50 SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED. 
a ship's side, and dragging him under water, as described 
by the old master-mariner Magnus Dens. The tough, 
supple tentacles, shot forth with lightning rapidity, would 
be long enough to reach him at a distance of a dozen yards, 
and strong enough to drag him within the grasp of the 
eight shorter arms, a helpless victim to the mandibles of a 
beak sufficiently powerful to tear him in pieces and crush 
some of his smaller bones. For, once within that dreadful 
embrace, his escape, unaided, would be impossible. The 
clinging power of this Plectoteiithis is so enormously aug- 
mented by the additional surface given by the expanded 
folds to the under side of the arms, that I doubt if even 
one of the smaller whales, such as the " White Whale," or 
the " Pilot Whale," could extricate itself from their com- 
bined hold, if those eight supple, clammy, adhesive arms, 
each 9 feet long, and 5 inches in diameter at the base 
on the flat under surface, and armed with a battery of 
2400 suckers, were once fairly lapped around it. 
Ought it to surprise us, then, that an uneducated sea- 
faring population, such as the fishermen of Fridrichstad, 
mentioned by Pontoppidan, absolutely ignorant of the 
habits and affinities, and even unacquainted with the real 
external form of such a creature, should exaggerate its 
dimensions and invest it with mystery } All that they 
knew of it was that whilst their friends and neighbours, 
whom we will call Eric Paulsen, Hans Ohlsen, and Olaf 
Bruhn were out fishing one calm day, a shapeless some- 
thing" rose just above the surface of the tranquil sea not 
far from their boat. They could see that there was much 
more of its bulk under water, but how far it extended they 
could not ascertain. Mistrusting its appearance, and with 
foreboding of danger, they were about to get up their 
anchor, when, suddenly, from thirty feet away, a rope was 
