I have been told, but cannot vouch for the truth of the report, that De Montfort’s propensity to write that which was not true, culminated in his committing forgery, and that he died in the galleys. But he records a statement of Captain Jean Magnus Dens, said to have been a respectable and veracious man, who, after having made several voyages to China as master of a trader, retired from a seafaring life and lived at Dunkirk. He told De Montfort that in one of his voyages, whilst crossing from St. Helena to Cape Negro, he was becalmed, and took advantage of the enforced idleness of the crew to have the vessel scraped and painted. Whilst three of his men were standing on planks slung over the side, an enormous cuttle-fish rose from the water, and threw one of its arms around two of the sailors, whom it tore away, with the scaffolding on which they stood. With another arm it seized the third man, who held on tightly to the rigging, and screamed for help. His shipmates ran to his assistance, and succeeded in rescuing him by cutting away the creature’s arm with axes and knives, but he died delirious on the following night. The captain tried to save the other two sailors by killing the animal, and drove several harpoons into it; but they broke away, and the men were carried down by the monster. The arm cut off was said to have been 25 feet long, and as thick as the mizenyard, and to have had on it suckers as big as saucepan-lids. I believe the old sea-captain’s narrative of the incident to be true: the dimensions given by De Montfort are an embellishment of his own. It is remarkable that there exists in the East a strong belief in the power of these animals to sink a ship and devour her crew. I have been told by a friend that he saw in a shop in China a picture of a cuttle-fish embracing a junk, apparently of about 300 tons burthen, and helping itself to the sailors, as one picks gooseberries off a bush. Mr. Laurence Oliphant, in his “China and Japan,” describes a Japanese show, which consisted of “a series of groups of figures carved in wood, the size of life, and as cleverly coloured as Madame Tussaud’s wax-works. One of these was a group of women bathing in the sea. One of them had been caught in the folds of a cuttle-fish; the others, in alarm, were escaping, leaving their companion to her fate. The cuttle-fish was represented on a huge scale, its eyes, eyelids, and mouth being made to move simultaneously by a man inside the head.”