M is for Mermaid….
Do you remember daydreaming about mermaids? For years, I always believed mermaids are an old sailor’s over-worked imagination. I’ll touch base on that late. During my research for today’s Alphabe-Thursday post, I discovered a real-life mermaid. Yeah, what’s she been smoking? you’re saying. Honestly, I found a modern-day mermaid.
Meet Hannah Fraser, a real-life mermaid. She can dive 50 feet beneath the surface of the ocean on one single breath before resurfacing. What’s truly cool about Hannah is her ability to co-exist with animals of the deep. Read the entire article HERE
While Hannah isn’t the mermaid from a bygone era of sailors’ beautiful sirens. Okay, beautiful, yeah, but not what long ago sailors saw. What did they see? You may know the answer to this $100,000 question already but, if not, then this is what they saw…the magnificent manatee!
Sailors spent months on end out on the ocean without the company of… the softer sex. One can only imagine where their thoughts were most of the time. The seaman spotted creatures submerged beneath the seas’ folds with a head, arms(flippers), and the back half a fish tail. Their imagination interpreted — half girl, half-fish. Wah-lah, the mermaid was born. In fact, Christopher Columbus even wrote about mermaids in his log on his voyage to the New World. Columbus reported that they “came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted…” (Cherry, 1995)
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I wouldn’t go so far to say manatee are beautiful. Manatees are sometimes called sea cows. They are considered to be gentle and slow-moving animals. These large, gray plant-eating, aquatic mammals can grow to be 10 feet long, can weigh 800 –1,2000 pounds, and have a lifespan of 60 years. Most of their time spent eating, resting, and traveling. Not a bad kind of life, eh? Because they are mammals, then they must surface for air about every 3-5 minutes, but while they sleep they may remain submerged for as long as 20 minutes. Sadly because of over hunting, they were nearly extinct and are under the Endangered Species Act.
Lonely sailors and the sea’s romance fueled ocean voyagers’ imaginations creating mystifying stories for young and old alike for centuries about a lovely, enchanting creature. Disney’s 1989 popular animation The Little Mermaid reenacted these very childhood fantasies in all of us. (Free Little Mermaid coloring pages downloads) To live in the world of make-believe for even a short while is a nice escape from reality’s insanity.
