The Battle with the Giant Squid

The Battle with the Giant Squid is the most harrowing close-quarters action in the Nautilus's voyage, a brutal encounter that strips away the ship's technological invulnerability and exposes its crew to a primitive, visceral threat. The fight not only claims a life and forces Captain Nemo to weep openly, but also cements a bond of reciprocal rescue between the captain and the harpooner Ned Land, while deepening the mystery of the captain's past and the national composition of his crew.

Causes and Approach of the Monster

The crisis began when the Nautilus, cruising at moderate speed through the deep waters off the Bahamas, suddenly stopped. A jolt trembled through its entire framework, and the propeller ceased to churn. Captain Nemo, who had been gloomy and withdrawn for days, entered the lounge and announced the cause: the horn-covered mandibles of a giant squid had become entangled in the propeller blades. The ship would have to rise to the surface and slaughter the vermin with axes, since electric bullets proved ineffective against such soft, yielding flesh. The creature that confronted them was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long, traveling backward with tremendous speed. Its enormous, staring sea-green eyes, its eight writhing arms lined with 250 semispheric suckers, and its parrot-like beak of horn made it a monster worthy of the most farfetched legends. Its unstable color shifted from bluish gray to reddish brown as it grew irritated, and its triple heart gave it terrifying vitality. Soon seven more devilfish appeared, providing the Nautilus with an escort and gnashing their beaks against the sheet-iron hull.

The Hand-to-Hand Struggle and the Loss of a Crewman

As the Nautilus reached the surface, a seaman undid the bolts of the hatch, but the moment the nuts were loosened, the hatch flew open, pulled by the suckers of a devilfish's arm. One long tentacle slithered like a snake into the opening, and twenty more quivered above. Captain Nemo chopped off the first arm with a sweep of his ax, but two more lashed down, seized the seaman stationed in front of the captain, and carried him away with irresistible violence. The man gasped, choked, and yelled in French: "Help! Help!"—a cry that stunned Professor Aronnax, revealing that a fellow countryman was among the crew. The poor fellow was swung in the air, glued to the suckers, and despite Captain Nemo's rush to his aid and a second ax blow that severed another tentacle, the squid shot off a spout of blackish liquid from its abdominal pouch. When the cloud dispersed, both the monster and its victim were gone. The crew, enraged and losing all self-control, piled into the thick of the writhing snakes on the platform, fighting amid waves of blood and sepia ink.

Ned Land's Rescue and the Captain's Debt

In the chaos, Ned Land was suddenly toppled by tentacles he could not avoid, and the squid's fearsome beak opened wide over him, about to cut him in half. Professor Aronnax ran to his rescue, but Captain Nemo got there first, driving his ax between the two enormous mandibles. The Canadian, miraculously saved, stood and plunged his harpoon all the way into the devilfish's triple heart. "Tit for tat," Captain Nemo told him. "I owed it to myself!" Ned bowed without answering. The struggle had lasted a quarter of an hour. Defeated, mutilated, battered to death, the monsters finally yielded and disappeared beneath the waves.

Aftermath and Thematic Significance

When the fight was over, Captain Nemo stood motionless by the beacon, red with blood, staring at the sea that had swallowed one of his companions. Large tears streamed from his eyes. This was the second companion he had lost since the professor and his friends had come aboard, and the manner of death—smashed, strangled, crushed by the fearsome arms of a devilfish, ground between its iron mandibles—meant that this friend would never rest with his companions in the placid waters of their coral cemetery. The despairing yell in French, the mother tongue of the dying man, haunted Aronnax, who realized that among the Nautilus's crew—allied body and soul with Captain Nemo and likewise fleeing from human contact—there was a fellow countryman. The battle thus deepened the mystery of the captain's multinational crew and his own hidden past, while the captain's tears and his act of saving Ned Land revealed a humanity that his later acts of vengeance would seem to contradict. In the days that followed, the Nautilus drifted aimlessly, its captain sunk in grief, and the ship seemed unable to tear itself away from the setting of this last struggle.