Book Review: The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival among America’s Great White Sharks by Susan Casey
In the days when there were only four channels on TV, no cable, and no streaming services, my friend and housemate Rolf and I used to go to a lot of movies. On one occasion we went to a downtown theater to see Spielberg’s box office sensation Jaws. My friend usually manifested an image of bravado, but when we came out of the cinema he was visibly shaken, trembling even. When we ducked into a bar to have a pitcher of beer and play some pool, he could hardly hold his pool cue, let alone keep it steady. He confessed that he wasn’t afraid of much, but he had a strong, irrational fear of sharks. I think that there are many people with similar paranoia. After all, sharks are immense, savage carnivores of the deep, lying in wait in the depths to attack unwary prey.
The mystique and primal fear of sharks plays a large part of the allure of The Devil’s Teeth. The previous book I read by Susan Casey, The Underworld, Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, is an account of historical and contemporary efforts to study the deep ocean and its denizens. In contrast, The Devil’s Teeth reads more like a memoir chronicling several visits that Casey made to the Farallones, an archipelago about twenty-seven miles west of San Francisco. The title of the book refers to the clump of islands, which are collectively known as the Devil’s Teeth. But surrounding the islands are the devils of the sea, great white sharks, which especially during the fall months of September through November, congregate in the waters off the islands in two groups. The scientists refer to a team of males as the Rat Pack, and a team of truly immense females as the Sisterhood.
The Farallon Islands are a protected area, and there is only one inhabitable house on the island of Southeast Farallon. For decades a team of scientists has lived on the island and studied its populations of birds and mammals such as seals, but during shark season specialists also study the great white sharks and their attack patterns. They scan for attacks from a lighthouse on a hill. When they spot them, they launch a boat that is smaller than some of the sharks, and head out to document the activities with underwater cameras held on poles.
For Casey’s first visit, she was allowed a permit for just a couple of days during shark season. She came back for a short time during the summer, when the island was covered in breeding birds, but this was not enough to satisfy her journalist’s curiosity. She was not allowed to stay longer on the island, so to be able to remain for an extended period during shark season, she rented a yacht and anchored it offshore, which was technically permitted. We normally associate the word “yacht” with luxury, but this boat was old and untrustworthy, with plumbing that spewed waste, a fridge that stopped working, and unreliable electricity. During storms the boat would pitch and toss, making sleep impossible. Nevertheless, Casey endured the discomfort for the opportunity to go on shark watches with the scientists and observe how they work.
This is a thrilling book about a unique, primitive part of the world that is in fact only a short hop off the coast from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It seems strange to have such opposites in such close proximity. As I mentioned above, this book does not delve as deeply into background and history as Casey’s The Underworld. For instance, I would have appreciated, and in fact was hoping for, a historical overview of the study of white sharks. Instead, it focuses solely on the Farallones. In this context, though, it is fascinating and fully absorbing.
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