More Adventures in the Sun
My Friend the Octopus (Sunday Times , March 24, 1957)
By Ian Fleming
Every year Ian Fleming returns to the small house by the sea in Jamaica which he built ten years ago and on each succeeding holiday he finds some new adventure to describe. Last year it was the deadly remora, the blue mountain solitaire and the flamingos which captivated him. Here, just back from his latest visit, he begins a new series of Adventures in the Sun.
Probably no living creature inspires such universal loathing and terror as the octopus. The reputation of this sea shell (for the octopus belongs to the same family of molluscs as the clam) stems from the fact that the octopus remains one of the few unexploded myths.
It is still a credible villain in children’s stories and its relative, the giant squid, is probably the most fearsome creature in the world.
But the octopus and the squid should not be confused. The giant squid lives thousands of fathoms deep and engages in titanic battles with sounding whales who are often found marked with its suckers. (Not long ago the eye of a squid was found in the stomach of a whale. It was two feet in diameter!) So, even in fiction, it is difficult to invent circumstances in which giant squids could be a threat to man.
An authentic case was the squid engaged by the French battleship Alecton in mid-Atlantic in 1860. The squid was 60 feet long, exclusive of the arms. The Alecton engaged the monster in battle but her cannon-balls traversed the glutinous mass without causing any vital injury. The Frenchmen at last got a harpoon to bite and passed a bowling hitch round the rear end of the squid and attempted to haul it on board. But the line cut through the flesh of the beast and the Alecton only salvaged a chunk weighing about 40 lb. From this morsel the total weight of the squid was estimated at two tons.
But this is a very different creature from octopus vulgaris , which this striking portrait [omitted] shows at about a quarter of its natural size.
When I first started spending my holidays in. Jamaica and skin-diving I was infected by the octopus myth and waged war upon the tribe. This year an octopus came to live at the bottom of my garden and I have quite changed my mind.
There are certain disagreeable features about octopuses. Their appearance is, to say the least, unusual and they have talents which seem to us supernatural. They can change colour from off-white to dark brown. They can turn luminous in the dark. They travel very fast by jet propulsion and the suckers on their eight arms exert terrific and unrelenting pressure. They are also slimy and creepy-crawly and are very difficult to kill unless, as is the custom with Jamaican fishermen, you bite off their heads.
In Jamaican waters they are not feared. They are not called “devil fish,” as they are in many parts of the world, nor yet “pus-fellers,” in the tough lingo of deep-sea divers, but “sea cats”— a much more friendly name. In fact, octopus vulgaris is an extremely shy creature which, although it has few enemies apart from man, has little confidence in its natural weapons and spends a disproportionate amount of its time trying to hide. It hides very effectively, squeezing itself like thick paste into rock crannies or choosing the nearest piece of coral and flattening itself against this after changing its colour to an almost exact camouflage.
As I say, I first regarded these creatures as enemies and had many, in retrospect, cruel and untidy battles with them. Then one day, standing on a rock at the side of my beach, I saw through the clear water a few inches down an octopus, asleep just below me.
It had turned itself into a kind of clumsy saucer with its tentacles wrapped round its body. Now and then the tip of a tentacle moved delicately, like the tail of a sleeping kitten. It did not seem to have attached itself to the shelf of coral and rocked slightly in the small currents. There were one or two leaves on the water. When the shadow of a leaf floated over the octopus it blushed a dark brown. Occasionally it opened a sleepy eye and then closed it again.
I defy anyone to watch a sleeping octopus for some time and not be captivated by its defencelessness and astounded by the bizarre mechanisms of its camouflage.
Finally I moved so that my shadow fell across it. At once the creature was fully awake. It turned exactly the colour of its coral bed and, with incredible stealth, its tentacles unfurled on the rock and took hold. The eyes watched me. I moved again and the octopus took a deep breath to prime the tanks of its jet mechanism and started slowly crawling sideways. I lifted a hand and it gathered itself up like the sheet in M. R. James’s ghost story, “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” and launched itself sideways with streamlined compactness and shot into the deeps.
It was from that day that I decided to befriend the octopus and when, this year, one took up residence a few yards out from the beach it was given a warm welcome and christened “Pussy.”
If you happen to collect shells an octopus can be a very valuable pet. Each morning when we visited “Pussy” in her comfortable burrow in the coral, we would find a new tribute of shells on her doorstep. They were not very rare shells—clams, tulip shells and small helmets—but they were in pristine condition. Octopuses have an easy way with shells. They simply attach their suckers to each side, or to the operculum, or door, to a shell, and pull and go on pulling, until the muscles of the animal in the shell are exhausted. Then they eat the animal.
“Pussy” became a valued feature of the property and privileged visitors were taken to inspect her. She would playfully tug at the blunt end of a spear and occasionally display a shy tentacle or a watchful, stealthily retreating eye. I had hopes of developing the relationship by giving her crushed sea urchins to eat. Then I had to be away from the house for a couple of days.
On my return I was greeted with disquieting news. My small son, never quite clear who “Pussy” was, but merely accepting her daily tribute of shells, informed me that fishermen had caught a fine sea cat and presented it to Beryl, the housemaid.
I hastily swam out and placed a fat meal of sea urchin at, the door of “Pussy’s” burrow. Nothing happened. Perhaps she was out hunting. I let a day go by and still she did not reappear.
I asked the housekeeper. Yes, indeed, Beryl had been given a fine sea cat by the fishermen.
Where was it? What had happened to it?
“Beryl mash her and cut her up and cook her in hollive hoil and eat her out of a coconut.”
That is the worst of pets. Something always happens to them.