The First Shark Attack

Watson and the Shark (1778)

If the question is the first (known) shark attack on a human being, archaeology has the answer: a man in Japan, whose 3,000-year-old skeleton has nearly 800 wounds.¹ If the question is the first human representation of a shark attack, the current answer is a Greek vase dating to c. 725 BC, discovered in Ischia, Italy, which shows a man being assailed by a large fish that is probably a shark. The scope of this article is narrower, focusing on the earliest written accounts of shark attacks. However, this does allow a somewhat broader inquiry into how people have perceived sharks over time, albeit not all people, since the literary sources come entirely from Europe.²

It is possible—even likely—that the first written record of a shark attack appears in the work of the Father of History himself, Herodotus, two-and-a-half millennia ago.³ In 492 BC, Mardonius, the son-in-law of the Persian King Darius I, led an expedition to Greece, nominally to punish Athens and Eretria for supporting the Ionian Revolt, but “the Persians were really aiming at the conquest of as many Greek States as they could manage”, Herodotus tells us. The Persian fleet “was approaching the headland” of Mount Athos, Herodotus goes on, when “a violent northerly gale swept down”, and “the damage suffered by their ships was terrible”. “It is said” 300 ships were destroyed and 20,000 men killed, “dashed onto the rocks or drowned because they did not know how to swim, or else [they] perished of hypothermia”. Herodotus then reports: “Some of these casualties were due to the presence in the waters off Athos of an immense number of savage beasts which devoured the Persians”.⁴ It is overwhelmingly probable this refers to sharks, but we cannot be absolutely sure.

There is no serious doubt that when naturalists in the Classical period, such as Pliny the Elder, wrote of “dogfish” or similar they were referring to sharks. The Greeks were a maritime people and the Mediterranean became a Roman lake: they saw sharks regularly. The tumult of the Roman Empire’s fragmentation reduced Europeans’ ocean-going capacity and the advent of Islam restricted their access: to even live on the coastline of Italy, let alone venture onto the Mediterranean Sea, was to be at high risk of being carried off by slave-seeking Arab pirates. Thus, in the Medieval era, confined basically to the Continent and fishing mostly in rivers, Europeans largely did not encounter sharks.

An exception to this rule was recorded around 1350. At that time, Europe had significantly recovered from the Roman collapse,⁵ and the brief period of counter-attack we call the Crusades,⁶ though it had failed in its objective of restoring Jerusalem and the Holy Land to Christendom, had succeeded in creating some more room to move in the Mediterranean. In this environment,⁷ Ludolf von Sudheim, a German Roman Catholic priest and a historian of the then-recently lost Crusader States, had been able to tour the Islamic-ruled eastern Mediterranean—the Land of Israel, the broader Levant, and Egypt—between 1336 and 1341.⁸ Ludolf’s chronicle of his travels discussed, inter alia, the various dangers of maritime journeys in small vessels: the sea itself; “pirates or corsairs”, especially around “Barbary” (the Muslim polities of North Africa); the “rocks and shoals”. Ludolf then mentions the “perils from great fish”:

About these you should know that there is in the sea a certain fish which the Greeks call Troya marina, which means sea-swine, which is greatly to be feared by small ships, for this same fish seldom or never does any mischief to great ships unless pressed by hunger. Indeed, if the sailors give it bread, it departs, and is satisfied; but if it will not depart, then it may be terrified and put to flight by the sight of a man’s angry and terrible face. However, the man must exceedingly careful when he is thus looking at the fish not to be afraid of it, but to stare at it with a bold and terrible countenance; for if the fish sees that the man is afraid it will not depart, but bites and tears the ship as much as it can. …

An exceedingly notable sailor has told me that when he was a youth he fell into peril with this in a small ship. There was with him in the ship a youth who thought himself exceeding brave and fierce, so that when the fish met him he … lowered himself down by a rope from the ship to the water to look at the fish with an angry face, as is the custom. But when he saw the fish he was straightway affrighted and shouted to his comrades to pull him up by the rope, and the fish, seeing the man’s fright, leaped out of the water as he was being drawn up, and with one bite took off half the man from his belly downwards[.]

The story is second-hand, and about events many years earlier. The tall tales of seamen are also notorious, particularly when it comes to the size of fish they encounter. Still, it could be true, and if it is, it is difficult to think what the creature could be other than a shark. But considerable ambiguity remains.

As the Ludolf case shows, even the vocabulary for sharks faded in Europe through the Middle Ages. The change came with the Age of Discovery, specifically the conquest of the Americas.⁹

In 1561, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar whose campaign to defend Native Americans and indict the conduct of the Spanish Conquistadors provides a lot of the raw material for the Black Legend that endures to this day, completed a book that describes a scene where a Spanish overlord uses an Indian to dive for pearls.¹⁰ The danger to the Indians, Las Casas says, came from three types of animal: lagartos or crocodiles; tiburones that could “tear to pieces” even horses, seemingly meaning smaller sharks, such as tiger sharks and bull sharks; and marrajos that could “swallow [a man whole] on the first gulp”, i.e., larger sharks, the description matching closely the great white shark and probably the mako shark, too.¹¹ From Las Casas:

On one occasion, it happened that an Indian, upon diving, saw a marrajo close to him, and came up fleeing up out of the water [onto the canoe]; the Spanish executioner argued with him asking why he came up so quickly without bringing anything; the Indian said that there was a great fish and that he feared it would kill him; the Spaniard forced him to return to diving and … beat the Indian with a stick. The sad Indian dove, and the marrajo, that was waiting for him, charged him and swallowed him.

It seems that at the beginning the Indian fought with the fish, and there was a swirl in the water for a while; the Spaniard understood that the fish had attacked the Indian, and seeing that the Indian was not returning, he killed a small dog that they had in the boat, and put it on a hook with a heavy chain, which they commonly carry for these fishes, and threw it in the water; and later the marrajo took it, for it was not satisfied, and the hook set in such way that it could not escape; the Spaniard feeling that the fish was hooked, gave it enough line, and slowly returned towards the beach in his canoe or boat.

Jumping to the land, he called for people to help him, they landed the beast, giving blows with axes and rocks or whatever they had, and killed it, opening its belly they found the unfortunate Indian and took him out, the Indian gave two or three gasps and he died there

There is no reason to doubt that pearl divers in the New World were menaced by sharks, but this story has the feel of myth about it, and the fact it appears without any rooted detail—names, time, place—in a work with a propagandistic purpose should increase the suspicion about its veracity.

Two decades on, in 1580, an officer sailing between Portugal and India wrote of seeing one of his crewmen fall overboard. The Early Modern equivalent of a lifebuoy, a wooden block tied to a rope, was thrown to the man:

Our crew began to bring in the man, who had managed to catch the block, but, when he was no more than half the range of a musket away, there appeared from beneath the surface a big monster known as tiburon; it rushed at the man and cut him to pieces right before our eyes. It was certainly a terrible death.

This is often said to be the first account of a shark attack in English, and it may be. There is, however, a problem in determining whether it was written in English, or translated into English. The word tiburón, borrowed by the Spanish from the Carib Indians or Kalinago of northern South America and used, as explained above, to designate the smaller man-eating sharks,¹² was also used by the English for about a century, until the late sixteenth century, i.e., the time when this was written. The English would switch to the word xoc from the Mayans in Mexico, which ultimately evolved into “shark”.¹³ As such, either case—originally English or a translation—is plausible, and this uncertainty is merely one complication with this source, which is of very murky provenance: there is no precise date, the author is anonymous, and nobody knows where the text first appeared.

Regardless, something like the modern view of sharks, the mingled fascination and dread, seems to have been in place by the end of the sixteenth century. For example, in 1593, the English privateer—an entirely different thing to a pirate—Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins wrote:

The Sharke or Tiberune, is a fish like unto those which wee call dog-fishes, but that hee is far greater, I have seene of them eight or nine foot long; his head is flat and broad, and his mouth in the middle … [H]is skinne is rough, like to the fish which we call a rough hound, and russet, with reddish spots, saving that under the belly hee is all white: hee is much hated of sea-faring men, who have a certaine foolish superstition with them, and say that the ship hath seldome good successe, that is much accompanied with them. It is the most ravenous fishe knowne in the sea; for he swallowth all that hee findeth.¹⁴

An intermittently-famous shark attack in the United States dates from 1642 in what was then-New Amsterdam, a settlement on Manhattan Island that would become New York City:

It was a dark and stormy night when good Antony Van Corlaer arrived at the creek [Harlem River] which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass [Van Corlaer was a trumpeter] across the water. For a short time, he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil, and daringly plunged into the stream. Scarce had he buffeted halfway over when he was observed to struggle violently battling with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively, he put his trumpet in his mouth and, giving a vehement blast, sank forever to the bottom.¹⁵

An “old Dutch burgher,” renowned for his honesty, witnessed Van Corlaer’s demise and told of how he had seen the “dvyvel” (devil) in the shape of a huge fish “seize the sturdy Antony by the leg and drag him beneath the waves”.¹⁶

The episode is listed in databases of shark attacks and appears in history books on the same subject, referred to as one of, if not the, earliest such incidents in the Colonial Americas. But it is a legend, originating in an 1809 book, A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, published under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a pseudonym for Washington Irving. Irving, one of the most famous writers of his day, admired by contemporaries like Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, was an author of fiction: his History was satire and Van Corlaer never existed.¹⁷ Irving is remembered now, if at all, for the “Rip Van Winkle” short stories.

A genuine report from two years earlier was written by Father Thomas Copley, a Jesuit missionary in Maryland, or “the Colony of Saint Mary”, as he referred to it. The representatives of the Society of Jesus wrote litterae annuae (annual letters) to Rome, explaining the progress of their ministries, and in 1640 Copley incorporated in his letter the story of a man who had been inclining to faith, then backed away from conversion and resumed a life of sin, even blasphemy. “[H]e was accustomed to smoke [the prayer-beads he had obtained] in his pipe with tobacco, after grinding them to powder, often boasting that he was eating up his ‘Ave Marias’,” wrote Copley:

But the divine vengeance did not let the wicked crime go long unpunished; for scarcely a year having passed, on the returning vigil of the day on which he had abandoned his purpose of embracing the Catholic faith, a more sacrilegious playfulness possessed him … [I]n the afternoon, when he had betaken himself to the river for the purpose of swimming, scarcely had he touched the water when a huge fish having suddenly seized the wicked man, before he could retreat to the bank, tore away, at a bite, a large portion of his thigh, by the pain of which most merited laceration, the unhappy wretch was in a short time hurried away from the living—the divine justice bringing it about that he, who a little while before boasted that he had eaten up his “Ave Maria beads,” should see his own flesh devoured, even while he was yet living.¹⁸

Modern researchers have argued that the evidence points to the attack taking place in August 1640 and the perpetrator being a bull shark, based partly on that species being a seasonal summer visitor to the Chesapeake Bay down to the present. The inference is reasonable, but not conclusive.

The difficulty with the sources examined so far is that we cannot be totally sure they refer to sharks and/or the reliability of the sources themselves is in doubt, with the contents being dubious or the authenticity being in question or both. The first unambiguously recorded shark attack on a human dates to 1749. The victim was Brook Watson, a British boy born in Plymouth in 1735.

Watson was orphaned when he was 6-years-old, in 1741, and sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the American colonies—Boston, Massachusetts, to be precise. Watson, inspired by his uncle, a trader in the West Indies, decided on a life at sea, and at the age of 14, he was given the job of cabin boy aboard a merchant ship. It was during downtime from this commission, while swimming in Havana Harbour off Cuba, that Watson was attacked by a shark.

As Watson later recounted, while his shipmates noticed the attack by his “voracious assailant” quickly, their rescue efforts were wrong-footed because he was pulled under the water and surfaced “at about 100 yards distance”. Then he was attacked and dragged under again. Watson was finally saved from the water as the shark closed in for a third attack, but the chances of saving his life were very low: “all the flesh was stripped off the calf from the bone downwards” on one leg and the “foot … divided from the [other] leg”, Watson wrote.¹⁹ Yet, despite such injuries, and the medical technology of the mid-eighteenth century, Watson survived. A surgeon managed to stop the bleeding, and Watson made it through the subsequent gauntlet of amputation and infections.²⁰ Fitted with a wooden leg, Watson was back at work within three months, and went on to have a colourful life as a founder of Lloyd’s of London, a Loyalist during the American rebellion, and a politician in Britain. He died ennobled as Sir Brook Watson at the ripe old age of 72 in 1807.

The sourcing is not perfect. Watson’s account was written in April 1778 for a newspaper to promote the painting (see above), Watson and the Shark, by Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley, which shows the moment of Watson’s rescue just before the shark closed in for its third and probably fatal attack. Twenty-nine years is time enough for memory to be unreliable about the details, and the promotional purpose of the account leaves open the possibility of elaboration. Nonetheless, the basics of the story are confirmed beyond question. Watson and his contemporaries had the concept and lexicography of a shark pinned down specifically,²¹ all were agreed a shark is what had attacked Watson, and there is the impressive physical evidence of Watson’s missing leg.²²

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FOOTNOTES

1. For those interested in all the shark attacks since then, and the patterns across time and geography, the International Shark Attack File hosted by the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida is the place to look, albeit the website is slightly annoying to navigate.

2. The situation with human representations of sharks is slightly different. There is some evidence of sharks appearing in the artwork of the pre-1492 Americas, concentrated unsurprisingly in coastal areas, particularly of what is now Peru and Chile. There is also a fifteenth-century Aztec manuscript with a picture of what is likely a shark.

3. There is no agreement on the exact date of Herodotus’s Historiai (Ἱστορίαι), variously translated as “Researches”, “Inquiries”, and “Histories”. From its contents, it was clearly completed at some point after the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC, and it is highly likely the project was initiated some years before that. A reasonable assumption is that Herodotus began writing c. 440 BC and was finished by 425 BC.

4. Tom Holland (2013), Herodotus: The Histories, p. 404.

5. Of course, the upward trend was by no means smooth: the Black Death was already raging by this point.

6. To the participants, the expedition to the Holy Land in the 1090s was an “armed pilgrimage” (peregrinatio armata). The term “Crusade” (Cruciata) only appeared in the thirteenth century and it was some time before it became widespread.

7. It was also in this period after the Latin States were dissolved, c. 1298, that the famous Venetian explorer Marco Polo wrote relaying an experience from India half-a-decade earlier:

[T]he sea here forms a gulf between the Island of Seilan [i.e., Ceylon, Sri Lanka] and the mainland. … The pearl-fishers take their vessels, great and small, and proceed into this gulf, where they stop from the beginning of April till the middle of May. … Of all the produce they have first to pay the King … the tenth part. And they must also pay those men who charm the great fishes to prevent them from injuring the divers … one-twentieth part of all that they take. These fish-charmers are termed Abraiaman [i.e., Brahmins] and their charm holds good for that day only, for at night they dissolve the charm so that the fishes can work mischief at their will.

It will be noted that on its own terms this is about attacks, not the account of an attack, and we are presuming it refers to sharks, without even getting into the questions of veracity that might be provoked by the inclusion of details about the “great fishes” being bewitched (on a time-limited basis).

8. Ludolf’s book was originally “published” in Latin as De itinere Terrae Sanctae (“On the Journey to the Holy Land”). It is best-known in English from an 1895 translation by Aubrey Stewart entitled, Ludolph von Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land, and of the Way Thither: Written in the Year A.D. 1350.

9. There is a report that Hernán Cortés encountered a shark on his way to Mexico in 1519, and his crew caught it “with hook and rope”. There was a problem lifting the shark onto the small ship, which began listing when Cortes’s crew tried, so they “killed the fish directly in the water, cut it in pieces, and hoisted it on board”. “[M]ore than five hundred rations of salt pork [were found in the shark’s] stomach, including ten sides of salt pork”: the “insatiable” creature had “found this provision [and] swallowed it whole … Its gullet contained a tin plate that had fallen from the ship of Pedro de Alvarado, three torn shoes, and a cheese. Although it seems incredible, … truly they will swallow anything.”

The detail given about the shark leaves no doubt that is what Cortes’s men caught, and the description of its stomach contents and this being a common finding adds to the source’s trustworthiness. Tiger sharks, in particular, do eat anything: shoes are known to be among the items; tires and license plates are frequent occurrences; and among the stranger items are dogs, a tom-tom drum, and a whole suit of armour. That being said, this comes from one of the most controversial sources related to the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

The author of the above is Chimalpahin, a Nahua (Indigenous) historian writing in the early seventeenth century. The obvious red flag is that this is a century after Cortes’s voyage, but that is not actually the problem. Chimalpahin was reworking the Historia General de las Indias (“General History of the Indies”), published in 1552 by Francisco López de Gómara, and the shark account is in the original. The problem is Gómara’s book.

Gómara, a sometime secretary and chaplain to Cortes on later missions, had never been to the Americas and wrote under Cortes’s patronage. Gómara’s book was denounced immediately from two directions. There were those among Cortes’s comrades in the New World, Bernal Díaz del Castillo most prominently, who charged that Gómara had written a ludicrous hagiography, exaggerating Cortes’s role to the point of virtually eliminating the agency of all the other Spaniards that went with him to Mexico. (Castillo’s memoir, written in 1568 and published in 1632, was tellingly entitled, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain.) Then there were those, Bartolomé de las Casas pre-eminently, who were displeased with Gómara whitewashing the conduct of the Spanish. In November 1553, less than a year after the book came out, it was suppressed by Prince Philip (subsequently King Philip II). Las Casas’s objections seem to have carried the most weight in Philip’s decision, though it is possible the Prince took against some of the unflattering allusions the book made to his father, World Emperor Charles V. The ban was only lifted in 1727, by which time Chimalpahin’s version, with its rewritings and additions (especially about Aztec Emperor Moctezuma and other key Indigenous actors), was in wide circulation.

See: Susan Schroeder (2010), Chimalpahin’s Conquest: A Nahua Historian’s Rewriting of Francisco Lopez de Gomara’s La conquista de Mexico, pp. 80-81.

10. The book is Historia de las Indias (“History of the Indies”). It was written by Las Casas between 1527 and 1561, but there is a complication. Las Casas willed the manuscript to his monastery in 1559, with a prohibition on publishing it until forty years after his death. In the event, Las Casas died in 1566, and the book never saw the light of day for three hundred years, being published at last in 1875. The famous book released by Las Casas in his lifetime was Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (“A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies”), written in 1542 and published in 1552. Brevísima drew on the Historia, which was a work in progress, but Brevísima was a much more condensed, scorched earth polemic—and it worked, having a significant impact on the Spanish Crown’s issuance of the New Laws.

11. Michael Bright (2025), White Shark: A Biography of the Fish That Scared the World, chapter three.

12. Tiburón in modern Spanish simply means “shark”. The Portuguese for “shark” is tubarão, but at this time that would not have mattered. In 1580, Portugal had come under Spanish rule, and would only regain independence in 1640.

13. Bright, White Shark, chapter three.

14. Emma Phipson (1883), The Animal-Lore of Shakespeare’s Time, Including Quadrupeds, Birds, Reptiles, Fish and Insects, pp. 380-381.

15. Richard G. Fernicola (2001), Twelve Days of Terror: Inside the Shocking 1916 New Jersey Shark Attacks, pp. 97-98.

16. Fernicola, Twelve Days of Terror, p. 98.

17. Frances F. Dunwell (2008), The Hudson: America’s River, p. 1.

18. Clayton Colman Hall [ed.] (1910), Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633-1684, pp. 133-134. Available here.

19. Emily Ballew Neff, ‘A “Dreadful Apparatus”: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark and the Cultures of Natural History’, in: Tricia Cusack [ed.] (2014), Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space, pp. 197-198.

20. “Not only was the rescue an amazingly miraculous incident”, wrote Dr. Gordon Bendersky, “but the mortality of a shark’s chewing off a foot in two attacks, the massive loss of blood expected from the anterior tibial artery, the near-drowning, and the mortality rate of the subsequent amputation procedure itself and the expected post-traumatic and postoperative infections would approach 99 percent or greater.”

21. Identification of specific shark species was more in its infancy. Modern historians tend to identify Watson’s attacker as a tiger shark.

22. The reinforcing evidence is what is not in the record: there is no hint of any doubt being cast on Watson’s story by the dozens of living witnesses, nor is there any suggestion anywhere that the hundreds of sailors who served alongside Watson ever heard another story explaining his missing leg.