told and retold over thousands of years in song and story, they cannot be dismissed without serious investigation and analysis. A few years before Matthew Arnold was born, another educationalist, William Munro, a schoolmaster from Scotland, wrote a letter to the Times, in which he described in great detail a sighting that he himself had made of “a figure resembling an unclothed human female, sitting upon a rock extending into the sea, and apparently in the action of combing its hair, which flowed around its shoulders, and was of a light brown colour …” Munro watched the strange being for some three or four minutes before it slid off its rock and down into the sea. He continued watching carefully, but it never reappeared.
The London Mirror of November 16, 1822, reported that John McIsaac from Corphine in Kintyre, Scotland, had made a very similar sighting in 1811. Like the creature that Munro saw, McIsaac’s mermaid had long hair which it tended to continually.
Were dugongs like this ever mistaken for mermaids?
Other early-nineteenth-century mermaid observers included a girl named Mackay, whose description of what she had seen along the Caithness coast tallied closely with William Munro’s account in his letter to the Times.
In co-author Lionel’s poetry anthology, Earth, Sea and Sky, there is a different, happier conclusion to the merman’s story, entitled “The Merman’s Wife Returns”:
There was an answer to the merman’s call,
A faltering step towards the beckoning sea.
“Wait for me, children. Husband, wait for me.”
The voice they knew and loved, but faint with pain;
Her children skim the waves to reach the shore.
Her merman husband bounds across the sands,
Sweeps her into his arms — his bride once more
Strong fingers close around her bleeding hands.
“What have they done to you, my love, my life?”
“They could not understand our unity.
They hated me. They said I was unclean,
A thing apart, because I lived with you.
They would not let me go back to the sea,
Our home of pearl and shell beneath the waves,
Our lovers’ wonderland of coral caves…
But I broke free… Somehow I found the strength
To pull my hands clear of their iron bands…
Their prejudice, their bias and their hate… ”
The merman gently kissed her bleeding hands
And held her very close, their children too.
They understood the cost of her escape.
Rejoicing in the power of her love…
Safe in their cool, green sea they headed home,
Their family re-united, strong, complete…
And in the merman’s heart the ocean sang.
Eighteen hundred years before either Munro or Mackay reported their mermaid sightings in Scotland, Gaius Plinius Secundus — better known as Pliny the Elder — was born in A.D. 23 in what was then called Transpadane Gaul: it now forms part of modern Italy. Before his tragic death caused by volcanic fumes from Vesuvius in A.D. 79, Pliny had written a Natural History that endured as a standard reference work for centuries — until rational, scientific biologists began to express doubts about some of what they considered to be dubious myths and legends that Pliny had incorporated along with his factual material. In his mermaid section, Pliny wrote,
Mermaids are not fables. They are, in fact, as the artists depict them. Their bodies, however, are scaly and rough, even where they seem most human. A mermaid was seen by many witnesses close to the shore. It was dying, and the local inhabitants heard it crying pitifully.
Henry Hudson, famous for his heroic but tragic seventeenth-century voyages in quest of the North West Passage, names two of his ship’s company, Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner, as witnesses to a mermaid sighting in an area then known as Novaya Zemlya.
FAROE ISLANDS MERMAN
A Danish Royal Commission went out to make a serious investigation of the mer-folk phenomena in 1723. Not far from the Faroe Islands, members of the commission reported that they had actually seen a merman. It submerged as they approached and then surfaced again, staring at them with a horrible, fixed intensity. This so unnerved the commission that they ordered their skipper to withdraw. Their apparent retreat caused the creature — whatever it was — to give vent to an almighty roar, and submerge again, like an animal that has triumphantly defended its territorial boundaries against intruders.
Sir Richard Whitbourne, who originally came from Exmouth in Devonshire — famous two centuries later for the trail of mysterious footprints crossing the estuary of the River Exe — was practically a contemporary of Hudson. Whitbourne reported sighting something similar to a mermaid in 1610, but his report is especially significant in that it describes whatever he saw as having blue streaks around its head, resembling hair: but Sir Richard was adamant that these streaks were definitely not hair.
Writing about mer-folk in The Natural History of Norway (1752–53), no less a dignitary than Bishop Erik Pontoppidan himself declared, “In the Diocese of Bergen, here, and also in the Manor called Nordland, there are many honest and reliable witnesses who most strongly and positively affirm that they have seen creatures of this type.”
Various reports of the infamous Amboina mermaids are also worth reporting in outline. Now named Ambon, the Indonesian island once known as Amboina, or Amboyna, is about ten kilometres off the southwestern coast of Seram Island. Its highest point is the summit of Mount Salhatu, and although Ambon is not entirely free from earthquakes, there is no volcanic activity. It does, however, have hot gas vents called solfataras as well as hot springs. The climate is tropical, and rainfall is heavy. There are many varieties of fish in Teluk Bay, and some of them are bizarre, which might have given rise to the mermaid sightings.
Dutch writer Francois Valentijn compiled The Natural History of Amboina, published in 1726, and containing accounts of mermaids as well as illustrations purporting to illustrate them. He calls them Zee-Menschen and Zee-Wyven. Valentijn’s illustration had already appeared in 1718 in a book called Poissons, Ecrivisses et Crabes … des Isles Moluques. The artist responsible for the picture in both volumes was Samuel Fallours, who held the rank of Official Artist to the Dutch East India Company.
The description accompanying Fallours’ illustration said that the creature was about 1.5 metres long and resembled a siren. After being captured, the unlucky Zee-Wyf was kept in a barrel of water. Not surprisingly, declining to eat anything, it died about a week later — after making a few faint mewing, squeaking noises that reminded its captors of a mouse.
Tales of the mermaid of Amboina reached the illustrious ears of Tsar Peter the Great, and George III of England, and Valentijn was interrogated further. In response to the imperial interrogation, he came up with an account of an East Indies Company Officer who had seen a pair of the strange mer-folk swimming together near Hennetelo, a village in the Administrative District of Amboina. After several weeks these two creatures were seen again — this time by forty or more witnesses. They were described as being a greyish-green and shaped like human beings from the head down to the waist — after which their bodies tapered like the tail-halves of large fish.
WODEN MERMAID
On co-author Lionel’s Channel 4 U.K. television series, one of the mysteries investigated was what purported to be a wizened, mummified mermaid, but which, under the pathologist’s knife, turned out to have been carved