Devils of the Sea
Pity the poor octopus. They only live for a year, but they have a weird alien like intelligence that’s diffused through their arms – a different way of being clever.
Their weird appearance, though, engendered fear and loathing and monster octopus like creatures – Sea Devils – featured in a number of sensational historical newspaper accounts.
The two splendidly lurid illustrations below come from the Illustrated Police News, sometimes referred to as Britain’s worst newspaper for its graphic images of murders, catastrophes and accidents…
Encounter with a Sea Devil
The engraving below was published in the Illustrated Police News in 1873 and was supposedly based on a sketch made by a sailor on an English trading vessel. The creature was said to be 16 feet in length and grabbed a fishing boat off the coast of Japan, near Kisarazu.
The creature wrapped its tentacles round the boat, while the terrified fishermen fought it off with axes and guns, eventually killing it and displaying it in a nearby temple.[i]
The Deadly Embrace of the Devil Fish
In August 1877 some Mokaw Indians were bathing in the Sea off Vancouver Island. A young woman of eighteen swam to a more isolated beach for some privacy, but didn’t return. When her friends realised she was missing, they paddled their canoes round the bay in search of her and eventually found her the next day. They could see her through the clear water. She appeared to be sitting on the sea bed with what looked like a bag of flour behind her. In fact, her corpse was clutched in the writhing tentacles of a devil fish.
Two of the bravest men dived into the water armed with daggers and managed to cut the unfortunate woman free and kill the creature. The devil fish was described by ‘an intelligent and respectable half breed woman’ as having a head the size of a fifty pound bag of flour and twelve tentacles. This same woman saw the body of the young woman, which still had some of the creature’s suckers attached.[ii]
Epilogue
It’s pretty clear the artists illustrating these two nineteenth century accounts had never seen an octopus, but it makes me wonder whether illustrations like these inspired the Martians in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. If you wanted to use a creature from earth as inspiration for an alien creature, a cephalopod seems as good a place as any to start…
[i] ‘Encounter with a Sea-Devil’, Illustrated Police News, 21 July 1873, p.2
[ii] ‘The Deadly Embrace of the Devil Fish’, Illustrated Police News, 11 May 1878, p.2
Paul Weatherhead 