This week, Japanese researchers announced that they have at last secured video footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat more than 2,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
News accounts naturally went for the "kraken" headlines. "The Kraken wakes: first images of giant squid filmed in deep ocean," wrote Reuters, while the New York Post adopted the variation "The kraken lives! Giant squid captured on film for first time."
Well—this "kraken" may have been captured on film for the first time, but writers have been writing about it since writers could write, and they have had plenty to say. Some of it has even been accurate.
God-fearing sea beasts
The mythologizing of enormous tentacled monstrosities has a long history going far back into the ancient world. Take, for example, this account from the always entertaining but unfortunately credulous Pliny the Elder. Writing in his Natural History, Pliny tells an incredible beast story about The Creature That Came From the Ocean:
At Carteia, in the preserves there, a polypus was in the habit of coming from the sea to the pickling-tubs that were left open, and devouring the fish laid in salt there... At last, by its repeated thefts and immoderate depredations, it drew down upon itself the wrath of the keepers of the works. Palisades were placed before them, but these the polypus managed to get over by the aid of a tree, and it was only caught at last by calling in the assistance of trained dogs, which surrounded it at night, as it was returning to its prey; upon which, the keepers, awakened by the noise, were struck with alarm at the novelty of the sight presented.
First of all, the size of the polypus was enormous beyond all conception; and then it was covered all over with dried brine, and exhaled a most dreadful stench. Who could have expected to find a polypus there, or could have recognized it as such under these circumstances? They really thought that they were joining battle with some monster, for at one instant, it would drive off the dogs by its horrible fumes, and lash at them with the extremities of its feelers; while at another, it would strike them with its stronger arms, giving blows with so many clubs, as it were; and it was only with the greatest difficulty that it could be dispatched with the aid of a considerable number of three-pronged fish-spears.
The head of this animal was shewn to Lucullus; it was in size as large as a cask of fifteen amphoræ, and had a beard, to use the expressions of Trebius himself, which could hardly be encircled with both arms, full of knots, like those upon a club, and thirty feet in length; the suckers or calicules, as large as an urn, resembled a basin in shape, while the teeth again were of a corresponding largeness: its remains, which were carefully preserved as a curiosity, weighed seven hundred pounds.
But such tales remained sporadic until the Scandinavians turned such creatures into something even more terrifying, referring to them as "kraken" large enough to rise from the sea to its surface and fool people into believing that they were islands. By 1700, the kraken stories of the North had become commonplace, and writers like the physician Christian Francis Paullinus repeated them uncritically.
Paullinus described "a monstrous animal which occasionally rose from the sea on the coasts of Lapland and Finmark and which was of such enormous dimensions that a regiment of soldiers could conveniently manoeuvre on its back," according to the 1883 book Sea Monsters Unmasked. (You know this is a good book because its author, Henry Lee, also wrote a book with the wonderful title The Octopus, or the Devil-Fish of Fiction and Fact.)
The stories grew ever more unlikely. "About the same date but a little earlier," continued Lee, "Bartholinus, a learned Dane, told how on a certain occasion the Bishop of Midaros found the Kraken quietly reposing on the shore and mistaking the enormous creature for a huge rock erected an altar upon it and performed mass. The Kraken respectfully waited till the ceremony was concluded and the reverend prelate safe on shore and then sank beneath the waves."
In the 1750s, the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Pontoppidan, published his Natural History of Norway and really ignited the kraken craze with a widely distributed account of the giant beasts.
"The Norwegian fishermen sometimes find unexpected shallows when a short distance out at sea the depth suddenly diminishing from one hundred fathoms to twenty or thirty," wrote Pontoppidan, according to a late 19th century English translation. "Then they know that the Kraken is rising and immediately retreat. His back first appears looking like a number of small islands, his arms rise above the surface like the masts of a vessel and are said to have power to grasp the largest man of war and pull it to the bottom."
Almost imperceptibly, however, the new scientific thinking was having an effect on kraken legends; even the authors of fantastic adventure stories soon raised questions about just how credible such accounts were.
Poetry, fiction, and increasing skepticism
By 1830, the English poet Tennyson combined the legend with Europe's hot new interest in geologic time and produced "The Kraken" when he was just 21. In Tennyson's nightmare world, however, the kraken doesn't become an island but rather sleeps in the deep darkness of the sea, Cthulhu-like, until the end of the world brings it raging to life.
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the lumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
In 1870, the kraken migrated from poetry to fiction, famously appearing in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (and later terrifying my childhood imagination with the beaky monstrosity seen in Disney's 1954 film adaptation). By this point, skepticism about the wilder stories had appeared, as seen in this conversation between the narrator and a man named Conseil. The narrator has clearly heard Pontoppidan's stories.
"When it is a question of monsters the imagination is apt to run wild. Not only is it supposed that these poulps can draw down vessels but a certain Olaüs Magnus speaks of a cephalopod a mile long, that is more like an island than an animal. It is also said that the Bishop of Nidros was building an altar on an immense rock. Mass finished, the rock began to walk and returned to the sea. The rock was a poulp. Another bishop, Pontoppidan, speaks also of a poulp on which a regiment of cavalry could manoeuvre. Lastly the ancient naturalists speak of monsters whose mouths were like gulfs and which were too large to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar."
"But how much is true of these stories?" asked Conseil.
"Nothing, my friends; at least of that which passes the limit of truth to get to fable or legend. Nevertheless, there must be some ground for the imagination of the story tellers."
Of course, the submarine Nautilus is attacked by a swarm of the gigantic creatures, requiring the sub to surface. Bloody work commences, then, with hatchets and harpoons. The fight is something from a nightmare, as the crew opens the hatch and faces a mass of tentacles, one of which quickly grabs a man.
For one instant I thought the unhappy man entangled with the poulp would be torn from its powerful suction. Seven of the eight arms had been cut off. One only wriggled in the air, brandishing the victim like a feather. But just as Captain Nemo and his lieutenant threw themselves on it, the animal ejected a stream of black liquid. We were blinded with it. When the cloud dispersed, the cuttle fish had disappeared and my unfortunate countryman with it. Ten or twelve poulps now invaded the platform and sides of the Nautilus. We rolled pell mell into the midst of this nest of serpents that wriggled on the platform in the waves of blood and ink. It seemed as though these slimy tentacles sprang up like the hydra's heads. Ned Land's harpoon at each stroke was plunged into the staring eyes of the cuttle fish. But my bold companion was suddenly overturned by the tentacles of a monster he had not been able to avoid.
Ah, how my heart beat with emotion and horror! The formidable beak of a cuttle fish was open over Ned Land. The unhappy man would be cut in two. I rushed to his succour. But Captain Nemo was before me; his axe disappeared between the two enormous jaws and miraculously saved the Canadian, rising, plunged his harpoon deep into the triple heart of the poulp.
Despite Verne's quest for scientific accuracy, such an account is pure fiction—giant squid do not appear to attack people directly in this way (though old travelers' tales do occasionally tell of the creatures attacking ships—possibly mistaking them for whales).
By 1874, the kraken story faced even sterner debunking. That year, the Popular Science Review devoted a lengthy article to the legend that showed the increasingly skeptical, scientific cast of mind with which researchers now approached such stories. The author of the piece, W. Saville Kent, called Pontoppidan's account a "stupendous production of human imagination." Pontoppidan's illustrations, likewise, were "certainly derived from his imagination."
Ancients like Pliny weren't spared, either; Kent says that "from time immemorial, tradition has assigned to certain members of this Calamary tribe proportions so far exceeding those of any authenticated representative of the Invertebrata or indeed—with the exception of the whales—of the whole animal kingdom that little or no credence in their existence has been placed by modern men of science."
Still, like Verne, Kent saw in the stories the hint of truth which modern science would soon reveal. "Emerging from the cloud of doubt and mystery which enshrouds the history of the Kraken," he wrote, "we now approach the firmer standing ground of modern record and investigation." What's remarkable about the enormous sea creatures behind the kraken legend, though, is just how long they eluded this "modern investigation"—and still elude it.
Kraken through the years (gallery—click to expand)
A woodcut image of a giant squid, recovered in the 1870s in Newfoundland.
Be glad this isn't your job. Scientists get close up with a giant squid's beak in 1999.
Cover to Sea Monsters Unmasked, 1883.
De Montfort's "Poulpe Colossal," reproduced in 1883.
Japanese prints of "kraken" attacks, gathered by Henry Lee for his 1883 book.
"Gigantic calamary" caught by a French ship.
Another giant squid illustration from French illustrator de Montfort.
Behold the kraken? A dead squid, in all its glory, in New Zealand in 1999.
Giant squid are, err, giant. This one, from 1999, is quite a big larger than a man.