Alexander of Alexandria, the good Bishop who had so healthy an abhorrence of Arianism, saw (upon his own authority) a Nereïd (Mermaid) that had been thrown ashore on the coast of the Peloponnesus. Seeing was believing; and if the Bishop was right in so many things, all the way up to Divinity, is it possible that he could be wrong in the mere fact of a dead animal? Or if he was wrong in this particular, is not the whole question as to the right or wrong of Arianism opened again?
A mermaid was stranded in 1403 near Haerlem,—driven ashore by a tempest, said one Meyer, a Dutchman. It was brought to feed upon bread and milk, taught to spin, and lived for many years. John Gerard of Leyden adds, that she would frequently pull off her clothes and run toward the water, and that her speech was so confused a noise as not to be understood by anybody. She was buried in the churchyard, because she had learned to make the sign of the cross. They had much consideration for a possible soul in those days.
Gerard spoke this upon the credit of several persons who had seen her. We find noted by another author, that, "in the fifteenth century, after a dreadful tempest on the coast of Holland, a mermaid was found struggling in the mud, near Edam, in West Friesland; whence it was carried to Haerlem, where it lived some years, was clothed in female apparel, and, it is said, was taught to spin." This was apparently the same.
This creature is said to have run,—a thing somewhat inconsistent with a caudal termination,—and she must be supposed, therefore, to be of the Wild-Man-of-the-Sea family rather than of the half-man, half-fish. She was, perhaps, a relative of this next, recorded in an ancient English chronicle:—
"In the time of King Henry I., when Bartholomew de Glanville was warden of Oxford Castle, the fishermen took in their nets a wild man, having the human shape complete, with horns on his head, and long and pick beard, and a great deal of shaggy hair on his breast; but he stole away to sea privately, and was never seen afterwards."
He wished, evidently, to avoid the embarrassment of the farewell.
Another of these footed sea-men makes his appearance in the book of Gellius on Animals. Therein is recounted the history, as far as landsmen knew it, of a Triton that used to come ashore on the coast of Epirus, and lie in wait by a well but a short distance from the sea, and who, when the country girls came to the well for water, would leap out and seize them, and bear them away beneath the waves; and not able to conceive the peculiarity of the human lungs that lurked beneath their beautiful bosoms, many a one the wretch thus drowned in his passionate admiration. Beautiful Greek girls! with such limbs as have come down in marble! Life under the sea seems favorable to the perfection of a correct taste.
Mem.—The reader is not at liberty to doubt this Triton. Draconetus Bonifacius, a Neapolitan, subsequently saw him preserved in honey.
In 1560 the fishermen of Ceylon caught seven of these sea-people of both sexes. They were seen by many Portuguese gentlemen then at Menar, and, among the rest, by Dimaz Bosquez, physician to the Viceroy of Goa, who minutely examined them, made dissections, and asserted that the principal parts, internal and external, were conformable to those of the human species.[A]
In the reign of Roger, King of Sicily, a young man swimming in the sea, one night, perceived that something followed him. He thought it one of his companions, but caught it by the hair, and dragged it on shore. It was a maiden of great beauty! He threw his cloak about her, and took her to his home. There she lived with him and bore a son. But he was continually troubled that one so beautiful should be dumb; for she had never spoken. One day a companion jeered at the spectre that he had at home, and, angry and terrified, he urged her to tell him who or what she was, and threatened with his sword to kill the child before her, if she did not. Then she said that he had lost a good wife by forcing her to speak; and she vanished. A few years after, when the son was playing on the shore, his mother dragged him into the sea, and he was drowned.