The Kraken Was Real: How the Giant Squid Left Legend for the Record Books
For centuries the kraken belonged to the same shelf as the mermaid and the sea serpent: a monster of arms and suckers that rose from the black water to drag a ship under, sworn to by frightened sailors and dismissed by educated men on land. The trouble for the sceptics was that the bodies kept arriving.
The reckoning came off Newfoundland in the 1870s, when a run of large squid stranded on the shore or were hauled in by fishermen. In late 1873, a clergyman and amateur naturalist in St John's, the Reverend Moses Harvey, bought a dead specimen and draped it over a rail to be photographed, producing what is regarded as the first photograph of a giant squid. The remains reached the American zoologist Addison Emery Verrill, who described the animal in scientific detail and gave the legend a Latin name: Architeuthis. The kraken had entered the catalogue of real creatures.
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