The krakens, one old legend said, were monsters so big that they resembled islands from a distance, sailors often steering toward them and dropping anchor in their bodies. Anyone so foolish as to light a fire in a kraken's back would cause it to sink down into the deeps, dragging anchor and ship with it. The beast is actually pictured this way in the work of Olaus Magnus-pseudonym of the famous author and ecclesiastic, Olaf Storr, who left Sweden for Rome after the Reformation of 1526 and published a history of Scandinavia. It is depicted there as an immense creature with plate-sized luminous red and green eyes, a beast writhing in agony as sailors built a fire on its back.
But the kraken, also known as the hafgusa, has also been described as a huge sea serpent some 200 feet long and 20 feet in diameter, one that plucked men off land as well as off ships. A Norwegian writer in the sixteenth century said that its body was a mile in circumference with bright horns on its head as tall as the masts of a ship.
Most evidence indicates that the kraken was a monstrous squid; in fact, the Norwegian word kraken is now used to mean both "giant squid" and "sea monster." Squids, as noted previously, have possibly attacked and even sunk ships at sea. The largest forms, such as the Architeuthis, for example, weigh nearly a ton, have tentacles 30 feet long, and their plate-sized eyes are actually luminous red and green. Even the weird creature called the "sailing kraken" by an early naturalist can be explained. This monster had eight sucker-bearing tentacles and part of its body was concealed in a shell, which seemed to be a boat carrying it. In reality it is probably Argonanta argo, or the paper nautilus, which hatches its eggs in its shell ..
Other legends about the kraken haven't been explained. One claimed that it "perfumed the sea" to attract fish, another that it swallowed enough food at one gulp to last it for a year before it ate again. It was even said that it was a beneficent monster because it drove codfish to the surface w here fishermen could catch them. Probably these legends can be attributed to fear or ignorance, but perhaps there is still another kraken deep down in some oceanic trench that no scientist knows about. The latest sighting of a "kraken" came in 1875 when the crew of the barque Pauline sighted one locked in deadly combat with a sperm whale off Zanzibar.
