Other mermaids in various sideshows and exhibitions where admission fees were charged almost always turned out to have been carefully crafted by skilled taxidermists from the upper body of a monkey and the rear end of a fish.
A rather more detailed and convincing historical account comes from Orford in East Anglia in England, where medieval fishermen apparently caught a merman in 1204. In those days, the port of Orford on England’s east coast was relatively prosperous. The event is related by Ralph of Coggeshall, a monastic chronicler of that epoch.
According to Ralph’s version of the case, a group of sturdy East Anglian fishermen were having a struggle to get their nets onboard because of a large creature that had somehow become entangled with their catch. When the net finally lay in the bottom of their boat, what looked very much like a man was glaring up at them from among the squirming fish. In Ralph’s account, the merman was unclothed but covered in hair — except for the top of his head, which was bald. Another very human feature was his long beard, which was described as straggly. The Orford men tried to talk to their captive, but his best replies were little more than grunting noises. Not knowing what else to do with him, the fishermen took him to the castle and handed him over to the Warden, Bartholomew de Gladville. Gladville wasn’t too sure about him either and decided to keep him there as a prisoner. The merman responded positively to a raw fish diet, but still refused to speak — almost certainly because he couldn’t. It was noted by his jailers that when he was offered a piece of fish, he squeezed the liquid from it first and drank it.
In desperation, Gladville resorted to torture to try to get some intelligible words from his strange aquatic prisoner, but even when he was hung upside down the merman would not (or could not) talk. On being taken to church, he showed neither knowledge of, nor interest in, religion. The humane side of Gladville coming to the top, however briefly, he ordered his men to sling nets across the harbour mouth and allow the merman to swim for a little while — probably in the hope that if their prisoner felt happier, he might say something. For a swimmer of the merman’s ability, the line of nets presented no barrier at all. He simply dived under them and vanished out to sea. After one or two triumphant appearances above the waves, he left the Orford area and was never seen again.
The nature of his real identity remains an unsolved mystery today.
What might still provide clues to the enigma of the mer-folk is what is alleged to be the actual grave of a mermaid in the cemetery at Nunton in the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. She was found dead on the beach in 1830, and was described in the traditional way — human to the waist and fish from there downward. The human part apparently seemed so human that the sympathetic islanders felt that a decent burial was called for. With the scientific advantages of twenty-first-century DNA analysis, that grave could well be worth very careful investigation.
John Smith — associated with Pocahontas in the rather controversial story of his rescue by the beautiful young indigenous American princess — also features as a reporter of romantic mermaid sightings. In the West Indies in 1614, Smith claimed that he had seen a mermaid so attractive that he had at first mistaken her for a human girl bathing. Closer inspection, however, revealed that she had luxuriant green hair, and in Smith’s own phrasing “from below the waist the woman gave way to fish.”
Christopher Columbus is also credited with sighting mermaids. He reported seeing no fewer than three of them “leaping out of the water,” but it seems much more likely that what Columbus actually observed were dugongs, because he added rather disappointedly that they were “not so fair as they were said to be.”
Ovid, the Roman poet, also known as Naso, born in 43 B.C., suggested imaginatively that mermaids were born from the burning galleys of the defeated Trojans. But where did they really come from? Could the manatee and the dugong be all there is at the back of the innumerable mermaid legends? Or is there more to all those reported sightings? The myths and legends of the mer-folk may be connected to the strange and ancient accounts of various marine deities such as Oannes — or demigods like the Tritons — that persist in various shapes and sizes in religious writings all over the world.
Two of the most famous ancient Greek sea monster accounts are remarkably similar: in the first, a fearless hero rescues Princess Hesione from the monster which Poseidon had sent to terrorize Troy; in the second, another hero, Perseus, rescues Andromeda from a parallel fate. So, reports of marine monsters go back a very long way. Early Greek poetry, for example, referred to the battle between the mighty Herakles (Hercules) and one of the terrifying Ketea — the awesome sea monsters under Poseidon’s control, sent out by him much as gangland bosses send out their hitmen today.
According to these classical accounts, the creatures were insatiably hungry and resorted to cannibalism when there was no other prey readily available. Oppian, the poet, referred to them frequently and in detail in his work Halieutica — a treatise on fishing. His book warns that they appear most frequently in the Iberian Sea off the coast of Spain. These ancient Ketea are frequently described as more elongated and serpentine than normal fish.
Ancient Greek artwork showing Herakles fighting Ketos, a sea monster.
There is a powerful and persistent nexus between Greek history and mythology and monsters of the deep. One of the most intriguing stories told about Alexander the Great is that he was an intrepid pioneer of the diving bell and that inside a specially constructed glass bell he watched a sea monster so vast that it took three full days to pass his submarine observation post.
Reports of sea monsters are also right up to date. The authors were called in by BBC television to investigate some very interesting reports of sightings in 2003 in Pembroke Dock, Wales. We interviewed four of the eyewitnesses there, and then set out for a couple of hours in the Cleddau King — a superb boat for the job, fully equipped with high-tech electronic search gear.
Our first witness was David Crew, Landlord of the Shipwright Inn, Pembroke Dock, Wales. This is what David told us:
On Wednesday March 5, 2003, at lunchtime, I was in the kitchen. My barmaid, Lesley, was behind the bar and a few of her customers, Peter, Tori and Philip, were in the pub. Lesley looked out of the window overlooking the Milford Haven Estuary and saw something resembling a large fin smashing through the water. She drew our attention to it and when we came out we saw something that we can only describe as a sea-serpent. I would say that it was a long, dark, serpent-shaped object about five to six cars’ length. Peter, one of the witnesses, quoted it as having a diamond-shaped head. He saw that diamond-shaped head rear briefly out of the water — it disappeared again just as quickly. I would say it was five or six feet in diameter.
Lesley herself said,
It was still when I first saw it. It was just motionless in the water at that point. It was a nice bright, clear day. The thing was strange and definitely alive. I felt very shocked when I saw it. It seemed to be a big sea monster.
The next witness was Peter Thomas, a customer who had been in the Shipwright Inn at the time when whatever-it-was was sighted. This is Peter’s statement:
Lesley drew my attention to something she saw in the river and I went to the window and looked out. It was something I estimated to be about ten metres in length. You could see a sort of diamond-shaped head, or what appeared to be a diamond-shaped head, out of the water and you could see the rest of it going back about thirty feet: a body moving through the water — probably about the size of a beer barrel in diameter.
At this point, I asked Peter to sketch what he’d seen.
When Lesley brought it to my attention, I went to the door and looked between the wall of the port and the Martello tower. You’ve got