The kraken is a creature of open water. It belongs to the deep reaches of the Sea of Coin and the western ocean beyond the Bagii Isles, and it does not come inshore. Coastal fishermen do not encounter it. Crews on the long crossings occasionally do, and a sighting close enough to describe happens perhaps once in a generation — often enough that the accounts exist, rarely enough that no two of them agree on size. Feldian naturalists have argued for two centuries about whether the animal is there at all.
What they agree on is that it is very large, that it moves below the surface, and that it was gone before anyone had finished being frightened.
The signs
The kraken is known far better by what it leaves than by what anyone has seen. Crews report stretches of open sea where the water turns oily and warm and comes up in a slow churn, and then the fish arrive — dead, floating in rafts, sometimes an acre of them, with the birds already working. Sailors call it a boil. Weather generally follows within a day or two, and it is bad weather: squall lines that build fast out of an empty sky.
Whether the animal makes the boil, feeds on whatever causes it, or simply keeps company with it is an argument older than any of the men having it. Kirchberg naturalists lean toward the last position, on the grounds that nothing that swims should be able to alter the weather. Anyone who has been in a boil holds the first, on the grounds that they were there.
Reading it
The practical knowledge belongs to the Bagii, who work the western waters and treat the whole matter as seamanship rather than religion. The first rule is the one every Bagii child knows: a net that comes up full of dead fish you did not chase is not luck. Get out of the water. A haul like that means a boil is under you or has been.
Beyond that there is a body of craft — color, smell, the behavior of birds, the way a swell arrives out of step with the wind — that Bagii pilots use to judge where the animals are running in a given season and to take a ship around rather than through. Feldian and Kretavic captains hire them for it and pay well. The pilots explain about as much of the method as they feel like explaining, which varies with the captain.
They do not worship the thing. Ask a Bagii pilot whether the kraken is a god and you are likely to be told, patiently, that a storm is not a god either and you still reef for it.
The insurance question
Far more ships are lost to krakens on paper than in fact. Underwriters in Seehaven and the Coin houses that stand behind them treat the word on a loss report as shorthand for a vessel that went missing with all hands and no witnesses, which covers storms, bad stowage, fire, piracy, and sheer incompetence at sea. The saying on the Seehaven quays is that every ship lost with all hands was taken by a kraken, and that none of them were.
A section of beak, black and roughly the size of a rowboat, hangs under the arcade of the Harbor Market in Seehaven, brought in by a Bagii crew nobody now recalls. One party calls it the only honest evidence in the whole question. Another calls it a piece of a large squid and a very good advertisement for the market that owns it. Both have been making their case, in public, for longer than anyone alive.