Free Demon Fish by Juliet Eilperin Page B

of the shield even shows the part of his right leg he lost as a teenager. The coat of arms’ message is clear: Watson faced down the sea monster and, with divine protection, bested the animal.
    These attacks on sailors began to permeate the public mind-set. No longer were sharks seen as complex creatures that could provide sustenance as well as mete out justice as part of some higher order. They were perfect, unrepentant killers, enemies in the sea.
    Still, even though sailors had recounted horrifying tales of the predators they faced at sea, average Americans had been largely shielded from sharks until the summer of 1916. For one terrifying week a shark—or multiple sharks, it remains unclear—attacked and killed four people off the New Jersey shore. This deadly episode, which helped inspire the movie Jaws , was captured brilliantly in Michael Capuzzo’s nonfiction account, Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence . From that moment on, beachgoers in America had a reason to fear entering the water.
    The attacks of 1916 tell us as much about changes in U.S. society as they do about shark behavior. For years ordinary Americans kept their distance from the sea, but this shifted during the late nineteenth century. It became fashionable to seek respite from the summer heat by heading for the ocean, and for the most part the victims of the Jersey shore attacks were adults and children enjoying the new popular pastime of spending time at the beach. When a great white started attacking swimmers near the New Jersey beach towns of Beach Haven and Spring Lake as well as in Matawan, more than a dozen miles from the ocean, it marked a turning point in Americans’—and by extension the industrialized world’s—relationship with sharks.

    On July 1, 1916, Charles Epting Vansant, a young textile salesman and recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, was vacationing in Beach Haven with his family when he entered the water for an early evening dip. He was joined by a dog—whose erratic paddling may inadvertently have attracted the shark’s attention. The shark struck when he was in just three and a half feet of water, chomping his left leg below the knee. Onlookers managed to drag Vansant onshore, and his own father, a Philadelphia physician, tended to him back at their hotel. But Eugene Vansant could not save his son, who died that night. 38
    What followed was a terrifying round of shark strikes. Charles Bruder, a bell captain at Spring Lake’s Essex and Sussex Hotel, was torn apart on July 6 during a solo swim around dusk. On July 11 a group of boys took a dip in Matawan Creek—five miles from the nearest bay—and fourteen-year-old Rensselaer Cartan Jr. felt something bump against him, leaving bloody scrapes across his chest. While the boy and a retired sea captain, Thomas V. Cottrell, tried to warn residents of Spring Lake that a shark lurked in the water, few paid attention. A day later the same shark killed both Lester Stilwell, an epileptic teenager, and the town’s tailor, W. Stanley Fisher, who fought to recover Stilwell’s body. That same day, July 12, the shark ripped off the left leg of twelve-year-old Joseph Dunn, before Dunn’s older brother and a man passing through on a boat managed to pull him from the creek. 39 The debate over whether a single great white was responsible for the attacks or whether it was a combination of animals—bull sharks are well-known for entering creeks, since they can survive in both salt water and freshwater—has raged for nearly a century. But the public reaction to the spate of attacks was unanimous: people were scared. An urban population that had just begun to venture out to sea now saw the ocean as harboring a deadly threat.
    Ironically, just before that series of shark attacks, prominent U.S. scientists and publications had downplayed the threat these fish posed. On August 2, 1915, The New York Times published an editorial titled “Let Us Do Justice to