Many of you know the story of the summer, 1916 shark attacks that occurred off of the coast of New Jersey. The attacks were foundational to our national shark hysteria and collective fear of sharks in general. It is also believed that they were the inspiration for Peter Benchely's novel Jaws. Here is the Wikipedia for those of you who may not be familiar with the events. This article (that was posted in r/UShistory) about the events referenced the fact that before the attacks, it was widely believed that sharks were relatively harmless. I can't help but question this, as obviously this wasn't the first shark attack that ever occurred, nor the last. Is this article correct in its assertion that it was widely believed sharks were benign and harmless creatures?
EDIT: the title should have read something like "New Jersey Shark Attacks, 1916" or something. The Matawan Creek attack is usually included in the story of these attacks. Should have been more specific.
Yes, it is! It sounds very weird to us now, but we must remember that very little was known about sharks in 1916 and before. Perhaps if you've seen Jaws, you'll remember that Hooper at one point describes the shark as essentially an automaton focused only on eating and having little shark pups. Hooper is a highly trained specialist, but he is completely wrong. Yet for the 70s, that really was what was believed. Even less was known a half-century before that.
This was a time of science - sea monsters were no longer to be believed in, and for the most part things like the "kraken" had been shown to be harmless squid, etc. In fact, in the 1890s a sportsman named Hermann Oelrichs placed a public wager in the pages of the New York Sun, declaring that sharks were cowardly and that he would give $500 to any person who could prove that a shark had ever hurt anyone.
Oelrichs actually made 5-mile swims in the ocean every year to demonstrate his belief that sharks were harmless. He even once dove off a crowded yacht into a group of sharks, and scared them all away with his thrashing. He seemed to be right.
So tl;dr, yes, the article is right. People believed that sharks were harmless. Strangely, people actually believed that sword fish and sea turtles were the possible menaces of the deep!
Source: Close to Shore by Michael Capuzzo
The Matawan attacks forced the mainstream American scientific establishment to reevaluate its estimations of the capabilities of sharks. A good many scientists dismissed tales of a shark's power as fishing tales. While they did not think they were harmless, they did not believe them to be capable of consuming a live human. The Brooklyn Museum's Science Bulletin issued a report on Atlantic sharks a few months before the Matawan attacks and concluded that sharks were not a danger to bathers. Both Treadwell Nichols, the curator of the Department of Fishes at the American Museum of natural history and Robin Cushwood Murphy at the Brooklyn Museum asserted that most shark victims had already drowned and thus offered no resistance. Frederick A Lucas, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, asserted in a letter to the Science Bulletin that:
One of the commonest statements is that "the shark bit off the man's leg as though it were a carrot," an assertion that shows the maker or writer of it had little idea of the strength of the apparatus needed to perform such an amputation. Certainly no shark recorded as having been taken in these waters could possibly perform such an act, though this might occur if a shark thirty feet or more in length happened to catch a man fairly on the knee joint where no severing of the bone were necessary. The next time one carves a leg of lamb, let him speculate on the power required to sever this at one stroke- and the bones of a sheep are much lighter than those of a man. Moreover, a shark, popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding, in not particularly strong in the jaws.
Although it's tempting to accuse these men of hubris, there were great difficulties in researching and collecting data on sharks during this time period. The 1917 issue of Copeia, the journal for American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists lamented that "we cannot transport a shark 10 to 50 feet in length, and weighing from 300 to 10,000 pounds or more, with ease to our laboratories, and very often our field notes do not suffice for identification purposes." Copeia noted that most studies of sharks came from dead specimens. These naturalists often operated in the dark about sharks; notice how the above notes take it as a given that sharks could reach above 30 feet. This was because a set of Great White jaws from Port Fairy, Australia had allegedly came from a 36.5 foot specimen, which was not debunked until 1972.
Sources
Allen, Thomas B. Shark Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. New York: Lyons Press, 2001.
Anonymous. "Abstract of the Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists" Copeia, No. 42 (Apr. 24, 1917), pp. 25-36
Brooklyn Museum. "Long Island Fauna- IV Sharks." Science Bulletin Volume 3. No. 1. (1916)