A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.
On Wednesday 7 January 1925, Jack Bruce, a diver working for the City of Vancouver, encountered a 6' 2" long shark while diving at the Second Narrows in Burrard Inlet. The shark circled Bruce, who fortunately had an iron bar for the work he was doing on the water mains. He prodded the shark with the bar in an attempt to get it to go away, but this just agitated the beast. After struggling with it for about twenty minutes, Bruce managed to kill the shark with the bar. A few days earlier, he managed to wriggle free from the clutches of an octopus in the same location.
While Jack Bruce's story is exceptional, it wasn't the first shark attack in Vancouver. In 1905, eight year-old Harry Menzies was nearly eaten by an 11' 4" long shark at the mouth of False Creek.
Source: Vancouver Daily Province, 8 January 1925, via The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver (Harbour Publishing, 2011)
