The Big Book of Mysteries. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe
Of all the great sea monsters of myth, legend, and prehistory, the dreaded Kraken holds the most prominent place.
Something that was described as a Kraken-type monster was encountered by the crew of a French gunboat, the Alecton, on November 30, 1861. In fear they fired cannon shot into it and discharged various small arms, but nothing seemed to deter the creature. Next they harpooned it and attempted to get a line around it, but the rope slipped until it jammed against the dorsal fin. As the sailors tried to haul their strange catch aboard, the body of the monster disintegrated, leaving them with only a relatively small portion of tail section.
Arriving with their trophy at Tenerife, the captain contacted the French Consul, displayed the evidence, and made a full report. By December 30, this evidence reached the French Academy of Sciences, where Arthur Mangin, among other highly traditional and formal orthodox scientists, proceeded to ridicule the evidence provided by the Alecton’s curious catch: “No wise person, especially the man of science, would permit stories of these extraordinary creatures into the catalogue.”
With a few honourable exceptions, it was automatically assumed by the ultra-cautious, traditional, scientific elite of the mid-nineteenth century that reports of things that did not fit their schemata were deliberate lies, hoaxes, wild exaggerations, or hallucinations.
Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, who was an indefatigable chronicler of weird and wonderful aquatic life forms, described something Krakenesque in his Natural History of Norway (1752–53). The bishop believed his beast was two and a half kilometres around, with arms (or tentacles) long enough and strong enough to drag the biggest warship of the day straight to the bottom of the ocean.
He appears to have had something like a very large representative of the giant squid tribe in mind, and that certainly fits in well with an account from Dingle Bay in Ireland dating from 1673 — almost a century before Pontoppidan’s book appeared. The Irish broadsheet describing the Dingle Bay monster said that it had been killed by James Steward “when it came up at him out of the sea.” The picturesque language of the broadsheet was surprisingly accurate in its description of the creature as having eight long “horns” covered with hundreds of “buttons”: very squid-like to the modern marine biologist.
Shortly after the Irish adventure in Dingle Bay, another Kraken of vast size ventured onto some rocks off the Norwegian coast, failed to free itself, and died there in 1680. Contemporary accounts said that the stench from its decaying carcass cleared the area for miles around more effectively than any fear of it while alive might have done.
Another Kraken spotter was the famous Hans Egede. Born on January 31, 1686, at Harrestad in Norway, Egede took a bachelor of theology degree at the University of Copenhagen in 1705, and was greatly influenced by the then popular religious movement known as Pietism. (It is necessary to understand Egede’s character and faith in depth, in order to evaluate his evidence. He seems to have been a man of great intelligence and integrity, which makes him a highly reliable reporter.) The Pietists advocated intensive Bible study, and believed that priesthood was universal among Christian believers, which meant that the laity should have an equal share in Church government. Pietists also believed that Christian practice of goodness and kindness in everyday life was essential, and that instead of criticizing those with different beliefs, or with no beliefs at all, the Church should do all it could to help them and make them welcome. Pietists also wanted to reorganize the universities and give religion there a higher priority. In addition, they wanted to revolutionize preaching so that it concentrated on building people up and increasing their faith.
At the age of thirty-five, in 1721, Egede went to work in Greenland as a missionary, and stayed there for fifteen years. In 1734 he reported a “Kraken” seen in the Greenland area. Egede said that it was so vast that when it came up out of the water it reared up as high as the top of the mainmast and that it was of about the same girth as the ship — and several times longer. He described its broad “paws” and long, pointed snout. He said that the ragged, uneven skin of the huge body seemed to be covered in shells. Assuming Egede was making an accurate report, could these have been barnacles?
THE KRAKEN
Tennyson’s famous poem captures the sea monster atmosphere associated with the Kraken perfectly:
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 grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Johan Streenstrup, a Danish researcher, found evidence going back to 1639 of a beached Kraken near Iceland. He lectured on his findings to the Society of Scandinavian Naturalists in 1847, and later backed up his archive evidence with parts of specimens washed up in Jutland. He gave his “Kraken” the scientific name Architeuthis which has stayed with it ever since. Recent scientific studies of Architeuthis describe it as having a probable maximum length of twenty metres with a body mass of approximately one tonne. They live at an average depth of around six hundred metres and their diet seems to be made up of fish and smaller squid. The eyes are among the largest found in any living creature — being up to thirty centimetres across. Such study of the brain as has been possible due to the very limited number of specimens available for examination is rather disconcerting: it appears to be very large and complex. The Architeuthis’s funnel is an amazing all-purpose organ that is capable of producing a powerful jet, expelling eggs, squirting defensive ink, breathing, and waste disposal!
Nondescript monsters — Krakens or otherwise — made several appearances along the eastern seaboard of Canada and the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century. In June of 1815, to cite just one widely publicized example, something more than thirty metres long and proudly displaying a series of the traditional undulating humps was seen ploughing its way southward through Gloucester Bay. Its head was described as equine.
Bostonian Sam Cabot saw a member of the same species — or the same one that had caused the disturbance in Gloucester Bay — when he was in Nahant in 1816. It also had a horse-like head and undulating humps, and Sam estimated that it was about thirty metres long. The following year another very confident expert witness had a high-quality telescope with him and said that the horse-headed marine creature he saw through it was definitely not a whale, nor an enormous member of the dolphin family. He was adamant that nothing he had ever seen among the giant cetaceans had an undulating back like the marine beast of Nahant.
Nova Scotia also had its fair share of eastern seaboard monster sightings during this period. One case involved two men from Peggy’s Cove who were out fishing, John Bockner and his teacher friend James Wilson. They later reported their encounter with a sea-serpent in St. Margaret’s Bay to the Reverend John Ambrose, who subsequently saw one for himself and contributed a scientific paper to the Nova Scotia Institute of Natural Sciences. Among Reverend Ambrose’s accounts was an episode that took place in 1849 involving four fishermen, Joseph Holland, Jacob Keddy, and two of their colleagues. On South West Island on the west side of the entrance to St. Margaret’s Bay, they observed something like a gigantic sea