In mari multa latent, goes the old saying: “In the ocean many things are hidden.” And it’s true enough. There is still much we don't know about what lurks in the depths, save for wonders that the occasional submersible dive turns up. But for millennia, humans have simply taken to guessing what could be swimming Earth’s oceans. Europeans, for instance, just assumed for a long while that every land critter had a counterpart in the sea, hence sea rhinos and sea cows and even the sea monks and sea bishops, the aquatic representatives of the human race.

Fantastically WrongIt's OK to be wrong, even fantastically so. Because when it comes to understanding our world, mistakes mean progress. From folklore to pure science, these are history’s most bizarre theories.

Browse the full archive here. Some of these beasts, though, are more grounded in reality than others. And none of these are more famed or feared or strangely real than the kraken, also known somewhat awesomely in lore as the “sea-mischief,” a legendary tentacled giant so powerful that it could pull down ships. Cross this monster and you’ll find yourself praying there’s a sea bishop or two in the depths to attend to your corpse.

This is a decidedly Nordic tale, contrary to the supposed rampages of the kraken around Greece in 1981’s awesome film Clash of the Titans and its recent remake that should have been loaded onto a ship and sunk to the bottom of the ocean while it was still just a script. The kraken, however, is many beasts in one, a perfectly terrifying amalgamation of the worst sea monsters humanity has ever dreamed up.

An illustration from Victor Hugo's novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer shows a man named Gilliatt battling a giant octopus. Source: Archive.org

Perhaps the most detailed description of the kraken comes from the Danish historian Erik Pontoppidan in his Natural History of Norway from 1755. He notes that the beast is “round, flat, and full of arms, or branches,” and is “the largest and most surprising of all the animal creation.” He cites various fishermen “who unanimously affirm, and without the least variation in their accounts,” that if you row out several miles into the Norwegian Sea in the summer, you’re in serious danger of falling victim to the kraken.

You’ll know when you start reeling in an inordinate amount of fish. It’s the kraken, you see, that’s scaring them toward the surface. But escaping from its clutches is not impossible. Accomplished rowers can hightail it out of there, and when they “find themselves out of danger, they lie upon their oars," and after a few minutes "they see this enormous monster come up to the surface of the water.” Its back is a mile and a half in circumference, and “looks at first like a number of small islands.” This is an echo of another mythical sea critter: the island whale, a beast so huge that sailors mistake it for land and anchor to it. Once they build a fire on its back, though, it heaves up and drags them all to their doom.

A rather more fanciful kraken from Olaus Magnus' Carta Marina, a masterful Scandinavian map from the 16th century. For more info, check out Joseph Nigg's Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map. It's seriously excellent. Courtesy James Ford Bell Library

But the kraken is far more dexterous in its attacks. Pontoppidan describes the emergence of this supposed island in great detail: “Here and there a larger rising is observed like sand-banks, on which various kinds of small Fishes are seen continuously leaping about till they role [sic] off into the water from the sides of it; at last several bright points or horns appear, which grow thicker and thicker the higher they rise above the surface of the water, and sometimes they stand up as high and as large as the masts of middle-siz’d vessels.” These horns are of course its dreaded arms.

The crew of the Nautilus battles a giant squid in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. That guy is in serious trouble, but someone should really get those birds some medical attention. They look unwell. Wikimedia

If the kraken doesn’t yank you down directly, the whirlpool it forms will finish the task. This, too, is an echo of another mythical sea monster: Charybdis, of The Odyssey fame. As Odysseus sailed through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy, he was warned to avoid the churning whirlpool that is Charybdis, in favor of taking his chances with Scylla at the opposite coast. And Scylla also finds her way into the kraken myth, for she too was tentacled, snatching Odysseus’ men and eating them alive.

The kraken, though, is happy to make do just eating fish. Pontoppidan notes that it has a “strong and peculiar scent, which it can emit at certain times, and by means of which it beguiles and draws other Fish to come in heaps about it.” And, appropriately enough, it uses the fish it has devoured to lure even more fish by … using its poo as a lure. A “great many old fishermen,” Pontoppidan claims, say that its “evacuation” colors the surface of the water, which “appears quite thick and turbid.” He explains in rather colorful detail: “This muddiness is said to be so very agreeable to the smell or taste of other Fishes, or to both, that they gather together from all parts to it, and keep for that purpose directly over the Kraken: He then opens his arms, or horns, seizes and swallows his welcome guests, and converts them, after the due time, by digestion, into a bait for other Fish of the same kind.” Ah, the circle of life.

A giant squid popsicle at the Melbourne Aquarium. Wikimedia

Armed and Ready

These muddied waters are a glaring clue as to the real-life inspirations for the kraken, which is based, as you might have guessed by this point, on sightings of the giant squid, which can grow to an astounding 43 feet long. Such a creature is in no way capable of totally mucking up the waters around it with poop, but it certainly is with a blast of ink. Almost all cephalopods, a family that in addition to squid contains octopuses and cuttlefish, will ink in self-defense if, say, hauled up by fishermen. Some species will quite cleverly also deploy mucus with the ink to create pseudomorphs, false bodies that distract would-be predators.

The inking behavior of the giant squid, though, along with pretty much all of its other behaviors, remains mysterious. While they have long haunted folklore, only a precious few specimens have ever been known to science. But looking at other squid species, we can infer how giant squid operate.

Though no one has seen it first-hand, scientists speculate that the giant squid hunts by hanging motionless in the water column, with the tip of its mantle pointed up and its two long tentacles dangling below (all of its other much shorter tentacles aren’t actually tentacles, they’re referred to as arms). Here it simply waits for fish or other squid to meander into its grasp of suction cups, which are lined with tiny teeth. The giant squid then reels its prey to the beak that is its mouth—and to a pretty horrible death by being slowly pecked away, mouthful by mouthful.

The first-ever image of a living adult giant squid. Wikimedia

It’s this beak that reveals what the giant squid spends its life trying to avoid: the sperm whale. The stomachs of dead sperm whales can be positively packed with the beaks of giant squid—the only bit the whale has a hard time digesting. It’s also not uncommon to come across living sperm whales with circular scars around their mouths, the tell-tale signs of battles with enormous squid desperately flailing their arms and digging into their foes with serrated suckers.

There is a squid, though, that makes the giant squid look downright cuddly. Stalking the waters of Antarctica is the colossal squid (let’s hope they don’t find an even bigger species, because we’re kinda running out of adjectives), which while measuring about the same length as the giant squid, has a far more robust mantle. Oh, and also swiveling hooks on its suction cups instead of serrated edges. Swiveling hooks. But—and I hate to disappoint you here—the colossal squid is probably extremely lackadaisical, by one estimate using up to 600 times less energy than similarly sized predators. Like the giant squid, it likely sits in wait for prey instead of running them down.

So the legend of the kraken is a bit over the top, sure, but it nevertheless serves as an enduring mishmash of a myth, borrowing from all manner of European tales. And as we explore more and more of the world’s oceans, we’ll doubtless answer the many questions swirling around the giant and colossal squid, such as, "Is that poop or ink I'm seeing here?"

OK, maybe I shouldn't be in charge of asking the questions.

References:

PBS. (2012) Inside Nature's Giants: The Giant Squid.

Nigg, J. (2013) Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map. University of Chicago Press

Pontoppidan, E. (1755) The Natural History of Norway