Don't Be Afraid of the Shark
Only five people have been killed in Texas waters. You probably won't be next.
With summer just around the corner and Texans thinking about heading for the beaches, what better time for a round-up of fatal shark attacks in our waters?
I am a child of Jaws — the movie came out when I was seven or eight, and unless you count Tom Sawyer, Peter Benchley’s book was the first grown-up novel I ever read. So…you might well imagine circa 1978-80, I was more than a little afraid to go in the water.
Aided by Dutch courage and testosterone, those fears had dissipated by high school, though they were somewhat reinforced by a famous non-fatal attack on a girl of about my age in the mid-1980s. It happened down near Padre, IIRC, and she lost a hand, also per memory. Per urban legend, she had been menstruating and the shark was driven to frenzy by her blood in the water.
A bull shark. Scientists believe most attacks in Texas waters come from this species, with tiger sharks second. Bulls routinely come close to shore and even up rivers: one of this species was observed in the Mississippi in Alton, Illinois. They like murky waters, too, so Galveston and its feeders are bull shark hog heaven.
Shark Fear has never gone away completely: death by shark-chomp is still in the back of my mind whenever I go for a dip, at times edging out far more mathematically probable hazards, like getting tagged by a Portuguese man o’war, stepping on a stingray, or getting caught in a rip current or undertow. Or pinched by a crab — I still have a little scar on one of my fingers from that little misadventure, and I well remember still the agony of my one and only stingray encounter, a few days after 9/11.
Athough now the chemical and hormonal factors telling me it’s okay to swim are joined by logic and reason. Per Wikipedia, which draws its numbers from the clunky if exhaustive Global Shark Attack File website, Texas waters are not exactly what you would call shark-infested, as opposed to say, Hawaii, where fatal attacks seem like an almost yearly occurrence. Here, we’ve had a mere five fatal attacks in recorded history. (Emphasis on fatal — there have been more with surviving victims.)
They are as follows:
Sometime before July 18, 1865, a Colonel Bryant of the XIII Corps of the occupying Federal army was killed by a shark while swimming near a place called “Brazos, Texas.” (Score one last victory for the forces in gray, aquatic division.)
There is not now nor ever has there been a town of that name on the coast, but it’s safe to assume this attack occurred near the mouth of the Brazos; so, it was somewhere between today’s Surfside (which was Velasco back then) and the environs of Quintana that this Yankee met his maker.
In fact, this report is so skimpy I am a little leery of including it at all, but it’s in the Global Shark Attack database…
The next occurred in 1904. I am including the clipping from the Montpelier Evening Argus here because I like the economy of the headline, and I wasn't able to find much more detail anywhere else:
Other sources say the incident occurred in Galveston; Houston seems an unlikely place for a shark attack. Maybe it was a gator that got ol’ Chester.
We also have only sketchy details about the 1911 demise of John Bloomquist. It is said he was eaten in the Galveston Ship Channel after he’d jumped in the water to save a companion.
Weird interlude…Apparently while on the stand in federal court in New York City, defending himself against charges of dealing in heroin, Galveston vice lord Sam Maceo related how in 1937 he worked with the island city’s chamber of commerce to host a beachfront swimming contest in order to refute the idea that Galveston’s waters were shark-infested. “I have lived here for about 30 years and I have never heard of a shark,” Maceo told the court.
Which is odd, because Galveston’s rep as a haven for man-eating sharks did not come from nowhere. The same year Maceo kick-started the saltwater swim meet, a 14-year-old Tulsa boy named Hal A. Thompson Jr. died after being attacked in about four feet of water, dying from shock and blood loss after a shark ripped off his right arm below the elbow and “mangled” the length of his right leg. (This is the exact scenario that terrifies me if I allow it to gain a foothold in my mind — shallow water, peaceful easy feeling, bobbing in the surf, and then whammo…)
Regarding the death of the Thompson boy, a sea salt with the wonderful name of Piggy Paige told reporters this was the first shark attack he could recall in about 25 years, with the most recent being a Spanish sailor who lost both arms after jumping overboard in the Bolivar Roads shipping lane.
Some listings include the 1947 demise of a pilot named Womack, whose transport plane crashed over the open Gulf between Brownsville and Yucatan. Per the surviving co-pilot, after several days in a life-raft, Womack lost his mind, jumped overboard, and was set upon by sharks immediately thereafter. I don’t include this one, because it happened very far from land, and that story seems a little off to me.
Which brings us to 1962, when angler Hans Fix was hit while wade-fishing on the laguna side of Padre Island. Fix lived long enough to tell rescuers and his attending doctor he’d been attacked by a shark, but the damage done to his leg was too great and he passed away from blood loss two-and-a-half hours after being pulled from waist-deep water near Andy Bowie Park. (Sometimes it’s just your time to go — the ambulance conveying Fix to the closest doctor stalled a block away from his office, necessitating transferring Fix to a second vehicle and losing vital minutes.)
Fix, 46, a machinist and former captain in the navy of the Third Reich, left five kids and a wife behind, along with a little mystery: the Valley Morning News said he’d been living in McAllen since 1943; in other words, right in the middle of the war. Was he here as a POW? Or had be exited the Kriegsmarine after 1939 and before December 7, 1941?
Two witnesses to the attack with a combined 93 years of living / working in and around Padre said this was the first fatal shark attack to their knowledge in the area, though both remembered a non-fatal attack from circa 1950 that cost a man only part of one finger.
And that was the last fatal shark attack in Texas waters. It came the same month Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, Marilyn Monroe died, and Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best in the Beatles, who were then still largely unknown outside Liverpool and Hamburg. Polio — both deaths from and vaccinations against — was still very much in the news, which also focused on strife at the Berlin Wall and battles between the Viet Cong against loyalist troops and their American advisors.
So in other words, it was a long-ass time ago in a world long-past.
I havve this theory that JAWS was perpetuated by pro-shark people to keep people out of the water. Fortunately, in all my years of salt-water swimming and floating on a raft, in Texas, Florida and Hawaiian waters, I've never seen a shark. Knocking on wood now.
I can't tell you how many times my brother and I went wade fishing with my grandfather. Despite having a cord to poke through the gills of our catches (meaning we had fish blood around us), we were never menaced by a shark. I once got "tagged" by a portugese man-o-war which was no fun but makes a good man-o-war story. If we were near the Texas City Dike (Tattoo Nat'l Park) our biggest fear was the passing oil tankers with their large wakes and the inevitable stern warning from my grandfather to "hang on to that damn rod and reel." So we survived the sharks and drowning.