The Country of the Blind

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 coast-line.  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 market-place, 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 carcass, 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 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.