Mermaids, Are They Real?

The mermaid, half woman, half fish is part of the human collective consciousness; everyone knows what a mermaid is, whether they believe they exist or not. They appear in TV commercials, children’s stories and movies for both adults and kids. With the majority of our oceans still unexplored, is it possible they are real creatures yet to be discovered? Or are they like the fairy-folk, deliberately hiding from human eyes?

Some actual documented sightings include:

An article in The Times newspaper, England, submitted in 1809 by William Munro, school teacher; an account that occurred twelve years earlier when he was walking along Sandside Bay. He saw what he thought was a naked woman, sitting on a rock and combing her light-brown hair. The face was plump, with ruddy cheeks and blue eyes. Munro thought that if the rock she’d been sitting on hadn’t looked so dangerous, he would have dismissed her as human. After a few minutes it dropped off and swam into the sea and away. Munro also wrote, ‘It may be necessary to remark, that previous to the period I beheld this object, I had heard it frequently reported by several persons, and some of those persons whose veracity I have never disputed, that they had seen such a phenomenon as I have described, though then, like many others, I was not disposed to credit their testimony on the subject. I can say of truth, that it was only by seeing the phenomenon, I was perfectly convinced of its existence.

‘If the above narrative can be in any way subservient towards establishing the existence of a phenomenon hitherto almost incredible to naturalists, or to remove the scepticism of others, who are ready to dispute everything which they cannot fully comprehend, you are welcome to it’.

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During an attempt to find a northern passage to the East Indies, Henry Hudson's log reported on June 15, 1608 that two of his company, Thoms Hill and Robert Raynor said that they had seen a mermaid, their description read: "From the Navill upward, her backe and breasts were like a woman’s. . . her skin was very white; and long haire hanging down behinde, of colour blacke; in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a Porposse, and speckled like a Macrell".

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In the Shipping Gazette on June 4th 1857 an article reported a Scottish seaman had spotted a creature, ‘in the shape of a woman with full breasts, dark complexion, and comely face.

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In 1947 on the Island of Muck in Scotland, an 80-year-old fisherman reported that he
had seen a mermaid, ‘in the sea about 20 yards from the shore, sitting combing her hair on a floating herring box used to preserve live lobsters. Unfortunately, as soon as the mermaid looked round, she realized that she had been seen, and plunged into the sea’.

Facts

Scientists do not think it’s possible for a creature to exist that is half mammal and half fish, the two species are simply too far apart in terms of vertebrate’s evolution. The popular scientific theory is that manatees or sea cows are what some sailors have seen and, due to long voyages at sea and malnutrition, have mistaken them for human-like creatures. The manatees are found in coastal regions and have a fish-like tail, but they could never be described as having a comely face. Even though we know very little about our oceans, with such a tiny portion of it explored; scientists still believe it unlikely mermaids are creatures yet to be discovered. They agree that there are many animals that we don’t know about yet and sometimes creatures are discovered; like the Coelacanth, ("see-la-kanth"), that 400 million year old "living fossil" fish, pre-dating the dinosaurs by millions of years and once thought to have gone extinct with them, 65 million years ago, the Coelacanth with its "missing link" "proto legs" was "discovered" alive and well in 1938 at the mouth of the Chalumna River on the east coast of South Africa. But the truth is, say the scientists, that the deep-sea areas have only become inhabited fairly recently in geological terms; so the likelihood of anything popping up from mythology is pretty low.

So does this mean that the mermaids of myth and legend have never existed? Some argue that there is a link between the Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey and mythological mermaids; the only problem with this is that the Mediterranean Sea, where the Odyssey is set, completely dried up around 10 million years ago and only started to refill recently during the times of mankind. In early Homer references the sea was as dry as a desert. This means that ancient Western stories from the Mediterranean cannot have creatures of this kind in them brought over from ancient times. But the interesting thing about mermaids is that stories about them come from all over the world, from different countries and cultures; as if they are part of the human collective memory. In West Africa, Mami Wata is a Vodou goddess of the sea who appears in mermaid shape; she is kind to women and often blesses them with children, but has special sympathies for barren women. The Babylonian God Oannes is said to be the first recorded creature part man, part fish; Lord of the Waters.

There have been links with human women and mermaids for a long time; the pain a mermaid goes through when she wishes to become human has been compared to the pain of menstruation and childbirth. Inthe Hans Christian Anderson story, The Little Mermaid, she has to bear the pain of 8 oysters being attached to her tail at the age of 15 to denote her rank, that she has come of age. Later when the witch grants her wish to become human, she has to bear the terrible pain of her tail splitting in two, becoming legs, with every following step feeling like walking on needles and swords. The tail here seems to be symbolic of the female reproductive system. In Melusine the French Medieval tale, Melusine married Raymond of Poitou, she forbid him to see her in the bath one day out of the week. They had children, and some of them had strange features like big teeth. One day he spied on her in the bath, and saw that she was part serpent or fish. This is thought to parallel men’s feelings of being unable to affect the changes women go through, particularly their menstrual cycle. Stories like these may back up what the scientists say, that mermaids do not exist, they could merely be a way of expressing certain human conditions in stories.

Still others argue that we should not discount the similarities of world-spanning mermaid sightings and myths, pervading so many different cultures who express aspects of life in vastly different ways. Mermaids are said to have fairy-like powers, with the ability to grant wishes; some fisherman have believed that spotting a mermaid is a bad omen, yet spotting them has saved their lives by making them steer clear of their intended paths. It could easily be argued, and well believed, that if something can exist with such prominence in the human psyche, the chances are that it is real; mermaids either exist here on Earth and appear when they wish, or live in some other dimension or plain of existence that our collective consciousness remembers.