The history of the ancient belief in the existence of gigantic cephalopods is somewhat obscure. All that we know of it is from passages in the works of a few old Greek and Latin authors, and a series of Scandinavian traditions. I have already referred to the “monstrous polypus” mentioned by Pliny,[30] which, at Carteia, in Grenada, used to come out of the sea at night, and carry off salted tunnies from the curing depôts on the shore, and also to the incident recorded by Ælian,[31] who describes his monster as crushing up the barrels of salt-fish in its arms, to get at the contents. In the legends of northern nations stories of the existence of a marine animal of such enormous size that it more resembled an island than an organised being frequently found a place; and though the descriptions given of it were wild and extravagant, it is not difficult to recognise in the ill-drawn and distorted portrait the attempted likeness of one of the cephalopoda. Olaus Magnus[32] relates many wondrous narratives of sea-monsters,—tales which had gathered and accumulated marvels as they were passed on from generation to generation in oral history, and which he took care to bequeath to his successors undeprived of any of their fascination.
Eric Pontoppidan, the younger, Bishop of Bergen, is generally, but unjustly, regarded as the inventor of the fabulous Kraken, and is constantly misquoted by authors who have never read his work,[33] and who, one after another, have copied from their predecessors erroneous statements concerning him. More than half a century before him Christian Francis Paullinus,[34] a physician and naturalist of Eisenach, who evinced in his writings an admiration of the marvellous rather than of the useful, had described as resembling Gesner’s “Heracleoticon,” a monstrous animal which occasionally rose from the sea on the coasts of Lapland and Finmark, and which was of such enormous dimensions that a regiment of soldiers could conveniently manœuvre on its back. Pontoppidan was not a fabricator of falsehoods; but, in collecting evidence relating to the “great beasts” living in “the great and wide sea,” was influenced, as he tells us, by “a desire to extend the popular knowledge of the glorious works of a beneficent Creator.” His fault, or mistake, was that he gave too much credence to old narratives and traditions of floating islands and sea-monsters, and to the superstitious beliefs and exaggerated statements of ignorant fishermen. If those who abuse him had lived in his day they would probably have done the same. The tone of his concluding remarks is not that of an intentional deceiver and knave. He says he “believes the accounts given to be true and well attested,” and that he “leaves it to future writers to complete what he has imperfectly sketched out, by further experience, which is always the best instructor.” No wonder, therefore, that his evident sincerity and the respectability of episcopal advocacy obtained belief for the fable of the Kraken.
Fig. 12.—Facsimile of De Montfort’s “Poulpe colossal.”
The Norwegian bishop was a conscientious, if over-credulous man: but the same cannot be said of Denys de Montfort, who, half a century later not only professed to believe in the existence of the Kraken, but also of another gigantic animal distinct from it; a “colossal poulpe,” or octopus, compared with which Pliny’s was a mere pigmy. In a drawing fitter to decorate the outside of a showman’s caravan at a fair than seriously to illustrate a work on natural history,[35] he depicted this tremendous cuttle-fish as throwing its arms over a three-masted vessel, snapping off its masts, tearing down the yards, and on the point of dragging it to the bottom, if the crew had not succeeded in cutting off its immense limbs with cutlasses and hatchets. De Montfort had good opportunities of obtaining information, for he was at one time an assistant in the geological department of the Museum of Natural History in Paris; and wrote a work on conchology,[36] besides that already referred to. But it appears to have been his deliberate purpose to cajole the public; for it is reported that he exclaimed to M. Defrance: “If my entangled ship is accepted, I will make my ‘colossal poulpe’ overthrow a whole fleet.” Accordingly we find him gravely declaring[37] that one of the great victories of the British navy was converted into a disaster by the monsters which are the subject of his history. He boldly asserted that the six men-of-war captured from the French by Admiral Rodney in the West Indies on the 12th of April 1782, together with four British ships detached from his fleet to convoy the prizes, were all suddenly engulphed in the waves on the night of the battle under such circumstances as showed that the catastrophe was caused by colossal cuttle-fishes, and not by a gale or any ordinary casualty.
Unfortunately for De Montfort the inexorable logic of facts not only annihilates his startling theory, but demonstrates the reckless falsity of his plausible statements. The captured vessels did not sink on the night of the action, but were all sent to Jamaica to refit, and arrived there safely. Five months afterwards, however, a convoy of nine line-of-battle-ships (amongst which were Rodney’s prizes), one frigate, and about a hundred merchantmen, were dispersed, whilst on their voyage to England, by a violent storm, during which some them unfortunately foundered. The various accidents which preceded the loss of these vessels was related in evidence to the Admiralty by the survivors, and official documents prove that De Montfort’s fleet-destroying poulpe was unequivocally a “devil-fish of fiction,” and that the “devil-fish of fact” had no part in the disaster he ascribes to it.[38]
I have been told, but cannot vouch for the truth of the report, that De Montfort’s propensity to write that which was not true, culminated in his committing forgery, and that he died in the galleys. But he records a statement of Captain Jean Magnus Dens, said to have been a respectable and veracious man, who, after having made several voyages to China as master of a trader, retired from a seafaring life and lived at Dunkirk. He told De Montfort that in one of his voyages, whilst crossing from St. Helena to Cape Negro, he was becalmed, and took advantage of the enforced idleness of the crew to have the vessel scraped and painted. Whilst three of his men were standing on planks slung over the side, an enormous cuttle-fish rose from the water, and threw one of its arms around two of the sailors, whom it tore away, with the scaffolding on which they stood. With another arm it seized the third man, who held on tightly to the rigging, and screamed for help. His shipmates ran to his assistance, and succeeded in rescuing him by cutting away the creature’s arm with axes and knives, but he died delirious on the following night. The captain tried to save the other two sailors by killing the animal, and drove several harpoons into it; but they broke away, and the men were carried down by the monster. The arm cut off was said to have been 25 feet long, and as thick as the mizenyard, and to have had on it suckers as big as saucepan-lids. I believe the old sea-captain’s narrative of the incident to be true: the dimensions given by De Montfort are an embellishment of his own.
It is remarkable that there exists in the East a strong belief in the power of these animals to sink a ship and devour her crew. I have been told by a friend that he saw in a shop in China a picture of a cuttle-fish embracing a junk, apparently of about 300 tons burthen, and helping itself to the sailors, as one picks gooseberries off a bush. Mr. Laurence Oliphant, in his “China and Japan,” describes a Japanese show, which consisted of “a series of groups of figures carved in wood, the size of life, and as cleverly coloured as Madame Tussaud’s wax-works. One of these was a group of women bathing in the sea. One of them had been caught in the folds of a cuttle-fish; the others, in alarm, were escaping, leaving their companion to her fate. The cuttle-fish was represented on a huge scale, its eyes, eyelids, and mouth being made to move simultaneously by a man inside the head.”