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porphyryTwo Octopus Stories:
Pliny the Elder (1st century AD)
We must not pass over the facts as to the octopus ascertained when Lucius Lucullus was governor of Baetica [southern Spain] and published by one of his staff, Trebius Niger…Moreover Niger asserts that no animal is more savage in causing the death of man in the water; for it struggles with him by coiling around him and swallows him with its sucker-cups and drags him asunder by its multiple suction, when it attacks men that have been shipwrecked or are diving…The rest of the facts reported by the same authority may be viewed as being close to a prodigy. In the aquaculture facility at Carteria an octopus was in the habit of getting into their uncovered tanks from the open sea and there foraging for salted fish…and so it brought on itself the wrath of the keepers, which owing to the persistence of the theft was beyond all bounds. Fences were erected in its way, but it used to scale them by making use of a tree, and it was only possible to catch it by means of the keen scent of hounds. These surrounded it when it was going back at night, and aroused the guards, who were astounded by its strangeness: in the first place its size was unheard of and so was its color as well, and it was smeared with brine and had a terrible smell; who would have expected to find an octopus there, or who would have recognized it in such circumstances? They thought themselves to be fighting a monster, for by its awful breath it also tormented the dogs, which it now scourged with the ends of its tentacles and now struck with the end of its longer arms, which it used as clubs; and with difficulty they succeeded in dispatching it with a number of three pronged harpoons. They showed its head to Lucullus—it was a big as a cask and held 90 gallons—and (to use the words of Trebius himself) ‘its beards which one could hardly clasp around with both one’s arms, knotted like clubs, 30 feet long, with sucks or cups like basis holding three gallons, and teeth corresponding in size.’ Its remains, kept as a curiosity, were found to weigh 700 pounds. Trebius also states that squid of two different species of the same size have been driven ashore on that coast.
Heimito von Doder, the Demons (1956; drmatic date, 1927):
I ran into one once….[i]n a perfectly safe harbor—right at the pier, in fact. A bizarre business. The way they dispose of their garbage there is to have refuse holes out on the pier, with gratings, like sewer gratings. They empty the slops pails into these. I was at a restaurant there, a place famous for its fish dishes. Suddenly a native gave a fearful cry; he’d gone to empty a pail, and this thing caught him. Right through the grating a long tentacle shot up and gripped him around the ankle. People came running up with knives and freed him, but one of the rescue crew was also caught by the foot. I saw it with my own eyes, and realized at once what was happening. I had a pistol with me, ran over and fired through the grating, kept firing as long as anything stirred. There was a tremendous splashing and crashing in the shaft. Nothing like this had ever happened in the port. Later they pulled out the dead creature; it weighed far | more than a hundred pounds and had eight arms about ten feet long, suction cups the size of plates. People said that the nettings over the outlets of the sewage system on the sea had long been rusted out. …Incidentally, a specimen of that size would be strong enough to pull a person from the shore into the water. Divers know a tick to be used in extremity, I’ve heard. The octopus had a kind of beak, a horny beak like a parrot’s or culture’s. The story is that anyone who can overcome his disgust and fear, reach between the writhing tentacles, pull apart the beak and turn it inside out like a glove, will kill the kraken. I don’t know whether it’s true or not—fortunately I’ve never been in a situation where I had to try it.
Pliny the Elder (1st century AD)
We must not pass over the facts as to the octopus ascertained when Lucius Lucullus was governor of Baetica [southern Spain] and published by one of his staff, Trebius Niger…Moreover Niger asserts that no animal is more savage in causing the death of man in the water; for it struggles with him by coiling around him and swallows him with its sucker-cups and drags him asunder by its multiple suction, when it attacks men that have been shipwrecked or are diving…The rest of the facts reported by the same authority may be viewed as being close to a prodigy. In the aquaculture facility at Carteria an octopus was in the habit of getting into their uncovered tanks from the open sea and there foraging for salted fish…and so it brought on itself the wrath of the keepers, which owing to the persistence of the theft was beyond all bounds. Fences were erected in its way, but it used to scale them by making use of a tree, and it was only possible to catch it by means of the keen scent of hounds. These surrounded it when it was going back at night, and aroused the guards, who were astounded by its strangeness: in the first place its size was unheard of and so was its color as well, and it was smeared with brine and had a terrible smell; who would have expected to find an octopus there, or who would have recognized it in such circumstances? They thought themselves to be fighting a monster, for by its awful breath it also tormented the dogs, which it now scourged with the ends of its tentacles and now struck with the end of its longer arms, which it used as clubs; and with difficulty they succeeded in dispatching it with a number of three pronged harpoons. They showed its head to Lucullus—it was a big as a cask and held 90 gallons—and (to use the words of Trebius himself) ‘its beards which one could hardly clasp around with both one’s arms, knotted like clubs, 30 feet long, with sucks or cups like basis holding three gallons, and teeth corresponding in size.’ Its remains, kept as a curiosity, were found to weigh 700 pounds. Trebius also states that squid of two different species of the same size have been driven ashore on that coast.
Heimito von Doder, the Demons (1956; drmatic date, 1927):
I ran into one once….[i]n a perfectly safe harbor—right at the pier, in fact. A bizarre business. The way they dispose of their garbage there is to have refuse holes out on the pier, with gratings, like sewer gratings. They empty the slops pails into these. I was at a restaurant there, a place famous for its fish dishes. Suddenly a native gave a fearful cry; he’d gone to empty a pail, and this thing caught him. Right through the grating a long tentacle shot up and gripped him around the ankle. People came running up with knives and freed him, but one of the rescue crew was also caught by the foot. I saw it with my own eyes, and realized at once what was happening. I had a pistol with me, ran over and fired through the grating, kept firing as long as anything stirred. There was a tremendous splashing and crashing in the shaft. Nothing like this had ever happened in the port. Later they pulled out the dead creature; it weighed far | more than a hundred pounds and had eight arms about ten feet long, suction cups the size of plates. People said that the nettings over the outlets of the sewage system on the sea had long been rusted out. …Incidentally, a specimen of that size would be strong enough to pull a person from the shore into the water. Divers know a tick to be used in extremity, I’ve heard. The octopus had a kind of beak, a horny beak like a parrot’s or culture’s. The story is that anyone who can overcome his disgust and fear, reach between the writhing tentacles, pull apart the beak and turn it inside out like a glove, will kill the kraken. I don’t know whether it’s true or not—fortunately I’ve never been in a situation where I had to try it.
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Date: 2007-07-14 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-16 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-20 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-14 05:39 am (UTC)There was nothing superfluous about the face, nothing of softness or spongy deception to obscure the structure of his physiognomy. Here everything was economically trimmed down. Nothing absolutely essential to the function of crime softened the sharp edge of this face—which consisted chiefly of an enormous beaklike nose toward which the chin below grew up. The eyes, however, belong to a higher order of life than the rest of the organism . The eyes were relatively overorganized, very light in color, very wide in the center and narrowing rapidly to damp slits. These eyes were terrible. The transformed the primitive creature into a kind of diabolic thing.
It strikes me that this too describes an octopus--at least if we grant the perhaps dubious commonplace that the eye of the octopus is remarkably like that of the human.
No dount the book would repay much deeper attention than I can give it. Too bad that the only English language treatise on it is listed as missing at Washington University.
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Date: 2007-07-19 05:46 pm (UTC)I've been on there for 3 years and I'm leaving the community because if it. If you're interested seeing more work from the series please add my journal and or voice your opinion to the mod "dolphingirl."
thank you!
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Date: 2007-07-19 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-19 06:35 pm (UTC)