When Captain Charles Thompson killed a 13-metre whale shark off the Florida Keys in the summer of 1912, it was the biggest fish that had ever been caught. It was such a monster that Thompson thought everyone should have a chance to see it, so he stretched the giant’s skin over a shark-shaped frame, mounted it on a railroad car and took it on a tour of the US. The shark amazed a generation and earned its owner a fortune – and for one man it triggered a lifelong obsession. Museum curator Eugene Gudger spent the rest of his days cataloguing every sighting and every detail of the rare and mysterious species as he went in pursuit of a whale shark of his own.
CHARLES THOMPSON hunted monsters. An intrepid charter fisherman from Miami, he made a living by taking rich men on adventures aboard his schooner Samoa, sailing down the Florida coast to chase marlin, tarpon and, on a good day, sharks. He was well known for catching bigger fish than anyone else in town, in more ways than one. Rumour had it he had been hired by four US presidents, and powerful businessmen from John Jacob Astor to William Vanderbilt.
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In July 1908, when a couple from nearby Little River returned from a trip across Biscayne Bay convinced they had seen a 10-metre sea serpent, it was Thompson who set out to catch the beast. “The people may rest assured,” announced the Miami Metropolis on 24 July, “if there is anything that swims of extraordinary dimensions, playing peek-a-boo with Captain Charley Thompson up around Little River within the next few days, its name will be ‘mud’.”
Thompson never did find the sea serpent, but four years later he snared an even bigger catch. Towards the end of May 1912, Thompson and his crewmate were engaged by Charles Brooks, a wealthy client from Cleveland, Ohio. The three men headed south for a few days fishing for tarpon off the Florida Keys. They anchored the Samoa just south of populated only by fishermen and railroad workers.
At around nine o’clock on the morning of 31 May, Thompson spotted a large tail fin, its pointed tip circling lazily just inside the newly built Seven Mile bridge that linked the islands all the way to Key West. The shadow moving beneath the surface had to be close to 15 metres long. He had seen nothing like it in all his years at sea.
The three men jumped into the Samoa’s launch and edged a little closer. The creature looked like a shark, but a very strange one. Its flat, grey back was as broad as a bus and covered with evenly spaced white spots, while several men could have fitted into its cavernous mouth.
“Its flat grey back was as broad as a bus and covered with spots”
Thompson harpooned the creature, but it cruised on, seemingly oblivious. For the next few hours, the men shot at it with rifles but even at point-blank range the bullets bounced off, leaving blunt, circular dents in its glistening back. When that failed, Thompson called over some nearby fishermen, and soon the shark was stuck with harpoons and dragging a flotilla of boats. Still it kept circling slowly, its tail sweeping back and forth in a huge, graceful arc.
By half-past five, a crowd of spectators had gathered on the bridge to see the huge fish make its final turn before Thompson’s men forced it aground on a sandbank and tied it, Gulliver-style, with lines made fast to oars stuck deep in the sand. Even now, the long-suffering giant wouldn’t die. The end came only after the men hacked through 10 centimetres of gristle to reach its brain.
It took two days to tow the carcass back to Miami, but the Samoa finally arrived triumphant. As Brooks headed back to Cleveland with the best story of his life, Thompson described his struggle with the great beast to a waiting press.
That summer, a biology professor called Eugene Gudger was visiting a marine biology lab in the Dry Tortugas, tiny dots of islands beyond Key West. He pored over the account in the Miami Metropolis, intrigued by this monstrous fish yet frustrated by the lack of scientific detail. Perhaps it was a killer whale. No doubt its size had been exaggerated.
At the end of July, as he headed home to North Carolina, Gudger stopped off in Miami to see the fish. He found Thompson working in a shed he had built on the bank of the Miami river, where for the past two months he had been stripping the skin from his huge catch. The stench was hellish and puddles of foul liquid covered the floor. Thompson had shaved half a tonne of flesh from the inside of the skin, and with the help of a taxidermist was now attempting to preserve it by drenching it several times a day with formaldehyde and brine.
Gudger, who prided himself on his encyclopaedic knowledge of fish, was amazed. The skin’s rough texture and parallel gill slits indicated that the beast was indeed a shark, but crammed into its huge jaws were thousands of tiny prickles, like those on a wool-carder’s brush. . The first known specimen of this giant but harmless filter feeder had been caught in South Africa’s Table Bay in 1828, but it was just 5 metres long. Since then there had been a handful of other catches, but at almost 13 metres, Thompson’s monster was by far the biggest ever recorded.
Gudger wanted to know more about these extraordinary fish. He wrote to Thompson repeatedly, asking for details about the capture and dimensions of his record-breaking fish, but the captain was too busy getting the whale shark ready to exhibit.
Thompson succeeded in draping the skin over a giant shark-shaped frame, then hoisted it onto a railroad car and exhibited it to the astonished inhabitants of Miami, who paid handsomely to have their photos taken with the monster. Gudger planned a trip to see it in May 1913, but before leaving he heard that Thompson had moved on and was now rolling his prize up the east coast of Florida. Hoping to intercept him, Gudger headed south. He was out of luck: by the time he reached Florida, Thompson was in New Jersey. Gudger finally caught up with the fish in Chicago in 1914, only to find there was little more he could glean from this particular specimen. The decaying skin “was in bad shape”, he reported dejectedly.
Gudger was disappointed but by now he was hooked. Whale sharks had become an obsession. Gudger made it his mission to catalogue every sighting, and he compiled photos, sketches, measurements and eyewitness accounts from every tropical ocean. In 1919, he joined the in New York as curator of fishes, and dreamed of procuring his own specimen of what he believed was the greatest shark since , a creature extinct for millions of years.
His chance came almost immediately. On 11 June a telegram arrived with news that a 10-metre whale shark had been stranded and killed near Cape Sable in Florida. The museum tried to buy the skin, but the price was “exorbitant”, the deal fell through and the skin fell to pieces. In June 1923, an 11-metre whale shark was killed near Marathon, the scene of Thompson’s epic battle 11 years earlier. Its captors agreed to present it to the museum, but Gudger’s hopes were dashed again when a combination of delays, warm weather and shark attacks ruined the fish before it could even be lifted from the water.
Gudger went on to become the country’s foremost expert on whale sharks. During his career he recorded more than 76 sightings and published at least 47 papers on every aspect of their biology. In 1935, after 23 years of hunting, he finally got his hands on the “powerfully smelly” skin of a 5-metre whale shark. He never found anything to rival Thompson’s, though, and he never saw a live one.
Thompson also devoted himself to the whale shark, though in a rather different way. Once he had exhausted audiences along the railroad, he took to the nation’s rivers in the Tamiami, a yacht-come-museum of marine curiosities, with his increasingly shabby monster as the star attraction.
If his shark was wearing thin, his story, like all fishermen’s tales, had grown in the telling. The graceful, plankton-eating giant had become a furious beast that had smashed a boat into thousands of pieces. The day-long battle to kill it had stretched to five days, during which the monster had dragged Thompson’s small boat “hundreds of miles” at “express train speed”.
The well-travelled shark was finally destroyed in 1922, when the Tamiami caught fire. But Thompson continued to tell the tale of the biggest fish ever caught.
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