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Twelve Days of Terror: A definitive Investigation of the 1916 New Jersey Shark Attacks

Amazon.com Price:  $17.87 (as of 02/05/2019 19:42 PST- Details)

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Description

Vividly told for the first time, the true-life story of the 1916 wave of shark attacks that inspired Jaws takes readers to the Jersey shore in the course of World War I, where a shark, or school of sharks, used to be feeding on bathers.
In July 1916, a time of record-setting heat and a raging polio epidemic, beachgoers along the New Jersey shore confronted a greater terror still: lurking in the water swam a shark, or perhaps several sharks, that had it appears developed a taste for human flesh. Within less than two weeks, the offending fish killed four swimmers and badly injured another, setting off a wave of panic that kept visitors well out of the water and threatened the state’s thriving tourist economy.

Officials were quick to react. President Woodrow Wilson, himself from New Jersey, sought and received $5,000 from Congress to eradicate the villain. Unsure of which species used to be to blame, commercial fishermen and state police alike destroyed each shark they encountered, even as some conspiracy-minded journalists hinted that the attacks had come what may been triggered by German U-boats plying the waters off New Jersey.

Those peculiar events of 1916 don’t seem to be much remembered today, excluding, perhaps, by fans of Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws, whose origin lies in the attacks. Richard Fernicola revives the incident with this thoroughgoing investigation, which offers solid information on the natural history and behavior of the many shark species that populate the Atlantic, and which hazards educated guesses as to which more or less shark did the fatal mischief–and why. –Gregory McNamee

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