We should learn to love sharks, not demonise them

Such a sublime, terrible beauty, the shark. Glidingly filled with our awe, as if those glassy eyes marked us out as a bite-sized snack from the start. Evolutionarily pre-lapsarian — they’ve been around for 450 million years — sharks are wreathed in a symbolic cruelty, theirs and ours. In one of the most vivid scenes in Moby-Dick, the whalers slice into sharks attempting to prey upon their prized whale catch; yet even as the fishes’ entrails spill out, the dying animals are so ferocious that they eat their own innards. It’s a terrifying, almost Jungian image of consumption that seems to echo the reality of their fate.

William McKeever’s book seeks to dispel these fearful dreams. Taking four species of shark — great white, mako, tiger and hammerhead — he starts with the first emperor of the sea, the great white. Prowling the east coast of the USA, this ultimate predator begat its own modern myth in 1916, when a spate of shark attacks on bathers on the New Jersey shores set in motion the prejudiced story that would culminate in Peter Benchley’s Jaws. But, as McKeever shows, the 21st century would reinvent this narrative in the same waters in which Benchley’s book was set.

With the end of a legal cull of grey seals off Cape Cod in 1972, their expanding population has drawn in great whites so close to the shore that friends of mine there have seen the vast bodies of the sharks (a fully-grown great white can reach the same length and weight of an adult giraffe) beaching themselves in search of their prey. Sadly, in the past couple of years, their victims have included humans, one of whom died last year. A mobile phone snap I saw of another surfer, who survived, showed his thighs bitten so deep that they gaped open as though great wedges of Edam cheese had been gouged out of them.

It was in these New England waters, too, that McKeever first gained his love and fear of sharks as a child.