Were Manatees Mistaken for Mermaids? The Columbus Story

What did Columbus write about mermaids?

In early January 1493, Columbus was sailing along the north coast of Hispaniola on his first voyage, preparing to return to Spain. In his diary entry for 9 January, he recorded that on the previous day, near the mouth of a river he called the Río del Oro, in what is now the northern Dominican Republic, he had seen three mermaids that rose well out of the water.

He was not impressed. According to the common English translation, they were “not as beautiful as they are painted”, although he thought they had something like a human face. He added that he had seen similar creatures before on the coast of Guinea in West Africa, where another species, the West African manatee, lives.

Columbus’s original logbook is lost. What survives is a summary made decades later by the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who copied some passages and paraphrased others, so modern translations differ slightly in their wording. The animals he described fit the West Indian manatee, which still lives along the coasts and river mouths of Hispaniola today.

Why would sailors mistake manatees for mermaids?

At first glance a manatee looks nothing like the beautiful mermaids of European art. But several features could make one seem half-human from the deck of a ship:

• Head and shoulders above water. Manatees sometimes rest upright or lift their heads high to breathe and look around, showing a rounded head and a broad, whiskered face.
• Arm-like flippers. Their front flippers bend at the elbow and wrist, and manatees use them to hold food, touch one another and hug their calves.
• Nursing calves. A mother’s teats lie just behind her flippers, so a calf nursing at her side can look as if it is being held in her arms.
• A fish-like tail. Seen briefly as the animal dives, the broad tail can suggest the tail of a fish.

Distance, glare on the water and brief glimpses did the rest. European sailors also set out expecting to meet sea monsters and mermaids, which appeared in books, maps and church carvings of the time. Columbus’s own disappointment is a clue that he saw a real animal that did not match the pictures he knew.

Sirens, mermaids and the order Sirenia

The connection is built into science. In 1811 the German zoologist Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger named the order that contains manatees and dugongs Sirenia, after the sirens of Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, the sirens sing so sweetly that sailors steer to their deaths, and Odysseus survives only by having himself tied to the mast.

Ancient Greek art usually showed sirens as part woman, part bird. During the Middle Ages, European artists increasingly gave them fish tails, and the siren and the mermaid merged. That is why the word for a mermaid in Spanish and Italian is sirena and in French sirène, and why Columbus wrote sirenas in his diary.

Today the order Sirenia contains four living species: three manatees and the dugong. A fifth, Steller’s sea cow of the North Pacific, was hunted to extinction in the 18th century. Their more everyday nickname is explained in Why are manatees called sea cows?

Dugongs and mermaid legends around the world

The dugong, which lives in warm coastal waters from East Africa to Australia, is linked to mermaid stories in many cultures across its range. In Malay and Indonesian, a mermaid is called putri duyung, meaning “dugong princess”. With its fluked tail, shaped like that of a dolphin, the dugong looks even more like the classic mermaid than a manatee does.

A popular claim says that the word “dugong” means “lady of the sea”. It does not. The name comes from dugung, a word in the Visayan languages of the Philippines, and was popularized in Europe by the French naturalist Buffon in 1765.

Manatees appear in legends too. In parts of West Africa, manatees were traditionally regarded as sacred and believed to have once been human, and killing one was taboo in some communities. The two kinds of sea cow are easy to tell apart, as shown in manatee vs dugong.

Not every mermaid was a manatee

Manatees and dugongs cannot explain every mermaid story. In 1608, crew members on the English explorer Henry Hudson’s ship reported seeing a mermaid in the Arctic seas north of Russia, thousands of kilometers from any sirenian. Seals, which often watch boats with only their round heads above the water, are a more likely explanation for sightings like this.

Other mermaids were outright fakes. In 1842 the showman P. T. Barnum exhibited the “Feejee mermaid” in New York, which was really the upper body of a monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish. Similar dried “mermaids” were made in Asia and sold to collectors for centuries.

Old stories about sea creatures often mix real animals with imagination. The narwhal, for example, helped inspire the legend of the unicorn, as described in Are narwhals real?

Manatees and mermaids today

Florida has fully embraced the link. At Weeki Wachee Springs, performers in costume have staged underwater mermaid shows since 1947, and in winter real manatees visit the nearby spring-fed river. Manatee-themed mermaid art, books and souvenirs are common across the state.

The real animals face real problems. The Antillean manatee, the subspecies Columbus saw near Hispaniola, is now listed as Endangered by the IUCN, threatened by poaching, fishing nets, boat strikes and habitat loss. Columbus may have been disappointed by his mermaids, but the animals behind the legend are worth protecting.