Savage Shore: Life and Death with Nicaragua's Last Shark Hunters

by Edward Marriott

Nicaragua's Atlantic coast is home to the most dangerous of fish, the bull shark, a lethal predator with a fearsome appetite and the only shark that swims in inland waters. Braving Nicaragua's hurricane-torn wilderness of mangrove swamps, Edward Marriott joins the last surviving shark fishermen to sail in a dugout canoe and fish for sharks with a hand line.

As Marriott charts the life of the bull shark, its migrations, its voracious feeding patterns, and the treasures it offers -- oil for vitamins, hide for leather, and fins for soup -- he reveals lives spent in fear and awe in the shadow of a monster that can sniff fresh blood a mile away. He also tells a tale of human an elemental community, battered by civil war and natural disasters, is now degraded beyond repair to the point of providing bounty for modern-day pirates.

A gripping narrative of risk and adventure, a poignant record of loss and corruption, Savage Shore confirms Marriott as one of our most original and insightful travel writers.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel

309 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable read that certainly enhanced my knowledge of Nicaraguan history and the natural history of the fearsome bull shark. Marriot is a fine wordsmith and his views on the "Dysneyification" of dangerous wildlife reflect my own.
Commenting on a grinning cartoon shark with a baseball hat - baseball is a big deal in Nicaragua - he notes: "... the shark was belittled and reduced. This puzzled me, but then it struck home: hoe better tp sanitise the monster than to do the Walt Disney on it?"
Every year I try to read at least one non-fiction book on Latin America and was happy to have spied this recently in a Joburg second-hand bookshop ...

[Tim Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written, very descriptive travelogue of Nicaragua in the late 1990s (this book was published in 2000 so maybe from the year 2000), focusing primarily as the title suggests on those who fish for sharks (or sadly, used to fish for sharks) rather than the sharks themselves (though there is a good bit of information on the sharks). The shark in question is the Bull Shark (Carcharhinus leucas), “the most willful and aggressive of all tropical sharks,” which unlike other sharks, “possessed the ability to cross from salt water to freshwater,” hunting on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, up the San Juan River, all the way into very much freshwater Lake Nicaragua. Though not a shark by any means endemic to Nicaragua and as far as I know not particularly rare globally, it was thought for many years to be divided into two species, with a species unique to Lake Nicaragua. Though maybe not rare elsewhere, it is increasingly rare in Nicaragua, having been the victim of an industrialized fishing and processing system that harvested thousands of sharks for their fins, oil, hides, and meat, this industry peaking in pre-Civil War Nicaragua in the 1970s.

Author Edward Marriott starting on the Atlantic Coast and making his way up the San Juan River and then finally into areas on the shores of Lake Nicaragua attempted to trace the journey of the sharks themselves, find those who fished the shark, find what remained of the former shark industry, and provide a glimpse of life in this part of Nicaragua (and a tiny bit of Costa Rica, though the travels firmly take place in Nicaragua) both historically and today. I got to learn more about Nicaragua than I ever had before, becoming acquainted a bit from the sleepy Atlantic coast town of Bluefields (its people often speaking Miskito Coast Creole, a mixture of English, Miskito, African languages, and New World Spanish), San Juan del Norte (once poised to be a great port as it was going to be the gateway of a Pan-American Canal that ended up never being built), San Carlos (the “one-time shark-fishing capital of Nicaragua….a border town, bridgehead to Costa Rica, and edgy and transient as any Tijuana”), and Granada (“more than anywhere else in Nicaragua, was the shark’s home town,” with its baseball team named for them and shark names commonplace, “a city in flux, with roofless derelict shacks, standing alongside freshy mortared “colonial-style residences” hopefully awaiting a surge of bold investors,” a poor town that hoped to trade on its cultural heritage of “elegant colonial courtyards” all while the shark fishing industry had basically ceased to exist).

A few historical figures make reappearances in the text, notably Thomas “Torso” Thorson, “an American zoologist who, throughout the late 1960s, had caught and tagged bull sharks up the length of the San Juan and Lake Nicaragua,” paying locals to find live fish who he then tagged at the base of the dorsal fin and released (fondly remembered by some locals still) and Horatio Nelson, who lead an ill-starred expedition to capture the area for the English (and expedition that without any real effort by the Spanish, just faded away thanks to heat, disease, and supply issues).

Kind of a depressing book I must say. I knew going in reading about shark fin fisheries would be depressing and it was (and that is the primary reason the sharks are still fished, though the numbers crashed so bad it isn’t fished anymore on an industrial scale, but rather by poor fishermen working as individuals). I had no idea how low shark numbers had gotten, and while this is a travelogue and a light history book and doesn’t get into hard data as far as shark numbers (if such are even available), they are low indeed. It was also sad because most everyone Marriott encountered was poor, often poorly educated, had few prospects, each living in their own pocket or bubble of Nicaragua and feeling detached from the rest of the country (especially on the coast but pretty much anywhere that wasn’t the capital), the history and lore of the shark fishing industry and of the sharks themselves fading more and more as shark fishing had become a thing of the past and those who had made a living on fishing sharks were retiring or passing away (and also encountering again and again people who were either basically illiterate or much more concerned with the daily struggle of life, with the fallout of the recent civil war a much more pressing concern than a faded shark fishing industry).

Those Marriott did encounter still involved in shark fishing almost always were touchingly optimistic, thinking the lull was temporary or that the sharks were still around but more wily, in deeper waters, or just a bit farther away, few seeming to appreciate that the numbers crashed from a vast overharvest with no thought whatsoever to the future. One passage:

“To a man, they were convinced of one thing: that is absence was but temporary, and unrelated to their own feverish hunting of it over the past three decades. It was bigger than all of this, they believed, and answered to its own rhythms. It would return.”

Quick reading, no index or photographs, it had a good gritty feel and the author really painted a vivid portrait of a number of people he encountered, some he became friends with. I liked the interweaving of historical lore and biographies but I thought the information on the shark itself was pretty light. He never encountered very many sharks but based on his travelogue it absolutely wasn’t from a lack of effort. I was amazed at his gung ho, gonzo attitude of going to villages unsure if there was going to be any place to stay, unsure if he could easily return from them to his former path, of just sort of making do as far as food and shelter went, but it seemed to work for him. The fact that has British and not American seemed to make his journey easier too.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first 50 pages are great, then it is pretty much downhill. However, it did make me an expert (at least in my mind) on bull sharks the whole time I was in Nicaragua. My travel companions make say this book just made me annoying since I started MANY sentence with "Did you know bull sharks...."

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

My second book by Marriott, and I must say he really walks the walk and talks the talk of cultural immersion to get his scoop.

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ran across this book while browsing through a Barnes and Noble where Sheila was signing her latest book. I ordered it when we returned along with several others by Marriott, an excellent sociologist/anthropologist.
The bull shark, notorious for its aggressive behavior and a fearsome appetite, is unique in that it inhabits both fresh and salt water. They can maneuver and attack in as little as three feet of water, so it’s been difficult to sell the area as a tourist attraction since swimming is a hazardous pastime. It’s also a source of revenue for the local fishermen who eke out a meager living by selling the fins and other body parts of the fish.
Marriott chronicles his journey through the area around Bluefields and San Juan del Norte -- replacement for the infamous Greytown that had sparked high hopes of being the location for the beginning of the canal that eventually went to Panama and was shelled by one of our earlier jingoistic presidents.
Nicaragua is not a nice place. Trammeled and bedeviled by war and nature – it was devastated by an earthquake in 1972 and again by the hurricane of more recent vintage – the people, once proud descendants of Mestizo Indians, black Caribs, and Spanish pirates, are poverty-stricken gaining what little cash they can through fishing and selling drugs that wash up on the beaches.
The shark travels up the San Juan River into Lake Nicaragua and back, but it is seriously becoming depleted. The shark processing plant established by former dictator Anastasio Samoza was too efficient.
The hardship Marriott voluntarily endured is most startling. In his anxiety to see the former Greytown, he manages to persuade a couple of boys – no one else will go – to canoe him through fearsome swamp and tangled brush, not to mention hoards of mosquitoes, to see the overgrown remains of cemeteries. It’s questionable which is worse: the shark attacks or the devastating poverty nature and revolution have wrecked on the country.

[Paul McBride · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicaragua does not appear to have entered the late twentieth century intact, especially the Atlantic coast or the interior.
I am pretty sure if I was to ever go there the only water I would enter would be a swimming pool or shower. Between the sharks in the ocean, rivers, and lakes, the piranhas, and the alligators it sounds a little to much wild kingdom for me. The author had some major guts to travel the way he does in a country as dysfunctional as Nicaragua. This was a very entertaining book.

[Jenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all good travel writing, gives you a sense of the cultural and historical context in which the story takes places.

[Selkie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Marriott does an excellent job describing the people, land, & culture of Nicaragua. His descriptive writing style would be just as suitable as a guide book, as it is a biography of his own adventures.
No doubt his attempt at finding one of the "monster sharks" futile & disappointing, but hopefully he found as much satisfaction with his writing as his readers do.

[Jrobertus · Rating 2 out of 5]

an entertaining narrative of a trip from the atlantic coast to lake nicaragua talking to shark hunters. tracking the migration of bull sharks into the lake.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A first hand view of Nicaragua's shark hunters. Gives interesting looks into the life of the bull shark, as well as some info on Nicaraguan life and culture.

[Madeleine]

Some of the scenes in this book were hard for me to stomach as an animal lover. But the history of shark hunting provides a great context for a comprehensive history of Nicaragua's mangled past.