LAID OUT: The first photograph of most of a giant squid, now displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, was taken for amateur naturalist Moses Harvey of St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1874. The 27-foot-long carcass (along with this photo of its arms draped on a rail over a bathtub) made its way to zoologist Addison Emery Verrill, who took detailed notes on the specimen. “The tub is 38½ inches in diameter,” he noted on the image. “On the club of the long arm there is a marginal row of small suckers on each side alternating with the larger ones.” Harvey displayed more awe. “I knew that I had in my possession what all the savants in the world did not,” he wrote in his journal. “A photograph could not lie and would silence the gainsayers.”WIKIMEDIA COMMONSIn Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, a small fishing boat was attacked in the fall of 1873. One of the boat’s occupants—so the story goes—saw vast tentacles rising up from the water and, in an act of heroism, hacked a couple off. Boat freed, the fishermen headed back to shore.
The anglers fed one tentacle to a dog, according to some accounts; the other, measuring 19 feet in length, they carried to nearby St. John’s, to the home of minister and amateur naturalist Moses Harvey. “Harvey was Presbyterian Irish, incredibly homesick for Ireland, and had lost himself in all things natural,” says Matthew Gavin Frank, who explored Harvey’s life and essays on Newfoundland’s flora and fauna in his 2014 book Preparing the Ghost. “He was known in St. John’s in the mid- and late 1800s as just being crazy after all things from the land and the sea.” Harvey bought the tentacle for $10, says Frank, and estimated the creature it came from to be 72 feet long.
A subject of cautionary tales rather than ...
