BIGGLES IN AUSTRALIA

by Captain W. E. Johns

III. AN UNCOMFORTABLE NIGHT (Pages 33 – 43)

“There are few things on earth more beautiful than an atoll on a still, moonlit night”. Ginger is unable to sleep and so goes for a walk. He notices odd ripples coming through the opening in the reef. At first, Ginger thinks they are turtles, but when things start to come ashore, he realises they are too big. Waking Biggles, he points out what he can see and Biggles recognises them. “By thunder!” he exclaimed tersely. “They’re decapods. I don’t know much about the ugly brutes but I believe they are dangerous. If they did decide to come for us we wouldn’t have much chance. We’d better get into the machine. (Johns doesn’t know much about decapods, either. Decapods (meaning “ten-footed”) are generally an order of crustaceans including such things as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp and prawns. Here, Johns is referring to a squid, which is a decapod as it has ten tentacles, but they are deep sea creatures and although they do rise up to feed, they are not known to drag themselves up beaches!). “Ginger wasted no time in splashing through the shallow water to the aircraft, which was afloat on about three feet of water ten or twelve yards from the beach”. (“They wasted no time in splashing through the shallow water” - is the illustration opposite page 26). Ginger looks back. “In the bright moonlight he could now see tentacles plainly, two long ones, not less than twenty feet in length, held out in front, and a tangle of smaller ones. For the first time he realised too, the bulk of the creature’s body”. Biggles intends to sleep on the aircraft but a sudden lurch alerts them to a problem. “With its great tentacles over the bows of the machine a giant squid was raising itself out of the water. Even as Ginger stared at a flat luminous eye the size of a tea plate the aircraft heeled over still further under the weight of the beast hanging on one side of it”. (This is the scene illustrated on the cover of the first edition of the book). Biggles fires a rifle at it and “simultaneously the eye disappeared, as if it had been an electric lamp switched off”. The creature drops off and thrashes about. “It looks as if we shall have to swat up on our natural history before we start on any more jaunts of this short,” averred Biggles. “Matter of fact I’ve heard of these big brutes but I’ve never seen one before. We must have struck a colony of ‘em. I once had a spot of bother with a big octopus. That was bad enough”. (Presumably this is a reference to ‘Biggles in the South Seas’ where an Octopus attacks a diver and then grabs Biggles’s amphibian aircraft in a similar incident). Things calm down and an examination of the aircraft shows only minor damage to the paint on the bows “caused, it was assumed, by the great squid’s suckers”. Biggles and Ginger are now able to sleep. In the morning, Ginger mentions some white spots that puzzled him as they came in to land. Biggles suggests that Ginger slips ashore to investigate, whilst he, Biggles, makes the tea. Ginger finds a torn piece of newspaper, written in German. He then finds what appears to be a typed list of names and addresses. Ginger then finds some Australian pound notes and returns with some of the money and the paper items to show Biggles. They speculate as to how the items got there and work out that they could have been blown by the wind. Ginger says that he now realises that it was on an island north-west of where they are now, that he saw what must have been bits of paper. They take off and fly the Otter to the last island they had surveyed without landing. There is no sign of any wreck. They then fly on, in the same direction, to an island in the Mandeville Group and immediately see that the beach is strewn with wreckage. Biggles lands on a lagoon within the reef. The island is around two miles long and a quarter of a mile wide and has some vegetation, including coconut palms. They take their amphibian up onto the beach and get out. Biggles says “This stuff represents more than one wreck”. They begin searching.