Note 25 — Chapter IX · ECONOMIC VALUE OF CUTTLE-FISHES.

The special correspondent at Gibraltar of the Daily Telegraph (Mr. George Augustus Sala) wrote as follows on this subject:—For the information of Mr. Henry Lee, I may observe that nothing whatever is known at Gib. about the terrible octopus who is said to have sucked the boatswain of a man-of-war into the lowermost depths of Davy Jones’s locker; but there are legends commonly recited in the smoking-room of the King’s Arms as to an octopus that held on to a sharp rock with one set of suckers, and capsized a felucca from Algeciras with the other. The Spaniards eat this horrible creature very willingly. When they catch him, they first pound him violently between two stones, as some cooks are in the habit of thwacking beefsteaks of which the tenderness is doubtful, and then they hang him up in the sun until his abominable body and limbs are dried. Ultimately they fry him in oil, and declare that he is very nice. I have an idea that I must have eaten fried octopus for supper at Bobadilla, and that it was the delicacy which gave me such a thorough disgust of the place. The octopus, nevertheless, under the name of pulpo, is popular enough throughout Southern Spain, and is equally common, and equally devoured, on the coast of Algeria and Morocco.—Daily Telegraph, March 15, 1875.