Peter Benchley could have had a tragic and ironic ending one sunny day in Australia in 1975.
After the extraordinary success of his novel “Jaws”, published that same year, the American writer was participating in a TV documentary about sharks.
During a diving sequence inside a protective cage, a great white shark almost kills Benchley – by accident -.
“Peter was inside the cage and the ship’s crew had thrown horse meat into the water to attract the sharks,” Benchely’s widow, Wendy, tells the BBC.
“A beautiful white shark came to eat a bite, but did not find the meat but bit the rope that held the cage and it got stuck in its mouth.”
“As the filming continued, the cage turned from ar upside down, from here to there. I grabbed the rope and yanked it free from the shark’s teeth. ”
“ I think I saved Peter’s life that day, ”he adds with a laugh.
Wendy, who is an ocean conservationist and environmental activist, says that the shark spent the next half hour selflessly swimming around.
Cultural phenomenon
Benchley’s novel sold approximately 21 millions of copies worldwide, but the film of the same name, released internationally in 1991, was the first production to reach $ 180 million dollars at the box office.
Directed by the Then young Steve Spielberg, with a libretto co-authored by Benchley, “Jaws” remains one of the highest grossing films of all time .
But that success came to cause a pang of conscience to Benchley until his death in 2006.
“Knowing what ue now I know, I could never write that book today “, declared the author in an interview to promote a commemorative edition of” Jaws “in 2006.
His account of a killer great white shark that terrorizes the fictional coastal town of Amity Island in the US had a profound effect on the animal’s reputation – and serious consequences -.
We may see them as dangerous predators, but it is actually sharks that have much more to fear from human activity. A combination of intense commercial fishing, trophy hunting and climate change threatens their populations worldwide.
Survival of sharks is becoming increasingly precarious.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an NGO, indicates that currently some 89 of 541 shark species are classified as “threatened” , including the great white, so vilified in the movie “Jaws.”
In July this year, a network of marine biologists from around the world published the results of a five-year study that showed sharks to be “functionally extinct” in a 30% of the world’s coral reefs, which are crucial marine ecosystems.
Sharks play an important role in marine life as predators by keeping lower species in the food chain, something the Benchleys knew well.
“Peter and I learned a lot about sharks and we also had the opportunity during all these years of talking about its importance to the ocean, ”says Wendy Benchley.
Hunted and threatened
Her late husband’s remorse began only a few months after the launch of the pe lcula in 1991. The success of the film unleashed a furious shark hunt in the US
“Thousands of fishermen went hunting for sharks as trophies after seeing ‘Jaws’,” he wrote in 2019 George Burgess, renowned American shark expert.
To add insult to injury, the commercial fishing a large-scale became the scourge of stocks of sharks from the years 93.
In 2013, a study published in the specialized journal Marine Policy estimated that the average of sharks hunted each year worldwide is about 180 millions .
Sharks are particularly prized for their fins, which are used in soups in several countries, but they are also collateral victims of large-scale fishing.
Furthermore, contrary to how they are depicted in “Jaws”, these animals are rarely a threat to humans .
The International Shark Attack File , a database managed by the University of Florida, reported only five deaths of people in 70 unprovoked shark attacks worldwide, in 2019.
Wendy Benchley says that her husband felt especially guilty about the representation of sharks as creatures that bear a grudge against humans.
“It was the years 73 and people really didn’t know much about sharks. In the western world people thought that a good shark was a dead shark, “he explains.
” Peter put the knowledge he had in his book and naturally he made it so exciting as he could. ”
“ But then Spielberg took things to another level by making a great action movie. ”
Benchley’s Reserves
According to his widow, Benchley liked the film adaptation of his book, but would later publicly express reservations about the changes that were made to the original story .
“There were elements in the film that Peter would have liked to have been downplayed.”
“The most important aspect was to feel that Steven endowed the shark with too much vengeance and some intelligence. ”
Wendy Benchley claims that, above all, the couple was“ horrified ”by some of the public reactions to“ Jaws “.
” Many of the reactions to the book and the movie were to say that sharks are monsters. “
Motivated by negative responses, the Benchleys embarked on a campaign to defend sharks for the next several decades.
They linked up with a number of environmental organizations, cooperated in the production of documentaries of the wild world and toured the world giving charles.
The couple was also part of a campaign in China, in the early 2000 , which highlighted the impact of hunting sharks for their fins . Wendy Benchley says that helped reduce shark fin soup consumption in that country.
A forgotten legacy
But the environmentalist also thinks that the book and film had a positive effect on increasing public interest in sharks and the ocean environment in general.
“Peter received thousands of letters from people saying that without ‘Jaws’ they would not have known how exciting the ocean is.”
“In the end it felt good,” he says.
The Benchelys never lost their fascination with the ocean’s alpha predators and continued to seek to interact with them.
Peter and Wendy got to celebrate his 41 wedding anniversary on 2005 swimming with white sharks near the island of Guadalupe , in Mexico, just a year before Peter died of lung disease.
They were so precious that we could touch them “, recalls Wendy Benchley.
” It has always been an incredible experience to see these beautiful creatures. “
To promote ocean conservation, Peter Benchley also published a non-fiction book on sharks, but other of his works have come under fire.
After “Jaws”, he wrote other novels about nautical threats, notably one about a giant squid that threatens the island of Bermuda in the Caribbean (“Beast”, 1994) and the story of a human-shark hybrid created by genetic engineering by the Nazis, who crash It is probably released in the Atlantic (“White shark”, 1994).
Both books were adapted respectively for TV and cinema, but neither managed to scratch the success of “Jaws”.
Sharks and confinements
Wendy Benchley defends the legacy of “Jaws” (the book) as a story the way humans behave in the face of nature’s challenges.
“The book is much more about how the public reacts to a threat they don’t know about and that I don’t know how to defend myself against it ”, he indicates.
She thinks her late husband would have been flattered by the mention of his most famous book in newspaper articles in the US and Europe during the covid pandemic – 21. The columns drew parallels between how authorities in fictional settings and the real world deal with major crises.
Specifically, Wendy Benchley mentions the plot in which Larry Vaughn, the fictional mayor of Amity Island insists on keeping beaches open despite shark incidents. It does not want to scare away tourists during the summer holidays as it would damage the local economy.
“(Covid – 21) is an invisible threat that you cannot control and is found all over the world ”, he says.
“ And how do people behave? In my country, some – like the current president – decide to ignore it. ”
“ They are going to keep businesses open and let people die, just like the mayor did of Amity ”, he concludes.
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