In a column published here three or four years ago, I told of the powerful impact that that great monster of the seas, the giant squid, has had on my imagination since I first encountered it as a boy of seven or so in Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As everyone who has read the book or seen the movie knows, Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, is attacked by a whole pack of giant squids, immense creatures eight yards long, with huge writhing tentacles, horrid gnashing beaks, and great staring green eyes as large as saucers. The valiant crew of the Nautilus drives the swarming attackers off, finally, but the struggle is a frantic one, and Verne milks it for every milligram of excitement inherent in it. Every little boy loves a good monster story, and the battle with the giant squids made a deep impression on my very impressionable young mind.

I had another giant-squid experience a couple of years later in a scary radio drama—radio, back then, featured dramatized stories all day long—called “The Kraken,” in which a German submarine, cruising off the Norwegian coast in World War II, blunders into the habitat of an enormous squid and becomes entangled in its tentacles, each of them as thick as a hundred-year-old oak. The sub’s captain—one of those scholarly Nazis so common in popular entertainment—immediately identifies the squid as the Kraken, long known as a menace to fishermen in northern waters. The great beast drags the sub down to the cave that is its undersea lair, and when the captain sends a man in a diving suit out to investigate the situation, the monster swallows him alive, imposing on him a fate that he himself describes, step by step, in a particularly grisly way. Eventually the Kraken is harpooned—why German submarines were equipped with harpoons is something I can’t tell you—but the roof of the cave collapses, crushing the sub, and only a few members of its crew manage to escape. I can never forget the nightmarish force of that broadcast.

Some years afterward, when I began to collect old science fiction magazines, I discovered that the story from which the radio play had been adapted had originally been published in one of them—the June 1940 issue of John Campbell’s famous fantasy magazine, Unknown. It was the work of L. Ron Hubbard, the future creator of Dianetics and the founder of the Church of Scientology, under the pseudonym of “Frederick Engelhardt.”

My next encounter with the Kraken came in my teens, when as I prowled through poetry anthologies I discovered that Alfred, Lord Tennyson had written a sonorous poem about the undersea giant that stirred the same feelings of wonder in me that the radio broadcast and the Engelhardt story had engendered:

 

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abys-mal 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
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms 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 man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

 

In the 1960s, when I turned my hand to writing books of popular science, I devoted a chapter of my book The World of the Ocean Depths (1968) to the Kraken of literature and its real-world counterpart, the giant squid, Architeuthis. The first published reference to the Kraken, I noted, was in Archbishop Olaus Magnus’ 1555 History of the Northern People, in which he told of “monstrous fish on the coasts or sea of Norway. . . . One of these sea-monsters will drown easily many great ships provided with many strong mariners.” The archbishop reported that the Kraken was so huge that sailors had been known to mistake it for an island, landing on its back and going to their dooms when the annoyed Kraken sank beneath the waves.

Another Norwegian clergyman, Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Ber-gen, provided a further account of the Kraken in his Natural History of Norway, 1751. Calling it “incontestably the largest sea-monster in the world,” and estimating its size —conservatively, he said—at “about an English mile and a half in circumference,” Pontoppidan asserted that fishermen often catch sight of the Kraken close to the surface on a summer day. “It looks at first like a number of small islands,” he wrote. Sometimes “several bright points or horns appear, which grow thicker and thicker the higher they rise above the surface of the water, and sometimes they stand up as high and large as the masts of middle-sized vessels. It seems these are the creature’s arms, and, it is said, if they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom.”

By the late nineteenth century, when Jules Verne was writing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, scientists felt reasonably certain that sea-creatures the supposed size of the Kraken did not actually exist. But it seemed clear that the giant squid, Architeuthis, was a genuine prototype for the Kraken legends. The first authenticated description of one, and the direct inspiration for that horrific scene in the Verne novel, was the work of Lieutenant Frederic-Marie Bouyer, commander of the French sloop Alecton. Sailing off the Canary Islands in 1861, the men of the Alecton caught sight of what Bouyer took to be a giant octopus. It made no attempt at an attack—that part was Verne’s own invention—but remained at the surface close by the ship, “moving about with a kind of intelligence.” Bouyer recognized it as an unknown species and after rejecting the idea of sending out a boat to capture it for scientific study, fearing that “in such a hand-to-hand struggle the monster might capsize the boat with its long tentacles, and perhaps use these formidable whip-like weapons, armed with suckers, to strangle several of my sailors,” he tried to snare it from shipboard with a noose. But the animal escaped, leaving behind a forty-four-pound chunk of tentacle. This is Bouyer’s description: “The body seemed to measure fifteen to eighteen feet in length. The head had a parrot-like beak surrounded by eight arms between five and six feet long. In aspect it was quite appalling, brick red in color, shapeless and slimy, its form repulsive and terrible.”

In the following decade, several similar monsters were washed ashore on the coast of Newfoundland. From them it could be determined that what Bouyer had seen was a giant squid, not an octopus, for they had ten tentacles, not eight: two very long ones and the eight that Bouyer had seen. (He had mistaken one of the long tentacles for a tail.) Fishermen in a boat off Newfoundland were attacked by one, and fought it off, severing two of its tentacles with a hatchet. One of these limbs was nineteen feet long and 3.5 inches thick. Another giant squid found in New Zealand had tentacles forty-nine feet long. Fragments of tentacles as thick as a man’s body were found in the stomachs of sperm whales, the chief enemy of the giant squid. From the study of these and other specimens, it was estimated that the biggest of these squids, which roved the seas in many parts of the world, could reach an overall length of some sixty feet.

But almost all the information we had about giant squids came from dead or dying specimens. No one had managed to make detailed observations of the living giant squid in the wild until a Japanese research team succeeded in photographing one in the North Pacific in September, 2004, at a depth of nearly three thousand feet.

The Japanese attached cameras to a long line, baited it with chopped-up shrimp and a small squid of a common species, and lowered it into the waters off Japan’s Osagawara Islands, where giant squids were thought to seek their prey in a region of the sea that sunlight never penetrates. Sure enough, one of the monsters came swimming up, enveloped the baited line in a ball of tentacles, and—as the researchers had hoped—snared itself on hooks that were mounted on the rig below the camera. For the next four hours the squid struggled to free itself while the cameras snapped some 550 images.

Then it succeeded at last in getting itself loose, but left a nineteen-foot section of tentacle behind that the researchers were able to hoist up on deck. “It was still functioning when we got it on the boat,” one of the Japanese scientists said. Repeatedly it gripped the boat deck, and tried to catch the fingers of a scientist who prodded it: “The grip wasn’t as strong as I expected; it felt sticky.” But the photographs of the hooked, thrashing squid, which was a relatively small one, only some twenty-six feet long, showed it to be a strong, energetic animal —perhaps not as fierce as the ones depicted in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but a vigorous, aggressive creature nonetheless and a dangerous predator.

And very strange-looking, too: the photos show us an eerie thing indeed, whose gigantic tentacles sweep the water in an oddly graceful way. Nor is it the weirdest deep-sea giant that marine scientists are likely to be spying on in the next decade or so. Perhaps the Lake Champlain plesiosaur and the much ballyhooed Loch Ness Monster are going to remain forever in the realm of mythology, but surely other astonishing discoveries await us. What these first photos of the giant squid tell us is that we are only at the threshold of exploration of the undersea world, and that the sea holds creatures every bit as bizarre as the denizens of other planets that science fiction writers have dreamed up over the years. I doubt that we will find any Krakens down there, but there can be little doubt that our probing cameras, dangling into those unknown lightless depths, will startle us again and again in the years ahead.