Embraced by the blind, dense, ancient sleep,
Under the formidable firmament, in the abysses of the sea, The kraken lurks - to such depths
Neither a hot beam nor a thunderous roll
Do not reach …
So, buried in a gigantic slab, Feeding on shellfish, he will sleep, As long as the flame, rearing the water column, Promotional video:
Will not herald the end of time.
Then, roaring, the monster will emerge, And death will end the ancient dream.
LEGENDS ABOUT THE KRAKEN
This poem by Tennyson is inspired by the ancient legends about giant octopuses - the ancient Greeks called these monsters polyps, and the Scandinavians called the kraken.
Pliny wrote about a giant cephalopod mollusc killed by fishermen:
“His head was shown to Lucullus: it was the size of a barrel and a capacity of 15 amphorae (about 300 liters). He was also shown limbs (that is, arms and tentacles); their thickness was such that a person could barely grasp them, they were knobby like clubs and 30 feet long (about 10 meters)."
A medieval Norse scribe described the kraken like this:
“In the Norwegian Sea there are some very strange and terrible looking fish, the name of which is unknown. At first glance, they seem cruel and fearsome. Their head is covered on all sides with sharp thorns and long horns, resembling the roots of a tree that has just been pulled out of the ground. Huge eyes (5-6 meters in circumference) with large (about 60 centimeters) bright red pupils are visible to fishermen even on the darkest night. One such sea monster can drag a huge loaded ship with it to the bottom, no matter how experienced and strong its sailors are.
Engravings from the times of Columbus and Francis Drake, among other sea monsters, often depicted giant octopuses attacking fishing boats. The kraken that attacked the ship is depicted in a painting hanging in the chapel of Saint Thomas in the French city of Saint-Malo. According to legend, this painting was donated to the church by the surviving passengers of a sailing ship that fell victim to a kraken.
BLOOD THRUSTING MONSTERS FROM THE SEA
However, scientists were skeptical about such stories, crediting the kraken to one company of mythical creatures along with mermaids and sea snakes. But that all changed in 1873, when the corpse of a giant cephalopod was found on the shores of Newfoundland. Marine biologists have identified the find as an unknown species of squid called the giant squid (Architeuthis). The first find of the dead giant was followed by a series of finds in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Zoologists even suggested that some kind of pestilence attacked the kraken in the ocean depths at that time. The size of the mollusks was truly gigantic, so a squid 19 meters long was found off the coast of New Zealand. The giant's tentacles were so large that, lying on the ground, the squid could reach them almost up to the 6th floor, and the eyes were 40 centimeters in diameter!
Having received material evidence of the existence of giant octopuses, scientists began to be less skeptical about the stories of kraken attacks on people, especially since medieval legends about bloodthirsty sea monsters have found modern confirmation.
So, in March 1941 in the Atlantic, a German raider sank the British transport "Britain", of which only twelve people were saved. The surviving sailors drifted on a liferaft in anticipation of help, when at night a giant squid, emerging from the ocean depths, grabbed one of the raft's passengers with tentacles. The unfortunate man did not have time to do anything - the kraken easily tore the sailor from the raft and carried him into the depths. The people on the raft awaited a new appearance of the monster with horror. Lieutenant Cox was the next victim.
Here is how Cox himself wrote about it:
“Tentacles quickly swept over my legs, and I felt a terrible pain. But the octopus immediately released me, leaving me writhe in the throes of hell … The next day I noticed that where the squid grabbed me, large ulcers were bleeding. To this day, traces of these ulcers have remained on my skin."
Lieutenant Cox was picked up by a Spanish ship, and thanks to this, his wounds were examined by scientists. By the size of the scars from the suckers, it was possible to establish that the squid that attacked the sailors was very small (7-8 meters in length). Most likely, it was just a cub of an architect.
However, larger krakens can attack ships as well. For example, in 1946 the Brunswick tanker, an ocean-going vessel 150 meters long, was attacked by a giant octopus. A monster more than 20 meters long emerged from the depths and quickly overtook the ship, moving at a speed of about 40 km per hour.
Having overtaken the "prey", the kraken rushed into the attack and, clinging to the side, tried to break through the hull. According to the assumptions of zoologists, the hungry kraken mistook the ship for a large whale. In this case, the tanker was not damaged, but not all ships were so lucky.
MONSTERS IN AWESOME
What are the dimensions of the largest kraken? The largest architheutis, washed ashore, had a length of 18-19 meters, while the diameter of the suckers on the tentacles was 2-4 centimeters. However, the British zoologist Matthews, who examined 80 sperm whales caught by whalers in 1938, wrote: “Almost all male sperm whales bear on their bodies traces of suckers … squids. Moreover, traces with a diameter of 10 centimeters are quite common. It turns out that 40-meter krakens live in the depths ?!
However, this is far from the limit. Naturalist Ivan Sanderson, in his book Chasing Whales, stated: "The largest footprints on the body of large sperm whales were about 4 inches (10 cm) in diameter, but scars with a diameter of more than 18 inches (45 cm) were also found." Such tracks could only belong to a kraken with a length of at least 100 meters!
Such monsters may well hunt whales and sink small ships. More recently, New Zealand fishermen have caught a giant cephalopod mollusk called "colossal squid" (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni).
This giant can reach, according to the assumptions of scientists, even larger sizes than architheutis. However, you can be sure that other types of giant octopuses lurk in the depths of the sea. In this regard, it is worth remembering that, judging by the surviving descriptions, the kraken was not a squid, but a monstrous octopus.
Octopuses larger than a few meters are unknown to modern science. However, in 1897, a huge dead octopus was found on the coast of Newfoundland, which was mistaken for a giant squid. According to the measurements of the professor of Yale University A. Verril, the octopus had a body about 7.5 meters long and twenty-meter tentacles.
Of this monster, only a part preserved in formalin has survived. As modern research has shown, the beached monster was not a squid at all, but a gigantic octopus! It was probably a true kraken, young and small in size. And its relatives, larger than the largest whale, are still hidden from science in the depths of the ocean …