82 June 2017ALAMY/BRITISH LIBRARY/BRIDGEMAN
The Feejee Mermaid
In July 1842, the PT Barnum marketing machine went into overdrive, telling the world
about a mermaid that he had acquired for display in his American Museum in
New York. The mermaid had, he said, been caught near the Feejee Islands in
the South Pacific, and its authenticity had been confirmed by Dr J Griffin of
the British Lyceum of Natural History.
The people of New York were transfixed, and flocked to the museum in droves.
When they got there, they found something quite different to the beautiful ocean
maiden that the Barnum advertising campaign had promised. What they set eyes
on was a ghoulish amalgamation of a monkey’s withered head and torso and
a fish tail, which had been stitched together by Japanese fishermen earlier
in the century.
‘The Feejee Mermaid’ was, of course, a hoax masterminded by Barnum.
And the esteemed Dr J Griffin? He was Levi Lyman, Barnum’s accomplice-in-
deception. The press railed at Barnum’s audacity. But that didn’t stop the ring and
clunk of the cash registers.The misshapen
man-monkey
Barnum repeatedly presented the public with
curiosities that he advertised as missing links in
the evolutionary chain. One of the first of these
freaks of nature was the ‘man-monkey’, which
he brought to Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall in 1844.
Barnum claimed the creature had been
captured in the forests of California. In fact, it
was a seasoned circus performer by the name
of Harvey Leech. By blacking Leech up and
covering his muscular and misshapen body
with matted hair, Barnum expected his Wild
Man to appeal to thousands of Londoners.
And it did – despite being exposed
as a hoax by The Times.Jumbo, the
5-tonne elephant
Forty years after offending
the British public with a bid
to buy the cottage in which
Shakespeare was born, Barnum
was at it again. This time, he had
his sights set on Jumbo, the
five-tonne African elephant who
had become a firm favourite with
crowds at London’s Zoological
Gardens. Once Barnum’s
agent succeeded in agreeing
a $10,000 fee for Jumbo, “the
outrageous sale of a national
character” led to a groundswell
of patriotic opposition. Jumbo-
mania peaked in March 1882,
when the Zoological Society’s
decision to sell was legally
challenged by two of its own
fellows. Despite petitions to
parliament, the court found in
favour of the society and, over
the next three years, Jumbo
went on to become the star
attraction in Barnum & Bailey’s
travelling circus, ‘The Greatest
Show on Earth’.Jumbo the elephant is the star attraction in this
c1882 poster for Barnum & Bailey’s circusA poster promoting
Joice Heth, Barnum’s
“ancient lady”Barnum turned a circus performer called Harvey
Leech into the ‘missing link’George Washington’s
161-year-old nurse
In 1835, Barnum somehow managed to persuade
the public that a black woman called Joice Heth was
the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington.
And, when interest in Heth waned, he came up with
the idea of exposing her as an automaton. “What
purports to be a remarkably old woman is simply...
made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numerous
springs ingeniously put together, and made to move
at the slightest touch, according to the will of
the operator.” The ruse worked perfectly. By inviting
viewers to determine for themselves whether Heth was
a flesh-and-blood supercentenarian or a mechanical
illusion, Barnum fastened on to a hoax strategy that
would serve him only too well in the future.The mermaid
that wasn’t:
Barnum’s
nautical curiosity
was a monkey’s
head stitched to
a fish’s tailBarnum’s greatest wheezes
| PT BARNUMHISTORY