Huge, creepy krakens have dominated the minds of sailors for centuries. Many believed that this monster was able to entangle a ship with its tentacles and drag it into the depths of the sea along with the team. All sorts of tales circulated about these monsters. It was said that the tentacles of the kraken can reach a length of up to one mile … And the sailors allegedly often mistook the emerging kraken for an island, landed on it, made a fire and thereby woke up a dormant monster, it plunged sharply into the abyss, and the resulting gigantic whirlpool pulled the ship into the abyss together with the sailors …
The kraken was first mentioned in a Scandinavian manuscript around 1000, a lot of space was given to him in his book by the aforementioned Olaus Magnus (1490-1557), the Danish naturalist Eric Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen (1698-1774) also wrote about the monster. Although the kraken is essentially a mythical creature, it is believed that the giant squid was its inspiration.
“It is difficult to imagine a more terrible image than the image of one of these huge monsters soaring in the ocean depths, even darker from the inky liquid released by these creatures in huge quantities; it is worth imagining hundreds of cup-shaped suckers with which its tentacles are equipped, constantly in motion and ready at any moment to grab onto anyone and anything … and in the center of the interweaving of these living traps is a bottomless mouth with a huge hooked beak, ready to tear apart the victim, caught in the tentacles. At the very thought of this, the frost cuts through the skin. This is how the English sailor and writer Frank T. Bullen described the largest, fastest and most feared of all invertebrates on the planet - the giant squid. With short throws, this ocean giant develops speeds faster than most fish. In size, it is quite comparable to the average sperm whale, with which it often engages in mortal combat, although the sperm whale is armed with very sharp teeth.
The squid's beak is very strong, and its eyes are very similar to human ones - they are equipped with eyelids, have pupils, irises and movable lenses that change their shape depending on the distance to the object that the squid is looking at. It has ten tentacles: eight ordinary and two, which are much longer than the others and have something like shoulder blades at the ends. All tentacles are dotted with suction cups. The usual tentacles of the giant squid are 3-3.5 m long, and the pair of the longest stretches up to 15 meters. With long tentacles, the squid pulls the prey to itself and, braiding it with the rest of its limbs, tears it apart with its powerful beak.
Until the second half of the 19th century, scientists doubted the existence of giant squids, and the sailors' stories were considered the fruit of their unbridled imagination. But now, for unknown reasons, many dead squid of gigantic size began to be found on the coasts and surface of the seas.
True, the monsters found were not always dead. “On October 26, 1873, three fishermen, sailing in a small boat,” writes E. R. Richiuti in his book Dangerous Inhabitants of the Sea, “saw a strange floating object in one of the fiords of Newfoundland, it was a giant squid. The fishermen had to fight him not on the stomach, but to the death: one of them, not suspecting anything, poked an unknown object with a hook, and immediately the tentacles of the squid flew up from the water, the animal grabbed the boat with a death grip and dragged it under the water. One of the fishermen, a 12-year-old boy, managed to cut off two tentacles of the squid with an ax, and the squid surrendered; the fishermen leaned on their oars and safely reached the shore. A piece of tentacle, cut off by the boy, remained in the boat, and it was then measured: it was 5.8 meters in length."
The worst human encounter with a giant squid was described in newspapers in 1874. The steamer Strathhoven bound for Madras approached the small schooner Pearl, bobbing in the water. Suddenly, the tentacles of a monstrous squid rose above the surface of the water, they grabbed the schooner and dragged it under the water.
The schooner captain, who managed to escape, told the details of the incident. According to him, the crew of the schooner watched the fight between the squid and the sperm whale. The giants disappeared into the depths, but after a while the captain noticed that at a short distance from the schooner a huge shadow was rising from the depths. It was a monstrous squid about 30 meters in size. When he approached the schooner, the captain shot him with a gun, and then a swift attack of the monster followed, which dragged the schooner to the bottom.
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Biologist and oceanographer Frederick Aldrich is convinced that even 50 meters long squid can live at great depths. The biologist proceeds from the fact that all found dead specimens of giant squid, about 15 m long, belonged to young individuals with suckers of five centimeters in diameter, while traces of suckers of 20 centimeters in diameter were found on many harpoon whales …
In the meantime, a giant squid 8.62 meters long can be seen with your own eyes in the British Museum of Natural History. Archie (as the squid was nicknamed) was caught in 2004 by fishermen from a trawler near the Falkland Islands. Fortunately, the fishermen realized that they had caught a unique specimen, froze it entirely and transported it to London. Scientists not only investigated the giant, but also prepared it for display. Now Archie, located in a 9.45 meter long aquarium filled with a special preservative solution, can be seen by all visitors to the museum.
It is worth noting that when talking about the kraken, there is often some confusion, the latter is sometimes considered a giant octopus. However, the reality of giant octopuses has not yet been proven, although there are a number of facts that speak of the possibility of the existence of very large specimens. For example, in 1897, on St. Augustine's beach in Florida, the corpse of a huge octopus weighing about 6 tons was found. This giant had a body 7.5 m long, and tentacles 23 m, which had a diameter of about 45 cm at their base.
In 1986, the crew and passengers of the motor ship "Ururi" near the Solomon Islands (Pacific Ocean) were able to observe a 12-meter long octopus emerging from a depth of 300 meters. About the same octopus was photographed in 1999. Therefore, it is possible that not only giant squids, but also huge octopuses took part in the formation of the creepy image of the kraken.
Andrey Sidorenko