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1769 J. Wesley Jrnl. 30 Mar. Let all beware of these land~sharks.

1815 W. Scott Guy Mannering II. 219 Lieutenant Brown..told him some goose's gazette about his being taken in a skirmish with the land-sharks.

1829 in Ohio Archaeol. & Hist. Q. (1939) XLVIII. 331 The Counsel is sure to be supported by the presiding Judges..& thus the Property of Society is Confiscated Legally between these Land Sharks.

1839 J. D. Lang N.Z. in 1839 i. 14 A class of persons in that Colony [sc. New South Wales] who were known by the name of Land Sharks..have turned their eyes all at once to New Zealand.

1840 Knickerbocker Mag. 16 211 Well! you're a land-shark, then—swallowin' up poor men's farms.

1848 W. Armstrong Stocks 37 A hundred thousand dollars..which he very naturally refused to deprive her of for the sake of satisfying certain land sharks.

1850 Ann. Rep. Commissioner Patents 1849: Agric. 107 in U.S. Congress. Serial Set (31st Congr., 1st Sess.: House of Representatives Executive Doc. 20, Pt. 2) VI In the county of Yates, I am not aware that there is the first full-blood breeding animal of any description, unless it be the full blood land-shark hog.

1852 Trans. Mich. Agric. Soc. 3 332 Variously known as narragansetts, alligators, land sharks and flea breeders.

1857 C. Kingsley Two Years Ago I. iv. 117 Can't trust these landsharks; they'll plunder even the rings off a corpse's fingers. They think every wreck a godsend.

1865 C. F. Hursthouse Lett. on N.Z. Subj. 89 ‘Land Sharks’, twenty years ago this was a term rife in Australia and New Zealand.

1873 E. Eggleston Myst. Metropolisville xi. 94 Making severe remarks on the subject of land speculators, and particularly of land-sharks.

a1910 ‘O. Henry’ Rolling Stones (1915) 218 A class of land speculators commonly called land sharks, unscrupulous and greedy.

1935 A. Sullivan Great Divide 342 The Metis are being stirred up by the land sharks to demand their scrip, then the sharks will swallow them.