Here There Be Sea Monsters

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 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. 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, 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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