The Kraken

What’s got loads of tentacles and, according to legend, snacks on gigantic sailing ships? It’s not a trick question and it’s no joke either! The answer is one of the most mythical sea creatures of all, an animal so enormous that it’s rumoured to have sunk ocean vessels and terrorised sailors for centuries. It’s known as the Kraken.

Tales of sea monsters have existed in folklore for centuries. Jon Ablett, senior curator (someone who chooses what to put on display) at the Natural History Museum in London says, “many cultures around the world have a myth or legend about a tentacled beast bothering seamen or generally getting up to no good.” An account written by King Sverre of Norway in the 12th century talks of sea serpents as big as islands “haunt[ing] the seas”. But with just a few eyewitnesses in the 18th century, could such a creature really exist?

The first modern description of the Kraken appeared in a travel diary by adventurer Francesco Negri in the late 1600s who used the word “krake” to describe a creature with arms and legs that looked like an uprooted tree. As a zoologist (a scientist who studies animals), his writings often included observations and descriptions of animals he’d find on his travels so when a story about a giant octopus that would drag ships to watery depths appeared, lots of people took it for fact. It was probably the case that Negri was simply uniting a creature he saw with old folklore.

In 1734, the ship of traveller Hans Egede was off the coast of Greenland when those aboard “saw a most terrible creature” with a big head, wrinkled body and long tail. Could this be another sighting of the Kraken?

One century later, famous poet Alfred Tennyson wrote a sonnet (a love poem) called “The Kraken” and secured the creature’s place in popular culture. In it, he describes a monster “with giant arms” that lives “in the abysmal sea”, sending sailors to early graves by destroying their ships.

Whilst the creature described by these three men is undoubtedly the same species, it’s unlikely that sightings of it by Negri and Egede are the same animal. Not only do hundreds of years separate the sightings but thousands of miles do too. How could two people distant in time and geography spot the same thing? Are there any explanations as to what their Kraken might be?

We know that many millions of years ago creatures on Earth went through a phase of gigantism, a trend where animals are much bigger than they are today. Gigantism still occurs among some animals including those that lurk deep within our oceans. The giant squid is a prime example and recent estimates put its size around 13 metres (about the size of a bus).

Some, like Czech biologist (a scientist who studies life on Earth) Jaroslav Mareš, believed the legend of the Kraken may have originated from sightings of giant squid. That would make sense. Whilst giant squid are nowhere near as long as a boat, squid do match the descriptions of these writers. Egede wrote that “the unknown creature was using giant fins which propelled it through the water” and Negri’s description of an “uprooted tree” would match a giant squid’s eight arms and two long feeding arms known as clubs.

There’s still lots we don’t know about the creatures that live deep in the ocean. The scientists have developed many tools that can help them survey the seas, but not all of them can unlock its mysteries. Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean near the Philippines is so deep that no human-made tools can reach the bottom.

Whilst we can put the mystery of the Kraken down to a misunderstanding of animals, it’s clear that the Kraken is alive in some form. Who doesn’t love a story about ship-smashing sea creatures? The Kraken in its physical form may just be a harmless giant squid but its tale of terror lives on in books, on our TV screens, in our video games, and in the movies.

Also

One of the most famous portrayals of the Kraken comes from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Writer Ted Elliot said that there are a lot of supernatural stories about the sea, “but nobody had actually done those stories as part of a larger pirate movie […] so there was a wealth of legends to draw from.”

In the film, one character describes the Kraken as “a fearsome creature with giant tentacles that’ll suction your face clean off, and drag an entire ship down to the crushing darkness.” Davy Jones bears a striking resemblance to the Kraken and is able to command the creature too, like a pet. He does, to attack Captain Jack Sparrow and drag The Black Pearl to its watery grave.

In the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Dead Man’s Chest, the Kraken was brought to life by visual effects. VFX supervisor John Knoll said that every shot was “months of effort” because “there’s a lot of interaction with water […] with a dozen tentacles swarming around, picking characters off the deck.”

First published in The Week Junior Science+Nature, issue 48, May 2022.