SEA MYSTERIES

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 209, 29 May 1919, Page 6

SEA MYSTERIES

AND THE GIANT OCTOPUS , SOME WEIRD THEORIES When' a mysteriously disappears from the face of tho deep, sendiuf; to the shores no fragments or wreckage an •nessengurs of disaster, then it is tbut marine theorists with old-iaslnoued imaginations begin to tluw out hints about the possible complicity of our old friend, the sea serpent, who, as every mariner siiould know, is so huge that, From the tip of his iiose to the top of his UU Is jußt one thoueand miles I . But that equally terrible and better authenticated monster, die giant squid, is also luiely to be held respoibiuii. Thus ilr.' ueorga Noble, in "The -National Marine, , ' revives tho time-hon-oured theory in regard to the mystery of the vanisiuuent ot tne United Slates I'.iival collier Cyclops, which has gone the way of seventeen' other ships ot our Navy einuo 1781—gone without trace, here was a ship that steamed away almost a year ago, well t'o'und, with, a modern wireless equipment and a complement 01 2!)j men, yet the exhaustive search of teh whole 'Caribbean Sea by the Navy hab revealed no clue as u, imitate. How shall we account for our misting ships, unless, like Mr. .Noble, we accept it as a fact that— About tho only possible explanation incapable of contradiction is 'tnat Gargantuan Squide—moiiste! cuttlefishtreated in tiction and in fact, may have reared themselves out of the sea, and, instead of winding their tentacles around the hulls and rigging and crushing the structure to niatctnvood before dragging it to' their lair at the bottom, may have helped themselves to the ship's people as oelicate'ly and effectually as uno ptuelra gooseberries oft' a bush—then sunk out of eight and left scarcely a ripple behind. The history of the ancient belief in the existence of gigantic cephalopods is somewhat obscure. All we know of it i» in passages in the works of a lew old Greek and Latin authors and a series ot Scandinavian traditions. Eric Pontoppidnn, Bishop of Bergen, is generally regarded as the inventor of the fabulous Kraken, and is constantly misquoted by writers who have never read his history of Norway. But fifty years or more before Pontoppidan, Christian Irancis Paullinus, who was born in 1643, a physician and naturalist of Eisenach, had described a monstrous animal which occasionally roso for plunder along the coasts of Lapland and •Finmark—so- enormous that a regiment 'of soldiers could conveniently manoeuvre on its back. Less conscientious and more credulous than the Norwegian episcopal advocacy is the testimony ot Denys de'jJlonti'ort, nigh a. century later, beside whose "Colossal Poulpe" the gigantic and predatory /animal described in the classics by Pliny was a mere pigmy. ' . Dβ Montfort gravely declared that six men-o'-war captured from the French by Admiral Kodney in the West Indies, Apr.l 12, 1782, together with- four-flritish 'ships detached from tho fleet as a convoy, were suddenly engulfed by colossal cuttlefishes. He , also records a statement of Captain v Jean Magnus Deus, by repute a. respectable and veracious man. a trader to China, of an instance when the captain was becalmed and having his vessel's bottom painted while crossing l'fom St. Helena to Cape Negro. The story runs that three men were standing, on planks slung over tiie side when an enormous cuttlefish rose from the water and threw one of its arms around two of the sailors, whom it toro away with the scaffolding on wnich they stood. With another ai'ui it seized this third man, who held on tightly to the rigging and screamed for help, .dis shipmates ran to his- assistance, and succeed ed in rescuing him by cutting away we creature's arms with axes' and knives, but he died delirious on the following night. The captain tried to save tuo other two sailors by killing, the animal, and drove several narpoonsinto. it, but they broke away, and tho'men were carried down by the monster. The nriu cut off was said to have been twenty-five feet long and as thick as tho niizzen-' yard, and to have had on it suckers as big as saucepan lids. The means of observation on the dura-; tion of growth and life- i/i the cephalopoda have been <iitticult to obtain, i'roni watching the rate of increase of size in young specimens, de Ferussac, d'Orbigny, and'other naturalists have arrived at tnc conclusion that they sometimes live for many years and continue to grow till th? end of their lives. That some, therefore, attain to a considerable magnitude is hardly surprising. —

Molina, in ins "Natural History of Chile," describes among- Ins other species of cuttle : fish one, Sepia tunicata, of which specimqns, aimed with hooks in their suckers, weighed 150 pounds. frwyn Jeffreys, in "Hritish Conchotomy," talks of a huge cephalopod, strandeu'in the 'sixties between Hiilsway and Stiillaway on the west coast of Shetland, of' which i the tentacles. were • sixteen feet long and the-pedal arms about half that length. The largest suckers were threequarters of an inch in diameter. 'lo the Paris Academy of Sciences was reported a huge squid met November iHi, 18bl, between Madeira and Tenerilfe, and stated by the officers and crew of the J.Tcnch dispatch steamer Alecton to be of a deep red colour and from sixteen to eighteen feet long without reckoning th" formidable arms. Harpoons thrust into the beast drew out of the solt flesh. ..\ 'rope with a running knot Vas slipped over it and held at tho juncture of the nils, but (when the men tried to haul tho creature on board its enormous weight caused the rope tocut through the Hash. But we are not left dependent on documentary evidence alone. Cuttlefish of extraordinary size are preserved in museums at Copenhagen and at MarscilK In November, 1874, the Kev. M. Harv'-y a-.Presbyterian minister of St. John's, Newfoundland, got possession of a squid, or calamury, as the English sometimes call them, which three- fishermen lo.md entangled in their herring net in Lo"ic Hay, about three miles from St. John's". ihe body of this specimen was more than seven feet long and the caudal fin was twenty-two inches broad. The hvo tentacular arms were twenty-four feet long each and the eight shorter arms sir, feet long each, the largest of the latter being ten.inches in circumference at the base. What couldn't such a monster do! ,