Journal of the thirtyseventh day on board

8th June, 1999

The view that meeting a shark always comes to a tragic end is a very common one.
Press, television, cinema and even novels have always painted the same picture about sharks, that of implacable killers ready to attack any human venturing into their waters. As a result we don't have any real idea about what a shark is. We only know its caricature taken from Hollywood or from novelists.
Reality is much more different.
There are many different kinds of sharks and only a very few of them are dangerous to mankind.
Lions and wolves are also able to kill a man, but we have a different relationship with them and anyhow we don't hate them. This is probably due to the fact that the lion and the wolf have the dog and the cat as domestic cousins which allowed us to become friendly with them. In contrast sharks haven't got any domestic relatives and we really have very few opportunities to meet them close up. Mission sharks is for sure a real opportunity, but even today we couldn't see anything because of a very rough sea which obliged us to remain quayside in Gallipoli.