A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Sea-Raiders’ by H. G. Wells

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Sea-Raiders’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in the Weekly Sun Literary Supplement on 6 December 1896. In the story, the titular ‘sea-raiders’ are a species of creatures resembling octopuses.

To summarise the story briefly: ‘The Sea-Raiders’ begins with the third-person narrator outlining the emergence of a new species of marine creature which had been recently discovered. A number of people are attacked and killed by these creatures.

The first person to encounter this creature and live to tell a tale was a Mr Fison, who came upon them one day while walking over the rocks:

And the rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat resembling an octopus, with huge and very long and flexible tentacles,

coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward bend of the tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the bend, the tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length.

He is chased by these creatures along the coast, until he comes to three workmen. He gets into a boat with the workmen to show them where the creatures were first seen, and their boat is promptly attacked by them. The creatures are mostly tentacles and eyes – at least that is what we ‘see’ of them – and they are relentless.

One of the men on the boat, Hill, is dragged overboard by the creatures, which manage to grab hold of him. Fison and the other men leap out of the boat and make for the shore. When he looks back out to sea, the creatures are dragging the boat underwater.

‘The Sea-Raiders’ ends with the narrator reporting several further attacks on individuals, but he says that the creatures appear to have disappeared back to the ‘sunless depths of the middle seas’ where they originated. Hunger, it is speculated, is what led them coming up the surface and to the coast, in search of human flesh. The narrator says that he cannot be sure that this is the last they’ll see or hear of the creatures.

As the noted H. G. Wells scholar J. R. Hammond observes in An H. G. Wells Companion, ‘The Sea-Raiders’ is an elaboration on Wells’s 1894 essay ‘The Extinction of Man’. In that essay, Wells turns his thoughts to that great unknown, the sea:

And, after all, even now man is by no means such a master of the kingdoms of life as he is apt to imagine. The sea, that mysterious nursery of living things, is for all practical purposes beyond his control. The low-water mark is his limit. Beyond that he may do a little with seine and dredge, murder a few million herrings a year as they come in to spawn, butcher his fellow air-breather, the whale, or haul now and then an unlucky king-crab or strange sea-urchin out of the deep water, in the name of science; but the life of the sea as a whole knows him not, plays out its slow drama of change and development unheeding him, and may in the end, in mere idle sport, throw up some new terrestrial denizens, some new competitor for space to live in and food to live upon, that will sweep him and all his little contrivances out of existence, as certainly and inevitably as he has swept away auk, bison, and dodo during the last two hundred years.

We can view ‘The Sea-Raiders’ as Wells’s monstrous realisation of this idea in fiction. The story can perhaps best be categorised, indeed, as a ‘monster story’, and can be productively analysed alongside ‘In the Abyss’, in which an inventor creates a steel sphere capable of transporting him to the bottom of the ocean. There he finds a whole city peopled by lizard-like creatures who seem to welcome him as a kind of deity.

But the mysterious marine life in ‘The Sea-Raiders’ is less friendly and more hungry. Like the Martians in Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which in some ways they prefigure, they view mankind as prey, something to be conquered and killed. The story is also a kind of forerunner to that novel of Martian invasion in that we find sleepy, idyllic southern England threatened by some mysterious force, which man is powerless and ill-equipped to fight. It is only thanks to circumstances outside man’s control that he is eventually spared further attacks.