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LISA MIGHETTO ON MERMAIDS, THE PACIFIC FISHERMAN, AND THE "ROMANCE OF SALMON"

FEMALE IMAGES HAVE figured prominently in the lore of mariners since ancient times. It is not surprising, then, that the Pacific Fisherman featured mermaids on several of its covers during the early twentieth century. This trade journal, which began promoting the Pacific Coast's commercial fishing and canned salmon industry in 1903, targeted a male audience and rarely included references to real women in its early years of publication. The persistence of the mermaid covers in the Pacific Fisherman reveals much about perceptions of women and the natural world, while demonstrating the potential of feminine imagery to romanticize the difficult conditions that faced the industry in the early twentieth century.	1
The three covers presented here share several characteristics. The mermaids, depicted in hues of watery blue and green, feature the heads and torsos of women, the tails of fish, and hair that flows like seaweed. All are associated with the products of the ocean. The 1903 cover displays a pair of large mermaids surrounding a smaller image of several fishermen. Although the fishermen appear focused on the catch, the seas are building and their boats seem vulnerable. The role of the mermaids in this image is ambiguous. With their hands entwined in fishnets, they look more coquettish than distressed at being captive. They could be poised to overtake the boats, but their position around the fishermen seems protective. In some tales, mermaids possessed the power to calm the ocean and could rescue seafarers from treacherous waters. In other representations, mermaids could be menacing and even predatory; they were capable of vanity, jealousy, and spite and had the ability to create enormous waves or fill a harbor with silt. Sighting one could portend disaster for a mariner. Mermaids could help or hinder—and they often represented the capriciousness of nature.1	2
Pacific Fisherman, 1903.
Feminine power over the elements is similarly portrayed in the 1906 Pacific Fisherman cover (also reproduced in color on the cover of this issue). Here two mermaids again surround a smaller image—in this case an advertisement for canned salmon appearing in the shape of a shell. With outstretched arms the two figures seem to offer the bounty of nature. Water cascades down the entire image, engulfing even the advertisement. Sprigs of ivy adorn the top of the image, while a lobster crawls along the bottom. Large pink salmon leap through the scene, their curved shapes reflecting the shapes of the mermaids' arms and their reddish color mirroring the color of the mermaids' breasts.	3
This image evokes centuries of portrayals of mermaids in various cultures. Irish lore, for example, often associated women and the ocean, depicting the transformation of female humans into sea creatures, including salmon. The tale of Liban recounts a woman swept away in a flood, who turned into a salmon from the waist down and lived as a fish for several hundred years. William Butler Yeats adopted this motif in his poem, "The Song of Wandering Aengus" (1899), in which a fisherman lands a small salmon that transforms into a "glimmering girl." The Samish and Skagit Indians of the Pacific Northwest told similar stories of women turning into salmon and other sea creatures. In such stories, women were associated with the fecundity of nature and could control the size of the salmon run.2 These tales of women and their connection to the sea share many commonalities, providing a context for the Pacific Fisherman images that readers might have recognized.	. . .