by Jamaica Rose
Sailors knew meetings with mermaids could be very risky. If she approached the vessel because she was interested in someone aboard, and then he scorned her, she could call up a storm or tidal wave to destroy the entire vessel. Sailors believed if they threw fish or coins to the mermaid, she would dive for them and disappear, thus saving the ship from disaster. But the sailor or sailors who distracted the mermaid in this way might be in even more danger on the next voyage. If throwing fish or coins didn’t work and the mermaid followed the ship, the ship was sure to sink.
Throughout the ages, it seems people wanted mermaids to be real. Numerous sightings of them and the multitude of stories written about these “ladies of the sea” show this to be true. There are stories of them in poems and books all around the world. They are portrayed in all kinds of art, from sculptures, paintings, vases, and other pottery works, to the figureheads on ships. Lamps, medallions, needlework, combs, and even chandeliers have been made with a mermaid motif.
Most of the written stories are about love and mermaids, or of mermaids who want to become human. Some stories are about mermaids having no immortal soul and how they try to obtain one by marrying a human.
Of the many stories written about mermaids, one of the most famous is The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen in 1836. When the mermaid turns fifteen, she falls in love with a handsome human prince. She seeks a magic spell from a witch that will give her legs. The mermaid pays a high price for this spell because although she is given the legs, every step she takes on land comes with a stabbing pain as if she were walking on a bed of sharp knives. In addition, the witch cut out the mermaid’s tongue. As a result, the mermaid lost her voice. The mermaid endured all of this in order to be able to be with the prince she loved, but she didn’t get what she wanted. The human prince jilted her to marry a human princess. The mermaid could have murdered the prince’s bride, but instead she chose to die by throwing herself into the sea. By doing this, she earned an immortal soul with her sacrifice.
The 1913 bronze statue of Anderson’s mermaid by Edvard Eriksen has become a national symbol in Denmark. The statue sits on a rock in the harbor at Copenhagen. The poor lass has been a target for vandals. Someone cut off her head in 1964. The crime was an unsolved mystery until thirty-three years later when Jørgen Nash, a writer, confessed that he cut off her head and tossed it into a nearby lake as a protest against society. Fortunately, the mold for making the original statue could be used to remake the missing part. Unfortunately, the original decapitation spawned copycats. Over the years, others have beheaded her, as well as cutting off her arms. She has also been painted a number of times by Danish taggers.
Cap’n Michael says:
The poor lass. Her feet hurt. She gets rejected by some vain jerk of a prince, and then some other jerks start cutting off her head and arms! Ta top it off, some cretins had to start slappin’ paint on her. If the captain had his way, they’d get ta see what a keelhauling feels like!
Throughout the ages, there have been thousands of sightings of mermaids, some by famous explorers. Christopher Columbus reported he saw three mermaids in the Caribbean off Haiti. In 1608, the explorer Henry Hudson wrote the following in his logbook:
This morning one of our companie looking over board saw a Mermaid...from the Navill upward, her backe and breasts were like a woman’s, her body as big as one of us; her skin very white; and long haire hanging down behinde, of color blacke; in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a porpoisse and speckled like a Macrell.
Shakespeare wrote of mermaids in several of his plays. Mermaid signs were common in London at the time, indicating the building was a tavern. The famous Mermaid Tavern was where William Shakespeare and his contemporaries met.
British colonists brought their folklore and legends of mermaids to America. Harriet Beecher Stowe used this wealth of folklore in writing a story about a Maine sea captain who claimed he had spoken to a merman. In the story, the merman came to the surface of the sea and asked the captain to move the anchor of the boat. The merman explained that the anchor was blocking the door to his underwater home. His wife and children were trapped inside the home because of the anchor. Traditional sea chanteys have included the story. A verse of one such chantey goes as follows:
Oh, you’ve dropped your anchor before my house
And blocked up my only door,
And my wife can’t get out, to roam about
Nor my chicks who number four.
People want to believe in mermaids and keep the romance going. Sometimes people are very gullible. They have fallen for many hoaxes that mermaids have really been found and are alive, or that there is proof of their existence. The most famous hoax was by P. T. Barnum (of the famous circus duo of Barnum and Bailey). Barnum had an exhibit that he claimed was the remains of a real mermaid found in the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific. What was actually exhibited was made by a Japanese taxidermist using parts from a monkey and a fish.
Barnum sent engravings of these remains of a “real mermaid” to newspapers. He distributed 10,000 posters and pamphlets with drawings depicting what this real mermaid supposedly had looked like when alive. It was exhibited in Barnum’s American Museum in New York in 1842. The exhibit drew thousands of people to the museum. Barnum had several letters of scientific authentication—written by himself—and a friend of Barnum posed as a professor who declared it the mummy of a real mermaid. Finally, in 1855 Barnum confessed to the fraud. The funny thing is that, even with the confession, people still thronged to see the “FeeJee mummy” when it was taken on traveling road shows. After it arrived back in the American Museum, there were always long lines of people wanting to get a glimpse.
There have been thousands of sightings of mermaids, so there must be something to the stories. What is out there that causes people to think they have seen a mermaid? It has been suggested that dugongs or sea lions are what people actually see. These are large aquatic sea animals. They rise up out of the water and, in the fog, a sailor might mistake them for being part human. Manatees could take the blame for the vision of a mermaid with long hair. Just imagine a manatee coming up to the surface through a patch of seaweed. The seaweed could give the impression of long hair.
People do want to believe in mermaids. Look at all the books, movies, games, and dolls out there. Who knows, maybe there are mermaids out there somewhere. Maybe the sailors have it right after all.
Let’s Get Kraken
Have you ever been out in a boat on the ocean? Ever wonder what was in the water beneath you, just out of sight? Ever worry there was some monster hidden in the deep beneath your boat, about to leap up and gulp you down its gigantic mouth? Just about everyone who’s been out to sea has thought the same thing.
There are many tales and legends to explain unexplainable things about the sea. There are a multitude of stories about sea monsters, mermaids, ghost ships, sprites, and Davy Jones and his locker. These and similar tales are found in cultures around the world. Different cultures prayed to various gods as well as making offerings and sacrifices in the belief that the gods had power to make things better if they were pleased. It was also believed that if the gods were not pleased, they had the power to do awful things. Now, the gods were thought to be good as long as they were happy, but there were also evil creatures that wanted to harm mankind and destroy it. One such monster was the legendary kraken.
Sailors from all over the world told the same stories—tales of seeing tentacles like that of a squid or octopus sticking out of the ocean. Only these tentacles were much, much larger. There were tales of seeing huge round heads with green eyes the size of dinner plates staring up through the water.
These sailors said they knew the answer to why so many vessels had just vanished without a trace. There was a monster prowling the depths of the sea—and it liked to drag ships down to their doom. It was the kraken!
Besides ships disappearing, there were also reports of WHOLE ISLANDS disappearing. On
e minute an island was there, and the next it was gone!
Even though no one had seen one of these monsters attack (and survived to tell of it), there were many tales of the monster’s huge tentacles wrapping around a ship and dragging the crushed remains to the bottom of the sea. Some sailors said the monster was able to create a huge whirlpool under a ship, causing the vessel to sink. Other sailors said this creature could burst out of the ocean, leaving a hole in the water. The hole would then turn into a whirlpool that sank the ship. Most people figured those sailors had just been drinking too much!
The word “kraken” comes from Scandinavian tales of sea monsters. The creatures were said to dwell in the frigid waters off the coasts of Norway and Iceland. But stories of similar beasts came from all over.
There were newspaper accounts of sightings of these sea monsters. Famous poets and authors used these reports of sea monsters, disappearing ships, and vanished islands in their stories and poems. In 1830, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote his famous poem “The Kraken.” Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870. He did not refer to his sea monster as a kraken, instead calling it a giant squid, but it fit the same description. All of this strengthened many people’s beliefs that this monster was real.
The Kraken
by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Sea monsters became all the rage in the 1800s. Jules Verne wrote: “They sang of it [the sea monster] in the cafes, ridiculed it in the papers, and represented it on the stage. All kinds of stories were circulated regarding it.”
More recently, these monsters have been in a number of films, including Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Clash of the Titans. In the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the kraken didn’t attack ships and sailors for himself. It did the dirty work for Davy Jones by bringing sailors and ships to Davy Jones’ locker at the bottom of the sea.
From watching these movies or reading stories with krakens and other scary sea monsters, you might have a nightmare or two. But, of course, you realize this is just an imaginary monster. So you can go boating or swimming in the ocean and not worry about a big monster coming out of the waters and grabbing you or your boat with its long undulating tentacles.
If you thought that, you would be WRONG!
Remember, there were thousands of reports by many credible people reporting they actually saw gigantic squids or parts of the animal showing above the ocean waters.
But don’t feel bad if you thought that way. You weren’t the only one. For a long time, scientists who should have accepted these reports denied there was such an animal. As none of the scientists had seen one nor did they have any photographs of them, they thought giant squid were just a myth.
Part of the problem was that these animals were seldom seen. They usually stayed at the bottom of the deep parts of the oceans where the waters were colder. Scientists had not yet developed the tools needed to explore the ocean depths.
Then in 1861, the sailors on the French steamer Alecton, cruising somewhere near the Canary Islands in the eastern Atlantic, saw something strange in the water. They fired a cannon and muskets at it, and then they gave chase. When they got close to this large thing, they threw harpoons at it, but the harpoons would not stick in the flesh. Then they managed to get a noose around it. When they started pulling on the rope, the rope sliced through the monster’s flesh, cutting it to pieces. The monster then sank into the sea. The captain did manage to get a piece of the tail and decided what they had seen was a gigantic squid. The tail was taken to the French Academy of Science. The scientists there said the tail was not part of a giant squid because no such animal could be real. It was against the laws of nature. Despite the evidence right in front of them, the educated scientists said the monster did not exist.
Then in 1878, fishermen at Timble Tickle Bay, Newfoundland, saw a huge mass floating in the water. They saw that it was a giant squid—and it was still alive. They pulled it to the edge of the beach and tied it to a tree. When the tide went out the giant squid died. They measured it; the body part was 20 feet long and the longest tentacle was 35 feet, making this giant squid 55 feet in length. The suckers on the tentacles were four inches across. Unfortunately, they didn’t take any of it to show the scientists. They just chopped the monster up for dog food! Imagine the commercials! A new taste sensation for pooches—Squid-Flavored Dog Food!
In 1930, the Brunswick, a Royal Norwegian Navy tanker, reported it was attacked three times by a giant squid. The squid tried to wrap its tentacles around the hull of the ship, but it couldn’t get a good grip. It slid off and fell into the ship’s rudders. More chopped squid for dog food!
On its maiden voyage, the sonar system of a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine failed. The sub returned to port for repairs. On examination, they found a rubber-like cover of the sonar system had been torn off. Embedded in the remains of the rubber were squid-like hooks. The size of the hooks indicated a very large squid had attacked them.
Perhaps the sub and the tanker looked like whales to the squid. Giant squids and whales are enemies and attack each other. In 1966 in South Africa, a giant squid was observed fighting a baby whale. The squid eventually killed the whale.
In 1965, a Russian whaler observed a giant squid attacking a 40-ton whale. Both animals died.
Many full-grown sperm whales have been seen with scars from the suckers of giant squid, which gives you an idea of their size and ferocity.
In the last half-century, there have been many, many documented reports of giant squid. There was one report in the 1980s of a giant squid just north of San Francisco.
An imaginary sea monster so large a ship can rest on its back while the crew celebrates Mass.
What about reports that the monster shot up out of the water leaving a big hole that turned into a whirlpool? That couldn’t have happened, could it? Well, perhaps it might have. Squid and octopuses can squirt water out of their body in a jet stream. The push of the squirting water quickly moves the squid or octopus along. Perhaps if the water is squirted downward, the force of the jet might shoot the animal straight up out of the water. When he fell back into the water, the whirlpool would be a natural result as he pulled the water down with him. It wouldn’t last very long, but it would be a whirlpool.
Now what is the connection between the giant squid and disappearing islands? The answer is simple. On the rare occasions when a giant squid comes to the surface, it has been observed to stretch its tentacles straight out along the surface of the water. If you saw one from a distance, you might mistake it for a small island.
Scientists finally agreed there is such an animal as a giant squid. In 1905, two naturalists on a scientific cruise spotted such an animal off the coast of Brazil. It is agreed that other observations of squid up to 80 feet long are valid, but we don’t know how much bigger a giant squid can get. There could be much bigger ones out there, waiting in the deep.
The giant squid is the largest invertebrate (animal without a backbone) on the planet—that we know about. Scientists still have a LOT to learn about these creatures. They know more about extinct dinosaurs than they know about giant squids.
Even though we know there are giant squids in the
ocean, we also know they do not like warm water. They are seldom seen because they usually stay at the bottom of the ocean—but not always!
There has been no actual proof a giant squid has ever eaten a man or sunk a ship, though they have been seen attacking whales, ships, and submarines.
Here’s something to think about: If a giant squid sank a ship, everyone on board would be missing and dead. So how would anyone really know what happened?
Just a bunch of sailors’ old superstitions you say? Maybe so. But if you’re sailing along and all of a sudden you see a big green eye more than a foot across, looking at you, you might want to sail faster!
Cap’n Michael says:
Any monster that’s got tentacles the size o’ tree trunks, likes to fight killer whales for fun, and uses ships’ spars for toothpicks is one I’ll be avoidin’, let me tell ya.
Are Pirates Long Gone? Think Again!
Recent news articles have headlines like “Cruise ship passengers describe ‘pop, pop, pop’ of gunfire as pirates attacked” and “$3M Ransom Parachuted to Tanker Pirates.” The pirates have returned! True, certain things have changed. They have traded in their cutlasses for AK-47s, their sloops for speedboats, their cannons for rocket-propelled grenades, and their compasses for handheld GPS devices. But they still go by the “take what you can, give nothing back” way of doing things.
Piracy has never completely disappeared. It probably never will. It comes and goes in waves. When there are strong navies on patrol, good economies, and plenty of honest work for sailors, there are usually few pirate attacks. But when times turn hard and there is a chance for easy money, pirates return.
Small yachts and sailboats have been attacked in various parts of the world throughout history, and these attacks have continued to modern times. If the victims are lucky, they are just robbed of their valuables. If they are unlucky, they might also lose their boat and maybe their lives.