But the outcome of this titanic battle was by no means certain, for it was impossible to tell who was eating whom. On deck, ship's work ceased as everyone rushed to the starboard side and gaped in awe at a spectacle very few humans had witnessed before.
The squid, snaking its remaining arms around the whale’s massive head, rooted its beak into the mammal’s thick gray hide and tore at the hinge point of its chomping mandible. With its powerful toothy jaw the sperm whale chomped hungrily at the squid’s tentacles as they crashed together back down into the brine. This caused several of the squid’s whip-like tentacles to flail about like the arms of a dancer possessed. The whale breached, twirling as it exploded up into the air. The two wrestling specters were in fact the legendary sperm whale in mortal combat with that denizen of the deep, the giant squid. And then we saw that another many-fingered hand had wrapped itself tightly around this fist in a wriggling death grip.
Then, rising up out of the water, it looked like an enormous angry black fist, snapping its great thumb loudly and repeatedly. At first glance it appeared to be an old steamship's paddlewheel incongruously churning away all by itself in the otherwise placid sea. The strange sound emanated from a bizarre apparition roughly a hundred yards off the starboard bow. I was on my way up to the bridge to have a look at the aged and habitually malfunctioning radar when a very unusual noise caught my attention.
This story, however, is about another kind of squid, which is what sailors are sometimes called. No scientist has ever documented the life of Archituethis-no photographs have ever been taken, no corroborated evidence exists-nothing. Credible or not, these are "sea stories" told by men home from strange lands and stranger seas-unbelievable men and men believable but lacking proof. There is even a World War II account of shipwrecked sailors being attacked by a squid that plucked one unlucky seaman out of the lifeboat and pulled him screaming beneath the waves. There are eyewitness reports of giant squids approaching 175 feet. These lifeless blobs of collapsed flesh are mere hints of living monsters with sixteen-inch eyes and tentacles big as tree trunks armed with rows of barbed suckers the size of Frisbees. Dead giant squids measuring seventy-five feet have been recovered from fishing nets hauled up from great depths. In October 1966, two lighthouse keepers at Danger Point, South Africa observed a giant squid attacking, killing and devouring a baby Southern Right whale as the mother watched helplessly. Unable to keep a firm grip on the slippery steel, the squids slid aft into the ship's propeller. In the 1930s the crew of the Royal Norwegian Navy tanker, the "Brunswick" reported that the ship was stalked and attacked several times by giant squids, which wrapped themselves around the ship's hull. When it finally died, the fishermen brought out axes and butchered the gargantuan animal for dog food. One of the squid’s 35 foot-long tentacles was chopped off and weighed in at 734 pounds. Its huge mantle measured 20 feet from the tip of its fin to its formidable parrot-like beak. At low tide the writhing creature lay marooned and doomed on the muddy flats. Three fishermen hooked onto the floundering animal with a grapple hook, which they tied with a line to a tree on shore, and then they waited for the tide to go out. On November 2, 1878, an Atlantic Giant Squid became stranded in shallow water in the harbor at Thimble Tickle, Newfoundland. To modern biology, the world's largest invertebrate is known as Archituethis-Greek for Ruling Squid. In the "Odyssey" the mythic beast was called "Scylla," in Tennyson's time, the "Kraken." Generations have been horrified by Jules Vern's nightmarish creature in "Ten Thousand Leagues under the Sea," the Giant Squid. Alfred, Lord Tennysonįor as long as ships have plied the world’s oceans, sailors have returned from distant seas with terrifying tales of many armed monsters rising up from the abyss, attacking ships and devouring men. VIII WGAE REG.NO.R07960-00 For Carrie Chapter One Below the thunders of the upper deep Far, far beneath the abysmal sea His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth. Simpson, Paul L - "New Perspectives on Prison Masculinities by Matthew Maycock and Kate Hunt (eds.Draft No.Sim, Janice - "When Parents Kill Children: Understanding Filicide by Thea Brown, Danielle Tyson and Paula Fernandez Arias (eds.)" CICrimJust 13 (2018) 30(1) Current Issues in Criminal Justice 71.
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