Maximilian Crabbe

Subaquatic researcher and entrepreneur (1940-1999?)

Max Crabbe was born in Lewes, West Sussex, UK, on Mar 22nd 1940 during Britain’s most critical war-time year. His mother Caroline was the daughter of Vladimir Vysparov, White Russian immigrant and reluctant inheritor of the notorious Vysparov Library. His father Edward was a minor aristocrat whose stable of businesses in the financial and technological fields contributed significantly to British military intelligence in WWII and the Cold War, supporting innovations in mechanical cryptography that stretched from a special unit at Bletchley Park to Axsys-related research in the US.

Max’s rebellious tendencies were evident from an early age. These culminated in Autumn 1957 with his expulsion from elite Sandwich College (Wiltshire), after an incident that apparently involved mescaline “pagan rituals” and a small-calibre handgun. The following spring, Max was sent to New York to stay with his uncle, Peter Vysparov.

In New York Crabbe seems to have fallen under the sway of Vysparov’s circle, developing a passionate interest in Nma ethnography. In June 1960 Crabbe traveled to Java to search for the remnants of the Dibboma (Dib-N’ma) people. Exactly what happened to him in the pestilential swamps and jungles of Indonesia remains a matter of dark conjecture, but it seems certain that the “icthyophidian” influences encountered on this expedition wormed their way deeply into his fate. Crabbe returned from this sojourn shortly before year’s end, triumphantly bearing his own translation of a previously unknown sacred incantation to the polymorphic sea-beast deity of the Nma – the Nomo Chant.

Although throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s Crabbe surfed the edge of the counterculture, involving himself in a variety of ‘projects’ with figures such as Gregory Bateson, John Lilly and Katy Shaw, his inherited business-sense was unmistakably emerging. By the late 1970s his interest in dolphin communication, cybernetic oceanography and hydro-acoustics had been leveraged into corporate assets (Crabbe Holdings) amounting to an estimated US$2.7 billion.

Crabbe’s growing reclusiveness took ever more extreme forms. By the mid-‘70s public appearances were almost nonexistent. The last verifiable photograph, taken in 1982, shows Crabbe floating in his technologically-enhanced private ‘swimming-pool’, his image little more than a malformed shadowy blur.

In January 1980 Crabbe founded the Institute for the Study of Binomics, appointing Katy Shaw as executive director. (The Crabbe Institute’s 1996 Report on Calendric Reform contributed significantly to a number of discourses surrounding the Y2K ‘time-bomb’.)

By the late 1980s Crabbe Holdings was almost entirely dedicated to ocean-floor activities, especially work on Bubble Pod One (BP-1) – a deep-submersion habitat, aquaculture production and research station, whose economic rationale is still not fully understood. Unconfirmed reports suggest that by 1990 Crabbe himself had become a permanent resident of BP-1, even though he was by this time suffering from a very serious medical condition of an unspecified ‘radically unprecedented’ nature.

By the late 1990s many assumed Crabbe was dead, with some even doubting whether he had ever existed. However, on the night of July 13th 1997 an Indonesian coast-guard radio-monitoring post picked up a mysterious transmission, consisting of barely comprehensible subhuman mutterings and croaks. Attempts to locate the exact origins of this signal were unsuccessful, but the most plausiable estimates place it in the depths of the Java Trench, reputed site of Max Crabbe’s BP-1 ‘Aquapolis’. The content of this message has never been publicly released, but international security and health officials have described it as “profoundly disturbing”.