“Lorntie, Lorntie, were it na for your man
I had gart your hairt’s blood, skirl in my pan!”
Some are also charged with embracing their sweethearts from no other motive than to suffocate them, as in the story of the Manx shepherd, who was so much hurt by being squeezed that he pushed the mermaid away, for which she wounded him to death by flinging a stone at him. Of this deceitful and dangerous kind are those Swedish sea-nymphs who pass their days upon the rocks combing their hair and viewing their perfections in hand-mirrors. They are also said to amuse themselves by spreading out linen to dry, but this fancy clearly springs from the mistakes of seamen who suppose the white foam crawling about the finny maidens to be the contents of the wash-tub. If a fisherman sees one of these mermaids, he is on no account to mention it to his mates, or bad luck will follow. But other kinds of these girls of the ocean are tender, and extremely affectionate and lovable. The melancholy, melodious sounds sometimes heard breathing amid the stillness upon the deep at night are the sighs of mermaids who have loved and lost, and who rise from their coral beds, their grottoes of pearl, their pavilions and palaces of shells, to make their moan to the stars. Mermaids are great lovers of music. They have been known to sacrifice their sweethearts for a tune. A fisherman was induced to give his handsome son to a mermaid on her offering in exchange a brave reward in the shape of luck. But the boy’s mother, who sang very sweetly, so charmed the mermaid’s heart, that she undertook to return her adored if his mamma would favour her with another air.
It is gratifying to find old Bailey in his “Dictionarium Britannicum” (1730), defining the word mermaid with a very sober and sturdy leaning in favour of the real existence of these ladies. “Whereas,” says he, “it has been thought they have been only the product of the painter’s invention, it is confidently reported that there is in the following lake fishes which differ in nothing from mankind but in the want of speech and reason. Father Francis de Pavia, a missionary, being in the kingdom of Congo in Africa, who would not believe that there were such creatures, affirms that the Queen of Singa did see in a river coming out of the lake Zaire many mermaids, something resembling a woman in the breasts, hands, and arms; but the lower part is perfect fish, the head round, the face like a calf, a large mouth, little ears, and round, full eyes. Which creatures Father Merula often saw and eat of them.” Which, I may add, does not say much for Father Merula’s manners and tastes, unless it is meant figuratively, as in the sense of the saying in the comedy, “Six weeks before I married her I could have eaten her, and six weeks after I was sorry I didn’t.” As to the face like the calf, the large mouth, and so forth, let it be remembered that the place Father de Pavia wrote of was the kingdom of Congo, where, to be sure, we should not expect to find even mermaids beautiful. But that these sea-nymphs, with their golden hair, their shining shapes, their teeth of pearl, their eyes of the liquid blue of their own glorious element, full of ocean mystery and the spirit of the unfathomable starless world in which they live—that they are as beautiful as dreams among shores from whose silent rocks neither the voice of a De Pavia nor a Merula has ever fetched an echo, who can doubt?
The mermaid is the sailor’s love. Let us leave her to him.
OLD SEA ORDNANCE.
Not very long since a French smack fished up an old cannon a league or so to the eastward of the North head of the Goodwin Sands. It was believed to be a gun of the time of De Ruyter and “Trump,” but so eaten, rusted, and defaced by time and the action of salt water that its paternity was scarcely a determinable thing.
There is no lack of reminders ashore of the sort of weapons with which our grandsires fought the battles of their country; but somehow an interest that no museum could impart attaches to an object dragged from the tomb of the deep, hauled out of the twilight of its oozy bed, and set up for all eyes to gaze at in the staring light of day. In marine collections there are still to be found tomahawks of the pattern which Nelson’s men handled; but figure one of these death-dealing contrivances fished up in Cadiz Bay! strangely hooked off a tract of the sand there, over which the keels of the flaming and thunderous ships of that Titanic struggle surged in their throes of conflict!
Of all the changes which the sea-vocation has witnessed none is so complete as the battle-ship’s armaments. The process has indeed been gradual; great sharpness of transition has only been visible within the last twenty-five years; yet it is not necessary to talk of hundred-ton guns to emphasize the growth of ordnance. There was a mighty difference betwixt the batteries of the old Duke of Wellington, for example, and those of the ships to which the cannon lately trawled up in the Channel belonged. But it is instructive, and certainly amusing, to go much further back still. In an ancient treatise, called “Speculum Regale,” a description is given of the method of attack and defence as practised in the navy in the twelfth century. Here the mariner is told to provide himself with two spears, which he must be careful not to lose in throwing. One of them is to be long enough to reach out of one vessel into another. In addition to these spears, the sailor was to be furnished with scythes fixed to long poles, axes, boat-hooks, slings fitted to staffs,[[14]] barbed darts, stones for heaving, and bows for shooting. How terrible these primitive weapons were in the hands of the early mariners may be read in the old accounts of sea-fights. Describing the great naval battle between the English and French in Edward III.’s reign, Daniel in his “Collection,” p. 227, writes: “Most of the French, rather than endure the arrows and sharp swords of the English or be taken, desperately leap into the sea, whereupon the French king’s jester, set on to give him notice of this overthrow (which being so ill news, none else willingly would impart on the sudden) said, and oftentimes reiterated the same: Cowardly Englishmen, Dastardly Englishmen, Faint-hearted Englishmen. The king at length asked him Why? For that, said he, They durst not leap out of their ships into the sea, as our brave Frenchmen did. By which speech the King apprehended a notion of this overthrow.” There were also contrivances called galtraps, beaks for the vessels like boars’ heads armed with iron tusks, towers for the bowmen to let fly their arrows from, breastplates of linen very thick, and helmets of steel. The old Jacks fought stoutly with these barbarous weapons, but their real qualities had to lie in wait for gunpowder.