Last Swim

Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, is a hard place to leave. Winter visitors "miss the boat" (back to the U. S.) surprisingly often. Nassau is warm. Nassau is wet. The sun, striking through Nassau's clear ocean shallows to coral bottom, paints them a variety of shore-sea greens and blues to which not even a penny postcard can do justice. When the Munson liner Munargo anchors outside the bar-guarded harbor and the stubby tender puts out from town with homegoers, people on shore feel sorry for people on the tender. People on the tender feel sorry for themselves. They yearn, usually, for "just one more cocktail, one last swim."

People on the tender, when it was plowing out to the Munargo one day last week, thought that going home had proved too much for one young man. As the tender passed the buoy by the Hog Island lighthouse, the young man whipped off his coat and dove overboard. His wife fainted. Passengers stumbled over suitcases to the rail. Then they saw that the young man, swimming powerfully, was saving a small boy. Tender-Captain Russell's ten-year-old had tumbled off the deck. Charles F. Havemeyer, onetime (class of 1921) Harvard footballer, N. Y. Stock Exchange member, had plunged to the rescue. A one-time (class of 1917) Princeton footballer, saturnine Knowlton L. ("Jew") Ames Jr., publisher of the Chicago Journal of Commerce, was nearby in his speed launch. While the tender turned itself around, Mr. Ames fished out Mr. Havemeyer and the Russell boy. Mr. Havemeyer did not miss the Munargo.

Nassau citizens talked of giving Mr. Havemeyer a medal, but not because Nassau harbor is "shark-infested" as newspapers said. Medal or no, Mr. Havemeyer, who denied he was a hero, was content. He had had "one last swim." Only at night do sharks frequent Nassau harbor. And when they do come in from the ocean, they are sand sharks; scavengers, not killers. On moonlight nights they may be seen and heard, huge but probably harmless, lurking and feeding near the piles of the town slaughterhouse. Once there was a monster that Nassau called "The Harbor Master." At the buoy where Mr. Havemeyer dived, "shark hunts" are sometimes held. When the tide is ebbing, a goat's throat is cut and the body tied to the buoy. Or a bloated horse is tied there and bloody scraps are sent floating out to sea. Usually it is hours before a long shape, bronze in the bright blue water, moves slowly in over the bar. Other slow shapes follow, circling the buoy cautiously. Chunks of "proud" beef, on six-inch hooks, chain leaders and lines like halyards, wait for them on the bottom--usually wait for hours. . . . In the garden of a Nassau hotel there used to be the jaws of a hammerhead shark, with a placard: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." A more appropriate exhibit would have been the jaws of a large barracuda (sphyraena barracuda), sharp-fanged "tiger fish" of West Indian waters. Long, silvery, black-barred, barracudas haunt the shallows boldly by day, are far more ferocious and aggressive than sand sharks.