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(Attacked by Sharks)

Attacked by Sharks

But the following morning they counted noses down there and they had a considerable group, quite a number more than actually were survivors in the final analysis. We had that group down there, I shouldn't say "we" because I was not with it, I didn't know it existed until Friday morning when I was picked up. I have been told by officers who were in that survivor group that there were people who when they did find something to eat would try to hide it, and they got food Thursday. Planes came out and dropped food and water and things like that to them.

They were, I think, you might say a cross-section of what you would expect in any group of 300 people. There were a few who were willing to sacrifice their lives for others and did so. There were those who were in more or less of an exhausted state and stupefied and they didn't know much of what was going on. There were others who took the attitude that "I'm going to save myself and the hell with everybody else." But, I don't think that you can censure any of that because so many people by that time were out of their heads, most of them didn't know what they were doing.

You can't pin anybody down. There are people who think certain things happened. Nobody naturally, now, in their right mind would ever admit that he did anything like that and he would deny it if you confronted him with it. There were no flagrant cases that we could bring to light, there were just people who said, "Well, I know somebody who got more food than I did", and somebody said, "Well, I didn't have any food at all. I wasn't eating anything." So you can't definitely state that there were really, you might say, acts of violence.

We had sharks, or rather they had sharks down there [in the life preserver group]. We know that because we have two survivors who were bitten by sharks and as I told this one boy in the hospital. I said "You'd better take some castellan paint and put on that thing before it heals up because nobody will ever believe you've been bitten by a shark. You might as well outline the teeth mark and you will have it for the rest of your life and can say `I know I was bitten by a shark'."

We have one boy who was bitten on the thigh. The group down there said that on the calm days, they knew there were sharks around because they cold see them underneath. They didn't actually seem to bother them on the surface. It was different with my group who were in rafts. We had a shark that adopted us apparently sometime in the early morning of Monday. We couldn't get rid of him. The kids who were in rafts by themselves on this one raft were scared to death of this shark because he kept swimming underneath the raft. You could see his big dorsal fin and it was white, almost as white as a sheet of paper, apparently [the shark] spent most of his time on the surface and this fin had bleached out so he didn't blend in with the water at all.

He had the usual pilot fish [remoras] which we were trying to catch, hanging on him and we could knock this pilot fish off with a canoe paddle, but the shark would then swim away and the pilot fish would be gone.

We were trying to get some fish to use as bait. We had a couple of the very excellent air tight fishing kits that are put up for the rafts that are the finest that I've seen. They're a delight to any fisherman's eye. They have the lures, the hooks and even a net [and] a gaf, but a spear in them, harpoon, I should say. But the fact that this shark was with us all the time prevented us from catching any except the smallest black colored fish. It looked to me like a member of the Parrot family and, although the meat was very white, I would not let anybody eat.

Alert, who was with me, turned out to be an excellent fisherman. He caught most of the fish. But as I say, every time we caught a little one and used that for bait, the shark got it before we could get any other fish. There were a number of good sized schools of fish that we saw and since I've done a great deal of salt water fishing myself, I know they were either Bonito or small Mackerel or one of those families which were edible, but we could never get any of those fish to bite due to this shark.

So about the 3rd day we were getting a little annoyed with this thing [the shark] and we only had a small knife, the knife that's put up in this fishing apron which has about a blade I suppose an inch long, and I would suggest that someplace in this kit that they put a larger knife, a knife such as a sheaf [sheath] knife.

Well, Heavens! All of you had a sheaf's knife, you wore them on the ship which is perfectly true. You wore them and they were uncomfortable, you sat on them and they were uncomfortable and nobody when we actually got in the rafts had a sheaf knife, either lost out of the sheaf or else had failed to pick it up and put it on when he got out of his bunk. Of course, it was unfortunate that this happened at night, because nobody had a chance really to pick anything up. So maybe if it [the sinking] happened in the daytime, we may have had people who would have had sheaf knives, but it is essential that you have a knife with a blade larger than an inch.

We believe we could have killed the shark if we had had a large blade knife, and then we might have been able to get some fish to eat. We felt that if we had a knife with a sufficiently long enough blade, we could have killed the shark and we, therefore, could have gotten some fish to eat.

Another thing I would like to point out is that obsolete water breakers should be done away with. We ought to have the water in tins, preferably, I believe, in a 11-ounce tin so that you can open that, drink it and it is small enough so that it will fit in the packet of a kapok life jacket. The matches should be in water-tight tines, the first aid material should be in water-tight tins. In fact everything that you expect to use in abandoning ship should have the best protection there is.

The Very rocket--that is well protected. It has a tin covering which may be opened with a can opener and inside of that is a lucite cylinder which further protects the material. The one thing that we noticed in the two containers we had that the first night when I tried to use one, we opened it with the can opener that lifts the top off. It has a narrow edge which you are supposed to grab with your fingers an pull out from the rest of the tin container. All that we saw had been damaged to such an extent that you could not pull this out. Consequently, you should have a small can opener inside this tin which will allow you to cut longitudinally to remove the tin from the inside container which holds the cartridges. I was afraid to cut this off at night the first time I tried it because I didn't know what I was running into. I realize now that it is essential that everybody aboard ship should be thoroughly familiar with every type of material which he may run into when he abandons ship.

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(Attacked by Sharks)