Page 171 - The Secret Museum

ZARH PRITCHARD, KNOWN AS ‘THE merman’, was the first person to paint underwater.

Not from memory, but actually sitting on a ledge under the water, paintbrush in hand,
creating pictures of what he saw on an easel.

He was born in 1866 in Madras, India, and was named Walter. In 1909, he
changed his named to Zarh. He said this was because there were other men called
Walter Pritchard and he kept getting their letters: ‘One was a drunkard, another was a
man who never paid his bills, and a third was constantly running away from his wife.
It was this last Pritchard who determined me to change my name. I received a letter
from his wife. She begged me to return to her, saying that the daughter, Mary, had

grown into a fine, tall, good-looking woman. So I changed my name to Zarh, which is
Persian for light.’

Which makes it all the more fitting that Zarh made a niche for himself painting a
special, dancing light; the magical, shimmering light of the underwater world.

He began in the Firth of Forth, Scotland. He put on homemade swimming goggles,
dived into the water and took a ‘photograph’ in his mind, observing the new colours
and tints beneath the waves, and then ran ashore to paint the memory in his
sketchbook. Each drawing took 30 or 40 dives to complete. He must have got pretty
cold running back and forth, in and out of the water, to swim, then out again to paint,

shivering away in his towel.
For the next 14 years he worked making costumes – for Sarah Bernhardt, among

others – and spent a stint in New Zealand on a sheep run at Hawkes Bay, painting
landscapes. Here, a local chief taught him how to paint underwater: the secret is to
make a canvas from leather soaked in linseed, then it will hold the paint.

Then, he came down with pneumonia. His doctor prescribed a trip to Egypt, for
the sunshine. Zarh decided to go instead to California, and then Tahiti. It was on this
magical island that he found his true calling.

It was all the result of a drunken bet. At a dinner party, he met the brother of the
last Queen of Tahiti, Narii Salmon. After many drinks, Salmon bet Pritchard that he
wouldn’t be able to paint a canvas while underwater. Pritchard bet him $500 that he

could, so long as Narii would lend him his boat and his so-called ‘diving suit’, the
only one on the island.
The two set off to see who would win the bet. Pritchard dropped into the ocean

wearing the diving suit (essentially a diving helmet attached to a sou’wester,
waterproofed with the sap of a breadfruit tree). Narii had his crew play a trick on
Zarh, and they took him to the top of a 180-metre deep wall in the coral reef. He
drifted at 23 metres until he found a shelf at 9 metres on which he could perch and
paint. When he was ready, he tugged on a cord, signalling for the crew to send down

his painting materials.
As Zarh painted in the silence of the underwater realm, watching out for shark and
octopus, he created the first painting ever made underwater. His canvas was soaked