The solid part of the earth's surface has now been so thoroughly explored that not many mysteries remain unsolved. Everest and a few other Himalayan peaks have not yet been conquered, and legends are still told about the race of snow-men thought to inhabit them; the polar regions and the jungles of Africa and South America may yet produce things stranger than we know. But for the rest there is very little land so inaccessible that man has not mapped it, photographed it, and catalogued its flora and fauna. We know now that no horse with wings exists except in poetry, and that the Chimera and all other monsters of its kind are mythical. Paradise, the land where the sun and moon grow young again, is no longer to lie just east of India and Ethiopia be seriously considered as the home of unicorns and satyrs, basilisks and gryphons.
     Only the sea retains something of mystery. Much of it has indeed been studied and explored. Soundings have enabled us to guess at the shape of the world below, and divers and bathyspheres have succeeded in observing undersea life at considerable depths, returning with specimens of fish as strange as any that man's imagination could invent. But all this touches a small fraction of the vast waters that flow from continent to continent; the sea still dwarfs man and all his efforts.
     What lies hidden in these waters that cover so great a part of the earth's surface? Mankind has long been frightened and fascinated by this question. Some, especially those whose western horizon was the sea, used to think that the land of the dead must be there, where the sun set. Some peopled the waters with sunken cities, and thought to hear their church bells ring. Others fancied that there were vast palaces and treasuries at the bottom of the sea, where dragon kings guarded the wealth of the world (it has been suggested that the pearl, as a moon symbol, was accounted very precious from earliest times and that it was the encounters of pearl divers with sharks and other fierce sea-beasts that gave rise to the treasure-guarding dragon legend).
     It seems to have originally been assumed that whatever existed on land had its counterpart in the sea. Thus there were not only sea-horses but sea-elephants and sea-tigers and sea-unicorns. There was, however, at least one exception to this rule, for it was thought that God had created a monster of the sea far bigger than anything that lived on land, or indeed could live on land. This was the Leviathan, so huge that only ocean would contain him:

"Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream. . . ."

     There have been lengthy arguments as to whether the Biblical Leviathan is or is not simply a whale. On the one hand it would seem that, since the whale is several times mentioned by its own name in the Bible, it cannot be the same as the Leviathan, but on the other hand it is quite possible that "whale" and "Leviathan" were used interchangeably to describe a single little-known monster; certainly "adder" and "cockatrice" were so used. In any case it is agreed that the Leviathan is huge beyond any other creature. (Its only rival is the Behemoth, an oxlike animal some seven miles in length who daily grazes over a thousand miles of grass in paradise and will eventually be slain by the Jewish Messiah.) The Talmud, always attentive to detail, concludes that the Leviathan is of such a size that it requires a fish three miles long (in itself, no mean whale!) every day for its feed.
     The Jews, however, also had a legend that after Jehovah had created the universe and all its living creatures He realized that the Leviathan was so enormous, so powerful and equipped with such an appetite that its very existence jeopardized the rest of creation. The world was out of balance. Fortunately, there were as yet only two such monster whales in being and He therefore destroyed one of the two, so that their race could not be continued. At the same time, lest no record should remain of His mammoth handiwork, He made the second whale immortal.
     Somewhat the same story is told of the Scandinavian Kraken. It is supposed that only two Kraken exist, and that these were created at the beginning of the world and are destined to live as long as the world itself endures:

     Since there were no earlier Krakens it is obviously impossible to find a skeleton or any such evidence of their existence, and the pair that do exist are seldom seen. (It is recorded that in 1680 a young Kraken was stuck in the narrow channel of Altstahong, where he died, and that as he decayed the stench was such that all the villages thereabouts were in danger of plague, but this was presumably an impostor.)
     The Kraken is a curious and in some ways useful creature, firmly believed in even today. In truth it is probably the great calamary or squid, a mollusc of the cuttlefish and octopus family, comparatively rare and described as huge, horrible and shapeless, as truly monsters as the monsters of legend. These calamaries are known to have reached at least eighty feet in length, while abnormal specimens probably grow even larger, and they are able to do what the Kraken is described as doing; that is, seize a man with one of their horrid tentacles and drag him from his boat.
     In that sense, then, the Kraken does exist, but its size and the characteristics attributed to it are certainly fabulous. Its body is supposed to be so enormous that when it rises to the surface it appears as a floating island, thus confusing even the most experienced navigators. Fishermen are always on the lookout for it; they know that if their soundings suddenly show the water to be much shallower in a particular spot than it should be, then a Kraken must be lying between them and the bottom of the sea. In that case they immediately throw out all their nets and are assured a good catch, the fish being crowded up between the body of the Kraken and the surface of the water. They continuously take soundings, however, for if the depth decreases still more they must waste no time in escaping. Otherwise they will either be stranded on his great back, sometimes a mile and a half long, or caught in the whirlpool of waters that is sucked in whenever he rises or sinks.
     The Kraken has been known to fool the wisest of men. On one occasion a bishop, returning to his own country after a short absence, saw an island off shore which he knew had not been there before. He therefore had himself rowed ashore from his ship and consecrated this new land in the name of God, holding a full Mass on shore. No sooner was he safely aboard his own ship again than the island, being actually a Kraken, disappeared from sight.
     The Physiologus, that collection of moral tales so popular in the Middle Ages, used the story of the whale island to point out the perils of being tempted by the devil. Their particular whale was called the asp-turtle or aspidochelone, and looked exactly like a rocky and moss-covered island. It was an extremely lazy creature, and insensitive as well, for the sailors who were deceived by it would sometimes moor their great high-prowed ships to the supposed island with strong cables and go ashore, even building fires and cooking their food, without disturbing the monster. Suddenly, however, just when the poor ignorant campers had made ready for a night's rest, the asp-turtle would sink down to the bottom of the sea, carrying both sailors and ship down with him to that underworld from which no man returns. So, says Physiologus, do demons tempt men with false appearances until they are firmly committed to evil ways, fastened to the very body of Satan, and cannot escape when the tempter sinks back to the hell from which he came.
     Perhaps the strangest of the sea-monsters is the sea monk, which occurs independently in Chinese and in Scandinavian folklore. Along the South China coast the terror of the seamen is the Hai Ho Shang (literally, "sea Buddhist priest") or sea bonze, which they say is like a large fish as to body but has the head of a priest, shaved as the heads of Buddhist priests are shaved. This Hai Ho Shang is so strong and so aggressive that he has often been known to seize junks and capsize them, sometimes drowning the entire crew.
     There are two possible means of driving the Hai Ho Shang away. One is by burning feathers, for it seems that the only smell the sea bonze cannot tolerate is the stench of burning feathers; until quite recently travelers setting forth by sea from South China ports would take with them their own bag of feathers so as to be quite sure of protecting themselves. The other method is by a ritual dance performed on board the threatened ship, and here, as in the case of the mermaids, we see that some supernatural control over the forces of nature is believed to be inherent in dancing. Every ship had at least one sailor who, in addition to being an ordinary deck-hand, had been trained for driving away the sea bonze. As soon as the monster was seen, or even if it was only suspected that he might be near, this man would dress himself in a long black gown, with very full sleeves, while another sailor stationed himself in the prow of the boat with a small gong. To the accompaniment of the gong the dancer would go through the necessary steps, waving about him as he did so a stick to which had been fastened several streamers of red cloth. In almost all cases this was sufficient to discourage the Hai Ho Shang.
     There is a pathetic touch in the story of the sea bonze, for it is said that sometimes fishermen when drawing up their nets will catch dozens of young sea bonzes, who look at them pitifully and raise their finny hands as though begging for mercy, kneeling in exactly the same posture assumed by Buddhist priests when praying. Frightened as they are of the full-grown sea bonze, the fishermen dare not spare the lives of these near-human infants.
     The Chinese believe that a man who has been drowned, and who is therefore doomed to drift for eternity in the waters of the sea, can under certain circumstances escape if he succeeds in luring a substitute into the water to take his place. These drowned spirits retain something of their human shape, appearing usually as mermen or as sea-monsters with human heads, calling to those on shore and using every means to entice or decoy the innocent fisherman to his death. This may explain why the sea bonze, who is probably in actual fact a dugong or seal, the most harmless of creatures, is held in such horror by Chinese seamen.
     The European sea monk, believed in as late as the eighteenth century, was a less formidable monster. Like all unknown and therefore fearful creatures of the sea, he was believed to cause storms when he appeared but otherwise he seems to have been inoffensive enough. One specimen which was caught off the coast of Norway and sent to the king of Poland was described as having a tonsured human head, his shoulders covered by something like the cowl of a monk (this suggests that it may have been some sort of cuttlefish), fins for arms, and the lower body of a fish. On its arrival at court, this creature made signs indicating that it wished to return to the sea and the king, much impressed by its religious guise, gave orders that it should be allowed to do so. Taken to the shore, it dived in and immediately disappeared from sight.
     But mediaeval writers did not rest content with the sea monk. Believing that everything on land had its equivalent in the sea, that if there were sea monks there were presumably other religious ranks carrying on their good work under the seas, they also discovered the sea bishop. This worthy was very similar to the sea monk, except that on his head he wore what was clearly a miter. The sea bishop was, naturally, a much less common creature than the monk, but it is recorded that one came ashore in Norway in 1526 and lived on land for six days.
     Other sea-monsters have been legion, especially in the Mediterranean, but in general they fit into one of these two types: either the merman, half human and half fish, or the giant beast huge beyond imagination and sometimes mistaken for an island. Among the first were Triton, the son of Neptune or Poseidon, who was said to have the lower parts of a dolphin and the upper parts of a man, and who gave his name to a whole race of mermen, the mischievous Tritons who appear in poetry as minor sea-gods and who loved to play tricks on seamen. Proteus, another of Neptune's sons, was the shepherd of the ocean flocks and usually carried a shepherd's crook to show his calling; he was famed for his ability to change his shape at will and as often as he liked, a quality also found among river-gods and perhaps meant to represent the every-flowing and ever-changing nature of water. Even more closely related to the merman was Glaucus, a fisherman who one day noticed that if he threw down the fish he had just caught on a particular part of the shore where an unknown herb grew wild, they nibbled at it and thereupon suddenly revived and plunged into the sea again. Curious, he too tasted of the herb and immediately felt an overwhelming longing to throw himself into the water. As he did so he felt his body change, his legs take the form of a fish's tail, his shoulders grow broad as the shoulders of Neptune himself, while his hair, grown long and green, streamed out behind him like the long tresses of seaweed. Fortunately, he enjoyed the change, saw himself as more handsome than he had ever been in human form, and was accepted by the gods of the sea as their equal; all that had been mortal in him was washed away by the great salt waves of Ocean.
     The Leviathan type of sea-monster were on the whole not an interesting breed. They were huge and formless, theoretically dangerous and yet never quite convincing. Such were the Balena, a creature differing very little from the whale; Cetus, the sea-monster who threatened Andromeda and was slain by Perseus; and the Orc, the same brute who ravaged an island off the coast of Ireland and was slain by the Saracen knight Rogero.
     All this makes no mention of the sea-serpent, ancient or modern. The primeval serpent that was once believed to lie in the deepest part of the ocean, its tail in its mouth, completely encircling the earth, is indeed one of the great monsters of myth. This is Jormungandr, the giant Midgardh serpent, and with the coming of the Twilight of the Gods, that awful cataclysm which Norse and Teutonic mythology believe will eventually overwhelm not only the earth but the gods as well, he will rise out of the abyss and destroy mankind. But Jormungandr is a dragon rather than a sea-serpent; he is of the breed of Tiamat and other dark creatures who existed before earth or man were created, and the story of his conflict with the gods is explained by the same light-and-darkness myth as the story of the dragon.
     As for the modern sea-serpent, he can scarcely be included among fabulous beasts, for there seems no doubt that he does exist. However much he may be laughed at, dismissed as something invented by reporters to fill up space, or explained away as the result of seaweed, rows of porpoises, or bad eye-sight on the part of seamen, there remains so solid a body of reliable evidence for the sea-serpent that he must be accepted as fact. Whether there are one or several types of sea-serpent, whether the Brontosaurus or some other giant Saurian has survived from the age of reptiles and still exists in the lower seas, whether indeed the sea-serpent is reptile or mammal, is another story. But there seems no doubt of his existence. And, since not only the sea-serpent but the giant squid, which was regarded until quite recently as mythical, do exist, we can safely say that all the wonders of the sea are not yet known. It is unlikely that we will ever again dredge up a sea bishop, but we can certainly find creatures in the sea whose appearance is at least as weird and as unlikely as that of any mythological beast.

Text excerpted from Peter Lum's Fabulous Beasts, copyright 1951.