John Smith! Mermaids! The problem was that I could not, for the life of me, find the original source of where this citation came from. But when she dove, Smith was horrified to realize that she was, in fact, a mermaid. Declaring the woman “by no means unattractive,” Smith began to feel the early pangs of love as his green-haired crush continued to splash about. Upon reading numerous peer-reviewed secondary sources, I kept coming across a quote from Smith where, after arriving in the West Indies in 1614, the intrepid explorer spied a woman swimming just off shore. It all started with John Smith and a mermaid. But that will have to wait, because my research for this piece led me down a different path that was both extremely frustrating and, ultimately, quite enlightening. A deeper analysis of early modern conceptions of mermen and mermaids, my article would propose, provide a more nuanced understanding of Britons’ imperial imaginations. Yes, a number of early modern Britons-ranging from Cotton Mather to Benjamin Franklin-entertained, if not believed in, the existence of merfolk. The articles, it must be added, consisted of in-depth analysis of mermen and mermaids. I originally planned for this piece to be a brief investigation into a number of articles that appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1750 to 1775. Johns Newfoundland, 1655,” from Ludwig Gottfriedt, Newe Welt und Americanische Historien (Frankfurt/ Bey denen Merianischen Erben, 1655).
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