Peter Matthiessen - Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark

Peter Matthiessen (19272014) is the only writer who has ever won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. His travels as a naturalist and explorer have resulted in more than a dozen books on natural history and the environment, including The Snow Leopard, his first NBA winner. Matthiessens equally important career in fiction has produced a collection of stories and nine novels, among them At Play in the Fields of the Lord (an NBA finalist) and the Everglades trilogy (Killing Mister Watson, Lost Mans River, and Bone by Bone), which, rewritten and distilled, were published in one volume in 2008 under the title Shadow Country, winner of the NBA in fiction. Shadow Country was also the 2010 recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished American novel published during the previous five years. Matthiessen was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His final novel, In Paradise, was published just after his death in 2014.

Blue
Meridian

THE SEARCH FOR THE GREAT WHITE SHARK

Peter Matthiessen

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First published in the United States of America by Random House, Inc. 1971

Published in Penguin Books 1997

Copyright 1971 by Peter Matthiessen

Photographs taken on the expedition are reproduced by permission of Cinema Center Films. Copyright 1970 by Cinema Center Films.

Portions of this book first appeared in Audubon, Esquire, and Playboy.

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ISBN 978-1-101-66315-8

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PENGUIN NATURE CLASSICS

Nature is our widest home. It includes the oceans that provide our rain, the trees that give us air to breathe, the ancestral habitats we shared with countless kinds of animals that now exist only by our sufferance or under our heel.

Until quite recently, indeed (as such things go), the whole world was a wilderness in which mankind lived as cannily as deer, overmastering with spears or snares even their woodsmanship and that of other creatures, finding a path wherever wildlife could go. Nature was the central theater of life for everybodys ancestors, not a hideaway where people went to rest and recharge after a hard stint in an urban or suburban arena. Many of us still do hike, swim, fish, birdwatch, sleep on the ground or paddle a boat on vacation, and will loll like a lizard in the sun any other chance we have. We cant help grinning for at least a moment at the sight of surf, or sunlight on a river meadow, as if remembering in our minds eye paleolithic pleasures in a home before memories officially began.

It is a thoughtless grin because nature predates thought. Aristotle was a naturalist, and nearer to our own time, Darwin made of the close observation of bits of nature a lever to examine life in many ways on a large scale. Yet nature writing, despite its basis in science, usually rings with rhapsody as wella belief that nature is an expression of God.

In this series we are presenting some nature writers of the past century or so, though leaving out great novelists like Turgenev, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner, who were masters of natural description, and poets, beginning with Homer (who was perhaps the first nature writer, once his words had been transcribed). Nature writing now combines rhapsody with science and connects science with rhapsody, and for that reason it is a very special and a nourishing genre.

Edward Hoagland

To all of the members of the film crew, I am indebted for assistance, information and cooperation of many kinds, particularly to Peter Gimbel, whose generosity in all respects made participation in his expedition a great pleasure, and to Valerie Taylor for her kind permission to use excerpts from her expedition diary. Gimbel, Lake and Waterman also made important contributions in the form of notes and letters.

Jan Moen and the crew of the Terrier, Captain Ben Ranford and Bruce Farley of the Saori, Ian Wedd of the Sea Raider, Captain Torgbjorn Haakestad, Reidar Smedsrud and Willy Christensen of W-29, and Captain Arvid Nordengen of W-17 were unfailingly courteous and/or hospitable; and Messrs. Jim Veitch and Al Giddings submitted cheerfully to crucial interviews.

I am grateful to Dr. Eugenie Clark of the University of Maryland and to Dr. Roger Payne of Rockefeller University, who have been kind enough to inspect the more technical material on sharks and whales, respectively; neither is in any way responsible for any errors of fact or emphasis that may remain.

I should also like to thank James F. Clark of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard for permission to paraphrase his arguments in support of the hypothesis (see ) that the white sharks gigantic relative, Carcharias megalodon, still exists.

P.M.

For my brother
George Carey Matthiessen

It is to sailors the most formidable of all the inhabitants of the sea, for in none besides are the powers of inflicting injury so equally combined with the eagerness to accomplish it.

J ONATHAN C OUCH ,

Fishes of the British Islands (1862)

g ood Friday, 1969. Aboard whale-catcher W-29, Captain Torgbjorn Haakestad, out of Durban. The coast of Natal just emerging from night shadows, twenty miles astern; no birds. Moon high over stern mast, and sun swelling the sky directly ahead, under the low cloud mass of yesterdays storms.

* * *

Storm had prevented W-29 from sailing earlier in the week. The wind whirling up the coast in squalls made it certain that the boats would stay in port on Thursday, but the office voice at the Union Whaling Company knew nothing about weather; it thought it best that any passengers should be on hand. And so I arrived at Salisbury Island docks at 3:00 on Thursday morning and sat in the guards shack, talking to the gunsmith; he takes this shift so that he can be available in case one of the harpoon guns needs repair. In fair weather, the boats retrieve the buoyed whales at dark and haul them, sometimes a hundred miles or more, to the slipway at Durban, arriving ordinarily after midnight. At 3 A.M. , after refueling and taking on water, they are bound offshore again, to be on the whaling grounds at daylight.