Kraken

This designation covers cold deep water and two clusters a century apart. The
older is Norwegian: sailors’ accounts compiled by the bishop of Bergen in
1752, describing an animal the size of an island that raised the sea as it
surfaced. The second is Newfoundland, where large squid came into the shallow
north-east bays in numbers through the 1870s, and where the accounts turn
specific — arms longer than the boat, a beak set where the arms meet, an eye
fishermen measured in inches rather than estimated.

On 26 October 1873 two fishermen and a boy working Conception Bay struck
something at the surface, took hold of it, and cut free an arm nineteen feet
long, which was carried ashore and kept. At that length it was consistent with
accounts set aside for a hundred and twenty years as sailors’ exaggeration.
The note the company filed that decade runs to one line: the older accounts
had not been too large.

An animal stranded at Thimble Tickle in Notre Dame Bay on 2 November 1878 and
measured about fifty-five feet from tail to arm tip. The species had been
named Architeuthis dux in 1857; the stranding gave it a size. Live footage
followed in 2004 off the Ogasawara Islands and in 2019 in the Gulf of Mexico.
The seal rests on that: the animal was landed, measured, named, and
catalogued. What was never recovered is anything at the scale the Norwegian
accounts gave. The 1873 arm went from brine into other hands,
and the trail ends there.