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
Â
Sweet singing mermaids sported with their loves,
On heaps of heavy gold, and took great pleasure,
To spurn in careless sort the shipwreck treasure.
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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
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And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song.
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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 Hannahâperfectly cast as everyone's vision of a golden-haired mermaid from the depths of the ocean.
11
A Wife in Every Port
A
UGUSTUS 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 eleven 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.
The ceremony took place at eleven o'clock at night in the tiny church at Lainston near Winchester. Apart from the vicar and the bride and groom, there were only four other people present, one of them being Miss Chudleigh's aunt, and another, her maid. Precautions were taken to ensure that the domestic staff of all concerned had no idea what was being planned, and the brief ceremony took place in semidarkness, the only illumination being a lighted taper stuck in the hat of Mr. Mountenay, one of the witnesses. Afterward the newly married couple returned to the house where they were staying, and Elizabeth Chudleigh's maid helped them to enter by a backdoor unseen so they could creep up to a bedroom and spend their wedding night together. A few days later, Hervey had to rejoin his ship at Portsmouth, and they did not see each other again before he sailed for the West Indies.
Apart from a brief reunion when Hervey returned from Jamaica in 1746, they drifted apart and both sought lovers elsewhere. Miss Chudleigh, as she continued to be known, acquired an increasingly scandalous reputation that was typified by her startling appearance at the Venetian Ambassador's Ball at Somerset House in May 1749. She arrived wearing a costume so transparent and flimsy that most of her lovely figure was revealed. The King and the other men present seem to have been delighted, but the women were not. The Princess of Wales draped her wrap over the bare shoulders and breasts of her maid of honor, and afterward Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu noted, “Miss Chudleigh's dress, or rather undress, was remarkable; she was Iphigenia for the sacrifice, but so naked the high priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim. The Maids of Honour (not of maids the strictest) were so offended they would not speak to her.”
2
Meanwhile Hervey had embarked on a pattern of life that he was to pursue for as long as he was on active service in the navy. We know the most intimate details of this because he kept a private journal that he later used as a basis for his racy memoir. If this had ever been intended for publication, one would be tempted to think that he had invented the more extraordinary episodes in order to establish his reputation as a great lover, but it was written between 1767 and 1770 (several years before the bigamy scandal) and according to his own words, “I write this over purely for my own satisfaction of recalling to my memory most of the events of all kinds of my life, I pursue the threads of it, just as I had set it down every day of my life as it happened, only not quite all the very particular circumstances attending it.”
3
Hervey had made the crucial step to post-captain in 1747, and his contacts in high places had ensured that after the briefest of spells in command of small warships he was given command of the 70-gun
Princessa.
In this splendid ship of the line, he sailed with Admiral Byng's squadron to the Mediterranean. At this time, the hostilities with France had ended, and the squadron's purpose was to show the flag in various ports and to be ready should hostilities be resumed. The period of peace provided an ideal opportunity for senior naval officers to organize entertainments in foreign seaports and to become acquainted with local society, particularly the ladies. Every ship had musicians, and a prolonged stay in a civilized port like Lisbon or Genoa was marked by a succession of gracious dinners and musical evenings. Hervey reveled in this way of life. In January 1748, at the little port of Vado, near Genoa, he held a masquerade on board and arranged for the whole ship to be so illuminated that “she was as pretty a sight to those on shore as those within her.” All the officers of the fleet arrived in fancy dress, and the entire ship's company were persuaded to put on party masks.
A few weeks later he organized an entertainment on a grander scale. At the Italian port of Leghorn, he invited the governor of the province, his mistress, and twenty-eight members of the nobility who were visiting the city from Florence and Pisa. The evening began with a concert on board his ship, and as darkness fell, the guests were rowed in boats along the city's canals. Hervey had arranged for all the bridges to be illuminated, and at intervals along the canals he had boats with musicians playing and boats with food and drink for his guests. Thousands turned out to see the spectacle, some watching from windows and others lining the banks of the canals.
In return, Hervey received numerous invitations to dinners and concerts. He found the ladies of Florence to be the most gallant in Italy and their husbands the least jealous, so that he was able to enjoy the favors of, among others, the Marchesa de Pecori and the Marchesa Acciaiola. Back in Leghorn, he spent his time with the wives of two merchants: “The first I had every enjoyment with I could wish, and she was very pretty as well as entertaining.” To show her appreciation, she presented him with her picture and a ring set with diamonds.
By September 1748, the squadron was in Lisbon, which enabled Hervey to renew his acquaintance with Signora Paghetti, the Italian singer who had taken him to her bed when he was a sixteen-year-old lieutenant. He found her still to be very handsome, but he also looked for pleasures elsewhere. He paid several visits to the convent at Odivellas, which had an unusually liberal regime. The previous king had maintained two mistresses there and had a child by each of them. Hervey noted that many of the nuns were ladies of quality and were most beautiful. Of a later visit to the convent he wrote, “We stayed late, making love in the
frereatica
way (as they call it).” By way of contrast he also visited the local prostitutes. He described one morning's work in company with the Duke of Bagnos and Charles Gravier, later Comte de Vergennes and foreign minister under Louis XVI: “We went in cloaks to upwards of, I verily believe, thirty ladies housesâladies of pleasure, I mean.”
4
Hervey's aristocratic background and social contacts opened doors at the highest level. Leaving his ship at Lisbon, he spent a few weeks in Paris during the summer of 1749. He was presented to the Queen of France, visited Madame de Pompadour and went hunting regularly with the Duke de Penthieve, the grandson of Louis XIV and admiral of France. At this time, it was his custom to get up very early and to keep in good shape by dancing for half an hour each morning and by riding three times a week. If he dined at home, he would spend two hours after dinner playing the harpsichord. The nights were spent with two dancers from the Paris Opéra.
This round of social engagements and casual sexual encounters was somewhat disrupted in November 1749 when he met Susanne-Félix Lescarmot, whom he described as the most beautiful woman in France. She had been groomed to become the mistress of the King, but the Duc de Richelieu had ensured that Madame de Pompadour gained that position, so she had been married off to Monsieur Caze, a
fermier-général
who later became
secrétaire du cabinet.
Hervey was introduced to Madame Caze at a masquerade and fell madly in love with her. He abandoned his opera girls and all other distractions in order to pursue her. Madame Caze was evidently attracted to him, but it was some time before they had an opportunity to meet in private and reveal how they felt about each other. They continued to steal meetings together, and the relationship blossomed to the point where she gave Hervey a ring with the motto
L'Union en la passe
and told him that she was no longer mistress of herself but was all his. Unfortunately, their attempts to consummate their love were frustrated by the presence of others, in particular her husband and her mother. However, one day, several weeks after their first meeting, Madame Caze sent for Hervey when the coast was clear, and they were able to spend one entire afternoon and evening together, “giving and receiving the last charming proofs of an unbounded love, and I never tasted such most exquisite delight, nor was I ever more fit for the scene.”
5
They now arranged to meet every day, and somehow avoided causing a scandal or arousing her husband's jealousy. On one occasion, the lovers were engaged in a tender farewell when Monsieur
Caze entered the room. Hervey was able to conceal his aroused state with a large muff that he had slung from his girdle, and although Monsieur Caze observed their guilty confusion, he assumed they were merely kissing. He stomped off to his library, and any suspicions he might have entertained about the true nature of their friendship he kept to himself. Life was simplified for the lovers when Monsieur Caze was appointed
secrétaire du cabinet
and had to spend much of his time at Versailles. This enabled Hervey to spend every night with Madame Caze. He would arrive at her house late in the evening, enter through the stables, and stay with her until two or three o'clock in the morning. Although Hervey seems to have been given considerable latitude by his fellow officers, the time came when he had to return to his ship.
By December 1750, he was back in England, and on half-pay. He used all his contacts to try to get another command and was eventually appointed captain of the
Phoenix,
a 20-gun ship, the smallest class possible for someone of his rankâLord Anson informed him that there were no larger ships available. While he was supervising her outfitting at Deptford, he received a letter from Madame Caze informing him that she was determined not to injure her husband again and had decided to give up her life to devotion.
In March 1752, Hervey set sail from Portsmouth on the
Phoenix
and headed for Portugal and the Mediterranean. First he sailed into Lisbon, and during the four months that his ship was anchored there, he amused himself by renewing his acquaintance with the ladies in the convent at Odivellas and by making love to the local Portuguese ladies. In August he sailed on to Marseilles, where he met Mademoiselle Sarrazin, a cheerful and spirited Frenchwoman who was the mistress of a French colonel. She insisted that he take her to sea with him. He agreed, and she came aboard with her maid and sailed with him to Minorca, Gibraltar, and Lisbon, where he set her up in a house that he rented so they could spend time together whenever he was free. This convenient arrangement did not prevent him from enjoying affairs with other women. In October 1752, he was intercepted by a man on horseback. At first Hervey thought the man had orders to assassinate him, but he had been sent to bring him to a lady who wished to make his acquaintance. He was taken to the garden entrance of an estate and led up to a finely furnished apartment in a large house. There he found a lady waiting for him: “She told me our time was short, and we must go to bed, which I did not hesitate as she had fired me all over. I put my pocket-pistols under my pillow, and passed a most joyous night.” After several more secret rendezvous with this mysterious woman, he discovered that she was the Duchesse de Cadaval and a princess of the House of Lorraine.