Stephen Ellery tried to get Eades to pay him what he was owed for his seven-eighths share of the Pickering out of the proceeds from the exhibition, but Eades refused and threatened to leave the country. The ship owner went to court to prevent that from happening, and the ruling supported his suit. And there ends the trail of the relationship between Eades and Ellery. Somehow in the aftermath, the strange specimen made its way to America and into Kimball’s hands.
In choosing Barnum to help him figure out what to do with the mermaid he had purchased, Kimball had come to the right man. They must have liked each other from the first, for a close relationship would quickly develop between them. Barnum would soon come to use his Boston brother as an almost daily sounding board. Kimball’s presence seems to have had an immediate catalyzing effect on Barnum, helping him to realize how he could combine his new museum’s solidity with his long-running instinct for amazement. He hatched a complicated plan for engaging the public’s curiosity not only about the Fejee Mermaid itself but also about the alluring possibility that mermaids really did exist, a persistent myth in many cultures going back thousands of years.
First, Barnum signed a contract allowing him to exhibit the mermaid for up to three months, at $12.50 per week, after which Kimball would have it for the same period of time. Then they would jointly send it on the road for up to two years, splitting the costs and the receipts—a long-range commitment to collaborate that reflects trust between the two men. Barnum’s scheme to “start the ball a-rolling” was to have friends in other cities forward letters to New York newspapers that Barnum himself had secretly written. The letters were constructed as a miscellany of local news, in which was included an item about the recent visit of a Dr. J. Griffin, who represented the (fictional) Lyceum of Natural History in London. The naturalist was reportedly on his way to New York and then to London with “a veritable mermaid taken among the Fejee Islands, and preserved in China, where the doctor had bought it at a high figure” for his London employer.5
Barnum’s hoaxes were always certain to mention the great expense involved in the procurement of any exhibit, a detail meant to distinguish his offerings from run-of-the-mill claptrap, suggesting an element of respectability that would appeal to his targeted middle-class audience (or those who wished to be middle class). Throughout these letters, written from the confines of his muggy office at the museum, Barnum continued to call the specimen the “Fejee Mermaid,” a name that must have added in incalculable ways to the allure the public would feel as it clamored to see her. He also tucked in the winning and irrelevant detail that the aptly named Dr. Griffin was “recently from Pernambuco,” an exotic and mildly romantic name to an American ear, even if the possessor of that ear didn’t know that it was a real place in Brazil. His careful attention to such seemingly small matters, similar to that he had shown in planning the celebration of his release from jail years before, undoubtedly distinguished him from others in his line of work, such as Kimball himself.
Barnum had the first letter mailed from Montgomery, Alabama, a second some days later from Charleston, South Carolina, and a third from the District of Columbia. A different New York newspaper fell for and thus published each of these letters, in which the non-mermaid news was plausible enough, and in the third letter the writer suggested that New York editors really ought to see the specimen for themselves. Before that would happen, a meeting was arranged with local reporters in Philadelphia, where they were introduced to the mermaid and to Dr. Griffin, who was in reality none other than Levi Lyman, Barnum’s henchman in the Heth affair.
Barnum reports with evident satisfaction that “the plan worked admirably,” and the columns in the Philadelphia papers served to further entice the New York press. By the time Lyman reached the foot of Greenwich Street in New York and signed himself in as Dr. Griffin at the Pacific Hotel, New York newspapermen were clamoring to see the mermaid. In the meantime, Barnum commissioned highly idealized woodcuts and engravings of beautiful, full-breasted, unclothed mermaids with flowing blond tresses, clearly meant to imply that this was what the Fejee Mermaid now, or at least once had, looked like. He added write-ups “proving” the authenticity of these formerly fictional creatures.
Barnum offered three different New York papers “exclusive” access to one of the images and a report, which he modestly acknowledged was “well-written.” All three papers ran the exclusive on the same Sunday morning, July 17, 1842. Just one day short of a month from the date he had signed the contract with Kimball, Barnum had blown up a typhoon of interest.
* * *
AT THIS POINT, BARNUM RELEASED for sale on the streets, at a penny apiece, ten thousand copies of a pamphlet that contained all of the images and stories he had prepared. Then he rented the Concert Hall on Broadway and placed advertisements in the papers saying Dr. Griffin (again “recently arrived from Pernambuco”) and the mermaid would be on exhibit “positively for one week only! ” Although Barnum’s connection with the mermaid must have been known to the newspaper editors to whom he was providing images, copy, and advertising, he deliberately kept his own name out of the ads and publicity, the better to suggest that the Fejee Mermaid was not a stunt but a legitimate discovery. For this reason, too, he did not at first display “her fish-ship” (his play on the honorific “her ladyship”) at the American Museum, but instead sent her up Broadway to the Concert Hall.6
The exhibit opened there on August 8, with Lyman, portraying the English Dr. Griffin, addressing the crowds and “learnedly descanting on the wonders of nature,” in his boss’s words. Barnum felt some concern that, despite his phony accent, Lyman would be recognized as a principal in the Heth affair, “but happily no such catastrophe occurred.” The glaring discrepancy between the portrait of the beautiful mermaid that appeared on an eight-foot-tall transparency outside the hall and the shriveled, three-foot mummy on display within caused, Barnum declared, little consternation in the thousands of people who paid a quarter to see the exhibit. But Lyman’s experience in coming face to face with these crowds was somewhat different from Barnum’s rosy memory. Barnum did tell of seeing an old Dutchman ask Lyman if the blackened object on display was really the “mare-maid.” When Lyman, “evidently ill at ease,” said yes, the “Dutchman, with a look of scorn such as I have rarely seen equalled, turned to depart, exclaiming, ‘Well, that is the poorest show I ever did see.’ ”7
When the Concert Hall week was up, Barnum was ready to advertise that he had acquired the mermaid (for a precious sum, of course) for his museum, where it would be displayed at no charge beyond the usual admittance fee of a quarter. He had made arrangements so that an eighteen-foot-long flag displaying an idealized mermaid “was streaming directly in front of the Museum.” When Lyman saw the flag upon reporting to work on the Monday morning that the mermaid went on display, he hurried to Barnum’s office, angrily insisting that it must come down. The difference between what was pictured on the flag and the mermaid itself was just too “preposterous,” Lyman said. When Barnum defended the flag, arguing that it was “only to catch the eye” and that nobody would expect it to represent the real exhibit, Lyman tellingly replied, “I think I ought to know something of the public ‘swallow’ by this time, and I tell you the mermaid won’t go down if that flag remains up.” Barnum protested that he had spent $70 on the flag, but Lyman insisted that either the flag must go or he would.
Barnum portrayed the dispute as a friendly one, but Lyman was clearly quite serious, and the strength of his feeling could only have flowed from further unpleasant experiences with skeptical visitors at the Concert Hall. Because Barnum needed Dr. Griffin to preserve some semblance of authenticity in the act, he took the flag down and never displayed it again. He good-naturedly told this story, chastening himself, but he couldn’t resist adding in a footnote that Lyman eventually became a Mormon and moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where Joseph Smith and his followers were ensconced and where Lyman became prominent in his new faith. We are left to presume that Lyman�
��s budding religious beliefs engendered his sudden and otherwise inexplicable qualms about deceiving the public. For Barnum, this was a minor and ultimately transparent sort of deception. After all, those patrons who were actually surprised by the disjunction between the beautiful creature on the flag and the ugly reality inside would have a whole museum of wonders to recompense them for the quarter they had spent.8
Barnum understated the Fejee Mermaid’s exhibit at the American Museum over the weeks it was on display as being an “attractive feature,” yet he made a point of comparing the gate in the month before the mermaid arrived ($1,272) with the month it was on display ($3,341.93). Each time he wrote about the mermaid in his memoirs, he did so with less bravura. After the 1869 edition, he wrote that his purpose in displaying her had been “mainly to advertise the regular business of the Museum, and this effective indirect advertising is the only feature I can commend, in a special show of which, I confess, I am not proud.” Still, even in this vein he is compelled to point out that as the exhibit subsequently traveled the country, “the fame of the Museum, as well as the mermaid, wafted from one end of the land to the other,” and he knew that every dollar he sowed on advertising it “would return in tens, and perhaps hundreds, in a future harvest.”9
The Fejee Mermaid was on tour by the following January, heading south. This represented a change in plans, but Barnum and Kimball evidently worked it out amicably, because by early 1843 a torrent of friendly letters found their way from Barnum to Kimball via No. 5 Wall Street, where the Adams Express pickup for Boston set out each afternoon at 4:30, on occasion bearing more than one letter for Kimball. Although Kimball’s letters to Barnum are lost, Barnum’s responses demonstrate that Kimball kept up his side of the correspondence. Barnum would sometimes ramble on for several pages in his hasty handwriting, liberally underlining words for emphasis. A twentieth-century fire at the Boston Athenaeum, where many of Barnum’s letters to Kimball are still kept, charred their edges and sometimes obscured his words, but Barnum’s energy for the business of acquiring acts for his museum is ever evident in them.10
At first, Barnum seemed satisfied with how the Fejee Mermaid was drawing crowds on the road as part of a traveling show similar to those he himself had often accompanied. The other acts included a magician, a ventriloquist, an automaton, a glassblower, and an orangutan. Barnum’s Uncle Alanson Taylor, long since forgiven for having sued Barnum for libel back in the Bethel days, had replaced Lyman, and on January 30, 1843, Barnum expressed what cannot have been a very serious fear that Taylor was sending the earnings to them too quickly and might not be holding back enough money to cover his expenses. By February 5 Barnum had received a letter from Taylor, who had appeared with the show in Charleston, South Carolina, from January 17 to 21. The letter, Barnum wrote to Kimball, “gives us occasion for more rejoicing. . . . Wasn’t it lucky to get rid of slow-moving, lazy-boned Lyman?” Barnum burbled on, “[In] showing and scientifically explaining, Taylor not only equals Lyman, but far exceeds him in point of industry and perseverance. He is faithful as the sun.” Barnum punctuated his optimism by informing Kimball that he had credited him $50 from Taylor’s remittances.11
But the optimism barely outlasted the new week. On February 10, Barnum sent Kimball a newspaper clipping that suggested Taylor was under attack in Charleston and “may be obliged to come home—though I hope for better things.” A Charleston minister and naturalist named John Bachman, two of whose daughters were married to sons of John James Audubon, had in January written a letter to a Charleston newspaper urging readers not to be deceived by the mermaid. Taylor counterattacked on January 21, offering $500 to anyone who could show him an example of a fake mermaid made of a monkey and a fish and insinuating that Bachman had once been on the wrong side of the law. On February 5 a group of local scientists and naturalists lent their authority to Bachman, calling the exhibit “an injury to natural science” designed to “extract money from the public under false pretenses.” It was their duty, they wrote, to “expose this vile imposition.” As Neil Harris writes in Humbug, his biography of Barnum, these scientists made the telling point that the Fejee Mermaid had been put together “with very little regard to anatomical accuracy, since there were present two chests and two abdomens.”12
By February 13 Barnum’s hopes for redeeming the tour were dashed. “The bubble has burst,” he wrote, and poor Taylor “[has] gone through everything that a mortal could stand.” The situation had gotten so bad so fast in Charleston, Barnum had been told, that “Fejee is on her way” by ship back to New York. “She will probably have to lie still a spell,” Barnum warned Kimball, “—perhaps forever.” Barnum and Kimball discussed whether Taylor should be cut loose while the mermaid made its slow return. It apparently arrived by February 21, Taylor having sent it to a third party in New York to prevent its detection. One day short of a month later, Barnum wrote to Kimball, “Some of our damned skunks have seen the Mermaid box stowed away on the top shelf of my office and that has been tattled out it seems. Now how the hell to keep anything from the damned traitors.”13
Barnum raised the idea of suing John Bachman or—saving the expense of an attorney—simply to “pretend” that they had sued him, with a tip to the Charleston papers. Either approach might “breathe the breath of life into her nostrils again.” Barnum did point out that, since the mermaid belonged to Kimball, Barnum’s name would not be on the suit, although he pledged to “join in that speculation.” Back and forth the correspondence went on the possibility of a suit, until Barnum concluded on April 8 that, “on reflection,” he “would not try the Fejee again.” At least from Barnum’s perspective, the decision not to show her removed the need for the suit and its attendant publicity, and all discussion of the suit then disappeared from his side of the correspondence. A few days earlier he had written Kimball, “My wife and all the old maids in town think [showing the Fejee Mermaid again] would ruin me,” but whether or not Charity’s advice helped sway him to the safer course, we are left to speculate.14
* * *
MORE THAN FIFTY LETTERS FROM Barnum to Kimball from 1843 alone found their way into the Boston Athenaeum collection. Even given his remarkable reserves of energy, Barnum could hardly have found time to write many more letters than that. He often apologized to Kimball that he was writing in haste, and the sheer number of subjects on his mind on any given day reinforced the truth of this. By early 1843 Barnum had purchased what was known as Peale’s Museum, which his rival, the New-York Museum Company, had owned. The directors of the company had bought it from Rubens Peale, the son of the painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale, who had started the first great American natural history museum in Philadelphia soon after the Revolution. The New York Peale’s, during its last days before Barnum acquired it, had created acts mocking Barnum’s, such as one it called the “Fudge-ee Mermaid.” At first, Barnum kept his ownership of Peale’s quiet and hired the museum’s last proprietor to stay on and keep up the mocking rivalry, which Barnum knew was good publicity for both of the museums. A month into his ownership, he shared with Kimball his weekly expenses for his new establishment (“lady doorkeeper at $3.50 . . . boy to sweep out $3.50 . . . advertisements $3.50 . . . fuel $1, Gas $8, Rent $25”). In all, he reported his expenses at $47 per week, whereas his weekly receipts were not lower than $56 and could be as high as $70.
Not only did Barnum go back and forth with Kimball about acts they could share (“I must have the fat boy or the other monster. . . . I think you had better come to New York and see these Indians and make a bargain”) as well as exhibits (“Do you want a pretty good sized bald eagle skin? I bought two yesterday—shot on Long Island”), but he was also in regular contact with the Peale family museum in Philadelphia and one they owned in Baltimore about renting out acts or other exhibits.15
The level of affection and trust in his letters to Kimball suggests that a real friendship was developing, even if it was largely epistolary. Several letters from 1843 alluded to meeting
s or possible meetings in New York, since Barnum couldn’t get to Boston: “If I ever see you it must be here—my leaving New York seems to be out of the question.” But it is not clear that any of those proposed 1843 meetings happened. Barnum’s greetings in letters from that year evolved from “Dear Moses” to “My Dear Moses” to “Friend Moses” to the mildly comic “Dearly beloved Moses” and back again. He generally signed off with “Thine,” “As ever Thine,” or “Thine as ever,” or, more playfully, “Thine all over” and once even “Yours forever and a day,” often followed by “Barnum” or just “B.”
Barnum was more than willing to give advice and to receive it. On March 22, 1843, he wrote in characteristic good humor, “Your advice in your letter was very very good and thankfully received—but won’t be strictly followed.” Six months later, he wrote:
Drive ahead—don’t share the steam—make all the noise possible—and by all means keep down the expenses!
Advice is cheap—ain’t it?16
As might be expected of two men whose businesses were increasingly intertwined, their best-laid plans sometimes went astray. When Barnum crossed a line with Kimball at a time when things were not going well in Boston and Kimball was feeling, and expressing, his distress, Barnum didn’t just apologize, he also sincerely sympathized with his friend and tried hard to josh him into a better mood. “Oh, Temperance! Oh Moses!!!” he began. “What a big oat you must [have] swallowed crossways when you wrote me. . . . Well, you are in rather bad luck just [now] and you have a right to be cross.” Then Barnum lists all the things he knows are going wrong for his friend—“the armour was wrong, [the] Indian men were contrary . . . business was bad”—and he works into the middle of the list “Barnum w[as] greedy and was keeping [an act] longer south than he promised.” Barnum calls his angry friend “a devilish clever fellow” and then begins to smooth things over with a vengeance:
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