How One Asshole Shark Ruined Everything for All the Other Sharks
Today, joking nervously about sharks before diving into the waves is as much of an American summer tradition as getting drunk and blowing things up, but it wasn’t always that way. Long before Jaws and Shark Week dominated our vacation viewing, sharks were generally believed to be harmless little guys who didn’t attack humans. They weren’t exactly friendly Pixar animations, but they left humans alone because humans are too big to eat.
That all changed with a series of attacks that occurred over the course of 12 days off the Jersey shore in the summer of 1916. Four people were killed and another merely lost most of a leg as some kind of mythical monster appeared to be chomping its way north along the shore, scaring away the pre-Snookis and -Situations who usually flocked there. These were, in fact, the attacks that inspired Peter Benchley to write Jaws, a move he regretted after its adaptation caused so much panic at the seashore, because the truth is you’re still hilariously unlikely to be attacked by a shark. It was mostly the one asshole shark who ruined everything.
Well, probably. Officially, we’ll never know exactly how many sharks were involved, but we have a pretty good idea because the same morning as the last attack, a great white shark got caught in a fishing net just a few miles away. The shark was pretty mad about it, too, thrashing about to the point of threatening to capsize the tiny boat until one of the fishermen, Michael Schleisser, managed to beat it to death with an oar. Believe it or not, his day only got weirder from there.
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It was common practice to cut open a captured shark’s stomach because there was sometimes good stuff in there, and as of late, the “good stuff” people were hoping to find was human remains, and boy, did they hit the jackpot with this one. There was a good 15 pounds of flesh and bones later identified as human in there, filling up “about two-thirds of a milk crate.” The attacks then abruptly stopped, so while we technically can’t say for sure, yeah, that was probably the guy.
Because everything about this story is cinematically ridiculous, Schleisser happened to be both a “seasoned, if not renowned, taxidermist” and an honest-to-god lion tamer for the Barnum & Bailey Circus. As a result, nothing seemed more normal to him than to stuff the shark and open an exhibit in Brooklyn where crowds from miles around showed up to see the “Matawan Man-Eater” and listen to Schleisser spin yarns of his epic adventure. He even displayed the fatal oar and wore “bandages over his fist and knuckles where abrasions were made by the sandpaper-like hide of the monster.” It really got captured by the right guy.
Yes, this means it’s possible that the original Jaws is gathering dust in somebody’s weird uncle’s attic somewhere, because we sure as hell don’t know where it is now. It’s more likely that “inferior early-20th-century methods of preservations,” combined with Schleisser’s “‘rushed’ taxidermy,” instead gave way to a really gross disintegration, but it very well could be lurking, unseen, ready to rise against as some sort of Frankenjaws.
Call us, Spielberg.
