Well, if it’s 6 May, that can only mean one thing: naturally — the 287th anniversary of inventor, scientist, statesman and US Founding Father Benjamin Franklin telling readers of his Pennsylvania Gazette about a mermaid sighting in Bermuda.
That’s not the mermaid in question, I’m afraid: it’s a print from the 18th century Gentleman’s Magazine showing a “Syren Drawn from the Life”. Obviously. It seems odd, though, when we think mermaids look like this:
There isn’t a picture of Franklin’s “Sea Monster”, but it was
(i.e. they didn’t kill it.)
Historian Vaughn Scribner has traced the history of merpeople to at least as far back as the Babylonians of about 5,000 BCE who
revered Ea, a fish-tailed god in the form of a man
It’s by the Middle Ages, apparently, that we first see the idea that mermaids are topless women with long hair (and a comb in one hand and a mirror in the other) — sisters (cousins, maybe?) to the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey, who try to seduce/drown Odysseus.
In the late 12th century, according to Ralph of Coggeshall, fishermen off East Anglia caught “a wild or savage man … covered with hair and with a long shaggy beard”, who they kindly locked up in Orford Castle.
Eventually, they let him swim in the sea again, under supervision, and he escaped, but is now immortalised in this hassock in the local church (even though chronicler Ralph makes no mention of a fishy lower half, in fact specifically says he has feet).
Anyway, by Franklin’s time, after a couple of centuries of global exploration (and lots of mermaid sightings) we’re into the era of elightened enquiry, when naturalist Cotton Mather and others want to “track down, trap and scientifically analyse merpeople”.
It hadn’t been definitively established yet that merpeople were mythical, so science-minded chaps kept looking, just in case. The most entertaining era, though, is surely the 19th century, when things like this start appearing:
That’s the famous, and not notably beautiful/seductive Japanese Monkey-fish from the Horniman Museum in south London. You can see it in this Victorian-era magazine illustration — although, oddly they’re not the same objects.
Apparently, at some point, the original disappeared, and was replaced in 1982 by a ‘mermaid’ bought in 1919 by someone working for noted collector of weird shit, Henry Wellcome, probably made in 19th-century Japan for tourists/export. If you click on that link, the blog goes into some detail about how they discovered what it was made of. The head’s papier-mâché, apparently — not even slightly monkey — and they include this helpful close-up of its face:
Only in the 20th century, according to a review of Scribner’s book, do we start getting “overtly sexualized mermaids in films, tourist attractions, and advertisements” — and these are about society’s “anxieties regarding women and gender roles”.
Which makes sense — and Scribner himself had something to say when some people decided last year that it was impossible for a mythical creature in a Disney movie to have non-white skin:
…but to end on a high note, one of my favourite bits of learning about contemporary mermaids came from my cousin, Virginia Sole-Smith, back in 2013 when she wrote this splendid thing about Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs State Park:
The article features such mermaiding tips as “the thick nylon tights that most of the women layered under their tails for extra warmth”, and how you need to pull a fishnet stocking over your head in order to create fishy scales on your face with metallic green and purple eye shadow.
One of the mermaids declares “this job is a lot more fun than bagging groceries”, which seems plausible, and if you’re ever out Florida way: it’s still going (and they have some mermen now, too).
