Christopher Columbus's three mermaids off Hispaniola

Christopher Columbus was nearing the end of his first voyage. On 25 December 1492 the Santa María was wrecked. La Navidad was founded. Columbus then sailed east along the north coast of Hispaniola, and near Monte Cristi the Pinta rejoined him. There he set about exploring a large river in the vicinity. He named it the Río del Oro. The River of Gold. Today it is called the Yaque del Norte, and its mouth lies in what is now the Dominican Republic.

Tuesday, 8 January 1493. Columbus was on his way to the river. In the water, he saw three sirens. They "rose well out of the sea."

The next day, he set it down in his log. And he did not hide his disappointment. They were "not so beautiful as they are painted." Their faces, he said, had in some way the form of a man. It was not the first time. He had seen such creatures before, on the coast of Guinea in West Africa, "where you find manegueta."

That is all the record gives. Three figures. Human-like faces. A rise from the sea. No size, no colour, no word on how they went back under. Columbus is the only named witness.

The original log is lost. What survives is an abridgement made in the 1530s by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who copied and summarised it. That is why the entry reads in the third person. The Admiral "said he saw." The abstract was found in 1790 in the library of the Duke of the Infantado. Editions followed. Navarrete's Spanish text in 1825. Samuel Kettell's English translation in 1827. Clements R. Markham's edition for the Hakluyt Society in 1893.

Translation shaped the story too. The Spanish says the faces in some way had the form of a man. One English version reads "their faces had some masculine traits." Popular retellings say "not half as beautiful as they are painted."

In 1828 Washington Irving offered the reading that stuck. "Columbus, disposed to give a wonderful character to everything in this New World, had identified these misshapen animals with the sirens of ancient story." Markham identified them as manatees and dugongs. The likely candidate is the West Indian manatee, which lives in Caribbean coastal waters and river mouths like the Yaque. History.com describes manatees as having "human-like eyes, bulbous faces and paddle-like tails." The Guinea remark fits as well. West Africa has its own manatee.

Snopes adds a further point. Columbus was "mentally primed for mermaids," since the maps of his day were "always fringed with mermaids and monsters." No one has accused him of inventing the sighting.

Eight days later, on 16 January 1493, Columbus began the crossing home. His three sirens stayed in the record. The entry is one of the earliest dated reports of a sea creature in European records written by the person who saw it. Every 9 January it surfaces again, in history pages, podcasts and almanacs. A reminder that a mermaid, seen from a ship, can be a very real animal.