Travel to Central America

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

Format: Paperback
Author: Edward Marriott
ReleaseDate: March, 2001
Publisher: Amazon Remainders Account
Rating:

savage shore sharks

My husband comes from a GREAT story-telling family and this book feels like it belongs in our family tales!Who would believe a book about the near-disappearance of shark fishing in Nicaragua would be SO compeling?. Our son sent us this book,after reading it while in Nicaragua.

3 sharks / 300 pages
Make no mistake; Marriot makes an incredible journey and has some amazing experiences. If you want shark stories, stear clear of this book. However, he has direct encounters with only three sharks and those all occured in one day. I would say 75% of this book is about Nicaragua's history and politics, 10% discusses shark mythology and 10% is a heavy handed attempt to draw metaphors between the two. This leaves 5% for actual sharks.

In short, a big disappoint for shark fans. Instead, check out Shark Attacks : Their Causes and Avoidance by Thomas B. Allen.

Not all sharks swim
Although conditions are definitely frontier-like the characters are very 20th century, and uniquely Nicaraguan. A few of the human kind can be found in places like Bluefields, Nicaragua, where if this book had instead been set in the wild west of the US, the only proper name for some of the residents would be desperados. Interspersed throughout SAVAGE SHORE are referrences to, and the occasional crossing of paths with, Sandinistas, Contras, Colombian drug dealers and the odd modern day pirate. These characters though are not even the central focus, but they certainly add to what is already a fascinating and well written travelogue, cultural study, nature journal, and critique on human greed, economic exploitation, and political chaos.

The central characters are not men at all but bull sharks that live, breed, and hunt in the Caribbean waters of Nicaragua's east coast. It is the "most willful and aggressive of all tropical sharks" and what makes it unique and worthy of a book, is that "like no other shark, it possessed the ability to cross from salt water to freshwater, hunting far upriver". That means that the bull shark can be found up the Escondido river near Bluefields or more impressively, 60 miles up the San Juan river, all the way to Lake Nicaragua. It is as the author says "shark where shark should not be - in fresh water, on human territory. "

The book tells the tale of this shark and the men who hunt it, as they have for generations, - bravely, in open dugout canoes with hand held lines. The sharks are hunted for their body oils, the fins are used to make soup and the skin is tanned into leather. Poverty means that resource management is non-existent and overfishing means that the shark itself may soon be gone from its last great freshwater holdout - lake Nicaragua.

Fear and greed, the author says, are the two most common human emotions the bull shark elicits. Perhaps it's fitting then that this also best describes the pervasive feeling that one gets from this rough and tumble area. History has a part to play. In the 17th century Bluefields was the capital of the British protectorate - the Mosquito Coast - which stretched the length of Nicaragua's Caribbean shoreline to Puerto Cabeza in the north, and beyond into what is now Honduras. This explains how a town with an Anglo name exists in a Latin country. Slaves from Jamaica were brought in and their descendants are now the large, patois/english speaking Creole population. Co-existence with the Miskito, Sumu, and Ramu indians has not always been peaceful but the natives of this area have at times pulled together, usually in the face of some external threat, whether natural as in the many hurricanes that have devastated the area, or man made as in the political tribalism and battles between Sandinistas and Contras.

This story of sharks, at sea and on land, makes the place most appropriately named SAVAGE SHORE. Yet in an irony fitting for this book, the area is also the focal point of Nicaragua's tourism industry.

Related products:
click image or link for details on these Central America travel books.