Scientists continued to doubt Steenstrup’s thesis until one day in 1873, when a fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland saw a creature floating on the ocean’s surface and struck it with a hook. The animal was alive, and reached up and tried to seize him; the fisherman then grabbed an axe. Over the years, the story was embellished, but one fact was undeniable: the fisherman returned to shore with a tentacle from a giant squid, which was nineteen feet long. It was placed in a museum, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where the public could see it. At last, even the most ardent skeptic was forced to admit that the Kraken was real.
As the winds and rains from the cyclone began to descend on New Zealand, O’Shea stood in his back yard beside his boat, which rested on a trailer. The boat was not exactly what I had imagined it to be. It was barely twenty feet long and seven feet wide, with an outboard motor. There was no galley or head, and no place to sleep, except for a forward berth the size of a broom closet. “I suppose you were expecting one of those American yachts, weren’t you?” O’Shea said with a smile.
Initially, he had planned to charter a vessel with a traditional squid squad-a professional crew and a team of scientists. Squid hunters from Japan, America, and Europe crisscrossed the sea in this manner, and O’Shea had been on such a voyage when he found his paralarvae. But such expeditions cost millions of dollars, and O’Shea is an academic who must cobble together funding for his research from private sources, like the Discovery Channel. He had already sunk a significant portion of his family’s modest savings into his quest, and as a result he was unable to afford a hearing aid, among other necessities. “If I don’t find a giant squid soon, I’ll be ruined,” he told me.
Yet, according to other hunters, part of the genius of O’Shea’s scheme is that it can be executed relatively cheaply. Juvenile squid swim in shallower waters than adults, and he didn’t need to descend, say, in a submarine. He also didn’t require a ship that could accommodate a huge tank. By December, O’Shea had decided that he would go forward using his own fishing boat, and he whittled down his crew to three people: O’Shea, myself, and a graduate student in marine biology named Peter Conway, a gentle thirty-two-year-old vegetarian who rolled his own cigarettes and had never been on such an expedition. “The big swells make me a wee queasy,” he confessed at one point.
O’Shea told me that he was not willing to wait for the cyclone to pass: there was only a short period each year during which adult squid migrated into the region to spawn and release their eggs. And so we set off in the truck, with the trailer in tow, and headed north, listening to Neil Diamond’s slightly nasal tenor on the stereo. (“He’s bloody brilliant, isn’t he?” O’Shea said.)
Within a few hours, the exquisite landscape of New Zealand, with its long white shores and volcanic hills and sheep farms, was obscured in blackness as the storm intensified. The trailer rocked in the wind, which was approaching gale force. According to news reports, a nearby river had burst its banks, forcing local residents to evacuate. Civil-defense teams were being called up, and the power had gone out in several cities, including Auckland.
The police were warning motorists to stay off the roads, but we continued farther up the northern peninsula, past towns with Aboriginal names like Te Kao and Te Hapua, until we arrived at a wooden cabin, in the afternoon. We would stay here during the day, O’Shea explained, then launch the boat at night, when the squid rose upward in the water column to feed.
The cabin had no phone and no heat, and it was musty inside, as if it had been abandoned for years. “Not bloody much, is it?” O’Shea said, as he brushed some ants off the kitchen table. He didn’t seem too dismayed, though, and while Conway and I unpacked our bags he spread his equipment across the floor and began to assemble a peculiar form. First, he took a round plywood board that was the size of a stop sign and drilled holes around its perimeter. He wove cable ties through the holes, then attached the board to a tube of fine-meshed netting that was large enough to accommodate him inside it. He was still working when Conway and I went to bed; when I got up the next morning, I found him in the same position. “It’s coming along nicely,” he said. A candle was burning beside him, and he held a sharp knife over the flame. Using the hot blade, he cut several holes into the sides of the net.
The slow, methodical work had put him in a reflective mood, and he told me how he first became interested in the giant squid. “It had never been my plan,” he said. “When I was four or five, my parents got divorced, and I was sent to live with my grandmother. I didn’t have many friends. I was one of these horribly geeky kids. I had glasses and a heart murmur and arthritis, and I spent all my time on the beach, looking for shells. I collected thousands of them. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I started to go out on commercial fishing boats in the summer to try to find the rarest kinds. I remember once, I was on this boat, and the fishermen pulled in this shell. I knew there were only one or two in all of New Zealand, and I let out this loud scream, and the captain came down and yelled at me for screaming, but I didn’t mind. I was so excited to find it.”
He burned another hole in the net, filling the room with an acrid smell. He said, “After I graduated from the university with a doctorate in marine biology, I went to work for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. In 1996, I got a phone call saying that a fisherman had found a giant squid down in Wellington, and did I want it. I’d never seen one, so I raced down to the jetty, and took one look at it, and it was the biggest bloody thing I’d ever seen. I knew it wouldn’t fit in the car, and so I borrowed a trailer, and strapped it down with the tentacles draped over the car.
“Before long, the press got wind of it, and they started calling and asking me all these questions, and I didn’t know anything about the giant squid. I spouted a bunch of nonsense, and I soon realized no one really knew anything about this blasted thing. It was this great unknown, this complete mystery. And I’ve been trying to solve it ever since.”
He seemed slightly embarrassed by his candor. “What we need now are Coke bottles,” he said. He had brought several empty one-litre containers with him; he sliced each bottle in half, so that the top part resembled a funnel. He inserted each funnel, the wide part facing out, into the holes that he had made in the mesh netting. He then sealed them in place with a glue gun. “We’re ready for the final touches,” he said. He slid a hula hoop inside the bottom end of the mesh sheath; the result looked like a Victorian skirt. Finally, he clamped the bottom of the net to a small glass container.
He climbed onto a chair and held the contraption up: it was roughly six feet long and cylindrical in shape, with a round hardwood top, a funnel-studded net draped along the sides, and a little glass jar dangling on the bottom. “Whaddaya think, chappies?” O’Shea asked Conway and me.