00:00The sea did not storm that night, it rose off the coast of Norway.
00:04In water black as ink, fishermen watched the surface begin to swell from below, as if something
00:10enormous were pushing up from below.
00:13First came a shape like a low island where no island should have been.
00:17Then came the arms, thick as the masts of a ship, rising out of the water.
00:23And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the creature sank, and the sea folded in after
00:28it, spinning into a whirlpool wide enough to drag a boat down with it.
00:33For 300 years, northern sailors swore this monster was real.
00:37They called it the Kraken.
00:39This is the story of that beast, and of the real animal hiding underneath it.
00:44Norwegian fishermen had a strange rule.
00:47If the catch was suddenly too good, they rode away.
00:50A captain would sail over water where his charts promised 80 or 100 fathoms of depth, and his
00:57sounding line would find only 20 or 30.
01:00At the same time, the cod and the laying would come up in numbers he had never seen.
01:06That, the old fisherman said, meant the Kraken was resting on the sea floor below him.
01:12They believed the creature fed for months where it rested, and the life it left behind drew
01:17whole shoals to the spot above it.
01:19Staying for that impossible catch was a gamble.
01:22Because water-shallowing further meant the beast was rising, the wise men rode for deep water
01:28and did not look back.
01:30The legend might have stayed a dockside story if a bishop had not written it down.
01:35Erik Pontepiddin, the Bishop of Bergen, published his Natural History of Norway in the 1750s,
01:43and he gave the Kraken its fullest description ever.
01:46He had never seen it himself, but he trusted the hundreds of fishermen and sailors who swore
01:52they had.
01:52Pontepiddin wrote that the back of the beast, when it broke the surface, could measure a
01:58mile and a half around, looking at first like small islands ringed with floating weed.
02:03Then bright points appeared, growing until they stood as high as the masts of a middle-sized
02:10vessel.
02:10The danger was not only in the rising, sinking again.
02:14It pulled the sea down with it into a whirlpool that could drag everything nearby into the
02:19deep.
02:20Yet he also admitted he had heard of no man actually destroyed by the monster.
02:25Long before the bishop, the Kraken was already swimming across Europe's maps.
02:31In 1539, the Swedish churchman Allaus Magnus published the Carta Marina, a great map of the
02:39northern seas, and he filled its waters with sea monsters rising beside tiny ships.
02:45The name Kraken never appears in the Old Norse sagas, but later books knew creatures very like
02:52it.
02:52The saga of Orvar Aad in a Norwegian book from around 1250 called The King's Mirror both describe
02:59a sea beast so vast that sailors mistook it for an island, only to discover the error when
03:05it moved.
03:06In 1735, Carl Linnaeus even listed it in the first edition of his Systema Naturi as microcosmus,
03:14then quietly took it out of later editions.
03:17The monster was already slipping between fact and fable.
03:21The Kraken's place was off the Lafoten Islands.
03:25Between two of those islands, Moskinessoi and Veroi, the tide races through a narrow strait
03:31and churns the sea into the monstermen, the whirlpool the world would come to call the maelstrom.
03:37When wind and tide fight, the water boils and even modern boats keep their distance.
03:43Edgar Allan Poe built his 1841 tail, a descent into the maelstrom, around a whirlpool that
03:51swallowed ships whole.
03:53Jules Verne sent his submarine into the same waters in 20,000 leagues under the seas.
03:59Local fishermen have always respected it, but visitors expecting an abyss that devoured fleets
04:05found a treacherous tidal race, terrifying in a storm, harmless on a calm day.
04:11The Kraken's whirlpool, it seemed, was a real place, made larger by every retelling.
04:18By the turn of the 1800s, the Kraken had changed shape.
04:22In Paris, French naturalist Pierre Denaise de Montfort's 1801 work on mollusks described
04:30two gigantic octopuses.
04:32He described a Kraken octopus reported by Norwegian sailors and American whalers, and a far larger
04:39colossal octopus engraved seizing a merchant ship off Angola with its arms around the hull.
04:46Montfort went further, and that was his ruin.
04:49He claimed that ten British warships which had vanished one night in 1782 must have been
04:55attacked and sunk by giant octopuses.
04:58When the claim was checked, it collapsed, and Montfort's reputation never recovered.
05:04He died poor in Paris around 1820, mocked for the monster he had tried to make real, but
05:11his wild-sounding sources were describing something that truly lived in the deep.
05:16The proof did not come from sailors.
05:18It came from whales.
05:20Through the 1800s, whalers cutting open sperm whales kept finding enormous horny peaks, far
05:28larger than any known squid could own, and sometimes tentacle fragments as thick as a man's arm.
05:35Then, in 1857, Danish zoologist Jabeda Steenstrub named the animal Architeuthis ducks, the giant
05:45squid from fragments collected in the Bahamas and a beak saved from a carcass washed ashore
05:51in Denmark.
05:53Four years later, in 1861, the French Corvette Electon met a live one at the surface near
05:59Tenerife.
06:00The crew tried to haul it aboard, but it broke apart and they kept only a fragment.
06:05The captain's report reached Paris, and a young rider named Jules Verne read it.
06:11Nine years later, the giant squid attacked Captain Nemo's submarine in his novel, and
06:18the whole world learned its shape.
06:20To judge the giant squid, look at its enemy.
06:24The sperm whale dives a kilometer down to hunt it, in darkness and crushing pressure, and
06:29the squid does not surrender quietly.
06:32When it is caught, it wraps all eight arms in both long-feeding tentacles around the whale's
06:38head, and the tooth strings inside its suckers bite into the whale's skin.
06:43Old whales carry hundreds of circular scars around their heads and mouths, a record of
06:49battles a thousand meters down.
06:51A grown sperm whale can outweigh a giant squid more than a hundred times over, and it hunts
06:57by the most powerful sonar of any animal.
07:00No reliable record exists of a giant squid ever killing a sperm whale.
07:06The scars tell a different story.
07:08Not of a monster that rules the deep, but of a prey animal fighting for its life against
07:14the one predator it cannot beat.
07:16For all that evidence, no one had ever photographed a living giant squid in its own world.
07:23That changed because one Japanese zoologist refused to give up.
07:27Tsunami Kubodra of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo spent years following
07:33sperm whales, because where the whales hunted, the squid had to be.
07:38With Kiyoichi Mori, he lowered a baited camera line near the Ogasawara Islands a thousand kilometers
07:45south of Japan, and waited.
07:48On the 30th of September, 2004, at a depth of 900 meters, the camera fired.
07:55An eight-meter giant squid, purplish red in the strobe light, seized the bait and fought
08:01the line for more than four hours, so hard that it tore off one of its own tentacles five
08:07and a half meters long.
08:09The photographs proved at last that the Kraken's cousin was real, aggressive, and very much alive.
08:15Kubodra wanted moving pictures, and for that he would have to go down himself.
08:20In 2012, he descended in a small submersible to a depth of nearly a thousand meters near
08:27the Ogasawara Islands, with Discovery Channel and NHGA cameras beside him.
08:33In the black water, lived only by the submersible's lights, a giant squid drifted into view, its
08:40long arms trailing behind it like ropes.
08:43It was the first time anyone had ever filmed a living giant squid in its natural habitat.
08:50His team had filmed one on a baited line six years earlier, but this was the animal free,
08:56moving through the deep on its own terms.
08:59Audiences who had grown up on the Kraken finally saw the creature that had started it all, not
09:05an island or a ship killer, but a shy giant longer than a bus in darkness no sunlight has
09:11ever reached.
09:12Then the sea produced something heavier.
09:15In February 2007, a New Zealand long-lined boat called the Santa Spiring was fishing for
09:21two fish in the Ross Sea, off Antarctica, when its crew hauled up a squid that refused to
09:27let go of its catch.
09:29It was a colossal squid, Messinichotuthis hamiltoni, a different species from the giant squid, and it
09:36weighed almost 500 kilograms heavier than any squid ever landed.
09:42Its eyes were wider than dinner plates, and inside many of its suckers were sharp hooks that
09:48swiveled to hold struggling prey.
09:50It went to the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington for study.
09:54The colossal squid lives only in the cold waters of the Southern Ocean, and unlike its giant cousin,
10:01no one has yet filmed one alive in its home waters.
10:05Expeditions have gone looking in recent years and come back empty-handed.
10:10The largest squid of all is still waiting for its first close-up.
10:15So what was the Kraken?
10:17In the end, not an island that moved, not an octopus that sank warships.
10:22No ship was ever reliably recorded as dragged down by a sea monster.
10:27The fishermen were describing a real animal, glimpsed in fragments for centuries, a squid
10:33longer than a bus, armed with toothed suckers, hunted by whales a kilometer down, and so shy
10:40that science needed 150 years to photograph it alive.
10:44The legend was wrong about the size, wrong about the danger, and right about the wonder.
10:50The colossal squid is still down there, unfilmed, in waters no human eye has ever explored.
10:57If the Kraken taught us anything, it is this.
11:01The sea does not need monsters.
11:02It already has them.
