PDF Savage Shore Life and Death with Nicaragua Last Shark Hunters Edward Marriott 9780805055566 Books
Download As PDF : Savage Shore Life and Death with Nicaragua Last Shark Hunters Edward Marriott 9780805055566 Books
Nicaragua's Atlantic coast is home to the most dangerous of fish, the bull shark, a lethal predator with a fearsome appetite and the only shark that swims in inland waters. Braving Nicaragua's hurricane-torn wilderness of mangrove swamps, Edward Marriott joins the last surviving shark fishermen to sail in a dugout canoe and fish for sharks with a hand line.
As Marriott charts the life of the bull shark, its migrations, its voracious feeding patterns, and the treasures it offers -- oil for vitamins, hide for leather, and fins for soup -- he reveals lives spent in fear and awe in the shadow of a monster that can sniff fresh blood a mile away. He also tells a tale of human greed an elemental community, battered by civil war and natural disasters, is now degraded beyond repair to the point of providing bounty for modern-day pirates.
A gripping narrative of risk and adventure, a poignant record of loss and corruption, Savage Shore confirms Marriott as one of our most original and insightful travel writers.
PDF Savage Shore Life and Death with Nicaragua Last Shark Hunters Edward Marriott 9780805055566 Books
"I read this book while on Ometepe Island for a study abroad excursion in 2009. I am HUGE FAN of Marriott. Very interesting work. I wonder why he did not sell better?
Are people not enthralled by adventure and analysis in third world lands?
I find his work, all of it (especially Savage Shore and The Lost Tribe) to be engrossing. Yet he no longer works as a writer!
I am an aspiring writer myself and having a difficult time understanding why Marriott no longer works, or why his very well-done polished works didn't sell better. Marketing?
He's British. He's sort of predictable and not Hunter S Thompson enough?
I don't know. I wish more travel writers were so engrossing. You are missed."
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Savage Shore Life and Death with Nicaragua Last Shark Hunters Edward Marriott 9780805055566 Books Reviews :
Savage Shore Life and Death with Nicaragua Last Shark Hunters Edward Marriott 9780805055566 Books Reviews
- This was an enjoyable journey to take with the author as he searched for the bull sharks. Well researched and well written, with the benefit of the author’s first hand experience.
- A really interesting book!
- 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. Although conditions are definitely frontier-like the characters are very 20th century, and uniquely Nicaraguan. 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. - I read this book while on Ometepe Island for a study abroad excursion in 2009. I am HUGE FAN of Marriott. Very interesting work. I wonder why he did not sell better?
Are people not enthralled by adventure and analysis in third world lands?
I find his work, all of it (especially Savage Shore and The Lost Tribe) to be engrossing. Yet he no longer works as a writer!
I am an aspiring writer myself and having a difficult time understanding why Marriott no longer works, or why his very well-done polished works didn't sell better. Marketing?
He's British. He's sort of predictable and not Hunter S Thompson enough?
I don't know. I wish more travel writers were so engrossing. You are missed. - A couple of quibbles.
1. The book is an absorbing look at a remote part of Latin America and the author has a great eye for detail and a wonderful talent for description BUT he lavishes it on every last pile of dog feces, human sputum, sweat smell, foul breath and any other evidence that he's passing through savage, hostile territory. I've never been to Mosquitia but spent years covering Latin America, including backwoods places in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru as well as the large and small cities of Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. I found the people fascinating and mostly charming and much of the scenery gorgeous. I'm put off by someone so intent on describing the ugliness of nearly everything he sees and everyone he meets.
2. It's vivid travel writing but I only believe about half of it happened the way he describes. He harps on the hardships, the long walks in near-fatal heat, the excruciating boat rides, etc., but is vague about some of the logistics of his trip, including how he got to Nicaragua in the first place, presumably by jet airliner. The account is weighted to emphasize the suffering of a civilized man alone in savage territory. That's a good writing angle but it only rings true part of the time. The shark lore and observations are good but the trip is finally pointless, despite efforts to give it mythical depth. It was a long, uncomfortable journey where he met a lot of colorful characters (artfully described) but in many cases, nothing much happened, and in the end he arrives nowhere and discovers nothing beyond what he gleaned from the Internet about Latin American history and zoology. Ending with a meaningless scrap of paper summed up by "nothing" sounds soulful and dramatic -- good try at making something out of, yes, nothing.
