6. Captain Stormalong was said to be thirty feet tall
Captain Stormalong was a giant who was said to have been found on a Cape Cod beach as a baby, already eighteen feet tall. Having quickly outgrown Cape Cod he moved to Boston and became a sailor, though his enormous size required him to build his own ship, which was equipped with hinged topmasts to prevent it from scraping the moon. Originally appearing in sea shanties and tall tales passed along by New England seamen, Stormalong was a lifelong enemy of the Kraken, a multi-tentacled sea monster which pulled ships to their doom. In the early twentieth century, several of the tales of the giant sailor were collected in magazines and pamphlets, for the entertainment of children, mostly in New England. In many ways Stormalong was a seagoing Pecos Bill.
His ship was said to have once become stuck in the English Channel, too large to negotiate the passage between England and France, and liberal applications of soap to the sides of the hull allowed him to slip through. It was the grinding of his ship along Dover’s Gray Cliffs which made them white. He once lost control in the Caribbean and the prow of his ship struck Panama, splitting the isthmus and creating the canal. Stormalong breakfasted on sharks, rescued other vessels during hurricanes and gales by picking them up and carrying them on the decks of his ship, and equipped his vessel with horses so that his crew could ride from stem to stern. One of the tales about the giant captain is that he rests in Davy Jones’ locker, somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.