In Newfoundland, giant squid inspire local legends – and questions about why they keep washing up there

More below • Map: Newfoundland squid sightings since 1870

It was a cold and wet day just before Christmas when Derwin Roberts set off in his truck to fill buckets of well-water from a friend’s faucet in the western Newfoundland town of Triton.

Mr. Roberts, then 32, with ropey forearms and russet hair, amused himself while waiting for his buckets to fill by throwing rocks into the grey glassy sea. That’s when he spotted it: something curious out in the water, about six metres off Topless Beach. It looked like white garbage bags and rope bobbing in the water. ‘Is that what I think it is?’ he wondered.

Mr. Roberts, a mussel farmer, had heard of the giant squid that had washed up across the bay nearly a century and a half ago. And that dozens more had been spotted or recovered over the years. But like most people, Mr. Roberts had never seen one in the flesh or ever fathomed that he would. Until Dec. 21, 2004 – the last time giant squid washed up on the shores of Newfoundland.

The creature, immortalized in legend, made the leap from feared Kraken to Architeuthis dux in the rugged seas of the province in the 1870s. It has since shaped the lore of the local people and the island’s collective mythology.

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On the shoreline, Mr. Roberts discovered a tentacle as long as a vacuum hose, ringed with suckers. He rushed over to where his brothers Avery and Perry were building lobster pots. “You guys wouldn’t want to come up and help me retrieve a giant squid?” he asked. Their jaws dropped.

On the beach, Mr. Roberts threw a cod-jigging line onto the animal and hauled it to shore. The men lifted the 90-kg cephalopod, slipping and sliding through their arms, into a wooden lobster box. Its long rubbery tentacles slinked out the top.

They heaved the giant squid onto the back of Mr. Roberts’s pickup truck and drove to the brothers’ fishing stage. There, the men laid out the squid on the timberwood floor. From tip to tip it was four metres long. Derwin lifted the tentacles and saw it had a beak the size of a cue ball.

Word travelled like the wind. Within hours people flocked to see the giant squid on the Roberts’ fishing stage.

“It was huge. Huge. HUGE,” laughed Derwin’s wife, Dana Roberts, at their kitchen table in August.

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The couple live a few kilometres away from where the squid’s ghostly tattered flesh is preserved, the Sperm Whale Pavilion, a small community museum with a plaque at the door celebrating the Roberts brothers’ donation. Triton is one of many small settlements around the Rock that have a connection to the giant squid, through stories of strandings and sightings – or fishermen simply chopping them up for fish bait and dog food, said Jenny Higgins, whose book Devilfish, about Newfoundland’s giant squid, will be published this fall. It’s the season when the “real-life sea monsters” are most likely to be seen.

“To grow up in Newfoundland is to be captivated by the story of the giant squid,” said Ms. Higgins from her home in the town of Flatrock, just north of St. John’s.

“Whenever I go walking by the ocean, I just wonder, ‘Are there any giant squid deep down under there?’ ”

Newfoundland’s giant squid sprang onto the world stage in October of 1873. Fishermen were out in a tiny boat near Bell Island in Conception Bay when they saw what looked like debris floating on the surface. But when they poked it with an oar, a creature sprang to life. Perhaps thinking it was under attack, the creature slung two great tentacles over the side of the boat. The son of one of the fishermen grabbed an axe and chopped off a tentacle, later delivering it to the home of St. John’s naturalist Moses Harvey, who photographed it. While there were reports of giant squid going back to the late 1700s, this was the first evidence that giant squid were real and not simply mythical creatures of the deep.

“Up until then its very existence as a species was somewhat doubted,” said Ms. Higgins.

The next month, a group of herring fishermen in Logy Bay pulled up a live, two-metre giant squid in their net. They brought it to Mr. Harvey, who photographed it and attempted to preserve it. Then he sent it to Yale scientist Addison E. Verrill, later renowned as the world’s first and foremost authority on giant squid, based on various Newfoundland specimens sent to him by Mr. Harvey.

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A few years later, giant squid made headlines in The Daily Globe, an early incarnation of The Globe and Mail, where, incidentally, Mr. Harvey was a correspondent. “The most gigantic cephalopods yet taken,” read the headline under “Newfoundland Affairs.”

In his dispatch, Mr. Harvey described the discovery of a record-setting 16-metre giant squid struggling to escape after it was caught in the ebb tide off Glovers Harbour on Nov. 2, 1878. “In its frantic efforts, it flung its huge arms about, lashing the water into foam, and from a funnel behind the head it spouted streams of water which was occasionally darkened by being intermixed with an inky fluid,” he wrote in the Saturday broadsheet published a few months after the fact.

Today, a tomato-red life-size replica of the massive creature stands at the Giant Squid Interpretation Site, a community museum in Glovers Harbour, population 55, a tranquil blip of homes along a rural road. The museum houses jars of giant squid appendages, (including one with a tiny fish entwined in a squid sucker), a papier mâché replica of a giant-squid eyeball the size of a soccer ball, and historical collages of Newfoundland’s most famous specimens. There, you can buy giant-squid souvenirs such as beer mugs, pencils, postcards and windbreakers.

People come from across Canada, the U.S. and Europe to visit, said Kimberly Vaters, who works at the museum. Born and raised in the community, she too is fascinated and fearful of the creature’s tentacles that are triple the length of its body and lash out at lightning speed.

“It’s a monster. It’s amazing,” she said. ”I think they can take the tentacles and just hold the boat down.”

The Glovers Harbour giant squid is in many ways iconic to Canada, featured on KitKat candy bar wrappers, a Canada Post stamp in 2011 and long regarded by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest-ever recorded specimen.

Similarly, the town of Hare Bay has also latched on to its giant-squid fame after one washed up in 1981. The 14-metre specimen is currently on display at the Rooms provincial museum in St. John’s, a source of pride for the town, said Dean Wells, who helped organize the second annual giant-squid festival in Hare Bay this summer.

“Not a lot is known about them,” said Mr. Wells, adding that the goal is to erect a giant-squid monument in the town. “To know one came ashore in this town, it’s unique and for a lot of us very interesting and mysterious too.”

In August, townspeople gathered for an outdoor movie to watch the 2023 film Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. They wore giant-squid T-shirts. Munched on giant-squid-themed cookies and pies. And took home colourful two-foot-long squids crocheted by Mr. Wells’s wife, Julie.

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Even today, little is known about the biology, migration and reproduction of the elusive creature, said retired Fisheries and Oceans scientist Earl Dawe, who has contributed to research papers and dissected two specimens. It was only in 2006 that the first living giant squid was captured on video.

While giant squid live in deep water all over the world, Fred Aldrich‚ a Newfoundland squid scientist who worked in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, tried to understand why the island, particularly the northeastern coastline, was a hotspot for sightings. He theorized that the Labrador Current, which runs southward along the east coast of Newfoundland, transports sick or wandering giant squid off the continental shelf into shallower waters in the bays. The giant squid, which carry more oxygen in their blood in colder water, may have suffocated.

Bolstering this theory is that giant squid have mostly always showed up in the fall, when ocean temperatures are the warmest, though the 1870s may be an exception, added Mr. Dawe.

“Why they find themselves out of their normal environment, I don’t know,” he said.

Another theory is that two giant squid washed up in 2004 because of seismic blasting during offshore oil exploration, according to 2011 research published in the journal Biological Conservation. A mass stranding of five giant squid in Spain also coincided with seismic exploration. And research has shown that low-frequency sound from an air gun array affects the balance of other squid species, which Mr. Dawe says could explain the coincidence.

“I don’t think we have any clear one explanation of it all,” said Mr. Dawe, adding that there may simply be fewer fishermen around to potentially spot washed up giant squid since the moratorium on cod fishing more than 30 years ago.

As for future sightings, Mr. Dawe said there hasn’t been enough of a pattern to predict if or when the next one will surface. And it’s also unknown what role, if any, climate change and the warming of the oceans and changing ocean currents may have on the species in and around the Rock. It’s something that Mr. Dawe ponders at his home in the town of Conception Bay South, in view of the tickle where a fishermen’s son once chopped the tentacle off a giant squid 150 years ago.

Could one be lurking out there right now? Like so many things about the giant squid, that too remains a mystery.

Giant squids sighted or stranded in Newfoundland since 1870

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1873: A fisherman’s son chopped the tentacle off of a giant squid near Bell Island in Conception Bay. It was the first documented evidence that giant squid were a species and not a mythical sea monster.

 

1873: A group of fishermen caught a giant squid in their net in Logy Bay. It was the first species to be studied by a scientist at Yale University.

 

1878: A giant squid measuring nearly 17 metres from top to tentacle was discovered thrashing in the shallow tide of Glovers Harbour, now home to a replica of the specimen and a local museum called the Giant Squid Interpretation Site.

 

1933: A six-metre giant squid was captured near Dildo, in Trinity Bay. It was packed up and sent via horse-and-sleigh to the train station and delivered to St. John’s. It ended up at the South Kensington Museum in London, England.

 

1981: A nine-metre giant squid was discovered in shallow water in Hare Bay. It is now on display at The Rooms provincial museum in St. John’s.

 

2004: In Green Bay, Derwin Roberts, a mussel farmer, discovered the last known giant squid.

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1873: A fisherman’s son chopped the tentacle off of a giant squid near Bell Island in Conception Bay. It was the first documented evidence that giant squid were a species and not a mythical sea monster.

 

1873: A group of fishermen caught a giant squid in their net in Logy Bay. It was the first species to be studied by a scientist at Yale University.

 

1878: A giant squid measuring nearly 17 metres from top to tentacle was discovered thrashing in the shallow tide of Glovers Harbour, now home to a replica of the specimen and a local museum called the Giant Squid Interpretation Site.

 

1933: A six-metre giant squid was captured near Dildo, in Trinity Bay. It was packed up and sent via horse-and-sleigh to the train station and delivered to St. John’s. It ended up at the South Kensington Museum in London, England.

 

1981: A nine-metre giant squid was discovered in shallow water in Hare Bay. It is now on display at The Rooms provincial museum in St. John’s.

 

2004: In Green Bay, Derwin Roberts, a mussel farmer, discovered the last known giant squid.

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1873: A fisherman’s son chopped the tentacle off of a giant squid near Bell Island in Conception Bay. It was the first documented evidence that giant squid were a species and not a mythical sea monster.

 

1873: A group of fishermen caught a giant squid in their net in Logy Bay. It was the first species to be studied by a scientist at Yale University.

 

1878: A giant squid measuring nearly 17 metres from top to tentacle was discovered thrashing in the shallow tide of Glovers Harbour, now home to a replica of the specimen and a local museum called the Giant Squid Interpretation Site.

 

1933: A six-metre giant squid was captured near Dildo, in Trinity Bay. It was packed up and sent via horse-and-sleigh to the train station and delivered to St. John’s. It ended up at the South Kensington Museum in London, England.

 

1981: A nine-metre giant squid was discovered in shallow water in Hare Bay. It is now on display at The Rooms provincial museum in St. John’s.

 

2004: In Green Bay, Derwin Roberts, a mussel farmer, discovered the last known giant squid.

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: GIANT SQUID INTERPRETATION CENTRE

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