<P> Apart from Poe and Verne other literary source is of the 1500s, of Olaus Magnus, a Swedish Bishop, who had stated that the maelstrom which was more powerful than The Odyssey destroyed ships which sank to the bottom of the sea, and even whales were sucked in . Pytheas, the Greek historian, also mentioned that maelstroms swallowed ships and threw them up again . </P> <P> Charybdis in Greek mythology was later rationalized as a whirlpool, which sucked entire ships into its fold in the narrow coast of Sicily, a disaster faced by navigators . </P> <P> In the 8th century, Paul the Deacon, who had lived among the Belgii, described tidal bores and the maelstrom for a Mediterranean audience unused to such violent tidal surges: </P> <P> Not very far from this shore...toward the western side, on which the ocean main lies open without end, is that very deep whirlpool of waters which we call by its familiar name "the navel of the sea ." This is said to suck in the waves and spew them forth again twice every day....They say there is another whirlpool of this kind between the island of Britain and the province of Galicia, and with this fact the coasts of the Seine region and of Aquitaine agree, for they are filled twice a day with such sudden inundations that any one who may by chance be found only a little inward from the shore can hardly get away . I have heard a certain high nobleman of the Gauls relating that a number of ships, shattered at first by a tempest, were afterwards devoured by this same Charybdis . And when one only out of all the men who had been in these ships, still breathing, swam over the waves, while the rest were dying, he came, swept by the force of the receding waters, up to the edge of that most frightful abyss . And when now he beheld yawning before him the deep chaos whose end he could not see, and half dead from very fear, expected to be hurled into it, suddenly in a way that he could not have hoped he was cast upon a certain rock and sat him down . </P>

What is the largest whirlpool in the world