Christopher Columbus’s Mermaids near Hispaniola

Record summary

Christopher Columbus’s journal, preserved through later transcriptions and summaries, records seeing three mermaid-like beings near Hispaniola and remarks that they were not as attractive as commonly depicted. Historians generally identify the animals as manatees, whose rounded bodies and forelimbs can appear humanoid at a distance. The episode matters because it shows how European expectations, maritime folklore, and unfamiliar Caribbean fauna interacted during first-contact reporting. The exact wording is uncertain because the surviving text is mediated through Bartolomé de las Casas rather than Columbus’s original manuscript.