The Shark That Walks On Land by Michael Bright

Author:Michael Bright [Michael Bright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785905605
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2013-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

MORE MEN OVERBOARD

The John Bartley story is not the only one of its kind. There is a tale told by Edgerton Y. Davis, a surgeon with the harp seal fleet out of Newfoundland. He wrote (in 1947) about a young sealer who fell from an ice floe off St John’s, Newfoundland, in 1893. An enormous bull sperm whale, which was apparently lost and in Arctic waters out of season, swallowed him. The whale was caught and when its stomach was opened up the man was found inside. He was badly crushed ‘in the region of his chest’, according to Davis, and partially digested. The gastric mucosa (the lining) in the whale’s stomach had encased his body, yet some lice on the sailor’s head were still alive. It was, perhaps, another entertaining story, but curiously Davis waited for more than half a century to tell it. Victor Scheffer, the award-winning author of The Year of the Whale – an imaginative book on sperm whale biology – is sceptical. He quotes the story but ‘ventures to doubt it’.

There is also an even earlier case. It was reported in the Massachusetts Gazette, and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, dated Monday 14 October 1771. The report described how a whaling ship arrived at Edgartown carrying Marshal Jenkins, a whaler whose own boat had been bitten in two by a sperm whale. Jenkins was thrown into the water and then caught in the whale’s mouth. The whale pulled him below, but later rose to the surface and discarded him. He was taken on board the mother ship, where he was found to be much battered and bruised, but after a couple of weeks he fully recovered.

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