The Alecton Giant Squid Encounter off Tenerife (the "Bouyer Kraken")

In 1861 most scientists still treated the giant squid as a sailors' myth. That autumn the Alecton, a French Navy paddle-wheel dispatch steamer launched the same year, was steaming from Toulon to Cayenne in French Guiana. She was 50.9 metres long and carried a crew of 66. Her commanding officer was Lieutenant Frédéric Bouyer.

30 November 1861. About two in the afternoon, by Bouyer's account. Forty leagues from Tenerife, on the waters between Madeira and Tenerife.

Something was floating at the surface. "It is a gigantic squid." It seemed to measure eighteen feet from head to tail. The head, shaped like a parrot's beak, was wrapped in eight arms five to six feet long. Its colour was a brownish red. Its sea-green eyes were the size of a plate.

It stayed at the surface. It moved "with a kind of instinct" and seemed to want to avoid the ship. It dived a few fathoms and passed from one side of the ship to the other.

The ship stopped, and many bullets were aimed at the animal. By the crew's statement, they passed through its soft flesh without doing much injury, until at length "the waves were observed to be covered with foam and blood." A strong odour of musk followed. Harpoons would not hold in the yielding flesh. The animal broke adrift, dived beneath the vessel and came up on the other side.

Asked to lower a boat, Bouyer refused because he feared for the crew's safety and thought the creature might give off electric, paralysing emanations. Finally, a running noose lodged at the base of the tail fin. When the crew tried to hoist the animal, the rope cut it in two, and the head and arms dropped into the sea. What came aboard was a fourteen-kilogram part of the tail. It was soft and smelled strongly of musk.

Ensign E. Rodolphe's sketch and watercolour became the basis of every published engraving. Sabin Berthelot, the French consul at Tenerife and a naturalist, examined the fragment about ten days later and reported to the Paris Academy of Sciences. Bouyer's own report went to the Minister of the Navy. Pierre Flourens presented it to the Académie des sciences on behalf of Marshal Vaillant, and it appears in the Comptes rendus for 1861.

Later retellings say the report was widely ridiculed. Commentators attribute to the popular science writer Arthur Mangin the claim that the rotting tail was plant matter, and that such creatures would contradict "the great laws of harmony and equilibrium". That quotation has not been confirmed in a primary text.

No one accused Bouyer or his crew of invention. The doubt was whether such an animal could exist. Today the accepted answer is a real giant squid, Architeuthis, seen at the surface. Steenstrup had named Architeuthis from the 1855 Bahamas material, and the Newfoundland specimens of 1873 settled the matter. The figures grew in the telling. Bouyer's eighteen feet became 36 to 40 feet and 2 tons, then fifty feet and four thousand pounds in All the Year Round in 1868.

Jules Verne named the Alecton in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. In his chapter on the poulps, translations call the commander "Captain Bouguer", and the crew propose "Bouguer's cuttlefish". Henry Lee carried the engravings on in Sea Monsters Unmasked (1884). The encounter helped move the kraken out of legend and into zoology.