Europeans found all sorts of monstrous creatures in the Americas. Just as Marco Polo noted a variety of wondrous flora, fauna and creatures in his eastern travels, so too did New World explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Columbus claim to interact with everything from headless men to cyclops to the cynocephalus. Though hindsight relegates these creatures to fantasy, other animals proved very real and just as terrifying to early modern Europeans. The female opossum, for instance, was a strange New World “composite creature,” combining parts from Old World animals and humans to create “an inorganic multiplicity.” She especially exposed Europeans’ perception of the New World as a place that might hybridize their bodies and minds, thereby steadily transforming these supposedly civilized Old World people into vulgar, weakened reflections of their savage surroundings. In many ways, because of New World habitation, Europeans worried that they themselves might become monsters.
These climatic, environmental and biological fears coalesced around Europeans’ perceptions of merpeople. Western travelers expected to find mermaids and tritons in the oceans, rivers and lakes of the Americas. Europeans had, after all, already encountered merpeople off the coasts of their own nations; surely the distant, foreign, hybridized New World must boast even more of these monstrous creatures. Interacting with and understanding these beings might pull back the veil on the mysteries of the world and help Europeans to better understand mankind’s ever-evolving place in it. In a more practical sense, a deeper knowledge of merpeople might also allow Westerners to more effectively adapt to—not to mention conquer—the New World. As the English naturalist John Josselyn remarked after hearing an alarming tale of a merman encounter in Maine in 1638, “there are many stranger things in the world, than there are to be seen between London and the Stanes [present-day Staines].”
Before the 15th century, Europeans’ mermaid sightings were few and far between, and generally rested on ancient stories, bestiary descriptions and folklore. The 12th-century contacts in England and Holland proved most enduring, but still remained tethered to allegorical lessons or religious impulses. As Europeans pushed into strange new worlds filled with mysterious creatures, their interaction with merpeople skyrocketed, both at home and in the mysterious locales they visited. As already mentioned, it is impossible to know which influenced the other—were heightened interests at home driving sightings abroad, or were Europeans’ foreign interactions with merpeople leading them to find more of these strange hybrids in their own waters? These heightened 15th-century global interactions revealed much about Europeans’ evolving worldviews. Not only did Europeans’ relationships with mermaids and tritons steadily transcend mere religious lessons or folklore in the Renaissance Period, they also reflected Europeans’ visions of imperial might, natural plenty and philosophical wonder.