Message in a Bottle Third Edition
PAGES
- Front Page - Message from the Editor
Page 2 - Portside Perusal: Global Event Gossip
Page 3 - Meliva vs Clockwork
Page 4 - Navigational Aids
Page 5 - Meet The Crew & Ship Stealing
Page 6 - Historical Lookback
Page 7 - Special Feature: Tall Tales of William One Eye
Historical Lookback - The Kraken:
The legacy of the Kraken, believe it or not, is more science than myth.
Before the modernization of our grasp on biological and natural law, the mythos of creatures like kraken was actually a pretty decent effort at understanding ecology around us. The lines between nature and mysticism were undefined; terminology that we now recognize as mythical were, at the time, used broadly as categorical tools to keep records and information collected. Stories of kraken spawned from hundreds, nay, thousands of inexplicable encounters on the open sea with benign but misunderstood ocean critters.
Making an effort at maintaining case-appropriateness throughout this article — Kraken capitalized refers to specific mythical characters, often godlike or mystical in some nature. The lowercase kraken, used more broadly as a debunked aquatic species, is where the history gets really interesting.
In the beginning, kraken were first “observed” (define that however you like) by sailors and explorers dating back to the 13th century. The history can be traced to a few notable legends and folktales, but if you look more broadly at the evolving stories, sightings of kraken form a rather ill-defined cloud of information that spans centuries.
The accounts of the animal varied wildly — sometimes the creature was octopus-like, other times looking more like a crab or lobster. And the kraken’s size, perhaps its most defining quality, was also wildly inconsistent — ranging between 100 feet and “miles” long in different accounts.
Still, given the vast oddities of the open ocean, let’s humor a bit of comparison.
The depths below.
As an industry standard set by the naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort in 1802 and popularized recently by Pirates of the Caribbean, our kraken estimate is approximately ten warships placed end to end.
Between the 13th and 19th centuries, sailors indiscriminately used the term “kraken” to catalogue any enormous, unidentifiable, or uncanny sea beast that may (or may not) have crossed their paths during early ocean exploration. Despite the myths and magic that would later be associated with the creature, for the time… this process is remarkably scientific, in a certain sense. These explorers and storytellers were inadvertently uncovering new phenomena about the open ocean and associating it under a unified umbrella: kraken.
And here’s where the nomenclature becomes really fascinating.
Off in the distance and after ten jugs of mead… Yeah this does look a bit monster-y.
It’s likely that the origins of these stories were actual, flesh-and-blood sea creatures: humpback whales look awfully “lobster-like” at a quick glance, and we now verifiably know that giant and colossal squid indeed roam the open ocean. At the time though, anything dubious was just labeled kraken and thrown into the proverbial bucket of myth and legend.
But still, these myths allowed data to be tracked and compiled. By the 1700s, after centuries of sightings, kraken (still lowercase!) had gathered enough data to be genuinely considered real. In 1735 Carl Linneaus actually classified kraken as a species with a scientific name: Microcosmus marinus.
The transition into Kraken, capitalized and mythical, was kickstarted in 1830 by renowned sea-monster enthusiast Lord Alfred Tennyson. This is when things get super interesting.
Grim.
In a narrow few decades in the mid-1800s, the Kraken grew rapidly into an icon of popular science fiction literature, bookended by references in Moby **** (1851) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1871), although not mentioned by name in the latter.
During this time, popular culture began replacing the pseudo-scientific archive of kraken (lowercase) with the mythical idea of a Kraken (uppercase).
For those unfamiliar with Google ngram, the database of word usage in literature, it’s a powerful deductive tool.
I love this so much.
Throughout most of the 19th century the terms “kraken” and “Kraken” shared pretty much equal footing in popular literature. But sure enough, slowly as our understanding of natural sciences matured and the Kraken became an icon of sea fiction, not fact, the terminology shifted into its modern usage. You can see this happening on the graph above right around 1885.
I find this absolutely amazing.
If the scientific “classification” of the kraken began with Linnaeus in 1735, my best efforts to track down the end of this pseudo-science legacy bring me to a 1872 paper submitted to the Royal Society of Biology. The full publication — which I recommend reading in its entirety — examines how mythical creatures tend to derive from exaggerated claims of real-life biology. In the publication, the Kraken is acknowledged as “simply an enormous exaggeration of the gigantic species of cuttle fish known or believed to exist in the Indian Ocean.”
Credit where credit is due.
Myth debunked. Although the rest of the publication goes on to defend the existence of the Bunyip, a mythical beast from Australia which would take a few more decades to thoroughly disprove.
And hell, if people today still think mermaids are real, I can’t say for certain that myth ever truly weeds itself completely out of our collective culture.
But there’s a 150-year-or-so window that holds a lot more information about the transition from kraken to Kraken; from myth to biology. The way science and research evolved during the Age of Enlightenment meant a more critical look at the natural world around us — and more importantly, a more robust methodology when naming organisms and collecting data.
As I said earlier, the kraken originally served as a catch-all for unknown and unidentified sightings at sea. So what happened when we sailors and explorers adopted a more modernized method of observing, naming, and categorizing sea creatures?
The contrast over just 100 years is stunning.
And thus the Kraken was released, not by man, but by science.
Before about 1820, the Kraken (I’m using all case-forms here) was the dominant language used in describing cephalopod life, at least in quite primitive terms. Over less than 50 years, from about 1820 to 1870, humanity adopted a new way of talking about the ocean world.
Octopus. Squid. Cephalopod. By 1900, they had all eclipsed our dear kraken.
Don’t Google mermaid truthers. It’s a dark spiral to explore.
This isn’t the only myth to be replaced by modern scientific understanding.
Evidence for dragons was eventually replaced in the popular consciousness by an understanding of dinosaurs and the fossil record. And it’s well-documented that mermaid myths were simply sparked from a mischaracterization of manatees. Gorillas, actually, were once thought to be entirely mythical before being thoroughly recognized by western scientists in 1847. We just kept the name intact as the myth transitioned into reality.
Myths like kraken serve an invaluable role in helping science develop — they give the inexplicable and misunderstood elements of the natural world a banner to be collected underneath. Sure, that name is eventually replaced with more accurate language, but just because science was a bit early that doesn’t mean it was wrong.
And luckily for kraken, this story actually ends on a high note.
Two genuine squid species — Giant and Colossal respectively — also lived on the precipice of myth and science for hundreds of years before the degree of sightings and specimens eventually became overwhelming. In the late 19th Century, early photo evidence lead to widespread acceptance of the creature as fact rather than fiction — a confirmation that gave new life to the Kraken legend.
Let’s all thank the giant squid for giving us five Pirates movies.
The mythical monster may have risked fading into obscurity if not for a newfound connection — almost a vindication — in actual biology.
During the Enlightenment era, it may have seemed like our improving understanding of science took us further away from the miraculous and the mythological. But now, as we look deeper into the true oddities of nature, we come full circle with actual acknowledgement of the bizarre extremes in the natural world—wildlife that does exist but pushes our imagination in new ways. So let’s keep discovering and embracing the blurred lines between wildlife and fantasy.
(Taken from the log of medium.com/@Nauralish.)
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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 millennial 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 arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
(Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1830)
The Weather Report:
Live from the windbag...er, Mel the prattling SeaHag herself.
Prattling SeaHag wrote:the weather coming up with a little old sea hag magic.
From what I've been able to tell, It's gonna be a bunch of snow for the northern ports, while the south ones will be getting cold wind and rain. Hail will hit a few ports too.
On the bright side, tis the day of love as I predict this weather, and lot's of folks have come to stock up on love potion so I'm making bank. One particularly strange person bought my entire stock, though I won't name names. Said something about spiking an entire port's water and watching everyone just go at it. The money was good, so I won't judge.
On another weather related topic, St. Martin will be closing it's harbor. The docks are frozen solid at the moment, and those dang kids won't stop ice skating on it so I can melt it. Darn kids, always on my lawn or ice.
Anyway, that's it for weather. Also be careful what you drink-might be spiked. Back to napping for me
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Thanks again to Dez and Mel, guest contributors Zephore, MyCrows, WilliamOneEye and the citz of Avonmora for bringing this months paper.
Please keep your stories and ideas coming in. It is very much appreciated.
"Til next month then.
