“Night after night,” Henry Field recalls in his memoir, “I thought of these men… with sharks cutting through the water around them.” As Anthropologist to the President, he had Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ear, even, it seemed, in matters of ichthyology. “I wrote the president a memorandum suggesting that we try to develop a shark repellent.”
With presidential blessings, Field met with fellow museum curator Harold J. Coolidge, also on the payroll of the OSS. Coolidge was a primatologist—a silverback gorilla he collected (shot) in the Congo resides to this day in Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology—but he agreed to oversee the shark project. You can well imagine that a gorilla expert on salary with a spy organization might suffer a mild sense of purposelessness. Here at last was something up his alley, if not precisely on his doorstep. Coolidge hired another curator pal, W. Douglas Burden, as the project’s principal investigator. Burden was an expert on Komodo dragons, had written an entire book about Komodo dragons, but he, too, knew little about sharks.
For actual shark expertise, the OSS turned to a college dropout named Stewart Springer, whose résumé included stints as a commercial fisherman and as a chemical technician at the Indianapolis Activated Sludge Plant. In 1942, there were no experts in shark biology and behavior. Truly, no one knew much about the creatures. The combination of hands-on shark experience and sludge chemistry was, in fact, ideal background for the task. “Dr.” Springer, as some of the OSS correspondence refers to him, was as good as it got.
The US Navy agreed to contribute funding, even though, as one of their rank pointed out, there was at that time no formal record of anyone who had taken the oath of the Navy having been harmed by sharks. Their concern was morale. Fear of sharks, however irrational, was thinning the ranks of willing fliers. Stewart Springer voiced the cockamamie irony of it: “It was okay to give one’s life for one’s country, but to get eaten for it was another matter.” If nothing else, a repellent would serve as what Douglas Burden called a “pink pill,” a psychological fix for shark-shy aviators. On July 3, 1942, funding was approved for OSS Office of Scientific Research and Development Project 374, Contract OEMcmr-184: a three-month investigation “looking to the development of means of protection against sharks, barracuda and jellyfish[50] for men adrift in lifebelts.” (In three hundred some pages of archived correspondence for Project 374, I saw but two passing references to barracudas. As far as I can tell, no one ever got around to jellyfish.)
The lab work was done mainly at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which housed a collection of captive sharks called dogfish—in size and temperament, somewhere between a great white and a goldfish. Rotenone was among the first substances the team tested. “Definitively negative,” Burden reported to Coolidge. “Lethal doses do not deter the feeding process.” The shark would die, but not before you did. Until such time as goldfish presented a threat to national security, rotenone would be limited to the arsenal of the USDA.
Seventy-nine substances were tested and rejected. Irritants failed. “Repulsive odors” failed. As did clove oil, vanillin, pine oil, creosote, nicotine. They tried compounds related to mothballs, asparagus, horse piss. The sharks ignored all of it. The first “hot lead” sprang from an item of sharker lore. Springer had heard that a shark carcass abandoned on a bait line will ruin the spot for shark fishing. He and his team got to work. They rented an “isolated” house in Florida for $10 a month, and never, I’m guessing, was a cleaning deposit more roundly withheld. Chunks of shark muscle tissue were left out at room temperature for four or five days. An extract was then prepared by grinding the decomposed flesh, stirring in alcohol, and filtering the resultant shark muck.
Forty-three experiments later, Springer enthused in a note to Burden, it was possible “to say POSITIVELY that the meat contains some substance strongly repellent to sharks.” Repellence value 88.4 percent! Ninety to 100 percent effective! The bimonthly progress report of Contract OEMcmr-184 describes Springer as “sufficiently convinced of the effectiveness of the concentrate that he would be willing to test it in a life belt with a bucket of blood.”
An expedition to test the decayed meat concentrate on wild sharks had been slated as the next step, but Springer and Burden urged the OSS to begin production immediately. “If we really have something now and… the field test delays use of a good thing by six months,” Springer wrote to Coolidge, “and if during those six months… some poor devils might have been protected it would be bad.” Springer happened to know a contractor who could get right to work producing the concentrate. Shark Industries was a Florida purveyor of shark skins and shark oil—and also, speaking of things that smell fishy, Springer’s sometime employer. The company, Springer felt certain, would be able to produce enough shark extract to outfit 2,000 to 5,000 life jackets per month. If Springer had his way, the whole undertaking would soon be moot, as there would be no sharks left to repel.
The OSS didn’t bite. Rather than move forward with the concentrate, they wanted to try to isolate the active ingredient—a compound that could be ordered or cheaply synthesized, thereby saving them the cost and bother of large-scale shark carcass reduction. Chemists were hired, three of them, and they soon came up with a promising candidate: ammonium acetate. It, along with two compounds that had earlier shown promise (copper sulfate and maleic acid), plus thirty pounds of the Macbethian-sounding “extract of decomposing shark meat,” were flown down to Ecuador, to the very same waters where our story began, to be tested on “voracious surface-feeding sharks.” Lodgings were secured, boats and guides hired. Three weeks later, Burden dispatched a glum cable: “The waters off the coast of Ecuador have been virtually empty.”
From deep in the pockets of the OSS came Harold Coolidge’s reply: Try Peru. “Don’t be discouraged,” he wrote. “Shark hunting is not unlike tiger hunting. You remember how plentiful tigers are in various parts of French Indo-China until you reach the point when you want to shoot one and have only two or three weeks at your disposal.” You got the sense, leafing through these letters, that a career in natural history was little more than a way for well-connected gentlemen to finance far-flung safaris and fishing expeditions in the name of science. The title of Douglas Burden’s memoir nicely summed the job: Hunting in Many Lands.
The expedition eventually located some sharks, off the coast of Guayaquil, Ecuador. More discouraging words followed. Nothing worked. They tried combining the ammonium acetate and the copper sulfate, and that compound (copper acetate) seemed effective. Unfortunately, two or three pounds of it, in the form of a slowly dissolving cake (think urinal, not birthday), would be needed for one day’s protection. This would not do. The Navy wanted something small enough and light enough—six ounces at most—to seal in a packet and attach to a life belt. The life belt, a precursor to the flotation vest, was a deflated rubber tube worn around the waist at all times and inflated in an emergency. Like any part of a serviceman’s uniform, the belts developed holes from wear and tear. The last thing a seaman needed on top of a leaky life belt was a three-pound anchor of questionably effective shark repellent.
The Navy was losing patience. A hundred thousand dollars—$1.5 million in today’s currency—had been spent, and they were no closer to having a practical, effective shark repellent than they’d been a year ago. The OSS was edged out, and the project taken over by the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The first thing the Navy did was to make the field tests more realistic. Springer and Burden had been baiting lone meandering specimens—“casual sharks”—using hunks of mullet as their man-in-life-belt stand-ins. The NRL wanted a better approximation of the thrashing aftermath of a downed ship or plane and the “large schools of frenzied sharks” that that scenario was thought to attract and inspire. The so-called feeding frenzy was a state of mind in which, it was speculated, olfaction took a back seat to the “mob impulse.” In August 1943, copper acetate was brought on board a shrimp trawler off Biloxi, Mississippi, and tested for its ability to protect “trash fish”—flailing, panicked specimens tossed off the back because they weren’t shrimp. Guess what? Even five to six pounds of copper acetate per bushel of trash fish “did not by any means” interrupt the het-up mob trailing the boat. “The sharks hardly paused.”
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Two months into it, the Chief of the American Intelligence Command wrote to Harold Coolidge urging him to add piranhas to the list. AIC needed better piranha intelligence. Years ago, nature filmmaker Wolfgang Bayer told me the story of the time he was sent to the Amazon to get footage of bloodthirsty piranhas devouring a capybara. Bayer strung nets across the river to trap a school of piranhas. He captured a capybara and herded it into the river. Nothing. He starved the piranhas. Still nothing. He went home.