Old Sea Map with Monsters

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This is the famous map called Carta Marina. It is about 500 years old, depicts the North of Europe and includes sea monsters.
The monsters are seen assailing the ships and each other.

The map is in public domain at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carta_Marina.jpeg

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Some monsters resemble big fish, others are like serpents and crabs and many have the faces of humans looking stupid, as if establishing a correlation between stupidity and evil.

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The geography is all wrong, as the map is based on the sailors’ ideas and memories rather than on any calculations.
The problem is that now one cannot take these pictures serious anymore. Their terror has become our entertainment.

The red sea serpent would be about the size of Rhode Island and it bites into a ship as if it were a bocadillo.

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And don’t they look as if they were walking on the surface of the water?
The monster on the left has feet like a dog and appears to enjoy her conversation with that mustached neighbour of hers. —

The pictures are from the map shown above in public domain at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carta_Marina.jpeg

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The swimmers, too, are at risk.
The fish that attack the swimmer are all as big as he is, but the monster that approaches the fish is many times bigger.

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There is another map called the Abraham Ortelius also featuring lots of zoology in the sea surrounding Iceland.

Columbus would have had maps like these to visualize a route to India which turned out to be America. These maps are from his time.

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And here is another dream boy. Is he going to forage on the ship including passengers and crew?

Why did they imagine the monsters all so big?

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The real monsters that live in the sea and have been photographed are smaller and much less dangerous.

The  picture of the walking fish is from mypettalks.com/content/gallery/fish/ where however  I could no longer find it. The picture of the wrinkled fish is from Wikipedia and is linked to the large original.

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Mola_mola_ocean_sunfish by  Fred Hsu  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mola_mola_ocean_sunfish_Monterey_Bay_Aquarium_2.jpg.
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See?
The monster is as big as an island and it is being assaulted by a smaller monster that bites his belly. These are again fragments of the Carta Marina at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carta_Marina.jpeg

All of these monsters look evil, but they also have something sad or clueless in their faces, and their eyes are more expressive than those of common fish.

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This is a real monster, a deep sea fish from Wiki.
Apparently,90% of the ocean’s volume is not accessible to humans.
It does not say why.

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And remember Melville’s White Whale?

Here are two spermwhales getting attacked by some little boats.

The picture is in the Penguin edition of Moby Dick and on Ismael’s WordPress blog.
In literature there are many sea-monsters.
Here is an octopus that is larger than the ship it assails….

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and a squid that got hold of a sailor:

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Added June 2, 2009:

In answer to some search keys received for this post:

The map with all those monsters is not from the Middle Ages. On the ontrary, these discoveries put an end to the Middle Ages.

One is by Olaus Magnus (1490 – 1557), and the other is by Abraham Ortelius (1527 – 1598).

On some of these maps you can see how they used to build their ships:

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A very large  version of the America map is at the US library of Congress  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/

And the strange fact is that these monsters were still feared, drawn, and studied, and kids maybe had to learn their Latin names at school long after Columbus decided that the Earth had to be round and that there would be a way to reach the East by going west.

The photo is from NASA and free for non-commercial use at http://mix.msfc.nasa.gov/IMAGES/HIGH/9265044.jpg

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January 2013

Giant squid

Gravure d’un calmar géant échoué en 1877 sur la baie Trinity, à Terre-Neuve.
Giant squid beached in 1877 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Giant_squid_catalina2.png . The author is not known. The etching is in public domain.

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