The Sea Raiders

[1] The story describes a brief period when a previously unknown sort of giant squid, which attacks humans, is encountered on the coast of Devon, England.

Legendary sea monsters include Scylla and Charybdis of Greek mythology, and the kraken of medieval times which is thought to have been a giant squid.

Previous fictional encounters with giant squids are described in chapter 59 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick of 1851, and in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas of 1870.

The arm of the boatman in Fison's boat becomes covered with tentacles: "the eyes of one of the brutes that had hold of him, glaring straight and resolute, showed momentarily above the surface."

After describing a few later incidents, the narrator suggests theories for the presence of the creatures: that hunger forced them to move away from their usual habitat in the deep sea; or that a shoal of them, after a foundering ship happened to sink amongst them, took a liking to human flesh and followed Atlantic traffic to the coast.