The Wasp, 1918 · page 40 of 330
The Wasp — 1918 — page 40: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains **narrative fiction**, not political cartoons or satire. It's a dramatic survival story depicting a man adrift in a boat, weakened by hunger and thirst, encountering a shark. The passage emphasizes his psychological distress—hallucinations of a dead man, terror at the shark's presence—and his desperate, violent response to the threat. The text employs vivid imagery (the "pearl-grey shell" sky, the gull's "red eyes," the shark's "vague shape") to build tension and mood. This appears to be serialized fiction published in *The Wasp*, the 19th-century American satirical magazine. **No political figures, caricatures, or topical satire are evident on this page.** It's purely literary—adventure/survival narrative rather than the magazine's typical satirical content.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE WASP 31 upon him. He lay on his back in the bottom of the boat. The stars had paled and the sky was like a pearl-grey shell. The white gull drifted into his line of vision on motionless wings, hung directly over him, and looked down with its red eyes. Then he remembered where he was, how he had come there, and what his fate was likely to be. He was hungry, for he had been two nights and a day without food. He was thirsty. He was about to sit up and take the water-breaker in his hands when the sound that had haunted his dream came to his ears—the sound of some- thing bumping softly along the side of the boat. He scrambled to his knees with a gasp of terror, then remembered that the dead man had been only a thing of his dreaming. He looked straight down over the starboard gunwale and saw the © long, vague shape of the shark at rest close beside him, not more than a foot beneath the brighten- ing surface of the sea. His heart shook, for here was a sinister omen indeed ; but with sudden fury he raised an oar spearwise and plunged it straight down at the great fish. The blade struck, and the shark darted away, with a swirl of water that rocked the boat, into the watery gloom beyond. ae comichooks.com