Has anyone else noticed that Cthulhu and Davy Jones (as played by Bill Nighy in Walt Disney’s production Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) is a dead ringer for Cthulhu or one of his spawn? Even Davy’s hat looks like Cthulhu’s wings.
Davy Jones lives at the bottom of the sea in Davy Jones’ Locker and is a nickname of the devil of the seas (Devil Jonah) since he kidnaps sailors and drowns them as they join him in his watery abode. Tobias Smollet‘s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) comments, “This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep....”. As an ardent Anglophile and avid reader (at his death he had over 1500 books in his library), it is quite possible that Lovecraft was familiar with Smollett’s works.
Davy Jones lives at the bottom of the sea in Davy Jones’ Locker and is a nickname of the devil of the seas (Devil Jonah) since he kidnaps sailors and drowns them as they join him in his watery abode. Tobias Smollet‘s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) comments, “This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep....”. As an ardent Anglophile and avid reader (at his death he had over 1500 books in his library), it is quite possible that Lovecraft was familiar with Smollett’s works.
Cthulhu lives – “dead but dreaming” – in R’lyeh, a sunken city deep under the Pacific Ocean in the middle of one of the biggest empty regions of water on the planet. Lovecraft describes Cthulhu as having an “awful squid-head with writhing feelers” (a very apt description of Davy Jones in the movie).
According to Wikipedia, “…Lovecraft said that R’lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R’lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth’s coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the “Ponape Scripture“, a text describing Cthulhu, was found.
In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W“. The sound was given the name “Bloop“.
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