The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (23 page)

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, Clyde Roper managed to keep ocean-dwelling squid alive for fourteen days—then a record. O’Shea, using cylindrical tanks made of acrylic, had kept his latest coastal specimens alive for eighty days. Earlier, he had maintained a batch of deep-sea squid for more than seventy days, which he then returned to the wild, satisfied that his experiment was a success.

He held up his white bucket. “Watch this,” he said, and dumped the sprat into the tank. Though the fish were bigger than the squid, the squid shot toward them, with their arms curved over their heads, hiding their tentacles; they looked metallic, except for their bulging green eyes. Then the squids’ arms sprang open, and their tentacles exploded outward, lashing their prey. The fish squirmed to break free, but the squid engulfed them in a web of arms. They drew their frantic prey into their beaks, and the squids’ stomachs turned bright red as they filled with the blood of the fish. Staring into the tank, I imagined what a full-grown giant squid might look like swallowing its prey.

When the squid finished eating, O’Shea said, “If I can keep these squid alive, there’s no reason I can’t keep the giant alive. I’ll just need a bigger tank.”

He was nervous about what would happen to his squid during our expedition—he had left the animals alone for only one day, on Christmas—and he anxiously arranged with an employee at the aquarium to care for them in his absence. “You need to treat them with reverence,” he said.

We then headed to his university office, where he had to gather various things for the expedition. It was in an attic-like space, and seemed entirely devoted to what he described as his “lunatic obsession.” Pasted to the walls and stacked on tables were pictures, many of which he had sketched himself, of giant squid, colossal squid, broad squid, warty squid, leopard squid. In addition, there were squid toys, squid key chains, squid journals, squid movies, and squid-related newspaper clippings
(
“
WARNING! GIANT FLYING SQUID ATTACKING VESSELS OFF AUSTRALIA
”). On the floor were dozens of glass jars filled with dead squid that had been preserved in alcohol, their eyes and tentacles pressing against the glass.

Many squid scientists wait for decades before getting their hands on the remains of an Architeuthis. O’Shea, however, has developed a large network of fishermen informants, and in the last seven years has collected a hundred and seventeen corpses. Together, these specimens offer a clearer picture of the giant squid. O’Shea has concluded that although the animals could be as heavy as a thousand pounds, most weigh between a hundred and four hundred pounds. (Females are typically heavier than males.) His squid collection also provided some of the first clues about the animal’s diet. In an article recently published in the New Zealand-Journal of Zoology, O’Shea documented the “gut contents” of his specimens, which included arrow squid and chunks of another Architeuthis (“proof of cannibalism”).

In another recent experiment, O’Shea dissected a squid’s statolith: a bonelike particle in the animal’s ear that helps the animal balance itself. A statolith builds up rings of calcium deposits over time, he explained, and, like the rings on tree trunks, the layers of bone might help scientists determine a squid’s age and growth rate.

Initially, O’Shea told me, he had thought that he would dissect his corpses in his office. But, after he made an incision in one, the specimen released a noxious odor, a mixture of rotting flesh and ammonium (which keeps the animal buoyant in the water). Students and faculty fled the building, and he was soon forbidden to make further dissections there. “I became quite unpopular after that,” he said.

He began to pick up various jars. “Oh, here it is,” he said, holding up what appeared to be a stem of tiny grapes.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The eggs from the ovary of a giant squid. I have a freezer full of ’em.”

The phone rang. He stared at it without moving. “They’ll only want something,” he said.

He stuck a pair of tweezers inside the jar, pulled out a strand of eggs, and placed it under a microscope. “Go ahead, mate, take a look,” he said. When I looked into the eyepiece, I could see at least a hundred eggs, each no more than two millimetres wide. O’Shea said that he planned to attach the eggs, which may produce pheromones, to an underwater camera, in the hope of luring a giant squid close enough to be captured on film.

He sat at his computer, typed for a few minutes, then stopped abruptly and ran out of the office. He returned moments later, carrying two hula hoops. “We’re almost ready,” he said.

The phone rang again. “Oh, bloody hell,” he said, and let it ring. He picked up another jar, this one containing two black shells that appeared to lock together. “It’s the beak of a giant squid,” he said. I ran my finger along its sharp edge, which pricked my skin. He said he had found it inside the stomach of a sperm whale.

He began to race around again, and before long his arms were filled with a box of specimen jars, the hula hoops, a net, a hammer, a rope, a worn leather briefcase that was only half buckled, and several rolled-up maps. “O.K., I think we’re about ready,” he said. “I just need a smoke, and we’ll be off.”

For months, he had been carefully working out our destination, studying squid migration patterns as well as satellite readings of water currents and temperatures. His plan was to go south, where he had found the para-larvae before. At the last minute, however, he changed his mind. “We’re going north,” he said. As we got back in his truck, he added, “I should warn you, there’s a bit of a cyclone coming our way.”

  For as long as sailors have been going out to sea, they have been returning with stories of monsters. The Bible speaks of “a dragon that is in the sea;” the Roman encyclopedia “Naturalis Historia” tells of an enormous “polyp” that was “smeared with brine and had a terrible smell.” As the science writer Richard Ellis demonstrates in his 1998 book, “The Search for the Giant Squid,” from these disparate accounts emerged a common portrait of a singular beast: a huge sea creature, with fearsome appendages—arms or horns or feet or legs or tails—that jutted out of its head. In the Odyssey, Homer describes a beast called the Scylla:

She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down
and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,
each head barbed with a triple row of fangs . . .
No mariners yet can boast they’d raced their ship
past Scylla’s lair without some mortal blow.

In Norway, sailors sometimes reported sightings of a tentacled predator, which they dubbed the Kraken. (The word is a colloquial term for a tree with the roots still attached.) In 1755, Bishop Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan included the animal in his “Natural History of Norway,” claiming that the Kraken was the size of a “floating island,” with horns as long as a ship’s mast. He went on, “It seems these are the creature’s arms, and, it is said, if they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom.”

Meanwhile, American whalers were exchanging their own stories of a “devilfish.” In 1851, Herman Melville, who had worked for three years on a whaling ship, published “Moby Dick,” in which he describes a sailor who is witness to “the most wondrous phenomenon”: a “vast pulpy mass” with “innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.”

Around the same time, Johannes Japetus Smith Steenstrup, an eminent Danish zoologist, decided to investigate the rumors himself. As Steenstrup sorted through the available evidence, he was drawn in particular to several accounts of a strange beast caught in the Øresund Strait in the fifteen-forties, and brought to the king of Denmark, at whose court it was preserved in a dried state as “a rarity and a wonder.” Named a “sea monk,” because its smooth-looking head evoked men of the cloister, it resembled, in an original sketch, a large squid. In an 1854 lecture, Steenstrup declared that the sea monk, like the Kraken, was “firstly a cephalopod”—a classification term which derives from the Greek words for “head” and “foot,” and refers to animals whose tentacles sprout from their head. To the amazement of his audience, Steenstrup then held up a glass jar containing the jaws of a giant squid, which he said had been retrieved from a dead specimen off the coast of Iceland. He named the creature Architeuthis (“ruling squid”)—marking, as Ellis has noted, “the official passage of the giant squid from the realm of fable into the scientific literature.”

Just as seamen had previously exaggerated the evidence for the giant squid’s existence, the scientific community now exaggerated the lack of it. Most scientists were still disputing Steenstrup’s findings when, in November, 1861, the crew of the French steamship Alecton, in the middle of the Atlantic, saw a Kraken rise up before them. The captain decided that he had to capture it, and ordered his men to fire their muskets. The bullets seemed to have little effect, so they hurled harpoons, which appeared to glance off it. Finally, they wrapped a noose around its tail, but, as they began to haul the creature on board, its enormous weight caused the rope to slice through its boneless flesh. All that remained was a piece of the tail, which was soon dispatched, along with a detailed report, to the French Academy of Sciences. The report inspired Jules Verne’s depiction of a menacing giant squid, but it did little to secure the organism a certified place in the animal kingdom. Arthur Mangin, a French zoologist, declared that the rotting tail was the remains of a sea plant, and urged “the wise, and especially the man of science, not to admit into the catalogue those stories which mention extraordinary creatures . . . the existence of which would be . . . a contradiction of the great laws of harmony and equilibrium which have sovereign rule over living nature.”

Scientists continued to doubt Steenstrup’s thesis until one day in 1873, when a fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland saw a creature floating on the ocean’s surface and struck it with a hook. The animal was alive, and reached up and tried to seize him; the fisherman then grabbed an axe. Over the years, the story was embellished, but one fact was undeniable: the fisherman returned to shore with a tentacle from a giant squid, which was nineteen feet long. It was placed in a museum, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where the public could see it. At last, even the most ardent skeptic was forced to admit that the Kraken was real.

  As the winds and rains from the cyclone began to descend on New Zealand, O’Shea stood in his back yard beside his boat, which rested on a trailer. The boat was not exactly what I had imagined it to be. It was barely twenty feet long and seven feet wide, with an outboard motor. There was no galley or head, and no place to sleep, except for a forward berth the size of a broom closet. “I suppose you were expecting one of those American yachts, weren’t you?” O’Shea said with a smile.

Initially, he had planned to charter a vessel with a traditional squid squad—a professional crew and a team of scientists. Squid hunters from Japan, America, and Europe crisscrossed the sea in this manner, and O’Shea had been on such a voyage when he found his paralarvae. But such expeditions cost millions of dollars, and O’Shea is an academic who must cobble together funding for his research from private sources, like the Discovery Channel. He had already sunk a significant portion of his family’s modest savings into his quest, and as a result he was unable to afford a hearing aid, among other necessities. “If I don’t find a giant squid soon, I’ll be ruined,” he told me.

Yet, according to other hunters, part of the genius of O’Shea’s scheme is that it can be executed relatively cheaply. Juvenile squid swim in shallower waters than adults, and he didn’t need to descend, say, in a submarine. He also didn’t require a ship that could accommodate a huge tank. By December, O’Shea had decided that he would go forward using his own fishing boat, and he whittled down his crew to three people: O’Shea, myself, and a graduate student in marine biology named Peter Conway, a gentle thirty-two-year-old vegetarian who rolled his own cigarettes and had never been on such an expedition. “The big swells make me a wee queasy,” he confessed at one point.

O’Shea told me that he was not willing to wait for the cyclone to pass: there was only a short period each year during which adult squid migrated into the region to spawn and release their eggs. And so we set off in the truck, with the trailer in tow, and headed north, listening to Neil Diamond’s slightly nasal tenor on the stereo. (“He’s bloody brilliant, isn’t he?” O’Shea said.)

Within a few hours, the exquisite landscape of New Zealand, with its long white shores and volcanic hills and sheep farms, was obscured in blackness as the storm intensified. The trailer rocked in the wind, which was approaching gale force. According to news reports, a nearby river had burst its banks, forcing local residents to evacuate. Civil-defense teams were being called up, and the power had gone out in several cities, including Auckland.

The police were warning motorists to stay off the roads, but we continued farther up the northern peninsula, past towns with Aboriginal names like Te Kao and Te Hapua, until we arrived at a wooden cabin, in the afternoon. We would stay here during the day, O’Shea explained, then launch the boat at night, when the squid rose upward in the water column to feed.

The cabin had no phone and no heat, and it was musty inside, as if it had been abandoned for years. “Not bloody much, is it?” O’Shea said, as he brushed some ants off the kitchen table. He didn’t seem too dismayed, though, and while Conway and I unpacked our bags he spread his equipment across the floor and began to assemble a peculiar form. First, he took a round plywood board that was the size of a stop sign and drilled holes around its perimeter. He wove cable ties through the holes, then attached the board to a tube of fine-meshed netting that was large enough to accommodate him inside it. He was still working when Conway and I went to bed; when I got up the next morning, I found him in the same position. “It’s coming along nicely,” he said. A candle was burning beside him, and he held a sharp knife over the flame. Using the hot blade, he cut several holes into the sides of the net.