The Thimble Tickle giant squid: three fishermen moor a stranded "devil-fish" in Notre Dame Bay

Newfoundland in the 1870s. Giant squid, living and dead, kept turning up along its coasts. More than a dozen were seen in the 1870s and 1880s. In St. John's, a clergyman and naturalist named Moses Harvey collected the reports. The zoologist A. E. Verrill was cataloguing them for the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Thimble Tickle lies on Notre Dame Bay, on the north-east coast of the island. In Newfoundland English a tickle is a narrow strait. The settlement is now called Glovers Harbour.

2 November 1878. A Saturday. Stephen Sherring, a fisherman of Thimble Tickle, was out in a boat with two other men. Not far from shore they saw "some bulky object." Supposing it might be part of a wreck, they rowed toward it.

Then they found themselves close to "a huge fish, having large glassy eyes." It was aground. The tide was ebbing. It was "churning the water into foam by the motion of its immense arms and tail." From a funnel at the back of its head it drove out large volumes of water, pushing itself backward. "At times the water from the siphon was black as ink."

The animal was partially disabled. The fishermen plucked up courage. They threw the boat's grapnel, and its barbed flukes sank into the soft body. The rope ran ashore to a tree. The creature was moored. "His struggles were terrific as he flung his ten arms about in dying agony." The long tentacles "ever and anon darted out like great tongues from the central mass." The men kept a respectful distance. At length it became exhausted. As the water receded, it died.

The fishermen, knowing no better, turned it into dog's meat. No part was saved. No photograph was taken. What survives is a letter. Harvey, who had not been there, wrote it to the Boston Traveller on 30 January 1879. He gave the body as 20 feet "from the beak to the extremity of the tail." One arm measured 35 feet. The girth was not stated.

Verrill reprinted the letter as specimen No. 18 in The Cephalopods of the North-Eastern Coast of America. He accepted it as an Architeuthis and added a note on the long arm: "This must have been a tentacle." Another stranding, the Three Arms specimen of 1878, had happened nearby. Later sources disagree on the witnesses. Some name Joseph Martin and Stephen Sperring, another a Frederick Martin. No source from 1878 or 1879 names any Martin.

Add the two figures together and you get 55 feet. That total became the legend. Secondary sources add a weight of 2,004 kg and an eye of 15.75 inches, credited to Guinness World Records. None of it is in Harvey's letter. The current Guinness page on the largest invertebrate does not mention Thimble Tickle.

Examined giant squid reach about 13 m in total length. Reports above 18 m are usually put down to stretched tentacles. In 2016 Charles Paxton argued that animals of about 20 m are possible. Critics pushed back hard. Nobody doubts the stranding itself. As Earl Dawe put it, "When they're discovered in Newfoundland, it's at times when they stray from their normal deep water habitat."

In 2001 Glovers Harbour raised a life-sized 55 foot squid of steel, wire mesh and concrete. Don Foulds, a fine-arts teacher from Saskatoon, designed it and built it with students. It stands beside the Giant Squid Interpretation Centre. In 2011 Canada Post put it on a stamp in its Roadside Attractions series.