A Mermaid Buried in Benbecula, and the Mermaids People Made

Two very different kinds of mermaid meet in this story. One is a creature that people on a Hebridean shore said they saw, chased, found dead and then buried with a coffin and a shroud. The other is an object that people built from fish skin, paper and hair, and that showmen sold as proof. Telling the two apart is the main work of anyone who writes about mermaids, and the sources for each are very different in kind.

What Carmichael recorded

The Benbecula mermaid is known from a single published account. Alexander Carmichael, a collector of Gaelic oral tradition, printed it in 1900 in the second volume of Carmina Gadelica, in a note on the Gaelic names for the mermaid, maighdean na tuinne (maid of the wave) and maighdean mhara (maid of the sea). He wrote that “the belief in the mermaid is common” in the islands and that he had taken down several mermaid stories.¹

The Benbecula story, as he gives it, begins “some seventy years ago,” when people were cutting seaweed on a reef at Grimnis in Benbecula. A woman who had gone to wash her feet heard a splash and saw, a few feet away, what looked like “a woman in miniature.” Others ran to the place. Some men waded in to catch it and failed; some boys threw stones, and one struck it in the back. A few days later the creature was found dead at Cuile, near Nunton, nearly two miles off.¹

Carmichael’s description is detailed. In size, he wrote, the upper half matched a “well-fed child” of three or four, with long dark hair and white skin, while the lower half resembled a salmon “but without scales.” Crowds came, some from far away. Duncan Shaw, factor for the chief of Clanranald and the local baron-bailie and sheriff, “ordered a coffin and shroud to be made for the mermaid,” and it was buried before a large gathering, a little above the shore where it had been found. Carmichael adds that some people alive in his own day had seen and “touched this curious creature.”¹

Reading the account as evidence

Taken as a historical source, the account has clear limits. It was printed in 1900 about events Carmichael placed “some seventy years ago,” and the familiar date of about 1830 comes from that phrase, counted back from publication, rather than from any record of the find. If Carmichael heard or wrote the story some years before 1900, the events may be earlier, which fits the report of 1820 to 1830 noted below. Carmichael does not name the people who told him the story, and the account gives no measurements of the body, no drawing and no examination by anyone with training in anatomy. No contemporary document of the burial was found for this article.¹

The grave itself has not been located. In 1994 a field reconnaissance of the dunes at Culla Bay, carried out at the request of the Keeper of Mollusca at the National Museums of Scotland, found an isolated stone in a wind-eroded hollow that might have marked the reputed grave. The Western Isles Historic Environment Record states that “a brief examination of the stone’s character did not support the hypothesis that it had been set-up as a grave-marker.” The record lists the site as the reputed burial place, dated by report to about 1820 to 1830.²

The other stories in the same note show how often such sightings were reported, and how an ordinary animal could be seen as something else. In the same passage he tells of Colin Campbell, a crofter on Barra, who raised his gun at what he took to be an otter eating a fish on a reef, and then saw that “the creature before him looked like a woman holding a child.” Through a telescope he became convinced it was the mermaid, and it slipped into the sea when the glass clicked. Carmichael called Campbell honest and intelligent, and he gave a similar account from Neill Maceachain of South Uist, who saw a woman-like head and shoulders beside a becalmed boat. Carmichael’s notebooks preserve still others: in 1890 Duncan MacLellan of Carnan, South Uist, described a mermaid with skin like a cod, and people there told Carmichael this was not a rare event.¹³

None of this settles what was found at Nunton, or whether anything was. The record does not allow the creature to be identified, and the respectful course is to say so plainly. What Carmichael’s account does describe is a community’s response: whatever lay on the shore, the people of Benbecula are said to have treated it as something that deserved a funeral, and a named local official is said to have ordered one. That detail is the most specific part of the story, but it rests on the same single, late account, and it says as much about the people as about the creature.

Mermaids made by hand

The second tradition left physical evidence, because its mermaids were objects. In Japan, composite sea creatures called ningyo were exhibited and kept in temples and collections, many of them from the Edo period. In 2022 researchers at Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts began examining one, a 30-centimeter “mermaid” kept at the Enju-in temple in Asakuchi, which came with a note saying it had been caught off what is now Kochi around 1740.⁴

Using X-ray CT scanning, microscopy, DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating, the team found no skeleton apart from a jaw that came from a carnivorous fish. The body was built mostly of cloth, cotton and paper, coated with a paste of charcoal or sand. The head had animal hair, the upper body was covered with pufferfish skin, and the tail was the scaly skin of a croaker. Radiocarbon dates suggested it was made around the late 1800s, well over a century after the date in its note. The temple kept it.⁴

Not all such objects were made the same way, but the Enju-in study shows the level of craft involved. Western visitors had noticed this craft long before. Writing in 1855, P. T. Barnum reprinted a passage from an account of Japan drawn from Philipp Franz von Siebold, describing a fisherman who joined the upper half of a monkey to the lower half of a fish “so neatly as to defy ordinary inspection,” and who sold pictures of his creature as protection against a predicted epidemic.⁵

Barnum’s Feejee mermaid

Barnum’s own mermaid became one of the most famous made mermaids in the world.⁶ In the summer of 1842 Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum showed him a specimen with a story attached: a Boston sea captain had bought it in Calcutta from Japanese sailors, spent his employers’ money doing so, and failed to profit from it in London. Barnum dated the purchase to 1817 in his 1855 autobiography and to 1822 in his 1869 one.⁵⁷ He asked his naturalist for an opinion. As Barnum told it, the man could not see how the thing had been made but rejected it anyway, “Because I don’t believe in mermaids.”⁵

What followed was a publicity campaign. Barnum wrote letters about a “Dr. Griffin” of the “Lyceum of Natural History” in London and had friends post them from Montgomery, Charleston and Washington, so that New York papers printed them as news. His associate Levi Lyman⁶ then played Griffin in Philadelphia and New York hotels, showing the specimen to landlords and editors. “I may as well confess that those three communications from the South were written by myself,” Barnum wrote in 1855. On Sunday, July 17, 1842, three New York papers each printed a mermaid woodcut that Barnum had offered as an exclusive, and he had 10,000 pamphlets sold around the city. When the editors realized he had given the same offer to all three, by his account, they called it “a scaly trick.”⁵ The mermaid was shown at Concert Hall on Broadway and then at Barnum’s American Museum.⁶

The woodcuts showed graceful, human-looking sea maidens. The object was something else. Barnum himself described it as “an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen, about three feet long,” with its mouth open and its arms thrown up.⁵ By 1869 he called it a show “of which, I confess, I am not proud,” and said he had used it mainly to advertise the museum.⁷ He also recalled visiting the government museum at The Hague, where a case of fabulous animals made from paper and other materials held “at least two dozen mermaids, of all sorts and sizes.” Its superintendent told him the Japanese were especially ingenious at making them.⁷

What became of Barnum’s specimen is uncertain. Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has held a “Feejee Mermaid” from Kimball’s Boston Museum since 1897. It is about nine or ten inches long, with papier-mache arms, much smaller than the “about three feet” Barnum gave in 1855, though in the same book he quotes Lyman calling their specimen “eighteen inches long.”⁵ A Peabody curator, Diana Loren, told the Harvard Crimson that whether it is the specimen Kimball and Barnum exhibited is “unclear.”⁸

Coney Island’s sea rabbits

The tradition of the made sea creature did not end with the nineteenth century, but some of its modern makers have turned it around. Takeshi Yamada, an artist born in Osaka in 1960, moved to Coney Island in 2002, drawn by its sideshow culture. “I didn’t choose Coney Island. It chose me,” he told the Coney Island History Project. He became known for walking the neighborhood in a black tuxedo with Seara, a sea rabbit, described by the project as “a taxidermied wonder with webbed feet and a mermaid’s tail.” Specimens from his Museum of World Wonders were displayed for more than four years at the Coney Island Library on Mermaid Avenue, and he has made curiosities for traveling sideshows, museums and television.⁹

This kind of work is often called rogue taxidermy, which the Coney Island blog Amusing the Zillion describes as “the creation of oddities and curiosities using traditional taxidermy materials and techniques.” Its account of Yamada’s work includes Fiji mermaids among his gaffed specimens, and quotes him predicting, before he appeared on the AMC series Immortalized, “My sea rabbit will be a household name.” The same report says that Hurricane Sandy flooded the first floor of his Neptune Avenue home and studio in 2012, destroying most of his artwork; Yamada himself described some works as “destroyed or heavily damaged” and said, “The show must go on.”¹⁰

The difference from Barnum lies in the frame. Barnum’s mermaid came wrapped in forged letters and a fake scientist. Yamada’s sea rabbits come with their maker standing beside them in a top hat,⁹ and they are shown in taxidermy contests, library displays and exhibitions under his own name, as rogue taxidermy and art.⁹¹⁰ They borrow the look of the old sideshow gaff, and something of its playful showmanship, without pretending to be the work of nature.

Folklore, fraud and art

Set side by side, these mermaids fall into three distinct categories. The Benbecula creature belongs to folklore: an account written down long after the fact, with no surviving body and an unconfirmed grave, but with a detailed account of how a community is said to have treated what it found. The Enju-in and Feejee mermaids belong to material history: objects made by skilled hands and given false histories, one with a note claiming a catch in 1740, the other with a fictitious English naturalist. The Enju-in mermaid has been scanned and dated; Barnum’s cannot be identified with certainty. Yamada’s sea rabbits belong to art: made with a related craft, without the deception.

The temptation with stories like Benbecula’s is to explain them away or to treat them as proof. The evidence supports neither. It supports a narrower and more interesting conclusion: that, by Carmichael’s account, people in the Hebrides believed in the mermaid strongly enough to give a funeral to a creature they took for one, and that elsewhere, makers and showmen found it profitable to manufacture mermaids for audiences who wanted to see one.

Footnotes

1. Carmichael 1900, Carmina Gadelica vol. 2, pp. 304-305. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Western Isles HER, Monument record 2152. ↩

3. Carmichael-Watson Collection, Coll-97/CW1/1 (catalogue description). ↩

4. Starr, ScienceAlert, February 21, 2023. ↩ ↩²

5. Barnum 1855, Life, pp. 231-237 and 241. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Boese, Museum of Hoaxes, “The Feejee Mermaid.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Barnum 1869, Struggles and Triumphs, chs. 8 and 30. ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Berry, Harvard Crimson, October 13, 2016. ↩

9. Coney Island History Project, Takeshi Yamada oral history. ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Amusing the Zillion, November 29, 2012. ↩ ↩²