Americans in 1916 did not believe sharks attacked people. The dominant scientific consensus among the marine biologists of the American Museum of Natural History — the most authoritative ichthyological institution in the country at the time — held that sharks were essentially harmless to human swimmers in the temperate waters of the northeastern United States, that the occasional reports of shark-related fatalities elsewhere in the world were probably misidentifications of other marine animals, and that the more spectacular tales of shark attacks circulating in 19th-century maritime folklore were essentially fabrications. The most-cited evidence for this consensus was a standing $500 reward (approximately $12,000 in current purchasing power) that the millionaire Hermann Oelrichs had offered in 1891 to anyone who could produce verifiable evidence that a shark had ever bitten a living human being north of Cape Hatteras. Oelrichs had died in 1906 without ever having paid the reward. The American Museum of Natural History’s assistant curator of recent fishes, John Treadwell Nichols, cited the unclaimed Oelrichs reward in 1916 as scientific evidence that man-eating sharks did not, as a practical matter, exist in the relevant geographic range. He examined the body of the second 1916 victim — the 27-year-old Swiss-American bellhop Charles Bruder, killed at Spring Lake on 6 July — and concluded that the wounds had been inflicted by an orca rather than a shark. The conclusion was, in subsequent retrospective analysis, substantially incorrect.

The first of the five attacks occurred at approximately 5:00 p.m. on Saturday 1 July 1916, at the Engleside Hotel beach in Beach Haven, New Jersey. As detailed in National Geographic’s reconstruction of the 1916 attacks and their place in the broader history of American shark perception, the 25-year-old Philadelphia resident Charles Epting Vansant had walked into the surf for a late-afternoon swim while his family prepared dinner on the hotel veranda. He was accompanied by an Airedale dog. Observers on the beach saw what they initially thought was the dog returning to shore — a dark shape moving rapidly through the water behind Vansant. The shape was, in fact, a shark of substantial size. Vansant was attacked approximately 50 yards from the shore. The lifeguard Alexander Ott and several other men managed to drag him from the water. The femoral artery had been severed. Vansant died approximately one hour later at the Engleside Hotel, where his father, a Philadelphia physician, had been unable to stop the haemorrhage. The cause of death was recorded as drowning. The local press coverage was substantial but not particularly alarmed. The standard interpretation, in the absence of any subsequent attacks, was that Vansant had been the victim of an isolated and exceptional incident.

What happened in the second week

The second attack came five days later. Charles Bruder, the 27-year-old bellhop at the Essex & Sussex Hotel in Spring Lake, approximately 45 miles north along the New Jersey coast from Beach Haven, went swimming during his lunch break on Thursday 6 July 1916. He was approximately 130 yards from shore. The shark struck so violently that the lifeguards George White and Chris Anderson, rowing toward him in a lifeboat, saw the water around Bruder turn red before they reached him. They pulled him into the lifeboat. Both of his legs had been severed below the knees. He died in the boat before reaching shore. The autopsy was conducted by Nichols of the American Museum of Natural History, who — in the conclusion the museum subsequently retracted — initially attributed the fatal wounds to an orca whale rather than a shark, on the grounds that no shark in temperate Atlantic waters could plausibly have caused injuries of that severity. The local New Jersey papers ran the story across the front pages. The Jersey Shore communities began posting armed boat patrols along the beaches. Several coastal resorts strung steel wire mesh nets across their swimming areas. The broader American shark consensus, as articulated by the Museum of Natural History scientists, remained that the events were an unprecedented and probably non-repeatable cluster.

The events that broke the prior scientific consensus occurred six days later in a place that no American shark expert in 1916 considered possible. As described in the Matawan Borough’s archival summary of the events of 12 July 1916 in Matawan Creek, the small industrial town of Matawan, New Jersey sits approximately eleven miles inland from Raritan Bay, on a narrow tidal creek that meanders through farmland and small-town residential streets. At approximately 11:00 a.m. on the morning of 12 July, a retired sea captain named Thomas Cottrell — walking home across the recently-completed trolley drawbridge that crossed the creek — observed what he immediately recognised as a substantial shark moving upstream against the muddy water with the incoming tide. He reported the sighting to the Matawan police chief (who, in the small-town overlapping responsibilities of the period, also served as the village barber). The chief considered the report a heat-induced delusion or a practical joke. Cottrell attempted to warn the local swimmers directly. He was not believed.

The three attacks in the creek

At approximately 2:00 p.m. that same afternoon, an 11-year-old factory worker named Lester Stillwell — released early from his summer shift because of the extreme heat — was swimming at Wyckoff Dock on Matawan Creek with five other local boys. As described in the Living Sharks Museum’s archival reconstruction of the Matawan Creek attacks, Stillwell was pulled underwater approximately one hour after Cottrell’s ignored warning. His friends, screaming and naked, ran into central Matawan to report what had happened. Several adult townspeople initially refused to believe the report. The local consensus shifted only when a 24-year-old Matawan tailor named Stanley Fisher — who had heard the boys’ screaming, had run to Wyckoff Dock, had dived into the creek to recover what he believed was the body of an epileptic child who had drowned during a seizure — emerged from the water with a substantial section of his right thigh torn away. Fisher had located Stillwell’s body. The shark had returned. Fisher was carried by boat to the railway station, transported on the next train to the hospital at Long Branch, and died of haemorrhage and shock approximately three hours after the attack.

The third attack at Matawan Creek occurred approximately 30 minutes later, at a different swimming location about half a mile downstream from Wyckoff Dock. A 14-year-old boy named Joseph Dunn was climbing onto a private dock — having been alerted by a passing resident to what had just happened at Wyckoff — when something he subsequently described as feeling “like a big pair of scissors” closed around his left leg below the knee and began pulling him back into the water. His older brother and several friends pulled him free. Dunn survived. He spent 59 days in the hospital recovering from the injury but kept the leg. As reported in an All That’s Interesting historical summary of the broader 1916 attacks and the national response that followed, the news that the same shark — or, as later marine biological analysis suggested, possibly a second shark operating in the same brackish water — had attacked three separate swimmers in a freshwater creek eleven miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean produced what was, by every reasonable measure of subsequent American media coverage of the event, a national panic. President Woodrow Wilson called a Cabinet meeting on 14 July 1916 to discuss federal assistance to the affected New Jersey municipalities. The White House authorised funds to support what one Philadelphia Inquirer headline described as the effort to “drive away all the ferocious man-eating sharks.” The Matawan creek was strung with chicken-wire nets and detonated with dynamite charges. The largest single-species animal hunt in recorded American history began along the entire eastern coast. Approximately 300 sharks were caught and slaughtered in New Jersey waters within the subsequent two weeks. On 14 July, a Newark taxidermist named Michael Schleisser pulled an eight-foot great white shark from Raritan Bay near the mouth of Matawan Creek. The stomach contained approximately 15 pounds of human remains. The attacks ended. The cultural transformation of the American shark — from the essentially benign marine animal of the pre-1916 scientific consensus into the malevolent man-eating predator that the 1974 Peter Benchley novel Jaws and its 1975 Steven Spielberg film adaptation would eventually crystallise as the dominant American cultural image — had, across the preceding twelve days, become essentially irreversible.