When some sailors succeeded in killing it they carried it to the epicure, Lucullus,--the head as big as a barrel, and some of its tentacles so huge that one person could hardly reach around them.

The chroniclers of the Middle Ages had also spoken of the gigantic cuttlefish that on more than one occasion had, with its serpentine arms, snatched men from the decks of the ships.
The Scandinavian navigators, who had never encountered it in their fjords, nicknamed it the _kraken_, exaggerating its proportions and even converting it into a fabulous being.

If it came to the surface, they confounded it with an island; if it remained between the two waters, the captains, on making their soundings, became confused in their calculations, finding the depth less than that marked on their charts.

In such cases they had to escape before the _kraken_ should awake and sink the vessel as though it were a fragile skiff among its whirlpools of foam.
During many long years Science had laughed at the gigantic polypus and at the sea serpent, another prehistoric animal many times encountered, supposing them to be merely the inventions of an imaginative sailor, stories of the forecastle made up to pass the night-watch.

Wise men can only believe what they can study directly and then catalogue in their museums....
And Ferragut laughed in his turn at poor Science, ignorant and defenseless before the mysterious immensity of the ocean, and having scarcely achieved the measurement of its great depth.