For centuries, fishermen from Norway and Greenland have told tales of a terrifying sea monster: the kraken. Supposedly, this vast creature has giant tentacles that can pluck you from your boat and drag you to the depths of the ocean. You can’t see it coming, because it lurks deep beneath you in the dark water. But if you suddenly find yourself catching a great many fish, you should flee: the kraken might be beneath you, scaring the fish towards the surface.
In 1857, the kraken began to move from myth to reality, thanks to the Danish naturalist Japetus Steenstrup. He examined a large squid beak, about 8 cm (3 in) across, that had washed up on Denmark’s shores several years earlier. Originally he could only guess at the overall size of the animal, but soon he was sent parts of another specimen from the Bahamas. When Steenstrup finally published his findings, he concluded that the kraken was real, and it was a species of giant squid. He named it Architeuthis dux, meaning “ruling squid” in Latin.
Only after Steenstrup had described the creature could scientists begin to unravel whether there was any truth to the old myths. Was this huge squid really as dangerous as the legends had led people to believe? Where did it come from, and what was it up to in the dark depths of the sea?
The kraken has held a grip on people’s imaginations for hundreds of years. The Norwegian writer Erik Pontoppidan described one in detail in his 1755 book The Natural History of Norway. According to fishermen, Pontoppidan wrote, it was the size of a “number of small islands”, and its back appeared to be “about an English mile and a half.”
Its grasping tentacles were only part of the problem. “After this monster has been on the surface of the water a short time, it begins slowly to sink again, and then the danger is as great as before; because the motion of his sinking causes such a swell in the sea, and such an eddy or whirlpool, that it draws everything down with it.”
Different cultures had different names for similar-sounding monsters. Greek mythology describes the Scylla, a six-headed sea goddess who ruled the rocks on one side of a narrow strait. Sail too close and she would try to eat you. In Homer's The Odyssey, Odysseus was forced to sail close to Scylla to avoid an even worse monster. As a result, six of his men were lost to Scylla, who swung them up onto her cliff and "bolted them down raw".Even science fiction writers have got in on the act. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne describes a giant squid that is distinctly kraken-like. It "could entangle a ship of five thousand tons and bury it into the abyss of the ocean." So does the real giant squid live up to its legendary counterparts?