This book deals with peoples’ practices, perceptions, emotions and feelings towards aquatic animals, their ecosystems and nature on the early modern Atlantic coasts by addressing exploitation, use, fear, empathy, otherness, and indifference in the relationships established with aquatic environments and resources by Indigenous Peoples and Europeans. It focuses on large aquatic fauna, especially manatees (but also sharks, sea turtles, seals, and others) as they were hunted, consumed, venerated, conceptualised, and recorded by different societies across the early colonial Americas and West Africa. Through a cross-cultural approach drawing on concepts and analytical methods from marine environmental history, the blue humanities and animal studies, this book addresses more-than-human systems where ecologies, geographies, cosmogonies, and cultures are an entangled web of interdependencies.

Cristina Brito is an Associate Professor at the History Department at NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, and researcher at CHAM - Center for the Humanities. She is one of the PIs of the ERC Synergy Grant 4-OCEANS: Human History of Marine Life, and of two EEA Grants Bilateral Funds Initiatives.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Magnificent and mighty monsters of nature
1. The case of Matto, the manatee
A Manatee in a Lake
2. Cosmogonies, aquatic deities, and water myths of origin
(My) Mermaid of the Island
3. Aquatic monsters: From imaginary animals to sharks, caimans and sea lions
4. Beliefs about and practices in nature: From living creatures to resources and symbols
Water Wor(l)ds
5. (Early) modern ‘naturecultures’: A co-constructed narrative of the world
The Roundness of Earth and Time
Index