The Real Shark Attack That Inspired Jaws

this video is kindly sponsored by curiositystream the subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers hey 42 here here's a random interesting fact for you a little over a hundred years ago it was widely believed that sharks were completely harmless to humans it was thought they were practically incapable of biting people and that even if they did the resultant damage would be minimal no broken bones no severed limbs just a few puncture marks and a bit of blood nothing a plaster couldn't fix basically fast forward to today and as you've probably noticed most people are absolutely terrified of sharks fatal shark attacks routinely make international news and sharks like the great white are consistently rated amongst the most feared animals on the planet in polls and surveys sharks have also played the villains in plenty of hollywood blockbusters most notably steven spielberg's jaws so what exactly changed in the last hundred years that turned sharks from harmless critters into bloodthirsty man-eaters in the public consciousness it's safe to say the sharks themselves aren't doing anything differently they've been around in one form or another for about 450 million years to put that insane number into perspective sharks evolved before trees and the reason we underestimated these fearsome creatures for so long is actually pretty simple we hadn't had the chance to spend much time with them the kind of beach culture that we know and love today didn't really get going in earnest until the middle of the 19th century and surfing a sport often associated with shark attacks didn't become popular in the west until the start of the 20th century so more people in the water over the years inevitably meant more encounters with sharks but there's a bit more to it than that because the change in public opinion that saw sharks shift from harmless to horrific was by no means gradual in fact it can be traced back to a single two week period in the summer of 1916. this is the genuinely disturbing story of the jersey manitou and the 12 days of terror that changed our relationship with sharks forever now curiosity stream is the world's first streaming service addressing our lifelong quest to learn explore and understand if you're into history like me then you need to check out their content packed history selection but history is only a small part of their enormous collection with content spanning from science nature history technology society and lifestyle it really is the new netflix for nerds it's hulu for history buffs and the disney plus for the scientists in all of us and what's more it offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals and they're adding more exciting new content all the time i've been particularly enjoying watching engineering the future it's a fascinating look behind the scenes at the mega building projects that humankind are undergoing to propel our planet into the future it's interesting to hear about the challenges with construction on such an epic scale and how they're overcome so if you're anything like me and you want to take more away from the programs you're watching then go to curiositystream.com 42 for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and non-fiction series and for my lovely viewers you can use promo code 42 and you'll save 25 off which comes out to only 14.99 a year that's just 125 per month so click the link in the description below or go to curiositystream.com42 and save 25 right now did i mention that's only 14.99 for the whole year which is an unbelievable price for such an incredible wealth of content don't miss out the first attack came in the middle of a sweltering summer's day near the town of beach haven a name that was about to gain a certain sick irony the victim 28 year old charles vancent had decided to take a refreshing pre-dinner swim in the ocean when he felt something rough brush up against his leg and then pain excruciating reality rending pain onlookers on the shore saw charles shouting and waving his arms but not a single person rushed to his aid not that this apparent callousness had anything to do with fear or cowardice these days if you see a man in the ocean screaming and flailing his arms your internal shark alarm starts blaring madly and you do one of two things if you're the hero type you rush towards the guy and try to help and if you're everyone else you swim for the safety of dry land as fast as your panicky breaststroke can propel you but in 1916 nobody had any idea that sharks might pose a threat to humans and so without that context a man shouting and flailing his arms in the ocean was probably just horsing around still there's only so long you can watch a man screaming immortal terror as he's ripped apart by a shark before you realize it probably isn't a joke and eventually local lifeguards went to investigate charles was pulled from the water in a bad state but for reasons that aren't entirely clear he was taken to a hotel rather than a hospital he bled out on the front desk in doing so he became the first and only confirmed victim of a fatal shark attack in u.s coastal waters in history not that he was going to have to wait long for company scientists were so confident in their belief that sharks weren't dangerous to humans at all that in the days after the attack they remained unconvinced that a shark was really to blame several other creative theories were put forward instead including that charles had been attacked by a family of angry sea turtles because of this skepticism no beaches in the area were closed in the aftermath of charles's death and vacationers continued to swim in the sea off the new jersey coast as if nothing had happened that changed five days later when the shark came back for more in what was probably a coincidence but possibly an indication that the shark had a name fetish the second victim was another charles charles brooder a 27 year old bellhop who worked in a local hotel this attack took place about 45 miles north of beach haven in a town called spring lake another name that was soon to take on a different meaning because spring a leak is exactly what charles brooder did he was swimming 120 meters offshore when the shark bit him in the abdomen the power behind the attack was astonishing literally cutting charles in half his legs torn free from his body there was so much blood in the water that the woman who reported the incident to lifeguards thought she'd seen a red canoe capsizing unsurprisingly charles broder was dead before he reached ashore and it was here that scientists so sure of themselves after the first attack began to do a little bit of soul-searching no doubt a sea turtle can give you a nasty bite but it's hard to imagine one could tear your legs off no matter how many times you call it a stupid water tortoise charles's death appeared on the front page of the new york times and both scientists and locals alike began to take this new fishy threat far more seriously with beaches along the new jersey coast emptying and vacation is heading home early but this is where things started to get a little bit weird because it turned out that staying out of the ocean wasn't enough to keep people safe from the shark that was now being called the jersey manitou you see as crazy as it may sound the next two victims weren't killed in the chilly waters of the atlantic ocean but 11 miles inland don't worry this wasn't a sharknado situation the next attack took place in matawan creek a tidal inlet in raritan bay where a group of local kids were swimming in the sunshine when one of them spotted an old log floating in the water nearby he pointed it out to his friends and they swam towards it to investigate but as they got closer they realized something odd the lug was coming towards them fast the children panicked and swam for the shore most of them made it but 11 year old lester stillwell was bitten in the leg and dragged beneath the murky water of the creek when he didn't resurface the remaining children ran into town screaming for help despite the recent attacks the locals didn't believe for a minute that lester had been killed by a shark that might sound naive but there was some reason for doubt this time first and foremost sharks were unsurprisingly not exactly a common occurrence in the usually fresh water of matawan creek on top of that lester was epileptic the town's people suspected he'd had a seizure and that the other children had mistaken his thrashing for a shark attack confident in this hypothesis several men ran to the creek and dived right in to search for the missing boy it was 24 year old watson fisher who found lester's lifeless body but as he returned to the shore carrying leicester in his arms the shark struck again biting watson in the fine he was badly injured and later died in hospital in the space of just 12 days the jersey manitou had killed four people it almost claimed a fifth victim half an hour after killing lester and watson when it took a bite out of 14 year old joseph dunn's leg but joseph was able to escape when his brother and a friend dragged him to safety with fatal attacks seemingly coming every few days and eyewitness accounts stacking up the initial skepticism as to whether a shark was to blame for all this carnage evaporated to be replaced with what can only be described as mass hysteria in under two weeks sharks seem to have evolved from harmless ocean dwellers to indiscriminate killers that could strike anywhere there was water the response to the attacks was huge every major news outlet in the u.s picked up on the story and patrol boats packed with armed men were dispatched up and down the new jersey coast the governor of new jersey began offering bounties to be paid on delivery of dead sharks encouraging hundreds perhaps thousands of people to take their boats to hunt the moneta many more headed to matawan creek where people lined the shores armed with rifles nets and in some cases dynamite only in america the panic even reached the white house with president woodrow wilson scheduling a cabinet meeting to discuss the escalating situation some historians have suggested that the search for the jersey man eater may just have been the largest animal hunt in history in the end it was a man by the name of michael schlieser that courts the creature history doesn't tell us much about michael other than the fact he had a rather intriguing double profession taxidermist by day lion tamer by night that's a cv you don't see too often michael claimed to have almost lost his life whilst catching the jersey manitou which turned out to have been a juvenile great white shark apparently the creature had almost sunk michael's boat before he was able to kill it by repeatedly smashing it over the head with a broken ore once back on dry land the shark's belly was opened and about seven kilograms of what was identified as human flesh was found inside mercifully the attacks abruptly stopped but whilst the immediate threat seemed to be over it's safe to say the jersey manitou's fearsome teeth had left indelible indentations in the american psyche swimming in the ocean would never quite feel the same again the funny thing is as brutal and terrifying as the events of 1916 were sharks are wholly undeserving of this reputation that they now have as a result because in reality sharks pose very little threats to humans for starters of the close to 500 species currently known to science just three are on record as having been responsible for more than 10 human fatalities the bull shark the tiger shark and of course the great white though there probably should be another species on that list the oceanic white tip there have long been rumors of shark feeding frenzies taking place after disasters at sea the sinking of the uss indianapolis an incident that's been mentioned in jaws is probably the most famous example oceanic whitetips are thought to be the species responsible in almost all of those cases but since there's normally nobody around to witness them we don't have any good data on how many victims have been claimed by them but even if we do add the oceanic white tip to the list of sharks with over 10 human kills under their lateral lines that still means over 99 of shark species are pretty much entirely harmless to humans and if you do actually look at the numbers even the four so-called dangerous species have only been responsible for a tiny number of human fatalities in the grand scheme of things on average around four people die from shark bites each year globally which means practically any animal that's even remotely dangerous is far more likely to kill you than a shark that includes the obvious ones like snakes spiders lions and crocodiles but it also includes deer cows horses dogs hippos elephants and ants you're over one hundred thousand times more likely to be killed by humanity's deadliest foe other humans than you are to be killed by a shark now i know what you're thinking these numbers are skewed by the fact most of us never go anywhere near sharks and that's partly true but even if you happen to be swimming or surfing near the shore i.e the single place on earth where you're most likely to be bitten by a shark you're still far more likely to die from drowning or a heart attack than you are from a shark bite it's true that shark attacks are on the rise in many parts of the world but again that's nothing to do with the sharks we're just spending more time in the water and as the world's population continues to grow and hotter temperatures tempt more people to cool off in the sea we can expect that trend to continue but hey if sunbathing naked in the serengeti suddenly became popular we'd probably see more fatal lion attacks too don't get me wrong i'm not trying to say that sharks aren't dangerous clearly they are it's just that they aren't nearly such a threat to humans as they're usually portrayed to be after hundreds of millions of people who swim in the sea every year only a handful end up a shark food and the irony is sharks have far more reason to fear us than we do to fear them after all we kill about a hundred million of them every single year at the current rate it would take the collective efforts of shark kind about 25 million years to kill that many humans but this barrage of statistics actually raises a kind of interesting question if all of this is true and sharks just have a bad reputation what the hell happened in 1916 if an average of four people are killed by sharks worldwide today when more people are spending more time swimming in the ocean how could four people have been killed by a single shark in new jersey at a time when shark attacks were practically unheard of well there's a fairly short answer to that question we have absolutely no idea the 1916 shark attacks continue to baffle scientists to this day the pattern frequency and distribution of the encounters are so unusual as to be unique we've quite literally never seen anything else like them anywhere in the world in the more than 100 years since they took place at the time it was believed that a so-called rogue shark was behind the attacks that is a shark that got a taste for human flesh and decided to try and single-handedly wipe out our entire species and that theory certainly fits the evidence the attacks took place in a neat line from south to north suggesting a single animal cruising up the coast but there's one small problem with this theory so far as we know rogue sharks don't exist in all of recorded history you can count on one hand the number of times a single shark is known to have attacked multiple people in fact putting the events of 1916 to one side for a second you can count that number of times a single shark is known to have attacked multiple people on one finger it happened in egypt in 2010 that's it and even then the incidents happened in the same location within minutes of each other resulting in just one death and four injuries very different to 1916. when you take our own fears out of the equation sharks are animals like any other they eat things because that's how they stay alive compared to plenty of other animals commonly found in the ocean human beings are a fairly terrible food source for large sharks we're bony not particularly calorie dense and have an annoying habit of fighting back it simply doesn't make sense that a shark would suddenly decide to become a strict humanarian it would be like you deciding that from now on you're only going to eat twigs although the way things are going i'll give it about five years until that's actually a thing great white sharks hunt by swimming around looking for prey on the surface when they find it they put on an incredible burst of speed and crash into their dinner like a torpedo hitting the ship often breaching the surface of the water spectacularly in the process we don't typically see that behavior when sharks bite humans because for the most part these incidents don't come about as a result of predatory behavior sharks are basically like toddlers they use their mouths to explore the world around them when they come across an object they aren't familiar with they give it a bit of a nibble to see what it is the problem is when it's a six metre 2000 kilogram great white shark doing the nibbling it's usually enough to cut a human being in half okay so rogue sharks aren't a thing and the majority of so-called shark attacks are basically just sharks being inquisitive and making a mess in the process but if it wasn't a rogue shark that killed four people and maimed another in 1916 what was it one theory is that the jersey man eater never really existed and that instead several different sharks were responsible the frequency and south to north pattern of the attacks certainly fit the idea of a single shark but it's possible that was just a coincidence backing this theory up is the fact that great white sharks like the one caught with a belly full of human flesh in 1916 by taxidermist come lion tamer michael schleizer can't survive for lung in fresh water bull sharks on the other hand can leading some people to believe that it was a bull shark that killed lester stillwell and watson fisher though i should point out that matawan creek is tidal meaning the water there is often brackish even quite far inland so we can't rule out a great white entirely whatever it was that really happened in new jersey in 1916 there's no denying it had a monumental impact on the way we see sharks even today when the weight of evidence and statistics tells us that sharks are the least of humanity's many concerns they're still widely misunderstood by the public and misrepresented by the media maybe it's time we changed that thanks for watching

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 739,495

Keywords:

Id: CkkYi-iSWXc

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021