Sea Monsters: What Did Sailors Actually See?

Simon Mattacks (0:02)

Sea Monsters No matter where you look in the world, the historical record contains some mention of one. Since time immemorial, the ocean waves have inspired enduring mysteries and legends about what lives down there in the dark. But what are the origins of the half-elephant, half-fish creature in the waters of Thailand? And when did the Kraken emerge as perhaps the most recognizable beast of the sea? Tonight, we'll explore some of the stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that humans have told about sea monsters. We'll learn about the history behind some of these creatures, and how these stories have shifted and changed over time. So just relax and let your mind drift. As we explore the Sleepy History of Sea Monsters.

On medieval maps, dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures can be found lurking in the corners and margins. Hear be dragons is a phrase you may have heard, used to denote an area of the world that had not yet been explored, but where dangers were thought to lurk. While we may now view this practice as a little silly, at the time very few cultures knew enough about the world to create a complete map. Certainly, they couldn't be sure that dragons didn't exist somewhere, and it wasn't just dragons either. The tabular Poitingeriana, or Poitinger map, warns of dog-headed men in certain regions. The Borgia map from 1430 says of Asia, Here are serpents so large that they could eat an ox whole. The Carta Marina warns of an elephant-like creature with enormous teeth called Ammorsus that lives in Norway. The last one turned out to be real. But it's not a mythical monster, it's a walrus. As cultures exchanged information, the monstrous became mundane. Creatures that were the subject of stories and myths were either debunked entirely, or, in the case of the Ammorsus, shown merely to be animals that people were not familiar with. For the most part, it seemed like monsters weren't real after all, and slowly much of the world moved on from hunting for dragons and other mythical beasts, at least on land. But there was one region where people never stopped believing that monsters might be lurking, the ocean. Perhaps this was on account of the sheer size and volume of water our oceans contain. Even today, we have not explored the majority of the Earth's oceans, certainly not the deepest depths like the Mariana Trench, where no light can penetrate. Even more interesting is that the ocean does actually contain animals that we might consider to be real-life monsters. Take one look at a giant squid or a blue whale. Their sheer size is incredible.

Imagine if you lived in a different era, one where monsters were believed to be real, or folk tales and myths were a daily part of your life. A person with that kind of upbringing might have seen the curved fin of a shark cutting through the water before disappearing beneath the waves. What would they have thought of that encounter? Would they have believed they'd narrowly avoided a monster? Or perhaps even a god?

Not all sea monsters were seen as true monsters by the people who believed in them. Some of them were seen as gods or as other divine beings. Some of the oldest written documents we have include explicit descriptions of sea monsters, and many of these documents are religious in nature. We can look at, for example, the Baal Cycle. The Baal Cycle is an ancient myth written on six incomplete tablets that were found in the ruins of Ugarit, an ancient coastal city in what is now northern Syria. The Baal Cycle is more than 3,000 years old, but there's evidence that Ugarit was inhabited as far back as 8,000 BCE, so we don't really know how old the story truly is. It may have spent thousands of years as a major part of the oral tradition of that region before being written down. In the Baal Cycle, a god named Baal struggles against Moth, the god of the underworld. In the first two tablets, however, Baal is mainly focused on fighting Yam, the god of the sea. Yam sends his servants to fight Baal, and one of these servants is Tanin, a sea monster with a long serpentine body, sometimes depicted as having two tails. Baal defeats Tanin with the help of his sister Annat. So, as we can see here, in this myth, Tanin is not just a monster, he's also a divine being who serves a god. Where the story gets even more interesting is that the word Tanin sticks around as part of the languages of the region. The word Tanin is found in Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac. In all those languages, it means roughly the same thing, sea monster. In fact, the word Tanin appears in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh 14 times, although it's not in reference to a specific monster, but rather a category of monsters.