Kraken

The Kraken

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 millenial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered 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.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson



Because of its reputed large size and tendency to turn the sea murky with ink (according to the 18th century Natural History of Norway), the Kraken was believed to be a kind of giant octopus. We know now that the giant squid Architeuthis could be responsible for sightings of giant tetacular beasts in the open sea. Seafarers are notorious for their poor eyesight and wild imagination: the mermaid legends are believed to have originated from sightings of sea cows or manatees -- stout, unattractive beasts as their names suggest, far from the beautiful sylphs of nautical legend. The Latin name of the group, Sirenia, also commemorates the Sirens of Odysseus's journey, whose beguiling song he protected his crewmen from by plugging their ears with wax.

As for the giant squid, their washed up remains on Scandinavian shores sans tentacles probably were responsible for cryptic pictures in old natural history books showing giant bishops' hats found on beaches. If you look at a squid's body without tentacles and turn it the right way around, it's not too difficult to see how it might be described in that way, given a length of time and embellishment of detail after a sighting. Stranded giant squid bodies are not uncommon. Bodies up to 16 m long have been recorded, and even greater records claimed, though as Clyde Roper of the Smithsonian Institution put it, molluscan flesh and tentacles being as rubbery as they are, it's possible that some of these records were stretched into the record books. He also described the dissection of a beached whale -- a big messy job -- and the finding of many squid beaks in the gut of the whale: squids appear to be a major component of whale diets. It is not impossible, therefore, that whales should also prey upon giant squid, and whale bodies have been found with giant sucker marks on their skin, demonstrating that in the deep dark ocean depths, mammal and mollusc do battle in the struggle for survival. It is also interesting because sperm whales from time to time cough up congealed, waxy masses from their gut, which float to the surface of the sea and are gradually cured by the combined action of seawater and sunlight, being eventually found by humans on coastlines as the prized perfume ambergris, quite literally worth its weight in gold because of its rarity. It is believed that at least some of this material has an origin in the undigested or partly digested food of the whale, that is, some of it might derive from squid, even giant squid.

Real life is so much stranger than fiction. Giant octopuses terrorising ships seems rather predictable and passe (how many B films by now have shown giant creatures terrorising poor defenceless humans out at sea?) compared to the fact that one of our most expensive and prized perfumes is actually whale vomit, possibly formed partly from the remains of giant squid. Beat that, Davy Jones!