Earlier this morning, I saw Fernando Brambila’s graphite drawing of a dugong at a special exhibition at the Galería de las Colecciones Reales, beside the Palacio Real in Madrid. I thought it was a bizarre coincidence that exactly 234 years earlier, on 24 August 1792, the animal depicted in the drawing was captured in Manila Bay.

Brambila made the drawing while serving as an artist on the Malaspina expedition. The circumstances surrounding the drawing were recorded by Juan de Cuéllar, the royal botanist working in the Philippines. On 24 August 1792, Alejandro Malaspina, the officers of the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida, their chaplains, surgeons and artists, and the botanists Tadeo Haenke and Luis Neé witnessed the capture of the dugong in Manila Bay.

The next day, twelve men carried the animal on their shoulders to Cuéllar’s house. It was placed in his cellar or storeroom, where Cuéllar asked Brambila to draw it. According to Cuéllar’s report, the dugong remained alive outside the water until 30 September.

It did not eat during this period. Its keepers brought it a marine plant that local people had identified as the food eaten by dugongs, but the animal did not touch it. Cuéllar suggested that the weight of its head against the floor may have prevented it from moving its jaws. He did not observe it drinking, except perhaps when it swallowed seawater while being turned onto its back. The animal was periodically rolled over so that its belly and lower body could be washed. Cuéllar also recorded that it continued to defecate daily.

A dugong belongs to the order Sirenia, the group of marine mammals named after the sirens of classical mythology. Sighting of dugongs have long been associated with stories about mermaids and Brambila’s own title identifies the animal as a sirena which is also the Filipino word for mermaid.

People in Manila called the animal dugong or pez mujer (woman-fish). Alcina’s 17th century Historia suggests that the origin of the word dugong is Bisaya and the term became part European natural history through descriptions from the Philippines.

Cuéllar informed the Spanish authorities that he intended to prepare a description of the dugong’s anatomy, dimensions and history. He dispatched these materials on 6 November 1793 aboard the Real Compañía de Filipinas vessel Rey Carlos. In October 1794, three crates sent by Cuéllar reached Madrid. They contained the skeleton of a sirenian, apparently the remains of the same animal (I have yet to find this).

Brambila drew the dugong in profile, with its tail on the left and its head on the right. Its body extends across almost the entire narrow sheet. One forelimb is visible beside the abdomen. The drawing records the divided tail, rounded body, small eye, nostril and downturned muzzle. Graphite shading is concentrated along the back and upper part of the body. Lighter strokes describe the underside. Irregular horizontal and curling marks appear beneath the animal. Brambila placed his initials, “F. B.,” near the lower-left corner.

I first knew this image through Resil Mojares’s Enigmatic Objects, a book I reviewed for a journal. In one of the essays, Mojares follows the history of human encounters with the dugong and how people gradually saw nature and their human characteristics through them.

Dugong tusks and dense bones have been used for ornaments and have circulated under names such as “mermaid ivory.” Earlier Philippine accounts attributed medicinal and talismanic properties to the animal’s bones and teeth. They were reportedly used in remedies for rheumatism, bleeding, fevers, snake and centipede bites, and problems involving the gums.

Ramón Jordana y Morera recorded another example in his Bosquejo geográfico e histórico-natural del archipiélago Filipino of 1885. He described a ruler in Palau wearing the first cervical vertebra, or atlas, of a dugong as a bracelet. Spanish and mestizo traders from Manila subsequently collected these vertebrae in the Philippines and used them in exchanges for balate (sea cucumber).

Jordana also wrote that dugongs lived in groups and defended one another. He claimed that when hunters captured a female, the male and young sometimes followed her closely enough to come within reach of the harpoons. Modern observations confirm the close relationship between a mother and her calf. A female usually gives birth to one calf after a gestation of approximately thirteen to fourteen months. She nurses it for about eighteen months, helps it reach the surface to breathe and remains closely associated with it during its early life.

By the late nineteenth century, Jordana was already reporting that dugongs were becoming scarce in the Philippines. He predicted that the species might disappear within a relatively short period. This did not happen but dugongs are now classified as vulnerable and are mainly found off the coast of Palawan. If people thought it magical in 1792 that a dugong was captured in Manila Bay, imagine that happening now. Aside from pollution, their Philippine populations have declined because of hunting or accidental entanglement in fishing equipment and the destruction of coastal seagrass habitats.

Mojares ends his discussion with the possibility of extinction: “When the dugong is finally gone, what becomes extinct is not just a species but a way of looking at the world.” That sentence gave me a lump in my throat.

When I saw Brambila’s original drawing for the first time and realized that I was standing before it on the very date the dugong had been captured 234 years earlier, I felt the same way. I suddenly remembered my own encounters with many sea creatures and why I think I had such a happy childhood.