by Bill Schutt
The legend of Odysseus’s encounter with Scylla is quoted accurately from Homer. The same monster appears in several forms on coins of the Roman Republic, from at least 270 b.c. through a posthumous memorialization (35 b.c.) of Pompey’s fears about conquest from the sea. The creature’s upper body was typically a nude woman, occasionally represented as youthful “Athena” holding a Gorgon’s shield and wearing a gown suggestive of writhing tentacles. Other times, the lower extremities were tentacles outright, often terminating in fish tails—literally a chimera made from three different creatures. In Greco-Roman mythology, Scylla was a beautiful nymph transformed into a monster. On a Pompey coin, the lower part of her body is a multiheaded dragon, rising from the sea with serpent’s tails and the faces of humans and dogs (for a dreadfully beautiful animation of what Romans imagined, see John Carpenter’s film The Thing). A variation on this multiheaded sea-dragon imagery—already quite familiar to Romans by the time Judeo-Christians set out to convert the Gentiles—appears to have made its way into the Roman-Christian book of Revelation and into much apocryphal religious literature and art. An example of this can be found on the island at the center of our fable.
Clinging to the cliff sides of Santorini’s “Mesa Vouno” is a church dedicated to Saint George, the dragon-slaying patron saint of England. Newcomers to early paintings and carvings of the dragon, having often heard stories of a towering fire-breathing monster, are often surprised to see that the dragon seems to be writhing and in retreat and is pitifully small—so small that George would have had to climb down from his horse to kill the beast by stabbing it or crushing it under the heel of one boot. Saint George’s dragon seems to have undergone many transformations during centuries of retellings and repaintings, each of them fascinating in its own right. The story of Saint George riding in on a horse and rescuing a princess from sacrifice to a sea monster closely (and possibly not coincidentally) echoes the ancient narrative of Perseus riding in on the winged horse, Pegasus, to rescue the princess Andromeda from a sea dragon.
The historical Saint George was scourged and beheaded about a.d. 303, near the end of an anti-Christian purge initiated by Emperor Diocletian. The Roman Catholic Encyclopedia cites narratives of pilgrims dedicating their first church to George within only a few years of his execution. Along the eastern shore of the Black Sea, where Saint George was originally said to have defeated the dragon, he was deified by the country that became Georgia. Saint George was officially canonized under Pope Gelasins I in a.d. 494 (a time in which Rome was fading and stories about the knights of King Arthur were just on the very cusp of originating). The earliest clearly defined textual stories of Saint George encountering a sea dragon record prior song-stories and pilgrimage tales in a Roman province of northern Turkey (bordering Georgia). The stories reached the British Isles by a.d. 650 (and later expanded to include Saint George resurrecting from the grave and joining British knights in victorious battle).
Northern Greece’s Vinica icons, dating from about a.d. 730, are the first known to visually portray Saint George (and other saints, including Mary Magdalene’s brother, Philip) slaying evil “dragons.” In this case, the dragons are little knots of snakes and tentacles with human heads. Saint George is shown riding in on a horse, with a lance held high above a cowering evil serpent’s nest. Here’s where it gets complicated: Because Pliny’s nephew was kind to the earliest Christians during times of oppression, his works were preserved by the churches, copied, and widely distributed. This may explain why several of the sea dragons depicted in religious paintings of Saint George have long, ropy forearms, multiple coiled tails, and even wings that sometimes more resemble the arms of Pliny’s “polypus” than anything capable of flapping. These creatures are also surprisingly small, compared to Saint George’s horse.
If (and this is a big if) the sea dragon originated in the imagery of a real octopus mixed in with Pliny’s version, then a legend originating along the Black Sea about a water serpent to whom a town sacrificed virgins until a saint came along and speared it makes a certain amount of sense. The octopus is uncommon in the Black Sea (especially along its eastern shore), and it becomes easy to imagine how, though smaller than a horse, one of the lamb-sized species—or even a smaller, more ordinary individual—dwelling among submerged rocks near a port and glimpsed by people not likely to have seen one before would frighten the villagers. Easily associated or confused with Tethys and other Triton sea gods of Emperor Diocletian’s time, or with the serpent features of Christianity’s dragons, this would not be the first time that villagers began drowning their virgin daughters and sacrificing them to the sea.
In all early paintings, and in many dating from the eighteenth century, the terrifying sea beast is much smaller than Saint George’s horse (only centuries later later did it swell to Godzilla or Game of Thrones proportions). The dragon in the Santorini church, like the one that came to be engraved under the sword and hooves of Saint George’s charge, as depicted on the British sovereign, is consistent with most eighteenth-century dragon imagery.
The story committed to writing in Great Britain’s Golden Legend (a.d. 1275) is more consistent with the “polypus” and our Santorini Kraken: “Where St. George slew the dragon, there sprang up a fountain of living water, which healeth sick people that drank thereof.”
To better serve MacCready’s mission to Santorini, we did take the liberty of pulling the World War II aircraft carrier Intrepid out of mothballs a little earlier than history records. Actual history reports that having survived five kamikaze attacks and one torpedo strike, the “Fighting I” was officially retired as part of the reserve fleet in 1947, and recommissioned for refitting in 1952. At the birth of the jet age, she became the first carrier to launch planes using steam-catapults, before deploying to the Mediterranean Fleet. During the space race between the United States and Russia, the carrier assisted in the pickups of astronauts Scott Carpenter, John Young, and Gus Grissom. The ship did conduct exercises deep within the margin of polar climate (in operations similar to High-jump) during the 1970s. Her final port of call was New York City, where she became a world-class air and space museum. In 2002 and 2003, the carrier’s well-shielded offices were temporarily reactivated, for a final military operation that included Navy medical and New York Fire Department planning for dirty-bomb protocols. Her final spaceflight-related duty was receipt of the space shuttle Enterprise—which had passed its airstrip approach and landing proof-of-concept test (1977) with Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise at the helm.
The nuclear mini-sub NR-3 is based on Admiral Rickover’s original designs for what became the fantastic vessel NR-1. The environment inside deep-diving mini-subs (also called submersibles) is based in this story on multiple firsthand experiences by colleagues who have actually lived in the NR-1, have descended more than two miles in the vessel’s “cousins,” and even survived a volcanic event/landslide and temporary stranding on the bottom of the sea—much as described in this tale.
Agent Number T070 was a real-life OSS agent who served during World War II with his British counterpart, Ian Fleming. “T070” went on to write A Night to Remember and Day of Infamy (the book that became the film classic Tora! Tora! Tora!). His real name was Walter Lord. At war’s end, he participated in the interrogations of Hitler’s architect Albert Speer (“Speer only pretended at being the repentant Nazi”); a surviving pilot who flew the raid on Pearl Harbor (“the start of a friendship”); and German physicist Werner Heisenberg (“an unsung hero, perhaps, who sabotaged the German atomic bomb project from within . . . Heisenberg could not believe we actually built and dropped the thing”). During the war, Lord knew the retired baseball star and polymathic genius Moe Berg, valued for his intensely photographic memory and fluency in multiple languages. In late 1944, Berg had been assigned by the OSS to kill Heisenberg at a Zurich conference and at the last moment declined to do so (leaving Lord and others somewhat perplexed, for many months). Berg continued working for a while with the postwar descen
dant of OSS, the CIA, and was instrumental in analysis of Tito in Yugoslavia. Ian Fleming went on to write Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and also created James Bond, based on his friend Walter, himself, and several other World War II agents (among them Berg, who had gathered much information in Italy about Eberhart Sanger’s plans to bomb America from orbit with a piloted predecessor to the space shuttle, in a manner consistent with certain Bond villains). The namesake of Fleming’s semifictional character was a real-life vertebrate zoologist who had written one of his favorite books: Birds of the West Indies. Little was ever told of the World War II period in Fleming’s life, or Lord’s, aside from a few humorous anecdotes and bits of declassified history that went into their books. In 1992, when a New York Times writer approached Walter Lord about a biography and the birth stages of the CIA, Lord said, “Never want to relive that. It’s too depressing a story to tell.” Moe Berg, when asked to write an autobiography, had said the same thing.
Nora Nesbitt’s James Bond–like tooth gadget, designed to call in a self-silencing strike on a captured scientist and anyone who might be interrogating her, really existed. We know a colleague who actually (and voluntarily) had one temporarily installed.
The volcano and the bombs: an event much like the eruption that led to Yanni’s capture, and the escape of the ship that captured her, actually did occur at Nea Kameni, at the center of Santorini Lagoon.
On September 18, 1940, one of Mussolini’s bombers attacked a freighter after it departed from the port of Fira for Athens. As in our fable, the ship was passing just north of Nea Kameni, in the region of on-again, off-again hot-water plumes that had been erupting since 1865. As in our fable, all of the bombs missed the ship, and hit the volcanic equivalent of a neurological trigger point instead. For the first and only time in history, a bombing raid instantly triggered a volcanic explosion, with columns of ash and steam towering more than a mile above the island and drawing a smoke screen over the freighter. The crew of the bomber radioed that they had apparently struck a ship full of munitions. Rome radio broadcasts proudly announced the victory, but the citizens of Santorini and Therasia offered a toast in the direction of the volcano. They had seen the ship emerge from beneath the smoke screen and exit the lagoon unharmed. Throughout the war, Nea Kameni continued to cough boulders and dust into the air almost daily. The waters around it steamed and swirled, one afternoon milky white or yellow, the next morning green, or violet, or scarlet.
The Virginia Beach incident: The stranding of a Russian submarine and damage to its rubberized hull by an unknown giant cephalopod is a composite event, informed by three actual incidents. The first event’s biological results were reported by J. C. Scott in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (August 1978, p. 106). This involved a collision of the U.S.S. Stein (a Knox-class destroyer escort). During a mission in 1978, the rubberized skin over a submerged dome of monitoring equipment was damaged by contact with a large mass that gouged and slashed away nearly 10 percent of the dome surface. The remaining skin contained several hundred broken barbs and “hooked claws,” morphologically consistent in every way with “teeth” rimming the suction cups of certain cephalopods. They differed only by a matter of degree. These “teeth” were much larger than those from any known cephalopod.
In a separate, non-“Kraken” related event of the period, known as the Vela Incident of September 22, 1979, a satellite detected the distinctive flash signature of a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon at 40 degrees south latitude in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of South Africa. During a wreckage search, a standoff developed between submersible-equipped ships of the United States and Russia. Meanwhile, there were concerns in Australia and New Zealand that radioactive fallout was approaching. Washington assured Canberra and Wellington that the flash had nothing at all to do with nuclear testing by either of the two suspected nations, Israel or South Africa. This was the truth, but only part of the truth. The rest of the story involved what at that time was classified under the category “Russian unscheduled energetic disassembly” of a nuclear device—or, “Oops, that atomic bomb was not supposed to go off then and there” (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Albright, 1994).
The fallout path shot straight through Australia’s south island of Tasmania and reached New Zealand’s capital, where some of the radioactive debris came down with the rain. In the spring of 1980—helping to kick-start the Australia–New Zealand nuclear-free zone movement—plant species known to respond quickly to low-level radiation came up displaying spectacular mutations (strange clovers, and crown chrysanthemums with multiple flower centers on the outside, ringing central clusters of petals). This led to the discovery of isotopes in the thyroids of sheep and a lot of political outlet hitting the fan. While children collected seven-and eight-leaved clovers, the Virginia Beach incident of February 1981 occurred.
This third mishap contributed mightily to America and Russia deciding to reduce the probability of blundering into a nuclear war by vastly pushing down the number of nuclear weapons in the arsenals (initially by 80 percent). The program was called START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). As Harry Truman would undoubtedly have observed: “A good start. We should START, and START again.”
The Vela Incident and the real Virginia Beach incident (which, except for the “here’s looking at you, squid” moment, happened much as described) were two of three Russian mishaps at sea that led novelist and honorary CIA publicist Tom Clancy to write his classic, The Hunt for Red October.
On the very real genetic frontier, it seems almost inevitable that we will be able to cure almost every disease, to vastly extend human life spans, reengineer life, and even turn the Jurassic Park recipe into something quite real.
Some of our colleagues, concerned with the possibilities of wars generated by overpopulation, are looking toward Mars as a possible relief valve for earth.
Hopefully, these novels convey a point: we do not live on a disposable planet.
Fortunately, contrasted against a time when major, problem-solving technological breakthroughs came every three years (at the turn of the century), they now come every three months. And the rate is accelerating.
There is plenty to hope for, if our species is wise, and pays attention.
But as anyone who studies Rome in the time of Pliny will see, the loss of liberty and the threat of the fall were always lurking no more than a generation away.
Rome fell with its engineers in possession of multiple water-powered grain mills with their paddles arranged in rows. It fell in possession of steam pumps, ball bearings, and multiple gearshift devices (among them the famed Antikythera mechanism). As near as we can tell from history and archaeology, if anyone ever connected them together to run a steam engine on wheels, or on a boat, no one paid attention.
It’s easy to mock the Romans for where they went wrong, but future generations, if we become the next archaeological mystery, may mock us for the same reasons.
Dmitri Chernov observed, sooner or later, every civilization is archaeology. Every civilization becomes a ghost story.
It does not have to be that way.
We simply have to live up to our species name: sapiens—“Wise.”
We can do better than merely “be fit” and “survive.”
We have the potential to excel.
And if we are unwise, if we become the next Atlantis legend, then there will be no words more poignant as an epitaph than “What might have been.”
Acknowledgments
JRF: I wish to thank, equally (1) my teachers and (2) friends in the USN and USMC and related expeditions. Among the latter, I carry with me, forever alive in my memories, those who did not make it back to shore. Ohana. Ohana.
I acknowledge warmly, over the course of many years, the people of Santorini, including the Marinatos family, members of the Greek Orthodox Church, Yaron Niski, and Petros Mantouvalos. Much gratitude also to James Cameron, Walter Lord, Robert Ballard, former Cousteau science officer Tom Dettweiler, Clifton Truman Daniel, and the rea
l-life “coin boy.”
Thanks also to Gillian MacKenzie, our incomparable editor Lyssa Keusch, her assistant Mireya Chiriboga, and Patricia J. Wynne.
A personal shout-out to our veterans—and to all first responders, past, present, and future.
B.S. thanks Janet and Billy Schutt, John Hermanson, Darrin Lunde, Kathy Kennedy, Gillian MacKenzie, Leslie Nesbitt Sittlow, Don Peterson, Nancy Simmons, Carol Steinberg, Patricia J. Wynne, and Lyssa Keusch.
Selected Bibliography
Amir, Sumayah. “Octopuses, Squids, and Cuttlefish Can Edit Their RNA.” Science News, April 7, 2017. Also on this subject, at increasing depth of technical exposition: Steph Yin, “A Genetic Oddity May Give Octopuses and Squids Their Smarts,” New York Times, Science, April 6, 2017, citing the journal Cell: Liscovitch-Bauer, et al. “Trade-off between Transcriptome Plasticity and Genome Evolution in Cephalopods.” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092–8674(17)30344–6.
Ball, Philip. “When the Mediterranean was a Desert.” Nature, August 12, 1999.
Cullimore, Roy (on Droycon Bioconcepts and bacterial/fungal/archaea “super-organisms,” an introduction): “Gigantic New Super Organism with ‘Social Intelligence’ Is Devouring the Titanic.” Oceanexplorer.noaa.gov, April 14, 2011.
Gierliński, Gerard D., et al. “Possible Hominin Footprints from the Late Miocene (c 5.7 Million Years Ago) of Crete?” Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. DOI: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2017.07.006.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016.
