Bizarre Lights and Sea Creatures: The Unsettling Journal of Columbus

Christopher Columbus’s journals don’t just document exploration — they read like the logbook of a man slowly realizing the ocean was hiding things it didn’t want understood.

In January 1493, near the coast of what is now the Dominican Republic, Columbus claimed to see three mermaids rise from the water. These weren’t the enchanting creatures of folklore. He wrote that they were “not as beautiful as they are painted,” noting their strange, almost masculine faces. The figures surfaced just long enough to be seen, then slipped back beneath the waves. Modern historians suggest manatees, but that explanation doesn’t erase how unsettling the encounter must have felt — human-shaped beings watching from the sea, appearing briefly, then vanishing without a trace.

Even more disturbing were the lights.

Columbus repeatedly described unexplained glows coming from the ocean at night, most famously on the evening before he reached land in 1492. He reported a small, wavering light rising and falling over the dark water, as if something was moving deliberately just beyond reach. It wasn’t fixed like a star, nor steady like a lighthouse. The light appeared, disappeared, then returned — enough that Columbus summoned another crew member to witness it, ensuring it wasn’t just his imagination.

No clear source was ever identified.

Some explanations point to bioluminescent organisms or distant fires, but Columbus described the light as active, almost intentional — drifting, pulsing, and retreating. Sailors across centuries have reported similar phenomena: glowing orbs over open water, lights that follow ships, and brief illuminations where nothing should exist.

Together, these sightings paint a far stranger picture of the voyage. Months into the Atlantic, isolated from the known world, Columbus and his crew sailed through waters where human shapes rose from the depths and unnatural lights hovered over black waves. Whether born of exhaustion, fear, or misunderstood natural forces, the entries suggest something deeply unsettling — a reminder that the ocean has always been a place where reality bends, and where even the most famous explorer on Earth admitted he didn’t fully understand what he was seeing.

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