A Monster Tale?
In April of 1863, the Montreal Ocean Steamship
Company’s ship Anglo Saxon, stuffed with emigrants from England and cargo, ran
ashore in thick fog on the southeastern tip of Newfoundland, where wind and
waves battered it to pieces and claimed nearly 300 lives.
Not long after, three divers were sent down to try
to recover valuable items.
One of those divers told the Bangor Commercial
newspaper in 1893 what happened next.Diving alone, he said he was inside the
wreck moving some bales around when he saw “a huge creature moving toward the
vessel” I had
never seen anything like it before,” he said. “It seemed to be several feet
high and about eight feet long and it had on each side an enormous arm.”
He said it had
countless little legs, a mottled brown color and two shining black eyes, along
with two “supple horns, each resembling an enormous whip.”
“A numb terror seized me,” the diver said, and
he quickly moved to depart from the ship so he could be hauled back to the
surface.
“But,
as if knowing what I intended, this brute, looking straight at me with its
frightful, motionless eyes, walked or rather crawled directly at me,” he said.
As
he stepped onto the rocky floor beside the wreckage, the diver said, “the two writhing
horns were twining about me and untwining. Then he would touch me with these
and sweep them up and down as if feeling what kind of prey I was.”
“Suddenly and without
any warning,” he said, “the monster threw out one of its arms and seized me
below the shoulder. I felt as if my bones were being crushed.”
He resisted, but the
more he struggled, the worse the pain he felt. At the end of each arm, the
creature had a claw that “opened and shut convulsively,” he said, adding that
he could see “two rows of shining white teeth” in its mouth in front of him.
He said he pulled a knife from his belt and tried to
thrust it into the beast, but its shell was too hard.
“Those terrifying eyes” then moved, the diver said,
and the huge lobster’s arms closed around him.
Desperate, he plunged the knife into one of the
eyes. Inky fluid poured out, he said, and the creature stopped its attack, but
held on.
The diver then sliced into the other eye, blinding
the creature.
It still held on. The diver said the pain grew
unbearable and he blacked out.
The next thing he knew, he was in a skiff on the surface, hauled out by his comrades who had dived down after getting worried at his absence. They told him they’d sliced the creature’s arm off to free him.
The diver said his rescuers told him they had seen
“an awful, deep-sea lobster.”
Did it really happen? There is no way to know.
Source:
https://www.sunjournal.com/2025/02/15/deep-sea-diver-insists-a-huge-lobster-nearly-killed-him/
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