The terrible news of a young man’s death after an attack by a shark off Cape Cod comes wreathed in a kind of narrative that cannot be any consolation to his family, suffering the grief of his violent taking.

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Arthur Medici, a 26-year-old from Revere, Massachusetts, died of his injuries in Cape Cod hospital at Hyannis on Saturday. He had been boogie boarding on Newcomb Hollow Beach, in Wellfleet, when onlookers saw a tail flick behind him. Joe Booth, a local fisherman and surfer, said: “I was that guy on the beach screaming, ‘Shark, shark!’ It was like right out of that movie Jaws. This has turned into Amity Island real quick out here.”

It is impossible, in the assumed arena of conflict between ourselves and the emblematical apex predator that is the great white shark, not to see such tragedy in sensational terms. But how does that help us negotiate the reality of such interactions? Not at all, I would say.

Saturday’s incident comes just weeks after a serious attack on a neighbouring Cape Cod beach, Longnook, where 61-year-old William Lytton was bitten by a great white. Lytton is in hospital in Boston, having suffered severe lacerations to his leg and torso. In July there were other shark-related incidents on New York’s Fire Island beach.

To anyone familiar with the Cape’s beautiful backshore, these stories are easily explained. In recent years there has been an exponential increase in the number of grey seals. As the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies notes, this expansion is a result of the removal of “seal bounties”, which sanctioned the killing of seals seen as a threat to fishing.

Now, with this lure of easy food, have come the sharks.

I know these beaches well, and often swim at Longnook and Newcomb Hollow. They are alluring places that allow us to interact with the vastness of the Atlantic ocean. The sandy spit of the Cape and its waters present a fragile ecosystem, where animals from giant fin whales, humpbacks and highly endangered right whales to schools of tiny sand eels as big as football fields testify to a rich and fertile sea.

It is in this contrast – wild beauty patrolled by seeming terror – that our dysfunctional relationship with nature lies.

Peter Benchley’s 1974 book, Jaws, and Steven Spielberg’s sensational 1975 film of it, may be responsible for the contemporary perversion of that connection. Famously, Benchley deeply regretted the skewed reputation he had created for the shark, and later in life attempted to make amends as an “ocean advocate”.

But our distrust of the shark reaches further back than that. Herman Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick in Massachusetts, set up a fearful image of the shark in his strange, fantastical chapter, The Whiteness of the Whale, seeing the “white gliding ghostliness of repose” and “white stillness of death in this shark”. New evidence suggests Melville himself was playing on received notions made vivid by an 18th-century painting, Watson and the Shark, depicting a young man being attacked by sharks off Havana.

In a forthcoming book The Natural History of Moby-Dick, Richard J King notes that the painting was exhibited in the Boston Athenaeum in 1850, where Melville almost certainly saw it. The naked young man looks like a surfer himself; the pallor of his body, in the jaws of the shark, is a fearful augury of the recent attacks.

But we must remember how unlikely such events are. Although 42% of shark attacks worldwide have occurred in North American waters, with 1,657 incidents recorded since 1900, only 144 unprovoked attacks to 2016 have been fatal. This year has seen 28 shark attacks in the US – 14 provoked – just two of which have been fatal.

Even to call them attacks is to assume an anthropocentric stance. The animals are merely behaving according to instinct. And they themselves are under threat, from us. Social media images of sports fishermen congratulating themselves on another kill during “shark tournaments” sit uneasily with the fact that global shark populations have declined by up to 90%, and that 70 species are classified as vulnerable or critically endangered. A hundred million sharks die each year as bycatch or are over-fished, many to make shark fin soup – as eaten by President Trump in Vietnam.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watson and the Shark, 1778, by John Singleton Copley. Photograph: National Gallery of Art/image courtesy National Gallery

As ever in the fractured meeting of human and natural history that the sea so powerfully embodies, it is our actions that come back to haunt us. In his prophetic 1979 essay The Tree, the novelist John Fowles ferociously deplored “the pollution of our seas and rivers, the extermination of the whale family and countless other crimes committed against the wild by contemporary man”. He laid the blame on “our own species’” frightened past, and our “eternal association of ignorance with fear. I do not know how else one accounts for the popularity of such recent and loathsome manifestations of a purely medieval mentality as the film Jaws, and all its unhappy spawn. The threat to us in the coming millennium lies not in nature seen as a rogue shark, but in our growing emotional and intellectual detachment from it.”

I can’t deny I look at the Cape’s beaches differently now. Surfer friends have had great whites pass directly under their boards and this summer Dennis Minsky, a naturalist on the Dolphin Fleet whalewatch boats, found himself narrating such an attack for his stunned passengers.

I’ve even gotten out of the water when I saw such a shape rising out of the surf. But I decline to demonise that scything dorsal fin. It does not represent death, but life on a grand scale. It connects us with the sea, rather than turning us away from it. It is part of our world, the emblem of an exquisite, ancient animal with whom we are lucky enough to share those deep, blue-grey waters.