Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Final Affliction
**Content warning: Distressing footage and descriptions of shark attack.**
People are still being rocked to the core over ‘shark attack footage’ of a man being eaten alive by a great white.
Not many people can get brutally attacked by a shark and live to tell the tale, but scuba diver and underwater filmmaker and photographer Henri Bource did.
Living in Hawthorn East, Australia at the time, Bource went out to sea – aged 29 – to capture some content. Little did he know just how life-changing the day out would turn out to be.
Accompanied by his friends – who were experienced divers – Bource travelled to Lady Julia Percy island – ‘a remote off-shore volcanic island located 22km from Port Ferry’ – to film seals and go spear-fishing on Sunday, 29 November, 1964.
The area was plagued by the legendary tale of an over 20ft great white shark nicknamed ‘Big Ben’. Locals claim they’ve been attacked by the shark, some with scars to prove it.
The filmmaker entered the water at 12.45pm, shooting content before coming back to the boat. However, unsatisfied, Bource decided to return to the sea at around 1.15pm, accompanied by two other divers armed with spears.
The trio found seals and Bource focused in on a bull seal.
The divers began to swim back up, Bource rising to the top and breaking the surface first.
But suddenly he felt ‘a force’ hit him.
According to Peter Coster – one of the other divers on the trip – he heard Bource scream ‘for his mother’.
In an article for The Daily Telegraph, Coster recalled: “Three of us dived in as the boat came closer to water that was skimmed with blood.
“Reaching for Bource I saw through the blood that one of his legs was missing. The femoral artery was pumping the blood from his body and would keep doing so until he either died or there was no more.
“We held him up, his face already dead white, as hands reached down. ”
The shark came back ‘at least five times’ and specifically targeted Bource, even when the two other divers jumped back in to try and fend it off with the dive spears and Bource’s girlfriend Jill Radcliffe took to the sea too.
Bource lost ‘half the blood in his body,’ according to Coster.
Miraculously, Bource made a ‘full recovery’ and returned to the water ‘weeks’ later.
In an interview about the ordeal, the filmmaker noted he didn’t blame the shark as it was ‘simply acting according to its nature’ and even viewed losing a leg as lucky, as he still managed to survive.
Bource went on to make a documentary – Savage Shadows – about the attack.
Some outlets report that actual footage of the shark attack was included in the documentary, although this is disputed. Bource reconstructed at least some parts of the incident, covering his missing leg with animal blood to create the effect that it had just been bitten off.
Either way, it makes for a horrifying and gut-curdling watch.