Sea People

The Sea People are a people whose kinship, communication, and shared history challenge the human habit of treating them as monsters. They gather in families, raise children, seek refuge in remote waters, and preserve their memories through songs that convey meaning without words. Through Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s attempts to interpret those songs, and Sherzad’s account of repeated attacks, their story becomes a record of both collective life and human violence. The contrast is central: the Sea People can speak through a medium humans must learn to understand, while human authorities have repeatedly used their own power to silence, capture, and misrepresent them.

Identity and Communication

The Sea People’s language is not organized around spoken words. When Marie-Josèphe asks whether the sea creature understands her and whether it can speak in words, the reply comes through song. What Marie-Josèphe receives is a sequence of images and linked impressions: a fish, its surroundings, its movement, and its taste. Meaning is carried through associations rather than a spoken label, so communication depends on attending to how images connect, not on translating a vocabulary word for word.

Marie-Josèphe tries to answer in the same medium, humming a melody, but recognizes that her attempt may reach the sea creature only as an indistinct blur. The exchange is therefore not instant or effortless: it requires listening, patience, and an acknowledgment that the human participant may not yet be understood. When the sea creature sings a complicated melody describing herself, the song also suggests qualities such as joy, boldness, and youthful wisdom. The Sea People’s songs can thus convey both concrete information and an impression of the singer’s character.

To preserve what she hears, Marie-Josèphe fetches paper and charcoal from the laboratory and sketches the songs as rough pictures rather than words or musical notation. She understands the scenes clearly, though her drawings cannot reproduce the full beauty of Sherzad’s songs. The sketches nevertheless serve as records: servants display and pin them up. This process makes the human court a witness to Sea People history, but it also shows the limits of mediation. The songs remain theirs; the drawings are a human attempt to document what has been heard.

Family Life and the Search for Refuge

Sherzad’s account presents the Sea People as a population with children, parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. In one image, a family welcomes a new baby. The child’s body is beginning to take on features associated with the Sea People, while her early humming and babbling produces large, indistinct pictures. Adults respond with wonder and approval. The scene gives collective life a generational dimension: the Sea People are not an isolated curiosity but families whose children grow within a community and whose futures are part of what is endangered.

Their attempts to escape human pursuit show both practical knowledge and the limits of refuge. They flee to birth islands far out in the ocean and to dense mats of seaweed that ships cannot easily cross. Yet they keep their annual gathering place, situated in deep indigo water between dangerous shallows, and return there together once each year before dispersing. The place’s isolation offers some protection, but it does not make the gathering unreachable.

A storm once preceded the annual gathering. The Sea People met the immense waves by riding and diving through them, and when the weather became too violent, they submerged and drifted into sleep. After the storm broke, they rose into the sun. Adults left adolescents to care for the children while they gathered. The account places communal life within a changing marine environment: the Sea People respond to weather and water on their own terms, but the same ocean that provides refuge cannot guarantee safety from ships.

Human Persecution and Collective Loss

Sherzad’s story turns from the imagined safety of the birth islands to the arrival of a galleon bearing a cross. The ship approaches the small island, brings its guns to bear, and sends men ashore with pikes and nets. The Sea People are described by their attackers as devils, and the attack is presented as being carried out for the glory of the attackers’ god. The account makes the religious language of the assault part of its violence: a sacred emblem accompanies armed force rather than protection.

Those who survive the island attack are taken to the mainland. Sherzad describes imprisonment, torture, and slow killing in human cities. One of Marie-Josèphe’s sketches shows an Inquisitor torturing a Sea Person on a rack, with a human figure being burned in the background. The image links the persecution of the Sea People to a wider apparatus of religious punishment without making their suffering merely symbolic: they are themselves the targets of capture and abuse. Their treatment follows from their attackers’ refusal to recognize them as people.

A second attack, remembered in Sherzad’s account, occurs at the annual gathering after a storm has left a ship damaged and off course. The Sea People are assembled in a communal mating haze when the ship reaches them. The sailors regard the gathering as evidence of demons, and the ship cuts through the crowd before the Sea People understand the danger. Barrels thrown from the vessel explode, and the gathering becomes a scene of mass loss. Young survivors find themselves responsible for frightened babies while their families die. The account makes the catastrophe especially stark by setting it against the preceding images of children, relatives, and shared safety: the attack destroys a community in the midst of its ordinary collective life.

Testimony, Memory, and Resistance

Sherzad’s songs make the Sea People’s history audible to human listeners, but hearing does not guarantee sympathy. When she presents the account before Pope Innocent XII, he watches her stonily, offering no visible kindness. The juxtaposition recalls the priest on the attacking ship holding up a cross while Sea People are wounded and dying. Religious authority is thus shown at two points in the chain of violence: in the imagery accompanying the old attack and in the present-day listener’s refusal to respond with compassion.

Marie-Josèphe’s role is that of an imperfect interpreter and recorder. She translates as well as she can from a language with no words, sketching rapidly as she speaks. The pictures document the story, but their existence also underscores how much depends on whether human witnesses accept the account. Sherzad supplies the testimony; Marie-Josèphe makes an effort to carry it across a linguistic boundary; the Pope’s response demonstrates that access to evidence cannot compel a moral change in its audience.

The Sea People’s voice persists beyond testimony as well. Aboard a ship, Sherzad sings softly enough that Louis XIV initially hears nothing beneath the vessel’s movement and the pumps. When he listens, Marie-Josèphe interprets the song as a promise that a Sea Woman will lead her to treasure, offered despite betrayals and broken promises, followed by a declaration of war against the men of land. Louis questions whether the threat is directed at Sherzad instead. The exchange does not establish that a war has begun; it does establish that the Sea People’s account of injury can become a claim, a warning, and a refusal to accept human terms without answer. Their songs preserve memory while carrying the possibility of resistance into the present.