His physical excitement seemed to desert him suddenly, and leave him
aimless and helpless. He turned shoreward, stumbling and wading towards
his two companions.
He looked back again, and there were now two boats floating, and the one
farthest out at sea pitched clumsily, bottom upward.
III.
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.
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