They were never myths. We only turned them into myths to forget what we destroyed.
In A Shadow History of Mermaids, maritime historian Britany Meadows offers a daring and meticulously documented re-examination of one of the world’s most persistent folkloric archetypes. Across oceans and centuries, mermaids have surfaced in the songs of West African griots, the carved prows of Norse ships, the illuminated margins of medieval bestiaries, and the oral histories of Polynesian navigators. But what if they were more than legend?
Drawing on lost naval logs, suppressed colonial records, pre-Christian temple carvings, and untranslated maritime maps from the Portuguese Age of Discovery, Meadows reveals a stunning and unsettling thesis: mermaids—sentient aquatic hominids—once thrived in Earth’s oceans, only to be systematically hunted into extinction.
Far from the romanticized sirens of popular culture, these beings emerge from the historical record as culturally rich, socially intelligent creatures whose coastal presence was well-documented by early civilizations, from Minoan Crete to the Han Dynasty. Meadows reconstructs their appearance, behaviors, and complex interactions with early human seafarers, making the case that early warnings of ecological imbalance were encoded in ancient “myths” dismissed by modern science.
The book uncovers evidence of organized mermaid extermination campaigns during the height of European colonial expansion, where sightings were covered up by naturalists and naval officers eager to preserve control over maritime trade routes. In chilling detail, Meadows exposes how Enlightenment thinkers colluded in the erasure of mermaid evidence in a broader effort to discredit indigenous and seafaring knowledge systems.
A Shadow History of Mermaids is not simply a book about forgotten creatures—it is a searing critique of historical amnesia, a call to reevaluate the boundary between the natural and the mythical, and a haunting meditation on the consequences of silencing voices beneath the waves.
Erudite, poetic, and deeply unsettling, this work will forever change the way you think about what we lost—and why we chose to forget it.
A Shadow History of Mermaids
Britany Meadows