A great white shark, one of the most feared and misunderstood creatures in the ocean. Photo: Francesco Califano/Unsplash
“It lives to kill. A mindless eating machine. It will attack and devour anything. It is as if God created the devil and gave him jaws.” So says the narrator in the trailer for the 1975 movie, Jaws.
Sharks, as you know, have a very bad reputation. They’re fodder for countless movies about shark attacks, the reason some people are scared of water, and generally thought of as mindless, soulless killers. But what, exactly, led to this global fear of them? It can likely be traced back to a string of attacks that partially inspired that famous movie.
It was July 1, 1916, just before dark. On a warm New Jersey evening, a 25-year-old man named Charles Vansant bled out on the beach in front of a hotel. He’d been pulled from the water by several onlookers, and his body was torn to ribbons. Then, a week later, another man, 27-year-old Charles Bruder, a bellhop working on the Jersey Shore, went for a swim. His legs were bitten from his body, and he too died on the beach with a group of onlookers gawking in horror at his injuries. Five days later, Lester Stilwell, a 10-year-old epileptic boy, was swimming in a creek called the Matawan when he was pulled under and eaten. According to National Geographic, the friends he was swimming with ran down Main Street in Keyport, the small New Jersey town where Matawan Creek empties into the ocean, wide-eyed with panic, screaming about the demise of their young swimming partner.
Three fatal shark attacks within spitting distance of each other in the course of a two week period didn’t, at the time, raise much alarm. In 1916, it was generally believed that shark attacks were exceedingly rare — which is true even today — and most attributed the 10-year-old Stilwell’s death to drowning during an epileptic fit.
The attacks didn’t end there, though. The next in line was a tailor named Watson Fisher who decided to search the creek for Stilwell’s body. He was attacked and died a few hours later from loss of blood. Less than an hour after Fisher’s attack, a 14-year-old boy was bitten on the leg, but he was pulled to safety and survived.
As I mentioned, however, in 1916 no one really thought that sharks actually attacked people. Shark attack reports were often shrugged off as a case of mistaken identity; when Charles Bruder’s body was examined, in fact, an ichthyologist claimed that he was killed by a killer whale, since it was thought sharks couldn’t kill humans.
Shark behavior was a barely-studied field at the time. “There were all kinds of misconceptions,” George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, told Nat Geo. “At least one school of thought at the time was this was all stuff of rumors and fabrications.”
Sharks are not hell-bent on tearing you limb from limb, as exciting as that narrative may be. Photo: Simona Sergi on Unsplash
But as time went on, the evidence became too much to ignore. Fourteen days after the first attack, President Woodrow Wilson signed an order that dumped money into a project designed to make the area safe for swimmers. Some time later, a young great white shark, eight-feet in length, was caught in the area. When they cut it open, they found 15 pounds of partially digested body parts in its stomach. If that last part sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a scene featured in Jaws. Originally a book written by Peter Benchley, the story was turned into a film by Steven Spielberg.
After that shark was killed, the attacks stopped. That was the beginning of the way we think of sharks today: killers hell-bent on tearing us limb from limb. That scenario, though, isn’t a common one.
“Animal populations, much like humans, sometimes have deranged individuals,” Burgess told Business Insider. “Most sharks aren’t going to be serial killers of humans.” But the damage was done, and sharks were well on their way to becoming our arch enemies.
In the early years of the 1900s, swimming in the ocean wasn’t nearly as popular as it is today. New Jersey residents were quickly falling in love with it, though, and with the crowds came the realization that we do not own the ocean in the same way we’ve dominated the land.
Years later, in 1974, Peter Benchley had his book published. It was fiction, but the idea for a shark that terrorizes a beachside community came partially from that string of attacks in 1916. He initially struck on the idea when he read a report of a 4,550-pound great white shark caught off the coastal community of Montauk on Long Island in New York, but those 1916 attacks were the meat on the bone.
It was a huge success for the struggling freelance writer, and it stayed on the bestseller list for 44 weeks. Millions of copies were sold, and the rights to make a film adaptation were scooped up. The movie Jaws was released the following year, and much like the novel, was massively popular. It quickly became the highest-grossing film to date, and it cemented the American public’s fear of sharks.
Since then, however, it’s become apparent that our blind fear of sharks is a bad thing. They are not mindless nor soulless, and they’re killers just as much as any other creature on Earth that needs to kill to survive. We do it on an almost unimaginable scale. Every year, humans kill upwards of 100 million sharks in the process of fishing for other types of fish or actively searching for sharks so we can lop their fins off for soup.
According to the International Shark Attack File (ISAF), in 2020 there were 129 shark attacks. Fifty-seven of those were unprovoked, and there were 13 fatalities. In the world. And although that number is up from the average, the average number is four fatal attacks globally each year.
After the success of his story, Benchley came to the realization that it had done enormous harm. Within a few years, he did a complete 180, and spent the latter part of his career trying desperately to change the public conception that his story had created. He worked on shark conservation efforts until he died of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 65, and although people are slowly coming around, the work he did was largely unsuccessful.
Now, all these years after that string of attacks and the commercial success of Benchley’s story, sharks are in dire straits — and who knows how long it will be before our view of sharks changes enough to see them for what they are: an ancient species perfectly evolved for survival — not perfectly evolved to be man eaters.
Learn more about sharks in Ocean Ramsey’s Guide to Sharks and Safety.
