Mystery of the Kraken - Mythical Beasts - Documentary

The Kraken. One of the most feared mythical monsters of the deep. Way before Jaws, the Kraken was the sea creature which gave people nightmares. For centuries, sailors lived in terror of it. I would not want to meet one of these guys underwater. Frightening. It was the biggest thing in the ocean. The size of an island. Its huge tentacles could rip boats to pieces in moments. You could be out on the ocean one moment, and the next, sucked right down into the depths. It would devour an entire ship's crew. You would not survive an encounter with the Kraken. But is this just a legend? Or could some kind of monster really be lurking beneath the surface? Seafarers had a reason to be scared of these waters. Now, investigators use the latest science and archaeology to discover the reality behind the myth. Exploring the hidden depths, and uncovering fresh evidence. This is new to science, this is new to mankind. We'll reveal the truth about this nightmare monster of the deep. Behold, the Kraken. Norway. Land of high, soaring mountains. And deep, dark seas. These waters gave birth not just to the Kraken myth, but many other legendary marine monsters. This 16th century map reveals how many strange sightings happened in these Nordic seas. Ancient sea beasts here came in many forms. One was the Sea Serpent. 61 meters long, it could tower over ships with its scaly body. The mythical Pristers would spit out huge torrents of water to sink vessels. And the legendary Xipheus could cut open boats with its sword-like fin. But the most terrifying of them all was the Kraken. It was armed with fierce teeth and tentacles, and was colossal in size. In the ocean, you can be infinitely big, because the ocean is actually supporting your weight. So animals coming from the dark, deep ocean had mass, and therefore they had power. How could you not fear something like that? That's the Kraken. Biologist Charles Paxton is on the hunt to discover if there was a real animal behind the myth of the Kraken. This is more than just a monster story. For some people, the Kraken was very, very real. He believes the answer may lie in the record of a sighting, hidden deep in the archives of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In the middle of the 18th century, we start getting the first eyewitness accounts of giant Kraken-like animals being described in the scientific texts of the day. So here we have a naturalist. He speaks of animals with arms 54 foot in length. In the report, the crew of a Danish schooner has a terrifying encounter while stopping for repairs. Three men are busy scraping barnacles off the side of their ship, when suddenly two of them disappear. They're under attack from a sea monster. Tentacles as thick as tree trunks shoot from the water and reach for the ship. Terrified that this beast will drag them to the bottom of the ocean, the crew takes up arms. They attack the monster with their cutlasses and shear off one of its tentacles. Wounded, it disappears back into the deep where it came from. The fear of the Kraken became so big that people wanted answers. What was it and where did it come from? People were starting to consider the world of living things in a completely different way. Naturalists were developing new techniques and new philosophies. This was the age of science. Charles searches for evidence of what effect this revolution would have on the Kraken. Paul von Linnaeus developed a new system of biological classification. This system defined a new standard of how animals should be identified. Animals were classified by their distinctive characteristics. Birds have feathers and wings, reptiles might have scales and crawl. Each animal was given two names, a genus name and a species name. Linnaeus' system provided a framework by which monsters could be classified and named as animals. Reports of monsters are still coming in, but now they're being classified and dissected under zoology. In 1857, a naturalist, Jepetus Steenstrup, made a bold move. He classified the Kraken. He said it was the giant squid, which he gave the binomial name Architeuthis dux. The Kraken had been turned into an animal. Could the giant squid really be the man-eating culprit? It's a strange creature that's rarely seen. Would its elusive nature explain why the Kraken mystery existed for so long? Fortunately, Charles has gained exclusive access to a massive specimen that washed up on the Norwegian coast 60 years ago. Could this be the legendary monster behind the terrifying accounts? Behold, the Kraken. So this is a specimen of Architeuthis, the giant squid. Named by Steenstrup in 1857, he thought it could be the Kraken. It's rare to find such a well-preserved specimen. Sharp coastal rocks and scavenging animals mean few remain intact. Can you see the eyes? I'm fulfilling one of my dreams here, to actually see a large specimen of giant squid, even though it's preserved. I mean, a specimen like this is absolutely massive. To think that an animal like this is actually living in the sea, very rarely seen at the surface. We don't know how long it lives for, we don't know how big it gets. It has eight arms, two tentacles. This would be a prime suspect for the Kraken. The giant squid has enormous arms, exactly as described in some Kraken sightings. But are they strong enough to pull a boat down into the depths so it can devour its crew? Comparative anatomist Dr. Joy Reidenberg investigates. Let's take a closer look at the body shape of a squid. What I have here are two smaller squid, but they are essentially the same body shape. Trailing behind it here are the arms. These are the arms over here. And these two very, very long ones, these are the tentacles. The tentacles come rocketing out from this animal, grab its prey, and pull it back, and pulls it into the mouth. The squid has a fearsome mouth. It has a beak in it that looks kind of like a parrot beak. This is something really special. These are actually taken from the suckers of a giant squid. And these little rings actually have teeth on them. The teeth are embedded inside hundreds of suckers at the tips of the giant squid's two feeding tentacles. So if you look carefully at them, these are weapons. I'm going to keep rolling this back and forth so you can get a good look at these little teeth. It kind of reminds me of the tool that you use when you're trying to make a hole in a door to put a doorknob. That's what these are, and they can grind back and forth with these little teeth. This is a really brutal attack weapon. The enormous size of the giant squid is equally terrifying. It has a really big body. Just this part of the body alone is about as big as I am, and I'm around five feet tall. But if you add to it the arms, which are all of these, plus the tentacles, the really long parts over here, now you're talking about an animal that's around 20 feet long. Enormous. It used to be thought that they were very slow animals, particularly because they were so massive. But we now know from underwater film footage that these animals can move very, very quickly. I would not want to meet one of these guys underwater. Frightening. Giant squid are clearly ferocious hunters, but could they ever take on a ship? And when? The images you often hear sailors talk about of the kraken that's wrapped its arms around the mast of a squaring wooden ship, that just couldn't happen with a giant squid. That would require really, really big arms. If you look at the arms of a squid, a giant squid, they're big, but they're not that big. The giant squid is a monster. I think it explains some of the stories, but not all of them. So if the kraken can't be explained by a giant squid, what else could have inspired tales of this huge monster? We really don't know the complete biological diversity of the sea. There are creatures out there still that inhabit the darkest, deepest parts of the ocean. And every once in a while, one will show up, and it just freaks people out. Every fisherman would have had a different take on what this thing could be. Some might say it was like a crab with claws, some might say more like an octopus. Its form kept changing depending on who you asked. This mythical sea monster struck fear into the hearts of sailors for centuries. The giant squid is no longer the prime suspect. So what inspired these tales? To find out, Charles tracks the myth back to its ancient roots in Scandinavia. It's in these waters the legend became famous. And I want to explore the origins and truth behind the myth. What was so special about these seas that they were considered the kraken's lair? Charles believes the first description of the beast comes from the ancient people who made this area their home. The Norse. This is the Arrowod Saga, a Norse tale of revenge from the 13th century. And it contains our earliest Scandinavian reference to the monster that will become the kraken. The story tells how a Viking hero called Arrowod has magical arrows that make him invincible. He sails the northern seas looking for glory. One day, he passes between two rocky islands. Suddenly, he hears a deep rumbling roar. These are no ordinary islands. They're the jaws of the kraken. An ancient sorcerer has sent the biggest beast of the sea to kill him. And even his magical arrows are powerless against it. But Odd narrowly escapes. This account suggests the kraken is not a giant squid, but a very different phenomenon. So what could really be lurking underneath the water to explain such a tale? Marine archaeologist Professor Eivind Edegaard is going to use a small, hull-mounted sonar system to find out. The seabed is usually inaccessible for us humans. So, as a result, 99% of the seabed is still unexplored. We know less about it than, for instance, Mars or the Moon. We scan the seabed using advanced technology. The sonar system will show a depth map of the kraken's lair. And could finally provide some answers. The saga said these waters were dangerous. I want to find out what those dangers actually were. The sonar system sends a sonic pulse into the depths that bounces back. This is then read by the scanner. While they wait for results, Charles finds specific reports of the kraken. Two kind of local accounts of the kraken. One, we've got a young and foolish kraken stranded in the parish of, forgive my pronunciation, Aalsterhoug in Nordland. So how far away is that? Four or five hours. It's on the outer coastline, so it's an island. So it's not like in the fjord here. It's quite different. But it's the second kraken encounter that's the most terrifying. Two fishermen of Fredrikstad, Agerhaus, they encountered a classic kraken. The sea turned to slime and mud and the horns of the kraken nearly crushed part of their boat. So where's Fredrikstad? That's the southern part of Norway. It's in the Oslofjord. And then we've got a transient island that's off the coast of Sweden. Transient island, what's that? That's an island which appears and disappears. So the question is, what caused this phenomenon? The scanner begins to receive revealing information. What we can see here is the soundings. It's a live view. As you can see, it changes as the boat moves. So you can see the depths are, in the deeper areas, about 100 metres. And it goes all the way up to 8 metres in the same scan. The scan data reveals that there are dangerous shallows here. The seabed dramatically changes depth over a very short distance. The extreme soaring Norwegian peaks and troughs above the waterline continue far down into the waters, making them a death trap. Could this be behind the kraken myth? So a little fishing vessel with a sail could very rapidly move between deep water and shallow water. Yeah, absolutely. At low tide and at the bottom of a wave, you could probably hit the seabed if you were exactly where we are now. So it could be potentially fatal. So it's very calm right now. Yeah. I presume off the coast of Norway, it's not always this calm. It's not always like this, no. It can be pretty rough when the weather sets in. And dangerous? Absolutely. Very dangerous. But crossing these waters is made an even more perilous journey because of the hidden dangers lurking on the undulating seabed. With a bottom that goes up and down with submerged rocks, it's very uneven and it's not a pleasant place to be in a boat if it really blows up into a storm. This dangerous marine landscape was created during the Ice Age. One million years ago, a vast ice sheet covered Norway. Huge glaciers bulldozed through the landscape, pushing gigantic piles of rocks towards the coast and dropping them into the ocean. When the glaciers retreated, they left behind an unpredictable and dangerous seabed all along the coast. Around 50% of all wooden ships ever built ended up as shipwrecks. Wow. That's an incredibly high figure. I've seen this coastline can be a dangerous place. A place of shifting depths and of jagged rocks. Seafarers had a reason to be scared of these waters. Without modern technology, the Norse couldn't see the submerged rocks that were sinking their ships. So fear of an island-shaped kraken took hold. Some believe an ancient text published around 1250 could be interpreted as a warning about the deadly kraken. Written by a member of the King's Court, The King's Mirror is a handbook for the rulers of Norway. It covers politics and statesmanship, but also the dangers of the northern seas. The most fearsome peril is the kraken, a beast the size of an island. It claims only two exist in the world because the seas don't hold enough fish to feed anymore. When the kraken is hungry, it opens its gigantic mouth, trapping vast shoals of fish inside. And when the monster has had its fill, it disappears into the depths. But the King's Mirror only makes the kraken mystery deepen, because this description is nothing like the beast that pulled down the Danish ship. Why are accounts so varied? The mystery of what really inspired the legend remains unsolved. Does it mean that people are seeing different things? Or are they seeing the same things and they're just describing it in different ways, perhaps influenced by their prior beliefs? Muddying the waters yet further, Charles uncovers another account that introduces a bizarre new kraken characteristic, one that is even more difficult to explain. Erik Pontoperden was the Danish Bishop of Bergen in the middle of the 18th century, and he was also a naturalist. His Natural History of Norway was written in 1752, and in it he has one of the earliest comprehensive accounts of the animal we know today as a kraken. Pontoperden's sources were Norwegian fishermen who passed kraken tales from generation to generation. Pontoperden tells how some ancient mariners actively seek the kraken out to catch more fish. Fish are attracted to the beast because of the pungent waste it spews out. They find it so irresistible that huge shoals gather to feed. But when the beast has eaten enough, it dives down into the depths. As it is so big, it displaces huge amounts of water, creating suction so powerful it can pull whole vessels down to a watery grave. So fishermen, seeking an abundance of fish, may actually look for and pursue the kraken. The kraken isn't solely an animal of terror. It is actually something that can be potentially used as a tool in order to find fish. But what was really going on in these waters? What was this huge kraken belch that people were seeing? Charles investigates. Helping him is historian Sturla Leth Olsen. He's an expert in the techniques used by early Nordic mariners. They will use a boat similar in design to the ones used in kraken times. Sturla hopes taking Charles fishing like the early Nordic sailors did will enable them to search for this mythical monster through their eyes. The coast is slowly disappearing into the distance. That fills me with some anxiety. If I was actively trying to cast a net out, bring a net in, especially a heavy net laden with fish, this would be a very stressful and scary experience. Sturla, your grandparents, when they were fishing, how did they feel about the safety aspects of their job? They didn't have such a life vest as we have. In fact, a lot of them couldn't swim at all. If they fell overboard, they just jumped. So they just had a fatalistic position? It's better to have a fast drowning instead of being in a painful condition and freeze to death. There were many reports of tragedies at sea when boats like this capsized in turbulent water. Every family has members who have lost their lives at sea. So what part of life do you fish on the Kraken? Just at the risk of being eaten. To find the fish, sailors first had to find the Kraken. They did this by sailing into deep waters, but looking for an area of shallows within it. When the depths got very, very shallow, then you knew that the Kraken was arising from the depths. How would traditional fishermen have gauged depth, Stella? You let the line go down here with a weight on its end. Charles drops the line with a bell-shaped lump called a sounding weight. Okay, so I'll test the depth here. Okay, that's it. We've hit it. It's not very deep here. Nordic sailors would have identified this as Kraken territory. Large numbers of fish naturally congregate in shallow waters in the morning and evening to hunt for prey. But what could explain the monster's foul belch and the cloud of semi-digested food that was said to attract even more fish? So, Stella, the fishy belch of the Kraken, does that remind you of anything you see at sea today? Perhaps it reminds me of the plankton loon. Phytoplankton are microscopic plant-like organisms that flourish in the sunlight of the summer months. Tiny shrimp-like creatures feed on the plankton. Small fish then feed on them, and bigger fish on the small ones. Plankton bloom can form huge patches in the ocean and attract an incredible amount of sea life. Satellite images show just how impressive this phenomenon can be. But Nordic sailors may have interpreted it as evidence that the giant Kraken really was in these waters. The beast could easily kill them, but it was also the key to their livelihood. Ancient people had a fraught relationship with the sea. On the one hand, it provided livelihood, used the sea to trade, to go to war, to get more goods. You got food from the sea. On the other hand, you could die doing those very things. Even today, the fishing industry is one of the most dangerous industries in the world. In the days when you're in little boats like this one, it would be very, very dangerous indeed. So having experienced this, I can well understand why there were so many accidents and why there were so many tragedies, and why you needed a folklore to try and explain that. But if rocks and plankton were really to blame, why did sightings become far more detailed and even more conflicting? And if the Kraken was believed to live in Nordic waters, why did sightings increase when ships travelled far beyond its territory? The reports are not always consistent. The Kraken wouldn't always be described in the same way, but it would always represent the same threat. Charles finds that no one natural phenomenon can explain the many conflicting reports. And this case becomes even more intriguing as more recent Kraken accounts come to light. These new precise reports are not just coming from the Norwegian coast, but from all over the world. Here we have an account recorded by the Apostle of Greenland, Hans Eged, in 1734. They are no longer vague hearsays, but precise eyewitness testimony. 6th of July, 1734. A Norwegian explorer and his crew are sailing off the west coast of Greenland when suddenly a terrible creature rises from the sea. It shoots out of the ocean, 15 metres high, to the top of the ship's mast. Here it spits out torrents of water before plunging back into the watery depths. As the terrified sailors check to see if the coast is clear, they spot a giant shape still sticking out of the water. The interesting thing about the Kraken is that at a certain point, roughly around the 18th century, people that were sailing around started to make notes in their logs saying that I saw a Kraken on this specific day and it looked like this. As maritime technology improved, vast unexplored areas of ocean could be navigated for the first time. Hello. Nice to meet you. Welcome. So this is the ship I want to show you. OK, great. Craftsman Gier Madsen is restoring a large ship similar to the ones used by Nordic fishermen in the 19th century. So a vessel like this could range a lot further than previous vessels I've seen. How long could it spend at sea without having to go back to port? It could stay for weeks, maybe for months, if it was necessary. It's built very strong and you have a deck so it will not be filled by water. It's big waves. It has two masts with big sails. They could follow the wind for a long time so they could travel very long voyages. There's a lot of possibilities that a small boat doesn't have. What sailors on long voyages soon reported was that the Kraken wasn't a Nordic beast at all. It seemed to be a terrifying worldwide phenomenon. One captain tells of seeing a creature three times bigger than a whale off the coast of Ireland. It has scaly skin, just like an alligator. Another spots a 60 meter long fish on a journey to New York. It's covered in a shell and has several birds resting on its back. And one comes across a gigantic beast in the Indian Ocean. It has flaps resembling wings and its skin is spotted with something like eyes. But why would reports of the Kraken become so diverse and conflicting? The sea can play tricks with our perception. What we see isn't a direct reflection of reality. It's impacted by light, by distance, by balance. So on the sea all of these elements come together and can result in some pretty distorted perceptions. Neurologist Professor Alex Olsen believes that the longer period spent at sea could also have played a role. He is convinced they resulted in psychological symptoms that directly affected what the sailors were seeing. What we need to know is that what we perceive, what we are experiencing in this world is not a photographic image of what is coming through our eyes. It's interpreted by the brain and that interpretation is based on your prior knowledge, your memory. It's based on the culture that you're brought up in. What kind of stories have you heard before? So a cold, stressed, tired Norwegian fisherman brought up with folk tales about sea monsters could actually perceive and report sea monsters? Yes, when you're out at sea for weeks, even months. And there's a lot of stressors to your brain. You have hypothermia, you have vitamin deficiency, you have sleep deprivation. All of these might cause changes in our perception. So you can misperceive things? Yeah, basically. When the brain doesn't have all the information, it starts making up stuff. So if you think you see something in the water, maybe it's a whale, maybe it's a reef getting out of the water, but if you're brought up with the Kraken history or the sea monster history and you're anxious, you're very stressed out, you might actually start to see a sea monster. The evidence suggests that the Kraken can never be explained by physical phenomena alone because the human mind played a key role in its birth. It would not be unreasonable to think that in a kind of agitated mental state from just the rigors of sailing would cause sailors to see things and see them differently from what they're actually seeing. But if reports of the Kraken became increasingly contradictory, why didn't the belief in this beast simply die off? Did sailors believe this beast could change form? And where did such an idea first come from? Are there any other water monsters that can help us understand the changing nature of the Kraken? Charles works with Scottish folklore expert Tony Bonning. For decades, he's investigated the ancient origins of legendary shape-shifting monsters. Scotland has a long history of mythical water creatures. The most famous of them, of course, is the Loch Ness Monster. Grainy black and white photographs have made this creature world famous. The global phenomenon that is the Loch Ness Monster started in 1933, but there's evidence here to show that the stories go back more than a thousand years. Can tracing Nessie's origins lead to the mythical shape-shifting beasts that were thought to inhabit Scottish lochs? And what will they reveal about why people thought the Kraken could change form? The ancient people of Scotland believed that creatures called Kelpies lived in these parts. These beasts transform to become anything they want. When they take the shape of beautiful horses, they wear silver bridles and entice small children into the watery depths. As soon as the unsuspecting victims touch them, the Kelpie has them trapped. They drag their prey underwater, where they devour them. Then the Kelpie hides again in the darkness of the loch until it is time for their next victim. What could make people here believe such a bizarre shape-shifting tale? In the small village of Aberlemno, Tony tracks down one of the oldest depictions of the Kelpie myth, a standing stone more than a thousand years old. There are some 350 objects around the country with the Pictish designs on them and they vary from shards of rock to this phenomenal megalith. It's been here for over a thousand years and look at it, it's magnificent. This particular Pictish stone is known as the Churchyard Cross. Tony believes it holds clues to the lives of these ancient people. This is more than just a piece of rock, it's a book, it's a story for people who couldn't read nor write. It tells their history, the great battle of Dunechan on the back there, you've got religion, you've got their art, all the way through the Celtic designs that you've got around here. Just as the Bible promoted belief in fantastical creatures from angels to devils, stones like this presented dangerous, shape-shifting beasts like Kelpies as terrifying fact. This is exactly what I've been looking for. You've got, first of all, the serpent's tail, the fish's tail, winding around here, dorsal fin, and then what have you got? Horse's head, horse's hooves. This is more than just a design here, these were living creatures as far as the people of ancient times were concerned. But what inspired such carvings? Tony heads 96 kilometres west of Abilemno to a typical loch to find answers. It was said that every single river, lochen, loch, had its own particular Kelpie. The Kelpie was a shape-shifter. The Kelpie will always change to suit the situation and its prey. Thousands of years ago, homes like this one were built out over the loch for the leaders of the village. They were a focal point for the settlements and their positions above the water was of great symbolic importance. Water was definitely a great part of people's lives. It's not just for drinking. For them, it's a living spiritual being. Where does water come from? It comes from the sky, it comes from the heavens, literally the heavens. It's the gift of the gods to humankind. And you living on the water is you connected entirely to the deepest aspect of your spirituality. This building here tells me that the people of the time venerated the water. But the tales of the Kelpie tell me also that they had something to fear. Tony believes that the myth of the Kelpie began not to warn of a deadly creature beneath the surface, but to warn of the dangerous waters themselves. The Kelpie was a coded message. Scottish weather is infamously bad at times. I mean, horrendous. What kind of clothing are you wearing back two and a half thousand years ago? Wool, definitely wool. In fact, what I'm just sitting on, this woolen cloth, that would be certainly something worn at the time. All right, wow. People were wearing this, you were in a rocky boat. Bad conditions. Next thing, the boat's capsized, and this is in the water. And you're wearing it, dragged down by the very garments. Now try and pull that out of the water, and that is heavy. Tony believes the Kelpie was created as a warning to ensure fewer people lost their lives here. If you say to a child, don't go near the water, the first thing they'll do is go near the water. If you say to a child, you go near that water, there's something in there called the Kelpie, it will drag you down and eat you. You're not going to get the water. But if the Kelpie myth was created just to warn against drowning, what is the significance of its ability to shapeshift? Tony thinks it could cover far more eventualities. The Kelpie tales are very useful means of warning the people against many different dangers that are out there. Off the west coast of Scotland, vicious Kelpies resembling mermen attack sailors whose trade too far off course. On land, a Kelpie disguised as a woman ambushes men foolish enough to walk the highlands at night. And in the Outer Hebrides, the story of a Kelpie disguised as a handsome man is told to girls to keep them close to home. Mythical stories, especially of sea monsters, were used as a form of social control. One of the beauties of monster legends is a lot of times the details don't matter. It's the overall idea, the warning, the ethical challenge to the reader or the viewer. The Kelpie unifies all the dangers to people in one beast, one tremendously demonic, horrible, nasty beast. You don't ever want to meet one. The Kelpie myth served to warn of many different perils. Did the Kraken legend serve a similar purpose? As sailors travelled further, they encountered more dangers. From typhoons to whirlpools, and large man-eating sharks. Did the Kraken change shape to fit the culprit? Marine biologist, Grove Vandermarine, realizes how scary these waters were for our ancestors. This is one of the most magnificent maps of the Scandinavian countries ever made. This is the Katar Marina. What's really magnificent is all these sea monsters. But while the origins of many have come to light, the inspiration behind the Kraken remains elusive. The deadly sea serpent. May have been based on the rare oarfish, a strange creature that grows nearly nine meters long and with a striking red crest. The mythical pristas could shoot powerful torrents of water. Was this based on spouting sperm whales? And the legendary Xipheus, with his deadly sword-like fin, may have been inspired by the orca and its triangular dorsal fin up to two meters tall. But a new discovery could potentially throw fresh light on the origin of the Kraken myth. Let's see what we've got here. This is some exciting footage taken by some divers. In the murky, plankton-filled water, something unbelievable emerges. Three-foot wide, gelatinous spheres. Just on top of this kelp forest, the divers came upon some big jelly balls. We expect it to be some kind of squid egg, but I've never seen anything like it. As long as we don't know what it is, we keep calling them Kraken egg. Gro works with specialist divers to hunt down more of these mysterious spheres. We are hoping to see more Kraken eggs, and if they could grab a piece of it, a tissue sample, that would be wonderful. The team is in position. They enter the water at a spot known to be particularly rich in life. They descend, and the lair of the Kraken is revealed. This is a new observation. This is new to science, this is new to mankind. Gro suspects the jelly balls may be related to the squid family, but further investigation will be required before it can be officially identified. It is possible that the Kraken eggs were seen 500 years ago, and they would probably be connected as eggs to some of these wondrous sea monsters they believed in. The uncertainty, the unknowing of the sea is really what lends itself to creating these mythical beasts and creatures. A ship goes down, and you never know what happens. In the sea, there are no answers, there is no closure. Considering that 90% of the oceans are still unexplored, it makes sense that stories like the Kraken will endure with us for a very long time. In many ways, the myth of the Kraken reflects the human relationship to the sea. It is a place of mystery, danger, and ultimately, reward. Above all, the Kraken is about the unknown, and reflects our lack of knowledge of the sea. With so much of our planet's oceans still to explore, stories like the Kraken will endure for many years to come.