Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Keener joined my fellow editor Katy Lamford. Candice, Katie. We have some mail, and not the kind of mail that we like to read on the air. We have an actual tangible piece of mail, a mysterious package. It's it's a box, and so we opened this box. We were going to do it live with everyone listening, but we decided that since we didn't really know what was in it, we didn't want to alarm anyone with our girl ish screams and cries. So we opened this box and inside is a a jar, and inside the jar, we've got a pair of bloodied, shredded swim trunks for one thing, and a newspaper clipping looks like an obituary, a key chain and a copper tag that says www Dot Frenzied waters dot com that's attached to what I presume is an artificial shark tooth. And we were delighted. We didn't know what this was, and then our producer told us it's actually a marketing campaign from Discovery. So we're still excited, but it's it's not as written with mystery and intrigue as we had thought and hoped. No. Shark Week two thousand nine, UM starting on August two, I think this year and Shark Week, like um, Black Friday is a holiday that everyone celebrates. You just you have to get into it, you know, uh, with all of your heart and mind and enthusiasm. And so we're bringing a bit of a historical perspective to Shark Week two thousand nine. So without further ado, we are going to enlighten everyone about the nineteen sixteen shark tacks on the Jersey Shore. And if you've seen Jaws, it was actually based on this story. So go back to July nineteen sixteen, UM, starting July one actually, so getting ready for into Pendance Day weekend, and there is a heat wave going on and also a polio epidemic and everyone is heading to the seashore for the weekend. And you should know that beach culture was really starting to take off in this era in history. Starting around the mid to late eighteen hundred, people began flocking to the beach. For one, it was cheap. For another reason, there were different modes of transportation that you could take to get there. It was pretty accessible. You could go buy a horse and wagon train automobile if you were lucky enough to have one. You could even walk and sun and surf and sand were a nice respite from insects and smoky, dusty industrial cities. And even though you know the beach was somewhat appealing, there were some things that weren't too appealing about it. For instance, people were really cumbersome bathing suits, sometimes made of wool and other heavy fabrics that well, um, they didn't show off to but they also uh sort of weighted people down. Picture yourself swimming in a woolen dress women and for men it was like a large tank top with shorts, and so they would absorb water and make movement very difficult. And there weren't really lifeguards as we think of lifeguards today until the nineteen hundred's. Usually it was police officers who would stand in place and pretend to be lifeguards for a little while while people bobbed in the ocean, and different oceanside resorts would section off their areas of the beach with poles and rope and people would hold onto the ropes and floating water in an activity called Fannie dunking you too, like I really can't wait to hit the beach right now and go hang on a rope. I know I'm stop. And then in the nineteen hundreds it became even more popular to go to the beach, and lifeguarding became a specialized profession. And not only that, but resorts would advertise that they actually had lifeguards, which would draw more people because people thought, well, hey, it'll be safe to get a Fanny dunk there's a lifeguard there. Some even had medical pavilions with registered nurses to help care for them. So it was a wonderful place to be. The seaside and the Jersey Shore was really popular. Something like eleven presidents the time had gone to stay, Mary Todd, Lincoln went to visit um. President Garfield actually asked to go there when he was dying from infection. So let's imagine the scene. We've got the white sandy expanses of the Jersey Shore coastal beach sides like Asbury Park, Spring Lake, Seaside Heights, Beach Haven, Atlantic City. People are out and they're colorful woolen separate, bathing in the sun. Perhaps some striped umbrellas here and their general merriment, maybe even a m a good smelling treat or to wafting in the air when that mary scene would soon be interrupted by grizzly crimes of nature. Charles Epting van Sant was there with his family at Beach Haven, wh was on the south coast of New Jersey. He was a University of Pennsylvania grad. He'd just gotten a job at a Philadelphia brokerage firm, and he was a pretty popular guy. Um. He's part of the glee club and on the varsity golf team, and he came from a very old family, and he and his father and his sisters were there at beach even for the weekend, and it was customary for young men to go for a pre dinner dip in the ocean, and Charles swam right out. But his dick of the ocean didn't exactly go as planned. He started crying out, and while some beach combers thought he was calling out for a dog, he was actually crying out for help because a shark had latched on to his thigh. And there was a lifeguard actually there at the time, Alexander Ott, who had been on the Olympic swim team for the US, and he swam right out, grabbed Van Sant and brought him in. But by the time he brought him in, Van Sant was missing most of his leg and he bled to death shortly thereafter. Yeah, the sharks bite had suffered an artery in his sign and so he led out pretty quickly. But people viewed this largely as an isolated instant, and for a few days things were calmed at the beach. And while today that sort of accident might scare people away from the beach for a very long time, it didn't really make that huge of an impact. You know, we have the local news at night broadcast scary stories and and put people on alert, but most of the headlines of the day were occupied with the events of World War One, so people weren't too frightened of the beach. The story was on page eighteen of the New York Times, it didn't even hit the front page. And people largely conceived of shark attacks as occurring in more southern Atlantic waters, like around Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, so they thought it was an anomaly, this one incident. It wouldn't happen again, but that would not be the case. On July six at Spring Like, a Swiss bellboy named Charles Brewder, who worked at the six and Sussex Hotel, went out for a swim, and he was very well liked among staff and guests, and he actually sent most of his his wages home to his Swiss mother because her other son was at war. So he went out to a special part of the beach that had been cornered off for employee swim and all of a sudden he went under and there was a large red patch in the ocean, which led a woman to tell the lifeguard that she thought a canoe had flipped over red canoe, and no one had seen a red canoe, so for a couple of minutes there was confusion, and then they realized that no, it was blood and it was Charles Brewder, and the lifeguards swam out in a boat and brought him back, and he was missing both of his legs below the knee, his bones were severed, his foot was missing, he had severe wounds to his abdomen. And because this was such a public rescue and public display of how badly mulled his body was, people became much more aware and fright of the sharks that may be cruising along the Jersey shore. Spring Lake was a much richer, more elite little resort town than Beach Haven was, so this made even more headlines. Now people were starting to come to because it wasn't just attacking the southern Jersey shore. No, the shark was targeting the rich. But the shark knew no boundaries of class because whether it was the same shark or a different one. One actually swim inward toward Mattawan Creek, which was a tidal river area off the coast. This was fresh water, and on July twelve, a twelve year old boy named Lester Stillwell was attacked, and Lester actually had epilepsy, so when he went under in Mattawan Creek, which was only about thirty ft wide and forty ft deep, his friends thought that perhaps he'd had a seizure and he'd gone under the surface and they needed help getting him out, So they raised town and came back with a dry cleaner named Stanley Fisher. Not to be confused with the literary theorys Stanley Fish totally different man. So he starts using it a pole to poke around the water to try to locate his body, and he actually discovers that there's a shark lurking in the depth. So imagine the surprise a shark in fresh water. People are panicking, and one of the accounts I had read said that they had um stretched a net in the creek beforehand so the body wouldn't wash out to see not knowing that there was a shark, and the net would also keep the shark in, and that maybe why it stayed there and was able to attack Fisher instead of swimming back to the ocean. But Fisher dove in and he was attacked. The shark latched onto his right thigh, and another man who had a boat actually tried to fend off the shark with one of the oars, and he fended the shark off successfully and got Fisher out, but Fisher later died. So now we're up to four deaths the same summer and the same general part of the country. And then we go about half mile up from where Lester Stillwell was killed and we have victim number five, Joseph Dunn. The shark bit his leg, but he actually was rescued. At this point, Mattawan residents had kind of wised up to what was going on and he was able to be saved. He was taken to the hospital, and they had said that he would never walk again and his limbs would probably be amputated, but he ended up keeping both legs, which was great news. And he was the only survivor in that series of brutal shark attacks. And people were really just freaked out at this point, and even President Woodrow Wilson had had enough. He launched a war on the Sea of Terror, and he sent in the Navy and the Coast Guard to help deal with the problem. And I'm not exactly sure what they did if they were on the lookout for sharks swimming along the beach, or if they were actively trying to capture sharks, But people thought that the Great White was out and about riaking havoc on humanity, and civilians took up their own sort of vigilante justice and shot, abbed, and dynamited Mattawan Creek and started shooting sharks whenever they found them, wherever they found them. There were several cases of civilians shooting sharks in the head and then getting their pictures taken for the newspaper, and clearly that would not fly today, but to put it into context at the time and the fear that was going on, it seemed appropriate and a battle event and heroic. And there's actually an unbelievable part of the story, but believable because it is true. There's a man named Michael Schleisser who was a taxidermist and supposedly a Barnum and Bailey circus lion tamer, and while he was out fishing, he actually caught a shark in Raritan Bay. It was a great white and supposedly when they opened it they found human flesh inside about fifteen pounds. So it was that great white the terror of Mattawan Creek or was it something else. Scientists today and a theologist who look back and examine that summer and that behave you're of different types of sharks and who the likely as culprits would be, are are not exactly sure that that's the mark of a great white. Even Fabian Crusto, who you may know from his father Jacques Crusto, said that it was unlikely a great white would be in freshwater. It's more likely the work of a bull shark, which is only one of only two species that can go in in fresh waters. Bull Sharks also have really small eyes, much smaller than other sharks, so their vision is pretty limited, which is why they like to swim near the shore because they can just sort of bump into things instead. And in fact, their hunting method is called the bump and bite because they will bump into something, figure out what it is from the bump, and then bite it. So I don't believe you. If a bull shark butts into you, things are not going to go well. Get away quickly. And after Katrina, actually a bunch of bull sharks were found um in Lake pontcher Train and they live in several freshwater lakes. And of course the purpose of this shark podcast is to talk about a particular moment in history and to think about the way that beach culture and attitude toward the ocean and the ocean predators have changed throughout time. It's not too scare you off from your your beach vacation by all means, go invite Katie and me will come and we'll come with you. But um, it is important to know just what's out there, and it's it's fun to look at how people's attitudes have changed about bathing culture and well even sharks. Yeah, scientists at the time kept telling people there were no danger, and in fact, there were several who said that it couldn't possibly have been a shark who attacked these people because sharks, you know, don't do unprovoked attacks, and that perhaps it was a sea turtle instead, So a crazy sea turtle might not make us good a movie as jobs, but still that was one theory. Well, now we know better, and the likes of tortoises and sea turtles are relegated to whimsical animated movies and in stories about who's fast or a turtle or a rabbit, money's on the rabbit. But if you want to learn even more about sharks, shark attacks, and post Victorian beach and bathing culture, be sure to visit the website and how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think, send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com, and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot com home page.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Keener joined my fellow editor Katy Lamford. Candice, Katie. We have some mail, and not the kind of mail that we like to read on the air. We have an actual tangible piece of mail, a mysterious package. It's it's a box, and so we opened this box. We were going to do it live with everyone listening, but we decided that since we didn't really know what was in it, we didn't want to alarm anyone with our girl ish screams and cries. So we opened this box and inside is a a jar, and inside the jar, we've got a pair of bloodied, shredded swim trunks for one thing, and a newspaper clipping looks like an obituary, a key chain and a copper tag that says www Dot Frenzied waters dot com that's attached to what I presume is an artificial shark tooth. And we were delighted. We didn't know what this was, and then our producer told us it's actually a marketing campaign from Discovery. So we're still excited, but it's it's not as written with mystery and intrigue as we had thought and hoped. No. Shark Week two thousand nine, UM starting on August two, I think this year and Shark Week, like um, Black Friday is a holiday that everyone celebrates. You just you have to get into it, you know, uh, with all of your heart and mind and enthusiasm. And so we're bringing a bit of a historical perspective to Shark Week two thousand nine. So without further ado, we are going to enlighten everyone about the nineteen sixteen shark tacks on the Jersey Shore. And if you've seen Jaws, it was actually based on this story. So go back to July nineteen sixteen, UM, starting July one actually, so getting ready for into Pendance Day weekend, and there is a heat wave going on and also a polio epidemic and everyone is heading to the seashore for the weekend. And you should know that beach culture was really starting to take off in this era in history. Starting around the mid to late eighteen hundred, people began flocking to the beach. For one, it was cheap. For another reason, there were different modes of transportation that you could take to get there. It was pretty accessible. You could go buy a horse and wagon train automobile if you were lucky enough to have one. You could even walk and sun and surf and sand were a nice respite from insects and smoky, dusty industrial cities. And even though you know the beach was somewhat appealing, there were some things that weren't too appealing about it. For instance, people were really cumbersome bathing suits, sometimes made of wool and other heavy fabrics that well, um, they didn't show off to but they also uh sort of weighted people down. Picture yourself swimming in a woolen dress women and for men it was like a large tank top with shorts, and so they would absorb water and make movement very difficult. And there weren't really lifeguards as we think of lifeguards today until the nineteen hundred's. Usually it was police officers who would stand in place and pretend to be lifeguards for a little while while people bobbed in the ocean, and different oceanside resorts would section off their areas of the beach with poles and rope and people would hold onto the ropes and floating water in an activity called Fannie dunking you too, like I really can't wait to hit the beach right now and go hang on a rope. I know I'm stop. And then in the nineteen hundreds it became even more popular to go to the beach, and lifeguarding became a specialized profession. And not only that, but resorts would advertise that they actually had lifeguards, which would draw more people because people thought, well, hey, it'll be safe to get a Fanny dunk there's a lifeguard there. Some even had medical pavilions with registered nurses to help care for them. So it was a wonderful place to be. The seaside and the Jersey Shore was really popular. Something like eleven presidents the time had gone to stay, Mary Todd, Lincoln went to visit um. President Garfield actually asked to go there when he was dying from infection. So let's imagine the scene. We've got the white sandy expanses of the Jersey Shore coastal beach sides like Asbury Park, Spring Lake, Seaside Heights, Beach Haven, Atlantic City. People are out and they're colorful woolen separate, bathing in the sun. Perhaps some striped umbrellas here and their general merriment, maybe even a m a good smelling treat or to wafting in the air when that mary scene would soon be interrupted by grizzly crimes of nature. Charles Epting van Sant was there with his family at Beach Haven, wh was on the south coast of New Jersey. He was a University of Pennsylvania grad. He'd just gotten a job at a Philadelphia brokerage firm, and he was a pretty popular guy. Um. He's part of the glee club and on the varsity golf team, and he came from a very old family, and he and his father and his sisters were there at beach even for the weekend, and it was customary for young men to go for a pre dinner dip in the ocean, and Charles swam right out. But his dick of the ocean didn't exactly go as planned. He started crying out, and while some beach combers thought he was calling out for a dog, he was actually crying out for help because a shark had latched on to his thigh. And there was a lifeguard actually there at the time, Alexander Ott, who had been on the Olympic swim team for the US, and he swam right out, grabbed Van Sant and brought him in. But by the time he brought him in, Van Sant was missing most of his leg and he bled to death shortly thereafter. Yeah, the sharks bite had suffered an artery in his sign and so he led out pretty quickly. But people viewed this largely as an isolated instant, and for a few days things were calmed at the beach. And while today that sort of accident might scare people away from the beach for a very long time, it didn't really make that huge of an impact. You know, we have the local news at night broadcast scary stories and and put people on alert, but most of the headlines of the day were occupied with the events of World War One, so people weren't too frightened of the beach. The story was on page eighteen of the New York Times, it didn't even hit the front page. And people largely conceived of shark attacks as occurring in more southern Atlantic waters, like around Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, so they thought it was an anomaly, this one incident. It wouldn't happen again, but that would not be the case. On July six at Spring Like, a Swiss bellboy named Charles Brewder, who worked at the six and Sussex Hotel, went out for a swim, and he was very well liked among staff and guests, and he actually sent most of his his wages home to his Swiss mother because her other son was at war. So he went out to a special part of the beach that had been cornered off for employee swim and all of a sudden he went under and there was a large red patch in the ocean, which led a woman to tell the lifeguard that she thought a canoe had flipped over red canoe, and no one had seen a red canoe, so for a couple of minutes there was confusion, and then they realized that no, it was blood and it was Charles Brewder, and the lifeguards swam out in a boat and brought him back, and he was missing both of his legs below the knee, his bones were severed, his foot was missing, he had severe wounds to his abdomen. And because this was such a public rescue and public display of how badly mulled his body was, people became much more aware and fright of the sharks that may be cruising along the Jersey shore. Spring Lake was a much richer, more elite little resort town than Beach Haven was, so this made even more headlines. Now people were starting to come to because it wasn't just attacking the southern Jersey shore. No, the shark was targeting the rich. But the shark knew no boundaries of class because whether it was the same shark or a different one. One actually swim inward toward Mattawan Creek, which was a tidal river area off the coast. This was fresh water, and on July twelve, a twelve year old boy named Lester Stillwell was attacked, and Lester actually had epilepsy, so when he went under in Mattawan Creek, which was only about thirty ft wide and forty ft deep, his friends thought that perhaps he'd had a seizure and he'd gone under the surface and they needed help getting him out, So they raised town and came back with a dry cleaner named Stanley Fisher. Not to be confused with the literary theorys Stanley Fish totally different man. So he starts using it a pole to poke around the water to try to locate his body, and he actually discovers that there's a shark lurking in the depth. So imagine the surprise a shark in fresh water. People are panicking, and one of the accounts I had read said that they had um stretched a net in the creek beforehand so the body wouldn't wash out to see not knowing that there was a shark, and the net would also keep the shark in, and that maybe why it stayed there and was able to attack Fisher instead of swimming back to the ocean. But Fisher dove in and he was attacked. The shark latched onto his right thigh, and another man who had a boat actually tried to fend off the shark with one of the oars, and he fended the shark off successfully and got Fisher out, but Fisher later died. So now we're up to four deaths the same summer and the same general part of the country. And then we go about half mile up from where Lester Stillwell was killed and we have victim number five, Joseph Dunn. The shark bit his leg, but he actually was rescued. At this point, Mattawan residents had kind of wised up to what was going on and he was able to be saved. He was taken to the hospital, and they had said that he would never walk again and his limbs would probably be amputated, but he ended up keeping both legs, which was great news. And he was the only survivor in that series of brutal shark attacks. And people were really just freaked out at this point, and even President Woodrow Wilson had had enough. He launched a war on the Sea of Terror, and he sent in the Navy and the Coast Guard to help deal with the problem. And I'm not exactly sure what they did if they were on the lookout for sharks swimming along the beach, or if they were actively trying to capture sharks, But people thought that the Great White was out and about riaking havoc on humanity, and civilians took up their own sort of vigilante justice and shot, abbed, and dynamited Mattawan Creek and started shooting sharks whenever they found them, wherever they found them. There were several cases of civilians shooting sharks in the head and then getting their pictures taken for the newspaper, and clearly that would not fly today, but to put it into context at the time and the fear that was going on, it seemed appropriate and a battle event and heroic. And there's actually an unbelievable part of the story, but believable because it is true. There's a man named Michael Schleisser who was a taxidermist and supposedly a Barnum and Bailey circus lion tamer, and while he was out fishing, he actually caught a shark in Raritan Bay. It was a great white and supposedly when they opened it they found human flesh inside about fifteen pounds. So it was that great white the terror of Mattawan Creek or was it something else. Scientists today and a theologist who look back and examine that summer and that behave you're of different types of sharks and who the likely as culprits would be, are are not exactly sure that that's the mark of a great white. Even Fabian Crusto, who you may know from his father Jacques Crusto, said that it was unlikely a great white would be in freshwater. It's more likely the work of a bull shark, which is only one of only two species that can go in in fresh waters. Bull Sharks also have really small eyes, much smaller than other sharks, so their vision is pretty limited, which is why they like to swim near the shore because they can just sort of bump into things instead. And in fact, their hunting method is called the bump and bite because they will bump into something, figure out what it is from the bump, and then bite it. So I don't believe you. If a bull shark butts into you, things are not going to go well. Get away quickly. And after Katrina, actually a bunch of bull sharks were found um in Lake pontcher Train and they live in several freshwater lakes. And of course the purpose of this shark podcast is to talk about a particular moment in history and to think about the way that beach culture and attitude toward the ocean and the ocean predators have changed throughout time. It's not too scare you off from your your beach vacation by all means, go invite Katie and me will come and we'll come with you. But um, it is important to know just what's out there, and it's it's fun to look at how people's attitudes have changed about bathing culture and well even sharks. Yeah, scientists at the time kept telling people there were no danger, and in fact, there were several who said that it couldn't possibly have been a shark who attacked these people because sharks, you know, don't do unprovoked attacks, and that perhaps it was a sea turtle instead, So a crazy sea turtle might not make us good a movie as jobs, but still that was one theory. Well, now we know better, and the likes of tortoises and sea turtles are relegated to whimsical animated movies and in stories about who's fast or a turtle or a rabbit, money's on the rabbit. But if you want to learn even more about sharks, shark attacks, and post Victorian beach and bathing culture, be sure to visit the website and how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think, send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com, and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot com home page.