, moved at half speed. By late afternoon, many of Engle's guests retreated to the rustic comforts of their small, narrow, vintage seventies rooms, to the renewing balm of hot and cold seawater showers, the latest modern convenience. As dusk approached, a line of roadsters nudged quietly against the sand-blown ark of the Engleside, and Beach Haven was left to its timeless sounds of wind and surf that came, again, with the lingering twilight. The last of the sails tipped and skittered on the horizon as a handful of guests watched from the wicker rockers high in the tower. In his office far below, Engle set plans for Sunday's “ladies' softball game,” where men played in skirts to even the odds. The laughter of the sea and of the swimmers subsided as the tide flowed out and young bathers changed in the Victorian bathhouses, leaving few swimmers in the water. There was a steady boardwalk parade back to the hotel of women who ducked demurely under sun umbrellas and cooled their porcelain faces with Chinese fans. In the lobby, men returned from fishing trips, grumbling there was nothing to be had; local guides were complaining of a mysterious disappearance of gamefish. From the formal dining room, lined with Corinthian columns and tropical murals like a European court, came the clink of china and silver and crystal, muting the distant call of gulls.

  Other sounds, presently, drifted over wind and waves and echoed along the ramparts of the great hotel. In the beginning, the sounds were quieter than the dissolving hiss of sand castles, soft beyond the range of human detection, in fact. They were easily lost amid the languid noises of the summer colony winding down an ordinary afternoon in the wistful last days of the Edwardian period.

  Yet the sounds would grow in intensity and travel swiftly, as sound does through water, and in time the reverberations would reach every corner of the grand hotel, around the globe, and across the new century, awakening something ancient and long forgotten in the human memory of the sea.

  The Fish

  The big fish moved slowly on the surface of the deep. Its dark top matched the leaden sea; its white bottom blended with sunshine reflected from beneath. The fish moved with grace and beauty remarkable for its size, in a cloak of invisibility fashioned from infinite silvery refractions of light. Unseen and unheard, it would swim for days without coming in sight of man or boat or another of its kind. Little about the scene had changed since the fish swam in the Age of Reptiles. The ocean was not yet watched by satellites or shadowed by the flying cross of airplanes. The fish had appeared before the continents divided, before there were trees and flying insects, enduring while nature underwent upheaval and extinction. The fish had survived and changed little.

  The Victorian scientific lust, after Darwin, to classify and catalogue every living plant, animal, and human tribe had made no inroads on the fish's privacy. Indeed, extreme scarcity is one of its greatest survival gifts. It was in 1916—and still is, almost a century later—a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a fisherman or a sailor to see such a fish.

  It was nature's plan for a minnow or a Maryland crab to be ordinary sights, but, like eagles in the sky and tigers on land, the great white shark sits atop the ocean's food pyramid, an “apex predator.” Great whites must consume such massive quantities of flesh to survive, it would be unthinkable for them to be numerous. The great white is the largest predator fish on the contemporary planet that the laws of physics allow. It is, quite simply, too dangerous for there to be more than a limited number of its kind.

  As a result of its great scarcity, little was known about the white shark in 1916. Most Americans had never seen a shark, except for scattered photographs in newspapers and drawings such as the comically nearsighted “grand chien de la mer,” vaguely resembling a great white shark, in Jules Verne's bestseller Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The sailors' myth of a “man-eating fish” persisted in the machine age as a hoary, vaguely dubious relic of the Age of Sail. Herman Melville had witnessed ferocious sharks on his Pacific whaling trips and wrote in Moby Dick of the white shark's “transcendent horrors, its elusive . . . terrible . . . whiteness.” But Melville had died penniless in New York in 1891, his big book an antiquated flop in the modern age of steamers and telegraph cables, Ahab's great sperm whale, the nineteenth-century sea monster, driven nearly extinct by man. All the sea monsters of the ancients were shrinking in the deductive glare of science: “It's scientific” would soon be the magic phrase that settled all parlor arguments, as Frederick Lewis Allen would write in Only Yesterday. The ship-grappling kraken turned out to be the giant squid, huge, mysteriously shy, tucked away harmlessly in the depths. The “man-eating giant octopus” was neither, simply a large, inky cephalopod; the mermaid, mythic Siren that lured sailors to their doom, was the far less perilous, if less comely, manatee. Well-read Victorian and Edwardian men were determined not to fall prey to excesses of ancient myth or modern “pseudo-science of the Jules Verne sort,” as Mark Sullivan noted in Our Times. A man was wary of being duped by the newspapers, notorious fabricators that trafficked in “perpetual motion, rain-making, pits dug through to China, messages from Mars, visitors from outer space.” To turn-of-the-century men, the man-eating shark, like the sea serpent, seemed just such a myth.

  Jules Verne himself faithfully reported the Victorian skepticism in 1870 in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: “Even though fishermen's stories are not to be believed it is said that in one of these fish was found a buffalo head and an entire calf; in another, two tuna and a sailor still in uniform; in another, a sailor with his saber; and in yet another, a horse with its rider. It must be said, though, that these stories seem a bit doubtful.” Myths of the sea had a way of enduring, however, even in the most rational men. It would fall to the 1890s, to a new class of men, men who controlled and manipulated nature like none before, to expo
se the myth. In 1891, “monopolies,” “trusts,” and “robber barons” entered the American language and men were seized by an awe and fear of bigness—big railroads, big money, big men like Rockefeller and Harriman. Yet if ordinary man was small and had to bow to “nature's noblemen,” as the robber barons much preferred to be called, he could at least be at ease and equal in the ocean, swimming—a sport “we all from cats to kings can enjoy.” For in the 1890s, the largest oceanic predator, the man-eating shark, was proven to be a specious fable, a fish no match for any man, and surely not the colossus of the day.

  On a warm, windy afternoon in July 1891, the luxury yacht Hildegard steamed east in the Atlantic far from the dark New York skyline. The day was fair with a reluctant sun, and now and again a wave crested. The Hildegard ran trim with teak and brass gleaming but lacked the whimsical grace of the old sailing yawls; the new coal-powered yachts of the Gilded Age were low and slick. Against the gray emptiness with only petrels for company and an occasional distant steamer, the ship buzzed and glowed with the faint nimbus of a Gay Nineties party. Cigar smoke curled beyond the gunwales, and the sports chewed tobacco. Cigarettes were a sign of sissiness to the men, or low breeding, for the men aboard the Hildegard were the “upper crust,” as the newspapers called them then. Smoking was verboten for women and the showing of an ankle a scandal, yet the gentler sex aboard the Hildegard displayed a decadent and empiric sensuality. In swan dresses and broad hats bedecked with ostrich feathers, they moved in a shifting constellation of diamonds—diamond hatpins, tiaras and diamond-encrusted lizards, insects, and bees, all the rage. Steam had given the rich for the first time in history the ability to sail away to the deep, to float to nowhere in particular for sporting amusements or the pleasure of squandering time and space as if there were no greater refinement. The wastes of ocean were a final barrier distancing gentlemen from the rabblement. “You can do business with anyone,” said J. P. Morgan, “but you can go sailing only with gentlemen.”

  Leaning over the railings that afternoon were men in Prince Albert suits and ties and glistening soft shoes, sportsmen like William K. Vanderbilt II, the captain's brother-in-law, who would reciprocate with invitations to come aboard his family's 291-foot yacht with twenty staterooms and crew of sixty-two. The younger Vanderbilt, dark and mustachioed and handsome, was in the process of reducing his great-grandfather Cornelius's railroad fortune in a manner that would directly inspire the coining of the 1890s term “conspicuous consumption.” Parties aboard the Hildegard routinely included such men as the captain's friend Charles Dana, publisher of the New York Sun; his newly hired architect, Stanford White; his boon fellow clubman at Delmonico's, Theodore Roosevelt, seven years away from leading the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill. The captain himself, Hermann Oelrichs, had also donned a suit and vest, yet neither silk nor gabardine could conceal the enormous power of his torso, nor deflect the admiring looks cast his way. In those days of titans of industry and sensation-seeking socialites and the obsequious gentlemen of the press, all were drawn to Hermann Oelrichs.

  Oelrichs stood nearly six feet, more than two hundred pounds, a giant of a man for the time, broad-beamed and narrow-waisted with a great handlebar mustache and shining, arrogant eyes. An international shipping mogul, Oelrichs was one of America's richest men, and had won the hand of the finest catch of the late Victorian Age—“bonanza heiress” Teresa Fair, a California senator's daughter in line to inherit the Comstock Lode. An avid sportsman, Oelrichs helped introduce polo and lacrosse to the United States. He was also acclaimed as the best amateur baseball player and hammer thrower in New York City and the finest amateur boxer and swimmer in the country. Yet there was about Hermann Oelrichs, too, the ache of promise unrealized. He remained aloof, declining offers to run for both mayor of New York City and president of the New York Athletic Club. “Hermann Oelrichs was so richly endowed by nature and so perfectly equipped both mentally and physically,” opined The New York Times, “that his friends have been almost unanimous in declaring that had he so chosen he might have made for himself a much larger place in life.”

  Yet that afternoon, as the Hildegard steamed east, Hermann Oelrichs made perhaps his greatest contribution. As his crew fed the leaping fires of the boiler, as servants distributed food, and the men called out, “gimme a smile” (a gentleman's term for a drink), and grew loud and expansive and joined in a raucous sporting mood, there arrived a moment, on the edge of dusk and the continental shelf, freighted with the nineties need for spectacle. In that moment Hermann Oelrichs declared he was looking for sharks.

  If a shudder overtook the Hildegard's passengers scanning the iron-colored sea, they could have been forgiven. Sharks were widely feared in those days as ferocious man-eaters, based on terrifying tropical legends of which Oelrichs, like his friend and fellow world-traveler Roosevelt, was especially familiar. Despite the skepticism of science, dread of the shark persisted in 1891 in tingling hairs on the back of the neck. In the publication that year of “Song of Myself,” Whitman celebrated all the universe except the “leaden-eyed” shark, the ominous crease in a wave “where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water.” That afternoon, as ripples of anticipation traversed the ship, Oelrichs announced, as he often had back in the parlors of Gilded Age New York, that so-called “man-eating” sharks were a fable of the ancients. Sharks were in fact cowardly, he insisted, and he would frighten away the largest of them that surfaced from the fathoms.

  That year Oelrichs had offered in the pages of the New York Sun a reward of five hundred dollars for “such proof as a court would accept that in temperate waters even one man, woman, or child, while alive, was ever attacked by a shark.” Temperate waters he defined as the East Coast of the United States north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

  In the rollicking spirit of the times, Oelrichs—like his brother-in-law, Vanderbilt, who hosted America's first motorcar race to further “scientific development of the automobile”—seemed more interested in a good show than in advancing science.

  But the audacious wager by a captain of the shipping industry “started the papers all over the country to discussing sharks,” The New York Times reported. “Mr. Oelrichs contended that the ancient and widespread fear of sharks had little or no support in the shape of verified or verifiable cases in which they had killed or even injured a human being . . . He limited the offer to temperate waters because he had little knowledge of shark habits in the tropics, but even there he thought them harmless scavengers.”

  Now, on this summery afternoon at the edge of the century of human progress, the validity of shark attacks would be settled to the satisfaction of intelligent men once and for all.

  If any man in the Gilded Age could best the shark, it would be a man who possessed Vanderbilt's wealth and Roosevelt's vigor and an unsurpassed reputation for prowess at sea. Such a man was Hermann Oelrichs. He was American director of the prestigious North German Lloyd shipping company, which would soon produce the world's first luxury superliner, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. According to historian Lee Server, the 655-foot-long, two-thousand-passenger German ship “held a place of pride in the human spirit” rivaled only by the big city skyscrapers as a “remarkable emblem . . . of a remarkable era . . . and of the seemingly limitless progress of science and technology.” Before the Mauretania and Lusitania, Normandie and Titanic were built in an effort to duplicate the glory of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Oelrichs hosted elaborate dinner parties in the middle of the Atlantic in the stateroom of the world's greatest ship, regaling his wealthy friends with tales of his long swims and encounters with sharks.

  In an era when the first modern oceanographic research from the 1870 voyage of the HMS Challenger was just being published, Oelrichs's captains, who traversed the seven seas in steamships, reported to him that in their combined years of transoceanic travel they had neither seen nor heard reliable evidence of a man-eating shark. And the tycoon confirmed as much to be true from his own extensive observation
s.

  The millionaire director of Norddeutscher Lloyd Bremen was indisputably one of the world's great long-distance ocean swimmers. At a time when ichthyologists researched sharks by waiting for dead species to be brought ashore by fishermen, Oelrichs had swum in the presence of countless sharks in deep and shallow waters and never been attacked. Although he never swam the Hellespont like Byron, as he had dreamed, New York newspapermen spread his fame. One wrote, “Some of the trans-Atlantic skippers used to say . . . that upon nearing the American coast they would look for Hermann Oelrichs, and would then know that they could not be very far from land.” Every summer for years he had made legendary five-mile “shark-chasing” swims off the New Jersey coast, from which he returned to shore and New York Herald headlines like “Oelrichs Scares Away the Sharks.”

  A generation before the Roaring Twenties rise of professional sports, Oelrichs was a star of heavily publicized sporting stunts for which the public hungered. He challenged the champion John L. Sullivan to a boxing match, putting up a $10,000 purse of his own money. Sullivan declined. Fighting an adversary who had no choice in the matter, Oelrichs wrestled a caged lion to a draw, to the thunderous approval of the press and his fans. Many of the passengers of the Hildegard had no doubt seen Oelrichs in the Atlantic off Newport, Rhode Island, demonstrating he was stronger than any fish in the sea. As the press and the cream of New York society, including Whitneys and Vanderbilts, crowded the cliffs over the ocean, Oelrichs challenged a fisherman in a boat to reel him in as a “human fish.” For twenty minutes the fisherman struggled and failed to reel in the stout sportsman on a line fastened to his waist, providing society with what newspapers called “the most interesting incident of the Summer.”