The Mermaid That Wasn’t: At Sea with Sri Lanka's Mammals

Europeans first encountered mermaids in Sri Lanka 500 years ago. Just a few decades after arriving, the Portuguese, under the command of Constantino of Braganza, a cousin of the King of Portugal, tiring of the rather successful raids upon his fleet by the Kings of Jaffna, decided war was the best way forward. His expedition, in November 1560, resulted in the capture of Mannar Island. Inevitably, many in his army were terribly injured and under the naval doctor, Dimas Bosque, a beach hospital was erected. Bosque, described as "a very cultured man, well known for his veracity, and quite sagacious in the treatment of illnesses,” took up the story in a letter later discovered in the Jesuit library in France. “One day a crowd of fishermen came to the Father, requesting him, with loud shouting in their own language, to go to their boats and look at some fishes they had caught. They said that while they were fishing, they had, by a stupendous miracle of nature, either by luck or that the marvellous works of God the Almighty might be spoken of, caught in their nets nine female fishes and seven males, which, because of their resemblance to human beings, the natives themselves called "sea men" and "sea women". "Struck by the novelty, as was natural, we went to the boats. The fishermen who had remained there had already taken the fish out of the boats and laid them on the shore. When I saw them and contemplated how greatly they resembled human beings, I could scarcely breathe. In wonderment I could hardly turn my eyes away from their admirable bodies. What I saw then with my own eyes I would never have believed if someone else had told me. I kept staring at these fish with their marvellous resemblance to human beings. Such a work of nature seemed hardly believable even while I was looking at it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, helped by Christiah philosophy, I referred the extraordinary shape of the fish before me to God the maker of all things, to whom nothing is difficult to make, let alone impossible. I considered it worthwhile to inspect and consider each particular member, so that in this way, after exactly examining the anatomy of each part, I would clearly understand the similitude of the whole body with that of a human being. Externally the resemblance was very great.” What Bosque had actually discovered as not mermaids by dugongs. He was by no means the first to confuse the two. Christopher Colombus himself had come across them a few years earlier, noting in his diary - “the day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.” Hundreds of years of brutal hunting have since driven this most marvellous of all the island’s sea mammals to the brink of extinction. But a gentler creature would be hard to find. Growing to around eleven feet in length, with poor eyesight but a good sense of smell, they propel themselves forward by flippers and tail, and although they can live to up to seventy years, longevity is now a but a dugong dream. Widespread legal protection has not stopped them being hunted, whilst habitat pollution and degradation has also decimated their numbers. In Sri Lanka, their meat was highly sought and considered to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties; and diaries note that as recently as the 1950s over one hundred and fifty slaughtered animals were offered for sale annually in Mannar alone. Their cautious reproductive habits do not much help them either, with males taking sometimes as many as eighteen years to reach sexual maturity. The impressive Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project reports depressingly that “large herds of dugongs were reported to have occurred in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka in the early 1900s; however, none were sighted during aerial surveys conducted of Palk Bay and the waters off western Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and their current status and distribution are unknown.” Even so, they have been uncorroborated reports of more recent sightings including one in 2017 in Puttalam Lagoon where some say they still live, grazing on sea grass meadows in shallow bays, and mangroves. But out beyond these sheltered shores, in deeper waters, Sri Lanka’s other sea mammals are faring better, and the country is one of the best places in Asias to sort them – especially in Mirissa it is November to April; off Trincomalee in May to September; or Kalpitiya from December to March. Three capacious seas splash against Sri Lanka’s beaches – from the east, the Bay of Bengal; from the west the Laccadive Sea; and from the south the Indian Ocean. Purists clamour for a fourth – the shallow Palk Straights that link the north of the island to the south of India. Either way, the country is blessed by being so central to a great mix of oceans. Like a roundabout amidst a myriad ...