Over the centuries, the high seas have served as blank canvas for cartographers’ worst nightmares. They have dotted the globe’s oceans with a whole crypto-zoo of island-sized whales, deadly seductive mermaids, giant sea serpents, and many more heraldic horrors. As varied as this marine bestiary is, mapmakers have settled on a single species as their favourite for land-based beastliness: the octopus.
Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus – CLO for short – need not worry about being in the right ecosphere. Being fictional, it is not restrained to any biosphere, and has only one iconic function: instilling readers with fear and revulsion. The CLO does have a link to the ocean, though. It is clearly descended from an older fictional monstrosity: the Kraken, a sea-bound giant squid whose enormous tentacles dragged whole ships down to their watery graves.