Anthony’s conduct “I wouldn’t be too hard on a man for tak-
ing a drop an odd time.”
I was glad to hear Peter say that. I myself had found it
necessary from time to time, for the sake of an old friend-
ship, not to be too hard on Peter.
“Nobody would have blamed him,” Peter went on, “if he
had behaved himself when he had a drop taken; but that’s
what he didn’t seem able to do. He bet her. Sore and heavy
he bet her, and that’s what no woman, whether she was a
natural woman or one of the other kind, could be expected
to put up with. Not that she said a word. She didn’t. Nor
nobody would have known that he bet her if he hadn’t taken
to beating the young lads along with her. It was them told
The Emerald Sea
19
what was going on. But there wasn’t one on the island would
interfere. The people did be wondering that she didn’t put
the fear of God into Anthony; but of course that’s what she
couldn’t do on account of his having the cloak hid away from
her. So long as he had that she was bound to put up with
whatever he did. But it wasn’t for ever.
“The house was going to rack and ruin
with the way Anthony wouldn’t mind it
on account of his being three-parts drunk
most of the time. At last the rain was com-
ing in through the roof. When Anthony saw
that he came to himself a bit and sent for my grandfather and
settled with him to put a few patches of new thatch on the
worst places. My grandfather was the best man at thatching
that there was in the island in them days, and he took the
job though he misdoubted whether he’d ever be paid for it.
Anthony never came next or nigh him when he was working,
which shows that he hadn’t got his senses rightly. If he had
he’d have kept an eye on what my grandfather was doing,
knowing what he knew, though of course my grandfather
didn’t know. Well, one day my grandfather was dragging off
the old thatch near the chimney. It was middling late in the
evening, as it might be six or seven o’clock, and he was think-
ing of stopping his work when all of a sudden he came on
what he thought might be an old petticoat bundled away in
Among the Mermaids
20
the thatch. It was red, he said, but when he put his hand on it
he knew it wasn’t flannel, nor it wasn’t cloth, nor it wasn’t like
anything he’d ever felt before in all his life. There was a hole
in the roof where my grandfather had the thatch stripped,
and he could see down into the kitchen. Anthony’s wife was
there with the youngest of the boys in her arms. My grand
-
father was as much in dread of her as every other one, but he
thought it would be no more than civil to tell her what he’d
found.
“‘Begging your pardon, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but I’m after
finding what maybe belongs to you hid away in the thatch.’”
With that he threw down the red cloak, for it was a red
cloak he had in his hand. She didn’t speak a word, but she
laid down the baby out of her arms and she walked out of
The Emerald Sea
21
the house. That was the last my father seen of her. And that
was the last anyone on the island seen of her, unless maybe
Anthony. Nobody knows what he saw. He stopped off the
drink from that day; but it wasn’t much use his stopping it.
He used to go round at spring tides to the bay where he had
seen her first. He did that five times, or maybe six. After that
he took to his bed and died. It could be that his heart was
broke.”
We slipped past the point of the pier. Peter crept for-
ward and crouched on the deck in front of the
mast. I peered into the gloom to catch sight of
our mooring-buoy.
“Let her away a bit yet,” said Peter. “Now luff
her, luff her all you can.”
The boat edged up into the wind. Peter, flat on his
stomach, grasped the buoy and hauled it on board. The
fore-sheets beat their tattoo on the deck. The boom swung
sharply across the boat.
Then minutes later we were leaning together across the
boom gathering in the mainsail.
“What became of the boys?” I asked.
“Is it Anthony O’Flaherty’s boys? The last of them went
to America twenty years ago. But sure that was before you
came to these parts.”
Among the Mermaids
22
Nautical Terms
The term
boot camp
originated during the Spanish-
American war, when sailors wore leggings called boots.
Recruits were nicknamed after these leggings, and their
training camps became known as “boot camps.”
The term
clean bill of health
was first used in reference to a
ship whose captain could produce documents proving that
the port his boat sailed from had not been host to an epi-
demic or infection.
The saying
down the hatch
comes from the term for lower
-
ing cargo into the hatch.
The Emerald Sea
23
The term
proof
(and the practice of identifying alcohol
based on proof ) came from sailors who would put gunpow-
der into the rum. If it ignited, the rum was 100 proof, or at
least 57 percent alcohol. If not, someone had watered down
the rum—and that someone was going to walk the plank!
The term
dungarees
, meaning sailor’s work
clothes, comes from the
Hindi word Dun
-
gri, a type of Indian cloth.
The word
mayday
, a radio distress call,
comes from the French “m’aidez,” which
means “help me.”
The word
scuttlebutt
refers to the cask
of drinking water on ships—a butt is
a wooden cask used for holding wa-
ter, while to scuttle is to drill a hole, as
in, “This butt has been scuttled so that we could
drink from it.” When sailors gathered at the scut-
tlebutt for water, they took the opportunity to gos-
sip—and so scuttlebutt became slang for rumors.
Today we have our modern equivalent of talking around the
office water cooler.
The term
fathom
is a nautical word used to measure the
depth of the water. One fathom is six feet, a measurement
Among the Mermaids
24
based on the length from a sailor’s fingertip to fingertip when
his arms were outstretched. It was once defined by Parlia-
ment as “the length of a man’s arms around the object of his
affections,” and derives from the Old English word
faethm
,
meaning “embracing arms.”
The phrase
showing your true colors
originated from the
&nb
sp; days when warships and pirate ships would hide their flags
when approaching an enemy (or a victim), then unfurl them
once it was too late for the oblivious ship to take aim and
return fire.
A
smoking lamp
was once used to signify that a space on
the ship was designated for smoking. This method was
used to reduce the risk of setting the ship on fire, and it be-
ing reduced to ash, because a sailor wanted a cig. Sailors
The Emerald Sea
25
could light their pipes on the lamp (before the invention of
matches). When the lamp was out, it meant conditions or
other responsibilities dictated that smoking was forbidden,
and officers still announce that the “smoking lamp is out”
when they want the crew to put ’em out.
Ever been asked to just
toe the line?
The phrase comes from
an old sailors’ punishment. Decks used to be made by sealing
planks with a mixture of pitch and tar, creating a series of
parallel lines. Each Sunday, a warship’s crew had to “fall in at
quarters,” or divide up and form a line, using the seals on the
deck to keep the formation straight. On other days, a young
ship’s boy or a boot (a new sailor in training) would fidget
or talk when he shouldn’t—and the captain would send him
to “toe the line.” He’d have to stand with his toes to the line,
sometimes for hours in harsh weather.
Batten Down the Hatches!
Since the first stories were told, the sea has been the source
of folklore, myth, and mystery in every corner of the earth,
and the life-sustaining and life-threatening center of ev-
ery coastal culture. Its sheer vastness holds a promise of
power and the unknown, and leagues under the surface lives
a world as different from ours as another planet’s. From
Among the Mermaids
26
Homer’s wine-dark waves, to Charles Weathers Bump’s
The
Mermaid of Druid Lake
, from the Welsh tales Wirt Sikes
tells in
It Moans on Land and Sea,
to the infamous Loch
Ness monster, it seems that everyone agrees—there’s some-
thing supernatural about the water.
No self-respecting headline would read, “Aliens Found
in the Deep Sea,” or, “Mermaid Sighted off Small Fishing
Boat.” Why? It is certainly true that no matter how much
we study and map and dive and explore, there will always
remain something inexplicable about the ocean. Here are a
few strange-but-true tales of the sea that did make headlines,
or at least turned a head or two.
In the summer of 1997, underwater microphones placed
in the ocean by the United States Navy detected an ultra-
low-frequency sound, the source of which has remained a
mystery. The sound, which became known as the Bloop, was
detected several times over a range of 5,000 kilometers. Sci-
entists say the Bloop matches the sound profile of a living
creature, but they have yet to identify which one. The Bloop
is too big and powerful to have been made by a whale. In
fact, scientists don’t know of any animal on earth that could
have made the sound—unless it’s an animal that hasn’t
been discovered yet. More recent evidence has surfaced that
NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration—claims to solve the mystery of the Bloop. They
The Emerald Sea
27
believe it to be the sound of cracking ice in Antarctica—in
short, an "icequake." (But they also publicly announced that
mermaids weren't real, so can you really trust them?)
In 2012, in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Swe-
den, 300 feet down, deep-sea divers discovered a mysterious
object that seemed to defy identification. Using remote con-
trolled cameras, further investigations revealed something
that looks eerily similar to the Millennium Falcon. Skeptics
declare it merely a coincidental collection of rocks, but ufolo-
gists and paranormal investigators won’t be swayed by this
explanation. Scientists have also speculated that it is the re-
mains of a nineteenth-century warship—which would also
be cool!
Also in 2012, Al McGlashan discovered the carcass of
a thirteen-foot squid near South Wales, Australia. “In all
my time on the water—and I’ve spent 200-plus days out
there—I’ve never seen anything like it,” McGlashan said. He
Among the Mermaids
28
also described the deep sea monster as “one of those mystical
things you hear of in those stories about ancient mariners.”
Creepy.
In Oregon, a concrete dock mysteriously washed ashore.
It was seventy feet long, seven feet tall, and nineteen feet
wide, made of metal and concrete. While imaginations ran
wild—was it a chunk of Neptune’s deep-sea palace?—it was
most likely from the 2011 massive tsunami in Japan. This is
remarkable in and of itself as the block of concrete traveled
more than 4,000 nautical miles in just over a year. Eyewit-
ness Kirk Tite, who made the discovery while walking along
the beach with his two sons, described it as “a massive hunk
of concrete and metal covered in sea creatures.”
And in October of 2012, Florida’s
Sun Sentinel
paper ran
the following headline:
Huge Eyeball from Unknown Creature Washes
Ashore on Florida Beach
A man named Gino Covacci was walking along Pom-
pano Beach, just north of Ft. Lauderdale on Florida’s sunny
east coast, when he made a rather gruesome discovery: a gi-
ant eyeball, which he reportedly kicked over, thinking it was
a softball. Later, sources confirmed that the eyeball belonged
to a swordfish of unusual size, which must now be sporting
an eye patch the size of a bikini bottom!
29
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths
and a great fear of shallow living.
—ANAÏS NIN
One of my favorite mermaid stories is the following classic
tale, “Lutey and the Mermaid,” by Mabel Quiller-Couch. It
has been told and retold in Celtic myths and fairy tales many
times over. Its familiar theme—a mermaid stuck in a shallow
tide pool lures a mortal man to her watery trap—is made
lively with Quiller-Couch’s lighthearted, but very feminine,
touch. Lutey is not as dumb as other mortals: the mermaid’s
beauty alone does not trick him. The prospect of her abusive
mer-husband eating her children convinces him to help her.
CHAPTER
2
M
Y
H
USBAND
W
ILL
E
AT
M
Y
C
HILDREN
Among the Mermaids
30
Lutey himself is a faithful(ish) husband, and perhaps a bit
too kind to his fellow man.
&
nbsp; “Lutey and the Mermaid” was originally published in
Quiller-Couch’s 1914 collection,
Cornwall’s Wonderland
, a
fantastic compilation of fairy tales featuring such gems as
“Lutey and the Mermaid,” “The Fairies on the Gump,” and
“How Madge Figgy Got Her Pig,” all retold by Quiller-
Couch. Born in 1866 in, you guessed it, Cornwall, England,
Quiller-Couch was widely praised as an editor, but she was
also quite a prolific author. She wrote more than twenty-
six published works. Interestingly, her younger sister Lilian
Quiller-Couch was also an editor and writer, and the two of
them collaborated on a couple of works.
Legend has it that Mabel Quiller-Couch was jilted by a
lover, and it seems that her ideal man may have been reborn
a bit in Lutey—and that even Lutey was flawed.
Lutey and the Mermaid
by Mabel Quiller-Couch
One lovely summer evening many, many years ago, an old
man named Lutey was standing on the seashore not far from
that beautiful bit of coast called the Lizard.
My Husband Will Eat My Children
31
On the edge of the cliff above him stood a small farm,
and here he lived, spending his time between farming, fish-
ing, and, we must admit it, smuggling, too, whenever he got a
chance. This summer evening he had finished his day’s work
early, and while waiting for his supper he strolled
along the sands a little way, to see if there was
any wreckage to be seen, for it was long since
he had had any luck in that way, and he was
very much put out about it.
This evening, though, he was no luckier
than he had been before, and he was turning
away, giving up his search as hopeless, when from somewhere
out seaward came a long, low, wailing cry. It was not the mel-
ancholy cry of a gull, but of a woman or child in distress.
Lutey stopped, and listened, and looked back, but, as far
as he could see, not a living creature was to be seen on the
beach but himself. Even though while he listened the sound
came wailing over the sand again, and this time left no doubt
in his mind. It was a voice. Someone was in trouble, evi-