Giant Squid in Newfoundland waters
Jack Fitzgerald’s Treasury of Newfoundland Stories, Volume III: Classic Spy Tales and Epic Sea Adventures, coming this November from Breakwater Books.
On September 18, 1966, the United States Naval Oceanographic Research vessel San Pablo was operating in waters 120 miles east-northeast of Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland, when the crew noticed something unusual breaching the water within viewing distance of the vessel.
The spectacle that followed was something no man on the boat had ever witnessed, and not likely would again. A life and death battle was being played out between a sperm whale and a giant squid. Which sea creature won the battle is not known, but this was not the first clash of this nature to be witnessed by man.
In 1875, F.T. Bullen, British journalist, was a passenger on the whaling ship Cachelot, and watched through his binoculars an encounter between a giant squid and a sperm whale. That incident inspired Newfoundland poet E.J. Pratt, in 1926, to write his epic poem “The Cachelot,” in which he immortalized the battle between two monsters of the sea.
The giant squid, known by other names—including kracken, devil fish, and cuttlefish—has terrorized Newfoundland fishermen over the centuries, and has been the inspiration in many tales and myths. According to the late Dr. Fred Aldrich, of Memorial University in St. John’s, a world authority on the giant squid, the first clear historical reference to the creature was made in 1555 by Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsala and Sweden, who described a monstrous fish seen off the coast of Norway. The archbishop noted, “Their forms are horrible, their heads are square, and they have sharp and long horns round about, like a tree rooted up by the roots.”
It was Olaus Magnus, according to Dr. Aldrich, who coined the word kracken in describing the giant squid. For more than 300 years after Magnus wrote about the kracken, there was practically no scientific work to verify the existence of this sea creature. Sailors around the world told exaggerated and often mythical tales of the monster squid. Jules Verne, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea described an encounter between Captain Nemo and the crew of the Nautilus with a giant kracken.
The author Osmond P. Breland observed:
Since Homer’s Odyssey, with its account of Ulysses’ battle with Scylla, who was evidently a giant squid, stories of blood-thirsty, many-armed monsters have been told by seafaring men.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Newfoundland became the world’s focal point for knowledge and evidence that proved the mythical devil fish or kracken really existed.
In 1873, when two fishermen and a boy were fishing in Conception Bay a few miles north of St. John’s, the existence of the sea-monster called the Devil Fish was only a talltale. By the end of the day they had the solid proof the world scientific community was looking for to prove the existence of the creature. It also marked a day of terror that remained instilled in their memories for a life time.
It was October 26, when Theophilus Piccott; his twelve-year-old son, Tom; and Daniel Squires, Theo’s fishing partner, set out for the fishing grounds in the tickle near Bell Island. Tom was proud to be at the tiller and enjoying working with his father, when suddenly terror struck. Dan Squires had noticed a darkened brownish object floating a short distance from the boat. After he pointed out the item to Theo, young Tom was told to steer the boat towards the object. Both men agreed that it was likely some kind of wreckage. When the boat drew near enough, Dan prodded the object with his boat hook.
Suddenly, the dormant floating object turned into a raging sea monster that sent waves of terror down the spine of the three fishermen. They had come face to face with the mythical devil fish. The creature swiftly emerged from the water and launched an attack upon the little fishing boat. What appeared to be a dozen snake-like tentacles, ranging between ten and thirty-five feet in length, lashed towards the boat with two of the tentacles gripping around it.
During this terrifying encounter, it was young Tom who severed the monster’s tentacles with a tomahawk and had the presence of mind to keep these specimens in the boat as proof of the encounter. So not only did Tom ward off the creature, but his actions provided the hard physical proof the scientific community needed to move the existence of the giant squid from myth to reality.