Squid — Moby-Dick

The Pequod still wades brit toward Java while her three masts sway like mild palms in a languid breeze, and lonely whale jets still appear at wide intervals in the silvery nights. One transparent morning the sea holds a stillness that feels almost holy. The sun lays a long gold path across the water. Daggoo, watching from the main-mast-head, sees a great white mass rise from the blue, gleam like a fresh snow-slide, sink, and rise again. It does not quite look like a whale, yet he wonders if it could be Moby Dick. When it breaks the surface once more with a sharp cry, he shouts that the White Whale is breaching right ahead.

The crew rushes to the yards. Bare-headed Ahab stands on the bowsprit and orders four boats lowered before anyone has named the thing. They pull toward it in silence until the mass surfaces again and the chase forgets the white whale for something worse. A vast cream-coloured body spreads across the water with countless arms curling like a nest of snakes. It has no face and no clear sign of will. Starbuck cries that he would rather have seen Moby Dick and fought him than have seen this white ghost. Flask learns it is the great live squid few ships ever see and return to port to describe. Ahab says nothing. He turns his boat back to the ship, and the others follow without a word.

Whalemen treat the sight as an omen and connect it to the deep food sperm whales take where no man watches. Chased whales sometimes vomit tentacle pieces twenty or thirty feet long, and old Kraken stories may be this creature enlarged. When your alert runs on a colour or a keyword, what will you require to see before you spend the whole crew again?