It’s worse than the boy who cried “wolf”: the plight of the poor seamen who cried “squid”. “No, no, I really did see a sea monster” — but it was years before anyone believed in the giant squid. In 1848 Peter McQuahe claimed the sighting of a sea monster near the Cape of Good Hope. Richard Owen, a big man in science, coiner of the word “dinosaur” and the driving force behind the Natural History Museum, took exception and poured scorn and personal vituperation on McQuahe, implying that he was unworthy to command one of Her Majesty’s ships.
A few years later a French captain claimed a sighting of the giant squid and even managed to bring a piece back. Scientists laughed and said that it was plant material, though Jules Verne liked it and put a huge squid into his 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; it attacked the Nautilus and devoured a crew member.
Then in 1873 a Newfoundland fisherman named Theophilus Picot didn’t exactly catch one; more vice versa, or so he claimed. He said that the thing attacked his boat and tried to drag it down. What’s certain is that Picot managed to hack off both feeding tentacles and bring them back to shore. Moses Harvey, the local rector, realised that this was something momentous: the 19ft tentacles made it clear to the world that the giant squid was not a fisherman’s tale. The kraken was real.
Why did it take so long for such a huge animal to make the great shift from mythology to science? It lives in the depths, thousands of feet down — a squid on the surface is dead or dying. Dead squid at those extreme depths get consumed long before their bodies float to the surface. And even if you managed to get hold of a surfaced or beached squid, it is highly unwieldy and constantly being eaten. It also keeps falling apart, since it is an invertebrate and lacks a skeleton. It is a mollusc and, as such, it is the relation of snails and slugs.
The giant squid is now accepted as a fact of oceanic life and I have been revelling in all squid in the recently published American book Kraken. It has been suggested that sperm whales eat a couple of giant squid every week. The mantle — the body bit — is about 6ft long; the tentacles extend that to 40ft. They live by catching fish with the two longest tentacles, “like a two-tongued toad”, as one scientist put it.
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It was believed to be the world’s largest invertebrate. But in the past century odd bits of an even bigger squid started turning up, and in the past decade people have found intact specimens. This is the colossal squid: an animal with a mantle twice the size of a mere giant and with tentacles that, when alive and active, take its total length to something like 60ft.
And still very little is known about it.
It has eyes that are about 12in across and is considered to be more formidable than the giant, an apex predator like the great sharks and the toothed whales.
Some scientists suggest that the animal is also pretty intelligent: though not necessarily in the sense that “intelligent” means “like us humans”. We know little about the colossal squid beyond the fact of its existence.
Our own planet remains a place of mystery. “Why aren’t we spending more on our oceans?” asks Clyde Roper, the squid scientist. “We know more about the Moon’s backside than we do about the ocean’s bottom.”
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Kraken: The Curious, Exciting and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams, published by Abrams.