Authors: Mary Roach
This was encouraging information, except that the Navy had inquired about something for sharks. World War II marked the first time in US military history that battles were being fought on and over tropical seas, and stories had begun to circulate of sailors and fliers being attacked and devoured after abandoning ship or ditching their plane. (During the previous world war, crews wound up in the North Atlantic, where cold devoured them first.) One particular narrative made its way to a man named Henry Field (as in the Field Museum of Natural History), who at the time held the title Anthropologist to the President, as well as a post with—well, hello again!—the OSS.
In June 1941, the story went, an Ecuadorian Navy plane went down in the Pacific after running out of fuel. The “desperation and terrification” of the flight officer is detailed in the official report of the incident, which Henry Field either heard about or read. It was a moonlit night. The man wore a life jacket, and as he swam he pushed along the body of a drowned colonel. Sharks began to cross the water in front of him. “At a given moment I felt that they were trying to take away the corpse, pulling it by the feet, on account of which I clutched desperately the body of my companion and together with him we slid until the tension disappeared.” Here I confess I became more interested in the translator of the report than its terrificated protagonist: “Once refloated, with despair I touched his legs and became aware that a part of them was lacking.” The flight officer abandoned the demi-corpse and continued alone to shore, “with various sharks following.”
“Night after night,” Henry Field recalls in his memoir, “I thought of these men . . . with sharks cutting through the water around them.” As Anthropologist to the President, he had Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ear, even, it seemed, in matters of ichthyology. “I wrote the president a memorandum suggesting that we try to develop a shark repellent.”
With presidential blessings, Field met with fellow museum curator Harold J. Coolidge, also on the payroll of the OSS. Coolidge was a primatologist—a silverback gorilla he collected (shot) in the Congo resides to this day in Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology—but he agreed to oversee the shark project. You can well imagine that a gorilla expert on salary with a spy organization might suffer a mild sense of purposelessness. Here at last was something up his alley, if not precisely on his doorstep. Coolidge hired another curator pal, W. Douglas Burden, as the project’s principal investigator. Burden was an expert on Komodo dragons, had written an entire book about Komodo dragons, but he, too, knew little about sharks.
For actual shark expertise, the OSS turned to a college dropout named Stewart Springer, whose résumé included stints as a commercial fisherman and as a chemical technician at the Indianapolis Activated Sludge Plant. In 1942, there were no experts in shark biology and behavior. Truly, no one knew much about the creatures. The combination of hands-on shark experience and sludge chemistry was, in fact, ideal background for the task. “Dr.” Springer, as some of the OSS correspondence refers to him, was as good as it got.
The US Navy agreed to contribute funding, even though, as one of their rank pointed out, there was at that time no formal record of anyone who had taken the oath of the Navy having been harmed by sharks. Their concern was morale. Fear of sharks, however irrational, was thinning the ranks of willing fliers. Stewart Springer voiced the cockamamie irony of it: “It was okay to give one’s life for one’s country, but to get eaten for it was another matter.” If nothing else, a repellent would serve as what Douglas Burden called a “pink pill,” a psychological fix for shark-shy aviators. On July 3, 1942, funding was approved for OSS Office of Scientific Research and Development Project 374, Contract OEMcmr-184: a three-month investigation “looking to the development of means of protection against sharks, barracuda and jellyfish
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for men adrift in lifebelts.” (In three hundred some pages of archived correspondence for Project 374, I saw but two passing references to barracudas. As far as I can tell, no one ever got around to jellyfish.)
The lab work was done mainly at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which housed a collection of captive sharks called dogfish—in size and temperament, somewhere between a great white and a goldfish. Rotenone was among the first substances the team tested. “Definitively negative,” Burden reported to Coolidge. “Lethal doses do not deter the feeding process.” The shark would die, but not before you did. Until such time as goldfish presented a threat to national security, rotenone would be limited to the arsenal of the USDA.
Seventy-nine substances were tested and rejected. Irritants failed. “Repulsive odors” failed. As did clove oil, vanillin, pine oil, creosote, nicotine. They tried compounds related to mothballs, asparagus, horse piss. The sharks ignored all of it. The first “hot lead” sprang from an item of sharker lore. Springer had heard that a shark carcass abandoned on a bait line will ruin the spot for shark fishing. He and his team got to work. They rented an “isolated” house in Florida for $10 a month, and never, I’m guessing, was a cleaning deposit more roundly withheld. Chunks of shark muscle tissue were left out at room temperature for four or five days. An extract was then prepared by grinding the decomposed flesh, stirring in alcohol, and filtering the resultant shark muck.
Forty-three experiments later, Springer enthused in a note to Burden, it was possible “to say POSITIVELY that the meat contains some substance strongly repellent to sharks.” Repellence value 88.4 percent! Ninety to 100 percent effective! The bimonthly progress report of Contract OEMcmr-184 describes Springer as “sufficiently convinced of the effectiveness of the concentrate that he would be willing to test it in a life belt with a bucket of blood.”
An expedition to test the decayed meat concentrate on wild sharks had been slated as the next step, but Springer and Burden urged the OSS to begin production immediately. “If we really have something now and . . . the field test delays use of a good thing by six months,” Springer wrote to Coolidge, “and if during those six months . . . some poor devils might have been protected it would be bad.” Springer happened to know a contractor who could get right to work producing the concentrate. Shark Industries was a Florida purveyor of shark skins and shark oil—and also, speaking of things that smell fishy, Springer’s sometime employer. The company, Springer felt certain, would be able to produce enough shark extract to outfit 2,000 to 5,000 life jackets per month. If Springer had his way, the whole undertaking would soon be moot, as there would be no sharks left to repel.
The OSS didn’t bite. Rather than move forward with the concentrate, they wanted to try to isolate the active ingredient—a compound that could be ordered or cheaply synthesized, thereby saving them the cost and bother of large-scale shark carcass reduction. Chemists were hired, three of them, and they soon came up with a promising candidate: ammonium acetate. It, along with two compounds that had earlier shown promise (copper sulfate and maleic acid), plus thirty pounds of the Macbethian-sounding “extract of decomposing shark meat,” were flown down to Ecuador, to the very same waters where our story began, to be tested on “voracious surface-feeding sharks.” Lodgings were secured, boats and guides hired. Three weeks later, Burden dispatched a glum cable: “The waters off the coast of Ecuador have been virtually empty.”
From deep in the pockets of the OSS came Harold Coolidge’s reply: Try Peru. “Don’t be discouraged,” he wrote. “Shark hunting is not unlike tiger hunting. You remember how plentiful tigers are in various parts of French Indo-China until you reach the point when you want to shoot one and have only two or three weeks at your disposal.” You got the sense, leafing through these letters, that a career in natural history was little more than a way for well-connected gentlemen to finance far-flung safaris and fishing expeditions in the name of science. The title of Douglas Burden’s memoir nicely summed the job:
Hunting in Many Lands.
The expedition eventually located some sharks, off the coast of Guayaquil, Ecuador. More discouraging words followed. Nothing worked. They tried combining the ammonium acetate and the copper sulfate, and that compound (copper acetate) seemed effective. Unfortunately, two or three pounds of it, in the form of a slowly dissolving cake (think urinal, not birthday), would be needed for one day’s protection. This would not do. The Navy wanted something small enough and light enough—six ounces at most—to seal in a packet and attach to a life belt. The life belt, a precursor to the flotation vest, was a deflated rubber tube worn around the waist at all times and inflated in an emergency. Like any part of a serviceman’s uniform, the belts developed holes from wear and tear. The last thing a seaman needed on top of a leaky life belt was a three-pound anchor of questionably effective shark repellent.
The Navy was losing patience. A hundred thousand dollars—$1.5 million in today’s currency—had been spent, and they were no closer to having a practical, effective shark repellent than they’d been a year ago. The OSS was edged out, and the project taken over by the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The first thing the Navy did was to make the field tests more realistic. Springer and Burden had been baiting lone meandering specimens—“casual sharks”—using hunks of mullet as their man-in-life-belt stand-ins. The NRL wanted a better approximation of the thrashing aftermath of a downed ship or plane and the “large schools of frenzied sharks” that that scenario was thought to attract and inspire. The so-called feeding frenzy was a state of mind in which, it was speculated, olfaction took a back seat to the “mob impulse.” In August 1943, copper acetate was brought on board a shrimp trawler off Biloxi, Mississippi, and tested for its ability to protect “trash fish”—flailing, panicked specimens tossed off the back because they weren’t shrimp. Guess what? Even
five to six pounds
of copper acetate per bushel of trash fish “did not by any means” interrupt the het-up mob trailing the boat. “The sharks hardly paused.”
The final slap in the face of Project 374 would come in the form of a paper by Navy Captain H. David Baldridge Jr.: “Analytic Indication of the Impracticability of Incapacitating an Attacking Shark by Exposure to Waterborne Drugs.” By plotting the speed of a closing shark against the speed of dilution and the concentration needed to put the creature out of commission, Baldridge showed that such a large quantity of drug would be needed that it “does not appear to be at all reasonable as an approach to the control of predaceous shark behavior.” As one of Burden’s colleagues put it: “You can’t do much with a pint of liquid in an ocean.”
Taking a cue from the octopus, Navy researchers next looked into using clouds of inky dye as a way to hide crewmen from potential predators. Under those same “mob psychology” conditions, all feeding activity was stopped until the dye had diluted to the point at which it no longer obscured the prey. Production began at once. Shark Chaser’s active ingredients: 80 percent black dye and 20 percent pink pill—a little copper acetate having been added to the pot
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for some false peace of mind. From 1945 all the way through to the Vietnam War, packets were available for the emergency survival supplies of lifeboats, life rafts, and life jackets on military vessels and planes. Even the post-splashdown survival kits of the Mercury astronauts were stocked with Shark Chaser.
Through all of it, there’d been skeptics among the Navy brass. Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, made the eminently reasonable point that a package labeled SHARK CHASER in bold capital letters might in fact lower, not raise, morale, planting, as it would, the seed of terror in minds that had been, until that moment, occupied by the real threats of ocean survival: dehydration, starvation, drowning, heat, cold. Especially given the “negligible danger,” to use McIntire’s words, that sharks posed to Navy personnel.
How negligible? Opinions varied, but at one point in the proceedings, the Commander of the South Pacific Fleet issued a memo to all naval bases and hospital ships soliciting “authentic cases of injury to personnel from attack by sharks.” With all hands reporting, the final count was two cases. (One additional attack was later determined to have been a “vicious eel.”) The OSS responded in time-honored intelligence-agency style: They disappeared the report. “The report on shark attacks has been destroyed, as you requested,” reads an interoffice memo to Harold Coolidge from a staffer in December 1943.
It was another stink bomb for the OSS. They’d set out to develop a shark repellent based on one man’s experience and another’s political connections, with no solid data to support a need. If you look back at the Ecuador incident—the original impetus for all this—it really wasn’t a testament to the danger or ferocity of sharks. If anything, it was a testament to the disinterest and/or shyness of sharks. The flight officer was adrift in a life jacket for thirty-one hours, yet he emerged from the ocean unmauled by the retinue of sharks that followed him most of the way to shore.
If you wanted to preserve morale, the better approach would have been to share these reassuring facts and statistics. “Correct information,” wrote McIntire, “would be more universally operative in alleviating those fears than any repellent that could be devised.” Beginning in 1944, that is what the Navy did. Their Aviation Training Division distributed copies of a pamphlet called
Shark Sense
to all future fliers: 22 pages of comforting facts, illustrated with comic drawings of cringing, perspiring, fleeing (“HALP!”) sharks.
And it proved true. In a review of 2,500 aviators’ accounts of survival at sea during World War II, there were just 38 shark sightings, only 12 of which resulted in injuries or death.
As reassuring as it was,
Shark Sense
failed to address the most urgent questions on the minds of men afloat in the bedlam of a disaster at sea. Is it true that a shark can smell a drop of human blood in an ocean of seawater? Does noise arouse a shark’s curiosity, or scare it away? What about movement? Some accounts—including that of the swimming Ecuadorian—indicated that thrashing scared a shark away; others suggested it sparked their interest. No one really knew.