Even a Bengal tiger, however, may be mastered by an elephant; and the mightiest of squids has to succumb before the yet mightier sperm whale.
“The monsters vast of ages past” received attention in a well-known poem. But the monsters vast of ocean-depths in the present may surely compete with them. Happily for mankind, these awful creatures do not frequently come out of their “ocean-caves” to be interviewed.
Now and again one is caught, or is flung ashore by a storm, or its dead remains are found and examined.
One huge creature, captured near Labrador, was reported to have a body thirteen feet long, with arms reaching to a distance from the head of thirty-seven feet. Another, left by the retreating tide on a Newfoundland beach, had a body twenty feet long, and arms about the same in length as those last mentioned.
But no more striking description has been given than that of Mr. Frank Bullen, in his fascinating volume,[6] when he tells of the tremendous midnight conflict between a large sperm whale and, surely, the monarch of the squids, “almost as large as himself, whose interminable tentacles seemed to embrace the whole of his great body.” The whale’s head “seemed a perfect network of writhing arms,” and by its side “appeared the head of the great squid, as awful an object as one could well imagine even in a fevered dream, with immense black eyes, at least a foot in diameter.” As the “titanic struggle went on,” the whale, “in a business-like methodical way,” munched at his huge enemy, gradually overcoming its resistance.
[6] Cruise of the Cachalot.
Such a battle-royal as this is perhaps very seldom to be seen, even by those who spend their lives upon the sea. It may be that these terrible creatures rarely come to the surface, unless compelled to do so by a hungry whale.
What they must be to the denizens of the deep, ever watching for prey, or pursuing it with swift determination in the darkness—“every cup-shaped disc of the hundreds with which the restless tentacles are furnished ready at the slightest touch to grip whatever is near, not only by suction, but by the great claws set all round within its circle—and in the centre of this network of living traps ... the chasm-like mouth, with its enormous parrot-beak”—all this and more has been pictured by Mr. Bullen, from personal observation, in words which cannot be strengthened. No tale of monsters in bygone ages can well exceed it.
If further proof be needed of the part played by cuttlefishes in the larder of Sperm whales, it is given by those whales, which, when harpooned and in their dying agonies, throw up the contents of their vast stomachs. Out of the stomachs come great masses of undigested cuttlefish, cubic blocks many feet in diameter, swallowed whole and not yet broken up.
In 1895 an immense cuttlefish was thus disgorged by a whale, and was found on examination to belong to a new and unknown species. The head had vanished; but the body was clothed in a strong armour of neatly arranged scales. So this was veritably an “armoured” kind.