Belief that the sea was in every respect like the land, and that its
very waves were only a thicker atmosphere, was the main source of
marine fable. In Celtic story, for example, Manannan sings to Bran that
what he is sailing across is not the sea but a flowery plain, and the
speckled salmon are lambs and calves. Mældune, voyaging over the ocean,
descries beneath him a country with castles, people, and cattle. In
the _Pih T’an_ it is said that in the midst of the waters off Shantung
there is sometimes the misty semblance of a palace, with towered walls
about it, and the appearance of men and carriages and horses busily
engaged; and this is called the Market of the Sea.
It was long held that every land animal had its counterpart in the
ocean. So there had to be mermen to match the men of the land. Such
names as sea-mice, sea-spiders, sea-kites, sea-hares, sea-dragons,
sea-lions, sea-oxen, and sea-horses, “the grisly wasserman” and “the
horrible sea-satyr,” are the records of old belief. Pliny tells of
a number of strange marine creatures, including elephants and rams,
stranded on a Mediterranean beach, and of others with the heads of
horses, asses, and bulls, which despoiled grain fields beside the
Indian Ocean. The Chinese believed that all domestic animals in the
Roman Orient came out of the sea. Proclaiming that the atmosphere was
only diluted water, De Maillet, a French naturalist of the eighteenth
century, contended that in the ocean was the original type of
everything; that dogs descended from seals and men from tritons, while
parroquets had their brilliant colors from gold, green, and violet
fishes in the sea. There were fierce tribes of men in the north who
seemed to him only lately emerged.
In classic legend, danger and marvel met mariners upon the strands
along which they sailed in coasting voyages, and there was no need to
go inland for adventure. The sirens sang their shrieking songs by
the water’s edge, the Polyphemus-folk flung masses of rock into the
breakers, and from their island palaces enchantresses kept watch for
passing ships. The voyages of fable were thus a sort of parade between
shores thronged with perilous romance. A writing on the Catalan map of
1375 is in this spirit. In the Spice Islands, it recites, are “three
kinds of sirens--one is half woman, half fish; another is half woman,
half bird; and the third is half woman, half horse.”
Elder fancy peopled the deep itself with tritons riding sea-horses and
stilling the waves with blasts from their shell trumpets, and with
divine nymphs of great beauty and often of engaging nature, as well as
with singular animals. The legate of Gaul wrote Augustus that a number
of nereids had been found dead on its shore, and men from Olisipo
(Lisbon) brought word to Tiberius that a triton had been heard blowing
a conch shell in a cavern retreat. Sea marvels multiply, but somehow
take on a coarser texture, in the mediæval time.
_The Sailors’ Favorite_
Among the marine populations the dolphin has always been a favorite
with sailors, as Greek and Roman bas-reliefs and the coins, medals, and
coats of arms of Mediterranean countries bear witness. It was supposed
to be the swiftest of animals; it was fond of men and of music,
particularly that of the water organ; it had a turned-up nose, and
according to Pliny recognized in a surprising manner the name of Simo
(flat-nose) and “preferred to be called by that name rather than any
other.” Ajasson thought it was attracted merely by the hissing sound of
the word. Pliny has a tale of its friendship with mankind which should
have a better ending:
“A dolphin at Hippo Diarrhytus on the coast of Africa used to receive
his food from the hands of various persons, present himself for their
caresses, sport about among the swimmers, and carry them on his back.
Proconsul Flavianus rubbed him with unguents whose odor rendered him as
if dead, and he kept aloof for months afterward, as though affronted.
But he returned to familiar intercourse later. At last the vexations
that were caused them by having to entertain so many influential men
who came to see this sight, compelled the people of Hippo to put the
animal to death.”
_Monster Whales_
The ancients held the great cetaceans in terror. The Talmud declares
that it would take a ship three days to sail from the head to the
tail of Leviathan. Pliny speaks of whales in the Indian Ocean nine
hundred feet long, and of others which would cover two acres of
ground. The traditional fear of them is in the account by Nearchus of
his battle--his own word--with a school of whales when he was taking
Alexander’s fleet back from the mouth of the Indus to the Persian Gulf.
The sailors saw columns of foam shooting up from the sea and at first
mistook them for waterspouts. When they learned that these came from
whales, “they were so terrified that the oars fell from their hands.”
But Nearchus rallied them, drew up his ships in order of battle, and at
a given signal dashed toward the monsters. Oars splashed loudly, rowers
shouted, trumpets sang defiance. The astonished whales plunged out of
sight, and his men hailed Nearchus as savior of the fleet.
Sailors in the Indian Ocean of a later time told of the head of a fish
“that might be compared to a hill; its eyes were like two doors, so
that people could go in at one eye and out at the other.” In these
waters Sindbad’s companions mistook a whale for a green meadow. The
whales of Norse lore carry witches, while the monster that bore
Glooskap, the Algonquin culture hero, could hear the song of clams as
they lay under the sand.
St. Brendan and his seventeen monkish brethren repeated the Sindbad
adventure when they sailed into the western seas in search of the Isle
of the Blessed. Bearing a lamb without blemish, they landed on a low
island to celebrate the Easter festival. But when a fire was lighted
and the pot set over it, the island began to move, and they fled to
their osier ship. What they had taken for an islet was “the beast
Jasconius, greatest of things that swim, which laboureth night and day
to put his tail in his mouth, but for greatness he may not.” In stories
of this kind in the _Physiologus_ the whale was supposed to represent
the devil, the sea the world, and the ship the human race.
_The Kraken_
“Oh, silly mariners,” exclaimed Arngrim, “that in digging cannot
discern whale’s flesh from earth!” Bishop Pontoppidan pondered these
accounts and in his _Natural History of Norway_, published in 1752, he
concluded that the whale, large as it was--and science knows no extinct
monster of equal bulk--was not large enough to explain them. These are
not floating islands, but a vast sea-monster called kraken, kraxen, or
krabben. “What the credulous Olaus Magnus writes,” says he, “of the
whale being so large that his back is looked upon as an island, and
that people might land, light fires, and do various kinds of work upon
it, is a notoriously fabulous and ridiculous romance.” No, this is the
kraken, the back of which “seems to be about an English mile and a half
in circumference.”
People, thinks the bishop, had some imperfect idea of the kraken for
ages back. Pliny heard an obscure account of it in the Gaditanian sea;
he likens it both to a wheel with spokes and to a tree with such large
branches that it could not get through a ship channel. The Kors Trold
or Soe-Drawl which sailors deemed an evil spirit, and which they said
could stop a ship under full sail, must be the kraken, concludes the
Norwegian.
Pontoppidan draws a spirited picture of this prodigious creature
showing itself among a fleet of fishermen. They are several miles out
at sea on a hot summer day. Their lines should show from eighty to one
hundred fathoms of water under them, but show only twenty or thirty.
Fish are plentiful, above all cod and ling. As fast as the sailors cast
in they draw out their finny prey. They are angling right over the
monster, and his back is the bottom the lines have sounded. Then they
see the water shallowing still further; the kraken is raising himself.
So they hasten out of danger and lie on their oars.
“In a few minutes,” says the historian, “they see this enormous
monster come up to the surface of the water; he there shows himself
sufficiently, though his whole body does not appear, which in all
likelihood no human eye ever beheld. His back looks at first like a
number of small islands, surrounded with something that floats and
fluctuates like seaweeds; and several bright points or horns appear,
which grow thicker and thicker the higher they rise above the
water. Sometimes they stand up as high and as large as the masts of
middle-sized vessels. These are the creature’s arms, and it is said if
they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it
down to the bottom. After this monster has been on the surface a short
time, it begins slowly to sink again, causing a whirlpool that draws
down everything with it.”
Pontoppidan believes the kraken is a polypus, one of the starfish kind.
It has a strong and peculiar scent by means of which it attracts other
fish. Those islands, among the Faroes, that suddenly appear and as
suddenly disappear and that people deem inhabited by evil spirits are
krakens.
All of which is set down in the famous eighth chapter of the _Natural
History_ which, as its author says, “treats of the Norwegian
Sea-Monsters, or those animals of enormous size and uncommon form
which are sometimes seen in the ocean.” In this chapter the Norse
cleric seeks seemingly to outmatch in the colder seas of Scandinavia
the marvels of the Mediterranean. He makes himself chief sponsor for
the sea-serpent. He describes the trold-fish, or unlucky-fish, that
sailors hasten to throw overboard. He has much to say of mermaids. He
tells of the Maelstrom in the Lofoden district of Nordland--an abyss
which penetrates the globe and issues in the Gulf of Bothnia; “within
a Norway mile of it, boats, ships, and yachts have been carried away.”
Whales are sometimes swept into it, “and then it is impossible to
describe their howlings and bellowings.”
_The Sea Serpent_
The sea serpent of Pontoppidan has a venerable past and a present of
conjecture and recurrent report. Insensibly a legend has been built up
in the modern time as strange as any in the whole range of fable. Men
say, not “a sea serpent,” but “the sea serpent.” It is assumed that
there is but one, and that for ages it has haunted the deep, appearing
sometimes in the Atlantic, sometimes in the Indian Ocean, sometimes in
the South Pacific--a plesiosaurus, perhaps, wandering the seas, the
lonely survivor of a vanished age.
Olaus Magnus described the great marine snake--the Soe-Ormen of old
lays--as two hundred feet long and twenty feet around, and as rising up
like a mast before ships and snapping men off their decks. Hans Egede,
the Greenland missionary, saw it in July, 1734. When it reared itself,
its head was higher than the ship’s maintop. When it flattened itself
upon the water, its tail was a ship’s length behind its head. “The
following evening,” says Mr. Egede, “we had very bad weather.”
From all accounts, Pontoppidan concludes that this monster is of about
the length of a cable, or six hundred English feet. The body is as big
around as two hogsheads. “The head has a high and broad forehead, but
in some a pointed snout, though in others that is flat, like that of
a cow or horse; with large blue eyes like a couple of bright pewter
plates, large nostrils, and several stiff hairs standing out on each
side like whiskers.” Its skin is smooth, except for a mane, like
seaweed.
These great snakes, the Norse writer declares, haunt the floor of the
North Sea, rising in July and August, their spawning time. The wind is
destructive to them, and they appear only in calms. They cannot face
the sun, and the fisherman may escape them by rowing toward it. Nor can
they endure the smell of castor or asafœtida, and anglers who go out
on Stor Eggen in the summer provide themselves with one or the other.
Sometimes, however, the monster rises under small boats and upsets
them, or throws its heavy folds across vessels even of some hundred
tons burthen, and sinks them.
The appearances of the sea serpent are well enough documented. It was
reported off the Norway coast in 1819, 1822 and 1837, off the New
England coast in 1815, 1817, 1819, 1833, and 1869, and off the American
coast farther south in 1895. It was seen in the South Atlantic in 1841
by the frigate _Dœdalus_, and in 1875 by the bark _Pauline_, when
seemingly it was dragging under a large whale. A few years ago it was
seen by the bark _Harvard_ near Borneo. In the nineteenth century it
was sighted so often near Boston that it became known as the American
sea serpent. The accounts were circumstantial and so well vouched
for that there could be no reasonable doubt that a strange marine
monster was abroad. A committee of the Boston Linnaean Society, for
example, drew up a report signed by eye-witnesses in 1819. The serpent,
they said, was from eighty to ninety feet long, with buoy-like
protuberances on its back and was swimming at twenty miles or more an
hour, and driving frightened mackerel before it.
These reports have been variously explained--that a low-ranging flight
of sea fowl could produce the semblance of a snake upon the water; that
a mass of seaweed had created this effect; that a pair of gigantic
basking sharks, swimming in a line, had seemed to be one creature;
that twenty-foot ribbon fish were the basis of the legend, and that
a monster squid had been mistaken for a snake. The preponderance of
scientific opinion inclines to the last named view. Cephalopods more
than sixty feet long have been seen off Newfoundland and the coasts of
northern Europe, and it may be that what the _Pauline_ saw was not a
serpent crushing a whale, but a whale killing a giant cuttle fish. But
it is not at all certain that a monster of some species unknown, or
too hastily assumed to be extinct, a stray from the Mesozoic or Eocene
seas, does not haunt the ocean.
Cousins of this prodigy, of vaguer outline, rove the deeps of myth and
romance. The sea serpent of Arab story is the waterspout. The spotted
snake of Navajo story caused the flood. The bunyip of Van Diemen’s
Land carried off women to his water abode. The yacu-mama, or mother
of waters, of Brazilian story--fifty paces long and twelve yards in
girth--drew anything within a hundred yards into its jaws, but could
be placated by bugle music. The orc of the Charlemagne cycle, a
horrible mass of tossing and twisting body with nothing of the animal
but head, eyes, and tusked mouth, haunted an island off the Irish
coast and menaced the manacled and beauteous Angelica. Rogero with
his hippogrif and magic buckler released her, and Orlando slew the
monster afterward. The killing by a Moslem of a like creature that had
been devouring beautiful virgins led to the conversion of the Maldive
islanders, according to Ibn Batuta; at times it reappears in the offing
in the seeming of a ship with lighted candles. The orc of science is
no serpent, but a large dolphin, and when it pursues the whale, says
an old writer, the latter makes “a hideous bellowing, like a bull when
bitten by a dog.”
_Tortoises_
A quaint humor animates much of tortoise tradition. By stringing cords
across a tortoise shell the infant Hermes invented the lyre. According
to the Sicilians a tortoise executed the decree of fate that Æschylus
should die of a blow from heaven; an eagle mistook the tragic poet’s
bald head for a stone and dropped a tortoise upon it to break the
shell. Pliny says that tortoises betray themselves to fishermen by
overeating at night on land and snoring loudly after they return to
the water. “Some persons are of opinion,” he reports, “that the female
refuses to have any intercourse with the male until he has placed a
wisp of straw on her back, and that she hatches her eggs merely by
looking at them.” From the tortoise the Romans obtained no less than
sixty-six remedies for bodily ills.
Sea turtles may attain a weight of a thousand pounds, and legend has
enlarged this figure. In their shells, says Diodorus, the Chelonophagi
(turtle-eaters) of the East African islands, sailed to the mainland for
fresh water. They used them also as roofs, nature’s bounty providing
them “by one gift food, vessels, shipping, and habitations.” Ælian
speaks of tortoise shell houses fifteen cubits long: “nor does the rain
beating against them sound otherwise than if it were falling on tiles.”
Odoric overtops this. In Cochin-China he saw a tortoise “bigger in
compass than the dome of St. Anthony’s Church in Padua.”
_Eels_
The Romans thought that the murænas, or sea eels, had a language
of their own, and that their voices were “low and sweet, with an
intimation so fascinating that few could resist its influence.” The
Emperor Augustus, it was believed, could understand the language. How
eels were generated was long a puzzle, their origin being imputed
to May dew, horse hairs, rocks, mud, the carcasses of animals, and
even to Jove and the goddess Anguilla; hence their scientific name of
_Anguillina_. A cod of the German coast and a Sardinian water beetle
have each been called the “eel-mother.” It has lately been ascertained
that the eggs are spawned in Bermuda waters, and the young reach Europe
after a two years’ journey.
_Three Traditions_
A German folk-tale has it that when Christ was crucified all the fishes
were terror-stricken and dived under water, save the pike, which thrust
forth its head and witnessed the scene. Hence the pike’s head shows
some of the parts of the crucifixion--the cross, three nails, and a
sword. Another fish, the remora, decided the fate of the world by
attaching itself to Antony’s galley and keeping it out of the battle
line at Actium; or so says Pliny. There are monstrous crabs on the
beaches of Japan, some of them seven feet across, which bear what seems
to be a human mask on their backs. The natives say they appeared after
a pirate fleet had been destroyed and its leaders beheaded on the shore.
_Water Horses_
The water gods of northern Europe usually had the horse form, and their
memory survives in Shetlandic tales of the njogel and tangi. The former
appeared as a sleek pony or decrepit gray horse; its hair grew forward
instead of backward; its fetlocks pointed upward instead of downward;
its hoofs were reversed. At dusk it would stand beside a trail, and
seemed to invite the benighted traveler to mount it. Then it galloped
over a waterfall, or dashed into a lake, leaving him to drown while it
vanished on the other bank in a blue light. The tangi was like it, but
had its ranging ground on the seashore. People became insensible for
days when it ran around them.
_Sharks_
Human attributes among the sea’s inhabitants are divided between
sharks and the merfolk. The latter are the graceful creatures of an
imagination at play with itself. The former are always things of
terror, not only because they attack man, but because they seem to have
some special and sinister relation to him. They have been thought to
be enchanted men. Savages tell of their taking human form and human
mates. The West African sacrificed children to a shark god. In the
shark temples of the Sandwich Islands priests rubbed their own bodies
with salt water so as to seem to have scaly skins. Offerings of coins
were made to the basking shark in northern Europe. In New Calabar it
was a capital offense to kill a shark. Sailors still think that this
fish will follow vessels on which some one is to die, and in the days
of the slave ships it was said to have a special fondness for the flesh
of blacks. In former times its teeth, set in gold, were used as amulets
and its powdered brains had a place in medicine; shark’s oil is still
in the pharmacopœias, shark fins are a Chinese dainty, and shark skins
an article of commerce. The source of these beliefs and practices may
be in the world-wide dragon myth, wherein pearls were thought to be
emanations of the moon goddess and were sought as givers of life. The
sharks that harassed the pearl fisheries came to be looked upon as
demons guarding the treasure houses of the sea floor, and embodiments
of evil like the dragon itself.
_Merfolk_
Under mermaid legend is the old notion that because there are men and
women on the land there must be men and women in the sea. The texture
of the legend has become about as complex as human nature itself, and,
like it, shows the divine, the semi-divine and the coarsely animal
subsisting together. In turn the mermaid has been goddess, enchantress,
and fresh meat at sea.
The oldest known form of the myth may be glimpsed on tavern signs,
where the mermaid is depicted with a circular mirror in her hand and a
fish tail. She is Chaldean and Phœnician. Derceto, the moon goddess,
was represented as half woman and half fish because it was conceived
that she divided her time between the earth and the waters under the
earth, plunging into the sea with every moonset. Baring Gould thinks
that the mirror she holds may be the moon disk.
Other shapes of poetry were merged in the legend before it entered the
prose period of maritime discovery. Among them were the tritons and the
nereids, “half-naked, natural, loving, and antique”--lesser divinities
of classic fable. At some time the sirens, who had been pictured as
half human and half bird, were immersed, and thereafter were pictured
as half human and half fish. Browne protests this representation, but
the mermaid myth does carry siren features, song included. The song of
the Rhine maidens is mermaid song, their prophecy mermaid prophecy. Of
the same family are the nixies who love music and foretell the future.
The legend has become further entangled--with tales of banshees whose
wailing portends death, of gull-befriended seal people who could take
human form, of swan maidens who wed mortals, of forward sea fairies
who leave their red caps on the shore of Ireland for young men to pick
up, even of the female demon or nightmare. There are both foam and
cloud-flock in mermaid story, and they meet in the gentle Phæacian,
Nausicaa, whom Ulysses discovers bathing on the shore.
In Fouqué’s _Undine_ the legend achieves its purest poetry. It is the
story of a nymph who lives with her foster parents on the edge of an
enchanted forest where a knight of the old German Empire finds and woos
her. Riding thither through the wood, a bear mocks him with human voice
from the branches of an oak, a troll shows him the goblins at play with
their gold beneath the earth, and what seems at one moment a tall white
man and at the next a foaming brook guides him to the cottage. These
were Undine’s familiars, and when the knight meets the water maiden the
brook rises and for days roars about the cottage, secluding him there
until he has won the nymph’s heart, and she his hand and with it an
immortal soul. Through the remainder of the story until its inevitable
disaster in the unwitting breaking of a vow--the end of all unions
between nymphs and mortals--water foams and flashes and strange shapes
dissolve in spray.
This is the type of a hundred mediæval tales, of which the best known
is that of Melusina, a fountain nymph wedded to the head of the house
of Lusignan, but lost to him because he did not keep his pledge to
respect her Saturday privacy. He discovered her in the bath, a serpent
from the waist downward. According to report her blood flowed in the
veins of the Luxembourg and Rohan families and in Henry VII, sovereign
of the Holy Roman Empire. Her spirit was seen whenever the death of a
Lusignan impended. The tale has an extensive bibliography.
Other accounts of water maidens are of a wilder cast. The judy of
Slavic folk tales lived in the lakes and rivers of the Rhodope
Mountains and danced in meadows, and him whom they coaxed to dance with
them they destroyed. When they saw a man in the water they entangled
him in their long hair and drowned him. The pariks of Armenian story
are erotic female demons of the river banks. In a Celtic tale Rath saw
mermaids as “grown-up girls, the fairest of shape and make above the
waters; but huger than one of the hills was the hairy-clawed, bestial
lower part which they had beneath.” They sang the hero to sleep and
tore him to pieces. The ships of another Celtic adventurer, Ruad, were
stopped, and when he went over the side he saw “three of the loveliest
of the world’s women” holding to the keels; the rest of the story is
dalliance. Pacific coast Indians have legends of beautiful, long-haired
women who lived in a round house under the ocean and made trouble for
people above. An Arab traveler tells of joyous water maidens caught and
caressed by sailors in the bright straits of Greece, and then returned
to the sea.
The prose of the legend was reached when men began to capture what
they conceived to be mermaids and mermen, and failed in most cases to
find kindred beings. There is a considerable list of these creatures
captured or sighted on the beaches of the Old and the New World.
Only one of these talked, and Pontoppidan mentions the story but to
discredit it. Two senators of Norway caught a merman, but let him go
on his threatening them in Danish to sink the ship with all its crew.
Of the so-called bishop-fish or sea bishop, said to have been netted
for the King of Poland in the Baltic in 1453, a similar tale is told.
It wore a dalmatic and mitre and carried a crosier. With gestures of
entreaty it besought the intercession of its brother prelates of the
court. When it was released into the sea the grateful creature made
the sign of the cross and gave the episcopal benediction with its fin
before it submerged. In one other instance there were points of human
contact. Milkmaids of Edam in West Friesland in 1430 found a mermaid
which had been swept over the dykes by a storm. They brought it home,
as the story goes, and dressed it in female attire; it learned how to
spin, to eat with them, to adore the crucifix, but it never spoke.
Through many other accounts runs the belief that merfolk were
weather-breeders. The _Speculum Regale_, an Icelandic work of the
twelfth century, describes a mermaid with a “very horrible face” that
haunts the deep near Greenland and before heavy storms is seen with
fish in its hands. If it casts the fish toward the ship, it is an omen
of death in the coming storm; if it casts the fish away from the ship
it is a good omen. Hakluyt’s _Voyages_ tell of a monster, from the
middle upward proportioned like a man and with a tawny skin, which was
discovered near Bermuda in the sixteenth century. The clerks of the
expedition put the account in writing, to be certified to the English
king. “Presently after this,” it is recited, “for the space of sixteen
days we had wonderful foule weather.” Knud Leems in his account of
Danish Lapland asserted that horrible tempests followed the appearance
of a merman and merwoman in those seas. The male, or hav-manden, was
like a robust man with brown skin and long hair and beard; the female,
or hav-fruen, had the human shape and hair and a ghastly visage.
It appears that a merman, captured in the Baltic in 1531, lived for
three days at the court of Sigismund, King of Poland, and there is a
story that to determine ownership of another the King of Portugal and
the Grand Master of the Order of St. James had a suit at law.
Merolla tells of a ship’s crew in a South African port who saw at a
distance “a sort of sea monsters like unto men” gathering herbs, with
which they plunged into the sea. The sailors gathered herbs for them,
and the grateful creatures “forthwith drew from the bottom of the sea a
quantity of coral” and laid it in the place where the sailors had piled
the herbs. Human perfidy ends a pretty story. The sailors spread a net
to catch the mermen, who lifted it and fled.
The purely animal quality predominates in other of the circumstantial
accounts repeated of the mer people. A merman was captured off the
coast of Suffolk in 1187, but escaped. Hendryk Hudson reports that his
crew saw a mermaid near Nova Zembla, and “from the navel upward her
back and breasts were like a woman’s,” while the tail was like the tail
of a porpoise. In 1560 fishermen netted seven mermen and mermaids in
the seas west of Ceylon; several Jesuit priests were witness thereto.
Captain Weddell, the Antarctic explorer, records the sworn testimony
of one of his crew that he had seen a creature with human form and the
tail of a seal, and with red face and green hair. In the sea of Angola,
says Pontoppidan, mermaids are heard to shriek and cry like women;
negroes net and eat them, and their flesh is considered much like pork.
Sigismundus ab Herbenstein had it from Muscovite sources that in the
river Tachnin there was “a certain fish with head, eyes, nose, mouth,
hands, feete and other members utterly of humane shape, and yet without
any voyce, and pleasant to be eaten.” In Pinkerton’s _Voyages_ there
is an account of the woman fish found “among the islands Boccias,” the
flesh of which is “of excellent savour when eaten boiled like other
meat, and which also serves to make highly savoury sausages.”
The dugong, manatee, or sea cow has been called the Old Man of the
Sea as well as the mermaid. It has figured in legends with a biblical
background; the people about the Red Sea took these creatures for
survivors or descendants of the army of Pharaoh that was drowned in
pursuing the Israelitish host. The three mermaids that Columbus saw on
his first voyage to the New World are supposed to have been of this
species. When white men first came to America the manatees thronged the
waters of Florida, but have since become nearly extinct there, although
there is a protected herd in the Miami River.
Reports of actual captures present the rationalization and degradation
of the mermaid legend. The divine daughters of the deep with their
lovely bodies and flowing hair become strange animals of the seal or
cetacean species with ugly faces and bodies that may be converted into
pork--sea apes, as the credulous and yet cautious Pontoppidan calls
them. They grow so common that the _Aberdeen Almanac_ of 1688 predicts
the periods when mermaids may be expected near the mouth of the Dee.
Sir Humphrey Davy argued that if God had created the mermaid, her
deficient means of locomotion and of self-defense would have left her
a prey to the fish. Yet the seas would have been poorer of romance if
the logic and poetry of men had not led them to correct, in ages more
naïve, what seemed to them an oversight of their Maker.