The first fatal encounter in North America was recorded by a Jesuit priest, explain Kent Mountford and Richard G Fernicola.
The year was 1640, and it was Assumptiontide in the Catholic-founded settlement of St Mary’s City in mid-Atlantic North America. August was hot for people in 17th-century garb, and an Englishman, followed by his companions, headed to the nearby St George’s River to cool off. He waded in alone and was suddenly seized by “a huge fish”. It bit him violently, and he soon died.
This swimmer that afternoon was the victim of the earliest known fatal shark attack in North America. The event was recorded in Latin by Fr Thomas Copley SJ, who ministered chiefly to the English colonists of Saint Mary’s City, in the settlement’s annual letter to Rome. This letter was translated into English by three priests during the 19th century.
Fr Copley was an important contributor to the establishment of Catholicism in America; the son of a noble recusant family who kept the faith in opposition to the Protestant takeover. He is honoured today by having his name on Copley Hall, a co-educational student residence at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
Sponsored by Lord Baltimore, the colony was planted in 1634 as a refuge from anti-Catholic persecution in England. It would prosper for decades along the western side of Chesapeake Bay, America’s largest estuary, and near the mouth of the Potomac River. It began with 150 men and women of Catholic, Protestant and likely agnostic persuasion.
This diversity was to become the first bastion of true religious freedom in America. St Mary’s City would, in the next century, give its name to this river and the name would persist in the name of the English colony and eventually the modern state of Maryland.
In 1640, the settlement was in its sixth year, having built a rudimentary fort to house and protect people against outside threats; it was ministered to by Fr Copley and four other fellow Jesuits. It is likely that the victim of the shark attack was an indentured servant, bound for some years.
As many as one in three colonists died in their first year. Copley sought to welcome this man into the Catholic faith, where salvation was promised and the Jesuits’ 17th-century medical training with promising herbal remedies, cleanliness and prayerful support offered security.
Our man remains nameless, but seems to have had something of a chequered past prior to the attack. With Copley’s ministry “in the time when he had meditated better thoughts, he had obtained rosary beads for himself”.
Nevertheless, he seems to have fallen away quickly enough: “Though he had felt some internal drawings of God, and had for some time made use of means which seemed to lead towards conversion, yet on a certain day determined to cast aside all such thoughts and go back to the customary paths of his earlier life.”
The man seems to have ground up his rosary beads, which were probably nuts or dried berries threaded with string – far away from Europe, ceramic beads and metal chains were in short supply – and to have mixed the combustible powder in with his pipe tobacco, “often boasting that he was eating up his
Ave Marias”.
As Copley’s letter explains, “The divine vengeance did not let this irreverence go long unpunished, for scarcely a year had passed… when a spirit of more sacrilegious ribaldry than usually possessed him was noticed by his companions.”
It continues: “On his going to the river in the afternoon… scarcely had he touched the water when a huge fish having suddenly seized the wicked man, before he could retreat to the bank, tore away, at a bite, a
large portion of his thigh, by the pain of which most merited laceration, the unhappy wretch was in a short time hurried away from the living.”
With his groin arteries severed, he cannot have lived long. But what sort of “huge fish” was this? We are certain it was a shark. “Shark” was not a word current in English then, and the Marylanders had likely had never heard it. In a Spanish account of an enslaved Caribbean Indian pearl diver killed when forced to swim among sharks, Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) also used “huge fish” and other local names.
The first use of “shark” in English seems to occur on 11 July, 1442, in the journal of Thomas Beckington, Bishop of Bath and Wells and secretary to King Henry VI, relating a tale in which “about the seventh hour by estimation a fish called the Shark gave chase to the ship”. His account is not part of this story, but it suggests that “shark” may have been current among seafarers, but not in the wider population.
In the next century, English fishermen had a “straunge and merveylous fyshe” tear into their mackerel nets between Calais and Dover on 16 June, 1559. Nets destroyed and catch lost, they hauled this 17-foot “fyshe” to Billingsgate, where it appeared in a “broadside” printed by Thomas Colwell of Fleet Street. The huge creature was then exhibited to the paying public, skinned and eaten.
Among its visitors were “sertayne men of Captaine Hawkinses [the English adventurer John Hawkins] who doth call it a sharke”. This was a big event, and in 1610 earned an oblique reference in Shakespeare’s The Tempest a year later: “A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man.”
Still, the word “shark” or sharke” was obscure to the American English settlers, and Fr Copley, so it remained “huge fish”.
Our first North American fatality set us off on months of inquiry into human-shark interactions in Chesapeake Bay, where it was widely claimed no shark attacks or fatalities had ever occurred. We recorded nearly 200 interactions: sightings, captures, terrified bathers, and possibly seven fatalities. Many sharks were identified, measured or weighed, and the evidence was that the Saint Mary’s predator was a bull shark Carcharhinus leucas, which was the Chesapeake’s most commonly reported species from 1845 to 2010. Considering all sharks, most were present in August. The average size was 8.07 feet and average weight about 347 pounds, or around 150 kg). Our work suggests that sharks usually attack prey smaller than themselves, so our victim, an average mid-17th-century colonist was probably about five and a half feet tall and therefore fair game.
In 1640, we doubt the bull shark thought about its quick meal, but Fr Copley ended his letter by concluding that it must have been “divine justice bringing it about that he, who a little while before had boasted that he had eaten up his Ave Maria beads, should see his own flesh devoured, even as he was yet living.”
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.