Sirens: Embodiment of Legends
Are mermaids more than myth?
Disney’s 30-year-old spin on this fairy-tale creature as a rebellious, red-haired teenager with an anthropomorphic sea-gull as a friend is one that fans around the world are intimately acquainted with.
I know that I was, anyway. I was about nine when ‘The Little Mermaid’ was released into theatres, and I remember eagerly asking my mother for the seventeenth time: “Mom, which character was your favorite?!” (“The crab,” she’d responded, through clenched teeth and unconcealed exhaustion.)
Hans Christian Anderson is the father of the mermaid as we know her in popular literature, having scripted her into existence in 1837. Ever since then, little girls have been hooked.
We’ve all wanted to be her; we’ve all craved her ethereal magnificence, beauty, and sinuous curves. For centuries in the imaginations of mermaid-lovers, her queenly perch upon the boulder has been intensely coveted, as has the comb that she runs languidly through Rapunzel-esque locks. The brilliant scales on her slender fish’s tail kiss the salty sea air as she suns in the mid-afternoon.
Sailors, too, are enamoured. However much they may deny it, there are few who haven’t paced the deck under the moonlight while wondering if they’ll ever hear the melodious song of the siren, or perhaps see her skimming the wake just beneath the water’s surface.
It is worth mentioning that mermaids didn’t saturate the human consciousness in a mere 182 years. Before Anderson spun the mermaid’s melancholy world in his fables, she had been worshiped by many cultures as a goddess for millennia. In Thai Buddhist folklore, she is venerated as Suvannamacha. In addition, she has a place in the African (Yoruban) Candomle religion, wherein she also holds the title of mermaid ‘queen’.
Japan, too, has its own version of the mermaid. This creature is called the ‘kappa’, and is said to inhabit various lakes and rivers. Described as having simian-like features and tortoise-shells on their backs, they’re a far cry from beautiful. The kappa prefer to indulge on fresh cucumber, but according to legend they won’t hesitate to feast on children. The country’s Fukuoka Temple came across kappa remains in 1222 and has kept them on display for the past 800 years. There are precious few bones left, but water in which the bones are steeped is said to have healing power.
Yet the unspoken question: could the mermaid exist as more than just a figure in folk-lore? Have there been credible sightings? Is it possible that the legendary mermaid can even live among us, masquerading as the young lady next door?
During my research for this article, I chanced upon an interview given by dive-master Jeff Leicher about his own fortuitous mermaid encounter. On the 12th of April, 1998, Leicher was exploring the waters with a few friends at Kaiwi Point, located about twenty minutes away from Hawaii’s Kona coast. According to Leicher, he was about to witness a truly whimsical phenomenon:
“…We were on our way out to the point when a school of dolphins started following the boat, playing in our wake. Suddenly, one of the men on the port side starts yelling and pointing.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw! There, not 10 feet from the bow, was what looked like a nude woman. She had long flowing hair and one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen, but there’s no way a human being could be swimming so fast. She was keeping right up with the dolphins.
“Then, she leapt into the air and my heart almost gave out on me. The entire lower half of her was covered with scales and tapered back into a huge fish tail. She jumped once more, then disappeared under the surface.”
…and if that weren’t enough, quoting Leicher, he claimed that the comely mermaid was to visit them yet again:
“About an hour later, we arrived at the point and we were diving. I was photographing some colorful fish with my underwater camera.
“Suddenly, I felt something brush against my right leg. She shot by me like a streak of lightning, then turned and came back past me, swimming the other way. I just aimed the camera and started snapping pictures. I kept shooting as she broke for the surface and swam away.”
Leicher’s pictures were examined at three distinguished photography labs, all of whom alleged at the time that the images had not been tampered with. While researching Leicher’s story, I was both surprised and enthralled to find the two photos that he says he took that day. I have included them here for the reader, and concede that (to me) the pictures are fascinating. They appear to show the black-and-white, siren-like form of a woman twirling about in the waves. Her waist is slender. Her arms are tapered. One can even see the delicate curl of both hands. It is as though the legendary mermaid was finally personified, right there in the flesh.
Leicher concludes:
“I feel very lucky that I’m the one to finally prove to the world what people here have known for half a century. The Kaiwi Point Mermaid is real.”
Whatever you happen to believe about the existence — or lack thereof — of creatures like mermaids, I have to say that I found Leicher’s account extraordinary. It gave me fresh zeal for my mermaid project, since the bulk of sightings usually come from centuries long past.
Another recent sighting comes from Israel: specifically, Kiryat Yam. Schlomo Cohen was one of the first people to see the mermaid in 2009. He reported that he’d been hanging out with friends on the coast of Kiryat Yam and noticed what he thought to be a young woman sun-bathing. However, she seemed to be lying on the ground in ‘a weird way’. The woman turned, realized she was being watched, and then proceeded to dive back into the waters. Cohen was stunned: the woman’s lower half, he explained, was long and fish-like. He was not the only one to witness the Kiryat Yam mermaid; at least a dozen other people were present that day and they, too, corroborated Cohen’s story.
Those who believe mermaids to be a staple of children’s bedtimes stories can be forgiven, if one reflects upon it. From an evolutionary and zoological perspective, both ‘human’ and ‘fish’ make for a truly impossible combination. In the first place, a woman is a mammal and fish are — well, cold-blooded aqua-dwellers. So, if mermaids existed, would they be able to breathe in the air, water, or both? If we imagine these young women of the ocean to have lungs, as people do, then wouldn’t their necessity to surface and breathe mean that we would have caught, or at the very least taken video, of such a specimen by now? Where are the decomposing mer-folk bodies snagged by trawlers or fishing nets? And what’s more, how would they reproduce? It would be very difficult to imagine a water-child being born through the end of its mother’s tail, but external fertilization of mermaid ova by a male member of the species is a bit easier to process.
By 2010, public interest in the existence of real mermaids spiked, in part thanks to the Kiryat Kam sightings. In 2012, the cable channel Animal Planet produced a TV drama titled ‘Mermaids: The Body Found’. The premise of the 90-minute program involved mysterious recordings of an unidentified marine creature, along with a supposed mermaid corpse and video footage depicting what the show’s researchers claimed were ‘aquatic apes’.
But while ratings for the program initially soared, not all was what it seemed. ‘The Body Found’ featured actors, not actual marine biologists. The ‘aquatic ape’ footage was nothing more than sophisticated CGI. There were no mermaid recordings, videos, or corpses.
‘The Body Found’ wasn’t meant to be a documentary at all. Rather, the program was classified as a ‘docudrama’, and both the CGI and the show’s earnest nature fooled millions of people into believing that evidence for the new-fangled aquatic-ape theory was real. In 2013, Animal Planet aired a follow-up to the original, called ‘The New Evidence’. And, while both productions included (finely-printed) disclaimers at the beginning, the damage had been done. Viewers felt that they’d been duped. So many people had been hoodwinked that the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration had to issue a statement, which read, in part: ‘…no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found’.
But faux-documentaries aside, is there even a smidgen of possibility that mermaids might still exist, or at least that they did at one time? A story from Holland offers a tantalizing clue.
In the mid 17th century, an unfortunate mermaid somehow slipped into Holland’s borders via a defect in one of its dikes. She was injured in the process, but people in the area found the poor creature and were said to have nursed her back to health. Not only did the mermaid survive; she thrived. She eventually learned to help the community with chores, learned how to speak Dutch, and even converted to Catholicism. Her account is alluring, but there is no mention of how the Dutch mermaid dealt with the issue of her tail. Would she have shed it during her rescue? If so, how would she have managed to ambulate without somehow generating a pair of legs? And if she kept her tail, how on Earth did she do chores?! Might they have kept her in a barrel of water to prevent her tail from drying out?
Questions flood, but there is no dam to quell them. And yet, there’s one extraordinary sweetheart who once proved that mermaids are closer than we ever could’ve imagined.
In the high region of Peru’s mountainous terrain, the Andes, Sara Arauco gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Milagros. Milagros — whose name means ‘miracles’ in Spanish — was born with a perfect heart and a healthy set of lungs, but she would immediately make medical history as one of only three children in the world afflicted with sirenomelia, otherwise known as ‘mermaid syndrome’.
Mermaid syndrome is exactly what it sounds like: an infant born with fused legs, resulting in a child who appears to be a mermaid, or ‘water-baby’. Sirenomelia occurs in one out of every 100,000 live births. It can be recognized in the mother’s womb via ultrasound as early as 14 weeks. The fetal legs are fused, the fibula rotated, and in most cases there is a single umbilical artery, along with rectal atresia. The abdominal aorta is always absent. There are no genitals, but the fetus with sirenomelia may also present with other defects, such as cardiac problems and spinal bifida.
“When I saw my baby when she was born, I was filled with desperation,” claimed Milagros’s father, Ricardo Serron. Understanding the dire nature of their daughter’s condition, her parents left the mountains and fled to Lima for medical treatment. Physicians there noted that, at 13 months old, Milagros weighed a healthy 15 pounds. But her anatomical anomalies were serious: her left kidney was deformed, and the right kidney was too small to be of any use.
Saving Milagros was paramount, and in 2005 her parents consented to a four-and-a-half hour surgery that would attempt to ‘correct’ the tail up to her knees. Incredibly, Sara and her husband were able to observe the operation remotely. The televised procedure required a team of 11 surgeons and various other specialists such as plastic surgeons, pediatricians, and cardiac physicians.
The operation seemed to be a success. By 2006, Milagros was taking her first steps, and in 2009, another procedure was able to separate her legs entirely.
According to Milagros’s parents, their miracle water-baby had always been bright, intelligent, and vocal, with a large vocabulary and a remarkable ability to relate to anyone, not just children her age. In 2016, another operation separated the binding tissue from Milagros’s knees to her groin.
Milagros thrived, but in 2019 her kidney ailments proved to be too much. Just before celebrating her fifteenth birthday, the water-baby from the Peruvian mountains passed away. Friends and family dubbed her ‘Ariel’, in memory of another mermaid who shed her tail in exchange for legs.
Dear Milagros was a stark conundrum for naysayers who parrot incessantly that we’ll never see a ‘real, live’ mermaid.
With 97 percent of the world’s oceans unexplored, the salty waters of the Deep Blue harbor secrets that we can’t yet even fathom. I hope that the mermaid is among them, skimming the water alongside her sisters, who are the narwhal and wise porpoises.
SOURCES: Peruvian News, Animal Planet, Wikipedia, LiveScience, StrangeHistory.net, Jeff’s Diving Locker
