The SS Britannia Raft Giant Squid Attack

The SS Britannia was an Anchor Line ship sailing from Liverpool to Bombay. Early on 25 March 1941, the German auxiliary cruiser Thor, under Kapitän Otto Kähler, sank her about 750 miles west of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Some 249 people were lost.

Twelve men ended up on a raft "no larger than a hearthrug". It was "always eighteen inches under water." The men "had to take turns in the water, leaning their bodies on the fragile raft". Around them swam "hundreds of sharks, whose fins protruded everywhere."

They drifted for five days. Then the Spanish ship Cabo de Hornos found them. Only three were still alive. 2nd Lt. R. E. G. Cox of the Indian Army. Sub-Lt. Davidson. Lt. Rowlandson. They were landed at Tenerife.

In 1941 the story was grim but familiar. According to the Illustrated London News, an Indian servant first had "his legs bitten off by a shark." Then "a huge manta, or devil-fish, seized his body, folded its great fins round the victim, and devoured him." Cox was stung on the leg, hand, mouth and head by a Portuguese man-of-war. The News Chronicle ran his photograph under the headline "I was seized by an octopus…" and said the raft was first attacked by a "stinging octopus". In hospital, Cox reportedly said he had met a jellyfish.

Around 1956, Cox met the writer Frank W. Lane. In Lane's Kingdom of the Octopus, published in 1960, the attacker had become a giant squid. It took one man off the raft. Then it came for Cox. In the version most often repeated, "a tentacle seized 2nd Lt. R.E.G. Cox, but released him, the hooked rims of the suckers leaving raw, bleeding sores the size of a penny."

Zoologist John Cloudsley-Thompson reportedly saw the scars on Cox's leg about two years later. They were "about the size of an English penny", set in "rings about six inches apart". Cox also showed doctors circular scars on his legs. One doctor said only a squid or octopus could have made them.

Historian Jonathan Dyer traced the story's drift in the journal War in History in 2020. He calls it a wartime urban legend. Cox, he suggests, "may well have been confused by the mental and physical trauma of the sinking and the deprivations of five days adrift." Giant squid, Dyer notes, only come to the surface when sick or dying, and do not feed there. A second eyewitness account from 1960 describes Portuguese men-of-war stinging survivors at night. Dyer also suggests a biologist friend may have persuaded Cox that his wounds pointed to a squid.

No one alleges a hoax. And the squid has its defenders. One modern writer argues that penny-sized ring scars six inches apart are not consistent with a Portuguese man-of-war. They are consistent with the suckers of a squid.

The squid version travelled far. Bernard Heuvelmans adopted it. Peter Benchley drew on it for Beast in 1991. On 9 September 1980, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World opened its "Monsters of the Deep" episode with Cox's story, and Cloudsley-Thompson described the attack. The programme reused the Illustrated London News drawing by Captain Bryan de Grineau, made from Cox's own notes and sketches. The ray had been cut out.