1640, First English-Language Documented Human Death from a Shark Encounter in North America -- St. Mary's, Maryland

Shark attacks on humans are rare, but they have taken up residence in our collective consciousness as a fear generator, bolstered by seminal Hollywood works such as the iconic Jaws franchise. This collective fear started building much earlier, maybe in 1916 when there was a series of deadly attacks in New Jersey, as chronicled in the book 12 Days of Terror by Richard Fernicola, a physician and local historian. But the first account of a death by shark in North America goes back even further, to 1640.

Previously, the Global Shark Attack File listed the earliest record of a North American fatal event as 1642, which Fernicola reported from the 1809 writings of Washington Irving. But then Kent Mountford went digging in letters to Rome from Father Copley, a Jesuit Priest detailing missionary work where he happened across another account. Per the letter: “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.”

Mountford and Fernicola spent six months researching Copley’s account before publishing their findings in 2023, which Kent will share with us.

As a senior estuarine researcher with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Kent Mountford was an early architect of the science behind the Chesapeake Bay Program, the multi-state and federal effort to restore the Bay. He retired in 2000. By then, he had already begun penning a column for the Bay Journal. Dubbed “Past as Prologue,” it often explored the region’s environmental history.