Record #148
Zaratan
An island-sized sea creature that deceives sailors before sinking beneath the ocean
Original Text
There is one story that has ranged the whole of geography and all epochs - the tale of mariners who land on an unknown island which then sinks into the sea and drowns them because it is a living creature. This invention is found in the first voyage of Sindbad and in Canto VI, Stanza 37, of Orlando Furioso (Ch’ellasia una isolettacicredemo- ‘We believed it [the whale] to be a small island’); in the Irish legend of St Brendan and in the Greek bestiary of Alexandria; in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, I;;;) by the Swedish ecclesiastic Olaus Magnus and in this passage from the opening of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, ‘stretched out huge in length’, is compared to a whale (203-8):
Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam, The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixed anchor in his scaly rind, Moors by his side under the lee, while night Invests the sea . . .
Paradoxically, one of the earliest versions of the legend
gives it in order to refute it. This is recorded in the Bookof I;;
Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam, The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixed anchor in his scaly rind, Moors by his side under the lee, while night Invests the sea . . .
Paradoxically, one of the earliest versions of the legend
gives it in order to refute it. This is recorded in the Bookof I;;