The Kraken
The embrace that dragged whole ships under in the northern seas
| Also known as | Hafgufa, the monster of the northern seas |
|---|---|
| Region | The seas of Norway, Iceland and Greenland |
| First sighting | Norse sagas, 13th century |
| Type of creature | Colossal cephalopod |
| Danger level | ☾☾☾☾☾ |
The island that was not on the charts
The Norse sagas speak of a creature so vast that sailors mistook it for an island: they would drop anchor, go ashore, light a fire… and the island would sink beneath them. In the eighteenth century Bishop Pontoppidan described it with a naturalist's precision: a being a mile and a half across whose whirlpool, as it dived, swallowed any vessel.
For centuries it was the standing terror of the northern routes: when a ship vanished with no storm in sight, the Kraken claimed its share.
Real tentacles on deck
In 1861 the French corvette Alecton managed to harpoon off a piece of a colossal squid near Tenerife, and the carcasses washed up on the beaches of Newfoundland in the 1870s put an end to the Academy's laughter: the giant squid was real. In 2004 a living one was photographed for the first time in the deep waters off Japan, and in 2012 it was filmed: eyes like dinner plates and tentacles more than ten metres long.
The monster that turned out to be true
The Kraken is cryptozoology's great triumph: a monster the learned mocked for centuries that turned out to be down there after all, almost exactly as the stories told it. The confirmed specimens do not sink ships… but only a fraction of the depths where it lives has ever been explored, and the plate-sized sucker scars found on sperm whales suggest the conversation down there is far from over.