Demon Fish (7 page)

In an essay, Martha Warren Beckwith recounts how she visited a village where two brothers from a family named Puhi, or Eel, inspired fear among their neighbors because they had an ‘
aumãkua
at their command. A native clergyman named Kawai from a nearby village explained to Beckwith how the Puhi brothers benefited from this arrangement: “When the Puhi go fishing, the shark appears. The ‘
aumãkua
obeys the voice of the man; name the kind of fish you want and it will bring it. The men give it some of the first catch, then it disappears, and they always come back with full nets.” The villagers, including the Puhi brothers, were confident that their ability to haul in fish was solely due to their having a divine shark on their side.
¹⁰
And the ‘
aumãkua
not only delivered financial rewards to the Puhi brothers, the clergyman told Beckwith, but also kept them alive despite their dangerous profession. “Besides this, the Puhi family can never be drowned. If there is a storm and the boat capsizes, the shark appears and the man rides on its back.”
¹¹
A similar tradition lives on in Vietnam, where some fishermen still build altars on beaches to the whale shark, which they call Ca Ong, or Mister Fish, to stay safe while on the water.

In some cases, these ‘
aumãkua
represented a reincarnation of a dead relative, whether it was an aborted fetus or an elderly family member whose bones were wrapped in a cloth and cast out into the sea. One account dating from 1870 describes how a few days after relatives performed such a ceremony, they could “see with their own eyes that the deceased had become a shark, with all the signs by which they could not fail to recognize the loved one in a deep ocean.”
¹²
This intensely personal connection to sharks not only provided comfort at a time of grief but also gave an entire family confidence that they now had someone defending them when they went out to sea.

At the same time many Hawaiians relied on these familiar, ancestral gods for everyday guidance, they also worshipped the
akua
, much more powerful shark deities that influenced the weather and other forces of nature. The shark Kalahiki, one of the more powerful gods, could predict when the wind and currents would be rough and could marshal a company of sharks to bring seafarers safely in to shore.
¹³
In fact Beckwith describes the ‘
aumãkua
as “ranked as kauwa, or of the servant class, because bound to obey those whom he serves.”
¹⁴
Even the most powerful shark deities were viewed as having regional allegiances, however. When a dry dock built by American forces collapsed in 1914, many Hawaiians attributed the disaster to the female shark god Ka’ahupãhau, who reportedly protected local residents from the man-eating sharks that lurked offshore. In this case Ka’ahupãhau was defending locals from the Americans, rather than from threatening ocean predators.

According to legend, Ka’ahupãhau was willing to fight off her own kind as well in defense of the humans who had treated her well over the years. At one point, the tale goes, sharks from another area came upon Oahu and started eyeing what they referred to as “delicious looking crabs.” Knowing that that amounts to a code name in the shark language for humans, Ka’ahupãhau and her brother Kahi’ukã (the Smiting Tail) devise a particularly clever way to dispatch these hostile visitors: through fishing. Ka’ahupãhau turns herself into a net and, with the aid of her brother, catches the sharks so they can be hauled in by fishermen and left to die in the heat.
¹⁵

The sharks that populate Hawaiian lore frequently mete out justice, protecting some humans while consuming others. In many cases these beings blur the line between human and animal: Ka’ehikimanõ-o-pu’uloa is the child of humans who is born a shark, nursed on his mother’s milk and ‘
awa
, the alcoholic drink humans often offered the sharks they worshipped. Ka’ehikimanõ-o-pu’uloa embarks on a sightseeing trip in which he pays homage to the shark gods of several islands; while they initially suspect him because of his human origins, Ka’ehikimanõ-o-pu’uloa manages to lead them and conspires to kill a man-eating shark. In the end the young shark returns to his human parents, where he “conveyed the greetings of the various distinguished sharks, and told of his victories and honors.”
¹⁶
Ka’ehikimanõ-o-pu’uloa serves as a bridge between the world of humans and that of sharks, demonstrating that the two species can coexist if each one acknowledges the distinct role of the other.

Unsurprisingly, several stories about these supernatural sharks provide explanations for why humans fall prey to sharks at sea. Kauhi, a suspicious lover who wrongly concludes his betrothed has betrayed him, is executed after repeatedly trying to murder his fiancée. But one of his relatives, a shark god, saves him by wiping him away in a tidal wave and transforming him into a shark. When his former fiancée, Kahalaopuna, can’t resist surfing with her friends, “he bit her in two and held the upper half of the body up out of the water, so that all the surf-bathers would see and know that he had at last obtained his revenge.”
¹⁷

The fact that the best-known Hawaiian shark tale, “Nanaue the Shark Man,” has so many variations highlights how ancient Hawaiians were fixated on the danger they faced in the water. The basic outline of the story is as follows: The king-shark god of Hawaii and Maui, Kamohiali’i—who is popularly credited by Hawaiians with inventing surfing—seduces a beautiful human called Kalei. Together they produce a child named Nanaue, who looks normal aside from the fact that he has a shark’s mouth between his shoulder blades, which he is forced to cover with a cloak. Kamohiali’i warns Kalei she should never feed their son animal meat, lest he develop a taste for human flesh. But Nanaue’s human grandfather ignores this admonition, and over time the boy grows ravenous for human flesh. After being uncloaked by his fellow villagers, Nanaue manages—with the help of his god-father—to escape to sea as a shark, reclaiming his human form once he lands on another island, Moloka’i. Nanaue finds himself pitted against a demigod known as Unauna, or Hermit Crab. With Unauna’s aid the villagers manage to tie up Nanaue and burn him, in a place that still bears the name Shark Hill. There are many variations on this theme—in one tale the shark man is Kawelo o Mãnã, a sorcerer; in another it’s Pau-walu (Many Destroyed)—but in each case the attacker warns his victims in advance of the risks they take by entering the ocean.
¹⁸

This nuanced portrayal of sharks highlights a central tenet of these ancient belief systems: sharks are neither pure evil nor pure good, but something of a mix. McDavitt attributes this to the fact that these islanders, coastal tribes, and river dwellers saw sharks on a regular basis. “If you have a society that’s not very engaged with them, it tends to be a monolithic and negative view,” he reasons. “If they’re engaged, you might see a more balanced view of them.”

The Ijo peoples living along the Niger River delta in southern Nigeria also believe in water spirits that are both dangerous and beneficial. According to their legend, these spirits used to play along the beach in masked dances and left their masks on the shore. In late December the Ijo summon the spirits by wearing large masks showing sharks and rays, becoming possessed in an effort to get rid of illness and misfortune. In this tradition, the dances provide a way for the water spirits to “play” with their human friends, but there remains an element of risk in this exchange. As Martha G. Anderson and Philip M. Peek write in their book,
Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta
, a masked dancer “can interrupt a dance sequence to dive at the drummers through the pole fence provided for their protection or dart around it to attack them. He might go crazy, slashing wildly at his own supporters until others join forces to restrain him, only to follow this by locking one of his human friends in an affectionate embrace.”
¹⁹
Other societies in the region channel water spirits differently. The Bidjogo of Guinea-Bissau stage dances with shark, sawfish, and stingray costumes as well, but these are used for young men’s coming-of-age ceremonies. For them, harnessing these sea creatures’ powers allows them to become men at last.
²⁰

These ancient societies used sharks for practical purposes as well. Aborigines living along Australia’s coasts have eaten stingrays and sharks for years, often in the form of a round cake that combines shredded meat with the animal’s heated or raw liver. (The Lardil people living on Mornington Island, in fact, use a fist lying on a cupped hand as the sign-language symbol for sharks and rays, mimicking the shape of this rounded cake.
²¹
) Australian aborigines used other shark and ray products for weapons and ornaments as well: the vertebrae became necklace beads, while the Wik from Cape York fashioned the tails of rays into circles they sported as knuckle-style hand weapons, in the same way Hawaiians made ones out of sharks’ teeth.
²²
Australians, like Hawaiians, used sharks’ teeth to create both cutting implements and war clubs. Their skin served as a sort of sandpaper and was even used for drums.
²³

Thousands of miles away in New England and Florida, American Indians were using sharks for many of the same purposes—sandpaper, tools, and ornaments. It appears sharks’ teeth became a commodity used in trading, since a Native American burial site in Ohio included teeth from a great white shark among its finds. The fact that shark remains have surfaced in a range of such burial sites, in locations throughout southern New England and Nova Scotia, suggests that these peoples viewed sharks as deities even as they hunted them in prehistoric times. They used the teeth from some of the fiercest sharks—great white, short-fin mako, and sand tiger—as grave gods, even as they targeted the spiny dogfish for their dinner.
²⁴
And in a sign of how New England waters have changed over time, evidence from American Indian middens in the region show these societies consumed cod and different species of sharks, but not the lobster that defines much of the Gulf of Maine today.

Some societies also used shark worship as an excuse for human sacrifice on earth, as well as for their own entertainment. In the Solomon Islands villagers viewed sharks as good but demanding deities, for whom they constructed worship caves along with stone altars nearby. To pay tribute to them, the villagers selected human victims to lay upon those altars. Several Pacific island tribes also occasionally sacrificed a man, woman, or child, but these cultures viewed the shark gods as hostile. They observed a ritual in which a high priest would approach a crowd along with an assistant wearing a mask whose nose resembled a shark’s snout—when the priest instructed the assistant to point his nose at the assembled throng, the person who became the target of the assistant’s gaze would be offered up to the sea.

Hawaiian kings used to engage in a particularly gruesome ritual in which they ordered gladiators to fight a shark to the death in a circumscribed, watery arena. To lure the sharks into battle, Hawaiians tossed both fish and human bait into the water; once the fight began, the rules of engagement favored the fish. Not only did the human competitor have to let the shark lunge toward him before he could attack, but his only weapon was a single shark’s tooth mounted on a piece of wood that he could hold clenched in his fist. Faced with those odds, few gladiators survived.
²⁵

While several cultures in the Pacific and Latin America incorporated sharks into their everyday and spiritual lives, an odd thing transpired in Europe as it entered the Middle Ages: people forgot sharks existed. Europeans at the time believed in a large, ill-defined group of sea monsters, but they stopped generating any literature that referred specifically to sharks. Medieval Christian accounts of animals included whales, panthers, and plenty of other wild creatures, but the “dogfish” that caught the attention of Greek and Roman philosophers had no place. Even once the Renaissance began, Europeans used shark artifacts without knowing what they were. A ceremonial practice began of dipping
glossopetrae
, or dragon “tongue stones,” into wine—these were sharks’ teeth, but the men and women who fetishized them didn’t have a clue.
²⁶
This historical break, where Europeans lost their connection to sharks altogether, had profound implications for how the West views sharks today. Severing that historic tie helped ensure that going forward, sharks would become humans’ outright opponents.

Sharks returned to the Western consciousness once Europeans began seafaring in earnest and entered tropical waters. The academic debate over the origin of the word “shark” continues to this day—some posit it evolved from the Anglo-Saxon term
scheron
, meaning to cut or tear, while others say it came from either the English term “search” or the French version,
chercher
. However, there’s strong evidence that it stems from the Mayan word for shark,
xoc
. The Humboldt State University geography professor Tom Jones argues that the men credited with introducing the word “sharke” to Europe—sailors who served under the British captain John Hawkins—picked it up during a problem-plagued trading expedition to the Yucatán in the mid-sixteenth century. During that expedition, Hawkins lost five ships in a fight with Spanish warships and had to turn to the pilot of a Spanish wine ship, who made his home in the Yucatán port of Campeche. Jones reasons that this man, Bartolomé Gonzales, was likely to have used the term
xoc
when piloting one of Hawkins’s vessels,
Jesus of Lübeck
. There’s no question that the Maya used the word
xoc
frequently: it even became incorporated into the name of a mythological creature called alternately Ah Xoc, Ah Kan Xoc, or Chac Uayab Xoc, which Jones describes as “an ominous demon that killed and devoured women, children and animals, a were-shark whose anthropomorphic tendencies finally, among the Lacandon, lost all connection with the rarely seen shark that had been its source and inspiration.”
²⁷
By contrast, the Spaniards and the Portuguese who had sailed to the tropics had developed two different but related words:
tiburón
and
tuburão
, respectively.