So it was _Haploteuthis ferox_ made its appearance upon the Devonshire
coast. So far, this has been its most serious aggression. Mr. Fison's
account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing casualties
to which I have already alluded, and the absence of fish from the
Cornish coasts that year, points clearly to a shoal of these voracious
deep-sea monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal coastline.
Hunger migration has, I know, been suggested as the force that drove
them hither; but, for my own part, I prefer to believe the alternative
theory of Hemsley. Hemsley holds that a pack or shoal of these
creatures may have become enamoured of human flesh by the accident of
a foundered ship sinking among them, and have wandered in search of it
out of their accustomed zone; first waylaying and following ships, and
so coming to our shores in the wake of the Atlantic traffic. But to
discuss Hemsley's cogent and admirably-stated arguments would be out
of place here.
It would seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the
catch of eleven people--for so far as can be ascertained, there were
ten people in the second boat, and certainly these creatures gave
no further signs of their presence off Sidmouth that day. The coast
between Seaton and Budleigh Salterton was patrolled all that evening
and night by four Preventive Service boats, the men in which were armed
with harpoons and cutlasses, and as the evening advanced, a number
of more or less similarly equipped expeditions, organised by private
individuals, joined them. Mr. Fison took no part in any of these
expeditions.
About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of
miles out at sea to the south-east of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen
waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats
at once hurried towards the alarm. The venturesome occupants of the
boat, a seaman, a curate, and two schoolboys, had actually seen the
monsters passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most
deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating,
five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the
blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep,
rolling over and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation
towards the south-east.
These people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one
boat drew alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet
of eight or nine boats collected together, and from them a tumult,
like the chatter of a marketplace, rose into the stillness of the
night. There was little or no disposition to pursue the shoal, the
people had neither weapons nor experience for such a dubious chase,
and presently--even with a certain relief, it may be--the boats turned
shoreward.
And now to tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole
astonishing raid. We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent
movements of the shoal, although the whole south-west coast was now
alert for it. But it may, perhaps, be significant that a cachalot
was stranded off Sark on June 3. Two weeks and three days after this
Sidmouth affair, a living _Haploteuthis_ came ashore on Calais sands.
It was alive, because several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a
convulsive way. But it is probable that it was dying. A gentleman named
Pouchet obtained a rifle and shot it.
That was the last appearance of a living _Haploteuthis_. No others
were seen on the French coast. On the 15th of June a dead body, almost
complete, was washed ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat
from the Marine Biological station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth,
picked up a rotting specimen, slashed deeply with a cutlass wound. How
the former specimen had come by its death it is impossible to say. And
on the last day of June, Mr. Egbert Caine, an artist, bathing near
Newlyn, threw up his arms, shrieked, and was drawn under. A friend
bathing with him made no attempt to save him, but swam at once for
the shore. This is the last fact to tell of this extraordinary raid
from the deeper sea. Whether it is really the last of these horrible
creatures it is, as yet, premature to say. But it is believed, and
certainly it is to be hoped, that they have returned now, and returned
for good, to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which they
have so strangely and so mysteriously arisen.