Watson and the Shark records something that really happened. In 1749, fourteen year old Brook Watson was swimming in Havana harbor when a shark took his right leg below the knee. His shipmates pulled him out alive, and almost thirty years later he paid John Singleton Copley to paint the day.
Copley, who had only recently moved from Boston to London, showed the canvas at the Royal Academy in 1778, and it helped win him a place in the Academy. The event is real. The picture built around it is more complicated.
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Copley was not in Havana in 1749. He painted the scene almost thirty years later in London, working from maps and prints, and some of his choices were deliberate. In his first sketch, every sailor in the boat is white. In the finished canvas, the man standing highest in the group, the one who has just thrown the rope to the boy, is Black.
The shark is the other surprise. Copley had never seen a tiger shark, and it shows. The animal in the water has strange lips, an odd ear and nostrils no shark has, while the harbor behind it was built with care from maps and prints of Havana. The man was real. The place was researched. The monster was guessed.
Then there is the man who paid for it. Watson waited almost thirty years to order this picture, and in the end he did not keep it for himself: he left it to a school. The sailor at the top of the boat and the man who paid are both explained below.
What really happened in Havana in 1749?
A shark bit Brook Watson in Havana harbor in 1749, when he was fourteen. He was working on his uncle's merchant ship, which traded between Massachusetts and the West Indies, according to the Bank of England Museum, and he had gone swimming while the ship lay in port. His shipmates pulled him out of the water. By then the shark had taken his right leg below the knee.
He lived, and he went on. For the rest of his life he walked with a wooden leg. He built a career in London as a merchant and a director of the Bank of England, served as Lord Mayor of London in 1796 and was made a baronet in 1803.
That is the event the painting records. The painting adds a good deal to it, and the additions start with the boat.
What You'll Discover
Who stands at the top of the boat.
What Copley had to invent.
What Watson put on his coat of arms.
Where Watson left the painting.