Page 3 - Three Adventures

Voyage of the Pomeranian

which I reiterate the goal of this undertaking and emphasize, through
historic example and scientific knowledge, how the kraken has been
misunderstood and demonized. Indeed, it is my intent to dispel many
hoary myths with the advancement in scholarship attendant upon my
capture of a live specimen and its conveyance intact to London.

Toward that end I have been insistent on maintaining the condition
of the holding tank through these months of fruitless tacking across
the South Atlantic. If the creature emerging from the deeps in our
drag net is as large as I suspect, it will require all fifty feet of the iron-
reinforced oak planking I dedicated to the length of my aquarium. I
had to journey to Danzig and personally supervise the construction—
there I found both cheap Carpathian lumber and shipwrights willing
to indulge the whims of an Englishman they undoubtedly believed to
have spent too much time bareheaded in the tropical sun. The
tonnage of seawater such a tank contains had to be carefully weighed
against the Pomeranian’s draft; but she was a decommissioned frigate
in the Polish navy, built for twenty-four cannon and their hundreds
of shells. Keeping the tank’s caulking intact and the water within
fresh and stocked with a cephalopod’s diet of mollusca enforces a daily
regimen of extra labor for all hands—not least for me, who must
ensure this natural but enclosed environment does not degrade.

In the meantime I continue to deal with men who, despite the general
enlightenment of our era, persist in confounding fact and fantasy,
whose minds must constantly be directed toward greed and away
from fear. Old sailors’ yarns and the penny dreadfuls have filled their
heads with outrageous notions of the giant squid’s size, strength and
malevolence. And some of greatest literary lights have joined the
chorus of infamy—Longfellow, for example:

Then, like a kraken huge and black,
She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp!
Down went the Cumberland all a wrack,
With a sudden shudder of death,
And the cannon’s breath
For her dying gasp.

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