14 DAY TRIAL // A sea monster resembling a dragon with lion ears and a crocodile-like mouth was pulled from the Baltic earlier this month. Worry not, the creature is not a monster per se. Rather, it is a wooden figurehead that researchers say adorned the prow of a Danish warship that sunk about 500 years ago.
The ship, called the Gribshunden and measuring about 100 feet (30 meters) in length, belonged to King John, ruler of Denmark between 1455 to 1513. Historical records say it was lost in 1495, when it caught fire while en route from Copenhagen to the city of Kalmar in Sweden.
Apparently, it was a stroke of luck that King John was not killed when the Gribshunden caught fire and sank. Thus, historians say that, although he boarded the ship together with the rest of the crew, he was onshore visiting the port of Ronneby when the vessel went up in flames.
Many of the knights and the crew who were traveling with him to Sweden, however, weren't so lucky and were killed by the blaze. Only a handful of people escaped the fire and made it to shore.
The figurehead was supposed to ward off evil spirits
In an interview, researcher Johan Ronnby, a marine archaeologist at Södertörn University in Sweden, explained that the grotesque figurehead, 11.1 feet (3.4 meters) long, was most likely fitted on the prow of the Gribshunden to ward off evil spirits or maybe simply scare off enemies.
Since the vessel's name translates as griffon-dog, odds are it was one such phantasmagorical hybrid creature that the figurehead was supposed to represent.
The wooden monster appears to have been depicted mid-lunch, its snack probably a human. “There seems to be something in his mouth. There seems to be a person in its mouth, and he's eating somebody,” explained Johan Ronnby, as cited by Live Science.
The remains of the Gribshunden were found by archaeologists back in the 1970s. However, it wasn't until 2013 that the ship was identified. Now that they've recovered the figurehead that once adorned its prow, researchers plan to study it to learn more about warships of the time.
