Columbus mistakes three manatees for mermaids - January 9th, 1493

On this day in 1493, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus recorded a sighting of three “mermaids” while sailing near what is now the Dominican Republic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class as a production of I
Heart Radio, Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that demystifies history one day at a time.
I'm Gabe Louzier, and today we're talking about the time

(00:20):
when a lonesome Christopher Columbus mistook a one ton sea
cow for a shapely mermaid. The day was January nine,
fourteen nine three. Italian explorer Christopher Columbus recorded a sighting

(00:42):
of three mermaids while sailing near what is now the
Dominican Republic. He had set out from Spain six months
earlier on his first voyage in search of a western
trade route to Asia. Rather than finding one, he infamously
stumbled into the America's instead. By January of the next year,

(01:05):
Columbus had lost two of his four ships and was
eager to head home. It was one week before setting
out for Spain that Columbus spotted something strange off the
prow of his ship. In his journal entry for January nine,
he wrote, quote, Yesterday, when I was going to the
Rio del Oro, I saw three mermaids that came up

(01:29):
very high out of the sea. They were not as
beautiful as they are painted since in some ways they
have a face like a man. The mermaids hadn't proved
as attractive as Columbus would have liked, but in their defense,
they were manatees, also known as sea cows. Manatees are large,

(01:51):
slow moving marine mammals. They have egg shaped heads, bulbous faces,
and whiskers. They swim using two four were limbs called flippers,
and a flat paddle shaped tail. A fully grown manateee
is generally between nine and twelve feet long and ways
anywhere from four hundred to thirteen hundred pounds. They're nicknamed

(02:16):
sea cows because they graze on underwater plants and grasses,
although they likely evolved from a common ancestor of elephants,
not cattle. By now, you're probably wondering how anyone could
confuse a giant aquatic cow for a mermaid, a legendary
half human half fish creature. It's definitely a stretch, but

(02:39):
there are some aspects of manateee anatomy that help explain
the confusion. For one thing, each of their flippers has
five sets of finger like bones, which give their limbs
the general shape of arms and hands. They also have
a vertebrae that acts like a neck, enabling manateee to

(03:00):
turn their heads from side to side. Lastly, and most crucially,
manatees are known to occasionally do tail stands in shallow water,
and that's exactly how Columbus described them, rising high out
of the water. So with all of that in mind,
it's possible to imagine that from a certain distance, at

(03:22):
a certain angle, in a certain light, manatees could be
mistaken for mermaids, or at least for something vaguely human shaped.
Of course, we should also consider the viewers state of
mind in all of this, because remember, Columbus had spent
many months at sea with his all male crew. By

(03:44):
that point, anything slightly curvy was probably enough to catch
his eye, and then his imagination could fill in the
missing details. It's true that Columbus was a bit let
down by the manatees physical appearance, but he's still found
them beautiful, just not as beautiful as they had been painted.

(04:05):
There are only three species of manatee, West African, Amazonian,
and West Indian, also known as the American manatee. Columbus
noted that he saw the three mermaids while on his
way to Rio del Oro, or as it's known today
the Republic of Haiti. That means his mermaids were most

(04:27):
likely West Indian manatees, but the journal entry goes on
to say that Columbus had actually seen some of the
creatures before while traveling along the coasts of Guinea and Liberia.
On that earlier occasion, he most likely saw a doogo,
a close cousin of the manatee and the only other

(04:47):
member of the Serenia order of fully aquatic mammals. If
the words Syreennia rings a bell, that's because it's derived
from the sirens of Greek mythology, the vicious creatures who
were said to lure lonely sailors to their death after
being mistaken for friendly mermaids. Manatees and doo gongs have

(05:10):
helped perpetuate the myth of mermaids for centuries, but the
sailors of old had been primed to see all kinds
of mythical creatures in the water. In the age of exploration,
seafaring was driven by fantastical rumors and folklore, and old
maps were littered with unknown areas which illustrators had helpfully

(05:31):
filled in with mermaids, krakens, and sea dragons. Columbus's expedition
added more fuel to that fire. After his return from
the America's European side shows began advertising recently discovered mermaids
from the New World, and in most cases they were

(05:51):
actually dead manatees or doo gongs. Still, the Sirenians have
been playing tricks on sailor's eyes for long before Columbus.
In the Pacific nation of Palau, ancient stories and wooden
carvings depict young women transforming into doo gongs and then
saving fishermen lost at sea. In fact, the word doo

(06:14):
gong actually means lady of the sea in the Malay language,
and three thousand year old drawings of doo gongs have
been found in Malaysian caves. As for mermaids, they showed
up and recorded history around the same time. The first
description of the creatures was written in Assyria in about

(06:34):
one thousand BC. From there, mermaids swam their way into
the cultures of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome during Antiquity. They
then made the leap to European and Arabic cultures during
the Medieval Age, meaning that by the time Columbus made
his sighting mermaids had existed in the collective consciousness for

(06:56):
nearly three millennia. In light of that, we can probably
cut him some slack for thinking manatees were mermaids, but
he's still on the hook for all the other stuff.
As for manatees and doo gongs, they've become almost as
rare as a real mermaid. Both animals are now considered
endangered and vulnerable to extinction. They have no natural predators,

(07:20):
so most of the decline is due to habitat loss,
dwindling sea grass and waterways and lagoons, and boat collisions.
These issues are especially pressing in Florida, where more than
a thousand West Indian manatees died in one alone, the
largest death toll ever recorded for a single year. If

(07:43):
humans make us stronger push, we can still stop these
gentle giants from becoming myths themselves and help preserve the
strangeness and wonder of our planet's oceans in the process.
If you'd like future generations to have the chance to
embarrass themselves I'm mistaking these animals for mermaids. You should
visit Save the Manateee dot org and Save the doogong

(08:07):
dot org to learn how to help I'm Gay Bluesier
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. You can learn even more
about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
at t d I HC Show, and if you have

(08:28):
any Mermaid sightings to report, you can send them my
way at this day at i heart media dot com.
Feel free to rank the attractiveness of the Mermaid on
a scale of your own choosing. Just keep in mind
that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Thanks
to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thank you
for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for

(08:52):
another day in History Class. Yeah. For more podcasts from
I Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.