belief for the fable of the Kraken. [Illustration: Fig. 12.—Facsimile of De Montfort’s “_Poulpe colossal_.”] The Norwegian bishop was a conscientious, if over-credulous man: but the same cannot be said of Denys de Montfort, who, half a century later not only professed to believe in the existence of the Kraken, but also of another gigantic animal distinct from it; a “colossal _poulpe_,” or octopus, compared with which Pliny’s was a mere pigmy. In a drawing fitter to decorate the outside of a showman’s caravan at a fair than seriously to illustrate a work on natural history,[35] he depicted this tremendous cuttle-fish as throwing its arms over a three-masted vessel, snapping off its masts, tearing down the yards, and on the point of dragging it to the bottom, if the crew had not succeeded in cutting off its immense limbs with cutlasses and hatchets. De Montfort had good opportunities of obtaining information, for he was at one time an assistant in the geological department of the Museum of Natural History in Paris; and wrote a work on conchology,[36] besides that already referred to. But it appears to have been his deliberate purpose to cajole the public; for it is reported that he exclaimed to M. Defrance: “If my entangled ship is accepted, I will make my ‘colossal poulpe’ overthrow a whole fleet.” Accordingly we find him gravely declaring[37] that one of the great victories of the British navy was converted into a disaster by the monsters which are the subject of his history. He boldly asserted that the six men-of-war captured from the French by Admiral Rodney in the West Indies on the 12th of April 1782, together with four British ships detached from his fleet to convoy the prizes, were all suddenly engulphed in the waves on the night of the battle under such circumstances as showed that the catastrophe was caused by colossal cuttle-fishes, and not by a gale or any ordinary casualty. Unfortunately for De Montfort the inexorable logic of facts not only annihilates his startling theory, but demonstrates the reckless falsity of his plausible statements. The captured vessels did not sink on the night of the action, but were all sent to Jamaica to refit, and arrived there safely. Five months afterwards, however, a convoy of nine line-of-battle-ships (amongst which were Rodney’s prizes), one frigate, and about a hundred merchantmen, were dispersed, whilst on their voyage to England, by a violent storm, during which some them unfortunately foundered. The various accidents which preceded the loss of these vessels was related in evidence to the Admiralty by the survivors, and official documents prove that De Montfort’s fleet-destroying _poulpe_ was unequivocally a “devil-fish of fiction,” and that the “devil-fish of fact” had no part in the disaster he ascribes to it.[38]