THE EAST SAGINAW COURIER — JANUARY 12, 1860
A Veritable Mermaid on its Way to the United States.
Francis Hall, late Mayor of Elmira, is now traveling in China and Japan.—While he was waiting at Hong Kong for the vessel to sail on which he had taken passage for Shanghae, he embraced the opportunity of writing a letter, from which we are permitted to take the following description of a mermaid, which he had just seen. We had supposed the animal was a “myth” and had no existance outside of Barnum’s Museum. Mr. Hall says it is a verity:
“HONG KONG, Sept. 26, 1859.
“I had an opportunity, by our delay, of seeing a mermaid, direct from Japan. There is something exceedingly curious and interesting about this nondescript animal. I never saw Barnum’s Fejee mermaid, which it is said came from Holland, to which place it had been imported from Japan. Hildreth, in his history of Japan, speaks of the mermaid as one of the Japanese manufactures, giving Japan as the origin of Barnum’s mermaid.—The mermaid which I saw last week was brought quite recently from Japan by Mr. King, of Hong Kong, in whose possession I saw it. It was in a glass case, that enabled me to see it with the greatest clearness, though I could not handle it. This mermaid is eighteen or twenty inches long. The fish part of the body is about the proportion of a trout that would measure that
