Episode #229 - Real Mermaids?

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Hey everyone, before we get started today, I just wanted to let you know that the band I play in, Fire Antlers, has a new album out now on Spotify, Bandcamp, or wherever you stream your music.

And if you would like to see Fire Antlers Live, the release show for the new album, The Plot is Lost, will be on June 14th here in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, at Irene's Pub on Bank Street.

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Have you ever heard of Black Isle in northern Scotland?

It's one of those places named in a way to flummox and beguile outsiders.

Because Black Isle isn't so much an island as it's a peninsula jutting out from Scotland's east coast into the North Sea.

In this way, Black Isle is a hybrid, both mainland and island.

And so it seems appropriate that Black Isle is the setting for one of Scotland's best-known mermaid stories.

For there is no hybrid more beguiling in the whole world of human folklore than the mermaid.

The story goes that a long time ago, a man named Patterson was walking near Kessack Ferry on Black Isle when something caught his eye, quote, sitting on the dark, misty deep, end quote.

As he drew closer, it became clear that it was a mermaid basking elegantly on a rock.

Patterson had been told that if one was able to pluck a few scales from a mermaid's tail, she would transform into a human woman and would be compelled to marry the man who had been bold enough to catch her by surprise.

So Patterson tried his luck.

He quietly waded into the sea, approached the sun-bathing mermaid, and then quickly plucked two scales from her large fish-like tail.

No sooner did he have the scales in hand that the transformation took place.

The fish's tail magically transformed into two human legs, and now, standing before Patterson, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen seen in his entire life.

Her hair was long and golden, her eyes as blue as the sky, and her lips, quote, red as winter berries and as tempting as the fruits of summer, end quote.

Patterson then led this newly transformed woman back to his small black aisle cottage, and soon the two were wed in a small ceremony.

The scales Patterson carefully stashed away in his outhouse, for if his new bride was to ever find those scales, she could become a mermaid once again.

Make no mistake, this great love story was really more of a kidnapping.

The mermaid lived with Patterson for many years and bore him a number of children, but she never forgot her home in the sea and yearned for her old life frolicking underwater.

She would regularly beg her husband to give her back her missing scales and allow her to return to the sea.

She promised Patterson that if she was set free, his family would always be blessed by the mermaids, their nets would always be filled with fish, and no one bearing his surname would ever drown in the waters off Black Isle.

But Patterson could not bear to lose his magical captive, so he kept the scales hidden.

But then one day, one of the couple's children, a lad named Kenneth, was in the outhouse when he came upon something peculiar.

Hidden behind an unassuming board, he found two shining scales that looked quite unlike any other fish scales he had ever seen in his life.

So he ran to his mother with the scales in hand and asked her what they were.

She recognized them immediately.

She quickly grabbed her scales from the child and ran headlong towards the lapping waters of the North Sea.

When she touched the waves, her legs magically transformed back into a mermaid's tail.

She dove into the depths, never to return to land.

Patterson was left alone, unloved, unblessed by the merfolk, and forever after, wary

the water.

That story was originally collected from Scottish fishermen by folklorists in the early 20th century, but it likely dates back centuries as an oral tradition.

Like many mermaid stories, it deals with themes of lust, desire, greed, and covetousness.

The mermaid is the object of sinful craving, but she is ultimately not of this world.

Now, what's somewhat unique about this particular Scottish legend is that, in a rare twist, Patterson, the human character, gets the best of the mermaid, at least for a little while.

Often, mermaids are presented as maritime temptresses who try to lure libidinous men into a watery grave.

It's usually the lustful man who finds himself trapped by the mermaid and not the other way around.

Still, I appreciate the Scottish tweak on this traditional structure.

Like many mermaid tales, Patterson's story ends in heartbreak.

But what I like about it is that he is undone by his own pride, lust, and desire to control.

The mermaid does not destroy him.

In fact, she gives him every opportunity for a happy ending.

But his unrelenting nature creates a situation where she has no option but to flee.

The tragedy here is not death, just a broken home and children left without a mother and a terrible father.

Now, I could have started this episode with any number of mermaid legends where watery sirens lure sailors to their deaths or magically sink ships at sea.

For instance, there's the famous English ballad where a crew of sailors glimpse a beautiful mermaid with a quote comb and a glass in her hand,

and immediately recognize it to be a dark omen for the ship.

The winds blow, the seas rage, and in the end, quote, three times round went our gallant ship, and three times round went she.

For want of lifeboat, they all went down and sank to the bottom of the sea.

In many ways, that poem better captures the spirit of most mermaid lore.

Despite their beautiful appearance, mermaids are usually vengeful and capricious creatures whose arrival is almost always an ill omen.

Don't let any Disney adaptations of the little mermaid lead you astray.

Mermaid mythology is generally anti-mermaid.

For most of history and across cultures, mermaids are usually presented as monsters who encourage vice and prey on the sinful.

But I chose to focus on that one piece of Scottish fisherman's lore because there's something very earthy, dare I say, real about that story.

Perhaps it's the humble setting, a small fisherman's cottage on a little-known Scottish peninsula.

Perhaps it's the familiarity of the named characters, Patterson and Kenneth.

There's also something about that outhouse.

In a story that's so economical with details, the storytellers were careful to relate that the mermaid scales were kept in an outhouse.

It's one of those details that's so specific, so mundane, and so strangely gross that it feels like it has to be true.

Leave it to the Scots to take a wonderfully magical premise and weave a melancholy tale of regret and heartbreak that hints at the smell of human filth.

I love you, Scotland.

Never change.

My point is, that legend feels grounded.

It takes place in a world that I recognize.

It's the kind of story where if an old Scottish fisherman spun you that yarn in a pub, then pointed out Patterson's cottage and his old outhouse, you might have a moment of pause.

Could there really be mermaids?

A belief in water spirits and myrrh people can be traced back to the earliest times.

You can find stories about half-fish, half-human, hybrid creatures in cultures all over the world.

In China, the Philippines, Thailand, Iran, India, and in indigenous communities throughout North and South America, there are tales of mermaid-like creatures.

In Europe, there seems to have been a widespread folk belief in mermaids dating back to well before the rise of the Roman Empire.

For medieval Europeans, they were one of a litany of fantastical creatures whose reality was more or less taken for granted.

Now, you might assume that as Europeans embraced a more rational and scientific worldview in the early modern period, belief in mermaids steadily declined.

But that was not exactly the case.

It's been argued that belief in mermaids and their male counterparts, tritons, actually surged in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

Before those periods, the tales of mermaids mingled with those of other nature spirits, which had been handed down orally for generations.

But starting in the 16th century, people began recording mermaid sightings with much greater frequency.

These were not allegorically rich tales that carried lessons about lust and sinfulness.

Instead, these were scientifically minded reports that usually came with authenticating testimony from respected and learned witnesses.

People clearly thought that they were seeing mermaids.

In fact, enough people thought they were seeing mermaids that the scientific establishment of the day took the question of mermaid reality quite seriously.

Papers were published, debates were convened, and scientific academies like the Royal Society of London seriously considered whether or not the Earth's oceans were filled with creatures that appeared to be half human and half fish.

This is the period that I really want to focus on today,

that period where folk belief and science collided.

This was a hybrid period, where a more magical medieval way of perceiving the world was melded together at the waist with a newly emerging scientific approach to understanding nature.

Why was it that mermaids, perhaps more than any other mythical creature, fascinated and frustrated European scientists?

What about these creatures made them seem so real?

Let's see what we can find out today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five

Episode number 229, Real Mermaids

There's

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

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This week, we are heading to the sea to discuss one of humanity's best-known mythical creatures, the mermaid.

Now, normally, this show doesn't concern itself with what experts call cryptozoology.

For the uninitiated, cryptozoology is the quasi-scientific study of animals that are not yet recognized as existing by mainstream zoology.

Those people who have dedicated their lives to finding Bigfoot would be cryptozoologists.

And while this this show does occasionally dip its toes into the world of the paranormal, I don't really consider this to be a paranormal podcast.

But I'm aware that it can be a slippery slope.

One show about griffins, one about the Hawaiian Menahune, a mermaid episode, and before long, I'm neck deep in chupacabras, skunk apes, and mothmen.

But what fascinates me about mermaids and tritons, which is the preferred nomenclature for male mer people,

is that they had a historical moment when they were taken more seriously as potentially real creatures.

Now, of course, this is not to say that mermaids are the only mythical creatures that have inspired sincere beliefs.

Folklore the world over is filled with fantastic beasts, and there are no shortage of stories from people who sincerely believe that they have encountered forest spirits, leprechauns, fairies, yetis, and so on.

But few of these creatures have received serious scientific consideration.

Mermaids, on the other hand, seem to have had a unique trajectory as folkloric creatures.

In the European context, mermaids emerged from a collection of different mythical traditions before finding their recognizable form in the Middle Ages.

For centuries, they existed like so many other medieval monsters.

In art, they were used as symbols for Christian vices, specifically lust, greed, and vanity.

While there certainly was a folk belief in mer people, they seem to have primarily served an allegorical function.

The stories of mermaids were meant to teach lessons about chastity and resisting temptation.

But something seemed to shift in the late 15th century, right around the era that sometimes gets called the age of exploration.

As European sailors started to navigate their ships to previously uncharted waters, mermaid encounters started becoming considerably more common.

This begins in 1492 with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.

In his journal, Columbus rather nonchalantly includes this surprising little passage while describing his cruise along the coast of the island of Hispaniola.

And be aware that Columbus refers to himself in the third person here as the Admiral.

Quote,

The Admiral relates that when on his visit to Rio del Oro yesterday, he saw three mermaids standing high out of the water.

They had faces something similar to those of human beings, and were not so handsome as it was customary to represent them.

He adds that he has formerly seen them in Guinea upon the Pepper Coast.

End quote.

Okay,

how should we interpret that passage?

Three mermaids standing up tall with faces similar to human beings, but not as good looking as European art might have you believe.

Hmm.

Plus, we're told that this isn't Columbus' first mermaid rodeo.

He has seen mermaids before on the Pepper Coast, which is in West Africa.

Now, I'm a little obsessed with this because it's written like a mermaid sighting is not a big deal.

In fact, Columbus is like, oh yeah, I saw some mermaids, but I'm totally over it.

I see these guys all the time.

Now, this passage often gets explained as Columbus misidentifying a group of manatees.

The manatee, with its adorable, empathetic eyes and big, flat, fish-like tail, seems like a good fit here.

This would also help explain why Columbus's mermaids' faces are, quote, human-like, as opposed to simply human, and are described as considerably less comely than the mermaid paintings he was familiar with back in Spain.

It's also worth knowing that a species of manatee can be found in West Africa, near the Pepper Coast, which might help explain that earlier Columbus sighting.

But why were his mermaids standing high out of the water?

That doesn't really sound like something a manatee can do.

So, who knows what's happening here?

It is true that many mermaid sightings can be explained away as the misidentification of much more mundane animals.

Seals, sea lions, dolphins, beluga whales, and dugongs all may have inspired tales of half-human, half-fish hybrids.

But what's interesting to me is how rarely most skeptical and scientifically minded Europeans reached for those explanations in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

On the contrary, mermaids and tritons were taken as seriously as any other exotic creature encountered at the fringes of Europe's growing maritime empires.

So I want to dig deeper into that particular era and explore how mermaids and tritons were being discussed by educated folks.

Why was it that this particular creature seemed to inspire such serious consideration?

Now, I should say as a caveat up top, I am specifically going to be looking at the Western mermaid tradition here.

As I mentioned earlier, there are mermaid stories from every corner of the earth.

Southeast Asia, in particular, has a robust corpus of mermaid and sea spirit mythology, which sadly I'm not going to be getting into.

Not because it isn't interesting, just because it's beyond the scope of what we're looking at here today.

Nevertheless, I thought it was worth acknowledging the fact that mermaids are not exclusively products of the European imagination.

They've got them everywhere.

This is also one of those episodes where I need to shout out my most important sources right off the top.

The 2020 book, Mer People, A Human History by the historian Vaughn Scribner has been an essential source for this episode.

It was that book that really opened my eyes to the fact that mermaids were at one time taken very seriously by the European scientific establishment.

And as such, I will be citing the work of Vaughn Scribner regularly throughout the show.

And while I'm at it, I'll also shout out the work of Christina Bakilega and Marie Alohalani Brown.

Their commentary in the Penguin Book of Mermaids has also been very helpful.

So, let's start by looking at the evolution of mermaids as mythical creatures.

which might help us understand how they fit within the Western cultural imagination.

This will hopefully give us some insight into the flood of mermaid encounters people start reporting during the age of European overseas colonization.

Let's dive in.

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Half-human, half-fish hybrids are as old as human culture.

However, the contemporary image of the mermaid, that is, an anatomically correct and usually conventionally beautiful woman from the waist up and a fish with a long tail from the waist down, took some time to evolve.

One of the earliest images we have of a human-fish hybrid is the Mesopotamian deity Oannis.

In that mythological tradition, Oanis is one of the seven sages, a culture-bringing god who emerged from the the deep to teach humanity the secrets of written language, visual art, and science.

In some ancient reliefs, his human form is shown growing on the underside of a fish, but in others, he looks quite a lot like a modern mermaid.

His top half looks like a Babylonian king, whereas his bottom half has a distinctive fishtail.

But beyond those images of Owanis, mermaid imagery is somewhat rare in the ancient world.

Now, there was certainly a belief in water spirits and sea gods, like Poseidon and his attendant water nymphs, but the specific human-fish hybrid creature that we would recognize today as a mermaid was not a common feature of ancient art.

One of the key predecessors for the modern mermaid were the mythical creatures described in Homer's Odyssey, known as the Sirens.

In one of the more memorable scenes from the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is forced to sail his ship past the island of the sirens, who are known to sing an alluring, hypnotizing song.

Homer writes that the sirens, quote, beguile all men whosoever come to them.

Whoso, in ignorance, draws near to them and hears the siren's voice, he nevermore returns to his wife and little children, but the sirens beguile him, and with their clear-toned song they sit in a meadow, and about them is a great heap of bones of mouldering men, and round the bones the skin is shriveling skin.

I love that.

The skin is shriveling skin.

So, famously, in the Odyssey, Odysseus commands his crew to stuff their ears with beeswax so they are not lured to their deaths by the siren song.

But Odysseus also requests that he be lashed to the mast of his ship and not be released until they are safely away from the siren islands.

This way he can listen to the song while remaining alive on his ship.

The story of the sirens would become an essential part of mermaid lore, and indeed by the medieval period the terms mermaid and siren were being used interchangeably.

However, it's worth knowing that the sirens were not originally described as half-human, half-fish creatures.

In the Homeric text, the physicality of the sirens is not even mentioned.

In future tellings, the siren song was often presented as seductive and sexual, but Homer's sirens offered nothing carnal.

Instead, the siren's song promised wisdom and profound knowledge.

In other words, these were not sexy fish ladies.

Often in Greek art, the sirens were depicted not as half-fish, but as bird-like women.

In the third century BC, the Greek author Apollonius of Rhodes described the sirens as, quote, fashioned in part like birds and in part like maidens to behold, end quote.

So for centuries, the sirens were imagined as bird women who promised mind-altering cosmic knowledge.

The first time we get a proper mermaid sighting reported is many centuries after Homer in the writings of Pliny the Elder in his monumental Natural History.

This book was a Roman-era attempt to catalog the entire natural world, and it's famous for including descriptions of creatures we might consider fantastical alongside more mundane descriptions of flora and fauna.

But the natural history gives us the first known description of a triton or a male myrrh person.

Pliny reports that at the time that that he was writing in seventy-seven AD,

quote, a triton had been seen and heard playing on a shell in a certain cave, and that he had the well-known shape.

The description of the nereids is also not incorrect, except that their body is bristling with scales, even in the parts where they have human shape, end quote.

For Pliny, his shell-playing triton was clearly a nereid, one of the minor deities who inhabited bodies of water around the Roman world.

So here we have a description of a sighting of a human-fish hybrid.

This is no mythological story, but a report of a supposedly real creature.

It then takes another few centuries for Pliny's scaly triton to merge with Homer's sirens and create the mermaids that we are most familiar with today.

In a text known as the Physiologius, written sometime between the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the anonymous author matter-of-factly describes what's commonly known about mermaids, writing that a mermaid is quote, like a maiden, in breast and body, she is thus joined.

From the navel downward, she is not like a maid, but a fish certainly with sprouted fins.

She sings sweetly, this siren, and has many voices, many and resonant, but they are very dangerous.

They have said of this siren that she is so grotesque, half made, and half fish.

This is significant because it demonstrates that there has been a shift in the popular understanding of what a siren is.

She is now a half woman, half fish creature, like Pliny's Nereids, only malevolent, like the creatures who tempted Odysseus.

In many ways, she is the worst of both worlds.

This is the image that stuck as European society headed into the medieval period.

Mermaids, as they were described in the Physiologius, became popular images in European art.

Somewhat surprisingly, sculptures and carvings of mermaids became common features in Christian churches.

In Britain alone, there are at least 55 medieval churches decorated with mermaids, and hundreds more to be found throughout continental Europe.

Now, I say this is surprising because it seems a little incongruous for an ostensibly pagan monster to be prominently displayed in a Christian place of worship.

It's especially remarkable considering that most mermaids were depicted in the nude.

But this was done for instructive allegorical reasons.

In medieval Christianity, mermaids were less important as real creatures one might encounter while at sea and were more significant as symbols of sinfulness.

As historian Vaughn Scribner explains, quote,

church leaders needed a feminine, dangerous, and lustful counterpart to their upstanding men.

This is where mermaids came in.

Although early church leaders had already begun to represent Ulysses, aka Odysseus, as the virtuous opposite to the sirens, mermaid imagery did not emerge in its current form until the medieval period, when churchmen altered Greek and Roman depictions of the sirens into what they considered an even more ghastly personification of death, power, and sex, the naked, not to mention hybrid, female form.

End quote.

The medieval mermaid was presented as lustful and wanton.

She was also commonly depicted holding a gold comb and a mirror to represent her vanity.

The message of the mermaid sculptures went hand in hand with medieval Christian lessons about sinful sexuality.

It was also in keeping with sexist narratives about how women were inherently sinful, lustful, and prone to lead otherwise pious men astray.

Mermaids were literally female monsters who destroyed the curious by promising the pleasures of the flesh.

To really emphasize this point, many medieval mermaid sculptures and paintings depicted mermaids with two tails, often being spread apart to suggest female genitalia.

You might recognize this kind of double-tailed mermaid image as the logo for Starbucks.

So the next time you're at Starbucks, blow your friend's mind with that little fact.

The mermaid has two tails to hammer home the fact that she is extremely sexually available.

Anyway, the proliferation of mermaid art in the medieval period was deeply tied to its allegorical function.

People were supposed to learn a lesson from the oddly titillating mermaid carvings in their churches.

Vanity, lust, and pridefulness will destroy your immortal soul.

But, as von Scribner has suggested, all this mermaid art had unexpected consequences.

Quote, by utilizing these hybrid monstrosities to support religious tenets, the Christian church legitimized such creatures, which in turn created the foundation for belief and acceptance for generations to come, end quote.

Now, that is an interesting idea.

It helps us answer the question, why did so many people report seeing mermaids in the centuries to come?

One explanation is that Europeans were primed to see mermaids because they had been surrounded by images of mermaids in their places of worship.

The mermaid had become part of the shared imagination, reinforced by countless carvings, paintings, and sculptures.

The suggestion, be it conscious or subconscious, was that mermaids were out there and they were going to try to do you harm.

Now, you can certainly find examples of mermaid encounters from the medieval period, but they are rare, and the ones that do exist often have a folkloric character.

They tend to be tales like the Scottish folk story that I told in the introduction.

Now, there's also the strange phenomenon of medieval people encountering what were called sea monks and sea bishops by the oceanside.

These were creatures that were described as being half fish, half priest.

Some of these sea monks were even said to have the distinctive shaved toncture hairstyle favored by medieval Christian monks.

But these are exceedingly rare stories.

Mermaid sightings as a European historical phenomenon really explode in the early 16th century.

And this makes sense when you consider that this was the start of Europeans' age of maritime imperialism.

Explorers, conquerors, slavers, freebooters, traders, and fishermen all started pushing across the oceans into lands previously unknown or only barely encountered by Europeans.

This push into the Americas, Central Africa, and eventually the Pacific meant that sailors were encountering human beings, cultures, plants, and animals that were entirely unfamiliar.

The very real zoology of places like the Congo, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Canada, just to name a few locales, was foreign to the point of being wondrous.

The real animals that resided in those places to the European eye could often seem monstrous and fantastical.

With that in mind, it seems almost predictable that Europeans would interpret various animal encounters as mermaid sightings.

This is an important aspect of the mermaid stories that come down to us from sailors, explorers, and imperialists from this period.

The mermaids often act less human and more animal.

There are fewer stories of mermaids singing, seducing men, transforming into real women, or playing musical instruments.

Instead, these early modern mermaids act more like seals or dolphins.

The mermaid changed in this period and came to be perceived more like an exotic animal than a mythical temptress.

These mer people were more like sea lions than sea witches.

Exotic tales of the New World, brought back by the early explorers, may have also contributed to this proliferation in sightings.

Sailors were expecting a strange encounter in the Americas and beyond.

Mermaids, being only half human, fit expectations many people had about the quote-unquote savage parts of the planet.

The first people of the Americas and Africa were often denigrated as being animal-like or less than human.

This harmful narrative about indigenous people made literal human-animal hybrids seem more plausible.

Von Scribner explains, quote, Europeans thus found Merr people in every new land they explored, thereby fueling the Christian Church's centuries-old narrative surrounding these monstrosities, while also validating Westerners' interest in them.

Europeans not only wanted to see myrrh people at home and abroad, they expected to, even needed to.

Early modern Europeans' deep-seated acceptance of mermaids and tritons cannot be discounted in investigations of this groundbreaking era.

As is still the case today, when humans presume the legitimacy of a belief, they often adjust their worldview to fit these supposed realities.

This confidence, moreover, is contagious as surrounding individuals also begin to believe in those same alleged truths.

Perception, in short, is everything.

Von Scribner dropping some serious insights there.

Okay, so if perception is everything, then what exactly was being perceived?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, many Europeans were seeing strange animals that they identified as mermaids, perhaps for lack of a better word to describe them.

In 1533, the Spanish captain Diego Hurtado was sent by the governor of the recently conquered territory of Mexico, Hernán Cortez, to explore the Pacific Ocean.

While making his way through Polynesia, Hortado reported not one, but two mermaids near his ship.

He commented that the creatures were seen, quote by the whole crew end quote.

The second of these tritons

continued to leap and play about the ship a short time, so that the crew had full leisure to consider him.

He leaped about in the water, like a monkey, sometimes diving, and at other times washing his body with his hands, with his eyes fixed on the crew, like a creature imbued with reason.

But, on trying to throw something to him, he dived and swam to a distance, but came up again in the light of the ship.

End quote.

This frolicking Polynesian mermaid shared much in common with a creature sighted by another famous European explorer a few decades later.

In 1608, the storied navigator Henry Hudson was sailing in the North Sea, just off the coast of Norway, when he recorded this in his journal.

Quote: This morning one of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid, and calling upon some of the company to see her, one more came up, and by that time she had come close to the ship's side, looking earnestly on the men.

A little while after, a sea came and overturned her.

From the navel upward, her back and breasts were like a woman's, as they say they saw her, her body as big as one of us, her skin very white, white, and long hair hanging down behind, of color black.

In her going down, they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a porpoise, and speckled like a mackerel.

Their names that saw her were Thomas Hills and Robert Rayner.

Now, one thing I think we should all notice about Henry Hudson's sighting is how seriously he takes the testimony of his crew.

In 1608, it was clearly not out of the question for a sailor to spot a mermaid.

Hudson goes out of his way to note the names of the men who witnessed the creature.

Now, I'm pointing this out because as the 17th century progressed, this would become a common feature of many mermaid accounts.

Often the person relating the tale would include the names of witnesses and would provide biographical details that would help emphasize their credibility.

Doctors, lawyers, aristocrats, or otherwise upper-class people were often cited as the guarantors of particular mermaid encounters.

Take, for example, the story of the Manar mermaid, which found its way into an early 17th century Jesuit history because the witness was a respected doctor and a fellow Jesuit.

Dimas Borsque was a Portuguese doctor who acted as the personal physician of the Viceroy of Goa in India in 1560.

In that year, while visiting an island off Ceylon, what is today Sri Lanka, Borsque claimed that he dissected a mermaid caught by some local fishermen.

He would write in a letter back to Portugal that while on the island of Manar, he had been stopped by a group of locals who, quote, by a stupendous miracle of nature, either by luck or by that the marvelous works of God Almighty might be spoken of, caught in their nets nine female fishes and seven males, which, because of their resemblance to human beings, the natives called them sea men and sea women.

The doctor then performed his dissection on the beach, so that, quote,

after exactly examining the anatomy of each part, I would clearly understand the similitude of the whole body with that of a human being.

Externally, the resemblance was very great.

The doctor was particularly taken by the being's eyes, which he described as, quote, with regard to both position and color, you would believe that they belonged not to a fish, but to a man.

Set in the face, they produced a very beautiful replica of the human visage.

End quote.

Now, this particular sighting was considered especially compelling because it was documented with an impressive level of scientific precision.

Accordingly, the Mer people dissected by Dimas Borske were taken quite seriously by other scientifically minded Europeans.

As we've discussed before on this podcast, despite their reputation, the Jesuits were easily the most scientifically progressive of all the Roman Catholic religious orders.

Their choice to include the descriptions of a mermaid dissection in one of their official histories speaks to just how plausible mer people seemed to Europeans in the late 16th century.

Now, interestingly, the very specificity of Borsque's anatomical descriptions of his Men Are Mermaids has taken some of the magic out of the encounter in modern times.

A close reading of his multi-paragraph description of the mer people,

and it becomes pretty clear that he cut open a sea mammal known as a dugong on the beach that day.

Dugongs are manatee-like creatures native to the waters around Sri Lanka, with large flat tails and flipper-like arms, which the doctor describes tellingly as, quote, not round but flat, extending forward to the length of two cubits.

There were no distinct elbows or hands, as in man, but the limb was altogether whole and continuous, without any joints.

End quote.

The doctor also describes the creature's large, snubbed nose and small mouth underneath.

He also notes that the creature has no real neck, and its head sort of emerges from the larger girth of its body.

It really sounds like a dugong.

Now the fact that these sea people were actually dugongs might seem laughably obvious to us now.

But in 1560, dugongs were not animals that Europeans were used to encountering.

When Dimas Borsque looked at a dugong, he saw a mermaid.

And interestingly, the longer he looked, the more it became like a mermaid.

Imagine you were an inquisitive and literate 16th century person, curious about the frontiers of science, and you heard that respected men like Christopher Columbus, Diego Hurtado, Henry Hudson, and Dimas Borsque had all seen mermaids and had those sightings confirmed by witnesses.

What would you believe?

You might just believe that mermaids were totally real and that perhaps real mermaids were somewhat unlike the mermaids of legend.

This might send you on a well-meaning quest to separate mermaid fact from mermaid fiction.

But let's pause here, and when we come back, we will get deeper into the mermaid debates of the early modern period.

One of the things that warmed my little Canadian heart while I was researching this topic was learning that one of the most sighted mermaid encounters of the 17th century occurred in Canada.

Gotta love a Canadian mermaid.

Well, to be clear, this encounter actually occurred in the harbor of St.

John's, Newfoundland in 1610, at which point Canada was still New France and Newfoundland had absolutely nothing to do with it.

As any proud Newfoundlander will tell you, the rock's distinct colonial identity runs deeper than its connection to the mainland.

So, more properly, this mermaid was a Newfoundlander.

The sighting was reported by Richard Whitbourne, an early English colonist on the island.

In his book, which was meant to drum up interest in this new English colony, Whitbourne related this strange tale.

Quote,

Now, also, I will not omit to relate something of a strange creature that I first saw there in the year 1610.

In a morning early, I was standing by the water-side in the harbour of St.

John's, which I espied very swiftly to come swimming towards me, looking cheerfully as it had been, a woman by the face, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, ears, neck, and forehead.

It seemed to be so beautiful, and in these parts so well proportioned, having round upon the head all blue streaks resembling hair down to the neck.

But certainly it was hair, for I beheld it long.

Thereby I beheld the shoulders and back down to the middle to be square, white, and smooth as the back of a man, and from the middle to the hinder parts pointing in proportion like a broad hooked arrow.

This creature then made an attempt to board a small rowboat in the harbor.

According to Whitborn, Whitbourne, quote, it put both hands upon the side of the boat and it did strive to come in, end quote, which inspired one of the frightened boatmen to, quote, strike it a full blow on the head.

When it fell off from them, the men then fleed in fear to land.

This, I suppose, was a mermaid, end quote.

Notably, Whitburn ends this story by going out of his way to name another credible witness who could support the tale.

He calls on the good character of, quote, William Hawkridge, then my servant, that hath since been captain in a ship to the East Indies, end quote.

Notice how he cites Hawkridge's maritime credentials.

This isn't just some guy, this is a ship's captain.

In its day, Whitburn's mermaid account was considered to to be extremely credible, coming as it did from a gentleman of high stature, and being attested to by a witness of known good character.

As such, this particular mermaid description would go on to be cited by later investigators debating the likelihood of mermaids' existence.

The St.

John's mermaid was consistently treated as a compelling account that needed to be taken seriously and accounted for even by those who ultimately thought that mermaids were fictional.

Interestingly, the fake history twist on this story has less to do with the mermaid and more to do with the man who witnessed it.

In later versions of the tale, Richard Whitbourne was subbed out with a more famous English colonizer, John Smith, as in John Smith and Pocahontas.

For later readers, it was deemed to be a better story if the man who was saved by Pocahontas also happened to see a mermaid one time in Newfoundland.

But John Smith didn't see that mermaid.

Richard Whitborn did.

Maybe, I guess.

As the 17th century moved into the 18th century, the mermaid question became an increasing matter of concern for biologists and European naturalists.

In 1676, a colonial American surgeon named Thomas Glover had a strange encounter in Virginia that he believed deserved the attention of the Royal Society in London, the most respected scientific society in Europe at the time.

In the course of a larger tract concerning the climate, economy, and tobacco cultivation in Virginia, he submitted this description for the consideration of the the learned society members.

Quote

About half a stone's cast from me appeared a most prodigious creature, much resembling a man, only somewhat larger, standing right up in the water with his head, neck, shoulders, breast, and waist to the cubits of his arms above the water.

His skin was tawny, much like that of an Indian.

The figure of his head was pyramidal and slick, without hair.

His eyes large and black, and so were his eyebrows, his mouth very wide, with a broad black streak on the upper lip, which turned outwards at each end like mustachios.

His countenance was grim and terrible.

His neck, shoulders, arms, breast, and waist were onto that of a man.

His hands, if he had any, were underwater.

At last, he shoots with his head downwards, by by which means he cast his tail above water, which exactly resembled the tail of a fish with a broad fan at the end of it.

End quote.

In his essay, Glover presents that description without comment before moving on to discussing the types of waterfowl that can be found in Virginia's rivers.

The gear shift from the fantastical to the mundane can be pretty jarring for a modern reader.

But it's telling because it demonstrates how mermaids and tritons were being understood in this period.

They were treated as curious, but not impossible.

Now, in my estimation, Glover's mermaid sounds a lot like a big seal or a sea lion.

The pyramidal head, the mustache, the hands supporting him under the water.

But I don't know.

You would also think a surgeon and a naturalist who documented wildlife would know a seal when he saw one.

So maybe we should take him a bit more seriously.

Glover was not the only colonial American luminary to submit evidence of mer people to the Royal Society.

Another somewhat surprising mermaid description was submitted by the Reverend Cotton Mather.

Those of you that have heard our series on the Salem witch trials might remember that Cotton Mather was a Puritan writer and theologian who was among the most influential people in Massachusetts during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

In 1716, Mather wrote a letter to the Royal Society of London titled simply A Triton, where he detailed his journey from being a mermaid skeptic into becoming a sincere believer in the existence of the hybrid creature.

In the letter, Mather goes on at length about the ancient accounts of so-called sirens and tritons, and makes a point of saying that he always found these unconvincing.

In particular, he points out that Pliny's account, that I quoted earlier, had lost all credibility, as by the early 18th century, men of science had now thoroughly rejected Pliny as a reliable source, or as he puts it, quote, Plinyisms are of no great reputation in our days, end

Mather says that he had always assumed that mermaids were no more real than quote, sphinxes and centaurs, end quote.

And I think that's an important line because it reminds us that in the early 1700s, most educated people did not believe in what we would call mythical creatures.

Mermaids were a bit of an exception.

What really started to change Mather's mind on the topic were what he called reliable historical accounts.

In particular, he found Richard Whitbourne's account from Newfoundland Harbor to be particularly compelling.

What really changed his mind was a story that he heard first hand from a group of, quote, three honest and credible men coming in a boat from Milford to Bainford, Connecticut,

who swore they had seen a triton off the coast of Massachusetts.

Their testimony was so compelling that Mather explained, quote, Now at last my credulity is entirely conquered, and I am compelled now to believe the existence of a triton, for such a one has just now been exhibited in my own country, and the attestations to it are such that it would be a fault in me at all to question it, end quote.

Explaining the men's sighting, Mather writes, quote, They had a full view of him and saw his head and face and neck and shoulders and arms and elbows and breast and back and all of a human shape.

Pause.

By the way, isn't it crazy that these guys feel like they have to list every single part of the body?

All of these descriptions, like the head, the neck, the nose, we get it.

Anyway, continuing, the lower parts were those of a fish and colored like a mackerel.

End

Mather was a respected scientist, and his letter was given due consideration at the Royal Society.

His belief in the existence of mermaids helped make that a respectable position among the learned.

Another famous colonial American who thought that mermaid sightings needed to be taken seriously was founding father Benjamin Franklin.

In seventeen thirty six, Franklin reported on this tale from Bermuda in his Pennsylvania Gazette.

Quote

From Bermuda, they write, that a sea monster has been lately seen there, the upper part of whose body was in the shape and about the bigness of a boy of twelve years old, with long black hair.

The lower part resembled a fish.

He was first seen on shore, and taking to the water, was pursued by people in a boat who intended to strike him with a fish gig.

But, approaching him, the human likeness surprised them into compassion, and they had not the power to do it.

I like the detail that the people on the boat were surprised into compassion.

Such a rare thing to be surprised into compassion.

Anyway, as historian von Scribner has pointed out, this account is just more evidence that scientists like Benjamin Franklin were not simply laughing off accounts of mermaids.

They were being presented as remarkable but true stories.

Indeed, it was held by many biologists and naturalists in the 1700s that mermaids were not so much a magical harbinger of evil and were instead some yet-to-be-identified animal.

In 1754, one Dutch commentator named Ernut Vosmar insisted that all the arguments opposing the existence of mermaids were, quote, weak.

He explained that the reason that so few mermpeople had been captured, living or dead, was that it was simply a clever animal that was better at avoiding nets than other marine creatures.

As for why there were no mermaid corpses corpses washing up on the shore, well, he believed that was because since they were more like human beings, mermaids were, quote, more subject to decay after death than the bodies of other fishes, end quote.

Hmm, not so sure about the logic there, but okay.

But as the 18th century progressed, the mermaids being sighted seemed to become increasingly animal and less human.

In fact, the mermaids started to shrink.

By the mid-18th century, the mermaids being sighted were considerably smaller than those that had been reported a century earlier.

In a 1759 edition of Gentleman's Magazine, a large color plate was included featuring an illustration of a merperson by the French artist Jacques-Fabienne Gauthier.

Gauthier was known for creating especially accurate depictions of scientific subjects.

His merperson had allegedly been displayed in Paris a year earlier, frolicking alive in a glass tank.

It was, quote, about two feet long, alive, and very active, sporting about in the vessel of water in which it was kept with great seeming delight and agility, end quote.

The small mermaid had, quote, harsh skin, the ears very large, and the back parts and tail were covered with scales.

Gauthier's illustration is quite striking, so I will be sure to post it on the website and on the Facebook page for people to check out.

In fact, I'll have a bunch of mermaid pictures up there for you.

Now, at the time in 1758, Gauthier's tiny two-foot mermaid was a bit of an outlier.

Typically, these beasts were not described as being that small.

But it presaged the next stage in the mermaid's story, which was her transformation into an attraction in cabinets of curiosity.

Cabinets of curiosity were a carnivalesque precursor to modern museums.

They could take the form of private collections, traveling shows, or sedentary attractions.

But they were basically collections of objects deemed to be marvelous or in some way scientifically instructive.

Nautilus shells and crocodile skeletons would be displayed beside ships in a bottle and ancient Roman coins.

Mermaid specimens also started becoming popular parts of these displays.

Now, originally, mermaid hands were quite popular in cabinets of curiosity.

These were likely preserved seal flippers or the skeletal remains taken from some other sea mammal.

But as the 1700s became the 1800s, taxidermied mermaids became more common.

These mermaid specimens tended to be small, around two feet in length, and were often quite a lot like the small mermaid illustrated by Gauthier.

We now know that many of these were artistic creations, most of which came from Japan and the Philippines.

The most famous of these creations was the so-called Fiji Mermaid, which we have discussed before on this podcast.

As many of you might remember, the great showman and hoaxer P.

T.

Barnum purchased a strange taxidermied object and displayed it in his American Museum in 1842.

He claimed that it was the remains of a real mermaid that had been caught off the coast of Fiji.

In his memoir, he described it as, quote, an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, diminutive specimen about three feet long.

Its mouth was open, its tail turned over, and its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony, end quote.

Now, in reality, this was a piece of gaffe taxidermy, the likes of which had been displayed for decades in various cabinets of curiosity.

Folks in London and throughout Europe and even in other parts of the United States had seen these types of hybrid taxidermy projects before.

This particular specimen had been made by stitching together the preserved remains of a monkey and a fish.

Now, even though these types of fake mermaid specimens had been seen before, Barnum was a master of publicity.

The sensation he caused in the press drove huge crowds to his American Museum in New York.

Barnum, of course, generated a fake controversy where people were debating the reality of his specimen in the press.

The final pitch to the public was: come see for yourself.

You decide if mermaids are fact or fiction.

But as was often the case with Barnum's attractions, the final reveal was a bit underwhelming.

When folks saw that the Fiji mermaid was actually a crude piece of taxidermy, many left believing that mermaids were obviously just another piece of Barnum humbug.

In the estimation of our key expert, Von Scribner, Barnum's Fiji mermaid prank finally killed popular belief in the hybrid creatures.

But perhaps we shouldn't give P.T.

Barnum too much credit.

The truth seems to be that by the time the American public examined the Fiji mermaid in 1842, the scientific community had long since moved on from a serious consideration of mermaids.

Belief in mermaids coincided with an era when the good word of a respected man was given quite a lot of weight as a piece of scientific evidence.

There's no doubt in my mind that most of the people I have quoted on this episode saw creatures that they believed were mermaids.

In a world where that testimony was tantamount to truth, I understand why a thinking person would feel compelled to believe in these creatures.

There were simply too many trustworthy accounts to ignore.

But eventually, in science, you need to show, not just tell.

Showing the actual body of a mermaid proved to be impossible.

The bodies that were shown were gimmicky pieces of taxidermy.

The lack of physical evidence eventually caught up with the mermaid.

Nevertheless, the stories continue to enthrall us.

As Christina Bacalega and Marie Alohalani Brown remind us, the stories, quote, reflect our fascination and fear of female bodies, the water, and our dread of predators and poisonous creatures that live in or near water.

But such tales are also social and cultural commentaries of what it means to be human.

They encapsulate our beliefs and mores, express our weaknesses and strengths, and expose our deepest fears and desires.

In our imagination, the mermaid went from being a magical, if disconcerting portent of ill omen, to being a remarkable animal living at the edges of colonial empires, to shrinking down into a more manageable size, the kind of creature that could plausibly avoid detection and fishermen's nets.

The mermaid changed shape to better fit our evolving understanding of the natural world.

But the mermaid kept shrinking, getting smaller in our imagination, until finally she disappeared.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore an all-new historical myth.

That was a fun one.

I enjoyed that.

In fact, we'll be back in just one week on June 10th with a brand new bonus episode where I will be answering questions about mermaids, about my conversation about myths with Liv Albert, or really anything else you want to talk about, please send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com if you have a question.

And patrons, please use the chat on the Patreon site, patreon.com slash ourfakehistory.

Before we go this week, I just want to let you know that the band I am playing in in Ottawa, Fire Antlers, has an album release show coming up on June 14th.

That's June 14th, 2025, at Irene's Pub on Bank Street here in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

If you want to see me play guitar in Fire Antlers, you should come to that show.

Feel free to come up, say hi, tell me that you like the podcast.

It will make my night.

If you want a taste of what Fire Antlers has been cooking up on their brand new album, The Plot is Lost, then listen to the end of our show here.

I will be playing the the song Hollow Moon.

The new album from Fire Antlers is now available through Spotify, Bandcamp, or wherever you stream music.

The other thing I need to do before we go this week, of course, is give some very special shout outs.

Big ups to Israel Nelkin, to

Layton Williams, to Jorge Bromberg, or is it George Bromberg?

Sorry, George or Jorge.

To Nikki Bengsen, to Stephen Burnip,

to

Ann 1997,

to Addison, a major nerd, like that one, to Maggie Farron, to the Cincinnati Kid, to BJ Harris, to Mark Milbauer, to Wesley J.

to Richard Johnson, to Jeremy Kush, to Michael Colvin, to Randy McCallum, to Jerry Conway,

to

Shelehe

to Tristan, to Freddie Castillo,

to

Tom Arnt, to

Oliver, to Maria Moeller,

to Merit Cottingham,

to Nathan Fornwalt, to Greg Turiel,

to Holly Bishop, to Denise Deeds,

and to Leighton Williams.

All of those folks have decided to pledge at $5 or more on Patreon.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you, thank you so much for your support.

I really hope you enjoy that new extra episode on the Bronze Age Collapse.

I've already been getting some nice feedback from that show.

So go check it out.

If you want to get in on this, patreon.com/slash our fake history.

Supporters at all levels get access to the Bronze Age Collapse show.

I've already given you my email, but you can find me everywhere else on social media at our fake history.

Go to facebook.com slash our fake history.

Check me out on blue sky at our fake history.

Find me on YouTube.

Search up our YouTube channel.

Find me on TikTok.

I'm everywhere.

Instagram at our fake history.

You know how social media works.

Go get me out there.

As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me, except for this final song, which is coming to you from Fire Antlers.

As always, my name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

Get in high

simulations, real ing harptunes

Full around with the airs, communicate, playing down some bad news, they do it

looking down at the crown.

You just know the silent old tight folks with the doors and can't forget about the time when you bury the line.

No blessing above another slide by the love will stop.

Right in time,

illuminations rising off the wall.

Big emotions who are messed against another.

Praying people are the falls and we're fools and jewelers all

good calls

to apologize.

Chocolate long, taking notes from the straw.

You just know to say it up.

Giant folks in the dough to say you forgot about the time when you married a lie.

No but blessing you know, first a slap in the shoulder, so God bless the soul.

It's a smile for of bottom of the hole.

Just a dress in the full of the road

as a ball so below.

Top folks with the dose, I can't forget about the time when you married the lion.

And all the blessing above is the slap of a shoulder.

So God bless the soul.

It's a hot summer bottom of a hollow.

That's a prison full of rose.

It's a hollow moon, looking down at you.

Won't tell down true.

It's a hollow house, looking down at you.

You're out eyes, I can see it through.

It's the hollow hole, looking down at you.

I'm telling

you,

You're juggling a lot, full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family, and now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

At APU, the bigger your ambition, the better we fit.

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