Frank Aubrey (1847-1927) is a 19th Century writer who deserves to be better remembered. He’s the guy who gave the worlds of Fantasy the killer plant. Not H. G. Wells but Aubry with his The Devil-Tree of Eldorado (1897). He also wrote “A Newfoundland Terror” (Fores’s Sporting Notes & Sketches, March 1896). Here we have a Northern not of the Arctic snows but the great fishing areas off Canada’s coast.
Aubrey tells his story in a fictional narrative. While out fishing in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, he encounters a rock that the sailors shun. It’s called “the Sea-devil’s Rock”. The fishermen tell him to talk to Sam Wilney, who over grog recounts his encounter in October 1873. Earlier, fishermen had disappeared without a trace near “Bishop’s Rock” (as it was called then). Sam’s partner, Pat Daly, thinks he sees what he calls a sea serpent, though he doesn’t believe in such things. The boat is almost capsized when two serpent-like arms cross over their boat. Fortunately, Pat had taken out the axe earlier to fix something and Sam chops the two tentacles off. The devil-fish rises up to look at them as they paddle away just as fast as they can. The men show the villagers their tentacle specimens. They are placed in formaldehyde and kept in the museum.
Three weeks later, after a storm, Sam goes to see another squid that is washed ashore. This one isn’t missing any arms so he figures it is a mate of the one that attacked him. Aubrey then sites records of the events to verify everything Sam has told him. Aubrey leaves the good fishermen to offer us some data. The last portion of the piece is an article on devilfish. He mentions that the devil-fish can regrow missing limbs.
The squid discoveries of the 1870s weren’t done in 1873. In 1878, fisherman near Glover’s Harbour pulled in a 55 foot squid. (A Guinness World Book holder.) To commemorate this event in 2001, the town has built a life-size statue of the creature. This is a truly exciting roadside attraction. To give you a sense of scale, if I stood next to the statue my 6 foot-ish self would reach the eyeball.
Now Aubrey was writing in 1896, twenty years after all these squids were recovered. Jules Verne amazed the world with his giant squids in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1869-70. The most famous horror writer of squid fiction is, of course, William Hope Hodgson, a man who (like Conan Doyle) had actually been to sea. Hodgson put devil-fish in at least three works, but the most notable is The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’(1907) and “A Tropical Horror” (The Grand Magazine, June 1905). He placed his squidly terrors in the Sargasso Sea (far from Newfoundland). Hodgson was a later influence on H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos full of squid-like monsters.
A big thank you to Roy Glashan and his wonderful Free Library. Check it out if you aren’t familiar.
