The Schooner Pearl and the Giant Squid, Bay of Bengal 1874

The Pearl was a schooner of 150 tons. Her master, Captain James Floyd, called her "as tight a little craft as ever sailed the seas". In May 1874 she was running from Mauritius to Rangoon in ballast, to come back with paddy. She called at Galle, Ceylon, for water and left on 7 May. Three days out, she lay becalmed in the Bay of Bengal. Accounts place her at 8°50′N, about 170 miles east of Vandeloos Bay, off Trincomalee.

10 May 1874. About an hour before sunset. Aboard the Pearl, the crew watched as "a great mass rose slowly out of the sea about half-a-mile off on our larboard side". It looked like a whale's back. It was brownish. Floyd fetched a rifle and fired at it.

One of the crew, a Newfoundlander named Bill Darling, raised his hand. "Have a care, master; that ere is a squid, and will capsize us if you hurt him." The shot had already been fired. The mass began to move toward the schooner, an oblong body "at least half the size of our vessel in length". Then, in the words relayed from the captain's account, "monstrous arms like trees seized the vessel and she keeled over".

Two miles away, the steamer Strathowen was running from Colombo toward Madras. One of her passengers saw "on our starboard beam and about two miles off a small schooner lying becalmed". Between the ships lay what looked like a bank of seaweed.

The mass moved. It struck the schooner. To the passenger, the mass and the hull seemed to merge together. "The masts swayed towards us, lower and lower; the vessel was on her beam-ends." For a few seconds she lay there. Then she filled and went down. The Strathowen picked up the survivors. Accounts differ on the toll, but most say one of her six crew was lost.

Joe Nickell traces the story to the Homeward Mail of 29 June 1874. The Times followed in early July under the heading "A Successor to the Sea Serpent", and reprints spread to the Sacramento Daily Union, the Australian Town and Country Journal and The Globe in New Zealand.

The trouble began with the steamer. Bernard Heuvelmans could not find the Strathowen in Lloyd's Register for that year. "This tale has never been confirmed," he wrote, "and it may well have been an opportune hoax." Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2019, found no record of the ship or of Captain James Floyd. He noted that the Bay of Bengal is not known as giant squid habitat, and suggested the tale drew on Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, where giant cephalopods attack the Nautilus. JSTOR Daily concluded there is no hard evidence that the event occurred as described. No carcass. No wreckage. No inquiry. Only two statements in a newspaper.

Others have been kinder. Richard Boyle retold the story sympathetically in the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka in 1999, and C. G. Uragoda examined it in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka in 2005. The case sits beside the French corvette Alecton, which tried to capture a giant squid near Tenerife in 1861, and the 1873 encounters in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, which were in the press in the months before the Pearl went down. The schooner, the steamer and the captain have never been found in any record. The story has never gone away.