From the New York Times, July 13, 1916
NEW JERSEY, USA, 1916. Captain Thomas Cottrell, a retired sailor, caught a glimpse of a dark gray shape swimming rapidly in the shallow waters of Matawan Creek this morning [12 July] as he crossed the trolley drawbridge a few hundred yards from town. So impressed was he, when he recalled the two swimmers killed by sharks on the New Jersey coast within two weeks, that he hurried back to town and spread the warning among the 2,000 residents that a shark had entered Matawan Creek. Everywhere the Captain was laughed at. How could a shark get ten miles away from the ocean, swim through Raritan Bay, and enter the shallow creek with only seventeen feet of water at its deepest spot and nowhere more than thirty-five feet wide? So the townsfolk asked one another, and grown-ups and children flocked to the creek as usual for their daily dip. But Captain Cottrell was right, and tonight the people are dynamiting the creek, hoping to bring to the surface the body of a small boy the shark dragged down. Elsewhere, in the Long Branch Memorial Hospital lies the body of a youth so terribly torn by the shark that he died of loss of blood, and in St Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick doctors are working late tonight to save the left leg of another lad whom the shark nipped as the big fish fled down the creek toward Raritan Bay.
The dynamiters hoped, when they brought their explosives to the creek, that, beside the body, they might bring up the shark where men, waiting with weapons, could kill it. Others hastened to the mouth of the creek where it empties into the bay a mile and a half from town and spread heavy wire netting.
The people of Matawan had been horrified by the tales of sharks which came to them from Spring Lake, Beach Haven, Asbury Park and the other coast resorts. They had been sympathetically affected by the reports of the death of Charles E. Vansant and Charles Bruder. But those places were far away and the tragedies had not touched them closely.
Tonight the whole town is stirred by a personal feeling, a feeling which makes men and women regard the fish as they might a human being who had taken the lives of a boy and a youth and badly, perhaps mortally, injured another youngster. The one purpose in which everybody shares is to get the shark, kill it and to see its body drawn up on the shore, where all may look and be assured it will destroy no more.
The death of the boy and youth, and the injury to the other youngster were due to the refusal of almost every one to believe that sharks could ever enter the shoal waters where clam-diggers work at low tide. As long ago as Sunday, Frank Slater saw the shark and told it everywhere. He stopped repeating the tale when everyone laughed him to scorn.
Then today came Captain Cottrell’s warning, and with that Lester Stilwell, twelve years old, might have been the only victim had it not been for the unfortunate coincidence that the boy suffered from fits. It was supposed that an attack in the water had caused him to sink, and rescuers, with no notion that a shark had dragged him down, entered the water fearlessly.
It was while trying to bring young Stilwell’s body ashore that Stanley G. Fisher, son of Captain W. H. Fisher, retired Commodore of the Savannah Line fleet, lost his life. The third victim, Joseph Dunn, twelve years old, was caught as he tried to leave the water, the alarm caused by Fisher’s death at last having convinced the town that a shark really was in the creek.
Stilwell was the first to die. With several other boys, he had gone swimming off a disused steamboat pier at the edge of the town. He was a strong swimmer and so swam further out than his companions.
So it was that none could follow him, but several boys, instead, raced through the town calling that Stilwell had had a fit in the water and had gone down. They said the boy rose once after his first disappearance. He was screaming and yelling, and waving his arms wildly. His body was swirling round and round in the water. Fisher was one of the first to hear and immediately started for the creek.
“Remember what Captain Cottrell said!” exclaimed Miss May Anderson, a teacher in the local school, as Fisher passed her. “It may have been a shark.”
“A shark here!” exclaimed Fisher incredulously. “I don’t care anyway. I’m going after that boy.”
He hurried to the shore and donned bathing tights. By the time he was attired many others had reached the spot, among them Stilwell’s parents. Fisher dived into the creek and swam to midstream, where he dived once or twice in search of Stilwell’s body. At last he came up and cried to the throng ashore: “I’ve got it!”
He was nearer the opposite shore and struck out in that direction, while Arthur Smith and Joseph Deulew put out in a motor boat to bring him back. Fisher was almost on the shore and, touching bottom, had risen to his feet, when the onlookers heard him utter a cry and throw up his arms. Stilwell’s body slipped back into the stream and, with another cry, Fisher was dragged after it.
“The shark! The shark!” cried the crowd ashore, and other men sprang into other motor boats and started for the spot where Fisher had disappeared. Smith and Deulew were in the lead, but, before they overtook him, Fisher had risen and dragged himself to the bank, where he collapsed.
Those who reached him found the young man’s right leg stripped of flesh from above the hip at the waist line to a point below the knee. It was as though the limb had been raked with heavy, dull knives. He was senseless from shock and pain, but was resuscitated by Dr G. L. Reynolds after Recorder Arthur Van Buskirk had made a tourniquet of rope and staunched the flow of blood from Fisher’s frightful wound. Fisher said it was a shark that had grabbed him. He had felt the nip of its teeth on his leg, and had looked down and seen the fish clinging to him. Others ashore said they had seen the white belly of the shark as it turned when it seized Fisher.
Fisher said he wasn’t in more than three or four feet of water when the fish grabbed him, and he had had no notion of sharks until that instant. If he had thought of them at all, he said, he had felt himself safe when he got his feet on the bottom.
Fisher was carried across the river and hurried in a motor car to the railroad station, where he was put aboard the 5:06 train for Long Branch. There he was transferred to the hospital, but died before he could be carried to the operating table.
At the creek, meantime, dynamite had been procured from the store of Asher P. Woolley and arrangements were being made to set it off when a motor boat raced up to the steamboat pier. At the wheel was J. R. Lefferts and in the craft lay young Dunn. With his brother William and several others, he had been swimming off the New Jersey Clay Company brickyards at Cliffwood, half a mile below the spot where Stilwell and Fisher were attacked.
News of the accident had just reached the boys and they had hurried from the water. Dunn was the last to leave and, as he drew himself up on the brick company’s pier, with only his left leg trailing in the water, the shark struck at that. Its teeth shut over the leg above and below the knee and much of the flesh was torn away.
Apparently, however, the fish had struck this time in fright, for it loosed its grip on the boy at once, and his companions dragged him, yelling, up on to the pier. He was taken to the J. Fisher bag factory nearby, where Dr. H. J. Cooley of Keyport dressed his wound, and then he was carried in a motor car to St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick by E. H. Bomick. There it was said last night that the physicians hoped to save his leg if blood poisoning did not set in.
The youngster steadfastly refused to tell where he lived, for, he said, he did not want his mother to worry about him. From his relatives, however, it was learned that his home is at 124 East 128th Street, New York. He and his brother had been visiting an aunt in Cliffwood.
Fisher was the son of Commodore Watson H. Fisher, who for more than fifty years commanded boats of the Savannah Line up and down the coast. He retired from active service a few years ago. About ten days ago the father and mother went to Minneapolis to visit a daughter there, and they had intended to remain for another week, but, when word was sent this evening of the death of their son, they sent a message that they would leave for home immediately.
News of the tragedies here s
pread rapidly through neighboring towns, and from Morgan’s Beach, a few miles away, came a report that two sharks had been killed there in the morning by lifeguards. One was said to be twelve feet long. Persons who saw the fish when it grabbed Fisher said they thought it was about nine feet long.
The horrific news of this attack spread quickly. A local newspaper in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated an entire page to the subject of sharks.
From the BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE, Friday, July 14, 1916
The recent activity of sharks along the Jersey coast and the fact that one was sighted off Mecox Beach here a few days ago by Philip Carter, a nephew of ex-Justice Hughes, has brought to mind that in years past the Atlantic coast, from Montauk to Shinnecock, was the chief fishing grounds.
In inquiring the probability of there being any man-eating sharks in these waters now a number of the oldest inhabitants of Bridgehampton say that they remember the time when they inhabited the water about here in large numbers.
Captain John Norris Hedges, who has lived in Bridgehampton for sixty-nine years and was the captain of the Mecox lifesaving crew for thirty-nine years, says that it was not uncommon about forty years ago to catch sharks of man-eating variety off Bridgehampton Beach; but owing to the fishing the last few years (which has driven the bunkers in small fish which is a favorite food of sharks) farther out to sea, the sharks have not come so far inshore of late until this season, which he attributes to the fact that there has been little fishing the past few years, and that the bunkers are coming closer in shore, and that the sharks are following them.
E. E. Halsey, another resident of Bridgehampton, who has passed a good part of seventy-nine years in this locality, corroborates Captain Hedges’ belief, and say that it is very likely that man-eaters are again inhabiting these waters.
Charles Deckert was a member of the crew that landed the last shark in this vicinity, which was of the blue-nosed variety and was brought to shore in the winter of 1914. It measured nine feet.
An unusual number of porpoises have been sighted near shore here of late, and on Sunday and Monday two whale about forty feet long were seen basking off Sag Beach.
Most Sharks on Long Island
Belong to Basking Family
Patchogue, L. I., July 14—Baymen and deep sea fisher who have had experience in shark hunting have great respect for wounded sharks. Captain Frank Rourke, who once shot a shark through the fin, described its performance:
“It shot ahead as straight and as swift as a cannon ball, for a quarter of a mile, lashing the water in an intense fury. Suddenly, like a shell hitting a wall of rock it stopped, and then with increased speed shot back in its own tracks, narrowly missing the boat from which the shot had been fired. So great is the speed of a shark enraged that it would wreck the stoutest skiff that came in its path.
“Most of the sharks in and around the bay are of the basking shark family, but there are over a half dozen varieties known here. Among the dog fish, which are young sharks, monsters fifteen feet in length have been observed several times in the bay.
“There is but one adversary that is feared by the shark that is the dolphin or porpoise. A dolphin will give battle to a shark and slash it to pieces by turning somersaults in the water so rapidly that its finds cut like a buzz saw. A hungry porpoise is in the same class as a shark.
“Sharks mother their young in the same manner as a kangaroo, and baymen thought practical the plan to establish a guard at Fire Island Inlet and shoot the sharks as they come into the bay with their young and altogether make it such an unhealthy place for them that they will avoid it and food fish find a haven.
“The disappearance of moss bunkers is believed to have put the sharks in sore straights for food and caused their depredations.”
Old Whalers Incredulous;
Man Eaters Only in Tropics
(Special to the Eagle.)
Sag Harbor, L. I. July 14—Old whalemen interviewed cannot recall any instance of sharks attacking men in waters other than the tropics. They are incredulous of stories of man-eating sharks doing mortal damage in small creeks or even along the beaches of New Jersey and Long Island. Gus De Castro Jr. and Stewart Gaffga, while bathing last summer at Cockles Harbor, Shelter Island, encountered sharks on the flats. They returned in their powerboat to Sag Harbor and armed themselves with whalers’ harpoons and lances. They killed two big sharks …
Man-Eating Sharks? Nonsense!
No Such Thing, Say Fishermen
Editor Arthur Knowlson of Fishing Guide Knows All About Sharks’ Habits—Has Seen Many, but No “Man-Eaters” Around These Waters—Others Say the Same.
They’re Astonished at New Jersey Stories.
According to the men who do down to the sea in ships each day for the purpose of catching fish, there is no record of a shark attacking a human being in Long Island waters. Some of the fisherman go as far as to say that there is no record in existence of a shark ever attacking a human being in Northern waters, and point to the offer made by the late Herman Oelrich of Manhattan of $500 for anyone who would bring him absolute proof that a shark had attacked a living man at sea. This sum was never won, although Mr. Oelrich received many stories, with the necessary proof.
Arthur Knowlson, editor and publisher of the Fishing Guide, “Fishing Around New York,” and similar publications, stated today that in all the years he has been fishing in Long Island waters, and that extends over a period of twenty-five years, he has never known of a shark attacking a human being.
“I can offer no explanation of what had happened off the New Jersey coast,” said Mr. Knowlson. “Undoubtedly, the swimmers were attacked by some sort of a fish, and as there is no other fish in the seas that could do such damage, it must have been a shark that was responsible. But it is at such odds with the usual customs of the fish that it is hard to believe.
Plenty of Sharks in New York Waters
“We have plenty of sharks in New York waters. There is the sand shark, the sucker shark and the hammer head. I have seen them upon many occasions, when I have been out in my canoe on Gravesend Bay. You will see the dark dorsal fin of the fish cutting through the water like a periscope. You can always tell a shark, as it goes steadily about its business. A porpoise tumbles through the water in big half circles, and so it could not be mistaken for a shark.
“I have had a shark come along, dive underneath my canoe and come up on the other side of the boat. These fish have been here for years. They run in years. Sometimes there are many of them in neighboring waters, and at other times they seldom, if ever, are seen. Last year was quite a season for sharks; in fact, there were so many of them around New York that one enterprising owner of a fishing boat advertised shark fishing, and only went out after the big fellows. This year there have been fewer reports from the Fishing Banks.
“The shark is a natural born scavenger. Although he lives off all forms of fish, he will eat it either dead or alive. The men who go after sharks generally fish with the head and the inside of some other fish as bait.
“The fishermen can always tell when the sharks are hungry. They will come alongside a boat, and when a weakfish or a blue or some other fish is hooked, he will turn on his side and bite the fish right off the hook. Many times I have had a shark clean my hook in this manner. Sharks have done very little of this stealing this summer. That makes me think that they have plenty of natural food. There, it is very hard to understand why they should attack human beings.”
No Record of a Shark in
L. I. Waters Attacking Man.
Mr. Knowlson was asked if the sharks that are usually around Long Island waters would attack a man.
“No record of such an attack has ever been known,” was the reply. “Still, if fish were hungry, I would not put it past him. But, judging by what happened at the fishing banks this year, there is no famine of shark food around here this year.”
If the fish that attacked the swimmers off the New Jersey coast is not the usual type of shark common to thes
e waters, do you think it is a man-eater from the South?” was the next question put to the fishing authority.
“Now we are drifting into the question of man-eating sharks,” was the reply, “and there is also a grave doubt if there really exists such as fish. There is no record in either the United States navy or the English navy of a shark attacking a sailor. When you stop to think that both American and English sailors swim in every clime, it is a rather astonishing fact that neither navy has any record of a man being attacked by a shark.
“Havana harbor is supposed to be filled with sharks. Sill the Cubans go in swimming with impunity. When American warships visit Cuba the men go overboard in so-called shark-infested waters, and nothing seems to happen. Some people state that a shark will not attack a human being unless he is perfectly motionless. Other authorities say that the fish will not attack a man in the nude. Both of these statements seem to be wrong if the shark stories from the Jersey coast are true. Boys swimming in the nude were attacked yesterday.”
“Have you any idea what would bring a so-called man-eating shark to northern waters?” “Lack of food in the South,” was the reply.
“Do you think that the great loss of life caused by the sinking of so many boats abroad would cause a shark to come north after dead bodies?”
Shark a Surface Feeder,
Mr. Knowlson Points Out.
“No. The shark is a surface-feeder. He takes all his food within a few feet of the top of the water. This is proven by the fact that when a school of small fish want to get away from a shark they all dive down to the bottom. The body of a drowned man sinks to the bottom, and so could not furnish food for sharks.”
Unspeakable Horror Page 7
