He eats man, as he eats anything else eatable because in the water man is easily caught, and not from natural depravity or an acquired taste begetting a decided preference for human flesh.  All natives of shores infested by sharks despise him and his alleged man-eating propensities, knowing that a very feeble splashing will suffice to frighten him away even if ever so hungry.  Demerara River literally swarms with sharks, yet I have often seen a negro, clad only in a beaming smile, slip into its muddy waters, and, after a few sharp blows with his open hand upon the surface, calmly swim down to the bottom, clear a ship’s anchor, or do whatever job was required, coming up again as leisurely as if in a swimming-bath.  A similar disregard of the dangerous attributes awarded by popular consent to the shark may be witnessed everywhere among the people who know him best.  The cruelties perpetrated upon sharks by seamen generally are the result of ignorance and superstition combined, the most infernal forces known to humanity.  What would be said at home of such an act, if it could be witnessed among us, as the disembowelling of a tiger, say, and then letting him run in that horrible condition somewhere remote from the possibility of retaliating upon his torturers?  Yet that is hardly comparable with a similar atrocity performed upon a shark, because he will live hours to the tiger’s minutes in such a condition.

I once caught a shark nine feet long, which we hauled on board and killed by cutting off its head and tail.  It died very speedily—­for a shark—­all muscular motion ceasing in less than fifteen minutes.  It was my intention to prepare that useless and unornamental article so dear to sailors—­a walking-stick made of a shark’s backbone.  But when I came to cut out the vertebra, I noticed a large scar, extending from one side to the other, right across the centre of the back.  Beneath it the backbone was thickened to treble its normal size, and perfectly rigid; in fact, it had become a mass of solid bone.  At some time or other this shark had been harpooned so severely that, in wrenching himself free, he must have nearly torn his body in two halves, severing the spinal column completely.  Yet such a wound as that had been healed by natural process, the bone knit together again with many times the strength it had before—­minus, of course, its flexibility—­and I can testify from the experience of securing him that he could not possibly have been more vigorous than he was.

A favourite practice used to be—­I trust it is so no longer—­to catch a shark, and, after driving a sharpened stake down through his upper jaw and out underneath the lower one, so that its upper portion pointed diagonally forward, to let him go again.  The consequence of this cruelty would be that the fish was unable to open his mouth, or go in any direction without immediately coming to the surface.  How long he might linger in such torture, one can only guess; but unless his fellows, finding him thus helpless, came along and kindly devoured him, no doubt he would exist in extreme agony for a very long time.