Here Be Monsters
Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth.
This week the Kraken woke. A mighty 20-stone halibut arose from the waters off Rockall. Taller than an adult male, older than Bridget Jones, the beast was a good five stone heavier than any recent monstrous catch. One hundred and sixty people got a slice of this fishy on a pretty large dishy, the boat came in beached on top of it, and one can only speculate on the size of the chips.
Humankind’s passion for monsters of the deep is such that creation itself has been assumed to issue from their cavernous bellies. In the Babylonian myth Enuma Elish, Tiamat is slain by Marduk in a great cosmic battle and the world shaped out of her dismembered corpse. Similarly, in the Bible, God slays Leviathan in order that out of chaos He can create the world. The resurgence of faith can also be symbolised springing from a sea serpent, whether it is Jonah’s regurgitation back into the world or St Patrick’s crozier-wielding re-emergence from the serpent of Lough Derg.
Literature needed to draw no such allegorical interpretations, but could, like Stephano, play up piscine spectacle to entice the sensation-hungry crowd. Ancient seas bobbed with a multitude of maiden monsters who tended to look all right from the waist up, but conceal hidden depths. The sailor’s punishment for abandoning women on land was to be plagued by demi-women on the seas, be it the seductive chants of the sirens or Scylla and her undercarriage of barking dogs.
Science may have made the modern world more explicable, but it did little for the mysteries of the deep, with the consequence that the adventures of the heroes of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Moby Dick and Jaws are as engrossing today as Odysseus’s monstrous encounters were to Homeric audiences.
Fact has been just as strange as fiction and all manner of fishy fare has washed up on Britain’s shores, from the flippered and bristled Glasgow Gourock, via the 55ft Stronsay Serpent, to the Canvey Island Monsters with their pulpy heads and bug-eyes. Most are what zoologists refer to as “globsters”, vast lumps of seaborne flesh that start life as the innards of a whale or shark and end it as some stagnant enigma.
The giant halibut is much to be preferred. Not only does it offer support to generations of fishermen’s claims to the effect that it was that big, it can also be enjoyed with mushy peas.
• Story originally published by •
The Times, London / England - April 20 2001
