Shark deterrents: from human sacrifice to blood cakes
Throughout history people have tried many different things to keep the gnashing jaws of sharks from chomping on their bathers
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The word shark sends a chill up the spine of most Australians. Despite sharks killing fewer people on average in Australia than bees or lightning strikes, stories of death by shark attack loom large in our psyche.
While the shark net debate has resurfaced again this week after the attack on a surfer at Lighthouse Beach, people have tried many ways over the centuries to keep sharks at bay.
In ancient times, the best way to avoid shark attack was to simply stay out of the water. Ancient authors including Herodotus wrote horrifying accounts of people being torn apart by sharks perhaps in an effort to scare people out of the water. When that failed, people carried amulets giving them protection from gods with power over the oceans.
The ancient Greeks might pray to their sea god Poseidon, give offerings at temples devoted to him or just launch them directly into the water, to gain protection from all sea creatures including sharks.
Many Pacific islanders believed in shark gods to whom sacrifices of food could be made at land-based shrines or directly in the water. Sometimes if the islanders felt their shark god was particularly angry they made a human sacrifice, strangling the victim, then slicing them up to offer to the shark god’s minions in the ocean. Some communities believed that wearing a shark tooth would also act as a deterrent.
For centuries Hawaiians believed sea creatures were ’aumakua, incarnations of ancestors. If the ancestor was incarnate as a shark, the person only needed to make regular offerings of the first of a catch of fish to gain their protection. There were even stories of the ’aumakua driving off other sharks.
In the 16th century, French naturalist Guillaume Rondelet reported finding the remains of a knight in armour in the stomach of a shark. It is not known whether the knight was using the armour as a deterrent, but clearly it didn’t work.
When colonists came to Australia in 1788 they soon discovered sharks lived in the waters around the site where they established the penal settlement.
While most of the newcomers couldn’t swim and those who could were wary of entering the waters unless they absolutely had to, they noticed Aboriginals were good swimmers who had no such fear.
What the colonists didn’t understand was that the Cadigal knew the worst places and times for attacks and were largely able to avoid unwanted encounters. Which is not to say that they were never attacked. Rock art attested to past fatal encounters and the earliest recorded fatality in Australia was an Aboriginal woman who was “bitten in two” in 1791.
From that death up until 1920 there were about 40 reported fatalities, but as beach bathing became more popular, the number of deaths began to rise sharply, prompting people to seek ways to make beaches safer.
In the ’20s and ’30s the first “shark-proof nets” were erected at many beaches around Sydney. A spate of deaths in 1934 saw the rollouts increased. Yet even then people warned of the dangers to other sea creatures and argued about the limited effectiveness of the nets. The nets were removed during World War II and there were fewer attacks, but that was mostly due to fewer people taking a dip. If the barbed wire on the beaches didn’t deter swimming, the threat of enemy subs and mines in the water was scarier than the prospect of sharks.
After the war debate continued about whether to reintroduce netting.
Meanwhile, other deterrents were explored, from armoured suits to cages and blood cakes that would explode when sharks bit into them.
More recently there have been devices that generate an electric field that interferes with the shark’s ability to detect prey.
THE CHEMICAL SOLUTION
DURING World War II the US military knew their frogmen would sometimes have to brave shark-infested waters and tried to develop chemical deterrents. One person who worked on a recipe for a deterrent in 1942 was Julia McWilliams, who would become better known by her married name of Julia Child when she found fame as one of America’s first television chefs. Child was working for the OSS (a precursor of the CIA) on a team of researchers working with inventor Richard Tuve who discovered that copper acetate was 60 per cent effective in repelling sharks.
Originally published as Shark deterrents: from human sacrifice to blood cakes
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