September 3, 2013 • 40 mins
Medieval and renaissance maps are resplendent with sea monsters, but what were these fanciful beasts all about? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie breakdown the science, economics and mythology of sea serpents, walruses and whales the size of islands.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Jusie.
You remember those three episodes that we did on maps
a while back. Oh, yes, yeah, it's pretty interesting stuff.
We talked about the way maps form our view of reality,
(00:27):
how maps exist not only on paper but in our minds.
We talked about the some of the history of cartography,
some of the problems entailed within right, and just exploration
in general, how matt making was this way to, you know,
make a concrete idea of the abstract notions of the
world around us. But one area that we didn't really
(00:47):
get into they were going to explore today is the
world of monstrosity, particularly the world of sea monster. Because
if you look back on old enough maps, you inevitably
encounter fantastic things. You you would, of course encounter fantastic
land forms that deviate to varying degrees from what we
know or believe to be the shape of our continents.
(01:08):
And then if you go out in the water, you
see these strange creatures that don't match up particularly well
with anything that actually exists, and yet like these creatures
that are represented on these maps, they are really powerful symbols.
And we just talked about the power of symbols in
the previous episode. So there's stand ins both for dangerous,
real and imagined. Yeah, and Uh, it turns out the whole,
(01:31):
the whole area of sea monsters is a largely understudied topic,
particularly we're talking about sea monsters on maps. I recently
attended a lecture by author Chet van Douser, who has
put together fabulous book called Sea Monsters on Menieval and
Renaissance Maps, and he thoroughly explored this topic. True and Uh,
(01:52):
I wanted to read a little bit from Ben Shattuck's
article from Salon. He talks about why, uh, the ocean
provide such a rich grounds for imagination. He says, there's
something about the ocean that keeps on giving to cryptozoology,
mostly because it's a great dark room whose door only
opens when animals rise to breathe or eat or some themselves,
(02:14):
or when they flash through a cone of light shot
from a deep water submersible. There's a bet of sunlight
caught in the first ten feet or so of water,
and then total and huge blackness. Still, though the unsettling
sea generates a productive fear to stoke our imaginations. That
Ben shattic, he's good. He's also, of course the guy
who wrote that the excellent article about being swallowed alive
(02:35):
by whale. That's right. So we're talking about monsters, which
we've we've touched on monsters before. I frequently blog about monsters,
and as I like to point out, the word monstrosity
originates from the Latin monster aary, which means to show
or illustrate a point. And in this as a Van
Deuser points out, it falls in line with the St.
(02:55):
Augustine's view of a monster as something that's part of
God's plan, an adornment of the universe that can also
teach us about the dangers of sin. But then there
are other medieval commentators that define a monster is a
thing against nature. So we have to sort of clarify
what are we talking about when we talk about a monster,
Because on one hand, a monster is, uh, you know,
a fantastic creature that is against the natural order and
(03:18):
doesn't actually exist in reality. But then we have things
like river monsters the Animal Planet show, where these are
actually real world animals, but we refer to them as
monsters because they are on some level monstrous. Yeah, I
mean they defy our expectations, right, because we have knowledge
of our land animals, we have knowledge of ourselves. But
when we see these creatures that come from the depths
(03:39):
and they are so odd and like est but not
like us, well they become abominations. Yeah. The popular theory
in the medieval ages and on up into the sixteenth
century was this idea that anything that exists on land,
there's a version of it that exists in the water.
And this goes back to planting the elder statements in
natural history. So the idea here is that the have
(04:00):
a stag that lives in the land. Well, then there's
a sea stag somewhere. There's a lion lives on the land.
Well there's a sea lion. There are men, there are merment,
and literally it really gets ridiculous when you start looking
at the sheer number, because you make it go always
just making some of these up. But just to to
look in the index of Van Deuser's book, there's a
reference to a sea bear, sea bish of a sea bowl,
a sea chicken, a sea cow, sea dogs, sea dragon,
(04:22):
au see elephant, sea, frogs, goats, hairs, horses, lions, monks, panthers, pigs, pig, dogs,
pig lions, rabbits, rams, rooster, serpent, stags, tigers, unicorns, and wolves.
Uh and uh you know. Just so, so you have
that idea, that existing sort of philosophic idea of how
the world works, and you bring that with you into
an actual observation and second and third hand accounts of
(04:46):
what is actually going on in the ocean, and you
can see where various uh bits of false data emerge. Well,
and just to confuse things about you have some animals
from mythology like you have. You've got you of corns.
But then you've got normals which actually exists. So what
do you get. Of course, you get some sort of
creature that is a unicorn fish like creature flilling out
(05:10):
there in the ocean. Exactly. Now, when we talk about
these maps, talking about these old maps, particularly medieval maps,
we're basically talking about two kinds of maps. First of all,
there is the mapa mundi, a map of the world.
And it's really cool when you look at the simplest
and oldest of these, you have what we call a
t O map, and I'll include a picture of one
(05:30):
of these in the gallery that accompanies this episode. But
a t O map. If you'll picture a big circle,
all right, that's the world, Okay. Imagine a central land
mass surrounded by a circular ocean. Now imagine a horizontal
line running across it. Cutting it into that line is
the Aegean and Black Sea on the left, and then
Nile on the Red Sea on the right. And then
a dividing line down the center of that line, forming
(05:52):
the stalk of the t that's the Mediterranean Sea. So
this is a vision of the world sort of on
its side, where the center of it, the very center
of the circle is Jerusalem, because that's the center of
the world, you know, Western Christian tradition, and so the
whole northern half of the circle is Asia. Then the
lower left hand quarter is Europe, in the lower right
(06:13):
hand quarter is Africa. Okay. So this is really a
map that is not used to navigate. It's rather a
map that's used to record our ideas about the world
and how it's configured. Yeah, you know, we talked about
when we did our map episodes. We talked about, say
something like the map of the tube system in London
about how important important it is uh, certainly to to
get around London, but also to form an idea in
(06:35):
the londoner's mind of what their city looks like, in
what their city is. This was a map to make
sense of the stories you were hearing about. All right,
Jerusalem so important? Where is it compared to me? Where?
Where's where is Africa compared to me? Where? How do
I fit into the world? And what is the shape
of the world. And what's interesting about that is it's
got that configuration, the t configuration, which is directly um
(06:55):
feeding into this idea that we we know we have
many more neurons that are dead a hitted to up
and down and right and left in terms of our
visual visual field and not diagonal, which is this need
to try to put everything into a neat little package.
So that's your earliest world map, and they certainly evolve
from there up until you know, modern times, as we
(07:17):
learn more and more about the the what the world
looks like, and how we get from one place to another.
So on these maps, on the t O maps, most
of the real estate here is concerned with the land uh.
And you'll have some cities marked and some important bits
of geography. But as in the Girona be at this map,
sea monsters do appear in the outer ocean that you know,
(07:38):
the outer the outer edge of the circle, the edge
of the world. Um. In this particular map from you'll
find a marine chicken and perhaps Jonah being swallowed by
whale or having been swallowed by a whale. You see
like this big fish and you see Jonah in the
belly um though most of the depictions of Jonah and
the whale, it's either Jonah being spit up, were swallowed
(08:00):
like they tend not to dwell on the whole, living
inside the belly bit. So that's one type of map.
And then you also have nautical charts because obviously people
are sailing from one point in the other and they
need a functional map to tell them how to do that.
A t O map is not going to help you
really navigate the world. Again, it's all about where you
are in your head, where you are actually on a
(08:21):
ship at sea. You need a nautical map. And so
these were generally these would generally have an outline of
the land uh and they were really only concerned with
coastal cities and ports. And they would connect to each
other by criss crossing rum lines. So you could look
at this and you'd be like, all right, this is
the line you need to follow if you need to
get from this port to this port, in this city
(08:43):
to this city. Okay. And the more common variety of
these maps was purely utilitarian. There were no frills, and
there were certainly no sea monsters, but clients could and
did opt for specially add on so you could pay
extra for painted cities, for flax and ultimately sea monster
and and the especially maps. These were generally not the
ones that you would have on the ship. These would
(09:03):
be the ones, uh, you know, you might give to
a king or or or you know, have you know,
hanging in your your office or whatnot. Yeah, I mean,
for the most part, medieval maps just didn't have steam
monsters to pick on them because what I mean essentially
why because that's going to cost you more money, right,
And it was much more pragmatic at that time, be
as you say, from going from a point A to
point B. But then you see later in the fifteenth century,
(09:27):
as you say, they became a thing. In fact, you
mentioned kings. There's a chart maker by the name of
Francis Picarti in four hundred, who commissioned four really extraordinarily
resplendent maps to give to four European kings in exchange
for the right to trade in their countries. So that's
how valuable these pieces of paper became, because again it
(09:51):
represented exploration and also as as well as people could
at that time. Compendium of beasts, you know of this
sort of like a learned man's way of trying to
learn about the world via the armchair. Yeah, it becomes
a kind of a zoological text as well. Now one,
I really like the idea of the sea monsters as
(10:12):
an add on, Like imagine way, like, we don't really
draw maps for one another anymore, but can you imagine
you know, you're asking a friend how to get to
some way that and you're like, can you draw me
a map? Oh, and make sure to put a seed
monster on there. I want to have some monsters on
that map. Or imagine if when you use Google Maps,
you could in the same way that you have the
options to click click on the button and have traffic represented,
(10:32):
click on the button and have satellite information represented. Why
is there no monster button? So I can see where
sea monsters and land monsters might potentially be represented. There
should be a monster overlay for sure. Um, but let's
talk about some of these some more of these reasons
for monsters being depicted. Um. One of the things that
I think is really interesting is we've already touched on,
(10:53):
is that you know, the truth is stranger than fiction.
So you have people who have been out in the
ocean's fishing for cent ease, and they talk about what
they have seen. Perhaps they well, I don't know if
they'd see it at a certain depths that it exists,
But vampire squid are an amazing that's an amazing creature.
To behold sea snakes that seems insane, and yet they
(11:16):
are in the ocean. If you've ever seen a bunch
of sea snakes congregating on the ocean floor and floating
there like shafts of wheat, just passively feeding on whatever
passes by, it is an amazing, incredible image and you
could not believe it. So it stands to reason that
if you have this collective of ocean life, that of
(11:37):
course these these beasts would emerge from from all this
sort of mythology. Yeah, and as we've still happens today.
When you encounter you know, you encounter a whale in
the ocean, it's pretty phenomenal. You encounter a half rotten whale,
or any kind of partially decayed but of sea lie,
you're liable to to interpret the original form in a
(11:58):
different light. We're you know, like, even to this day,
you'll find pictures of some sort of weird thing washed
up on a beach and people are like, oh, my goodness,
this looks like nothing on earth. Clearly it's a sea monster. No,
it's just a whale. That is a grosser and in
a little decayed you're seeing more of it's a skeleton
and less of it's a flesh, and therefore it looks
like a sleeker, different creature. That's true. And even now
(12:20):
things are getting reclassified, right because every once in a
while we find the bones of something. It's like, oh,
we think that this is a new something, and they're like, no, no,
this is actually a brachiosaurs. Yeah. Now, um, Now again,
as we we mentioned sea monsters, of a lot of
them are going to originate in myth and religious tradition.
You have Jonah's whale, you have the primordial Leviathan. One
of the stories that that keeps coming up again and
(12:42):
again in Van Duser's book is the idea of the
whale or fish that's so enormous that a ship lands
at it, and then the sailors get off. They on
what they think is land. They can't. They set a fire,
and then when they set the fire, that disturbs the fish,
and the fish descends back into the ocean and they
have to scramble to get back on the ship before
(13:03):
they drown. Now, clearly this never happened um or it's
it's at least it's at least very difficult to imagine
a scenario in which this could happen. But it becomes
such a tale like it captures the imagination, and so
it comes up again and again on these maps. It's true,
And you know, their representation on the maps is not
(13:25):
just a symbolic standing for for man versus nature, but
is also a way to depict actual geographical points of
interest or even dangerous straits on a map. So there
is a there's actual pragmatic reason for them to be
on there. But a lot of these cartographers, though, what
they were trying to do is they were trying to
utilize the best information of the time to create a
(13:46):
map that it's either going to stand out its own
or it's accompanying some other texts. And so most of
the time they've never seen these creatures before, but they
were laboring to create accurate depictions. Uh. In many cases
they continued existing motifs such as the island fish, and
presume factual depictions of actual life in the oceans. They
are the hybrids that they ended up drawing. Well, those
were backed up in the theory of this land water
(14:08):
duality that we mentioned earlier, and they were able to
repeat the true aspects of their depictions. Whales are big spouts,
you know, they spout water and sometimes they damage boats. Um,
as well as the inaccuracies. Whales have two blowholes, they
have wolfish faces, and they attack boats. Yeah, it's cool
because I think about these maps is sort of the
(14:28):
graphic novel at the time. There again, Yeah, trying to
record as much scientific information is thought scientific at that time,
and trying to explain the creatures. Um. But the problem
is is that you don't get a lot of clear
perception of these creatures that you see without context. Yeah,
there's a lot of times these are These are again
(14:49):
people who are several times removed from any actual observation
of the creature. Uh, you have in the same way
that you know. Burno Eccho said, books speak to other books,
and there's those endless kind versation, particularly among between older manuscripts,
where this idea flows to this one and picked up
by this one. It's like that game we all play
as a kid where you whisper in a circle and telephone. Yeah, telephone.
(15:10):
It's like a game of telephone with with with texts
and then with visual representations of the world. You're right,
and at the end of the telephone conversation you get
the vakham Marina the sea cow right, because everything gets
so distorted. Um. I was thinking about the perception and
context problem in terms of ben Shadduck's article for Salon
(15:32):
and when she was trying to pin down a nineteenth
century account of a massive sea serpent, and the fisherman
had described it as a hundred feet long with an
interlocking barrel like body and a serpent like face. And
he kind of kept scratching at this, saying, what I mean,
these are like hardened fishermen, They're they're all like, you know,
(15:54):
they've been out there, their experience, and yet there's so
many of these fishermen who said, we saw something, and
he wonders what could it be. So he talks to
um someone who is an expert in leather back turtles.
Her name is Kara Dodge, and she says that, you know,
it's probably just that perception problem, because she says that
(16:15):
even when trying to track leatherback turtles, now they have
to train fishermen to look for the hump and not
the fin. And so now they're getting a ton more
accounts of leatherback turtles as they try to pin their whereabouts.
But until you give people the context for it or
the imagery, then it's hard to pin down. By the way,
(16:37):
the whole leatherback turtle things, he serpent turns out, Ben
Shottic thinks from his research that it could have just
been essentially a bunch of leatherback turtles that were bumped
up against each other and it makes the appearance of
these humps of serpent. Yeah, because you're saying, if you
look at videos of leather backs, it's kind of the slimy,
(17:00):
black uh image that emerges from just under the water.
And then if you look at their faces, their serpent
light and they have fangs. So if you solve that
from a you know, a good distance away, you might
think that it's this hundred foots he serpent coming at you. Now,
the other thing about that is that narrative might serve
you well if you decide to make a map to
(17:22):
dissuade other fishermen from coming to your country and fishing
your waters. And that's where I think it's fascinating that
a map from the sixteenth century could have an economic
function built into it. Yeah, the map in question is
Alas Magnus is amazing nine map, the Card of Marina,
which I'll make sure to include this one in the
(17:44):
gallery that goes with this episode as well, because it's
it's really the granddaddy of these. I mean, it's a
marvelous map from a number of different perspectives. He brings
whimsy to his creations of the monsters, he brings an
artistry and and just a sheer number of monsters on
this map is incredible. It's just it's just the world
is just completely monster haunted and it's beautiful. But there
(18:06):
is this theory that that he used a lot of
these monsters to scare away foreign fisherman from Scandinavian waters. Right,
because if you were to look at this map, you're like, ho,
get it, there's this dragon sea serpent thing at every turn,
or this other lobster slash octopus thing that might take
(18:28):
me down. Yeah, And in the full map included like
a zoological m sidebar that explained like what some of
these creatures were supposed to be. And yeah, you look
at it, and they're they're just all sorts of fantastic
um whales and whale like creatures spouting up their attacking ships.
They're pulling ships down, they're flooding them with their with
their they're spouted water. It's marvelous. Well, one of my
(18:51):
favorite ones on there is that lobster looking like creature
that's said to be an octopus, and it's depicted with
eight legs and it's holding a man in one of
its claws. Um and and and scale. You can see
that it's monstrous in in comparison to this man. And
according to its scientific information, it lives in underwater caves
and can change its color to match surrounding. Now that's amazing, right,
(19:13):
because what we're hearing there is that there's some seppal
pod information, right, Yeah, at the core of this we
have some some good information. Eight limbs can change its color,
lives in the rocks underwater. Yeah, we're talking about that
this perception of chromatoforce right, well at the time they
weren't called chromatoforce, but this idea that seppal pods can
change their skin color through pigment cells. So think about
(19:36):
being on a ship at night and gazing over the
prow and seeing by a luminescent light then emanating from
a squid and that's from the bacteria that's being housed
in the organ lights and just what a sight that
would be that there's this monstrous creature below that has
a beacon of light coming from it. Yeah, we we
(19:57):
throw in the narrative of monstrous creatures in the ocean,
and that makes the thing ginormous. And then if then
you have somebody attempting to create it on a map,
and you know, how would you come up with the
idea of the occupus if you've never seen one? You know,
like clearly this the artist had had some experience with
crustaceans and so that is the form that the artistic
representation of the creature took. Yeah, it's it's amazing because
(20:20):
you do you see the good bits of science and
they're mixed in with fantastical. It's in a way, it's
kind of like all of our depictions or a lot
of our depictions of alien life. There's something humanoid or
vaguely humanoid about them, you know. That is the form
that we understand is intelligent life. So that's the form
we tend to to project in trying to understand, uh,
mythical or imagine creatures. And it's similar here. The form
(20:43):
that they understood was the crustaceans, so that's the one
that was projected. Are you saying that we just need
to be retrained to look for humps instead of fins
out there? Uh No, I mean in the intergalactic space.
I think it just comes down to the fact that
you have data in your mind that using to understand
the outer world, and we're never gonna haven't have enough
(21:04):
data to understand some of the mysteries out there. We're
gonna be able to sort of partially construct them, which
has implications for how we perceive our universe. Right, all right, Well,
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to run through some more specific examples of
of how we have interpreted real things as fantastic sea
monsters and the sort of journey from puremid to truth
(21:27):
in uh, the walrus and in the whale. All right,
we're back, and first of all, let's talk a little
bit about the walrus. Now, the walrus is a great
example of a creature that that does not exist worldwide.
It's not something that you would have, It's not a
(21:48):
form you would have common knowledge off. You know, like
a fish. You know, fish vary a lot, but there's
sort of a prototypical fish and uh, and you can
you know, one culture knows what a fish is, an
other culture knows of the fishes. A walrus is a
little more exotic, it's a little more uh monstrous. So
when we when we look to the various interpretations of
(22:08):
the walrus on these maps, again often depicted by someone
several times removed from actual observation of the thing itself,
you see a curious evolution of form. Uh. And there's
a there's an excellent bit in Van Deser's book where
he lays out eight different images and you get to
see how it changes. Um. For instance, you look at
(22:28):
the fifteen sixteen Carter Marina by Martin Walt Simuler, and
you'll see what looks like a deformed elephant. Then you
look at a fifty two copy of Tommy's Geography, and
this time the same artist, Walt Simuler, depicts a straight
up elephant. Like the first time it was kind of
a monstrous elephant. Then he's just like, oh, it's it's
an elephant, like it has feet, has it's just a
(22:51):
brown elephant that apparently lives in the water and is
a walrus. Okay uh. Fast forward to fifteen thirty nine.
Ish are may on oleg Magnus depicts something that looks
more like a fishy alligator with tusks. It has kind
of that wolfish face common to many sea monster depictions,
and this design pops up in other photographers work as well.
(23:12):
But then we look at fifteen fifty five and we
see depictions of the walrus continue to grow more and
more accurate around her head, flippers instead of feet, tusk
like a walrus instead of an elephant, and then you're
going to take on a more appropriate color. So in
this we see what begins as just uh, you know,
an attempt to understand an exotic form by using what
(23:35):
you knew. You knew what an elephant looked like from
existing you know, well maintained and and and well backed
up illustrations, and so you apply that form to imagining
this tusk fat creature that lives in an arctic waters.
You know. The weird thing about that is um when
you consider extreme mammals that have gone extinct and you
turn back the clock, you start to see some of
(23:57):
these weird the attribute showing up. And I'm thinking about
the whale with legs that was in the exhibit extreme
animals here at from Bank, and how that sort of
plays into this idea of this walrus that's depicted here
in the book. Now should be noted, even though a
lot of these photographers were again trying to use the
best information of the time to depict an accurate vision
(24:18):
of the world, there was still a lot of uncritical
copying of sea monsters. For instance, a fifteen fifty eight
edition of Cornelius enthuses Carta van Us a map of
northern Europe. It included a fabulous flying turtle. Uh. I mean,
it's it's kind of like a gammera creature in a way.
It's got like it's kind of beaked, uh nose, It's
(24:39):
got mostly a turtle body around the rest of it,
except its front legs are like eagle wings. So it's
a really fabulous looking creature. But here's the thing. It
turns out it was probably at the logo of the publisher.
Then that's the only reason it was on the map.
The publisher's logo was this flying turtle, and then when
people copied that, they included it as if it was
(25:01):
supposed to be there, as if it was a depiction
of the natural world. It would be like if you
copied a Rand McNally map and you included that Rand
McNally diamond logo and said it was a continent. You know, right,
You know, I can't help it thinking. I'm sorry, a
little bit distracted by the legos chimera sets that have
come out. Have you seen those of a chimera the
chimera lego sets where they've got different animals depicted. No, No,
(25:25):
I haven't seen that. They should take a page from
these maps, I'm telling you. But that's not to say
that again that everybody was just copying monsters willing knowing
there were some very there were some definitely some skeptics
of the time, and that's always important when you're talking
about the Middle Ages or Renaissance times, that not everybody
was just blindly believing everything that came across their play.
One great example of this, as explained in the Van
(25:46):
Deuser's book, you had this guy Fromorrow from Morrow lived
in a fourteen fifty thereabouts when he was doing his thing,
and he wrote, because there are many cosmographers and most
learned men who right that in this Africa there are
human animal monsters, I think it is necessary to give
my opinion. In all these kingdoms of the Negroes, I
have never found anyone who could give me information on
(26:08):
what those men have written. Thus, not knowing anything, I
cannot bear witness to anything, and I leave research in
the matter to those who are curious about such things.
So basically saying, I'm not buying this information that you're
telling me about what's going on in Africa in terms
of the strange creatures and the weird people that live there,
So I'm not going to comment on it, I'm not
gonna draw it, etcetera. May Yeah, it's a little bit
(26:31):
of a weak sauce statement because it's like, yeah, I
don't know, yeah, I suppose that was bold for back
then though. Yeah. So let's talk about whales, because these
guys are amazing in terms of the sort of stories
that were circulated around about them and then how it
was depicted and the images of them. And I was
thinking about this because last night I was looking at
(26:52):
pictures of humpback whales and um, I was looking other
blue holes as you do, as I do, and I
couldn't help but just be really sort of um taken back,
because as I looked at those pictures, it started to
look like a giant human snout stuck on the back
(27:13):
of a whale. And if you look at pictures close
up of a blowhole, you'll see that there's like a
little bridge between what looks like nostrils. Um. And I thought, well,
if that were to be swimming, you know, parallel to
your ship, and you happen to look at that, wouldn't
you sort of misunderstand that as a distortion or um,
(27:35):
you know, as as a sort of monstrosity of a
human form in a way that it looked like, oh,
this must be a monster because there's their giant snout,
And how then would that be depicted? How would how
would you would you describe that to somebody and they
had to draw it having not seen it, and you
weren't there to say no, a little more little a
little closer to the animals back now, a little more
(27:56):
like a human nose, you know, if you weren't there
to actually get that kind of feedback, how would they
draw it? So? And if yeah, water is is just
spouting out of it right then then sort of like
what do you mean water spouts out of it? Then
clearly there must be some sort of tube system here. So,
as we've mentioned previously, the whale is a pretty classic
sea monster if people have been seeing them for ages,
(28:18):
even before we knew what to call it. We had
the Leviathan, we had the giant fish that swallowed Jonah.
You had the island fish that we talked about with
the people land on it, and many of the older
whales of there especially, they were these wolf faced beasts
with long fish tails. They were spouters. But it took
a while to work out exactly what all that spouting
(28:39):
was about. Pristance. You look at one one map free
you see this very wolfish actually furry sea monster known
as a spouter, attacking a ship by vomiting water upon
its deck out of its mouth. So here's a great
example of someone probably said, oh, there are these whales,
and they spout water, they spit up water, and so
then the artist depiction of that is a whale rolling
(29:00):
up to this ship, opening its mouth and just vomiting
water on it and like and just completely drowning the ship. Okay,
so there's there's that. Uh. And then if you look
at Ole Magnus's carda Marna again, you see that the
whales here spout water from two blow holes to Shrek
like tube like horns that emerge from the top of
the creature. And this is uh. This is a classic
(29:22):
attribute of of of Magnus Magnus's maps and his depictions
of sea monsters. And the crazy thing is that it
matches up so well with what you were just saying
about the huntback whales real blow holes. If someone were
to say, oh, well, they have these two holes on
their back, and there's the water, and then if if
it's passing through you know, down the telephone game of
illustration and manuscript and matt making and that comes to
(29:45):
somebody and they're like, Okay, well, what does an animal
like that look like if it has two holes on
its back to split water out up? And then it
becomes this idea of these two tubes sticking out of
the creature's back, right, and you can kind of see
again like how this m this weirdness occurs and the depictions,
in fact, it's very steampunk looking. These a lot of these. Yeah,
there's a certain you can't help but interpret them as
(30:07):
kind of smoke stacks, so they have this kind of
biomechanical vibe to them. Yeah. Now I can't help but
be reminded of this class that I took in college,
and it was a psychology class having to do with sexuality,
and one of the things we had to do is
we had to pair up and one of us had
to look at a depiction of a sexual act and
the other person had to draw it as described by
(30:28):
the person looking at it. So one of one of
the things I remember is there was a Victorian woman
on a bike that was a bike that was made
of a penis. Let's just say that penis parts, which
is kind of a difficult thing to try to Nobody
knows what a bike is, But then you have to
describe a bike that's made out of a penis. It
might be difficult to make them out of penises. Well,
you know, this was some out of someone's imagination, and
(30:50):
so the other person had to try to describe what
they are looking at. Well, you could go across the
class and you could see all sorts of variations of
what this penis bike look like. It made me think, well,
this is very much the same thing that's going on
in these depictions of maps, minus the penis. Yeah. Another
great example of this comes from Pierre des Selaer's World
Map of fifty six, which has a fairly realistic depiction
(31:14):
of whaler's harpooning a whale. But it's it's a little serpentine.
It's flippers are a bit like wings, and most remarkably
of all, it has a gigantic mustache. It looks kind
of like the luck dragons from the Never New Story.
It's a gentleman whale. Yeah, so so why does the
whale have the mustache? Why is there suddenly? You know,
because they're trying to clearly, it's an attempted depiction of
(31:36):
an actual cultural tradition. Of whaling, of hunting the whales,
catching the whales, harvesting the whales, and a lot of
these accounts included, you know, some some very specific accounts
of what then the whale parts are used for and
how it's used, you know, culturally and economically. But it
has this mustache. Well, according to Van Duser, the mustache
is probably the artist's attempt to portray bailen, which the
(32:00):
whaling basques commonly referred to as barbaus dave balina, or
the beards of the whale. So again you have to
set you're trying to make the best use of the
information that's provided to you, and then someone talks about
the beard of the whale. Are you talking about the
filtering system, which of course is very internal and it's
certainly not a mustache. But if you describe it as
(32:22):
the beards of the whale, and then someone down the
chain has to draw the beards of the whale, this
is what you get, a whale with a giant must
I love it. I was just like to imagine I'm
sitting around, you know, at some pubs saying it's like
when you get you know, that crumbs in your mustache.
It silts it out, you know, and it's easy for
us as modern commentators to to have a lot of
fun with this. But but just think about how to day,
(32:44):
like all the information in the world is instantly at
your fingertips. If you if you've even halfway know what
you're doing on the Internet, you can fact check something
pretty quickly. But still, think of the emails you get
in your inbox just spouting complete nonsense that no one
or the questions that come up one book where you're
you're like, really, why are you asking all of us
when you could have just googled that and found out
(33:05):
immediately if you knew what sources to look for. Now,
I'll take that that same mindset, or even some variation
of it, and put it in an age without Internet,
where you only have books speaking to books over the
course of decades and centuries, and this is the kind
of closed system of information that you get exactly. Now.
That's not to say we didn't have accurate depictions of whales.
So as early as fourteen thirteen we see a realistic
(33:27):
illustration of a whale hunted by whalers on Mercedes Valestis
nautical chart. And finally, in an interesting closure of these
two trends of the fantastic and the realistic. We see
the Nova Frontier map, which features an old fashioned sea
monster with double spouts and wolfish heads, you know, very
much in Magnus's style. But then you also see an
(33:49):
incredibly realistic portrayal of way whalers harvesting a whale. So
you see the incorporation of the older idea of the
sea monster as a as just a fantastic decorative note,
while you also see this this very accurate depiction of
whales and whaling. So you see the two coming together,
and you see the idea of the old sea monster
(34:09):
becoming more and more just a relic, more and more
just a decoration that eventually fades away. Well or it
becomes a tattoo, right because it still has power as
a symbol, because you found that awesome tattoo with someone
had one of old magnus h shrek Horn sea monsters. Yeah,
and you know even some of the more classical tattoos
that show all sorts of sea creatures, um, you know,
(34:32):
taking out a boat or just being ferocious. It kind
of this sort of um talisman against your trade. If
you are someone who is you know a marine merchant
or just who works in the industry, industry being in
of the ocean, the oceans. So in a sense, you
can look at sea monsters on maps as a story
(34:55):
of man versus ocean over the course of centuries. We
see the gradual journey from the ocean as a place
of chaos and certain death to a thing conquered by man.
Think back to those early depictions in the o t
world maps. So over again, the outer ocean is teaming
with monsters or as in a map of Moundy from
eleven eighty, most of the map is outer ocean as
a tail eating serpent or or a boris. And then
(35:18):
you also see various titan sized sea monsters out there
as well. Uh. And then we but we gradually learned
to combat the ocean, and we gradually learned to combat
these uh, these monsters of the mind um in the
Gulf of Cattle in Atlas of thirteen seventy five, we
see a depiction of pearl divers utilizing spells to keep
sea monsters at bay. Fifteen forty five, there's a map
(35:39):
where we see men aboard a ship driving spears into
an attacking beaked tentacle horror, and in the Carton Marina
we see men blowing trumpets stared off one of these
spouting whales. And then most remarkably fifteen sixteen, on Martin
Walt Sigmueller's Carton Marina, we see King man Ale of
(36:00):
Portual writing a sea monster off the tip of Africa
to symbolize Portugal's mastery of the oceans. And from there,
you know, again, sea monsters become more and more decoration
and we start adding more and more ships into our
artistic representation of the ocean and more technology technology. Yeah,
and they kind of go by the wayside because by
the time that the camera has been invented is starting
(36:22):
to document nature, then you you know, have a moving
away of this idea of these really monstrous creatures, and
then the maps begin to rot. We only retain the
you know, a very slim number of them, and they
just become creatures of fantasy, and then we tend to
forget that at times they were wrapped up in symbolism,
(36:43):
that they had economic purpose, that they that they were
attempts to understand the zoology of the ocean. Yeah, and
I wanted to kind of lead out of this episode
with a passage that Shaddick actually brings up in his article.
It's from Moby Dick, and it's when Ishmael climbs up
the rigging to take his watch, and he's sitting on
(37:05):
the top sailed yard and is hanging his leg, is
kind of hanging lazily over by the sail, and he's
reflecting on all the other young men who have taken
watch from those heights. And here it is, says luld In,
such an opium like listlessness, of vacant, unconscious reverie. Is
this absent minded youth, by the blending cadence of waves
and thoughts, that at last he loses his identity, takes
(37:27):
the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image
of that deep blue, bottomless soul pervading mankind in nature,
And every strange, half seeing, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him,
every dimly discovered uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems
to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only
people the soul by continually flitting through it. Here you go,
(37:51):
there you go, man in nature as one awesome well,
you know. On that note, let's call the robot over
and let's see if we have any listener. Maybe. All right,
we have one for you today. This one is from
Erin Erin Wright sentences, Hi, Robert and Julie. I was
just listening to the Circus Freaks episode and it brought
me back to my college days. My nursing school was
part of a university with a music theater school. It's
(38:14):
a great combination. You bring those two energies together. Uh.
One day those worlds collided. A visiting pyrotechnic stage professional
came to a small gathering my friends were having. We
learned to swallow fire. The trick was using kerosene, like
you mentioned in the fire blowing. It's not toxic and
it burns just warmer than the human mouth. I won't
give the particulars, but it was an amazing trick I
(38:34):
haven't done since. My husband shakes his head in shame
and I tell people I can do this, and my
father in law wants me to do this at his
Viking funeral. We're thinking cremated ashes in a small wooden
boat in a small pond, casting the whole thing into
a ball of fury with flaming eros. Thank you so
much for your mind blowing podcast. I'm I am embarking
on a new career. I listened to your podcast while
(38:55):
baking tasty muffins for a farmer's market here in town
with the hopes of expanding to a small cafe. Your podcast,
as well as your siblings on the Stuff Network, gives
me hours of entertainment while baking and boxing my goods.
I've also started having a quiz from my Facebook followers
using the knowledge I've gained. Again, thanks sincerely, uh Aaron
the Main Street Muffin Factory. All right, well that was
(39:18):
very entertaining a Viking funeral. Yeah, I mean that's a
way to go out. That's a good way to go
out on an episode about sea monsters too. So hey,
would you like to learn more? Would you like to
see more? Again? Head by stuff to Blow your mind
dot com After you listen to this. While you're listening whichever,
find the gallery that we've put together with pictures of
some of these monsters we're talking about. I'll definitely be
(39:40):
including a lot of stuff from Oliga. Magnus is fantastic
map and you can look at those all you want
and pull up a big screen version of the map
as well. So if you want to just really pour
over it, and you can also let us know what
you think about all this. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Tumbler. You can find us
on Twitter. On Twitter, we are Below the Mind and
we'd love to hear from from you about your thoughts
(40:01):
on sea monsters if you've if you've looked at them
a lot, what are some of your favorites are? What
are some of your favorite real life monsters in the ocean.
We have a seamonster tattoo. Yes, if you have a
seamonster tattoo, we would love to see it if it
is appropriate for us to see it. Um. You can
also check us out on stuff to Blow your Mind
on YouTube, where we look at the camera and commit
(40:22):
acts of word salad. Yeah, Mind Stuff Show, Mind Stuff Show.
And you can also drop us a line at Below
the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Jusie.
You remember those three episodes that we did on maps
a while back. Oh, yes, yeah, it's pretty interesting stuff.
We talked about the way maps form our view of reality,
(00:27):
how maps exist not only on paper but in our minds.
We talked about the some of the history of cartography,
some of the problems entailed within right, and just exploration
in general, how matt making was this way to, you know,
make a concrete idea of the abstract notions of the
world around us. But one area that we didn't really
(00:47):
get into they were going to explore today is the
world of monstrosity, particularly the world of sea monster. Because
if you look back on old enough maps, you inevitably
encounter fantastic things. You you would, of course encounter fantastic
land forms that deviate to varying degrees from what we
know or believe to be the shape of our continents.
(01:08):
And then if you go out in the water, you
see these strange creatures that don't match up particularly well
with anything that actually exists, and yet like these creatures
that are represented on these maps, they are really powerful symbols.
And we just talked about the power of symbols in
the previous episode. So there's stand ins both for dangerous,
real and imagined. Yeah, and Uh, it turns out the whole,
(01:31):
the whole area of sea monsters is a largely understudied topic,
particularly we're talking about sea monsters on maps. I recently
attended a lecture by author Chet van Douser, who has
put together fabulous book called Sea Monsters on Menieval and
Renaissance Maps, and he thoroughly explored this topic. True and Uh,
(01:52):
I wanted to read a little bit from Ben Shattuck's
article from Salon. He talks about why, uh, the ocean
provide such a rich grounds for imagination. He says, there's
something about the ocean that keeps on giving to cryptozoology,
mostly because it's a great dark room whose door only
opens when animals rise to breathe or eat or some themselves,
(02:14):
or when they flash through a cone of light shot
from a deep water submersible. There's a bet of sunlight
caught in the first ten feet or so of water,
and then total and huge blackness. Still, though the unsettling
sea generates a productive fear to stoke our imaginations. That
Ben shattic, he's good. He's also, of course the guy
who wrote that the excellent article about being swallowed alive
(02:35):
by whale. That's right. So we're talking about monsters, which
we've we've touched on monsters before. I frequently blog about monsters,
and as I like to point out, the word monstrosity
originates from the Latin monster aary, which means to show
or illustrate a point. And in this as a Van
Deuser points out, it falls in line with the St.
(02:55):
Augustine's view of a monster as something that's part of
God's plan, an adornment of the universe that can also
teach us about the dangers of sin. But then there
are other medieval commentators that define a monster is a
thing against nature. So we have to sort of clarify
what are we talking about when we talk about a monster,
Because on one hand, a monster is, uh, you know,
a fantastic creature that is against the natural order and
(03:18):
doesn't actually exist in reality. But then we have things
like river monsters the Animal Planet show, where these are
actually real world animals, but we refer to them as
monsters because they are on some level monstrous. Yeah, I
mean they defy our expectations, right, because we have knowledge
of our land animals, we have knowledge of ourselves. But
when we see these creatures that come from the depths
(03:39):
and they are so odd and like est but not
like us, well they become abominations. Yeah. The popular theory
in the medieval ages and on up into the sixteenth
century was this idea that anything that exists on land,
there's a version of it that exists in the water.
And this goes back to planting the elder statements in
natural history. So the idea here is that the have
(04:00):
a stag that lives in the land. Well, then there's
a sea stag somewhere. There's a lion lives on the land.
Well there's a sea lion. There are men, there are merment,
and literally it really gets ridiculous when you start looking
at the sheer number, because you make it go always
just making some of these up. But just to to
look in the index of Van Deuser's book, there's a
reference to a sea bear, sea bish of a sea bowl,
a sea chicken, a sea cow, sea dogs, sea dragon,
(04:22):
au see elephant, sea, frogs, goats, hairs, horses, lions, monks, panthers, pigs, pig, dogs,
pig lions, rabbits, rams, rooster, serpent, stags, tigers, unicorns, and wolves.
Uh and uh you know. Just so, so you have
that idea, that existing sort of philosophic idea of how
the world works, and you bring that with you into
an actual observation and second and third hand accounts of
(04:46):
what is actually going on in the ocean, and you
can see where various uh bits of false data emerge. Well,
and just to confuse things about you have some animals
from mythology like you have. You've got you of corns.
But then you've got normals which actually exists. So what
do you get. Of course, you get some sort of
creature that is a unicorn fish like creature flilling out
(05:10):
there in the ocean. Exactly. Now, when we talk about
these maps, talking about these old maps, particularly medieval maps,
we're basically talking about two kinds of maps. First of all,
there is the mapa mundi, a map of the world.
And it's really cool when you look at the simplest
and oldest of these, you have what we call a
t O map, and I'll include a picture of one
(05:30):
of these in the gallery that accompanies this episode. But
a t O map. If you'll picture a big circle,
all right, that's the world, Okay. Imagine a central land
mass surrounded by a circular ocean. Now imagine a horizontal
line running across it. Cutting it into that line is
the Aegean and Black Sea on the left, and then
Nile on the Red Sea on the right. And then
a dividing line down the center of that line, forming
(05:52):
the stalk of the t that's the Mediterranean Sea. So
this is a vision of the world sort of on
its side, where the center of it, the very center
of the circle is Jerusalem, because that's the center of
the world, you know, Western Christian tradition, and so the
whole northern half of the circle is Asia. Then the
lower left hand quarter is Europe, in the lower right
(06:13):
hand quarter is Africa. Okay. So this is really a
map that is not used to navigate. It's rather a
map that's used to record our ideas about the world
and how it's configured. Yeah, you know, we talked about
when we did our map episodes. We talked about, say
something like the map of the tube system in London
about how important important it is uh, certainly to to
get around London, but also to form an idea in
(06:35):
the londoner's mind of what their city looks like, in
what their city is. This was a map to make
sense of the stories you were hearing about. All right,
Jerusalem so important? Where is it compared to me? Where?
Where's where is Africa compared to me? Where? How do
I fit into the world? And what is the shape
of the world. And what's interesting about that is it's
got that configuration, the t configuration, which is directly um
(06:55):
feeding into this idea that we we know we have
many more neurons that are dead a hitted to up
and down and right and left in terms of our
visual visual field and not diagonal, which is this need
to try to put everything into a neat little package.
So that's your earliest world map, and they certainly evolve
from there up until you know, modern times, as we
(07:17):
learn more and more about the the what the world
looks like, and how we get from one place to another.
So on these maps, on the t O maps, most
of the real estate here is concerned with the land uh.
And you'll have some cities marked and some important bits
of geography. But as in the Girona be at this map,
sea monsters do appear in the outer ocean that you know,
(07:38):
the outer the outer edge of the circle, the edge
of the world. Um. In this particular map from you'll
find a marine chicken and perhaps Jonah being swallowed by
whale or having been swallowed by a whale. You see
like this big fish and you see Jonah in the
belly um though most of the depictions of Jonah and
the whale, it's either Jonah being spit up, were swallowed
(08:00):
like they tend not to dwell on the whole, living
inside the belly bit. So that's one type of map.
And then you also have nautical charts because obviously people
are sailing from one point in the other and they
need a functional map to tell them how to do that.
A t O map is not going to help you
really navigate the world. Again, it's all about where you
are in your head, where you are actually on a
(08:21):
ship at sea. You need a nautical map. And so
these were generally these would generally have an outline of
the land uh and they were really only concerned with
coastal cities and ports. And they would connect to each
other by criss crossing rum lines. So you could look
at this and you'd be like, all right, this is
the line you need to follow if you need to
get from this port to this port, in this city
(08:43):
to this city. Okay. And the more common variety of
these maps was purely utilitarian. There were no frills, and
there were certainly no sea monsters, but clients could and
did opt for specially add on so you could pay
extra for painted cities, for flax and ultimately sea monster
and and the especially maps. These were generally not the
ones that you would have on the ship. These would
(09:03):
be the ones, uh, you know, you might give to
a king or or or you know, have you know,
hanging in your your office or whatnot. Yeah, I mean,
for the most part, medieval maps just didn't have steam
monsters to pick on them because what I mean essentially
why because that's going to cost you more money, right,
And it was much more pragmatic at that time, be
as you say, from going from a point A to
point B. But then you see later in the fifteenth century,
(09:27):
as you say, they became a thing. In fact, you
mentioned kings. There's a chart maker by the name of
Francis Picarti in four hundred, who commissioned four really extraordinarily
resplendent maps to give to four European kings in exchange
for the right to trade in their countries. So that's
how valuable these pieces of paper became, because again it
(09:51):
represented exploration and also as as well as people could
at that time. Compendium of beasts, you know of this
sort of like a learned man's way of trying to
learn about the world via the armchair. Yeah, it becomes
a kind of a zoological text as well. Now one,
I really like the idea of the sea monsters as
(10:12):
an add on, Like imagine way, like, we don't really
draw maps for one another anymore, but can you imagine
you know, you're asking a friend how to get to
some way that and you're like, can you draw me
a map? Oh, and make sure to put a seed
monster on there. I want to have some monsters on
that map. Or imagine if when you use Google Maps,
you could in the same way that you have the
options to click click on the button and have traffic represented,
(10:32):
click on the button and have satellite information represented. Why
is there no monster button? So I can see where
sea monsters and land monsters might potentially be represented. There
should be a monster overlay for sure. Um, but let's
talk about some of these some more of these reasons
for monsters being depicted. Um. One of the things that
I think is really interesting is we've already touched on,
(10:53):
is that you know, the truth is stranger than fiction.
So you have people who have been out in the
ocean's fishing for cent ease, and they talk about what
they have seen. Perhaps they well, I don't know if
they'd see it at a certain depths that it exists,
But vampire squid are an amazing that's an amazing creature.
To behold sea snakes that seems insane, and yet they
(11:16):
are in the ocean. If you've ever seen a bunch
of sea snakes congregating on the ocean floor and floating
there like shafts of wheat, just passively feeding on whatever
passes by, it is an amazing, incredible image and you
could not believe it. So it stands to reason that
if you have this collective of ocean life, that of
(11:37):
course these these beasts would emerge from from all this
sort of mythology. Yeah, and as we've still happens today.
When you encounter you know, you encounter a whale in
the ocean, it's pretty phenomenal. You encounter a half rotten whale,
or any kind of partially decayed but of sea lie,
you're liable to to interpret the original form in a
(11:58):
different light. We're you know, like, even to this day,
you'll find pictures of some sort of weird thing washed
up on a beach and people are like, oh, my goodness,
this looks like nothing on earth. Clearly it's a sea monster. No,
it's just a whale. That is a grosser and in
a little decayed you're seeing more of it's a skeleton
and less of it's a flesh, and therefore it looks
like a sleeker, different creature. That's true. And even now
(12:20):
things are getting reclassified, right because every once in a
while we find the bones of something. It's like, oh,
we think that this is a new something, and they're like, no, no,
this is actually a brachiosaurs. Yeah. Now, um, Now again,
as we we mentioned sea monsters, of a lot of
them are going to originate in myth and religious tradition.
You have Jonah's whale, you have the primordial Leviathan. One
of the stories that that keeps coming up again and
(12:42):
again in Van Duser's book is the idea of the
whale or fish that's so enormous that a ship lands
at it, and then the sailors get off. They on
what they think is land. They can't. They set a fire,
and then when they set the fire, that disturbs the fish,
and the fish descends back into the ocean and they
have to scramble to get back on the ship before
(13:03):
they drown. Now, clearly this never happened um or it's
it's at least it's at least very difficult to imagine
a scenario in which this could happen. But it becomes
such a tale like it captures the imagination, and so
it comes up again and again on these maps. It's true,
And you know, their representation on the maps is not
(13:25):
just a symbolic standing for for man versus nature, but
is also a way to depict actual geographical points of
interest or even dangerous straits on a map. So there
is a there's actual pragmatic reason for them to be
on there. But a lot of these cartographers, though, what
they were trying to do is they were trying to
utilize the best information of the time to create a
(13:46):
map that it's either going to stand out its own
or it's accompanying some other texts. And so most of
the time they've never seen these creatures before, but they
were laboring to create accurate depictions. Uh. In many cases
they continued existing motifs such as the island fish, and
presume factual depictions of actual life in the oceans. They
are the hybrids that they ended up drawing. Well, those
were backed up in the theory of this land water
(14:08):
duality that we mentioned earlier, and they were able to
repeat the true aspects of their depictions. Whales are big spouts,
you know, they spout water and sometimes they damage boats. Um,
as well as the inaccuracies. Whales have two blowholes, they
have wolfish faces, and they attack boats. Yeah, it's cool
because I think about these maps is sort of the
(14:28):
graphic novel at the time. There again, Yeah, trying to
record as much scientific information is thought scientific at that time,
and trying to explain the creatures. Um. But the problem
is is that you don't get a lot of clear
perception of these creatures that you see without context. Yeah,
there's a lot of times these are These are again
(14:49):
people who are several times removed from any actual observation
of the creature. Uh, you have in the same way
that you know. Burno Eccho said, books speak to other books,
and there's those endless kind versation, particularly among between older manuscripts,
where this idea flows to this one and picked up
by this one. It's like that game we all play
as a kid where you whisper in a circle and telephone. Yeah, telephone.
(15:10):
It's like a game of telephone with with with texts
and then with visual representations of the world. You're right,
and at the end of the telephone conversation you get
the vakham Marina the sea cow right, because everything gets
so distorted. Um. I was thinking about the perception and
context problem in terms of ben Shadduck's article for Salon
(15:32):
and when she was trying to pin down a nineteenth
century account of a massive sea serpent, and the fisherman
had described it as a hundred feet long with an
interlocking barrel like body and a serpent like face. And
he kind of kept scratching at this, saying, what I mean,
these are like hardened fishermen, They're they're all like, you know,
(15:54):
they've been out there, their experience, and yet there's so
many of these fishermen who said, we saw something, and
he wonders what could it be. So he talks to
um someone who is an expert in leather back turtles.
Her name is Kara Dodge, and she says that, you know,
it's probably just that perception problem, because she says that
(16:15):
even when trying to track leatherback turtles, now they have
to train fishermen to look for the hump and not
the fin. And so now they're getting a ton more
accounts of leatherback turtles as they try to pin their whereabouts.
But until you give people the context for it or
the imagery, then it's hard to pin down. By the way,
(16:37):
the whole leatherback turtle things, he serpent turns out, Ben
Shottic thinks from his research that it could have just
been essentially a bunch of leatherback turtles that were bumped
up against each other and it makes the appearance of
these humps of serpent. Yeah, because you're saying, if you
look at videos of leather backs, it's kind of the slimy,
(17:00):
black uh image that emerges from just under the water.
And then if you look at their faces, their serpent
light and they have fangs. So if you solve that
from a you know, a good distance away, you might
think that it's this hundred foots he serpent coming at you. Now,
the other thing about that is that narrative might serve
you well if you decide to make a map to
(17:22):
dissuade other fishermen from coming to your country and fishing
your waters. And that's where I think it's fascinating that
a map from the sixteenth century could have an economic
function built into it. Yeah, the map in question is
Alas Magnus is amazing nine map, the Card of Marina,
which I'll make sure to include this one in the
(17:44):
gallery that goes with this episode as well, because it's
it's really the granddaddy of these. I mean, it's a
marvelous map from a number of different perspectives. He brings
whimsy to his creations of the monsters, he brings an
artistry and and just a sheer number of monsters on
this map is incredible. It's just it's just the world
is just completely monster haunted and it's beautiful. But there
(18:06):
is this theory that that he used a lot of
these monsters to scare away foreign fisherman from Scandinavian waters. Right,
because if you were to look at this map, you're like, ho,
get it, there's this dragon sea serpent thing at every turn,
or this other lobster slash octopus thing that might take
(18:28):
me down. Yeah, And in the full map included like
a zoological m sidebar that explained like what some of
these creatures were supposed to be. And yeah, you look
at it, and they're they're just all sorts of fantastic
um whales and whale like creatures spouting up their attacking ships.
They're pulling ships down, they're flooding them with their with
their they're spouted water. It's marvelous. Well, one of my
(18:51):
favorite ones on there is that lobster looking like creature
that's said to be an octopus, and it's depicted with
eight legs and it's holding a man in one of
its claws. Um and and and scale. You can see
that it's monstrous in in comparison to this man. And
according to its scientific information, it lives in underwater caves
and can change its color to match surrounding. Now that's amazing, right,
(19:13):
because what we're hearing there is that there's some seppal
pod information, right, Yeah, at the core of this we
have some some good information. Eight limbs can change its color,
lives in the rocks underwater. Yeah, we're talking about that
this perception of chromatoforce right, well at the time they
weren't called chromatoforce, but this idea that seppal pods can
change their skin color through pigment cells. So think about
(19:36):
being on a ship at night and gazing over the
prow and seeing by a luminescent light then emanating from
a squid and that's from the bacteria that's being housed
in the organ lights and just what a sight that
would be that there's this monstrous creature below that has
a beacon of light coming from it. Yeah, we we
(19:57):
throw in the narrative of monstrous creatures in the ocean,
and that makes the thing ginormous. And then if then
you have somebody attempting to create it on a map,
and you know, how would you come up with the
idea of the occupus if you've never seen one? You know,
like clearly this the artist had had some experience with
crustaceans and so that is the form that the artistic
representation of the creature took. Yeah, it's it's amazing because
(20:20):
you do you see the good bits of science and
they're mixed in with fantastical. It's in a way, it's
kind of like all of our depictions or a lot
of our depictions of alien life. There's something humanoid or
vaguely humanoid about them, you know. That is the form
that we understand is intelligent life. So that's the form
we tend to to project in trying to understand, uh,
mythical or imagine creatures. And it's similar here. The form
(20:43):
that they understood was the crustaceans, so that's the one
that was projected. Are you saying that we just need
to be retrained to look for humps instead of fins
out there? Uh No, I mean in the intergalactic space.
I think it just comes down to the fact that
you have data in your mind that using to understand
the outer world, and we're never gonna haven't have enough
(21:04):
data to understand some of the mysteries out there. We're
gonna be able to sort of partially construct them, which
has implications for how we perceive our universe. Right, all right, Well,
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to run through some more specific examples of
of how we have interpreted real things as fantastic sea
monsters and the sort of journey from puremid to truth
(21:27):
in uh, the walrus and in the whale. All right,
we're back, and first of all, let's talk a little
bit about the walrus. Now, the walrus is a great
example of a creature that that does not exist worldwide.
It's not something that you would have, It's not a
(21:48):
form you would have common knowledge off. You know, like
a fish. You know, fish vary a lot, but there's
sort of a prototypical fish and uh, and you can
you know, one culture knows what a fish is, an
other culture knows of the fishes. A walrus is a
little more exotic, it's a little more uh monstrous. So
when we when we look to the various interpretations of
(22:08):
the walrus on these maps, again often depicted by someone
several times removed from actual observation of the thing itself,
you see a curious evolution of form. Uh. And there's
a there's an excellent bit in Van Deser's book where
he lays out eight different images and you get to
see how it changes. Um. For instance, you look at
(22:28):
the fifteen sixteen Carter Marina by Martin Walt Simuler, and
you'll see what looks like a deformed elephant. Then you
look at a fifty two copy of Tommy's Geography, and
this time the same artist, Walt Simuler, depicts a straight
up elephant. Like the first time it was kind of
a monstrous elephant. Then he's just like, oh, it's it's
an elephant, like it has feet, has it's just a
(22:51):
brown elephant that apparently lives in the water and is
a walrus. Okay uh. Fast forward to fifteen thirty nine.
Ish are may on oleg Magnus depicts something that looks
more like a fishy alligator with tusks. It has kind
of that wolfish face common to many sea monster depictions,
and this design pops up in other photographers work as well.
(23:12):
But then we look at fifteen fifty five and we
see depictions of the walrus continue to grow more and
more accurate around her head, flippers instead of feet, tusk
like a walrus instead of an elephant, and then you're
going to take on a more appropriate color. So in
this we see what begins as just uh, you know,
an attempt to understand an exotic form by using what
(23:35):
you knew. You knew what an elephant looked like from
existing you know, well maintained and and and well backed
up illustrations, and so you apply that form to imagining
this tusk fat creature that lives in an arctic waters.
You know. The weird thing about that is um when
you consider extreme mammals that have gone extinct and you
turn back the clock, you start to see some of
(23:57):
these weird the attribute showing up. And I'm thinking about
the whale with legs that was in the exhibit extreme
animals here at from Bank, and how that sort of
plays into this idea of this walrus that's depicted here
in the book. Now should be noted, even though a
lot of these photographers were again trying to use the
best information of the time to depict an accurate vision
(24:18):
of the world, there was still a lot of uncritical
copying of sea monsters. For instance, a fifteen fifty eight
edition of Cornelius enthuses Carta van Us a map of
northern Europe. It included a fabulous flying turtle. Uh. I mean,
it's it's kind of like a gammera creature in a way.
It's got like it's kind of beaked, uh nose, It's
(24:39):
got mostly a turtle body around the rest of it,
except its front legs are like eagle wings. So it's
a really fabulous looking creature. But here's the thing. It
turns out it was probably at the logo of the publisher.
Then that's the only reason it was on the map.
The publisher's logo was this flying turtle, and then when
people copied that, they included it as if it was
(25:01):
supposed to be there, as if it was a depiction
of the natural world. It would be like if you
copied a Rand McNally map and you included that Rand
McNally diamond logo and said it was a continent. You know, right,
You know, I can't help it thinking. I'm sorry, a
little bit distracted by the legos chimera sets that have
come out. Have you seen those of a chimera the
chimera lego sets where they've got different animals depicted. No, No,
(25:25):
I haven't seen that. They should take a page from
these maps, I'm telling you. But that's not to say
that again that everybody was just copying monsters willing knowing
there were some very there were some definitely some skeptics
of the time, and that's always important when you're talking
about the Middle Ages or Renaissance times, that not everybody
was just blindly believing everything that came across their play.
One great example of this, as explained in the Van
(25:46):
Deuser's book, you had this guy Fromorrow from Morrow lived
in a fourteen fifty thereabouts when he was doing his thing,
and he wrote, because there are many cosmographers and most
learned men who right that in this Africa there are
human animal monsters, I think it is necessary to give
my opinion. In all these kingdoms of the Negroes, I
have never found anyone who could give me information on
(26:08):
what those men have written. Thus, not knowing anything, I
cannot bear witness to anything, and I leave research in
the matter to those who are curious about such things.
So basically saying, I'm not buying this information that you're
telling me about what's going on in Africa in terms
of the strange creatures and the weird people that live there,
So I'm not going to comment on it, I'm not
gonna draw it, etcetera. May Yeah, it's a little bit
(26:31):
of a weak sauce statement because it's like, yeah, I
don't know, yeah, I suppose that was bold for back
then though. Yeah. So let's talk about whales, because these
guys are amazing in terms of the sort of stories
that were circulated around about them and then how it
was depicted and the images of them. And I was
thinking about this because last night I was looking at
(26:52):
pictures of humpback whales and um, I was looking other
blue holes as you do, as I do, and I
couldn't help but just be really sort of um taken back,
because as I looked at those pictures, it started to
look like a giant human snout stuck on the back
(27:13):
of a whale. And if you look at pictures close
up of a blowhole, you'll see that there's like a
little bridge between what looks like nostrils. Um. And I thought, well,
if that were to be swimming, you know, parallel to
your ship, and you happen to look at that, wouldn't
you sort of misunderstand that as a distortion or um,
(27:35):
you know, as as a sort of monstrosity of a
human form in a way that it looked like, oh,
this must be a monster because there's their giant snout,
And how then would that be depicted? How would how
would you would you describe that to somebody and they
had to draw it having not seen it, and you
weren't there to say no, a little more little a
little closer to the animals back now, a little more
(27:56):
like a human nose, you know, if you weren't there
to actually get that kind of feedback, how would they
draw it? So? And if yeah, water is is just
spouting out of it right then then sort of like
what do you mean water spouts out of it? Then
clearly there must be some sort of tube system here. So,
as we've mentioned previously, the whale is a pretty classic
sea monster if people have been seeing them for ages,
(28:18):
even before we knew what to call it. We had
the Leviathan, we had the giant fish that swallowed Jonah.
You had the island fish that we talked about with
the people land on it, and many of the older
whales of there especially, they were these wolf faced beasts
with long fish tails. They were spouters. But it took
a while to work out exactly what all that spouting
(28:39):
was about. Pristance. You look at one one map free
you see this very wolfish actually furry sea monster known
as a spouter, attacking a ship by vomiting water upon
its deck out of its mouth. So here's a great
example of someone probably said, oh, there are these whales,
and they spout water, they spit up water, and so
then the artist depiction of that is a whale rolling
(29:00):
up to this ship, opening its mouth and just vomiting
water on it and like and just completely drowning the ship. Okay,
so there's there's that. Uh. And then if you look
at Ole Magnus's carda Marna again, you see that the
whales here spout water from two blow holes to Shrek
like tube like horns that emerge from the top of
the creature. And this is uh. This is a classic
(29:22):
attribute of of of Magnus Magnus's maps and his depictions
of sea monsters. And the crazy thing is that it
matches up so well with what you were just saying
about the huntback whales real blow holes. If someone were
to say, oh, well, they have these two holes on
their back, and there's the water, and then if if
it's passing through you know, down the telephone game of
illustration and manuscript and matt making and that comes to
(29:45):
somebody and they're like, Okay, well, what does an animal
like that look like if it has two holes on
its back to split water out up? And then it
becomes this idea of these two tubes sticking out of
the creature's back, right, and you can kind of see
again like how this m this weirdness occurs and the depictions,
in fact, it's very steampunk looking. These a lot of these. Yeah,
there's a certain you can't help but interpret them as
(30:07):
kind of smoke stacks, so they have this kind of
biomechanical vibe to them. Yeah. Now I can't help but
be reminded of this class that I took in college,
and it was a psychology class having to do with sexuality,
and one of the things we had to do is
we had to pair up and one of us had
to look at a depiction of a sexual act and
the other person had to draw it as described by
(30:28):
the person looking at it. So one of one of
the things I remember is there was a Victorian woman
on a bike that was a bike that was made
of a penis. Let's just say that penis parts, which
is kind of a difficult thing to try to Nobody
knows what a bike is, But then you have to
describe a bike that's made out of a penis. It
might be difficult to make them out of penises. Well,
you know, this was some out of someone's imagination, and
(30:50):
so the other person had to try to describe what
they are looking at. Well, you could go across the
class and you could see all sorts of variations of
what this penis bike look like. It made me think, well,
this is very much the same thing that's going on
in these depictions of maps, minus the penis. Yeah. Another
great example of this comes from Pierre des Selaer's World
Map of fifty six, which has a fairly realistic depiction
(31:14):
of whaler's harpooning a whale. But it's it's a little serpentine.
It's flippers are a bit like wings, and most remarkably
of all, it has a gigantic mustache. It looks kind
of like the luck dragons from the Never New Story.
It's a gentleman whale. Yeah, so so why does the
whale have the mustache? Why is there suddenly? You know,
because they're trying to clearly, it's an attempted depiction of
(31:36):
an actual cultural tradition. Of whaling, of hunting the whales,
catching the whales, harvesting the whales, and a lot of
these accounts included, you know, some some very specific accounts
of what then the whale parts are used for and
how it's used, you know, culturally and economically. But it
has this mustache. Well, according to Van Duser, the mustache
is probably the artist's attempt to portray bailen, which the
(32:00):
whaling basques commonly referred to as barbaus dave balina, or
the beards of the whale. So again you have to
set you're trying to make the best use of the
information that's provided to you, and then someone talks about
the beard of the whale. Are you talking about the
filtering system, which of course is very internal and it's
certainly not a mustache. But if you describe it as
(32:22):
the beards of the whale, and then someone down the
chain has to draw the beards of the whale, this
is what you get, a whale with a giant must
I love it. I was just like to imagine I'm
sitting around, you know, at some pubs saying it's like
when you get you know, that crumbs in your mustache.
It silts it out, you know, and it's easy for
us as modern commentators to to have a lot of
fun with this. But but just think about how to day,
(32:44):
like all the information in the world is instantly at
your fingertips. If you if you've even halfway know what
you're doing on the Internet, you can fact check something
pretty quickly. But still, think of the emails you get
in your inbox just spouting complete nonsense that no one
or the questions that come up one book where you're
you're like, really, why are you asking all of us
when you could have just googled that and found out
(33:05):
immediately if you knew what sources to look for. Now,
I'll take that that same mindset, or even some variation
of it, and put it in an age without Internet,
where you only have books speaking to books over the
course of decades and centuries, and this is the kind
of closed system of information that you get exactly. Now.
That's not to say we didn't have accurate depictions of whales.
So as early as fourteen thirteen we see a realistic
(33:27):
illustration of a whale hunted by whalers on Mercedes Valestis
nautical chart. And finally, in an interesting closure of these
two trends of the fantastic and the realistic. We see
the Nova Frontier map, which features an old fashioned sea
monster with double spouts and wolfish heads, you know, very
much in Magnus's style. But then you also see an
(33:49):
incredibly realistic portrayal of way whalers harvesting a whale. So
you see the incorporation of the older idea of the
sea monster as a as just a fantastic decorative note,
while you also see this this very accurate depiction of
whales and whaling. So you see the two coming together,
and you see the idea of the old sea monster
(34:09):
becoming more and more just a relic, more and more
just a decoration that eventually fades away. Well or it
becomes a tattoo, right because it still has power as
a symbol, because you found that awesome tattoo with someone
had one of old magnus h shrek Horn sea monsters. Yeah,
and you know even some of the more classical tattoos
that show all sorts of sea creatures, um, you know,
(34:32):
taking out a boat or just being ferocious. It kind
of this sort of um talisman against your trade. If
you are someone who is you know a marine merchant
or just who works in the industry, industry being in
of the ocean, the oceans. So in a sense, you
can look at sea monsters on maps as a story
(34:55):
of man versus ocean over the course of centuries. We
see the gradual journey from the ocean as a place
of chaos and certain death to a thing conquered by man.
Think back to those early depictions in the o t
world maps. So over again, the outer ocean is teaming
with monsters or as in a map of Moundy from
eleven eighty, most of the map is outer ocean as
a tail eating serpent or or a boris. And then
(35:18):
you also see various titan sized sea monsters out there
as well. Uh. And then we but we gradually learned
to combat the ocean, and we gradually learned to combat
these uh, these monsters of the mind um in the
Gulf of Cattle in Atlas of thirteen seventy five, we
see a depiction of pearl divers utilizing spells to keep
sea monsters at bay. Fifteen forty five, there's a map
(35:39):
where we see men aboard a ship driving spears into
an attacking beaked tentacle horror, and in the Carton Marina
we see men blowing trumpets stared off one of these
spouting whales. And then most remarkably fifteen sixteen, on Martin
Walt Sigmueller's Carton Marina, we see King man Ale of
(36:00):
Portual writing a sea monster off the tip of Africa
to symbolize Portugal's mastery of the oceans. And from there,
you know, again, sea monsters become more and more decoration
and we start adding more and more ships into our
artistic representation of the ocean and more technology technology. Yeah,
and they kind of go by the wayside because by
the time that the camera has been invented is starting
(36:22):
to document nature, then you you know, have a moving
away of this idea of these really monstrous creatures, and
then the maps begin to rot. We only retain the
you know, a very slim number of them, and they
just become creatures of fantasy, and then we tend to
forget that at times they were wrapped up in symbolism,
(36:43):
that they had economic purpose, that they that they were
attempts to understand the zoology of the ocean. Yeah, and
I wanted to kind of lead out of this episode
with a passage that Shaddick actually brings up in his article.
It's from Moby Dick, and it's when Ishmael climbs up
the rigging to take his watch, and he's sitting on
(37:05):
the top sailed yard and is hanging his leg, is
kind of hanging lazily over by the sail, and he's
reflecting on all the other young men who have taken
watch from those heights. And here it is, says luld In,
such an opium like listlessness, of vacant, unconscious reverie. Is
this absent minded youth, by the blending cadence of waves
and thoughts, that at last he loses his identity, takes
(37:27):
the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image
of that deep blue, bottomless soul pervading mankind in nature,
And every strange, half seeing, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him,
every dimly discovered uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems
to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only
people the soul by continually flitting through it. Here you go,
(37:51):
there you go, man in nature as one awesome well,
you know. On that note, let's call the robot over
and let's see if we have any listener. Maybe. All right,
we have one for you today. This one is from
Erin Erin Wright sentences, Hi, Robert and Julie. I was
just listening to the Circus Freaks episode and it brought
me back to my college days. My nursing school was
part of a university with a music theater school. It's
(38:14):
a great combination. You bring those two energies together. Uh.
One day those worlds collided. A visiting pyrotechnic stage professional
came to a small gathering my friends were having. We
learned to swallow fire. The trick was using kerosene, like
you mentioned in the fire blowing. It's not toxic and
it burns just warmer than the human mouth. I won't
give the particulars, but it was an amazing trick I
(38:34):
haven't done since. My husband shakes his head in shame
and I tell people I can do this, and my
father in law wants me to do this at his
Viking funeral. We're thinking cremated ashes in a small wooden
boat in a small pond, casting the whole thing into
a ball of fury with flaming eros. Thank you so
much for your mind blowing podcast. I'm I am embarking
on a new career. I listened to your podcast while
(38:55):
baking tasty muffins for a farmer's market here in town
with the hopes of expanding to a small cafe. Your podcast,
as well as your siblings on the Stuff Network, gives
me hours of entertainment while baking and boxing my goods.
I've also started having a quiz from my Facebook followers
using the knowledge I've gained. Again, thanks sincerely, uh Aaron
the Main Street Muffin Factory. All right, well that was
(39:18):
very entertaining a Viking funeral. Yeah, I mean that's a
way to go out. That's a good way to go
out on an episode about sea monsters too. So hey,
would you like to learn more? Would you like to
see more? Again? Head by stuff to Blow your mind
dot com After you listen to this. While you're listening whichever,
find the gallery that we've put together with pictures of
some of these monsters we're talking about. I'll definitely be
(39:40):
including a lot of stuff from Oliga. Magnus is fantastic
map and you can look at those all you want
and pull up a big screen version of the map
as well. So if you want to just really pour
over it, and you can also let us know what
you think about all this. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Tumbler. You can find us
on Twitter. On Twitter, we are Below the Mind and
we'd love to hear from from you about your thoughts
(40:01):
on sea monsters if you've if you've looked at them
a lot, what are some of your favorites are? What
are some of your favorite real life monsters in the ocean.
We have a seamonster tattoo. Yes, if you have a
seamonster tattoo, we would love to see it if it
is appropriate for us to see it. Um. You can
also check us out on stuff to Blow your Mind
on YouTube, where we look at the camera and commit
(40:22):
acts of word salad. Yeah, Mind Stuff Show, Mind Stuff Show.
And you can also drop us a line at Below
the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works
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