Sharks in the Potomac and the Man Who Punched One

In 1911, Alexandria's fishermen formed a society to fight man-eating fish. The Potomac's real shark is a bull shark, and its story starts in 1640.

Show Notes

In July 1911, the Washington Post reported that a man on the Potomac punched a shark on the nose. Days later, Alexandria's fishermen formed the Society for the Suppression of Man-Eating Fish.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2012/07/09/sharks-potomac/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

What is Ghosts of DC?

The lost and untold stories of Washington, DC. The buildings, blocks and people the city and region forgot.

The Beatles played their first American concert here. Sharks turned up in the Potomac in 1911. Ford’s Theatre collapsed in 1893 while government clerks worked inside.

Since 2012, Ghosts of DC has been digging through old newspapers, maps and archives for stories like these, from Georgetown to Anacostia and across the whole DMV. Now they’re a podcast.

Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.

Something for the Metro ride or the walk to work.

Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

Sharks in the Potomac and the Man Who Punched One
Ghosts of DC

The man punched the shark on the nose, and it fell into the water.

That's a sentence from the Washington Post. July of nineteen eleven. On the Potomac.

A few days later, the fishermen of Alexandria formed a club to deal with it.

The Society for the Suppression of Man-Eating Fish.

But the river's real shark story goes back much further. Almost three hundred years, to a death. So were there ever really sharks in the Potomac?

Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. Since twenty twelve, I've been digging up the stories this city forgot, and this one came up out of the river.

We built this one from eleven sources, from a nineteen eleven newspaper dispatch to a twenty twenty-three report in the Bay Journal. You'll find them all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

The man at the center of the Post's story was Captain Henry Simmons, of Alexandria. According to the Post, sharks had been trying to climb into small boats and drag people into the water.

And Simmons had a theory about them.

Here's how the Post put it.

The sharks are desperate, hardened, and totally without fear of human beings. They are not even scared of motorboats, he declares. Hardened. Like a gang.

So picture it. A Wednesday in July, about thirty miles down the river. Simmons is chugging along in his gasoline boat when he spots a man in a little rowboat, punching something.

It was a shark. Between fifteen and twenty feet long, the Post said. And it was trying to climb in.

Here's the Post again.

While he hurried to the batteau man's assistance, the fish made a vicious leap, and almost got over the gunwale. You know what happened next. The punch to the nose.

Check this out. The shark came back. Simmons picked up a chunk of iron and pulled alongside, and here's how he told it.

As I did, the enraged shark came to the surface, and, with gleaming eyes, again rushed toward the batteau. His mouth was open, and I could see his interior works as he lashed himself against the side of the batteau.

Then, in his words, I hit him fairly behind the ears, and, with a roar, he disappeared under the water.

A shark. Roaring.

Simmons went home to Alexandria and spread the news. Within a few days the society was formed, with the leading fishermen in town as members and Simmons as president. And he had a message.

Something must be done, before it is too late. We cannot afford to have our leading citizens attacked.

Remember, this is nineteen eleven. Five years before the Jersey Shore attacks that later helped inspire Jaws. Alexandria got its shark scare first.

But the Post wasn't the first paper to tell this story. And in the first version, the shark was a lot less impressive.

Five days before the Post, the Alexandria Gazette ran it. Same captain, same man in the boat, near a spot called Cockpit Point. The shark's head kept coming up over the side, nearly tipping the boat over. Then, the Gazette said, it finally retreated.

No size. No iron bar. No society. Three days later, the Gazette was crediting the whole thing to an old waterman.

Somewhere between the two papers, the fish grew to twenty feet.

So was there anything out there at all?

Probably. Just not that.

Most sharks die in fresh water. One kind doesn't. The bull shark. It can move between salt water and fresh, and it's turned up as far up the Mississippi as Illinois.

The Potomac is an easy commute by comparison.

In twenty thirteen, Maryland's coastal fisheries manager estimated that about ten bull sharks are caught in Chesapeake waters in an average year. And she wasn't alarmed. Here's how she put it.

I don't really find this to be particularly unusual.

That same summer, a waterman pulled two bull sharks out of his net near Point Lookout, where the Potomac meets the Bay. One of them was eight feet long.

They came up a couple hundred yards from a popular swimming spot.

Two years later, another eight-footer turned up dead in a net near Leonardtown. Real sharks. Smaller than Captain Simmons's. But real.

And yet, in twenty fifteen, Live Science reported there had never been a reported shark attack in the Chesapeake Bay or the Potomac.

Never. Eight years later, two researchers said that wasn't quite true.

In twenty ten, a former federal marine scientist named Kent Mountford wrote a history column for the Bay Journal. Almost in passing, he mentioned a death in sixteen forty. Years later, a New Jersey physician named Richard Fernicola found that column online. He'd written a whole book on the nineteen sixteen Jersey Shore attacks.

In his words, I was completely struck by it.

So here's what the two of them pieced together. It's the summer of sixteen forty, in the young Maryland colony. A laborer wades into the Saint Mary's River to cool off. The Saint Mary's runs into the Potomac, a few miles up from the Bay.

The man who wrote it down was a Jesuit priest, Father Thomas Copley, in his annual report to Rome. In Copley's telling, the swimmer was a would-be convert who had turned on the Church. He'd been grinding up his rosary beads and smoking them.

So the priest read what happened next as a judgment.

Here's how he wrote it. His words, not mine.

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 think the shark was a bull shark. And a shark scientist who has studied the Bay for the Smithsonian found that the lower Potomac, around Saint Mary's, was a bit of a hot spot for sightings.

Then they make a bigger claim. They argue this is the earliest documented fatal shark attack in North America. The usual record holder is a sixteen forty-two attack off what's now New York City.

Which may have been invented, in eighteen oh nine, by Washington Irving.

They kept going. Combing the record for the whole Chesapeake region, over the centuries, they counted one hundred eighty-one shark encounters.

As many as seven of them fatal.

So Captain Simmons got the size wrong. But the rivermen of nineteen eleven weren't imagining things.

The Potomac had its shark all along. It had been here long before they ever formed their society.

And that's the Potomac's shark. Thanks for listening to this one. You'll find plenty more where this came from at Ghosts of D C dot org.

Ghosts of DC is here to bring Washington's lost and untold stories back. This has been Ghosts of DC.