The Kraken | 19min Documentary

Out of all the mythical creatures ever whispered about, dragons, mermaids, sea serpents, one refuses to sink into legend, the kraken. Maybe because it feels possible. We've already found squids the size of cars drifting through the deep. If those exist, who's to say something larger isn't still down there? Or maybe because the ocean itself is still our planet's last great mystery. We've mapped Mars more completely than the floor of our own seas. 90% of it remains unexplored. A perfect hiding place for a myth that never died. For centuries, the kraken has lived where fear and fact collide. And in that narrow space, we dive tonight to trace how a legend born from sailors' terror became one of the most haunting mysteries of the modern world. Every legend begins somewhere. For the kraken, that somewhere wasn't a port, a map, or a rumor in a sailor's tavern. It was a place where the sea ruled everything, the far north. Long before the creature had a name, the north spoke of it in whispers. To them, the ocean wasn't an empty horizon. It was real, restless, and unpredictable. Fog would roll in without wind. The water would tremble. And sometimes, the surface itself would rise. Those who returned swore it wasn't a wave. It was something alive. The first time this being was written down was in the 13th century Icelandic saga, Þurvar Odur, a Viking tale of a hero who sailed beyond Iceland and saw two enormous sea creatures, the Lingbakr and the Hafgúfa. One looked like an island covered in heather. The other, a monstrous shape that opened like jaws beneath the sea. As the ship drew near, the ocean itself seemed to breathe, and then close in. Who knew that this very image of the sea becoming a mouth would echo through centuries, evolving into what sailors later called the Kraken. Only decades later, in 1250 AD, the creature appeared again in the King's Mirror, a Norwegian royal manuscript meant to teach a prince about nature and navigation. It spoke of a beast so large that its back may be mistaken for land. He called it Hafgúfa and claimed that only two existed in all the world, and that's because the ocean could not feed more. When hungry, it opened its mouth and created a whirlpool so strong that fish and ships were swallowed whole. These weren't stories told by poets. They were written by scholars, copied by monks, and studied by navigators, which means that for medieval sailors, the Kraken wasn't a myth at all. It was as real as the stars that guided them home. As Europe sailed into the Age of Discovery, the Kraken followed. It drifted from legend to ink and parchment, sketched in the corners of maps that charted new worlds. In 1539, Swedish scholar and priest Olaus Magnus published a grand map of the north, the Karta Marina. It was meant to be a guide for sailors, a masterpiece of geography. But what people remember most isn't the coastlines or ports, it's what swims beneath them. In the icy waters off Norway, Magnus drew a creature with twisting arms wrapped around a ship, the Kraken, immortalized in cartography. It was no longer a whisper between sailors. It had become part of geography itself. To 16th century mariners, the northern seas were still wild and largely unknown. Volcanoes rumbled beneath the ocean floor. Geysers erupted without warning. Whales surfaced and vanished in fog so thick it distorted their size. To those who watched from wooden decks, it seemed as if the sea itself could think, choosing when to calm and when to kill. And so the Kraken became more than a monster. It became an explanation, a reason for the ship that never came home. By the 18th century, the legend had reached the desks of scientists. Norwegian Bishop Erik Pontappadan, fascinated by tales from fishermen, documented them in his natural history of Norway in 1752. He described the Kraken as a living animal, round, flat, and full of arms, the largest creature on earth, sometimes a mile wide. Pontappadan argued that the Kraken wasn't a myth at all, but a misunderstood creature, a species of enormous squid that science simply hadn't recognized yet. For the first time, the Kraken wasn't dismissed by science, it was classified by it. As Europe kept exploring, the reports multiplied. Ship logs, coastal sketches, and early zoological journals all began describing the same thing. Vast, tentacled bodies washing ashore, eyes the size of plates, arms thicker than oars. Each account blurred the line between discovery and dread, pushing the Kraken further from legend and closer to reality. Now, let's pause here for a moment. Imagine just for a second that the Kraken wasn't a story, because if it truly existed, what terrified people most wasn't its size, it was its appetite. The idea that something enormous could rise from the deep, wrap around a ship, and drag it silently into darkness. Even today, the question still stirs debate. Most experts and many researchers online argue that squids, or what sailors once called Krakens, are shy and elusive creatures that avoid human contact. It's unlikely that one would ever attack a ship. So how did those stories begin? One person even wrote, if squids really attacked ships in the past, then why hasn't one attacked a ship in modern times? Even centuries ago, Pontapodon, in his 1752 account, tried to make sense of these stories. He suggested that when the creature rose to feed, fishermen mistook its back for an island and cast their nets upon it. When it sank again, the suction dragged their boats under, a chillingly rational explanation for centuries of maritime disappearances. Maybe the answer never really lay in the creature, but in human psychology. For sailors lost to fog and storms, it was easier to believe that something had taken them than to accept that the sea was simply indifferent. The human mind hates uncertainty. When we face the unknown, we give it a face. And for those who lived and died by the ocean, that face was the Kraken. But was it truly that violent? We still can't say for sure, but attack or no attack? The problem was now simple. For centuries, people had described a huge, many-armed creature of the deep, but no one had ever put one on a table. That changed in the 19th century. In 1857, Danish zoologist Jaipita Steenstrup examined reports and bits of strange cephalopods that had washed ashore in the North Atlantic, especially around Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Fishermen had long been finding huge, pale arms with suckers, sometimes attached to nothing, sometimes badly decayed. Steenstrup did something different. He compared these fragments, looked at their sucker arrangement, measured the beaks, and realized they belonged to a single type of enormous squid, not a random monster. He gave it a scientific name, Architeuthis dux, meaning the ruling squid. That single act of naming changed everything. For the first time, the world was told that a giant, many-armed animal lives in the northern seas. It is not supernatural. It is real, and it's a cephalopod. In doing so, Jaipita Steenstrup confirmed what Bishop Pontapadan had only guessed a century earlier. The legendary kraken might not have been a myth at all, but a misidentified giant squid. Still, even with a name, one question remained. Where's the proof? Where's the whole animal? Then came Newfoundland, in the cold years of the late 1860s and 1870s. This remote stretch of the North Atlantic became the unlikeliest stage for revelation. Fishermen began pulling strange, enormous arms from their nets. Others saw vast, dying forms drifting near the surface or washed ashore after violent storms. And then, one man made sure the world could no longer look away. Reverend Moses Harvey, a clergyman with a fascination for sea life, bought one of the carcasses from local fishermen in 1874. He took it home, draped it over his bathtub, and photographed it. That image became iconic. The first clear proof that such a creature truly existed. It showed a real animal, around five to six meters long, with eyes like lanterns and tentacles lined with toothed suckers. No horns, no wings, no demon's face. Just a colossal version of something we already knew. And suddenly, the kraken didn't seem so impossible anymore. But Harvey wasn't alone. At Yale, Professor A.E. Verrill also began gathering reports from Newfoundland, Labrador, and Iceland. Through the late 1882, he documented the details. Mantle lengths, arm counts, sucker sizes. He even noted that many suckers were edged with small, sharp teeth, perfect for gripping prey. Verrill noticed something else, too. Most of the specimens found were either injured, dying, or already dead. Creatures dragged up by nets or driven to the surface by storms. And that, in a strange way, fit the legend perfectly. Sailors had only ever glimpsed the kraken when the sea itself turned violent. Another key line of evidence from the 19th century came from an unexpected place, sperm whales. Whalers had long noticed their prey sometimes had circular scars on the head, as if something with suckers had fought back. When they cut open the whale's stomachs, they found huge squid beaks. That told zoologists two things. First, giant squids were large enough to be worthwhile prey for whales. Second, these battles were happening deep below the surface where humans could not watch. If whales were carrying the scars of undersea fights, sailors claiming to see a great armed beast were not inventing the idea out of thin air. So, by the late 19th century, three things were clear. One, there really are giant squids in northern waters. Two, they get large enough to match parts of the kraken story. Three, they are rare, which explains why they were only ever seen briefly by sailors. By the early 20th century, the kraken was no longer a myth. Scientists had already proven that giant squids were real, yet something about the legend still didn't add up. The story spoke of creatures big enough to drag ships under, their arms rising from the deep like towers. The giant squid was massive, yes, but not that massive. Something didn't fit, and the ocean, as always, refused to give a clear answer. In 1925, that changed, or at least it seemed to. A British zoologist named Guy Coburn Robson was studying the stomachs of sperm whales caught near South Georgia Island in the Antarctic Ocean. Sperm whales often fed on giant squid, so their stomachs were biological graveyards filled with beaks and tentacles. But what Robson discovered inside one whale was nothing like the others. Two enormous beaks, thicker, heavier, and wider than any squid species known at the time. These weren't from Architeuthis ducks. They belonged to something much larger. Robson named it Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid. Based on the size of those beaks alone, he estimated it could reach up to 10 meters in length and weigh nearly 500 kilograms. That made it the heaviest squid ever recorded. And unlike its northern cousins, this one lived deep in the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean, a place so dark and remote that even the strongest light couldn't reach it. Then came silence. Decades passed without a single confirmed sighting. Scientists found fragments, broken arms, smaller beaks, scars on whale heads that hinted at epic battles far below the surface, but no living specimens. It was like the ocean had swallowed its secret again. Some scientists even began to wonder if Robson's colossal squid was a fluke. Meanwhile, sailors didn't doubt it for a moment. They called it proof that the Kraken still existed. And in 1981, their faith was rewarded again. A Soviet fishing trawler named Eureka, working near the coast of Antarctica, felt its net strain against something heavy, far heavier than fish. When they hauled it in, the crew froze. A pale pink creature thrashed on the deck, its tentacles lined with rotating hooks. It was huge, dense, and unmistakable. The colossal squid was real. Weighing nearly 275 kilograms, it was the first full specimen ever recovered. When Soviet scientists studied it later, they found something terrifyingly beautiful. It was a predator built for ambush, not pursuit. Short, muscular arms, flesh filled with ammonia to keep it afloat in icy water. Hooks that spun like drill heads. It was, in every sense, a monster made for the dark. But once again, the ocean closed its mouth. For the next 20 years, there were no sightings. The colossal squid became a myth with a Latin name, proven but unseen. By the early 2000s, the legend had survived everything science could throw at it. The giant squid had already been filmed, measured, and accepted as fact. The colossal squid, too, had been caught once and dissected, but never seen alive. Scientists had the evidence. They had the bones, the beaks, the scars on whales, but they had never seen the creature breathe, move, or exist freely in its own world. It was like studying a ghost from its fingerprints. That changed in 2003. Japanese marine biologists Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori set out to do what no one had done before, capture a living image of a giant squid in its natural environment. Off the coast of the Ogasawara Islands, they lowered a deep-sea camera rig almost 900 meters below the surface. For hours, the footage showed nothing but blackness. Then, without warning, the dark moved. A massive squid rushed the bait, wrapped its arms around it, and vanished back into the deep. It was alive, real, and fast. When the footage was released, the world watched in awe. This was the first time anyone had ever seen a giant squid alive in the wild. The creature that haunted myths for centuries now stared back from a television screen. Scientists realized that if this was possible, then finding the colossal squid, the one even deeper and larger, was no longer a fantasy. It was only a matter of time. Four years later, time ran out. In February 2007, the New Zealand fishing vessel Sanaspiring was working in the Ross Sea when its lines went taut. The crew assumed it was a large fish until the water broke. A pale, thrashing form exploded from the surface, 10 meters long and half a ton in weight. The crew froze in disbelief. It was a colossal squid, alive. The crew fought to secure it as it lashed the deck with its tentacles. They knew they were handling something historic. Hours later, exhausted and trembling from the cold, they finally managed to freeze the animal intact. When it reached New Zealand's Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, scientists carefully thawed it under controlled conditions. What they found inside stunned them. Its eyes were the largest of any creature ever recorded, 27 centimeters across, roughly the size of a soccer ball. Inside, faint light organs glowed softly, allowing it to see in the total blackness of the Antarctic deep. Its body was dense with ammonia-rich fluids that acted like antifreeze, letting it float effortlessly through subzero water. Its tentacles bore rotating hooks, each able to spin 360 degrees, and its beak could slice through bone. It was both elegant and terrifying. The 2007 discovery changed everything. For the first time, the kraken was biology. But now the world wanted to see one alive and unafraid in the wild. For more than a decade, expeditions tried to find it again. Remote submarines and deep-sea probes ventured farther and deeper into the Antarctic. Cameras captured strange flashes, shifting shadows, and unrecognizable shapes, but never the full creature. It was as if the ocean itself was protecting it. Every dive ended in silence. Then came a new era of exploration, one where machines did what humans could not. Between 2018 and 2025, the Schmidt Ocean Institute launched its deep-diving submersible Sebastian, a robot capable of descending beyond 2,000 meters into the black. It moved quietly, without the roaring engines or bright lights that scared away deep-sea life. In March 2025, Sebastian's cameras caught something extraordinary. While exploring the volcanic ridges near the South Sandwich Islands, a faint, translucent figure drifted into view. Its arms moved slowly, gracefully, pulsing with faint red light. Scientists watching the live feed held their breath. It was a juvenile, colossal squid, alive, uninjured, and moving through its natural world. The footage was surreal. Its body was mostly transparent, shimmering like glass. Its chromatophores, pigment cells under its skin, flashed patterns like pixels, creating colors that rippled across its surface. For the first time in history, a colossal squid had been filmed alive in its own habitat. The sight left scientists speechless. The recording revealed things no one had known. The squid was only 30 centimeters long, likely a juvenile, but already displayed the same hooks and structure as adults. It was found at a depth of 600 meters, far shallower than the zones adults inhabit. This suggested the colossal squid may have a vertical life cycle, starting higher in the ocean before descending into the abyss as it matures. But it also raised a haunting question. If this was just one juvenile near the surface, how many unseen giants were still below, hidden in the dark trenches beneath Antarctica? Today, researchers use artificial intelligence to analyze thousands of hours of underwater footage from submersibles around the world. Algorithms trained to detect subtle movements, shapes, and light patterns are helping find creatures humans might miss. The next kraken might not be discovered by a diver or a camera operator, but by a line of code-scanning pixels in the dark. What began as sailor superstition has now become one of science's greatest ongoing mysteries. The colossal squid isn't just real, it's proof that the ocean still holds secrets deeper than our understanding. And if a creature like this can live unseen for centuries in the blackest parts of our world, who's to say what else might be waiting below, watching and waiting for its turn to be discovered? And that's a wrap on the mystery of the kraken, a legend that refused to sink. From Viking sagas to modern science, it's a story that keeps reminding us how little we truly know about the deep. If you enjoyed this journey, make sure to subscribe and dive into our other episodes, including our explorations of the North Sea and the Drake Passage, where the ocean still guards secrets no one has yet seen.