Europeans first encountered mermaids in Sri Lanka 500 years ago.  Just a few decades after arriving, the Portuguese, under the command of Constantino of Braganza, a cousin of the King of Portugal, tiring of the rather successful raids upon his fleet by the Kings of Jaffna, decided war was the best way forward. His expedition, in November 1560, resulted in the capture of Mannar Island.

Inevitably, many in his army were terribly injured and under the naval doctor, Dimas Bosque, a beach hospital was erected.  Bosque, described as  "a very cultured man, well known for his veracity, and quite sagacious in the treatment of illnesses,” took up the story in a letter later discovered in the Jesuit library in France.  

“One day a crowd of fishermen came to the Father, requesting him, with loud shouting in their own language, to go to their boats and look at some fishes they had caught. They said that while they were fishing, they had, by a stupendous miracle of nature, either by luck or that the marvellous works of God the Almighty might be spoken of, caught in their nets nine female fishes and seven males, which, because of their resemblance to human beings, the natives themselves called "sea men" and "sea women". "Struck by the novelty, as was natural, we went to the boats. The fishermen who had remained there had already taken the fish out of the boats and laid them on the shore. When I saw them and contemplated how greatly they resembled human beings, I could scarcely breathe. In wonderment I could hardly turn my eyes away from their admirable bodies. What I saw then with my own eyes I would never have believed if someone else had told me. I kept staring at these fish with their marvellous resemblance to human beings. Such a work of nature seemed hardly believable even while I was looking at it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, helped by Christiah philosophy, I referred the extraordinary shape of the fish before me to God the maker of all things, to whom nothing is difficult to make, let alone impossible. I considered it worthwhile to inspect and consider each particular member, so that in this way, after exactly examining the anatomy of each part, I would clearly understand the similitude of the whole body with that of a human being. Externally the resemblance was very great.”

What Bosque had actually discovered as not mermaids by dugongs.  He was by no means the first to confuse the two. Christopher Colombus himself had come across them a few years earlier, noting in his diary - “the day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.”

Hundreds of years of brutal hunting have since driven this most marvellous of all the island’s sea mammals to the brink of extinction.  But a gentler creature would be hard to find.

Growing to around eleven feet in length, with poor eyesight but a good sense of smell, they propel themselves forward by flippers and tail, and although they can live to up to seventy years, longevity is now a but a dugong dream.  Widespread legal protection has not stopped them being hunted, whilst habitat pollution and degradation has also decimated their numbers. In Sri Lanka, their meat was highly sought and considered to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties; and diaries note that as recently as the 1950s over one hundred and fifty slaughtered animals were offered for sale annually in Mannar alone. Their cautious reproductive habits do not much help them either, with males taking sometimes as many as eighteen years to reach sexual maturity. The impressive Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project reports depressingly that “large herds of dugongs were reported to have occurred in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka in the early 1900s; however, none were sighted during aerial surveys conducted of Palk Bay and the waters off western Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and their current status and distribution are unknown.” Even so, they have been uncorroborated reports of more recent sightings including one in 2017 in Puttalam Lagoon where some say they still live, grazing on sea grass meadows in shallow bays, and mangroves.

But out beyond these sheltered shores, in deeper waters, Sri Lanka’s other sea mammals are faring better, and the country is one of the best places in Asias to sort them – especially in Mirissa it is November to April; off Trincomalee in May to September; or Kalpitiya from December to March.

Three capacious seas splash against Sri Lanka’s beaches – from the east, the Bay of Bengal; from the west the Laccadive Sea; and from the south the Indian Ocean. Purists clamour for a fourth – the shallow Palk Straights that link the north of the island to the south of India. Either way, the country is blessed by being so central to a great mix of oceans. Like a roundabout amidst a myriad of roads, its shores are a nursery, school, home, and larder for a plenitude of marine creatures, not least its mammals. Whale watching, with abundant side helpings of dolphin and the odd bit of porpoise watching, are propelling a whole new branch of environmental tourism.

Scientists estimate that across the ninety species of whales found today, there are some 1.5 million creatures, many centred around specific oceans. Sri Lanka boasts an impressive 12 of these massive saline residents including that most magnificent of whales – the Blue Whale, one of country’s 2 most commonly encountered sea beasts 

Measuring up to one hundred feet, there is nothing that still lives on our harried planet quite so large or inspiring as the Blue Whale. From Moby-Dick, and the prophet Jonah, to Aristotle and Kipling, they have become creatures whose literary heritage is almost as impressive as their mythological one. They sing, live blamelessly on krill, and press on through the ups and downs of life for up to ninety years. The males sport a 3 metre penis, the largest of any species still alive. They are truly one of our planet’s greatest wonders, yet have been hunted to near extension, their numbers falling from around 140,000 in 1926 to some 25,000 in 2018. Today they also face serious threats from collisions with ships, and rising noise pollution. They take about ten years to reach sexual maturity and produce calves every two to three years – a low, slow reproductive process that puts further strain on their global numbers. They only area of the world they seem to avoid is the Arctic. Remarkably, the blue whales found off Sri Lanka’s beaches are permanent residents, their otherwise migratory inclinations negated by the sheer magnetic nutrient wealth of the country’s waters, fed by run off and monsoon rain and captured by an ocean shelf that is perfectly constituted to maximise the availability and accessibility of food.

The Sperm Or Cachalot Whale is the other whale often seen here.  Massive, migratory, equipped with the largest brain of any living creature, and able to live up to seventy years, the Sperm Whale is everything that a well bread species of whale aims to be. It abounds in superlatives: a four chambered stomach, the longest intestinal system of any creature in the world; capable of emitting a sound louder than any other living beast, and happiest swimming in ice-free waters over 1,000 metres deep. Hunted by commercial whalers for hundreds of years, their numbers were pushed to the point of extreme vulnerability but have since started to recover – slowly. They are one of the most sighted whales off Sri Lanka’ shores, tempted by warms and plentiful seas to group together and mate,...