“There’s bigger,” said Mate Hollister, grimly. “Ask any old Norwegian hardshell about the ‘kraken.’ I don’t mean the octopus; I mean the real devil-fish—the squid.”
“I know the octopus and the squid are two different creatures,” said Barney.
“Yes. And that yonder is a squid—a devil-fish of the largest size. There! you can see his fore-arms now—look!”
I had observed something moving thirty feet beyond one end of the bulky brown creature. Two snake-like tentacles suddenly whipped out of the water. They bore between their ends a struggling fish. In a moment tentacles and fish disappeared, apparently sucked in toward the head of the monster.
“Good-bye, Johnny Fish!” said Mr. Hollister, grimly. “The parrot-beaks of that gentleman have snapped him up.”
I had seen small squid. This beast lying on the sea so near us was between fifty and sixty feet long, with an average diameter of something like five feet, and a ten-foot breadth of tail.
The squid are the natural food of the sperm whale. Often the whale is so greedy for the squid that it tackles one of these giants and swallows the hard and indigestible beak which, causing a disease in the cetacean’s stomach, sometimes brings about the death of the gourmand. As parts of squid beaks have been found imbedded in masses of ambergris, scientists are quite convinced that this gormandizing of the sperm whale on squid is the immediate cause of that secretion in its stomach which, strange as it may seem, is the basis of many of the best perfumes. Ambergris is a very valuable “by-product” of the sperm whale.
The orca—that tiger of the sea—is inordinately fond of the squid, too, as a diet. This devil-fish, with its eight short arms, each covered on the underside with innumberable “suckers,” and its two fishing-arms which have suckers only at the extremity, excites no fear in the killer-whale.
Concealed at the base of the squid’s ten arms is the terrible beak, shaped like that of a hawk, except that the upper jaw shuts into the lower. This beak is likewise dark brown in color, almost black at the tips, and is supported by powerful muscles.
Years ago there was a huge squid captured at Catalina, on the southern shore of Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. This squid was bought by the New York Aquarium and was the largest perfect specimen of its kind ever examined by scientists. Of course, they had to satisfy themselves with a post-mortem examination!