Nowhere else, perhaps, has an honest belief in the existence of Mermen and Mermaids been held so long, and held so firmly, as among the Highlanders and Hebrideans of the West of Scotland. Besides meeting with her in many a Gaelic song and many a fireside tale, the Mermaid is still - and quite as prominently in the folk-lore of the Western littoral as in that of the Outer Islands - is still a central figure round whom clusters quite a large body of legend, so amusingly quaint and harmless that, once the subject is started at a winter's nights' ceilidh, one listens and listens until in a measure persuaded that every word is true; and when on after reflection and in a more prosaic mood we have leisure to re-call and review it all, it is almost with regret that we begin to realise that we have been listening not to fact but fiction - fiction, too, of a character often so weird and wild and wonderful that it could only have had birth amongst such a highly imaginative people as the Celts of the Hebridean archipelago and the neighbouring mainland.
We once heard a native of Mull tell, and tell it with all seriousness, how his grandfather, while still a very handsome young fellow, one day disappeared, and was lost to his family and friends for a period of thirteen months. He had gone to gather shell-fish in a sandy bay some considerable distance from his home; and when he did not return at night, search was made for him next day, and for several days thereafter, but all in vain. Nothing could be seen or heard of him; and at last his friends were forced to the conclusion that venturing on a rock to gather dulse, of which he was known to be fond, a tidal wave had swept him off his feet, and, as he could not swim, that he was drowned.
One early morning thirteen months afterwards, the young man reappeared in his native hamlet, to the no small astonishment of everyone, as may be believed. His story was that having filled his creel (craoileag) with shell-fish, he lay down, the day being very hot, under the shadow of a rock above highwater mark and slept. When he awoke, he was amazed to find himself in the company of two very beautiful females, one of whom asked him if he was thirsty? He replied that having been eating dulse and raw cockles for dinner he really was very thirsty, and that he must now go in search of a spring or to the nearest stream in order to have a good drink, after which he would take his creel on his back and go home. Upon this the lady who had just addressed him produced a large confaluted shell full to its lips of iridescent pink with some pleasuant liquor, which, at her request, and thirsty as he was, he drank with delight, and instantly fell asleep again; shortly afterwards to awaken in a cave, the floor whereof was of silveriest sand, and its walls resplendent with all sorts of precious stones and gems, into which the ladies must have carried him when he was in a state of unconsciousness after drinking the deliciously cool and potent draught from the many-whorled shell. Fed by his beautiful hostesses on the richest and rarest food, and abundantly supplied with all manner of pleasant drinks, the young man (whose name, by the way, was Hector Mackirnon) led a delightfully luxurious and dreamy life in that cave for thirteen months and a day (Tri' miosan deng r's latha), until one day he ventured to follow his hostesses, who told him they were going to bathe in a silvery-sanded and sheltered creek some half-a-mile away from the grand cave, with its gem-studded walls and roof, which was their home. He followed them at a distance, taking care not to be seen; and, to his astonishment, as soon as they reached the shore, they assumed each a mermaid form ad plunged into the sea. He returned straightway to the cave, and when the ladies returned in the evening he taxed them with not being females proper of the human race at all, but fish-tailed mermaids foul and scaly; and instantly the cave, its beautiful inmates, andall its splendours vanished at once, and forever, as if the whole had been a dream; and he found himself seated on a rock close by the shore of the bay on which he had been gathering shell-fish "thirteen months and a day" before. He went home, and was received with joy by his family and friends; and to his dying day he persisted in sticking to the cave-and-mermaid story as the true and only cause, on that particular occasion, of his prolonged absence from his native township.
On the Western mainland there are still a few families left, the survivors of a sept of a very distinguished clan, who have long been known to Gaelic genealogists as Sliochd na Maighdein, or, more fully, Sliochd na Maighdein Mhara - that is, the descendants of the sea maiden or mermaid. The story is that a mermaid, whilst temporarily in human form, was captured by a man who was b y himself for several days and nights on an uninhabited island killing seals. The man took the captured maiden home. She was very amiable and very beautiful, and became the mother of a fmily of several sons and daughters. The popular belief in the mermaid origin of this sept was largely corroborated by the curious fact that the children born to them were frequently web-fingered - a malformation so rare as to be altogether unknown in that district except amongst this Sliochd na Maighdein race.
The midwife of that district, a woman of superior intelligence, whom we cross-examined on the subject many years ago, assured us that she had repeatedly seen children born of parents of this sept whose fingers were webbed up to the middle joint, and in one instance all the way up to within half an inch of the tips of the fingers of both hands. As often as she noticed this anomaly in a newly born child, her habit was to slit the web-membrane with a pair of scissors, the operation being comparatively painless as she averred, and the result that when the child grew up it was only on a very close inspection of the inside of the fingers that any trace of such a membrane ever having existed could be detected. We knew a female of this race who was said to have been born with webbed fingers, but the connecting membrane having been scissored by the attendant nurse soon after she was born, there was nothing, now that she had attained to the stature of perfect womanhood, to be seen about the fingers from which one could guess that there had ever been any other connection than the normal juxtaposition between them.
For a long time people of this sept were proud rather than otherwise when allusion was made to their mermaid descent; but within comparatively recent years they began to act as if ashamed of it, and readily to take offence if any reference was made to their traditional pedigree. At a local market not many years ago, a man of the Sliochd na Maighdein race turned upon a drover who had jocularly asked him if any mermaid wives were still to be picked up along his strip of seaboard - turned upon the drover, and gave him then and there such a thrashing as probably made the facetious cattledealer extremely cautious as to when and where it would be safe to venture on such jokes in future.
It is a very old tradition in the Outer Hebrides that a mermaid was for many years domesticated in the family of Macneil of Barra. She had been captured when very young - a baby mermaid; and being kindly treated soon became reconciled to her lot, and grew up to be a very comely female in her upper parts, although still retaining her fishy tail, which is described as glittering with silvery scales, mar shlios bradain - like the flank of a salmon. She was very fond of milk, of which she was always ready to drink as much as she could get. Her favourite food was fish, which she ate raw. When she went to bathe, which she did frequently, she caught fish for herself, some of which she ate while swimming about in the water; and the rest she laid on the beach, to be carried by the woman who happened to be attending upon her. Flesh meat she was never known to taste, nor did she eat bread or vegetables. She had no speech, except a sort of meaningless murmur; although she understood much of what was said to her. She learned to knit, and on one occasion was much pleased when she saw that a pair of hose which she had knitted were being worn by the son of the chief. After thus living in a semi-domesticated sort of way for years, she disappeared one stormy night, ann am faoiltich an earraich- in the season of the vernal equinox - and was never seen again. Such is the story of the Barra mermaid as told by Arhibald Macneil, fisherman, Oban, himself a native of Barra, and a highly intelligent seannachie.
As often as we read or hear of the appearance of a mermaid it is always somewhere within the temperate zone, and usually in a bay or creek of a seaboard more or less influenced by the kindly waters of the great Gulf Stream. The only instance known to us of the appearance of a mermaid well within the Arctic Ocean is that mentioned in the account of Hudson's voyage in search of the North-West passage in 1608. When off the north-west of Greenland, in latitude 75 deg., we are told that "a mermaid came close to the ship's side, looking earnestly on the men. From the navill upwards her back and breasts were like a woman's; her body as big as one of us; her skin very white, and long hair hanging down behinde, of colour black." Whilst the famous navigator and his crew were intently gazing at the highly intelligent countenance of their strange visitor, and admiring her graceful movements in the water, "a greate wave sudenly arose which washed her awaye."
But what, now it is time to ask, is this creature that for several seasons, as it appears, has been haunting the south-eastern shores of the middle islands of the Orkneyan archipelago? If it be not a veritable mermaid - and it has always to be kept in mind that there is nothing unscientific or inherently absurd in entertaining a belief in the existence of such an anthropoid of the deep - if it be not a mermaid, all as described, what is it? It has been suggested that it is a bladdernose or hooded seal (Cystophora Cristata), but seal of any kind it cannot be, if the description of it, in which so many observers agree, be correct. The Deerness visitor has its mammae or paps on the breast as in the human female, and these are described by all the observers as a prominent characteristic; whereas in the seal tribe the lacteal supply for the young is presented through teats placed along the abdomen. Amongst marine mammalia the only creatuers, so far as we know, that have mammae on the breasts like the human female are the dugong (Halicore Dugong), and the manatee or sea-cow (Manatus Petulans). The Deerness visitor, however, cannot well be a dugong, for that mammal is only found in the East African and Indian Ocean; and one cannot conceive how it could possibly find its way year after year to the Orkney archipelago.
It is possible that the creature may be a manatee, of which there are two species - Manatus Americanus, chiefly found along the Atlantic shores of North America; and this, by the way, may be the creature taken for a Mermaid by Hudson and his crew in the north of Baffin's Bay. The other species of manatee is the Manatus Senegalensis, so called because it chiefly haunts the West African shores from a little north of the Senegal southwards by the Ivory Coast to the Bight of Benin. The manatee has the habit of rearing itself erect - standing up, so to speak - in the sea, and sometimes with its baby (it has never more than one at a birth) held tightly to its breasts with its flippers or arms; and seen in such an attitude and thus suckling its young, it is not diffiult to understand how it should have given rise to the Mermaid fable.
If the Deerness visitor is a manatee, it is much more likely to be the Americanus than the Senegalensis - much more likely that it crossed the Atlantic from the North American shores than that it found its way to the Orkneys from the shores of Senegambia. And if the description of the creature be at all correct as to the particulars referred to, a manatee, we take it, it must be; unless, indeed, it be a specimen of the real, actual, mermaid of legend and song, regarding whose existence, as in the case of the great sea serpent, it is perhaps wisest for the present to keep an "open mind."
We had hoped to be able to include two other communications on other subjects in this paper; but the Deerness mermaid, as will be seen, required all the space at our disposal, if she was to have anything like justice done to her. The communications omitted, however, shall have a place in our next.
Inverness Courier, 6th September 1895
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