SOURCE: "The Terror of the Sea Caves" (Everybody’s Magazine, January 1907) by Charles G. D. Roberts

DESCRIPTION: "To his huge unwinking eyes of crystal black, which caught every tiniest ray of light in their smooth, appalling deeps, the wreck looked strange enough to attract his attention at once. It was quite unlike any rock-form which he had ever seen. Rather cautiously he advanced a giant tentacle to investigate it. But at the touch of the unfamiliar and alien substance the tentacle recoiled in aversion. The pale monster backed away. But the wreck made no attempt to pounce upon him. It seemed to have no fight in it. Possibly, on closer investigation, it might prove to be good to eat; and he was hungry. In fact, he was always hungry, for the irresistible corrosives in his great stomach — and he was newly all stomach — were so swift in their action that whatever he swallowed was digested almost in the swallowing. Since coming upon the ledge he had clutched and devoured two small basking sharks, from six to eight feet long, and a sawfish fully ten feet long, who had not been on their guard against the approach of such a peril. Besides these substantial victims, countless small fry, of every kind, had been drawn deftly to the insatiable vortex of his maw. Nevertheless, his appetite was again crying out. He tried the wreck again, first carefully, then boldly, till the writhing tentacles, with their sensitive tips and suckers, had enveloped it from stem to stern and searched it inside and out." ("The Terror of the Sea Caves" by Charles G. D. Roberts)

NOTES: Jan Laurvik, a deep-sea diver retrieving pearls from a sunken ship, is attacked by a massive squid. The creature attempts to pull him out of the cabin of the ship with its many tentacles. Laurvik protects himself with his knife but it is a killer whale that saves him in the end.

HISTORY: Giant squid have fascinated readers since the time of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). See H. G. Wells' killer squid as well as William Hope Hodgson's "Thing in the Weeds". That Charles G. D. Roberts (whose fame in Canada rests entirely on his body of poetry) should write such a good adventure yarn is surprising. I guess poetry didn't pay the bills even back in 1907.