During the Age of Exploration, ships sailed all over the world, mainly looking for new products to sell, new sources for existing products, and new markets to sell them to. Along the way they found strange lands, strange people, and saw strange things in the ocean that were difficult to describe -and that's how you get mermaids. The legend of mermaids had already been around, but between 1610 and 1784, there were so many documented reports of merpeople that History Today put together an interactive map of them. Use the right arrows to read them in chronological order, or drag the map around to find a sighting near you. -via Nag on the Lake