1
A Matter of Misunderstanding: From Pliny to Disney

The axe comes down on the body, which twists and turns. It strikes again and again. An incredible violence that seems to express all the repugnance humanity has towards such a vile beast: the shark! It is 1954, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on the deck of the Calypso, Captain Cousteau's ship; he concludes with a terse: 'Sailors the world over detest sharks . But for us divers, the shark is our mortal enemy.'1

Thirty-five years later, aboard the same Calypso, in the same Indian Ocean, we set sail, off the shipping lanes, towards the mysterious Andaman archipelago. We aim to make an inventory of the marine fauna of this region where no one has ever dived and which, in 1989, was still free of industrial fishing. But our secret hope, after having scoured the Caribbean Sea, after having searched the Pacific Ocean, from the Marquesas Islands to the Great Barrier Reef, is to finally find a virgin ecosystem, full of shark communities. A place where sharks abound, a place so famous that Jules Verne himself refers to it in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: 'I know well that in certain countries, particularly in the Andaman Islands, the negroes never hesitate to attack them with a dagger in one hand and a running noose in the other; but I also know that few who affront those creatures ever return alive.'2

By 1989, the world had definitely changed.3 The exploitation of 'marine resources' was at its peak. More than ninety million tonnes of fish were shipped worldwide, a critical threshold that would never be reached again.4 The shark is no longer the enemy; it is in danger. And Cousteau, whose exploration of the marine world had turned him into an environmental protector, wanted to sound a warning about the massive and rapid disappearance of sharks. Perhaps, inwardly, he wanted to repair the damage his film The Silent World had done to them.

The Andaman Islands sharks

On 4 April 1989, Calypso dropped anchor at 11° 8´ north latitude, 93° 31´ east longitude, on Flat Rock, Invisible Bank. Five o'clock in the morning. Camera, writing slate, sample tubes, everything is ready for the first reconnaissance dive. Dawn is just breaking. The sky and the sea merge into a greyish uniformity. The 'Invisible Bank' is formed out of a skull-like volcanic rock crowned with foam at water level. It is low tide. We tumble down under the surface. With no time to turn around, to take our first breath, there are three silvertip sharks (Carcharhinus albimarginatus) and two large grey reef sharks (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos) coming straight towards us. How did I identify them without seeing them properly? Their bodies are barely visible. Only the bright fin edges are dancing in the obscure depths. Opalescent flames circling quietly in the distance, then they wheel and suddenly shoot off.

The sea seems to be giving birth. Sharks coming into the world: first the black crescent of the mouth which contrasts with the paleness of the snout, then the powerful roundness of the body, stabilized in the dense water by the pectoral and dorsal fins. The eye is perfectly round. A golden iris with a vertical anthracite pupil. It stares without letting go. The five gill slits, like exclamation marks. Then the muscles playing under the skin that is both granular and silky. A mass of energy, contained, ready to explode. Supreme power. Finally, the whip of the tail, like a white flag that leaves you spinning.

We reach the bottom. We wedge ourselves between a coral mass and a red sea fan. The biggest shark comes up to us, a large female grey reef shark. She measures at least 2.8 metres, maybe three metres, a giant for a species whose biggest individuals rarely exceed two and a half metres. This is a sure sign, no fishing in these parts. It is a pristine ecosystem. Indeed, these rare mature giants are the first to disappear as soon as fishing begins. And they are never replaced, because the harvesting rate is such that the young ones no longer have time to grow older and larger. This matriarch shows deep bites on her flanks and a large tear on her left fin, traces of her numerous couplings. This one scarred female tells the story of a world, of a former Earth, populated by such noble savages, prodigiously enormous beings who had grown old unmolested. This makes me forget the notes scribbled on my slate and my samples. Dull figures and words cannot convey such an impact.

Cousteau and Lord Longimanus

Returning from this survey, the decision was made to use the protective cage, given the abundance of large sharks. In these unexplored waters, Cousteau did not want to take any risks. He had been cautious since his misadventure with a big oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus)5 in 1948 off the Cape Verde Islands. Memory does not fade away so easily. It left a deep impression on him, so much so that he, often discrete about his past adventures, told us the story many times around the Calypso's dining table, and described it in several books, with various embellishments over time:

We had scarcely entered the water and were only fifteen or twenty feet below the surface when we saw Lord Longimanus . He resembled none of the sharks we had met before.. Confident - too confident - in ourselves, we dropped the line that still linked us with the ship [the Elie Monnier] and swam straight toward him. His squat, gray-brown silhouette was sharply etched against the clear blue of the water. His head was very round and very large, his pectoral fins enormous and his dorsal fin rounded at its extremities.. It was time - much too long a time - before we realized that the Lord of the Long Arms was drawing us with him into the distance, but was not in the least afraid of our approach. As soon as we realized this, we were seized with an almost paralytic fear and wanted nothing more than to return to our ship. But it was too late . Two blue sharks, very large but classic in form, came to join our longimanus and then the three squali began to dance around us, in a gradually narrowing circle. For twenty seemingly interminable minutes, the three sharks, prudently but resolutely, tempted a bite at us each time we turned our back on them or each time one of us went up to the surface to signal - in vain - to our far-off ship. Miraculously, the gig which the captain of the Elie Monnier had put overboard to look for us found us and saved us from imminent death. Shortly before we were hauled from the water I had arrived at the point of smashing my camera against the head of the longimanus, in the forlorn hope of warding off his attack and gaining a little time.6

Final exit from the shark cage

Even though we were not in the same situation - we didn't have three kilometres of water under our flippers, only fifteen metres - we did not want to argue about J.-Y. C.'s (Jacques-Yves Cousteau's) instructions or put ourselves in a difficult situation simply out of bravado. So, at 9.30 a.m. the shark cage was hanging from the end of the crane behind Calypso. It looked a bit like one of those papier mâché Mardi Gras decorations that are burned in public to mark the end of winter. It was a disturbing impression. Those steel bars, carefully painted yellow, behind which the pioneers of underwater exploration took refuge in 'shark-infested' waters, seemed quite useless at that moment. We had already had so many encounters with sharks that we had changed our minds about these unloved creatures. At the same time, this cage, the stuff of dreams of generations of divers and millions of television viewers, which had given me comfort in my childhood, linked me fraternally to my predecessors, those marvellous heroes of Calypso's earlier odyssey.

Solemnly lowered in the Zodiac, the cage was tipped into the sea at the dive site, a few hundred metres further on. And what everyone predicted happened: the great whitetip sharks kept their distance, ceding the place to the many colourful small fry that are the soul of the reef. Only a few whitetip reef sharks (Triaenodon obesus) and a tawny nurse (Nebrius ferrugineus) came close enough to bump into Didier Noirot's camera. No need to take refuge behind bars!

That was the last time the shark cage was used. Before day's end it was dismantled and stowed, never again to bring a yellow glow to the Cousteau films; that special hue, that little something that made us Calypso's intrepid frogmen. A page in the history of our relationship with sharks had been turned.

A peaceful dusk among the sharks

It was a frustrating day, so I dived again at dusk, this time alone. The sleek unicorn fish (Naso hexacanthus) and banana fusiliers (Pterocaesio pisang) that enliven the reef were already lying in crevices. I found the big whitetip sharks again. A dozen or so on the hunt. As in the morning, I could hardly make out the grey bodies that were blending in with the masses of coral reefs. But, despite the darkness - or perhaps because of it - the white tips edging their fins seemed luminescent. I found this ballet of white flashes hypnotizing and soothing, transporting me to a powerful, wild, former world, like a time traveller in communion with all the other living creatures around me, not only the sharks, but the...