In 1775 appeared a very circumstantial account of a Mermaid which was
captured in the Grecian Archipelago in the preceding year, and exhibited
in London. The account is ludicrously minute, and it ends with: "It is
said to have an enchanting voice, which it never exerts except before
a storm." This imposture was craftily made up out of the skin of the
angle shark. In Mr. Morgan's "Tour to Milford Haven in the year 1795,"
appears an equally circumstantial account of a Mermaid, said to have
been seen by one Henry Reynolds, a farmer, of Ren-y-hold, in the parish
of Castlemartin, in 1782. It resembled a youth of sixteen or eighteen
years of age, with a very white skin: it was bathing. The evidence
is very roundabout, so that there were abundant means for converting
some peculiar kind of fish into a Merman, without imputing intentional
dishonesty to any one. "Something akin to this kind of evidence is
observable in the account of a Mermaid seen in Caithness in 1809, which
attracted much attention in England as well as in Scotland, and induced
the Philosophical Society of Glasgow to investigate the matter. The
Editor of a newspaper, who inserted the statement, had been told by a
gentleman, who had been shown a letter by Sir John Sinclair, who had
obtained it from Mr. Innes, to whom it had been written by Miss Mackay,
who had heard the story from the persons (two servant girls and a boy)
who had seen the strange animal in the water." (Chambers's "Book of
Days.")
Then we read of a so-called Mermaid, shown in the year 1794 at No. 7,
Broad-court, Bow-street. Covent-garden, said to have been taken in the
North Seas by Captain Foster. It was of the usual description.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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