Until the mid-19th century, the giant squid was science fiction. They called it the Kraken. Specimens washed ashore—tentacled corpses rotting on remote beaches in Newfoundland or Norway—but no one had ever seen one alive. They were flukes, oddities, monsters caught between worlds—whispers of the Kraken.
Illustration of a giant squid (Addison Emery Verrill / public domain)
In the midnight world of the deep, where sunlight cannot follow and pressure crushes steel, there lives a creature so strange, so elusive and so immense that it has earned a place in both science and legend.
It is the giant squid—the living ghost behind the Kraken myth.
Its very name, Architeuthis dux, sounds like a sea chant in Latin: ruler of the deep. For centuries, it was a nightmare sketched in fear and half-truths by sailors who glimpsed only its wreckage.
There is a notable historical account from the late 19th century involving a ship named the Pearl allegedly being attacked and sunk by it.
The Pearl incident
In June 1874, the 150-ton schooner Pearl was reportedly attacked by a massive sea creature while sailing near the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of Sri Lanka. According to the account, a giant squid emerged from the depths and wrapped its enormous tentacles around the ship's masts. The creature was described as having a body length comparable to the ship. Despite the crew's efforts to fight back, the squid allegedly dragged the vessel under the sea. A passing steamer, the Strathowen, witnessed the event and rescued the surviving crew members. The story was widely reported in newspapers at the time.
The ghost in the water
The giant squid is not merely large—it is enormous. Adult specimens can reach lengths of over 40ft (12m), with arms and tentacles that writhe like living cables, each lined with suction cups ringed with tiny, serrated teeth. Its eyes, each the size of a dinner plate, are the largest of any known creature—evolved to see in the blackest place on Earth.
The giant squid moves with a strange and fluid elegance, jet-propelling itself by shooting water through its siphon, gliding in bursts through the gloom like a creature that does not belong in this world. And perhaps it doesn’t. It belongs to another—a place we still don’t fully understand.
From specimen to spector
It was not until 2004 that a living giant squid was photographed in the wild, off the coast of Japan, and not until 2012 that one was filmed alive in its natural habitat—a fleeting, ghostly figure rising from the blackness, its arms trailing behind like streamers. To see it alive is to realise just how much of the ocean—and of our planet—we do not know.
Hunter, hunted and hiding
The giant squid is a predator. It hunts fish and smaller squid, using its two long feeding tentacles to snatch prey and pull them towards its sharp, parrot-like beak. But even this titan has its own nightmare: the sperm whale.
These two behemoths battle in the depths, their epic struggles evidenced by the telltale sucker scars found on whale skin. We know they fight, but we have never seen them. It happens in the abyss, far beyond our lights.
In many ways, the giant squid survives not because it dominates—but because it vanishes. It has mastered the art of absence. Elusive, silent, and deep-dwelling, it reminds us that the ocean is not ours. It is a kingdom we visit only at the edges.
The monster that wasn’t
If the Kraken ever truly existed, it almost certainly took this form. A deep-sea creature so large and alien that early mariners could not help but turn it into myth. A creature that appeared suddenly, unpredictably, and disappeared just as fast.
What they saw—a mass of writhing arms, enormous eyes, perhaps a flash of ink and a breach of the surface—was real. But what they imagined—the wrath of gods, the tug of Leviathan—was the human mind grappling with the unknown.
And that may be the giant squid’s greatest power: to remind us that wonder, fear, and awe are still possible in the age of satellites and sonar.
Final descent
We have mapped Mars in more detail than we have the floor of our own oceans. In those sunless trenches, the giant squid still glides through water older than our species, living its hidden life as it always has. It does not roar or rage or destroy. It simply exists.
And that—in this world of noise and light—is perhaps the most powerful thing of all.
