26 
SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED. 
consequence, strictly forbidden ; in spite of which several 
men went into the water one evening. Suddenly one of 
them screamed for help, and when several others rushed to 
his assistance they found that an octopus had seized him 
by the leg by four of its arms whilst it clung to the rock 
with the rest. The soldiers brought the * monster ' home 
with them, and out of revenge they boiled it alive and ate 
it. This adventure accounted for the disappearance of the 
other soldiers." 
The Rev. W. Wyatt Gill, who for more than a quarter 
of a century has resided as a missionary amongst the in- 
habitants of the Hervey Islands, and with whom I had the 
pleasure of conversing on this subject when he was in 
England in 1875, described in the Leisure Hour of April 
20th, 1872, another mode of attack by which an octopus might 
deprive a man of life. A servant of his went diving for 
"poulpes" (octopods), leaving his son in charge of the 
canoe. After a short time he rose to the surface, his arms 
free, but his nostrils and mouth completely covered by a 
large octopus. If his son had not promptly torn the 
living plaister from off his face he must have been suffo- 
cated — a fate which actually befel some years previously a 
man who foolishly went diving alone. 
In AppletorHs American jfournal of Science and Arty 
January 31st, 1874, a correspondent describes an attack 
by an octopus on a diver who was at work on the wreck of 
a sunken steamer off the coast of Florida. The man, a power- 
ful Irishman, was helpless in its grasp, and would have been 
drowned if he had not been quickly brought to the surface ; 
for when dragged on to the raft from which he had 
descended, he fainted, and his companions were unable to 
pull the creature from its hold upon him until they had 
dealt it a sharp blow across its baggy body. 
