Caterpillars and cocoons, sea serpents, a seahorse and a mermaid
Voussoirs 10, 11, 12 south face, west arch.
On the south face of the western arch, on the right side as you look at it, is a pair of sculptures that is recognisable, referring to metamorphosis: that change from one form into another, like a maggot into a fly, a caterpillar into a butterfly, from an egg via a cocoon. A pair of five-petalled flowers, not a butterfly, is juxtaposed.
The symbolism is death, redemption and regeneration. Norman Laird saw in these carvings the same things, interpreting with the erudition of a scholar. (Tasmanian archives NS1377-1-1)
The 5th arch stone on the same half-arch, is about death as well.
Image: Paul Reeve 2017
Sometimes, the images are clearer in black and white
In the centre of the sculpture is a seahorse, his tail curled into the curve of the tail of a mermaid. He is holding her neck with a hind leg and he seems to have a fist above her head bending her neck so her head is within the concavity of his torso. Her tail curves up to the left edge of the stone and her hair sweeps below her back.
Above them are four or five serpentine creatures with faces.
Underneath the pair, parts of human and animal bodies seem to settle on the bottom of the ocean.
Image: Brad Harris 2020
To see the carved lines more convincingly, I have drawn the seahorse with the mermaid
The role of the seahorse in legend was to guide the souls of dead sea travellers to the seabed. The contrary role of the mermaid was to lure them to their death. Is this consensual sex? Rape? or constraint of the siren?
Does it relate to Coleridge’s lines in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: (1798)
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: Oh Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
Or Lord Byron’s address to the “deep and dark blue ocean” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: (1812 - 1819)
like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
Is it an illustration of the convicts’ fears when they were between decks of the transport ship - or on deck, specks in the middle of a vast, watery, unfamiliar world?
I think Daniel Herbert lived in a household open to books, inhabited by thoughtful people, in a community of Quakers, Swedenborgians, Methodists and other independent churches. He was baptised in the Paul Street Independent Chapel in Taunton, Somerset; I think his mother came from a Quaker family in Barton, to the west of Manchester and as a widow of fourteen years, in 1817, married into the Bible Christian sect. She was buried in their cemetery in 1834 when Dan was an overseer on the new Customs House in Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land.