Since antiquity, stories about sea monsters have been known. Scylla, along with Charybdis, according to ancient Greek mythology, posed a mortal danger to anyone who sailed past her. The Old Testament mentions the sea monster Leviathan, sometimes identified with Satan.
Norwegian folklore tells of the giant sea monsters encountered by fishermen along the coasts of Norway, Iceland and Ireland - the Kraken. Similar giant sea creatures have been seen in the Atlantic and in the ancient Mediterranean. The Kraken is a legendary gigantic sea monster, a cephalopod mollusk. The name of the legendary monster comes from Swedish and Norwegian.
According to one version of folklore, the Kraken is an underwater monster, according to another - a demon, according to the third - a kind of superintelligence. Researchers received reliable information only at the beginning of the 20th century, when sea animals fell into their hands, which, by their size, can be attributed to the Kraken. Prior to that, scientists simply refused to agree with the existence of these sea monsters. Of course, before the XX century there were only stories told by eyewitnesses.
The first detailed summary of marine folklore about the Kraken was compiled by the Danish naturalist Eric Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen (1698-1774). He wrote that the Kraken is an animal "the size of a floating island." According to Pontoppidan, the kraken is able to grab with its tentacles and pull even the largest warship to the bottom. Even more dangerous for ships is the whirlpool that occurs when the Kraken quickly sinks to the seabed.
The Carta Marina by Olaf Magnus from 1539 shows the variety of sea monsters in the waters between Norway and Iceland.
According to the Danish author, this Kraken brings confusion to the minds of sailors and cartographers, since sailors often mistake it for an island and cannot find it a second time. According to the testimony of Norwegian sailors, once a huge squid, similar to the Kraken, was washed ashore in northern Norway.
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Further, Pontoppidan conveys the words of the sailors that the Kraken takes three months to digest the swallowed food. During this time, he releases so much nutritious excrement that clouds of fish always follow him. If a fisherman has an exceptional catch, then they say about him that he “fished on the Kraken”.
The English edition of St. James Chronicle "in the late 1770s. cited the testimony of captain Robert Jameson and the sailors of his ship that they saw in 1774 a huge body up to 1.5 miles in length and up to 30 feet in height, which appeared from the water, then plunged and finally disappeared "with an extreme wave of the waters." After that, they found at this place such a quantity of fish that they filled almost the entire ship. This testimony was given under oath in court.
One of the first to investigate the Kraken was the American zoologist Addison Verril. He gave the animals of this genus a name, and compiled a description of the animal according to all the rules of zoological science. Finally, the legendary Krakens received official recognition.
Based on the description given by Pontoppidan, Karl Linnaeus classified the Kraken among other cephalopods and gave it the Latin name Microcosmus. True, the Kraken was excluded from the second edition of his Systema Naturae.
In 1802, the French zoologist Pierre-Denis de Montfort published a study of mollusks, in which he proposed to distinguish between two species of a mysterious animal - the Kraken octopus, which lives in the northern seas and was allegedly first described by Pliny the Elder, and the giant octopus, which terrifies ships plying the vastness Southern Hemisphere.
The scientific community was critical of Monfort's reasoning. Skeptics believed that the sailors' testimony about the Kraken could be explained by underwater volcanic activity off the coast of Iceland, which manifests itself in bubbles emanating from the water, a sudden and rather dangerous change in currents, the appearance and disappearance of new islands. It was only in 1857 that the existence of a giant squid (Architeuthis dux) was proven, which, apparently, served as the prototype of the Kraken.
According to cryptozoologist Mikhail Goldenkov, evidence of the size of the kraken "from an island" and "thousands of tentacles" indicate that this is not one creature that, with such a size, would be torn to pieces by waves even in a weak storm, but a flock of giant cephalopods, perhaps, giant or colossal squid.
In its natural habitat, the giant squid was photographed only in 2004. The species Architeuthis dux, the Atlantic giant squid, could very well be the terrible Kraken that has killed so many lives. The largest squid seen to date has been encountered by a military trawler off the Maldives. This monster reached a length of 53 meters. According to Dr. Paxton's work, the average size of a giant squid is about twenty meters.