Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Pliny used to recount the destruction accomplished by a gigantic octopus in the vivarium of the Mediterranean. When some sailors succeeded in killing it they carried it to the epicure, Lucullus,—the head as big as a barrel, and some of its tentacles so huge that one person could hardly reach around them. The chroniclers of the Middle Ages had also spoken of the gigantic cuttlefish that on more than one occasion had, with its serpentine arms, snatched men from the decks of the ships.

The Scandinavian navigators, who had never encountered it in their fjords, nicknamed it the kraken, exaggerating its proportions and even converting it into a fabulous being. If it came to the surface, they confounded it with an island; if it remained between the two waters, the captains, on making their soundings, became confused in their calculations, finding the depth less than that marked on their charts. In such cases they had to escape before the kraken should awake and sink the vessel as though it were a fragile skiff among its whirlpools of foam.

During many long years Science had laughed at the gigantic polypus and at the sea serpent, another prehistoric animal many times encountered, supposing them to be merely the inventions of an imaginative sailor, stories of the forecastle made up to pass the night-watch. Wise men can only believe what they can study directly and then catalogue in their museums….

And Ferragut laughed in his turn at poor Science, ignorant and defenseless before the mysterious immensity of the ocean, and having scarcely achieved the measurement of its great depth. The apparatus of the diver could go down but a few meters; their only instrument of exploration was the metal diving-bell, less important than a spider-web thread that might try to explore the earth by floating across its atmosphere.

The great cuttlefish living in the tremendous depths do not deign to come to the surface in order to become acquainted with mankind. Sickness and oceanic war are the only agents that from time to time announce their existence in a casual way, as they float over the waves with members relaxed, snatched at by the iron jaws of the flesh-eating fish. The great danger for them is that a chance current might place this plunder of the immense marine desert before the prow of a slow-going sailboat.

A corvette of the French navy once encountered near the Canary Isles a complete specimen of one of these monsters floating upon the sea, sick or wounded. The officials sketched its form and noted its phosphorescence and changes of color, but after a two-hour struggle with its indomitable force and its slippery mucosity constantly escaping the pressure of blows and harpoons, they had to let it slip back into the ocean.

It was the Prince of Monaco, supreme pontiff of oceanographic science, who established forever the existence of the fabulous kraken. In one of his intelligent excursions across oceanic solitudes he fished up an arm of a cuttlefish eight yards long. Furthermore the stomachs of sharks, upon being opened, had revealed to him the gigantic fragments of the adversary.

Short and terrible battles used to agitate the black and phosphorescent water, thousands of fathoms from the surface, with whirlwinds of death.

The shark would descend, attracted by the appetizing prospect of a boneless animal,—all flesh and weighing several tons. He would make his hostile invasion in all haste so as not to be obliged to endure for a long time the formidable pressure of the abyss. The struggle between the two ferocious warriors disputing oceanic dominion was usually brief and deadly,—the mandible battling with the sucker; the solid and cutting equipment of teeth with the phosphorescent mucosity incessantly slipping by and opposing the blow of the demolishing head like a battering ram, with the lashing blow of tentacles thicker and heavier than an elephant's trunk. Sometimes the shark would remain down forever, enmeshed in a skein of soft snakes absorbing it with gluttonous deliberation; at other times it would come to the surface with its skin bristling with black tumors,—open mouths and slashes big as plates,—but with its stomach full of gelatinous meat.

These cuttlefish in the Aquarium were nothing more than the seaside inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast,—poor relations of the gigantic octopus that lighten the black gloom of the oceanic night with their bluish gleam of burned-out planets. But in spite of their relative smallness, they are animated by the same destructive iniquity as the others. They are rabid stomachs that cleanse the waters of all animal life, digesting it in a vacuum of death. Even the bacteria and infusoria appear to flee from the liquid that envelops these ferocious solitudes.