We have three reports of different reliability on local mermaids. The first is from August 1812. A group was on a sailing trip a mile off Exmouth when it heard a wild, tinkling harpsichord melody. The trippers then spotted a human-like sea creature, almost six feet long, with a fish tail, ‘diving and twisting in the water’. Excitedly, they threw boiled fish into the sea - the creature drew nearer and seemed to be cavorting playfully near the vessel. After three quick plunges, ‘she’ swam rapidly away and was lost to sight. A mermaid!, with a long, oval face, seal-like, but more agreeable. Hair seemed to crown her upper and back head. Not beautiful, she was more like an animal, whose upper arms were covered with a soft fawn or pinkish down. Her two arms ended in four webbed fingers on each hand. The waist tapered gradually to form a tail apparently covered with shiny scales, while on her back was something like feathers.
The second report was about 100 years later. A group of eight fisherman caught a similar mermaid off Topsham bar. The group used sticks brutally to knock it down after it leapt out of the fishing net and tried to ‘run away with great swiftness’. The four foot long mermaid had legs, webbed feet, human eyes, a mouth, and a salmon-like tail. Dying ‘it groan’d like a human creature’. The mermaid subsequently went on public display in Topsham and then London.
The anonymous contemporary third tale reached us recently and triggered off Monica Lang’s memories of the first two accounts in The Exmouth Journal.
It was a cold and windy night; a gale was blowing up the Exe. The ghostly moon peeped wanly through the scudding cloud. On the end of the Starcross pier sat a sad, love-lorn, lonely and hunched figure, playing a lament on his harmonica. The young man looked up, startled, as he fleetingly saw a beautiful young woman's head emerge from the waves, her long blond tresses streaked with seaweed and kelp. The young man's heart pounded frantically, it was love at first sight, who was this gorgeous phantom, as she slipped below the waves without apparently so much as a glance in his direction. Had she noticed him? Was it an hallucination? Perhaps one glass too many in The Galleon on his way to Starcross pier....’
Are there any other stories of the River Exe mermaid? Our Loch Ness Monster!
If so, please send to
starcross.history@gmail.com
Jon Nichol
