Henry Hudson's crew and the mermaid of the Barents Sea

22 April 1608. The Hopewell left St Katherine's in London. Henry Hudson was master and pilot, sent by the Muscovy Company to find a north-east passage to Asia. Fifteen people were aboard, among them his son John and his mate Robert Juet.

By mid June the ship was in the Barents Sea, heading from North Cape towards Novaya Zemlya. The noon latitude was 75° 7′ N. The log recorded the weather in a line. "All day and night cleere sunshine. The wind at east."

15 June 1608. Morning.

One of the crew looked over the side and saw a mermaid. He called up some of the company to see her. One more came up. By that time she had come close to the ship's side. She was looking earnestly on the men. A little after, a sea came and overturned her.

From the navel upward, they said, her back and breasts were like a woman's. Her body was as big as one of theirs. Her skin was very white. Long black hair hung down behind her. As she went down they saw her tail. It was like the tail of a porpoise. It was speckled like a mackerel.

Hudson wrote it down. He was careful to note that he had not seen her himself, writing "as they say that saw her." Then he named the men. "Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner."

Samuel Purchas published the log in 1625. In a 1626 summary he added that Hudson and Juet had both testified to the report. In 1857 Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words retold the story. There she was seen to "rise by the ship-side," and when the company was called, "shee sanke downe."

No one has claimed the report was invented. In his 1860 Hakluyt Society edition, G. M. Asher added a short footnote. "Probably a seal." That remains the standard scholarly view.

Others have pointed to manatees and dugongs, the animals usually blamed for the mermaids Christopher Columbus reported in 1493. Claire Ridgway of the Tudor Society wondered if the crew were exaggerating, or if the hair was something like seaweed. Some retellings place the sighting off Greenland. It was not. The voyage went north-east.

Thomas Janvier, writing in 1909, refused the seal on purpose. "I much prefer to believe in the mermaid," he wrote. For him the entry showed how the old seafarers saw the sea.

The witnesses measured what they saw against animals they knew well. A porpoise. A mackerel.

Asher noted that the account "has often been quoted and reprinted." It still is. Among the mermaid reports of the age of exploration it stands out for its plainness. Written down at the time. Two named witnesses. And a navigator who took care to say what he had not seen.