Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  Your next encounter will be with the Sirens, who bewitch everybody that approaches them. There is no homecoming for the man who draws near them unaware and hears the Sirens’ voices; no welcome from his wife, no little children brightening at their father’s return. For with the music of their song, the Sirens cast their spell upon him, as they sit there in a meadow piled high with the mouldering skeletons of men, whose withered skin still hangs upon their bones. 14

  Circe advised Odysseus to plug the ears of his crew with beeswax and have them bind him to the mast so that he could hear the sirens’ song but be unable to approach them. As his ship neared the spot where they lived, Odysseus heard their lovely voices coming across the water and was filled with such longing that he signed to his men to set him free, but they ignored him and rowed resolutely on until they were out of danger. Homer does not describe the appearance of the sirens in the Odyssey, but in Greek and Roman art and literature they are always depicted as bird-women, sometimes as women with wings, more often as birds with women’s heads. According to tradition, they lived off the coast of Italy on the island of Capri.

  Sharing some of the attributes of the sirens but altogether more beguiling were the mermaids. Their origin is difficult to determine because they appear in various forms in the myths of many countries. In Russian folktales, a maiden who drowned was likely to become a Rusalka. In the southern regions around the Danube, the Rusalki were beautiful in appearance and so bewitched their victims with their sweet songs that death in their arms was peaceful. In the cold northern regions, the Rusalki were frightening to behold; their eyes shone with a green fire, their hair was unkempt and uncombed, and their skin was like that of the bodies of the drowned. Scandinavian legends tell of the goddess Ran, the ravisher, who caused storms at sea and captured dying sailors in a huge net. She entertained the drowned men in a great hall beneath the sea and fed them on fish delicacies. Her nine daughters were temptresses who reached out their arms and dragged young men to the seabed.

  The mermaid who appears in the art and literature of Western Europe is invariably beautiful, but she too is associated with death. Invented by men, she became a symbol of men’s ambivalence toward women. She is a temptress like Eve, and her fishy tail is a reminder of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Like Aphrodite, who was born from the sea in a scallop shell, the mermaid has long, flowing hair, a sure indication of an abundant sexual appetite. Also like Aphrodite, she holds a mirror. This was a symbol of vanity, but it was also possible to see the future by looking into a mirror: The gift of prophecy was an important attribute of the mermaid, as it was of the siren. In addition to the mirror in one hand, the mermaid invariably has a comb in her other hand. The meaning of this is lost on us today, but in classical times it was directly connected with female sexuality because the Greek word for comb, kteis, and the Roman pecten were also used for the female pudenda. An alternative interpretation was proposed by Robert Graves, the poet and compiler of a comprehensive encyclopedia of mythology: In The White Goddess, he suggested that the mermaid’s comb was originally the plectrum that the sirens used to pluck the strings of their lyres.

  It is often assumed that the mermaid owes her origin to sailors mistaking the dugong or manatee for a fish-tailed woman, but this is too simplistic an explanation. In the first place, the dugong is a bulky, ugly creature with a shiny, bald head and a mustache: It could only be mistaken for a mermaid by a sailor who was either very nearsighted or very drunk. Likewise, a number of mermaid sightings took place in seas that have never been home to either dugongs or manatees. The dugong lives in the shallow waters of countries bordering the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and Australia. The manatee frequents the rivers and freshwater lakes in Florida, some of the West Indian Islands, Brazil, and the Congo River in Africa. Neither mammal is known to have lived in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, or the North Sea, where so many of the mermaid legends first surfaced. It is possible that the dugong, or the much more attractive seal, may account for some mermaid sightings, but it seems more likely that the mermaid was the creation of poets, writers, and artists. She is one of those creatures like the unicorn and the dragon that appeared in early folktales and took a firm hold on people’s imaginations.

  Whatever her origin, the mermaid appeared increasingly in writings and pictures from medieval times onward. She was used by the Church in the Middle Ages as a symbol of vice: She was a harlot who tempted men with wild, forbidden pleasures. She stood between man and his salvation and must be resisted by the God-fearing. We therefore find the mermaid in churches and cathedrals, where she is carved on the capitals of columns, on roof bosses, and among the homely and irreverent scenes found on the oak misericords that served as seats for praying monks and clergy. The mermaid often appears in the margins of medieval manuscripts and on countless sea charts. She also features in songs, ballads, and stories.

  The most popular of all mermaid stories of the Middle Ages was that of Melusina. The various versions of her story were collected by Jean d’Arras and recounted in his Chronicle, published in 1387. It was said that Raymond, the adopted son of the Count of Poitou, came upon three lovely maidens beside a fountain in the forest when he was out hunting. He fell in love with Melusina, who was the most beautiful of the three, and asked her to marry him. She agreed to do so on the condition that he must promise to leave her to herself every Saturday and not interrupt her privacy. Raymond willingly agreed to this, and they were married in a great castle at Lusignan that Melusina gave him as a wedding present. Raymond kept his promise for many years, but he was disturbed by strange tales that reached him concerning Melusina’s weekly seclusion. He decided he must investigate, and one Saturday he entered her apartment and found that she had locked herself in the bathroom. Peering through the keyhole, he saw Melusina in the bath and was horrified to find that the lower half of her body had turned into the tail of a fish. When Melusina learned that he had discovered her secret, she fled and Raymond never saw her again. According to legend, her ghostly figure would hover over the battlements whenever a lord of the castle was about to die. The demanding of a promise or the laying down of conditions with awful penalties should they be broken was to be a feature of many other mermaid stories in the succeeding centuries.

  The Elizabethan poets tended to stress the beauty of the mermaids’ song. In his narrative poem Hero and Leander, Christopher Marlowe describes how Leander was pulled beneath the waves to the bottom of the sea where the ground was strewn with pearls and

  Sweet singing mermaids sported with their loves,

  On heaps of heavy gold, and took great pleasure,

  To spurn in careless sort the shipwreck treasure.

  In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the mermaid is a dangerous enchantress who makes false melodies that lure weak travelers, “whom gotten, They did kill.” Perhaps the most haunting passage appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Oberon describes how he was once sitting upon a promontory

  And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

  Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,

  That the rude sea grew civil at her song.

  Each succeeding century has produced its stories and poems about mermaids. The most familiar to people today must surely be The Little Mermaid, by Denmark’s most famous storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen. First published in 1873, it is one of those children’s stories, like Alice in Wonderland, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, that transcend national boundaries. The little mermaid saves the life of a prince in a shipwreck, falls in love with him, and asks the sea witch how she can gain his love. The sea witch makes a cruel bargain with her. She will give the little mermaid human legs in place of her fish’s tail, but she must lose her tongue and her lovely singing voice. She must also suffer further, because when she walks, it will feel like walking on knives. She meets the prince but is unable to win his love. When he marries another woman, the mermaid is distraught with grief and dies.
/>   Alongside the stories and myths were factual reports in journals and ships’ logbooks by sailors who had sighted mermaids while at sea. There was a spate of mermaid sightings during the age of exploration, as European seafarers ventured across unknown oceans. Many of these sailors would have expected to see monsters and strange creatures during their travels and would have been less likely to cast doubts on a mermaid sighting than sailors in later ages. It has been suggested that sea captains educated in the classics might hope to encounter some of the fabulous creatures of classical mythology, because this would set their voyages in the heroic tradition of Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts, and the other explorers of antiquity. This is an interesting theory and may provide a more convincing explanation for some of the sightings than the dugong theory. It would certainly help to explain the conviction with which Columbus reported the sighting of three mermaids off the coast of Haiti. He noted that they came quite high out of the water, but he was disappointed because they “were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.”

  But what is one to make of the matter-of-fact description that appears among the daily weather observations in the logbook of the explorer Henry Hudson? In April 1608, he set out from London to look for a northwest passage to India. Two months into the voyage, his ship was far out in the Atlantic at latitude 75° north. On June 15, he noted that the wind was in the east and there was clear sunshine, and then he made the following note:

  This morning, one of our companie looking over boord saw a Mermaid, and calling up some of the companie to see her, one more came up, and by that time shee was come close to the ship’s side, looking earnestly on the men: a little after, a Sea came and overturned her: from the navel upward, her backe and breasts were like a womans (as they say that saw her) her body as big as one of us; her skin 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 Porpoise and speckled like a Macrell. Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner. 15

  Two years later, another British seaman saw a mermaidlike creature on the northwest coast of the Atlantic. Captain Richard Whitbourne, who was later knighted and published a book entitled Discourse and Discovery of New-found-land, was standing by the waterside in the harbor of St. Johns, Newfoundland, when he saw something swimming toward him that looked very like a woman. It seemed to be beautiful with a well-proportioned face and blue streaks resembling hair down to its neck. It came close enough for him to see that it had white, smooth shoulders and back but that the lower part of its body was shaped like a broad hooked arrow. One of his companions also observed the creature, and it later attempted to board some of the boats in the harbor but was beaten off by one of the sailors, who dealt it a full blow on the head so that it fell back into the water. Whitbourne observed that because much had been written about mermaids, he felt he must relate what he had seen but concluded “whether it were a Mermaide or no, I know not. I leave it for others to judge.” 16

  Captain John Smith was so entranced by the sight of the lovely creature that he saw off a West Indian island in 1614 that he began to experience the first effects of love, until she made an unguarded movement and he discovered that from below the waist she had the body of a fish. When he first spotted her she was swimming gracefully near the shore. She had large eyes, a finely shaped nose, well-formed ears, “and her long green hair imparted to her an original character by no means unattractive.” 17

  Occasionally, there were reports of mermaids being captured. When the dikes of Holland were flooded during a storm in 1403, a mermaid was washed ashore and was stranded in the mud near the town of Edam. She was found by some women who were on their way to milk their cows. They took her home, and after they had cleaned off the sea moss that stuck to her body, they clothed her and fed her with bread and milk. She was taught to spin and undertake other womanly tasks but had to be watched carefully because she kept trying to sneak back to the sea. She apparently lived fifteen years, but in all that time she remained dumb and never spoke a word.

  The most famous mermaid to be caught alive was the mermaid of Amboina, caught off the coast of Borneo in the early eighteenth century. A chaplain working in the Dutch colonies described how the creature survived for four days and seven hours in a jar of water. It refused to eat the fish offered it and uttered plaintive sounds like those of a mouse. The creature was illustrated in the 1754 edition of Louis Renard’s book on fish and is shown with an oval face, brown curly hair, slim arms with webbed fingers, small breasts, and a very long, blue tail more like that of an eel than a fish.

  Sightings of mermaids continued at regular intervals over the centuries, and these, together with the poems and the fairy tales, have provided a rich harvest for painters and illustrators. Their images range from the charming and decorative to the wildly sensual. Among the most charming are the woodcuts of mermaids that appear in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century bestiaries, books filled with descriptions of strange and fabulous creatures that were compiled by monks as a warning against various temptations and sins. In contrast, Victorian artists such as Herbert Draper and John Waterhouse painted a number of highly finished and realistic pictures of the most enticing sirens and mermaids imaginable. Some of the finest pictures of mermaids appear in books illustrated by gifted artists such as Arthur Rackham and Norman Rockwell. But the most extraordinary pictures are those of the German Symbolists and, in particular, Arnold Bocklin, who, seemingly fixated on mermaids, painted a series of pictures in which the most voluptuous mermaids and mermen writhe and frolic in an abandoned manner among the rocks and waves. 18

  Mermaids have been the subject of so many stories, legends, ballads, poems, songs, paintings, drawings, bronze sculptures, and carvings in wood and stone that it is little wonder that to some people they have seemed as real as fairies and witches, and that occasionally sailors have seen them during the course of their ocean voyages. Even today, they continue to inspire writers and artists and have even been the subject of several films, notably the 1984 film Splash, in which Tom Hanks falls in love with Daryl Hannah—perfectly cast as everyone’s vision of a golden-haired mermaid from the depths of the ocean.

  11

  A Wife in Every Port

  AUGUSTUS HERVEY WAS a womanizer on an epic scale. As a naval captain in the 1740s and 1750s, he used his aristocratic connections, his charm, and his money to seduce an astonishing number of desirable women. His cruises around the coasts of Europe in command of a British warship were punctuated by a succession of lavish parties, tortuous love affairs, and one-night stands. Society beauties and opera stars, nuns and country girls all fell victim to his insatiable sexual appetite. In his later years, he found himself at the center of a scandal as notorious in its day as the liaison of Nelson and Lady Hamilton. His wife, whose love life was almost as colorful as his own, engaged in a bigamous marriage with the Duke of Kingston and became the first and only woman to be tried on a charge of bigamy before the House of Lords. Hervey was then in his fifties. He had inherited an earldom, was a rear admiral and a Lord of the Admiralty, and was living a relatively quiet life in London with his mistress. After a lifetime of dalliances with other men’s wives, he had to endure a torrent of gossip, in which he appeared as the cuckolded party. 1

  Augustus Hervey was born in London on May 19, 1724. His father was Baron Hervey of Ickworth, and his mother was Mary Lepell, daughter of a brigadier general and so famed for her beauty that she inspired eulogies from poets and writers as diverse as Pope, Gray, and Voltaire. His grandfather was the Earl of Bristol, a title to which Augustus would succeed many years later but which first passed to his elder brother, George, on the first earl’s death in 1751. Augustus was the second son, and in the usual tradition of aristocratic families, he was expected to go into the navy while his younger brother, Frederick, went into the Church. After spending a few years at Westminster School, he joined HMS Pembroke. He was e
leven years old, and the captain of the ship was his uncle, the Honorable William Hervey, a man so notorious for his cruelty that he was eventually court-martialed and dismissed from the service. In 1736, Augustus was rated midshipman and moved to the frigate Greyhound, which sailed to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. By 1740, he was back again on a ship commanded by his uncle William, this time HMS Superbe. In May of that year, he passed his lieutenant’s exam at the unusually young age of sixteen. In the same year, his ship put in to Lisbon after riding out a storm, and it was there that he had what appears to be his first sexual encounter. The woman was Ellena Paghetti, whom he later described as “a very famous Italian singer, and not less so for her beauty.”

  Postings to other ships followed, and he saw action in the West Indies and then commanded a Navy Board tender on the coast of East Anglia with instructions to impress seamen. It was while on leave during the summer of 1744 that he met Elizabeth Chudleigh at the Winchester races. She was twenty-four and had recently been appointed a maid of honor to the Princess of Wales at Leicester House. Her vivacious beauty had already attracted the nineteen-year-old Duke of Hamilton, who had courted her and promised to marry her when he returned from the Grand Tour on the Continent. In his absence she allowed herself to fall for the charms of Lieutenant Hervey. Both of them were impetuous and rash by nature, and within weeks they were married.

  The marriage was conducted in secret and was to remain a secret from English society until the details of the curious ceremony were revealed during the bigamy scandal twenty years later. The principal reason for secrecy was that if Miss Chudleigh were known to be married she would have to relinquish her post as maid of honor and the £400 that went with it. There was also the fact that Hervey’s illustrious family would be unlikely to give their approval to the match.