THE SEAL PEOPLE
Sightings of mermaids and the Seal People are two long-standing mysteries of the folklore of the northern coasts of Scotland. TAYLOR EDGAR ventures a solution.
Sightings – and even captures – of elusive mermaids and the Seal People have been reported right into the late 19th century and are remarkably consistent in detail and nature. Now, there is some evidence that links them, convincingly, with a little known tribe of Norwegian Same (Lapps). Historian and author, John Macaulay, who lives and works on the Isle of Harris, contends that the nomadic wanderings of the sealskin-clad Sjo-Same – an offshoot of the reindeer-herding Same – may be the real-life identity of the mermaids and Seal People of legend. 1
Marginalised from the main, inland, body of Same people, the Sjo-Same were forced into ekeing an existence on the Norwegian coast. Here, they took to their kayaks, living out a nomadic lifestyle all over the Scandinavian seaboard, the wider circumpolar region and southwards across the North Sea to Scotland. Spending most of their time at sea in ocean-going kayaks, the Sjo-Same were accomplished mariners and could, in fair weather, easily make the short sea crossing from Norway to the Faroe Islands and thence along the west and east coast of northern Scotland via Orkney and Shetland. In 1688, the Rev James Wallace of Kirkwall, Orkney, wrote about local people gathering to see the ‘Finmen’ in their canoes.
A traditional boat builder, Macaulay has painstakingly pieced together the sparse clues with the assistance of the University of Tromsö. He has established that the Sjo-Same were a shy and placid people who favoured lonely offshore rocks or islets to haul ashore for their brief forays on dry land. “Tales of Seal People being captured by fishermen and hastily returned to the sea, and even inter-marrying with the local populations, abound round the north of Scotland, from Shetland and Orkney to the north east coast and as far down the west coast as the Mull of Kintyre,” says Macaulay.
The earliest written account dates back to 1676 in the Faroe Islands and the most contemporary is as recent as the late 1800s. States Macaulay: “The sightings cover quite a wide area, but the interesting thing is that all the reports… are pretty similar. They give a description of the upper part of the human body being seen in the water, occasionally ashore on a rock, but no-one has given a detailed description of the lower half of the body. There has been no attempt by witnesses to exaggerate what they saw or to give a romantic image of mermaids with fish tails.”
The similarity of these reports leads Macaulay to conclude that these sightings are not just fishy stories but actual encounters with the seafaring Sjo-Same. Accounts describe the Seal People’s features and where they were seen; some mention their kayaks and their extraordinary capabilities. “There are reports of these Seal People disappearing, seeming to dive in the water to re-appear some distance away. To be able to submerge and take with them the buoyancy of a kayak requires considerable strength or a highly developed technique of doing so,” Macaulay notes.
He postulates that some accounts of the Seal People sitting on semi-submerged rocks are mistaken. The wood and sealskin construction of the Sjo-Same kayak gave it much less buoyancy than a modern canoe and it sat much lower in the water and with less buoyancy, it is completely feasible that the kayaker was able to escape by a submarine-style dive underwater.
According to tradition, the only way to prevent a Seal Person escaping was to hide his ‘belt’. These ‘belts’, according to Macaulay’s surmise, would be the spray decks built into the Sjo-Same’s sealskin suits, without which they could not put out to sea. Their elusive character, possibly a result of their persecution in Norway, makes the Sjo-Same difficult to pin down with certainty; however, the strongest evidence of their peripatetic ways is to be found in Iceland, where examples of Same runes have been found.
Actual physical evidence of their presence in Scotland is even harder to come by, but at least one tantalising remnant does exist. Possibly blown off course by bad weather, a male Seal Person was captured in the mouth of the River Don in Aberdeen in the early 1700s. Perhaps sick or injured, he survived only three days in captivity.
His kayak 2 was later acquired by the anthropological museum of Marischal College, Aberdeen and until recently it lay ignored in a storeroom. A number of other kayaks of unknown provenance – and in varying stages of decay – are also to be found in other museum storerooms in Edinburgh. Further research is required to discover whether these kayaks provide supporting evidence for the Sjo-Same theory.
Macaulay has been disappointed that he can find no evidence in any of the Scottish museum kayaks for a rudimentary pumping system he believes the Sjo-Same utilised as bilge pumps. To date, only the Inuit of Greenland are known to have used animal bladders to pump out their kayaks. Due to the perishable properties of the materials used, this lack is no great surprise. Given the Sjo-Same’s reputation as mariners it seems feasible that the Inuit of Greenland learnt the technique from the Sjo-Same.
Despite the slender data, Macaulay pinpoints a small, rocky archipelago – eight miles (13km) north-west of North Uist – as the stopping off point for the Sjo-Same visiting the Western Isles. Haskeir is an inhospitable outcrop in the Atlantic and it is here Macaulay believes family groups of Sjo-Same gathered, seasonally, bringing their kayaks ashore and thriving on a nutritious diet of seals, fish, seabirds, seabird eggs and seaweed.
In the Western Isles, there is a well-documented legend of the Seal People which is backed up by numerous sightings and the family name, MacCodrum, an Old Norse name derived from Godrum (meaning Good Serpent or God Serpent). “It is well known that there was a family in Uist called MacCodrum. Now there was one of that family quite famous – the bard, John MacCodrum – and he was buried in Kilmuir cemetery in Uist,” explains Macaulay. “The ancestors of the MacCodrums – or Sliochd nan Ron in the Scots Gaelic – were said to be Seal folk. What intrigues me is why a real family, whose background is shrouded in mystery, should be identified as the descendants of Seal folk who originally lived on Haskeir.”
By coincidence, the MacCodrums throughout history were also known as Cloinne na Magnuis (Children of Magnus) and were reputedly descended from a Norse Royal line. Another Old Norse connection is the place name of Scolpaig, the nearest point of North Uist to the island of Haskeir, which appears to have obtained its designation from scolp or scolpvig meaning the type of kayak reputedly used by the Seal People!
From FT 155
FEBRUARY 2002
NOTES/REFS
1 John Macaulay, Seal Folk and Ocean Paddlers (Sliochd nan Ron), (White Horse Press, 1998).
2 The kayak that arrived in the River Don in Aberdeen in the 18th Century was described by Francis Douglas in his General Description of the East Coast of Scotland (1782) as: “A canoe taken at sea with an Indian man in it about the beginning of this century. He was brought alive to Aberdeen, but died soon after his arrival and could give no account of himself.”
