Sharks in Stories, Media, and Literature 205
a girl whose father cut off her fingers while drowning her. Each finger be-
came a sea creature, one of which was Skalugsuak.
New World temperate societies also had legends about sharks and
their relatives. The Snununeymuxw people of British Columbia (www
.snuneymnuxw.ca) tell of Stleluqum, a huge stingray-like creature that lived
in the narrow, turbulent channel between Newcastle Island and Nanaimo,
British Columbia. Stleluqum’s activities caused the water to boil, and the
Snununeymuxw referred to the place as Lhapqwum, or “boiling place.” One
day, a young man tried to swim across the channel to visit a young woman
with whom he had fallen in love. Stleluqum swallowed him, just as the
young man had been warned. His lover screamed, and her relatives came
running. When she explained what had happened, the village elders ad-
vised the young people to gather clams and their spears and paddle out to
the monster. When they tossed the clams (a favorite food of rays every-
where) into the water, the monster came up, and they speared and killed it.
When they cut it open, the young man jumped out unharmed. (One moral
of the story is that young people should respect their elders and learn from
them. The authors of this book are much older than you.)
What roles do sharks play in Western religions?
According to Judeo-Christian scripture, sharks (and other aquatic or-
ganisms) were created on the fifth day. Genesis 1:20–21 of the Old Testa-
ment (New American Standard Bible, 1995 update) reads: “Then God said,
‘Let the waters^ teem with swarms of living creatures... .’ [and] God created
the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the
waters swarmed after their kind.”
Sharks as such do not appear to have been mentioned in either the Old
or New Testaments, which isn’t surprising, given how little Westerners
knew about large sharks before the sixteenth century (see “How did sharks
get their name?” in chapter 1). However, many interpretations of the story
of Jonah involve a large shark rather than a whale, a point argued by bibli-
cal scholars as well as ichthyologists for centuries. The original text (Jo-
nah 1:17), literally translated, reads, “And the lord provided a great fish
for Jonah, and it swallowed him, and Jonah sat in the belly of the fish for
three days and nights.” It wasn’t until 1534 that the phrase “great fish” was
translated to mean a whale, which became the authorized version in 1611.
No small amount of the confusion arises from the fact that whales were
thought to be fish at that time. This was corrected in 1758 when Swedish
biologist Carl Linnaeus, in the tenth edition of Systema naturae, recognized
whales to be mammals. Given the close proximity of biblical authors to
the Mediterranean Sea, Jonah’s attacker was probably a White Shark. This