Of Ancient Mariners... and Monsters of the Deep

When Dartmouth awarded him an honorary degree, ordinarily a crown on an illustrious career at peak or already culminated, KENNETH P. EMORY '2O was cited as "one of the world's foremost authorities on the peoples and cultures of the southern archipelagos." The year was 1949. More than a quarter of a century later, the National Geographic hailed him still as "the dean of Polynesian archeologists."

While tides may stir "Pike" Emory's professional interest, time seems all but irrelevant. Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Hawaii since 1963, he became four years later the first incumbent of the John Ledyard Distinguished Chair in Prehistory, established by Honolulu's Bishop Museum to honor his 70th birthday. This summer, only weeks short of his 78th birthday, he led, in company with his grandson, a 50-mile hiking expedition around the circumference of Lanai, an island he first surveyed in 1921. Retirement he regards as unthinkable.

The parallel between Ledyard and Emory, those sturdy sons of Dartmouth who became scientific voyagers among the Pacific islands, is striking if limited. Although he left the Hanover plain under vastly different circumstances, Emory shared with the College's first dropout an enduring fascination with primitive cultures and both rejected the concept of Christianizing "the heathen."

A Honolulu resident from the age of two, Emory was "pretty much Hawaiianized" when he entered college only thirty-odd miles from Pike, New Hampshire, founded by his great- grandfather. He kept in touch through Hawaiian-language newspapers and cherished a growing desire the see the islands of the far Pacific. The missionary route seemed most logical, so he joined an evangelical student group, only to leave it because "I wasn't at all convinced I could offer the natives a life in which they would be better off. At least they were themselves and they had elements of culture I wished I had."

The next approach was to sign on with a scientific expedition. Appointed assistant ethnologist at the Bishop Museum, he first looked the word up in the dictionary, then rather than voyaging, "spent most of my time helping the scientists pack and nailing up their boxes." A 1923 master's degree from Harvard won him a promotion to ethnologist and a part in an expedition to the Society Islands. In Tahiti, he met a French-Tahitian girl, daughter of a government official, now his wife of 50 years and the mother of Tiare - "morning flower" in Tahitian - and Winifred, named for her New Hampshire grandmother.

For more than half a century, often with his wife as interpreter, Emory has been tracing the migrations of prehistoric people to the islands of Polynesia. Expeditions to the atolls and archipelagos of the south seas, the study of artifacts, language and cultural patterns, plant and animal life, have convinced him that the progenitors of the Polynesians, who inhabit that great triangle comprising some ten million square miles, from Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand, settled on previously unpopulated islands. Sailing their canoes over vast reaches of ocean, they came - probably from the Fijis - to occupy western Polynesia, Samoa and Tonga, as early as 1000 8.C.; moved east to the Society Islands and the Marquesas about the time of Christ; went on to Easter Island some 500 years later and, simultaneously about 750 A.D., to Hawaii and New Zealand! Archeological data indicate, quite conclusively with radio-carbon dating, that all the Hawaiian islands were settled by the year 1000.

Emory maintains that the early presence in Hawaii of more than 20 cultivated plants and domesticated animals from Tahiti and the Marquesas demonstrates that those remarkable mariners "repeatedly negotiated the longest sea route in Polynesia." As part of Hawaii's Bicentennial Year, the 5,000-6,000-mile round- trip will be reenacted in a replica double canoe, without instruments, with only wind and muscle for power and with only those provisions available to the prehistoric Polynesians.

Since 1923, Emory's work with the museum has been interrupted only twice, almost consecutively. He had barely returned from a year's leave, to satisfy the residence requirement for his Ph.D. at Yale, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Packing archeological treasures for safe storage, he microfilmed irreplaceable documents, shipped them off to Baker Library, and set up a survival training program for the armed forces. His instruction on living off the land and sea - identifying edible plants and animals, making rafts, shelters, even clothing, from indigenous trees - earned him a commendation for "exceptional and meritorious service" and the gratitude of more than 150,000 men who took the course.

Looking to the future of the past, Emory laments the shortage of funds to train scholars and finance research. "The outlook for research on Polynesian origins and the details of its original culture would be bright indeed if funds were not now being severely cut back and costs rocketing."

His own plans for the year include an expedition to the Tuamotu Islands to record native songs and chants and a trip to Tahiti to greet the Polynesian Voyaging Society on the Bicentennial sail, a project in which he's been deeply involved.

The sun sinking behind the romantic islands may be the standard traveloguist's cliche for the Pacific, but it seems unlikely ever to set on the work of "Pike" Emory, Yankee Polynesian.

It was in 1970 that RICHARD H. BACKUS '44 published TheNatural History of Sharks and in 1973, well before Jaws was more than an anticipatory twitch in Peter Benchley's pocketbook, that the paperback edition appeared.

And now, with "Jawsmania" rampant on the land, Backus, an ichthyologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, finds himself a celebrity. Interviewers queue up to identical questions, and he and co-author Thomas Lineaweaver are a hot commodity on TV and radio talk shows.

A genial man, Backus is amused by the limelight. He deals cheerfully with requests for sharks' teeth to make costume- jewelry molds or photographs for the manufacture of jigsaw puzzles. He marvels at the level of concern about sharks in Saskatchewan that keeps him answering a radio audience's questions for 45 minutes on a special telephone hook-up.

Yes, he agrees, sharks are dangerous, and the voracious white model for Jaws' mechanical "hero" - can find swimmers, along with seals and porpoises, just about bite-size. Nevertheless, he reminds the timid, the last attack recorded in New England occurred in 1936. "If you're brave enough to drive to the beach, you should be brave enough to swim. The chances of getting killed in an automobile accident or by a shark run about 10,000 to one."

Why all the furor, then? Backus refers the question to the psychologists, conceding the while that there is something particularly distasteful in the idea of being eaten. He found Jaws an "indifferent book," but was quite taken by the movie. "No matter how often your head tells you that's a mechanical fish, it gets to you in the viscera."

Man and shark are about equal threats to one another. Having slight commercial value, sharks are not endangered by over- fishing, as are certain types of whales. Some make good eating, other fine leather; their livers are a prime source of vitamins, though no better than synthetic substitutes. There is "incidental mortality" from long lines used by tuna fisheries, and pollution from oil spills and pesticides affect sharks as they do other fishes. Tar globs the size of golf balls have been found in their stomachs and hydro-carbons in their tissues, but the extent of toxicity and its persistence have not been thoroughly determined.

Aside from their distinguishing anatomical peculiarities, the roughly 250 species of sharks are widely diverse in size, range, habitat, and feeding habit. They vary from surprisingly small through the flesh-eating tiger and leopard and voracious white to 30-50-foot monsters which strain plankton into their gullets in the manner of whales. Their position on the food chain differs with their diets, and the food chain itself, Backus notes, functions differently in an aqueous environment than on land, so no shark seems endangered from high concentration of hydro-carbons as is, for instance, the peregrine falcon.

Dartmouth's foremost shark authority, Backus insists, is Perry Gilbert '34, director of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida (ALUMNI MAGAZINE, June 1968). While the oceanographic institution, one of four labs at Woods Hole, conducts a good deal of shark research, mostly under contract with the Navy - whose personnel are infinitely more threatened by sharks than seaside vacationers - Backus' primary scientific investigations are currently centered on the mesopelagic, or mid-water, fishes. Of these there are 500 to 700 finger-length varieties, which inhabit waters at a depth of 1,200 to 2,500 feet. The family includes "very fancy fishes," some with eyes tubular rather than spherical, most bio-luminescent in the fashion of fireflies. Their varying patterns of lights, little understood, are apparently "reserved for very special occasions"; ichthyologists can study their light shows only briefly under artificial stimulation shortly after they're caught. Bachus spends seven to eight weeks a year at sea, netting and sampling at test areas throughout the Atlantic. Then back at the laboratory, with the aid of the computer, he studies the patterns of distribution of the mesopelagic fishes, plotting the "fawnal regions" of the ocean.

Backus traces his Dartmouth antecedents through his father, the late Sidney Backus '11, back to great-great-grandfather Joseph, who graduated in 1788, and his work, indirectly, to the Dartmouth connection. As a graduate student at Cornell, he sailed to the Arctic on the Dartmouth-sponsored research voyage of the Blue Dolphin and subsequently wrote his doctoral dissertation on the fishes of Labrador. Seeking his first job, he was drawn back to Wood's Hole, embarkation point for the expedition. He was appointed a research associate at the Woods Hole lab in 1952 and senior scientist in 1963.

And there the serious study of mesopelagic fishes, sharks, and myriad other species goes on quietly as the research staff and their graduate assistants broaden their knowledge of marine life - until another Benchley breaks the surface or another rare shark attack brings another wave of public titillation, another flurry of queries about "How grim, really, is the shark menace?"