won the hand of the finest catch of the late Victorian Age—“bonanza heiress” Teresa Fair, a California senator's daughter in line to inherit the Comstock Lode. An avid sportsman, Oelrichs helped introduce polo and lacrosse to the United States. He was also acclaimed as the best amateur baseball player and hammer thrower in New York City and the finest amateur boxer and swimmer in the country. Yet there was about Hermann Oelrichs, too, the ache of promise unrealized. He remained aloof, declining offers to run for both mayor of New York City and president of the New York Athletic Club. “Hermann Oelrichs was so richly endowed by nature and so perfectly equipped both mentally and physically,” opined
The New York Times
,
“that his friends have been almost unanimous in declaring that had he so chosen he might have made for himself a much larger place in life.”
Yet that afternoon, as the
Hildegard
steamed east, Hermann Oelrichs made perhaps his greatest contribution. As his crew fed the leaping fires of the boiler, as servants distributed food, and the men called out, “gimme a smile” (a gentleman's term for a drink), and grew loud and expansive and joined in a raucous sporting mood, there arrived a moment, on the edge of dusk and the continental shelf, freighted with the nineties need for spectacle. In that moment Hermann Oelrichs declared he was looking for sharks.
If a shudder overtook the
Hildegard
's passengers scanning the iron-colored sea, they could have been forgiven. Sharks were widely feared in those days as ferocious man-eaters, based on terrifying tropical legends of which Oelrichs, like his friend and fellow world-traveler Roosevelt, was especially familiar. Despite the skepticism of science, dread of the shark persisted in 1891 in tingling hairs on the back of the neck. In the publication that year of “Song of Myself,” Whitman celebrated all the universe except the “leaden-eyed” shark, the ominous crease in a wave “where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water.” That afternoon, as ripples of anticipation traversed the ship, Oelrichs announced, as he often had back in the parlors of Gilded Age New York, that so-called “man-eating” sharks were a fable of the ancients. Sharks were in fact cowardly, he insisted, and he would frighten away the largest of them that surfaced from the fathoms.
That year Oelrichs had offered in the pages of the
New York Sun
a reward of five hundred dollars for “such proof as a court would accept that in temperate waters even one man, woman, or child, while alive, was ever attacked by a shark.” Temperate waters he defined as the East Coast of the United States north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
In the rollicking spirit of the times, Oelrichs—like his brother-in-law, Vanderbilt, who hosted America's first motorcar race to further “scientific development of the automobile”—seemed more interested in a good show than in advancing
science.
But the audacious wager by a captain of the shipping industry “started the papers all over the country to discussing sharks,”
The New York Times
reported. “Mr. Oelrichs contended that the ancient and widespread fear of sharks had little or no support in the shape of verified or verifiable cases in which they had killed or even injured a human being . . . He limited the offer to temperate waters because he had little knowledge of shark habits in the tropics, but even there he thought them harmless scavengers.”
Now, on this summery afternoon at the edge of the century of human progress, the validity of shark attacks would be settled to the satisfaction of intelligent men once and for all.
If any man in the Gilded Age could best the shark, it would be a man who possessed Vanderbilt's wealth and Roosevelt's vigor and an unsurpassed reputation for prowess at sea. Such a man was Hermann Oelrichs. He was American director of the prestigious North German Lloyd shipping company, which