Eight Arms To Hold You*
Notes From The Downs
The South Downs is home to many habitats and one of these is the sweeping, iconic chalk-cliffed coastline. Last Thursday was World Ocean Day and to celebrate I was going to explore the stories and lore of the seahorse, two species of which live in the seas off the south coast. I was going to include lore associated with water horses, so you can magine my dismay when I realised I’ve already written a post on these creatures here. In fact it’s one of my top posts!
I love water horse stories but you’ve heard me tell them before and given the seahorse has very little folklore of its own, other than its undeniable charm, today, a little later than planned, I am instead exploring the world of the octopus and its giant watery cousin, the Kraken! So here goes with a Kraken read.
The common octopus, native to the seas of the UK, can reach a length of up to 1 metre and can be found in our seas all year round. They have a shy and secretive nature and are recognised in UK animal rights law as sentient beings . They are colour changing like their cuttlefish cousins with their favourite food being a hearty meal of crab. Octopus mothers take their role to the extreme tending to the every need of the eggs of her young to the point that when they hatch she is so exhausted she more often than not dies.
So how did these timid, intelligent, loyal and charming beings become the horror that is the Kraken? The answer, of course, lies in our seafaring history.
There have been sightings of these ocean dwelling monsters for hundreds of years and there are various origins and explanations for these sightings. Many things happen at sea that cannot be explained, even today you ask any sailor and they will be sure to have some mysterious tale to share with you of strange occurrences on the whale road. Hundreds of years ago though, the knowledge of species such a giant squids and enormous ribbon fish was not as mainstream as it is today.
Giant squids can reach lengths of up to 40ft+ and so with the average length of fishing boat being around half that, you can imagine the terror that may have ensued should one of these squid surface during the working day of the lonely fisherman. Their description in some text as appearing as ‘floating islands’ has led people to believe that these could indeed be octopus rather than squid.
The giant Pacific octopus can reach a length of four times the common octopus of the UK and whilst 4 metres is no where near as large as the giant squid it is possible to see how the squid and octopus have merged to create the lore of the sea beast that is the Kraken.
The roots of sea serpents and beasts can be linked back to Olaus Magnus who was a Swedish archbishop who created a map in his book ‘The History Of Goths & Swedes’, in which he describes a giant beast living off the coast of Norway.
Next was the Bishop of Bergen - Eric Pontopiddan who reported that he had heard of many sightings of sea serpents off the coast and in 1741 Hans Egede found the body of a beast that was four times the size of a ship, washed up on the coast of greenland.
These early sightings are often located in Scandinavia and are, in the main, recorded by the clergy, perhaps because it was the clergy concerned with record keeping in most cases and because these would have been the people deemed worthy of listening to when these sightings were the topic of conversation. They are frequently described as having a back a mile wide and tentacles long enough to encompass large ship.
In more recent years there have of course been scientific explanations offered for these curious occurrences and cryptozoologists even suggest that they may be a prehistoric relic of a time long past that has somehow survived.
The fierce mother found in the octopus also links to a myth hailing from the Caroline Islands. This myth tells of a shape shifting octopus goddess named Hit. Hit’s daughter has an affair with one of the gods, but the god’s wife follows him everywhere he goes. Hit facilitates her daughter’s affair by performing a wild dance to distract the wife of the unfaithful god. The dance is successful, the wife is overcome by the performance, and so Hit continues to perform this dance every time her daughter is visited by her lover.
The Kraken has appeared in many stories throughout the years and there is a wonderful poem by Tennyson dedicated entirely to ‘The Kraken’:
‘Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die’
More recently, in the 1920s, the Kraken morphed into the well known and well loved beast of Lovecraftian horror that is Cthulhu. This beast is a terrifying octopus like creature with a human body, arms and legs. He is said to be source of anxiety for all mankind and is described in Lovecraft’s short story, The Call of Cthulhu.
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Unsurprisingly, the Kraken also pops up in Pirate Lore and one of the most famous pirates, thanks to the franchise 'Pirates Of The Caribbean,' and many other stories, is Davy Jones. In the aforementioned franchise, Davy is depicted as an octopus headed, undead, pirate.
There are several versions of Davy’s tale and how he cam to exist in this form but the one that I tell is combined with the story of The Flying Dutchman.
The Flying Dutchman is essentially a ghost ship which is said to have various captains: Dahul who was an Arabian Pirate, Captain Bernard Fokke who captained the fastest ship in the Dutch Trading Company the VIC, Falknberg a Captain who became lost at sea or pirate Captain Van de Decken. If you see the ship whilst at sea, a member of the crew is likely to meet a watery death.
The Flying Dutchman, like Davy Jones, is prevalent in popular culture. It’s a legend that can be traced back to the 17th century and even appeared as an Opera in 1843 composed by Wagner.
The ship has been sighted on several occasions, usually in bad weather and on some occasions royalty have spotted it. One such occasion was when a young prince George, later to be George V, and his brother noted in a journal, that when at sea serving as midshipmen aboard a ship called the Bacchante they saw the red port lights of a spectral ship at 4am in the morning. At the same time 13 other ships claimed they too saw this spectacle, but then again who is going to disagree with royalty? Furthermore the curse of seeing The Flying Dutchman came to pass as there were two deaths on that ship that followed the sighting.
Some have argued that this was simply a propaganda story propagated when trade relations between the British and the Dutch were far from amicable and in fact later resulted in several wars.
The captain of The Flying Dutchman was said to have committed many many sins before he died examples of which range from, what may appear to us to be as benign as setting sail on an Easter Sunday, to the horrors of cannibalism and fratricide. So without further ado let me share with you the story of Davy Jones and The Flying Dutchman, which I have based on the reported character of Captain Van de Decken and Wagnar’s Opera.
So grab yourself a cuppa and find a quiet spot to listen to my version of ‘The Legend Of Davy Jones’. I’ll be back soon with stories for Sussex Day.