I
thought it wasn’t going to happen. They phoned to say the weather was too
bad. It was: an icy wind was blustering
in off the South Atlantic, whipping the sea into opaque soapy breakers,
offshore a blistering of whitecaps. I settled for a peek at a huddle of
miserable-looking African penguins on the old slipway of the Betty’s Bay
whaling station. Plinths carried blurry sepia photos of the historic slaughter.
This little group of penguins is also the remnant of a far larger population,
drastically reduced because the over-fishing of their food sources. There are
few oceanic species that have escaped the depredations of humans – not even the
great predators.
The
following day another call: the weather looks to improve, perhaps we are on
after all; would I like to make myself available? For a mere 1600 clams, why
not? I drive down to the coast again; the day is overcast and a little ruffled,
not ideal but calm enough for the boats. Sightings are possible though not
guaranteed. After a briefing delivered with rough humour, seventeen of us board
the rather diminutive boat: an international coterie of hopeful and slightly
nervous gawkers: an English accountant, a Spanish couple (she gung-ho, he
reticent), a pair of American women, a family group of over-exuberant Mancunians. We churn and bounce out
across the green swells, cold spray slashing back across the sides. Then slow and drift to a stop. There are several boats out here already,
slopping fish oil into the sea and attracting flocks of gulls and skuas. And, hopefully, great white sharks.
We have
been divvied into small groups, the none-too-substantial looking cage winched
around to the side and roped tight, and we have wrestled ourselves into the
clammy rubber of wetsuits. Mine has a
rent in the shoulder I hope wasn’t the result of a bite. We wait.
The chum slicks the surface of the sea to the west; a sailor is
dunking the head of a tuna on a rope and dragging it back and forth hopefully.
(Tuna is also pretty endangered, incidentally.)
The time seems ripe: we don masks and clamber over the side. This is not
so much a shark-dive as a human-dunk. I am caged in with the raucous group from
Manchester. Perhaps big fish don’t worry about squeaking yells and appalling
jokes, but I do wish they’d shut up; it seems disrespectful.
At any
event, more or less on cue, a couple of great whites make passes at the tuna
head in front of us, two-metre whipping shapes. People yell “Down!” but there’s
not too much to be seen under water, visibility poor after the storms of the
day before. Still, one shark bangs up against the cage a foot from my nose, a
slick of violent grey, the raked gills, the famously indifferent eye, gone in
two seconds. I know they must be tough animals, but it can’t be good thrashing
into corners of metal.
Indeed,
emerging from this mildly exciting encounter, I feel deeply ambivalent about
the whole enterprise. There are too many tourist boats out here, greasing the
sea with fish-oil and guts and noise. The sharks attracted in expend a good
deal of energy for no reward, and with unpredictable effects on their hunting
and communal lives, and thus on the ecosystem more generally. I understood we
would have a marine biologist on board, underlining putative links between the
tourist outings and research; but we have only a professional diver effectively
on vac from repairing North Sea oil rigs. I ask him about the allegation that
chumming has exacerbated shark attacks on humans; he predictably denies it,
claiming that tagged sharks show they only stay in the bay for 4 to 7 weeks,
too short to learn any dependency on chumming. The chum is pure fish, no mammal
material permitted. In any event,
attacks on humans are minimal to almost vanishing-point: according to posters
back at the office, 419 people die annually from faulty toasters, maybe 4 in
shark attacks – and up to a hundred million sharks are killed by humans. Not even our great oceans can sustain that
level of slaughter.
The
arguments for and against cage-diving are fierce and various (see here). The usual argument ‘for’ is that the
experience is uniquely educational – but in fact one learns little from
watching a three-metre shark thrash at the tuna head for a few violent seconds.
Not that I’m not glad to have seen it, but the situation is shot through with a
certain artificial contrivance, a edge of intrusiveness. There’s a certain kind
of education best accessed through film and literature, and through just
leaving the animals alone.
Of
course, being that kind of guy, I started fossicking about for shark
literature. There are numerous web sites advertising “shark poems”, most of
them for kids and a large number of them very bad. I did find one poem, by
Australian Rachel Mead, which captured my own feelings about the shark dive beautifully – we are “human
bait”, she says, “exhibiting ourselves to the wild”, ultimately unable to remember
much about the vibrant glimpse one is accorded:
It’s
difficult to know what to tell you, what I saved
from
that oddly geometric world, the hard blue planes
speared
with light, the hollow toll of cage on boat,
those
plates of cold sliding between wetsuit and skin.
South
African writing on sharks seems as sparse as the sharks themselves. Such references
as exist are usually more symbols of something else, something in ourselves, not
about the sharks themselves. Sydney Clouts’s poem “The Shark”, for example, is
about lovers in a forest, the circling shark an image of some unspoken inner
fears. In Henrietta Rose-Innes’ novella Shark’s Egg, we are a little closer,
though inevitably land-bound. On the
opening page, the protagonist Joanna recalls beach-combing near Cape Town and finding
a curious black pod, with a spine the length of her little
finger at each corner. When she picks it
up it leaves a neat impression in the damp sand.
Look, look here, what’s this?
Her mother
turns it over carefully with her pale fingers. It’s a shark egg, she says, her voice regretful, handing it back to
the child. Some people call them mermaid’s
purses.
... At
home, sceptical, she cuts the object open with a pair of nail-scissors. Inside,
the embryo is still alive, a perfect little shark no bigger than a new tadpole.
It gapes and thrashes its tail, at last expires. ... Joanna is shaken, and for
days feels deeply guilty.
But also
powerful: she has killed a shark.
Later
in the novel, Joanna works in an aquarium, and sees real sharks – but always in
their entrapment, separated from them by translucent glass.
South African-born writer Basil du Toit has a poem about a
shark. It, too, is dead: the poem is
entitled “Unravelling a Shark”, depicting a post-mortem in which the shark is
reduced to the mechanical:
Slabs of plumbing run the length of its body
like the dust bag in a vacuum cleaner;
its works are as plain and practical
as the rubber windpipes in a car’s engine.
And
then the shark becomes symbolic of humans once again:
...sometimes we use the mauling ethics
of the shark: betraying, and moving on,
leaving behind us the shocked and shattered meat
of marriages, girlfriends, daughters. (Older
Women, Snailpress, 1996)
Not
much justice accorded the deceased shark.
In 1987, Etienne de la Harpe wrote “Shark”, in which the speaker
descends in a dive through a rainbow of watery lights towards a vision of death
itself,
And meeting the true host of this
dark ocean sky:
all long-lethal lethargy, of tapered steel-grey,
and blunt with a deadness of eye. (25/25, 1989)
I haven’t
searched much further – but isn’t there a work out there that honours the
shark, for the shark’s sake?
*****
