“I was in the clipper ship Chelsea that time, I was,” continued the old man, taking another “chaw.” “Cap’n Daggett ordered a boat ashore for turtles. He shot ’em for soup and fresh meat. Good eatin’, too. But I took a seal-club with me, for I wanted a sea-lion’s skin to make me a pair of moccasins, and I’d heard ’em roaring when we dropped anchor.
“I went off by myself and waded around a low, rocky point, in water not ha’f knee deep, but deep jest outside, when I saw Mr. Squid moving along atop of the water. He made considerable thrashing as he come along, like a whirligig waterwheel; his body part looked bigger than I am, and his arms two or three times as long—at any rate, them two long arms was tremendous.
“It headed into a little bay ahead of me,” pursued Job, “and when it got into about three foot of water it dropped anchor and began to feel around with three or four of its arms. The upperside of them arms were brown colored like the rocks, with wrinkles and stiff bristles all along the edge; the underside was white—sort of a nasty, yallerish, dead-looking white—with suckers like saucers in two rows. What I took to be the head had something like eyes; but I couldn’t make ’em out plain.
“Ye know how it is when ye see a snake, when you’re walking on shore,” said old Job. “Ye always want to try and kill it. That’s the way I felt about that squid. I didn’t think of any danger when I waded to it, but it seemed to be watchin’ me, for it squared round, head-on. I hit it a clip with my iron-bound seal-club, when, quick as a thought, it took a turn around the club with one o’ them short suckers, and held on. I pulled my blessedest, but the critter was too much for me. Then’s when I’d oughter backed out.
“But I was obstinate and I kept tugging at the club. Just then it showed its head—it shot out from the knob in front, a brown-and-purple spotted thing with the eyes showing. And in a second one of its arms was around me. It wound around my bare leg and another shot around my neck. The suckers took hold like a doctor’s cups.
“It began to heave and haul on me. You kin guess I pulled and hollered. I got out my knife and hacked at it, but it would have mastered me—it sure would!—if Cap’n Daggett hadn’t come running along the shore and fired both barrels of his gun into its head. Then it let go and slid back into deep water, squirting its nasty ink all about.
“I ain’t never fooled with no squid again,” concluded Job Perkins. “They ain’t no pets.”
It was later in that day, when I was standing my trick on lookout, and the Seamew had got a better wind and was forging ahead at a spanking pace, that Mr. Hollister and Mr. Barney stood near me and I heard the second mate ask the older man about the experience he had had with a giant squid.
“Yes,” said Mr. Hollister, “when I was a young fellow I ran against one of those squids, and I never want to bother with another one. I was mate of a little schooner—the Pearl, she was—150 tons and a crew of six men forward, with the cook. We were bound from the Mauritius to Rangoon in ballast, to return with paddy, and had put in at Galle for water. Three days out we fell becalmed in the bay—about latitude 8 degrees 50 minutes North, longitude 84 degrees 5 minutes East.
“On the 10th of May about five o’clock in the afternoon—eight bells, I know, had gone some time before—we sighted a two masted screw steamer on our port quarter, about five or six miles off. Very soon after, as we lay motionless on a sea like glass, a great mass rose slowly to the surface about half a mile on our larboard side, and remained spread out, as it were, and stationary.