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Science30 November 1861

The Alecton and the Giant Squid

The French warship Alecton met a giant squid some five or six metres long off the Canary Islands and, trying to harpoon it, brought back only its tail end — one of the first records of the legendary sea monster as a real animal.

The Alecton trying to haul in a giant squid (30 November 1861) — engraving, 1865
The Alecton trying to haul in a giant squid (30 November 1861) — engraving, 1865

P. Lackerbauer · Public domain · Source

On 30 November 1861 the French navy’s Alecton, bound for the Canary Islands, came upon a huge squid floating at the surface north of Tenerife. Commander Bouyer spent hours trying to take it with guns and harpoons; a rope was got round it, but the body tore and only the tail end was hauled aboard. It soon rotted, but an officer’s drawing and the report reached the French Academy of Sciences.

From about this time it was accepted that giant squid, long thought as legendary as the Norwegian kraken, really existed. In the giant squid scene of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Jules Verne speaks of the Alecton directly.

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States at the time
France

Before and after

Earlier
1856 Second Opium War and Treaties of Tianjin and Beijing
Later
1866 Byeongin Persecution

Themes that include this event

  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas1702 – 1958

    Jules Verne’s novel of Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus circling the world beneath the sea — the treasure ships of Vigo Bay, La Pérouse’s wrecks, the giant squid and the Atlantic cable behind it, and the people who really reached the South Pole and passed under the North Pole after the novel went there first