Erik Pontoppidan was Bishop of Bergen and no fabulist. He collected accounts from men who fished the Norwegian coast, compared them against one another, discarded what he judged impossible — and entered the kraken into a treatise on the natural history of Norway, alongside the elk and the cod.
The description is careful, which is what makes it unsettling. The animal rises slowly. Its back breaks the surface over a wide area and is mistaken for an island; crews have landed on it and lit fires. When it sinks, the water it drags down takes boats with it.
What was actually seen
Sperm whales surface off the Azores carrying circular scars the width of a dinner plate, left by the sucker rings of something very large. Sailors saw those scars for centuries before anyone saw the animal that makes them, and reasoned backwards to a monster. They were not wrong about the animal — only about its size.
The giant squid was not photographed alive until 2004, by Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, nine hundred metres down off the Ogasawara Islands. Until that photograph, the kraken belonged entirely to this volume.