JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 In the History of Real Monsters the Kraken occupies an elevated spot–that’s what made me sit up a bit while browsing an issue of The Medical Repository of Original Essays and Intelligence Relative to Physic, Surgery, Chemistry and Natural History… for 1813. The “natural history” part comes well down the title page, but lurking their in the back of this slim volume, after articles on spotted fever, and the winter epidemic of 1812-1813, and the varia of medical and surgical correspondence, came this article on the Sepia Octopus.  This was a report sent in by the editor of the journal, Samuel Mitchill, on the sighting of the beast by a Captain Merry of the ship Niagra, sighting “A large lump” on the sea, and determining on closer inspection that it was a colossal polypus, 200’x30′.  There are many other sightings told, and then Mitchill gets down finally to identifying these creatures as the legendary Kraken (naming Pliny as an original source). 

I’d love to reproduce the article, but the pamphlet is fragile, and the pages were never separated at teh top.  I did however find an associated article from 1846 that addresses the idea of the Kraken  [The Eclectic Magazine: Foreign Literature, Volume 8, edited by John Holmes Agnew and Walter Hilliard Bidwell, May to August 1846]: