“A mermaid on a dolphin’s back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.”
Shakespeare seems to have made a very natural error in confounding the mermaids and the sirens together, for in the “Comedy of Errors” his allusion to the one is in language more adapted to the other:—
“Her fair sister,
Possessed with such a gentle sovereign grace,
Of such enchanting presence and discourse,
Hath almost made me traitor to myself.
But, lest myself be guilty to self-wrong,
I’ll stop mine ears against the mermaid’s song.”
Another illustration of this will be found in the third part of King Henry VI., a passage peculiarly appropriate to our present purpose, as it embodies in a concentrated form no less than three of the items of unnatural history we have already dealt with—the siren’s death-dealing charms, the death-giving glance of the basilisk, and the changing tints of the chameleon, besides referring to the hypocritical tears of the crocodile. The passage will be found in the second scene of the third act, where Gloster exclaims—
“I can smile, and murther while I smile,
And cry, content, to that which grieves my heart;
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor;
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could;
And like a Sinon take another Troy:
I can add colours to the cameleon.”
Other references will be found in “Hamlet” and in “Antony and Cleopatra.”
It has been conjectured that the ancients derived their idea of the mermaid from the Manatees that may be found on the shores of Africa washed by the Atlantic, or from the Dugongs of the littoral of the Indian Ocean. These singular animals have been placed by naturalists in a class by themselves and called Sirenia. They have a curious habit of swimming with their heads and necks above water. They thus bear some grotesque and remote resemblance to the human form, and may have given rise to the poetical tales of mermaids and sirens found in ancient literature. When the female Dugong is nursing her offspring the position assumed is almost identical with that of a human mother. The sea-lions and seals have the same habit of raising themselves in a semi-erect position in the water, and the intelligent aspect of their faces gives them at a little distance a close resemblance to human beings—a resemblance often equally striking when they are seen recumbent on the rocks. It is but little strange, that early navigators with all the superstitions of their race, and having a very slight knowledge of natural history, should be deceived, when we find in Scoresby’s Voyages the incident narrated of the surgeon of his ship so deceived by one of these creatures that he reported that “he had seen a man with his head just above the surface of the water.” At the same time, it appears to us at least as probable that the mermaid, like the sea-horses of Poseidon, was purely a creature of the imagination.
From the graceful beauty of the mermaiden to the less pleasing physiognomy of “Mistress Tannakin Skimker, the hog-faced gentlewoman,” is a great step indeed, yet both beliefs bear testimony alike to the universal desire after something wonderful and outside the ordinary course of nature, a feeling that in its lowest form finds satisfaction in paying a penny to see a six-legged lamb, while more cultured minds revel in the wealth of fancy found in the myths of Hellas. The unhappy lady who has prompted our present remarks was bewitched at her birth on the understanding that she should recover her true shape on being married. She was born, we are told, in 1618 in a town on “the River Rhyne.” Our authority, a book dated the year 1640, gives various facts, but does not say whether any one was so courageous as to remove the spell by offering her marriage. The book is embellished (or otherwise) with a portrait of the luckless Tannakin. While referring to the one old book our thoughts naturally turn to another of a similar type, the “Humana Physiognomonia” of Porta, a book published in the year 1601. It is full of curious woodcuts showing the great resemblance sometimes seen between the features of men and those of some of the lower animals.
Old Burton tells us, in his “Miracles of Art and Nature” (A.D. 1678), of a creature found in Brazil that had “the face of an Ape, the foot of a Lyon, and all the rest of a Man,” and he almost needlessly adds, “a Beast of a most terrible aspect.” This is not by any means the only wonder in that vast and distant land, and he winds up his description by asserting that “it may be said of Brasill as once of Africk, every day some New Object of Admiration.” In his account of India he tells us of dog-headed men, while in the Oriental Isles, besides a river plentifully stored with fish, yet so hot that it scalds the flesh of any man or beast thrown therein, there are men with tails.
Numerous other instances might readily be given of strange combinations of the human form with that of some animal, but enough has been given as an illustration of the sort of thing to be freely met with in ancient and mediæval history; so we pass to our second division of humanity—those who are wholly human, yet in some way of so marked a departure from the ordinary type of mankind as to come within the scope of our strange history. These modifications sometimes arise from the suppression of some part, as in the case of the headless people; in its exaggeration, as in the instance of the men of India whose ears sweep the ground as they walk; or in the multiplication or subtraction of various members, as in the one-eyed Cyclops or the hundred-armed Briaræus.