"Hastily raising his weapon his lordship fired and hit the creature between the eyes."

I checked the date of this 1890’s Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about some English fishermen who allegedly killed a merman (male mermaid). I intiially assumed it was an April Fool’s Day prank, but the story was reported in earnest. The article doesn’t say it, but these Brits were likely drunk out of their skulls. Also: They may have murdered a hobo who’d gone swimming. An excerpt:

“A party of Englishmen who have been porpoise fishing in the Pacific discovered and killed a monster that resembled a merman. The party was off the island of Watmoff on a housing boat and Lord Devonshire, one of the fishers, had just shot a porpoise, when some one called out ‘Look there,’ pointing to a frightful looking monster about a cable’s length away. Hastily raising his weapon his lordship fired and hit the creature between the eyes. The shot, though it did not kill it, so stunned the animal that it lay perfectly still on the surface of the sea.

It showed fight when hauled into the boat and had to be killed to prevent it from swamping the craft. The monster is said to be one of the strangest freaks ever put together. It measures 10 feet from its nose to the end of its fluke shaped tail and the girth of its human shaped body was just six feet. It would weigh close to 500 pounds. From about the breast bone to the point at the base of the stomach it looked like a man. Its arms, quite human in shape and form, are very long and covered completely with long, coarse, dark reddish hair, as is the whole body.

It had, or did have, at one time four fingers and a thumb on each hand, almost human in shape, except that in place of finger nails there were long, slender claws. But in days probably long since gone by, it had evidently fought some monster that had got the best of it, for the forefinger of the right hand, the little finger of the left and the left thumb are missing entirely. Immediately under the right breast is a broad, ugly looking scar which looked as if sometime in the past it had been inflicted by a swordfish. The creature is now being preserved in ice at Seattle and will be shipped to the British museum.”

More Old Print Articles:

• Hobos steal fine clothes from decent folk. (1895)
• General Robert E. Lee kisses pretty girls. (1891)
• Monkey trained to steal jewelry. (1895)
• Brooklyn tailor tears out rival’s whiskers. (1898)
• Public baths required for Brooklyn filthbags. (1897)
• Judge orders monkey arrested. (1882)
• Silent film legend John Bunny is remembered in Brooklyn. (1915)
• Artist John Frankenstein perishes in Brooklyn. (1881)
• Four-year-old artistic genius in San Francisco. (1896)
• Brooklyn woman paints her own house, everybody freaks. (1900)
• Profile of an old-time clown. (1896)
• Performing bears at Bay Shore. (1895)
• Circus Freak gets indigestion after swallowing metal objects. (1904)
• Hairy woman thrown through barbershop window, uninjured. (1897)
• Hunchback paramour has throat cut. (1877)
• Inflated a boy with air. (1900)
• Prisoner gives evil eye to jailer. (1900)
• Three-card monte man passes away. (1878)
• Monkey rides bicycle. (1897)
• Bears brawl in Central Park. (1902)
• Umbrella duels. (1895)
• Boiling eggs with electricity. (1890)
• Billy goat guards recluse. (1900)
• Kissing bandit captured. (1892)
• A maniac gymnast. (1877)
• Brooklyn judge encounters sea monsters in his bathroom. (1902)
• Man finds severed human head, throws head back into creek. (1897)
• Brooklyn geezer tries to shoot noisy dogs. (1896)
• Hoaxer pretends to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. (1889)
• Manhattan madman goes on rampage. (1890)
• Fisticuffs at a male beauty pageant. (1893)
• Tough girl breaks detective’s nose. (1898)
• George Francis Train loses his mind. (1888)
• Organ grinder has monkey kidnapped. (1899)
• Human vampire behaves poorly. (1892)

"Some of them keep away from baths now because they never had one and are afraid to begin." (Image by Kristen Holden.)

People in Brooklyn in the late-nineteenth century were apparently a bunch of slobs who lacked indoor plumbing and needed a good scrubbing. They stunk to the high heavens, and everyone was close to fainting from the nasty smell. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle offered a solution for the cleansing of filthy citizens in the most demeaning, insulting terms in its August 13, 1897 edition: Build some public baths, so these miserable scumbags could be less stanky. An excerpt:

“An enthusiastic support of Mr. Henriques’ device to build public baths under the bridge is assured from a majority of the people. It cannot be denied that baths of some sort are sadly needed in quarters of the city. Ocular and olfactory evidence of that fact is offered only too freely. We have a few floating baths, but they are ridiculously inadequate to the demands upon them. On any warm day you shall see the string of youngsters extended far up the pier, and many are their dodges to escape the vigilance of the police in order to get in ahead of their turn or even commit the offense of going in twice.

Bathing is to be encouraged in the young. If they persist in it the custom will adhere to them through life. It is desirable that it should adhere to everybody. If not, other things will. It is not the individual alone who profits by the practice of bathing, but the community. If we could feel assured that every citizen in Brooklyn took a bath daily we could laugh at cholera and bubonic plague. Even diphtheria and allied diseases would be lessened, not because clean people are always exempt from them, but because a habit for personal cleanliness begets a habit for cleanliness and order in one’s surroundings and the clean man will desire to live in a clean house.

The average Brooklyn resident in 1897. (Image by Jim Champion.)

Near the bridge are unclean persons who live in houses that menace the health of the whole river front. More over, apart from its most obvious virtue bathing has sanitary influence as a stimulant and a sedative. People are awakened by a bath at noon, and a dip on a hot night often enables them to sleep. The swimming and other exercise induced by a plunge in a large pool are likewise beneficial. But why restrict these baths to the edges of the town? They should be for the whole people. Water is a public property, even if we are a little short of it at this moment. In any case, there is the Atlantic Ocean to draw from, for bathing purposes, too, if we are very short.

Rome had baths so fine and solid in their architectural setting that their ruins are still more substantial than half of the buildings in Brooklyn, and so general and constant were they in use that it was possible to put them at the service of the multitude for a penny or two, while the plunge baths were free to all comers. The regular bath was similar to what we know as the Turkish bath and included sweating, shampooing, swimming and drying. What a different people those of the east side of New York might be if they were persuaded into establishments like that, at least once a week!

And in time they could be. Some of them keep away from baths now because they never had one and are afraid to begin. This is serious, indeed, too serious. If they could be persuaded to try one many of them would like it. They would induce their friends and command their offspring to try them. Then they would begin to clean up their homes a little and desist from throwing trash about their streets. In time they would become as Americans and would exhibit that virtue which is next to godliness.”