In February 1945, the British 14th Army had surrounded a mass of fleeing Japanese in a mangrove swamp in southern Burma. In the swamp were thousands of saltwater crocodiles, averaging 15 feet long, but the Japanese refused to surrender. The crisis came on the night of Feb. 19:

That night was the most horrible that any member of the [marine launch] crews ever experienced. The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by the screams of wounded men crushed in the jaws of huge reptiles, and the blurred worrying sound of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left. … Of about 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive.

That’s the account of naturalist Bruce Wright. If it’s accurate, this would be the worst crocodile attack — and indeed one of the deadliest animal attacks — in recorded history.

Unusual methods adopted by suicide victims, compiled by George Kennan for a report in McClure’s Magazine, 1908:

• Hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees
• Throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws
• Exploding dynamite in their mouths
• Thrusting red-hot pokers down their throats
• Hugging red-hot stoves
• Stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snowdrifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars
• Lacerating their throats on barbed-wire fences
• Drowning themselves head downward in barrels
• Suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys
• Diving into white-hot coke-ovens
• Throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes
• Shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle with a sewing-machine
• Strangling themselves with their hair
• Swallowing poisonous spiders
• Piercing their hearts with corkscrews and darning-needles
• Cutting their throats with handsaws and sheep-shears
• Hanging themselves with grape vines
• Swallowing strips of underclothing and buckles of suspenders
• Forcing teams of horses to tear their heads off
• Drowning themselves in vats of soft soap
• Plunging into retorts of molten glass
• Jumping into slaughter-house tanks of blood
• Decapitation with home-made guillotines
• Self-crucifixion

“One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least painful way,” Kennan concludes, “but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been tried.”

M. Ofilius Hilarus, an actor of comedies, after he had highly pleased the people upon his birth-day, kept a feast at home in his own house; and when supper was upon the table, he called for a mess of hot broth, and casting his eye upon the visor he had worn that day in the play, he fitted it again to his face, and taking off the garland which he wore upon his bare head, he set it thereupon: in this posture disguised as he sat, he died, and became cold before any person in the company knew any thing of the matter.

— Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World, 1806

Tiger attack, Saugur Island, off Calcutta, Dec. 23, 1792, recounted by a witness in The Terrific Register, 1825:

I had just laid hold of [my gun], when I heard a roar like thunder, and saw an immense royal tyger spring on the unfortunate Munro, who was sitting down; in a moment his head was in the beast’s mouth, and he rushed into the jungle with him with as much ease as I could lift a kitten, tearing him through the thickest bushes and trees — every thing yielding to his monstrous strength. The agonies of horror, regret, and I must say fear, (for there were two tygers, a male and female), rushed on me at once; the only effort I could make was to fire at him, though the poor youth was still in his mouth. I relied partly on Providence, partly on my own aim, and fired a musket. I saw the tyger stagger and agitated, and I cried out so immediately; Mr. Downey then fired two shots, and I one more. We retired from the jungle, and a few minutes after, Mr. Munro came up to us, all over blood, and fell; we took him on our backs to the boat, and got every medical assistance for him from the Valentine Indiaman, which lay at anchor near the island, but in vain. He lived twenty-four hours in the extreme of torture: his head and scull were all torn and broken to pieces, and he was wounded by the beast’s claws all over his neck and shoulders: but it was better to take him away, though irrecoverable, than leave him to be devoured limb by limb. We have just read the funeral service over his body, and committed it to the deep. He was an amiable and promising youth.

“The beast was about four feet and a half high, and nine long. His head appeared as large as an ox’s, his eyes darting fire, and his roar, when he first seized his prey, will never be out of my recollection. We had scarcely pushed our boat from that cursed shore, when the tygress made her appearance, raging mad almost, and remained on the sand as long as the distance would allow me to see her.”