76 
SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED, 
Deinbolt and his neighbours had not access to, and which 
has only within the last few years been placed in our 
hands. The movements and aspect of their sea monster 
are those of an animal with which we are now well 
acquainted, but of the existence of which the narrators 
of these occasional visitations were unaware ; namely, the 
great calamary, the same which gave rise to the stories of 
the Kraken, and which has probably been a denizen of the 
Scandinavian seas and fjords from time immemorial. It 
must be remembered, as I have elsewhere said, that until 
the year 1873, notwithstanding the adventure of the 
Alecton in 1861, a cuttle measuring in total length fifty 
or sixty feet w^as generally looked upon as equally 
mythical with the great sea-serpent. Both were popularly 
scoffed at, and to express belief in either was to incur 
ridicule. But in the year above mentioned, specimens of 
even greater dimensions than those quoted were met with 
on the coasts of Newfoundland, and portions of them were 
deposited in museums, to silence the incredulous and 
interest zoologists. When Archdeacon Deinbolt published 
in 1846 the declaration of Mr. Lund and his companions 
of the fishing excursion, he and they knew nothing of there 
being such an animal. They had formed no conception of 
it, nor had they the instructive privilege, possessed of late 
years by the public in England, of being able to watch 
attentively, and at leisure, the habits and movements of 
these strangely modified mollusks living in great tanks of 
sea-water in aquaria. If they had been thus acquainted 
with them, I believe they would have recognised in their 
supposed snake the elongated body of a giant squid. 
When swimming, these squids propel themselves back- 
wards by the out-rush of a stream of water from a tube 
pointed in a direction contrary to that in which the animal 
