Twice ToldHadrianus Junius, Batavia (1588): the sea-monster of the Purmer
- Language
- Latin
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 10 October 2026
Batavia, by Hadrianus Junius of Hoorn, physician (“Hornani, medici” on the title page), is a history of Holland. Describing the castle of Purmerend and the lake beside it, he gives the sea-woman from “our annals”, says the story seemed hard to believe, and then argues about it. The first part of the passage is given here, to the point where he ends his doubts and turns to the sea-people of the ancients.
In Annalium nostrorum monumentis proditam invenio rem, quae mihi difficilis ad fidem visa est, circiter annum à natali ortu Christi tertium supra millesimum quadringentesimum, monstrum quoddam marinum, mulieris specie, viridi musco turpe, & undique squallens, atrocissimae tempestatis vi è mari Oceano in sinum Batavicum, qui Australis maris agnomine notior est, compulsum, & in lacum Purmerum (quem perrupti aggeres cum praedicto sinu confuderant) ejectum fuisse; in quo dum variis erroribus agitur, post reparatos statim à tempestate aggeres, ut solent, priusquam profundà voragine ima aggerum fundamenta exedantur, virgines quae bis quotidie cum mulctralibus ultro citroque in prata commeant, ut vaccarum ubera mulgendo siccent, monstrum istud conspicatae fuerunt. Neque parum attonitae principio ob novam & inusitatam speciem, in spectri modum, mox confirmatis animis erectiores, ac mutuas conjunctasque inter se operas pactae, circumseptum lenunculis & scaphis suis, ne qua effugium pateret, oppresserunt; captumque Edamum, quod oppidum Lacui quoque adjacet, pertraxerunt; ubi cibis hominum more assuefactum vesci coepit, sono peregrino ac suspirioso potius, quàm ullo articulati sermonis commercio & usu, qui piscium toti generi negatus est, manifestum. Cujus miraculi fama quum multos mortales visendi gratiâ exciuisset, quae longè latèque emanarat, Senatus Harlemensis missâ eò legatione monstrum sibi permitti flagitavit, ut loquuntur Annales, neq. repulsam tulit. Quod plures annos, postquam eò adductum fuerat, vitam exegisse illic, atque inter foemineos coetus pensa etiam traxisse, & coemiterii honorem, postquam vitam exuerat, assecutum ob exhibitam crucis imagini reverentiam, memoratur. Quae omnia ut neque firmiter asseverare, ita neque refellere omninò est animus, tum ob eam quae debetur publicis Annalibus fidem, tum quòd recentior esse videatur, quàm cui me opponam, memoria, à mulierculis de manu, quod dicitur, in manum tradita. Dicam tamen illud fabulae vicinius non probari mihi, quòd fila deduxerit, quasi manus in articulos humano more distinctas discretasque habuerit: sed fidei periculum auctori relinquo. Equidem religione quadam deterreor, ne à vetustatis exemplis discedam, quae sanctâ illâ testimoniorum fide non carent, inter quae constat non omninò fictum & commentitium esse, aut in poeticâ cortè natum sermonem de Nereidibus, quarum è genere fuisse illam, de quâ modò sum commentatus, nihil ambigo: quarum non exiguum numerum apparuisse olim in Gallico littore, D. Augusto legatus illius perscripserat. Eam certè de Nereidibus opinionem haud falsam fuisse testatur Plinius, corpus universum squamis hispidum, etiam quâ humanam speciem referunt, illis tribuens;
Translation
In the records of our annals I find an event that seemed to me hard to believe: about the year 1403 after the birth of Christ, a sea-monster in the shape of a woman, foul with green moss and filthy all over, was driven by the force of an extremely violent storm from the Ocean into the Dutch gulf, the one better known as the Southern Sea, and thrown out into the Purmer lake (which the broken dikes had merged with that gulf). While she drifted about there, wandering in various directions, after the dikes had been repaired immediately following the storm (as is usual, before the deep whirlpool eats away the lowest foundations of the dikes), girls who go back and forth twice a day into the meadows with their milk pails to strip the cows’ udders caught sight of the monster. At first, because of the strange and unaccustomed appearance, like a ghost, they were quite stunned; soon they took courage, grew bolder, agreed to work together, surrounded her with their small boats and skiffs so that she could not escape, and overpowered her. They took her captive and dragged her to Edam, a town that also borders the lake. There, accustomed to eating food in the human manner, she began to do so, and she made herself known by a strange, sighing sound rather than by any use or exchange of articulate speech, which is denied to the whole race of fish. When the fame of this wonder had drawn many people to come and see it, and had spread far and wide, the council of Haarlem sent an embassy to Edam and demanded that the monster be allowed to them, as the annals say, and it was not refused. She is said to have lived there for many years after she had been brought, even to have spun among the women’s gatherings, and, after she died, to have received the honour of burial in a cemetery for the reverence she showed the image of the cross. I do not intend to affirm all this firmly, nor to refute it entirely, because of the trust owed to public annals, and because the memory seems too recent for me to oppose it, handed down, as they say, from hand to hand by little women. But I will say that I do not accept one point, which is closer to fable: that she spun thread, as if she had had hands divided into separate fingers in the human way; I leave the risk of that claim to its author. I am held back by a kind of scruple from departing from the examples of antiquity, which do not lack the sacred trust of witnesses, and among which it is certain that the talk of Nereids was not wholly fabricated and invented or born in the poets’ court; and I have no doubt that the woman I have just written about was of their kind. A considerable number of them, as the legate of the deified Augustus had reported to him in writing, had once appeared on the coast of Gaul. That the belief about the Nereids was certainly not false is attested by Pliny, who gives them a body bristling all over with scales, even where they resemble humans;
Notes
Pages 304 to 305 of the printed book; the passage continues with Pliny’s account of the Nereids’ death-song and other sea-men (a bishop-shaped creature of 1531), also reprinted by Ampzing (1628, pp. 378 to 379). Junius never gives her a tail: “mulieris specie” is “in the shape of a woman”, and he reaches for the scaled Nereids of Pliny in general. The marginal note “Ann. 1403” sits beside the first lines of the passage. “Qui Australis maris agnomine notior est” is Junius’s gloss on the Zuiderzee. “Annales” is Junius’s own name for the source; he does not give an author.