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She says you must give tired persons what they most need; and is emphatic about the importance of everybody's sleeping in a wholesome atmosphere. So I have not been permitted to design a fine nightmare or a creditable terror nothing morbid or blood-freezing, no sea-serpents or krakens or hippogriffs, nor anything that gives me a really free hand, for months and months: and my art suffers.
The wind that then revealed itself only in white blots and streaks now lashes my hair into my eyes, and only the lift of my bows is betwixt me and the throat that swallows the whales and the krakens. "Will it be so with death? It looks strange and far off now, but it draws nigh noiselessly, and one day I meet it face to face in the grapple: shall I rejoice in that wrestle as I rejoice in this?
So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; I have heard of Krakens. This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper.
Now, this strange animal, if it was an animal, had never "blown" as the whalers say; nor, had it ever made any noises of breathing. Yet if it were not one of these huge marine mammals, how was this unknown monster to be classed? Did it belong among the legendary dwellers in the deep, the krakens, the octopuses, the leviathans, the famous sea-serpents?
Johnny, after having settled it to his own entire satisfaction, that the shell in which his pearls had been found, was properly a mussel, and not an oyster; and having also, by Arthur's help, resolved his doubts and difficulties, touching divers other knotty points in conchology; successively raised and canvassed the grave and edifying questions whether there actually were such creatures as mermaids? whether sea-serpents were indigenous to the neighbourhood of Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bay? whether the narratives of ancient and modern voyagers, in regard to Krakens, and gigantic Polypes, with feelers or arms as long as a ship's main-mast, had any foundation in fact or were to be looked upon as sheer fabrications? and, finally, whether the hideous and revolting practice of cannibalism, really prevailed among the inhabitants of certain groups of islands in the Pacific?
One was anchored in the middle of the river, and looked like a floating island. These Krakens of the Rhine are composed of oak and fir floated in smaller rafts down the tributary streams, and, their size constantly increasing till they arrive hereabouts, they make platforms of from four hundred to seven hundred feet long, and one hundred and forty feet in breadth.
It is surprising how much a landsman, however well-informed, may gather from a sailor when he listens like a three-years' child, and the mariner hath his will. I only wish I was as well posted up in devil-fish, stingarees, krakens, and other marine commonplaces, as I am thanks to Jack's information in the man-o'-war hawk and the penguin.
"We've had krakens and mermaids and all variety of horrid beasts," said one old tar, with his jaw a-shaking, "and now the foul fiend has that anchor, and is pulling us ashore with it." The chain had run out to its length, but the anchor had found no bottom. A cracking and grinding of the links could be heard, as if a tug of war were going on between two giants that had this chain between them.
Nowadays it is our 'Minotaurs' and 'Warriors' that are the real leviathans and behemoths of the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing krakens of the latter-day seas.
We have gone over the vast extent of waters which encompass our globe, and been for some months engaged in examining the wonders of the ocean, without meeting any of the monsters of the deep, such as krakens, sea-serpents, &c.; nevertheless, I am not so skeptical as to disbelieve all I have not the opportunity of viewing with my own bodily eyes.
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