In 1630, Holland was visited by a storm that carried away dikes and forced the sea into the meadows. Some marketwomen, crossing the mere in a boat, saw a human head above the water. When they got nearer they found it was a mermaid floundering about in the mud.
The woman-fish made some resistance, but they speedily conquered that; and by kindly usage taught it to wear woman's clothing, to eat bread and milk, and to spin. Even more remarkably, she displayed a singular predilection for the art of painting, which was at that time entering its Golden Age in Holland, as its masters vied with each other in the accurate depiction of everyday reality.
Being shown the uses of brush, pigments, palette, canvas and easel, and all the other accessories of the craft, she took them up with alacrity, and within a matter of days was able to reproduce a likeness of a merman, and those who saw it swore it breathed, it looked so real. She then, over the 16 years of life that remained to her, after she had been taken from the drowned meadow, proceeded to paint an extraordinary series of canvases of marine life. At the time she was residing in the Town-house at Haarlem, with a woman attendant, but it was impossible to teach her to speak. It is reported that she made her reverences very devoutly when she passed a crucifix, and had some notion of a deity. Indeed, some interpreters of her art saw in her depiction of fishes a reflection of the bountiful Creator; for some of the species painted by the mermaid were hitherto unknown to man, until a specimen would be discovered in some serendipitous trawl for herrings, and what had been dismissed as fantasy became an intimation of reality.
The amber-fish - also called the amberjack, the sea-bream, or dorado - was not sighted until the year 1639, and that in the sub-tropical Atlantic; yet the mermaid had accurately forecast the beauty of its near-translucent golden skin, and had registered exactly the odd Vermeer blue of its eyes, and its carp-like mount, in 1634. This fish is not to be confused with the dorado of the Indian Ocean, which the mermaid is unlikely to have known; but it is worth observing in passing that my compatriots, the navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, bestowed the name Dorado on a small southern constellation which is notable for containing most of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbour galaxy of our own Milky Way. Among the other constellations which they traced was Pavo, the Peacock, the sacred bird of Hera, wife of Zeus; and how the peacock came to have eyes on its tail is another story, which if I were to relate now would detain us too long from the matter in hand.
To continue: painting the scenes of her former habitat was the mermaid's chief delight. She would happily labour for hours at her canvas, using the finest camel's hair brushes to achieve her effects of meticulous delicacy. Such colouring! - slate blues, coral pinks, pale amphitrites, the wet cobblestone blue of mussels, frail sea-forget-me-nots, anemone yellows and carmines, emeralds and eau-de-nils! No scale of being could escape her microscopic gaze. In some of the mercurial pupils of her fishes' eyes she would paint a tiny portrait of her self-reflection, invisible except to whomsoever sought it. Or she would paint her keeper, whom she appeared to love devotedly.
Indeed, this woman of the Haarlem Town-house was of a most tender disposition; and the pair were often seen sharing a celebratory repast of oysters, tangy-fresh, and Amber beer, with its undercurrent of burnt honey, after the mermaid had successfully navigated a particularly difficult passage of her current work. I have said that the mermaid never learned how to speak Dutch; but so deep was their bond that the woman of the House was able to manage to communicate to some extent with the creature, and came to be her interpreter. By various movements of her tail and flutterings of her eyelashes, the mermaid made her wishes known to the woman, to the extent that she conferred on her the role of naming her pictures.
It was marvellous to watch the pair in action, as the woman tried one word, then another, carefully scrutinising her partner all the time; to see the light dawn in her eyes as she realised the mermaid's beautiful intentions. Then the mermaid would reciprocate with joyous thrashings of her tail. How she could name a thing! So we have titles like Underwater Grotto with Echinoderms and Cod, Although the Starfish has No Brain, years before Kippering, Sea-mouse Evading Catfish, and Why Smoke a Haddock, When There are the Pipe- fish and the Sea-gar?
Merchants enriched by tobacco, beer and herrings, patrons of the arts, astronomers and microscopists, natural philosophers and fish economists, all flocked to her dank quarters in the Haarlem Town-house. All wanted to buy a piece of her art; but the mermaid steadfastly refused, and would not be coerced for any price, for she never learned the use of money. In this she was aided and abetted by the older woman, who made their mutual wishes forcibly known. So, over the years, the Mermaid's Grotto, as it came to be known, grew more and more elaborate, more labyrinthine; and gradually, the light grew more sub-aqueous. Mesmerising schools of herrings glinted patterns of eternity. Gurnards and latchets wove their sapphire blues. There were glimpses of the underwater palace of the plaice.
I forgot to mention that the mermaid learned to smoke, as evidenced by one of her titles above; and she was especially fond of the meerschaum pipe for its ostensibly aquatic origins. Mischievously, she would sometimes paint a pipe as a throwaway item in the corner of one of her canvases. Its bowl would be marvellously modelled to resemble the face of some curious fish, and would emit bubbles instead of puffs of smoke: some connoisseurs interpreted these as symbols of the transience of life, others as portrayals of eternal pleasure.
One day in the Year of Our Lord 1646, the older woman fell down dead of a embolism. While she was being buried, a sudden conflagration burst out in the Townhouse. When its smouldering ruins had been sifted through, it was concluded that the mermaid, who had been left alone in her chamber while the obsequies were in progress, had knocked over with her tail one of the votive candles that had been left burning in the chamber to signify that the soul of the deceased was in transit to a higher realm; that the volatile oils of the paintings had immediately responded; that the fire had spread to the kitchens above, with all their tremendously combustible comestibles of fat bacon, sugar, lard, cod-liver oil, et cetera; that the refectories above the kitchens, with their resinous pitch-pine tables, had immediately blazed up, carrying the fire to the gentlemen's smoking-rooms above that, to the ladies' chambers, to the private cubicles lined with plush, to the amber museum; and when the flame reached the powder magazine at the top of the Town-house, the explosion was not as loud as might have been expected, for the powder-stock was low, owing to its expenditure in the current war. Nevertheless, all who remained there were consumed - thank God, there were not many, since most were at the funeral!
All that remained of the mermaid was her skeletal anatomy, which, when touched, crumbled into ash. Therefore we have no physical record of this prodigious creature, and no evidence of the wonders of her art. But her legend lives on, and wherever Dutchmen go, they will tell her story, because it is true, and beautiful, and as your English poet John Keats says in his "Grecian Urn", Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty: That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
From Fishing for Amber by Ciaran Carson, published by Granta