Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. — Alfred Lord Tennyson
Remember those spooky artists renderings of sperm whales battling Giant Squids? Or the 19th century illustrations of boats being pulled down into the depths by tentacled arms?
Well, it turns out, those stories were true.
Image from Discovery/NHK funded mission
A crew of Scientists, funded by Discovery channel and Japan’s NHK TV, just filmed a bus sized Giant Squid in its natural habitat for the first time. As a writer, this intersection of mythology and reality is particularly fascinating. Writers deal in myth and story and we rarely get to see a creature emerge from the crucible of legend into cold, hard reality.
For 3000 years, the giant squid was mythology; codified by sailors, deified as The Kraken, dramatized by Jules Verne in 20,000 leagues under the sea and sung into existence by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The slumbering giant moved with us through history, glimpsed in pieces, with no more substance than a dream. But now, recorded in digital perfection, the Giant Squid, Architeutis dux, is visible and unquestionably real. “Then once by men and angels to be seen,” Tennyson wrote. And now we can see the creature for ourselves, not red and decomposing, rising to the surface in its death throes, but vibrant and alive, clothed in silvery beauty and otherworldly strangeness, tentacles snaking out beneath the ocean’s surface— Lovecraft’s Cthuthu come to life.
Of course, people have seen this creature all along. The Giant Squid was recorded by Homer’s Odyssey as the Scylla, in Viking legends as The Kraken and was sighted by Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. The threads of the legends came from real encounters. This fact alone should make us wonder what other mythological creatures in this world are true. With the rise of Zoology in the 18th and 19th century, evidence began to mount about the reality of the Giant Squid’s existence: Squid Sightings
With the advent of movable type and newspapers, Squid sightings were being reported by sailors. Beached squids were measured, beaks, tails and tentacles were preserved in alcohol or honey and sent to scientific societies around the world. By the 19th century, a few European Zoologists speculated the creature might actually exist. Still, despite the evidence, there was enormous resistance in the Scientific community. In 1857, Japetus Steenstrup, a Danish zoologist at the University of Copenhagen, postulated the Squid was real, based on a beak and past sightings, “From all evidences the stranded animal must thus belong not only to the large, but to the really gigantic cephalopods, whose existence has on the whole been doubted.”
Japetus Steenstrup named the creature: Architeutis dux.
Giant Squid Sightings
In 350 B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle first described greater and the lesser squid. He called the great squid teuthos. “The Teuthos is much larger than the Teuthis, for it reaches the length of five cubits. Some species are two cubits long, and the tentacula of the polypus are as long and even larger in size. The class of Teuthos is rare and differs in form from Teuthis, for the extremity of the Teuthos is wider; and again the fin is placed round the whole abdomen, but it is wanting in the Teuthis. ” So Aristotle had seen a Squid the size of a man or longer.
Pliny the Elder, living in the first century A.D. described a gigantic squid in his Natural History, with the head “as big as a cask”, arms 30 feet (9.1 m) long, and carcass weighing 700 pounds (320 kg).
With the onset of the Industrial age and steam ships, Giant Squid sightings changed in tone. Instead of being beached or washed ashore, men not only encountered the animal on the seas, they were no longer subject to the capricious winds.
Illustration of the Alecton’s encounter with a Colossal Squid.
In 1861, the French dispatch steamer Alecton, sighted a “sea-monster” off the Canary Islands. They pursued, harpooned and shot the animal then tied it with ropes and tried to haul it on deck. When the ropes sliced the monster in half, they managed to acquire the tail. (From the artists rendering of their eye-witness account, the monster was probably a Colossal Squid: Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni.) The Commander of the Alecton contacted the French consul and filed an account with the French Academy of Sciences, showing the spear-shaped tail as proof. A member of that august body, Arthur Mangin, summed up the Scientific response, saying no “wise” person, “especially a man of science,” would “admit into the catalogue those stories which mention extraordinary creatures like the sea serpent or the giant squid, the existence of which would be…. a contradiction of the great laws of harmony and equilibrium which have sovereign rule over living nature as well as senseless and inert matter.”
Baroque Pauline Squid Sighting
On January 8th, 1875, the Baroque Pauline sighted a Sperm Whale battling a “Monster Sea Serpent.” The crewman carefully described what he observed, making a rendering of the whale’s battle with the serpent.
“The weather fine and clear, the wind and sea moderate. Observed some black spots on the water, and a whitish pillar, about thirty-five feet high, above them At the first glance I took all to be breakers, as the sea was splashing up fountain-like about them, and the pillar, a pinnacle rock bleached with the sun; but the pillar fell with a splash, and a similar one rose. They rose and fell alternately in quick succession, and good glasses showed me it was a monster sea-serpent coiled twice round a large sperm whale. “
Size Matters
During World War II, a British Admiralty trawler was lying off the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean. One of the crew, A.G. Starkey, was on deck late at night when he saw something peculiar in the water. “As I gazed, fascinated, a circle of green light glowed in my area of illumination. This green unwinking orb I suddenly realized was an eye. The surface of the water undulated with some strange disturbance. Gradually I realized that I was gazing at almost point-blank range at a huge squid.’ Starkey walked the length of the ship finding the tail at one end and the tentacles at the other. The ship was over one hundred and seventy five feet long.”
On November 2nd, 1878 a Giant Squid was beached at Thimble Thickle Bay, Newfoundland. The dying squid measured 20 feet in length from tip of the head to bottom of the beak. The longest tentacles were 35 feet, making the creature 55 feet in length.
Giant Squid Attacks
The most remarkable account of a Giant Squid attack took place in 1874 in the Bay of Bengal and was reported by a number of Indian newspapers and the London Times ( a few years before Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the sea was published). The attack was also witnessed by a passing steam ship, the Strathowen.
Illustration from 1st edition of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, based on the Giant Squid attack on the Schooner Pearl
In 1874, three days out of Galle, the 150 ft long Schooner Pearl was attacked by a Giant Squid. A second ship, the steamer Strathowen, watched the Pearl go down. One passenger who witnessed the sinking testified,“As I watched, the mass was set in motion. It struck the schooner, which visibly reeled, and then righted. Immediately afterwards, the masts swayed sideways, and I could clearly discern the enormous mass and the hull of the schooner coalescing – I can think of no other term. Almost immediately after the collision and coalescence the schooner’s masts swayed towards us, lower and lower; the vessel was on her beam-ends, lay there for a few seconds, and disappeared, the masts righting as she sank, and the main exhibiting a reversed ensign struggling towards its peak.”
Captain James Floyd describes the attack, “a great mass rose slowly out of the sea about half-a-mile off on our larboard side, and remained spread out, as it were, and stationary; it looked like the back of a huge whale, but it sloped less, and was of a brownish colour; even at that distance it looked longer than our craft, and it seemed to be basking in the sun.”
“‘What’s that?’ I sung out to the mate. ‘Blest if I knows; barring its size, colour, and shape, it might be a whale,’ replied Tom Scott; ‘and it ain’t the serpent,’ said one of the crew, ‘for he’s too round for that ‘ere critter.’”
Crew member Bill Darling recognized the shape in the water closing in on the Pearl. Many historical sightings had taken place in his native land of Newfoundland. Darling identified the animal as a Giant Squid, warning the Captain not to fire on the creature. But Captain Floyd chose to ignore the warning and shot at the advancing Squid.
Floyd gave the following account, “By this time three of the crew, Bill included, had found axes, and one a rusty cutlass, and all were looking over the ship’s side at the advancing monster. We could now see a huge oblong mass moving by jerks just under the surface of the water, and an enormous train following; the wake or train might have been 100 feet long.
“In the time I have taken to write this the brute struck us, and the ship quivered under the thud; in another movement, monstrous arms like trees seized the vessel and she keeled over; in another second the monster was aboard, squeezed in between the two masts, Bill screaming ‘slash for your lives.’ But all our slashing was to no avail, for the brute, holding on by his arms, slipped his vast body overboard, and pulled the vessel down with him; we were thrown into the water at once, and just as I went over, I caught sight of one of the crew, either Bill or Tom Fielding, squashed up between the masts and one of those awful arms.”
Only four members of the crew and Captain Floyd survived.
This astounding attack influenced writer’s Jules Verne, Peter Benchley who wrote Jaws and Beast and Arthur C. Clarke who wrote a paper on
the subject titled Reflections on Squid.
Giant Squid and Sperm Whale, the squid’s natural predator.
In the 1930′s, The Brunswick, a royal Norwegian Navy ship reported being attacked by Giant Squid at least three times. The Giant Squid pulled along side of the ship, pacing it with their jet propulsion, then suddenly rammed into the ship and wrapped its tentacles around the hull. Unable to keep a grip on the steel hull, the animal slid off and fell into the ship’s propellers.
During World War II (in 1941), survivors of the troopship Britannia sunk by a German raider The Thor, clung to the sides of the life rafts. Survivor Lieutenant R. E. G. Cox, told author of The Kingdom of the Octopus, Frank Lane, that on the first night a man was plucked from the raft by a large squid. Later that same night, Cox himself was attacked. A tentacle wrapped around his leg, then released him leaving painful scars.
In January 2003, French veteran yachtsman Oliver de Kersauson’s ship was attacked by a giant squid while ironically competing for the Jules Verne trophy. “I saw a tentacle through a porthole. It was thicker than my leg and it was really pulling the boat hard.” The squid released the boat once the motor stopped. “We didn’t have anything to scare off this beast, so I don’t know what we would have done if it hadn’t let go. We weren’t going to attack it with our penknives,” he said. Kersauson says the squid must have been 22 to 26 feet (7 to 8 meters) long. “I’ve never seen anything like it in 40 years of sailing,” Kersauson said.
(Don’t ask me what Giant Squid have against the French…)
The Giant Squid or Architeutis dux is the largest of all invertebrates, reaching lengths of 60 feet (18 meters) and possibly, if the WW2 witness is correct, 200 ft in length.
