CHAPTER III 



TEN-ARMED GAME 



THAT there was sport of an exciting nature 

 in the capture of a large octopus and its 

 ten-armed ally the squid, which ranges from 

 seven to sixty or seventy feet in length, dawned upon 

 me when spearing specimens on the Florida reefs and 

 among the islands of the California coast. No 

 animal affects the imagination as do these weird 

 uncanny creatures which more resemble a Gorgon's 

 head, with its repellent snakes, than anything else. 

 From early times writers have invested them with 

 horror; painted them as giants of the ocean world; 

 the very church giving sanction to the tales; Bishop 

 Pontoppidan, of Norway, having described and fig- 

 ured squids as krakens monsters which were mis- 

 taken for islands as they lay upon the surface of 

 the sea while other authors of the past century pic- 

 tured them as dragging ships down by twisting their 

 snakelike arms about the masts and rigging. In 

 ' The Toilers of the Sea " Victor Hugo vividly pic- 

 tures the ferocity of the tribe; and the names, devil- 

 fish, cuttlefish, became in the public mind synonymous 

 with all that was terrifying and mysterious among 



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