3. The British gave us the first written account of a shark attack in 1580.
For centuries, British seamen had been terrified by stories of shark-infested waters and deadly attacks. For the most part, however, such stories were passed on orally. This – and the fact that most sailors were illiterate – means that the earliest example of sharks being written about in the English languages dates back to only 1580. Unsurprisingly, the account was penned by an officer, probably the only man on his ship who knew how to write. And just as unsurprisingly, the account is gruesome and over-the-top.
The anonymous sailor wrote of a shark attack he had personally witnessed whilst sailing from Portugal to India. He recalled that one of the men fell overboard during a storm. “We threw him a block of wood attached to a rope, specially provided for this purpose. Our crew began to bring in the man, who had managed to catch the block, but, when he was no more than half the range of a musket away, there appeared from beneath the surface a big monster known as tiburon; it rushed at the man and cut him to pieces right before our eyes. It was certainly a terrible death.”
From then on, as more and more literate men went to sea, ships’ logs start being filled with similar accounts. In some cases, the attacks were fatal, but not always. In one notable example, the captain of a ship called the Ayrshire fell overboard. A shark saw him floundering and headed towards the stricken officer, ready to attack. The captain’s dog jumped into the water to rescue his master. The pair made it safely back to the boat – though, according to the ship’s log, the dog’s tail was sliced clean off by the shark.