Was skeptical about those old maps with sea monsters, but a 1587 one changed my mind

I always thought they were just decorative fluff, but I got a cheap reproduction of a Ortelius map of Iceland and the kraken drawing actually matches a real squid sighting from 1853. Has anyone else found a fake map detail that turned out to have some truth to it?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamiesingh1mo ago

Huh, that's wild about the kraken matching a real sighting. I had a buddy who worked on a fishing boat up in Newfoundland, and he swore they saw something huge break the surface one foggy morning. He said it was just a massive dark shape with tentacles, not like the freaky monsters in the drawings, but still enough to make the whole crew go quiet for a while. He never talked about it much after that, but I always remembered it when I'd see those old maps. Makes you wonder if those cartographers were just doodling or if they had some actual weird stories passed down to them.

the_claire1mo ago

Wait, that's exactly the kind of thing I've been wondering about. I've got this old 1544 map of the North Atlantic and there's a drawing of some giant eel-like thing off the coast of Norway, and I swear it looks just like a picture of a giant oarfish I saw online a few years back. The oarfish was all washed up on a beach and it had that same weird shape with the red crest on its head, just like the map drawing. Makes you wonder if those old sailors actually saw something real that we just don't know about today, or maybe they saw a dead one washed up and tried to draw it from memory. Your buddy's story is exactly the kind of thing that gives me chills, because it's not like they're making it up, they just saw something big and strange and that's all they could say about it.