Probably no legendary sea monster was as horrifying as the Kraken . According to stories this huge , many soldiers , creatures that can reach as high on the main mast of a yacht. A kraken would attack the ship with their arms wrapped around the body and sank . The crew would drown or be eaten by the monster . What is amazing about the kraken stories is that , all the sea monster tales we have, we have the best evidence that this creature is based on something real .
Fairy tales are great, many military , or horned head sea creatures that existed since ancient times . Greek legend of Scylla , a monster with six heads that Odysseus must sail past during his journey, is an example of this tradition . In 1555 Olaus Magnus wrote of a sea creature with " sharp and long Horns throughout the balance, like tree roots by the Roots: They are ten or twelve cubits long , very black , and with a great eye
Although kraken term was first found in print in Systema Naturae ( Carolus Linnaeus - 1735 ) , stories about this monster seems to date back to the twelfth century Norway . These stories often refer to this being so large that it is wrong for an island or series of islands . Even as late as 1752 , when the Bishop of Bergen , Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan , wrote his Natural History of Norway he described the kraken as "
incontestably the world's largest sea monster " with a half-mile wide . Bishop also noted that animals have a bulge types of starfish : " It seems this is being hand -in-hand , and , he says, if they want to punch the largest man -of-war , they would pull it down. " Although this Pontoppidan say that the kraken danger represented to ships coming from the disturbance it made as it came to the surface or whirlpool as created as it drops below . Because the fish are attracted to the kraken , he also stated , Norwegian fishermen often fish on the creature , despicable risk to their ship and their lives.
Later Kraken stories bring into being a smaller, but still monstrous, size. Although early descriptions of animals give more crab like appearance, in the 18th century it began to appear in the painting as a giant, heavily armed cephalopods (such as octopus or squid). In 1802 the French scientist Pierre Denys de Montfort stated in his book on the natural history of mollusks that the creature encountered by Norwegian browser is the kracken squid. Montfort also suggests that there is also a larger type of this squid, the colossal squid have been known to attack ships at sea.
