Mermaid Monday: Chocolate-Colour Backstroke Mermaid February 26, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This little report was printed in the Daily Telegraph in November 1886. The article in question gives a series of classic mermaid sightings, but starts with one that the journalist had personally heard of and that had purely local interest. The problem is: where are we?
A boatman lately told me that about two years ago [c.1884] whilst fishing off the coast in probably forty feet of water, the tide a quarter ebb, and the sea a dark clear green, he and his mate were hanging over the boat’s side with lines in their hands, when they saw a mermaid floating past under the surface by about the depth a man’s arm would penetrate. I asked him what the mermaid was like, and he replied that she was of a chocolate colour, with short black hair and very large intensely black eyes. Her figure to the waist was that of a woman, the rest of her was fish-shaped. Altogether he reckoned her to have been of the size of a thirty-pound salmon, only that she was longer than a fish of that weight would be. Her face and figure – as much of it as was human – were as small as those of a child of two years old. She was an unmistakable mermaid – he’d warrant that. Might he never earn another shilling in this world if he was telling a lie. She floated by at an oar’s length; had the sight of her left him and his mate their wits they would have tried to secure her; but some minutes passed before they recovered from their amazement, and though they got their anchor and pulled in the direction of the creature, they saw no more of her. I was glad to hear that there was, at all events, one mermaid still in existence, for I had been given to understand that the last of these ocean Mohicans had been gorged by the sea serpent a little before the date on which her Majesty’s ship Bacchante sighted the Flying Dutchman.
And the location? This was a British journalist and so the natural thing to assume would be that this was off the coast of Britain: ‘boatman’ suggests the same thing. Beach wonders whether you could really see an arm’s length into the water in most British waters, at least in the detail described here. There is also the question of how they saw the mermaid if it was swimming under them. The only way to make sense of this would be if the mermaid was doing backstroke under water; and chocolate coloured… Any thoughts: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
