towing a third, larger net behind the boat. “We’ll trawl for fifteen minutes at about one and a half knots,” O’Shea said. The maneuver was a delicate one, he explained: if he trawled too deep or not deep enough, the paralarvae would escape the net; if he trawled for too long, the net would suffocate what he caught. We drove the boat around for precisely fifteen minutes, then pulled in the net and dumped its contents—a thick, granular goop—into a cylindrical tank filled with seawater. The tank instantly lit up from all the bioluminescence. “There’s plenty of life in there, that’s for sure,” O’Shea said.
He found no
By all accounts, O’Shea is tireless and single-minded: he works eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and he no longer watches TV or reads newspapers. He never attends parties. “I’m not antisocial,” he said. “I just don’t socialize.” His sister told me, “We’d love him even if he chased mushrooms, but we just wish he’d spend the same emotion on people as he did on squid.” Shoba, his wife, who often calls him to remind him to eat lunch, said, “I don’t want him to stop. I just wish he could temper it a little bit and see that there are other things out there.”
People inevitably compare O’Shea’s quest to that of Captain Ahab. But, unlike Melville’s character, O’Shea does not think of the creature he pursues in grand symbolic terms. Indeed, he is constantly trying to strip the giant squid of its lore. He considers books like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” to be “rubbish”; his studies of dead specimens have led him to believe that the longest recorded measurement of a giant squid—fifty-seven feet—is apocryphal. “Now, if someone really wanted to prostitute the truth all they have to do is take the tentacle and walk and walk and walk,” he once told me. “The bloody things are like rubber bands, and you can make a forty-foot squid suddenly look sixty feet.” Unlike some other hunters, he thinks it is ridiculous to imagine that a giant squid could kill a sperm whale. He thinks of the giant squid as both majestic and mundane—with a precise weight, diet, length, and life span. He wants it, in short, to be real. “We have to move beyond this mythical monster and see it as it is,” O’Shea said. “Isn’t that enough?”
After a while, he stood and dropped the trawling net back in the water. We worked until after sunrise. When we still hadn’t found any squid, O’Shea said, “An expedition that begins badly usually ends well.”
At the cabin, Conway and I took a brief nap while O’Shea plotted our next course. In the afternoon, we ventured into town for supplies. O’Shea warned us not to use his real name; he had recently campaigned to shut down a nearby fishery in order to protect the wildlife, and he said that he had received several death threats. “This is quite dangerous country for me,” he said.
I wasn’t sure how seriously to take his warning, but, when I accidentally used his name, he became tense. “Careful, mate,” he said. “Careful.”
Later that day, O’Shea was standing on the cabin porch, smoking a cigarette, when a villager approached. “Are you the guy chasing them monsters?” he asked.
O’Shea looked at him hesitantly. “I’m afraid that would be me,” he said.
“I saw you on the telly, talking about them things,” the man said. He reached out his hand. “After I saw you, I named my cat Architeuthis.”
O’Shea brightened. “This mate here has a cat named Archie,” he told Conway and me.
O’Shea invited the man in for “a cuppa,” and soon he and the stranger were bent down over his maps. “They say you can find the big calamari out here,” the man said, pointing to a reef.
Before long, another villager stopped by and was offering his own advice. “I’d try over here,” he said. “Billy Tomlin said he once found a big dead one out in these parts.” O’Shea took in the information. Fishermen sometimes embroider the truth, he said, but they also know the local waters better than anyone else.
That night, we went out again. Although we continued to haul up enormous quantities of shrimp and krill— sometimes there were so many that they could barely move inside the tank—we found not a single squid. As the night lengthened, O’Shea seemed, for the first time, to grow dispirited. “The weather’s causing havoc with the currents,” he said.
After each haul, he’d study his charts and choose a new spot with renewed hope—“This could be it,” he’d say—only to be disappointed again. When the sun rose, at six-thirty, casting its bright rays upon the sea, O’Shea raced the boat over to the two anchored traps. He said that he had often had the best luck at dawn; the creatures seemed to rear their heads before vanishing deep below. “Let’s see what we got,” he said, hauling the nets on board.
“Anything?” Conway asked.
O’Shea held one of the nets up to his eye, then dropped it in disgust. “Diddly,” he said.
“We have to go farther out,” O’Shea said the following night. We sped far into the Pacific, leaving the safety of the inlet behind. The hauls remained dismal; after each one, he aimed the boat farther out to sea, saying, “We have to go deeper, that’s all.”
Conway, who was looking increasingly pale, said, “Haven’t we gone out enough?”
“I know the squid are out there,” O’Shea said.
The less he found, the harder he seemed to work. He is not a big man, and his childhood illness had left his body somewhat brittle, yet he never slowed down as he pulled the net in with all its weight, then returned it to the water. His fingers were covered in blisters, his clothes were soaked through, and his glasses were stained with salt from the seawater.
“He’s a bit of a fanatic, isn’t he?” Conway said quietly.
As the cold nights wore on, we worked in a kind of fog. We were getting little sleep during the day, and it became harder to pay attention to the mounds of larval fish, shrimp, krill, and jellyfish; not even the sight of dolphins jumping in the waters nearby relieved the drudgery. At one point, I felt fatigued, and lay down in the forward berth. I could fit only if I bent my knees toward my chest. As I closed my eyes and listened to the waves smashing against the hull, I could hear O’Shea grunting as he pulled in another net and cursing when there was nothing inside.
On yet another night, at around four in the morning, as we pulled in the trawling gear and dropped the contents in the cylindrical tank, Conway shone a flashlight and asked, “What’s that?”
O’Shea peered inside, and blinked several times, trying to keep himself awake. “Heaven help us!” he shouted. “It’s a fucking squid!” He stared blearily into its eyeball. “It looks like Archie,” he told us.
Although the creature was only the size of my thumbnail, I could see it, too—its tentacles, its fins, its eyes, its arms, its bullet-shaped mantle.
“This could be your dream squid,” Conway said.
“Quick,” O’Shea said. “Let’s drain some of the krill before they crush it.”
He held the cylindrical tank in the air, his arms shaking from exhaustion, as the waves pounded the side of the boat. “Steady!” he yelled. It was hard to see in the darkness—there was no moonlight—and as he poured some of the contents into a strainer, struggling to balance against the violent waves, something happened.
“Where did it go?” O’Shea asked.
“I don’t know,” Conway said. “I can’t see it anymore.”
“Jesus Christ,” O’Shea said.
He grabbed a specially designed tank, which he had purchased expressly for transporting a baby giant squid, and poured the rest of the cylindrical tank’s contents inside it. “Where is the bloody thing?” he said. “Where is it?”
He reached in with his hand, stirring the water frantically. “It has to be here,” he said.
He pulled out one shrimp, then another, holding them under the light.
“It’s gone,” Conway said.
But O’Shea didn’t seem to hear. He sifted through the mounds of plankton, trying to find the baby squid’s microscopic tentacles. At last, he stumbled backward, and put his arms over his head. “It’s a fucking catastrophe,” he said.
He fell back in the captain’s chair, and sat motionless. I tried to think of something to say, but failed. “It was right there,” O’Shea said to himself. “I had it.”
After a while, he tried to drop the traps in the water again, but he no longer seemed able to muster his strength. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said, and disappeared into the forward berth.
