Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, February 23, 1867
Readers of M. Victor Hugo’s “Toilers of the Sea,” will remember the terrible narrative of the fisherman Gilliatt’s encounter with the octopus or sea-devil, who winds his horrible suckers round his victim, and gradually draws away his life’s blood. The poet novelist has been accused of exaggeration in this incident, but according to Mr. Lord, an English traveler, who has just published in London a book about British Columbia and the pacific coast, the sea-devils of the North Pacific even outdo the terrors of the Channel species. Mr. Lord says;
“The octopus, as seen on our coast, although even here called a ‘mansucker’ by the fishermen, is a mere Tom Thumb, a tiny dwarf, as compared to the Brobdignagian proportions he attains in the snug bays and longland canals along the east side of Vancouver Island, as well as on the mainland. These places afford lurking dens, strongholds and natural sea nurseries, where the octopus grows to an enormous size, fattens and wages war with insatiable voracity on all and everything it can catch. Safe from heavy breakers, it lives as in an aquarium of smoote, lakelike water, that save in the ebbing and flowing of the tide, knows no change or disturbance.
“The ordinary resting place of this hideous ‘sea-beast is under a large stone or in the wide cleft of a rock, where an octopus can creep and squeeze with the flatness of a sand-dab or the slipperiness of an eel. Its modes of locomotion are curious and varied, using the eight arms as paddles and working them alternately, the central disks representing a boat, octopi row themselves along with an ease and celerity comparable to the many-oared caique that glides over the tranquil waters of the Bosphorus; they can ramble at will over the sandy roadside intersecting their submarine parks, and converting arms into legs march on like a huge spider. Gymnasts of the highest order, they climb the slippery ledges, as flies walk up a window pane, attaching the countless suckers that arm the terrible limbs to the face of the rock, or to the wrack and seaweed, they go about, back downward, like marine sloths, or, clinging with one arm to the waving algae, preform a series of trapeze movements that Leotard might view with envy.
“I have often, when on the rocks in Esquimault harbor, watched my friend’s proceeding; the water being clear and still it is just like peering into an aquarium of huge proportions, crowded with endless varieties of curious sea-monsters, although grotesque and ugly to look at, yet all alike displaying the wondrous works of Creative wisdom. In all the cozy little nooks and corners of the harbor the great seawrack [Macrocytis} grow wildly’ having a straight round stem that comes up from the bottom, often with a stalk three hundred feet long; reaching the surface, it spreads out two long tapering leaves that float upon the water; this sea forest is the favorite hunting ground of octopi.
‘I do not think, in his native element, an octopus often catches prey upon the ground or on the rocks, but wait for them just as a spider does, only the octopus converts itself into a web, and a fearful web, too. Fastening one arm to a stout stalk, it puts out the other seven, one would hardly know their concealed while it waits for a shoal of fish.
By a sort of poetical justice, these tyrants of the seas are themselves hunted by an enemy of untiring pertinacity. The Indian regards the octopus as a great delicacy, especially when its huge glutinous body is carefully roasted. Were the octopus once to get its long thong feelers over the side of the canoe, and at the same time retain a hold upon the seawrack, it could as easily haul it over as a child could a basket. This the crafty Indian knows. How he captures him Mr. Lord thus describes.
“Paddling the canoe close to the rocks and quictly pushing inside the wreck, the Indian peers through the crystal water, until his practiced eye detects an octopus, with its great ropelike arms stiffened out, waiting patiently for food. His spear is twelve feet long, armed at the end with four pieces of hard wood, made harder by being baked and charred in the fires; these projects about fourteen inches beyond the spear-haft, each piece having a barb on one side, and are arranged in a circle round the spear-end, and lashed firmly on with cedar bark. Having spied out the octopus, the hunter passes the spear carefully through the water until within an inch or so of the centre disk, and then sends it in as deep as he can plunge it. Writhing in pain and passion, the octopus coils its terrible arms around the haft; the redskin making the side of his canoe a furlcum for his spear, keeps the struggling monster well off, and rises it to the surface of the water. He is dangerous now; if he could get a holdfast on either Indian or canoe, nothing short of chopping off the arms piecemeal would be of any avail.
“But the wily redskin knows all this, and has taken care to have ready another spear, unbarbed, long, straight, smooth and very sharp, and with this he stabs the octopus where the arms join the central disk. I suppose the spear must break down the nervous ganglions supplying motive power, as, the stabbed arm loses at once strength and tenacity, the suckers that moment before held on with a force that ten men could not have overcome, relax and the entire ray hangs like a dead snake, a limp, lifeless mass. And thus the Indian stabs, until the octopus, deprived of all power to do harm, is dragged into the canoe, a great inert, quivering lump of brown jelly.