06/19/2026
Hemingway’s preferred shark repellant was a Thompson machine gun?
Ernest Hemingway was not just a writer who liked the idea of the outdoors. He lived in it, wrote from it, and built a major part of his identity around fishing, hunting, boats, guns, and the kind of hard physical contests that eventually bled into his fiction.
During his Key West years, Hemingway was deep in the Gulf Stream fishing world. After returning from an African safari in 1934, he used money from an Esquire advance to help buy Pilar, a custom 38-foot wooden cabin cruiser built by Wheeler Shipyard. This was not some decorative yacht for cocktail cruises. Hemingway had her modified for serious fishing, with a live well, a roller across the transom to help bring big fish aboard, extra fuel capacity, a flying bridge, and separate power for running and trolling. He kept Pilar close to his home on Whitehead Street in Key West, fished the waters off the Keys, Cuba, and Bimini, and eventually moored her near Cojímar, the Cuban fishing village that helped inspire The Old Man and the Sea.
His fishing résumé was real. Hemingway was chasing marlin, tuna, sailfish, tarpon, and sharks at a time when modern big-game fishing was still being shaped. The JFK Library records that in 1934 he topped the Atlantic sailfish record with a nine-foot fish, offered Pilar and himself to the Academy of Natural Sciences as a research vessel and collector for work on sailfish, marlin, tuna, and other game fish, and in 1935 caught a 786-pound mako shark and the first Atlantic bluefin tuna ever taken at Bimini without being mutilated by sharks. By 1940, he had become a lifetime vice president of the International Game Fish Association.
That is the backdrop for one of the wildest Hemingway stories: his use of a Thompson submachine gun as shark repellent.
In 1935, Hemingway was fishing around Bimini with painter Henry “Mike” Strater when Strater hooked an enormous marlin. The fish was reportedly more than 14 feet long, and some estimates put it near or over 1,000 pounds before the sharks got to it. As the tired marlin came close to the boat, sharks moved in and began tearing it apart. According to the famous version of the story, Hemingway grabbed the Thompson he kept aboard Pilar and opened up on the sharks.
The details sound almost too perfectly Hemingway: a Nobel Prize-winning author before he was a Nobel winner, a giant marlin, a wooden boat in the Gulf Stream, sharks circling a once-in-a-lifetime fish, and an opportunity to solve the problem with a Tommy gun. The gun was identified as a Thompson Model 1921A, an early pre-NFA-era Auto-Ordnance submachine gun with a detachable buttstock, front pistol grip, finned barrel, and no Cutts compensator. Hemingway seemed to prefer the 20-round box magazine over the more famous 50- or 100-round drums, likely because the drums made the gun awkward and unbalanced for shoulder firing.
Unfortunately, shooting into the water and wounding sharks added more blood to what was already a growing chum slick, which likely attracted even more sharks to the fight. By the time the marlin was brought in, it had been “apple-cored,” with much of the back half eaten down toward the spine. What remained was still said to be 14 feet, 6 inches long and about 560 pounds, which tells you how massive the fish probably was before the sharks took their share.
The same man who wrote about war, bullfighting, Africa, hunting, courage, fear, death, and endurance also helped shape the culture of big-game fishing. He hunted deer, elk, grizzly, and African game. He wrote Green Hills of Africa after safari. He turned Gulf Stream fishing into literature. He treated big fish as worthy opponents, not just meat on a line, and believed the fight between angler and fish should still require skill, strength, and endurance.
That is what makes the Tommy gun shark story more than just a strange historical footnote. It captures Hemingway’s world in one scene: part adventure, part ego, part innovation, part recklessness, and part honest frustration from a fisherman watching sharks destroy a fish he may never see again.
Who else is looking at their tackle box to see if a tommy gun would fit in there?
