Lisa Mighetto | Lisa Mighetto on Mermaids, the Pacific Fisherman, and the "Romance of Salmon" | Environmental History, 10.3

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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.

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

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.

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.

The 1916 cover is both the simplest and most sophisticated of the three images. Here a single mermaid appears as a naiad, surrounded by water lilies in fresh water. Again, she is associated with nature, cradling flowers in her hands and wearing a garland of shells. She seems a part of the river or lake, both of which played an important role in salmon production.

Perhaps the most striking thing about these images is that they were atypical in the Pacific Fisherman, which was, for the most part, a practical publication, serious in tone. During the first three decades of publication, the majority of its illustrations highlighted the mechanization of the salmon processing industry, featuring the so-called "Iron Chink" and other machinery. The Pacific Fisherman also included many photographs displaying the salmon catch—mounds of dead fish awaiting processing—while numerous advertisements described the merits of various fish fertilizers. Although the mermaids might at first seem out of place in a journal devoted to these topics, they provided an element of whimsy and charm, counterbalancing the mundane technology of the fishing industry typically displayed throughout its pages.

The mermaid images also provided sentimental relief from the hardships and the complexities of the industry. Many advertisements for foul-weather gear warned of the dangers of salmon fishing, showing men working in stormy conditions with their boats nearly swamped by waves. The cover mermaids could be viewed as providing a safe harbor for men risking their lives at sea, which, as revealed in the 1903 cover, could envelop them at any moment. The Pacific Fisherman interspersed illustrations of the physical hazards of the trade with articles on the fluctuations in salmon production, the vagaries of supply and demand, the need for scientific investigations, and the politics of fishing regulations. Mermaid images likely provided levity for an industry grappling with a host of economic, social, and environmental concerns.

Pacific Fisherman, 1906.

Pacific Fisherman, 1916.

The number of mermaid covers further suggests that the selection of these images was deliberate, in keeping with burgeoning marketing strategies in the early twentieth century. Miller Freeman, the publisher of the Pacific Fisherman, might well have understood the importance of an attractive cover in selling his journal to readers and advertisers in the fishing industry. The Pacific Fisherman included numerous promotions for canned salmon labels explaining the need to select an appealing color and artwork to help package and sell the product. The mermaid covers addressed those needs while also softening the harsh realities of the fishing industry.

Although the Pacific Fisherman focused on male readers, the fishing and canned salmon industry recognized the significance of women as consumers and approached them in a similar manner. The Associated Salmon Packers, a major presence in the journal, sponsored a contest in 1926 for the best canned salmon recipes, offering $1,000 in prizes. With the exception of two male chefs, all prizes were awarded to women. The booklet announcing the results was available for fifty cents, or six canned salmon labels—and it displayed careful attention to color and artwork. An introduction to the recipes juxtaposed sentiment with the mechanistic character of salmon processing. "The romance of SALMON," it explained, begins in seas that "murmur dreamily" in "fathomless, icy waters," where fish "held on their true course by unerring instinct." In this description, dreams and instinct soon gave way to images of "rambling buildings vibrating with the whir of machinery" that packed salmon with "incredible speed ... automatically without the touch of human hands," into hermetically sealed tins.³ Like the Pacific Fisherman, this publication restored a personal element to the automation of fish processing. Through combining the fanciful and the practical, it rendered the technology of the industry more palatable, and ultimately, more marketable.

Lisa Mighetto, a senior associate historian at Historical Research Associates in Seattle, is currently writing a book about salmon for the University Press of Kansas.

NOTES

I would like to thank Heather Lee Miller, Patrick O'Bannon, and Joseph Taylor for their advice and assistance in preparing this article. Its shortcomings, of course, are my responsibility.

^1. Lee Ellen Griffith, "The Tale of the Mermaid: An Essay on the Folklore and Mythology of the Mermaid, Accompanied by Illustrations of Objects From the Exhibition," (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Maritime Museum, 1986); and Horace Palmer Beck, Folklore and the Sea (Mystic Seaport, Connecticut: Marine Historical Association, 1996).

^2. Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha, eds., More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh, Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and Her Kin (New York: Citadel Press, 1965), 61–62; 204–5; Lester I. Conner, A Yeats Dictionary: Persons and Places in the Poetry of William Butler Yeats (Syracuse., N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 4–5; and Aunt Susie Sampson Peter, The Wisdom of a Skagit Elder, trans. Vi Hilbert and Jay Miller (Seattle: Lushootseed Press, 1995), 223–33.

^3. Associated Salmon Packers, Thousand Dollar Prize-Winning Recipes: Canned Salmon, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Connecticut.

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