The Sea Raiders

I.

Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species
_Haploteuthis ferox_ was known to science only generically, on the
strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a
decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by
Mr. Jennings, near Land's End.

In no department of zoological science, indeed, are we quite so much in
the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods. A mere accident, for
instance, it was that led to the Prince of Monaco's discovery of nearly a
dozen new forms in the summer of 1895, a discovery in which the
before-mentioned tentacle was included. It chanced that a cachalot was
killed off Terceira by some sperm whalers, and in its last struggles
charged almost to the Prince's yacht, missed it, rolled under, and died
within twenty yards of his rudder. And in its agony it threw up a number
of large objects, which the Prince, dimly perceiving they were strange and
important, was, by a happy expedient, able to secure before they sank. He
set his screws in motion, and kept them circling in the vortices thus
created until a boat could be lowered. And these specimens were whole
cephalopods and fragments of cephalopods, some of gigantic proportions,
and almost all of them unknown to science!

It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures, living in the
middle depths of the sea, must, to a large extent, for ever remain unknown
to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by
such rare, unlooked-for accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the
case of _Haploteuthis ferox_, for instance, we are still altogether
ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the breeding-ground of
the herring or the sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are altogether
at a loss to account for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it
was the stress of a hunger migration that drove it hither out of the deep.
But it will be, perhaps, better to avoid necessarily inconclusive
discussion, and to proceed at once with our narrative.

The first human being to set eyes upon a living _Haploteuthis_--the
first human being to survive, that is, for there can be little doubt now
that the wave of bathing fatalities and boating accidents that travelled
along the coast of Cornwall and Devon in early May was due to this
cause--was a retired tea-dealer of the name of Fison, who was stopping at
a Sidmouth boarding-house. It was in the afternoon, and he was walking
along the cliff path between Sidmouth and Ladram Bay. The cliffs in this
direction are very high, but down the red face of them in one place a kind
of ladder staircase has been made. He was near this when his attention was
attracted by what at first he