Page 6 - Three Adventures

Voyage of the Pomeranian

I called upon Doctor Lamb, ship’s surgeon and a rather disagreeable
fellow, to determine if anything could be done to assist the wounded
octopus. He barely glanced at the poor animal. “Sir,” he said
disdainfully, “I am no marine veterinarian, if such there be.” Medical
aid, in his opinion, was to be reserved for human beings and their
more useful servants among the lower species, not the wild and
repulsive bottom-feeders in my tank. After his departure the ship’s
cook came up on deck, sweating and red-faced, having heard
erroneously that something to the taste of his diners had washed
aboard. But he, too, left after expressing his own profession’s
disparagement of such flesh.

That rejection served merely to strengthen my resolve. I had the tank
drained to a depth of four feet and put the entire area off-limits to
the crew. Others before me have studied the octopus, and not much
profit is to be gained in examining a cephalopod so frequently
dissected and described in the scientific works available to even the
most casual natural philosopher. Nevertheless, most of that
information concerns gross anatomy and shoreline habitat. Perhaps
an octopus recovered from a greater depth will display some hitherto
unobserved traits. In any event, I shall have an opportunity at last to
exercise my talents in the service of that insatiable curiosity which has
brought me to this otherwise barren expanse of ocean.

Nevertheless I recognize that this will be but a diversion from the
concern I have felt of late, as my strongbox slowly but steadily
empties of its once-bountiful supply of pound notes and the net
comes up empty day after day. Yet all my researches indicate that we
are in the right place at the right time to find the kraken: the sea is
alive with fish here and they are close to the surface in this season.
All the reliable sightings, examined by date and location, led me here.
Of course, no sane man would expect to find a needle in a haystack
on such scanty evidence. Must I now doubt my sanity?

Why monsters were placed upon the earth only the Good Lord
knows. Who in England could have conceived of an elephant before
a live specimen was presented to the public? Travelers’ tales and
fantastically embellished sketches of pachyderms based on

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