Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 June 1892 — A MAN-EATINC OYSTER. [ARTICLE]

A MAN-EATINC OYSTER.

(t 1* Six Feet Ln( and Idea In Walt for the Pearl-Divers. “Your wealthy ladies of Chicago who assemble at evening parties and soirees In magnificent costumes covered with fine pearls know little or absolutely nothing, perhaps, about the many dangers encountered in gathering those pearls from the sea,” remarked J. G. Danvers, of London, England, at the Tremont House yesterday, says the Chicago Herald. “I was on a trip along the coast of Zanzibar, Africa, a year ago, when I learned that sea-pearl fishing is not a trade for men of weak hearts to follow. The pearls are gathered at the bottom of the sea by divers. The reason a man with a weak heart is not fit for the work is because the stopped breath and the pressure of ninety feet of* sea water, with its weight of six-ty-two pounds to the cubic foot, will bring on palpitation of the heart and burst the weaker vessels, causing distressing and often dangerous hemorrhages. But the divers are all stalwart savages, in such rugged health that the physical danger never occurs to them.

“Two dangers constantly menace the diver. Wherever the oyster grows there also thrives the giant tridachna, a monstrous bivalve, whose shell is from four to six feet in length, firmly anchored to the bottom. It lies with its scalloped shells yawning a foot or more apart. Immediately anything touches it the shells snap together, and once these large shells are closed not a dozen men out of water could get them apart, far less the single diver, fifteen fathoms deep, who may have dropped into the capacious mouth or have carelessly put his hand within its shells while groping in the gloom. “If such a fate befall a diver there is only one thing for him to do, and that is to amputate himself from the enormous mollusk and rise to the surface, fainting, bloody, and mangled. Those savages will fight anything from a lion to a python on land, but they haven’t the courage to run against a bivalve under ninety feet of water and stand the chance of those yawning shells closing in on an arm or a leg and crushing the bones to splinters. “If the monstrous mollusk should close down and catch the diver’s head, of course he would never know what killed him. Ilis head would be mashed to a pulp, and it would go off as if severed by a guillotine. I saw only one native who had been caught by one of these molluSks. It had closed down on his left hand, and the only thing he could do as the monster held him in its grip was to cut off the left arm at the elbow joint.”