by Michael Daly
Barnum had the associate jailed. The associate thereupon arranged for the man who had sold Joice Heth to file a complaint that Barnum had never given him a quantity of brandy that was supposedly part of the price. Barnum was himself briefly jailed and he returned to New York, in his words, “resolved once more that I would never again be an itinerant showman.”
He began to buy and sell illustrated Bibles but was not ready to give up being a showman altogether. He again rented the Vauxhall Gardens saloon, using his brother-in-law’s name so as not to alienate Bible buyers. He searched for a new “break down” star in Five Points and found a spectacularly talented teenage dancer named William Henry Lane. Known as Juba, Lane had started out at ten dancing for coins on a street corner and now was faster and more stylish and more original and simply just better than Diamond or anybody else. There was only one problem: Juba was actually black.
“There was not an audience in America that would not have resented in very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real Negro,” the British writer Thomas Low Nichols later noted. “To any man but [Barnum] this would have been an insuperable obstacle.”
Barnum applied burnt cork to Juba’s face and pulled a wooly wig over his close-cropped hair. Juba became the first black man to appear in blackface.
“Had it been suspected that the seeming counterfeit was the genuine article, the New York Vauxhall would have blazed with indignation,” Nichols wrote.
Barnum billed the new dancer as Master John Diamond and staged “contests” just as he had in New Orleans with the original Diamond. A letter appeared in the Sunday Flash making the scandalous accusation that Barnum’s new blackface dancer was a fake fake:
The boy is fifteen or sixteen years of age; his name is “Juba”; and to do him justice, he is a very fair dancer. He is of harmless and inoffensive disposition, and is not, I sincerely believe, aware of the meanness and audacity of the swindle to which he is presently a party. As to the wagers which the bills daily blazon forth, they are like the rest of his business—all a cheat. Not one dollar is ever bet or staked, and the pretended judges who aid in the farce, are mere blowers.
The letter was unsigned, but the author was quite possibly Barnum himself in a variation on the letter that suggested Joice Heth was actually an automaton. The scandal almost certainly filled seats in the Vauxhall Gardens and generated the nineteenth-century equivalent of buzz.
Almack’s was a low-ceilinged basement tavern and bordello owned by a black man and his mulatto wife on Orange Street in Five Points. The visitors there in 1842 included Charles Dickens, who wrote in American Notes of watching Juba, the teen he called “the greatest dancer known,” take the floor.
“In what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter?” Dickens wrote.
The passage brought fame to both the dancer and the saloon. Juba was able to perform outside Five Points without burnt cork and a wig. Almack’s became Dickens’ Place. It added an elephant to its attractions, though elephants had lost so much of their novelty that the creature drew nary a mention in the press.
Barnum, in the meantime, had again found the Vauxhall venture too expensive to continue, and the Bibles were not bringing in what he had hoped. He garnered a few extra dollars writing freelance advertising copy for the Bowery Amphitheater, originally built by the Flatfoot circus and menagerie cartel.
“I was at the bottom rung of fortune’s ladder,” Barnum would recall.
He was still Barnum, which meant a simple lack of money did not stop him from putting in a bid when he heard the American Museum on Broadway was for sale. He may have felt fate was at work, for this collection of curiosities included the stuffed remains of Old Bet.
The price was still $15,000—or about $15,000 more than he had.
“What will you buy it with?” a friend supposedly inquired.
“With brass,” Barnum replied, “for silver and gold have I none.”
Barnum convinced the owner that while he had but a pittance to put down, he would make the museum such a success he would quickly pay off the purchase price. He thereupon embarked to make good on his word, adding entertainments and a constantly changing host of exhibits. He ventured the inverse of blackface with “Madagascar albinos,” described in the museum guide as possessing “features being so decidedly Ethiopian as to preclude the possibility of doubt as to their being purely African,” making them “beyond all doubt, white negroes.” He also had Dora Dawron, the “double-voiced vocalist, who sings with equal cue and effect a loud-and-manly tenor and a delicate-and-feminine soprano while dressed one half as a man, one half as a lady, and changing to the audience simultaneously with the change of voice.” Other exhibits included a model of Niagara Falls “with real water.”
The buildup to his first big attraction began with three letters to New York newspapers spaced about ten days apart, the first postmarked Montgomery, Alabama, the second Charleston, South Carolina, and the third Washington, D.C. The letters were signed by different individuals, but each reported that a Dr. J. Griffin, naturalist with the British Lyceum of Natural History, had passed through that locale with a genuine mermaid that had been found off the “Feejee Islands” and preserved in China. The third letter expressed the hope that the New York newspapers would clamor for Griffin to accord the city the opportunity to see the “great curiosity” before he sailed home to England.
Several days later, Dr. J. Griffin checked into a top Philadelphia hotel. The afternoon before he was to depart for New York, he offered the proprietor a glimpse of the mermaid. The hotelier was not discouraged from summoning any newspaper editors he happened to know.
“The Philadelphia press aided the press of New York in awakening a wide-reaching and increasing curiosity to see the mermaid,” Barnum later wrote.
Curiosity yet again became coin as crowds paid to see the “Feejee Mermaid,” which, in a woodcut Barnum gave the newspapers, looked very much like the creature of myth, but in person looked very much like a mummified monkey’s head and torso sewn to the bottom half of a large fish. Barnum subsequently acknowledged in his autobiography that he wrote the seemingly far-flung letters and sent them to friends with instructions on when to mail them to the New York newspapers. He further acknowledged that there was no British Lyceum and that Griffin was in fact Levi Lyman.
“Who was my employee in the case of Joice Heth,” Barnum added.
The museum’s biggest human attraction was also its smallest, having stopped growing when he stood only twenty-five inches. Charles Sherwood Stratton was just shy of his fifth birthday when his distant cousin Barnum brought him and his mother from their Connecticut home to New York.
“Mrs. Stratton was greatly surprised to see her son announced on my Museum bills as General Tom Thumb,” Barnum later wrote.
Barnum informed the public that his new marvel was eleven years old and from England, the name having been taken from British folklore. The fictitious honorific was ironic, but it also intuitively played on the diminutive figure’s appeal, a fascination as intense as that inspired by an elephant, and not entirely unrelated.
Just as the biggest of land animals allowed its beholders to imagine a natural order not predicated on ferocious struggle, the smallest of generals mocked a social order ruled by stature and macho supremacy. Barnum noted that the boy possessed a “keen sense of the ludicrous,” which he displayed with precocious aplomb, cracking jokes and imitating such iconic half pints as Napoleon and Cupid.
Tom Thumb was a sensation and would end up responsible for 20 million of the 82 million tickets Barnum would sell in his various enterprises in his lifetime. Relatively scant interest was generated by Vantile Mack, the Giant Baby, described in the museum guide as �
��only 7 years old, yet weighed 257 pounds, measured 61 inches round the chest, and just one yard round the thigh; the largest child of his age ever known.” Others of the less popular human extremes at the museum included the Arabian Giant and the towering Very Thin Man, who seemed more like typical specimens of their species as they engaged in an increasingly vituperative rivalry. They finally prepared to do battle, one grabbing a supposed Crusader sword, the other a war club that, by Barnum’s account, “might have been the one that killed Captain Cook.” Barnum voiced outrage that they would even think of engaging in mortal combat without due preparations.
“It must be duly advertised,” he declared, leaving the giants laughing and peace restored.
To the usual bombast of his advertising (“mammon is ever caught with glare”) Barnum added a slyer tactic, which began with hiring a man who had come in off the street asking for a handout. Barnum instead presented the man with five bricks.
At Barnum’s secret instruction, the man set down four of the bricks on as many corners in the surrounding streets. The man then quickly strode from spot to spot, at each solemnly exchanging the brick in his hand for the one on the sidewalk, remaining resolutely mute.
“You must seem to be as deaf as a post,” Barnum would recall telling the man. “Wear a serious countenance; answer no questions; pay no attention to anyone; but attend faithfully to the work, and at the end of every hour, by St. Paul’s clock, show this ticket at the Museum door, enter, walking solemnly through every hall in the building.”
He was then to exit the building and repeat it all over again. This kept up for several days, with more and more people noticing the man and following him. Barnum enlisted the intervention of a policeman, who declared the growing crowd a hazard and escorted the “brick man” away. That generated even more public attention for Barnum’s Great American Museum. He festooned the building with flags and banners and placed atop the roof New York’s first “Drummond lights,” cylinders of lime turned incandescent by intense flame, the result subsequently known as “limelight” when used in theaters.
So many people were now arriving at the entrance beneath the limelight beacons that Barnum too often suffered the agony of being unable to accommodate people who had cash in hand. He became particularly distressed on St. Patrick’s Day, when a large number of Irish patrons brought their dinners with the intention of making not just a day but an evening of it as well rather than passing through and making room for others. He enlisted a workman to paint and hang a sign that had a pointing finger and read: “THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.”
Just as he hoped, a good number of the customers assumed that an egress must be some kind of exotic animal. Barnum’s account of the ploy would mildly mock the accents of the crowd and play off a current expression, “seeing the elephant,” which had come to mean seeing the world’s remarkable sights: “The throng began to pour down the back-stairs only to find that the ‘Aigress’ was the elephant, and that the elephant was all out o’doors, or so much of it as began with Ann Street.”
Barnum was soon prosperous enough to follow his childhood idol Hack Bailey into the actual elephant business, thanks to proceeds from the museum as well as a lucrative European tour with Tom Thumb and a wildly successful American tour with the opera singer Jenny Lind, “the Swedish nightingale,” who was welcomed to New York by a Barnum-drummed crowd of thirty thousand.
But as had been demonstrated at Dickens’ Place, so many people had at this point literally seen an elephant that presenting just one was not likely to draw much attention. Barnum entered into a partnership with Seth B. Howes, who had started out in the business at age eleven, tending to Lil Bet as Hachaliah Bailey took her on tour. With Howes, Barnum now sought to outdo his childhood hero Bailey and acquire a herd.
FOUR
The Elephantine
Expedition
In May of 1850, Barnum and Howes chartered the ship Regatta and dispatched a representative on what they termed an “elephantine expedition” to the island nation off the coast of India then called Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. The representative arrived hoping to purchase from temples and government officials enough elephants to create a sensation back in America. He discovered that the government was in turmoil due to a particularly arrogant British governor and that monsoons had washed out so many roads that every available elephant had been pressed into service to clear and repair them.
The representative enlisted a guide and ventured from the coast into the interior jungles where the elephants were living wild. The local kings had long prohibited the killing of elephants on pain of the transgressor’s own death, but that had changed with British rule. British officers considered it fine sport to shoot such a large creature. They were not just after ivory like the poachers who would in the next century hunt elephants into near extinction, particularly in Africa, where both genders have tusks. They killed Asian females with equal zest even though they are tuskless. The record holder was Major Thomas Rogers, a colonial administrator and district judge said to have killed more than fourteen hundred elephants during an eleven- year period ending in 1845, when he was struck by lightning, celestial electricity that many locals viewed as divine justice.
Barnum’s sole aim was to capture, and to that end his representative followed the long-standing local strategy involving a kheddah, almost certainly the same method that would be employed to capture baby Topsy.
As with Topsy’s herd twenty-five years later, the elephants must have either not caught the scent or not sensed a serious threat when the trackers crept up, careful to remain upwind and hidden. Otherwise, the elephants would have retreated deeper into the forest by the time the hundred catchers arrived. The catchers had done their stealthy best to go undetected as they split into two groups, filing off to the right and to the left. Each group posted a pair of catchers every fifty yards or so as they formed a circle six to eight miles in diameter around the herd. The “surround” was completed with a light bamboo fence, not designed to contain the elephants but to mark any place they broke out and to indicate which catcher should be held responsible.
If any of the herd approached the perimeter, the pickets drove them back with shouts and gunshots and flaming torches, just as they later would with Topsy. Such encounters occurred more often at night, so it was during the day one picket from each pair slipped inside the surrounded area to help construct a stockade that was near an established path but well hidden by foliage and close to water. The stockade workers rejoined their partners at night to man the perimeter, then returned to their labors in the morning.
After maybe a fortnight, the stockade was done. The pickets spent one last night in pairs on the perimeter. One of each pair remained behind to maintain the surround while the others began to close in, shouting and brandishing torches and firing guns in the air as they drove the elephants into the trap.
When it was all over, the Barnum expedition marched nine newly captured elephants to the port of Point de Galle, one a calf, the others fully grown if not exactly giants of their species. The elephants were understandably nervous when loaded upon a tippy lighter that was to ferry them two at a time to the Regatta. One male broke free of his restraining ropes and bolted, scattering a crowd of onlookers.
Eventually, the male was brought back. He, like the others, calmed once the lighter pulled away from the dock and further fuss would only have made the footing more unsteady. Elephants seemed to be creatures with some sense of when struggle became self-defeating.
The elephants did become resistant again when the lighter was alongside the ship and they were fitted with a harness, an outsize version of the kind used to load horses, with multiple belly bands. A line rose to a wooden block and tackle that had been affixed to a reinforced yardarm or boom.
The elephants quieted once more when their feet left the lighter’s deck and they were hoisted up over the gunwale with the help of a windlass, h
uman ingenuity prevailing over their massive bulk. Creatures who had never been off the ground since they thudded upon it at birth and who had always walked supreme felt themselves airborne and helpless as they were swung over the open loading hatch. They were lowered into the hold and fussed only briefly, any resistance being met by the stringencies of a mahout who had been brought along.
The long sea voyage took them down through the horse latitudes, zones of scant wind where becalmed ships were said to sometimes become so short of water they had to let horses aboard perish. The Regatta had plenty of water, even with each of the elephants drinking as many as fifty gallons a day in addition to eating as much as three hundred pounds of food a day, but it still lost one of the younger captives to unspecified causes as it passed the Cape of Good Hope. The crew hoisted it overboard and into the sea. The remaining elephants survived being squeezed into the hold for the four-month, twelve-thousand-mile trip, without drawing a fresh breath or taking a free step.
“They behaved really well during the passage, accommodating themselves to their straitened quarters and hard fare with a patient philosophy worthy of general imitation,” an observer reported.
A Barnum-size crowd was waiting to welcome the ship when it returned, almost exactly a year after it had departed. The new arrivals were joined by two elephants leased for the day to make an even ten adults. The augmented herd was harnessed in pairs to a painted wagon billed as the Great Car of Juggernaut.
The real Car of Jagannath, in India, was a gigantic wagon forty-five feet tall and thirty-five feet square with seven-foot wheels. It was brought out once a year for a great festival in which the figure of Jagannath, or Lord of the Universe, was (and still is) transported from the main temple in Puri to his “summer home” less than a mile away. The Car was (and is) drawn through deep sand with ropes by thousands of the Hindu faithful.
Barnum’s car was about the size that might have been used to carry dry goods in his clerk days, but painted and affixed with carved elephants and figures of supposed Hindu gods. He likely was inspired by James Raymond, a menagerie impresario from upstate New York who had been a founder of the Flatfeet and who in the 1840s owned five of the six elephants then in America, the biggest herd the nation had ever seen until now. Raymond had introduced the bandwagon and had four of the elephants pull it as the musicians played. He had become disconsolate and left the business after three of the four died, apparently succumbing to the inexpert care and brutalities of their handlers.