Selachophobia: A brief history

[Mr T.]

Selachophobia: A brief history

Bradley Miller
National Post

Saturday, July 30, 2005

You know the scene: A black dorsal fin slices through the surf toward a solitary swimmer. From the crowded beach come cries of "Shark!" But it's too late.

That's vintage Jaws, of course, and it's become a staple of summertime pop culture since the first Jaws film, released 30 years ago, stirred up shark hysteria worldwide. Even in Canada, where there has never been a recorded shark attack fatality, swimmers looked at the water with new suspicion.

Over the next 12 years, the studios churned out three progressively more terrible Jaws instalments until, in the final film, a descendant of all the previous Jawses travelled to Bermuda to exact revenge upon the transplanted family of the New England sheriffs who had killed its sharkly predecessors. Against all cinematic odds it, too, was a hit.

Since then, there have been rafts of shark movies, ranging from the award-winning independent film Open Water to the absurd made-for-TV Spring Break Shark Attack of last winter. Then there are the documentaries, the constant dorsal fin cameos on TV, the growing body of shark-lit and, of course, Shark Week, which surfaced once again this month on the Discovery Channel. We're hooked, apparently.

But this is nothing new. Every seaside civilization in human history has somehow incorporated the shark into its culture. Archaeologists in Italy have found depictions on pottery of attacks by giant fish as far back as 725 BC. Likewise, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus famously depicted a "marine monster" attacking sailors in 492 BC.

In many early cultures, the shark was revered -- as scientists say it should be nowadays -- for its ecological role as apex predator. Sharks were gods then, feared and respected, capable of mercy and wrath.

But as monotheism spread and the roots of a global economy were established by sea-going explorers and colonial governments, the powerful god became a dangerous pest. In fact, the name we now use for it probably comes from the German word for scoundrel or villain, schurk. Historians trace its use to Captain John Hawkins, who brought a huge, dead "sharke" to London in 1569, amazing the city.

As Europeans explored more of the world, rumours of giant man-eating sharks drifted back. In 1778, as interest grew, the American painter John Singleton Copley unveiled his "Watson and the Shark" at London's Royal Academy.

In Copley's epic version of a real attack, a naked youth reaches for help as an enormous shark surges through the waves of Havana harbour toward him, mouth agape. The painting captivated audiences and spread throughout the world as an engraving.

Yet somehow, just a century later, many Europeans and North Americans seemed to have forgotten all about the threat posed by man-eating sharks. The 19th century was a time of confidence in human progress, and the idea was widespread that there could be no predator superior to mankind.

In 1891, the American millionaire Hermann Oelrichs even posted a $500 reward for proof of a shark attack anywhere north of North Carolina. Oelrichs, who claimed to have often swum with sharks, declared they were harmless and timid, and by the time he died a decade later no one had claimed his money.

By 1915, there still hadn't been any reliable reports of shark attacks in northern waters and The New York Times declared the idea that "sharks can properly be called dangerous, in this part of the world, is apparently untrue."

But the very next summer would prove them all wrong.

In 1916, the United States was rocked by a series of shark attacks along the coast of New Jersey. On July 2 and 6, swimmers were killed in the ocean. And on July 12, in a small swimming hole on Matawan Creek, a few miles inland from Raritan Bay and 10 miles from the Atlantic, a shark killed a young boy and then a local man who had jumped in to rescue him. On its way back to the ocean, the shark mangled another child.

The newspapers quickly made the "shark menace" the summer's top story. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson held a special Cabinet meeting to deal with the issue, delegated the treasury secretary to lead a "war on sharks," and called in the Navy and Coast Guard to help. Meanwhile, up and down the coast, fishermen were conducting one of the largest animal slaughters in human history, killing any shark they could find. And in Matawan, not sure if the killer had stuck around, locals dynamited the creek and blasted away at it with shotguns.

The end came on July 14, when a taxidermist called Michael Schleisser, in an eight-foot motorboat, won a life-or-death struggle with an eight-foot great white shark, not far from Staten Island; human remains were found in its stomach. Schleisser embalmed the creature and put it on display in New York City, where thousands showed up to examine the "Jersey Man Eater." Although the attacks promptly ceased, we'll never know for sure if this was the rogue shark.

As Michael Capuzzo remarks in Close to Shore, his splendid history of the 1916 attacks, "the shark exposed an American impulse to make entertainment out of tragedy." That, certainly, was very much in evidence during the so-called "summer of the Shark" in 2001, when a series of 50 attacks in U.S. waters -- three of them fatal -- dominated the media.

It didn't matter that the number of attacks was actually down that year (there had been 52 in 2000, and one or two deaths annually is the American norm) or that most of the incidents meant only a few stitches and an abbreviated day at the beach for the victim. It was a slow news summer and, for a precious few months before reality intervened on Sept. 11, sharks were the scariest things on TV.
© National Post 2005