06/21/2025
We wish everyone at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade today a fun-filled celebration filled with splashy costumes, creativity, and community!
Famed author Herman Melville uses the term "mermaid" in his 1845 novel Typee as a metaphor for the young women of the Pacific island Nuka Hiva that board the whaling ship Dolly when it anchors at bay. He wrote, "The Dolly was fairly captured; and never I will say was vessel carried before by such a dashing and irresistible party of boarders! The ship taken, we could not do otherwise than yield ourselves prisoners, and for the whole period that she remained in the bay, the Dolly, as well as her crew, were completely in the hands of the mermaids."
Melville came to Sailors’ Snug Harbor often to visit his brother, Thomas Melville, who was the third Governor of the institution in the years 1867-1884. Today best known for the novel Moby Dick, it was actually Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, first published in London as "Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence Among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands" that made him an overnight sensation and remained the most popular work during his lifetime.
Pop into the shop for these masterworks of American literature, or perhaps just indulge your inner-mermaid with some natural south-seas inspired self-care.
🖼️: “Jeune Fille de l'lle Madisson,” hand colored woodcut of Piteenee, a young woman of Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands, from Auguste Wahlen's “Moeurs, Usages et Costumes de tous les Peuples du Monde,” (Manners, Customs and Costumes of the People of the World), 1845. Piteenee was the 18-year-old granddaughter of Taiohae chief Gattanewa, and the consort of David Porter, Captain of the USS Essex in the country’s fledgling U. S. Navy during the war of 1812.
