Alfred Bulltop Stormalong was an American folk hero and the subject of numerous nautical-themed tall tales originating in Massachusetts. Stormalong was said to be a sailor and a giant, some 30 feet tall; he was the master of a huge clipper ship known in various sources as either the Courser or the Tuscarora, a ship so tall that it had hinged masts to avoid catching on the moon.

The legend

Stormalong was said to have been brought up on Cape Cod, where he had been found on the beach as a baby, already two fathoms tall. According to one telling, he outgrew the Cape and moved to Boston, where he signed aboard the first ship that would take him at the age of twelve. It was said that he was responsible for the tradition of referring to seamen as "able-bodied" by signing his name on his first shipboard employment contract as "Stormalong, A.B."

He had a lifelong rivalry with a kraken, a huge sea monster from Norse myth; in fact, the kraken escaped from him in their first encounter, causing a dejected Stormalong to abandon the sea life for life as a farmer somewhere in the midwest (various sources place him living in Michigan, Texas, Kansas, and other states). Ultimately, however, he was drawn back to the sea, where he had the Courser built, a ship so large that he had to keep a stable of Arabian horses for his crew to get from one end of the ship to the other. Among other things, the ship was said to have drilled the course of the Panama Canal by slamming into the Panamanian coast and gotten stuck in the English Channel, which required the crew to grease the ship's hull with soap. The soap combined with the scraping of the hull against the Gray Cliffs of Dover turned them bright white.

As Stormalong grew older, he eventually encountered the kraken again, this time successfully drawing the beast into a whirlpool from which it never escaped.

Stormalong's death is not universally attested by all sources, but one ending to his life is as follows: After Stormalong angered a steamboat captain by dumping water down the boat's funnel in an attempt to put out what he thought was a dangerous fire on the boat, the steamboat captain challenged Stormalong to a transatlantic race. The aged Stormalong won the race by several miles, but the stress of handling the wheel through the difficult Atlantic crossing killed him. Stormalong was buried at sea, and Davy Jones himself opened his famous locker to accept Stormalong's body.

External links

• One retelling of the Stormalong story

American folklore