http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/03/07/jumbo_the_elephant_from_child_star_to_boozedup_wreck.html
Jumbo the elephant: From child star to boozed-up wreckJumbo, The
Unauthorised Biography of a Victorian Sensation tells the tale of the
West's obsession with a famous animal, and a tragic life.
By: Jennifer Hunter The Reader, Published on Fri Mar 07 2014
The Star Policards: 0 Councillors mentioned in this article
In Victorian England, one of the great attractions at the London Zoo was
Jumbo the elephant. Jumbo seemed sweet and friendly. He ate the sugared
buns people pushed through his cage. He gave children rides on his back,
including young Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. But when he came
to sexual maturity, and became more difficult to control, the zoo decided
to sell him to P.T. Barnum, and Jumbo became part of a circus act in the
United States. There have been plays and films made based on the life of
this stalwart elephant - including a musical with Doris Day. Walt Disney
used Jumbo as a template for his cartoon, Dumbo. Author John Sutherland has
traced the elephant's eventful life, which ended in 1885, here in southern
Ontario. Our conversation has been edited for length.
I was brought to tears by your book. Jumbo may have been adored by
Victorian schoolchildren, but his story was a tragedy from the moment of
his birth. Tell us how he was first found in the jungle and what happened
to him.
In a sense Jumbo was lucky in that he did survive for 25 years whereas most
of his kind in [what is now] Eritrea were slaughtered. Today Eritrea has no
elephants; they have been exterminated. In Jumbo's time the natural habitat
allowed an ecological relationship between the elephants and the tribes who
hunted them. Then along came the white hunters with their massive guns and
the extermination began.
Jumbo was a baby elephant when he saw his mother hacked before his eyes for
her tusks and her hide. Baby elephants are very dependent on their mothers.
So he was taken from his mother. He must have been just about the age where
he could make it on his own.
Because he was small they could carry him to Europe on a boat. In the
mid-19th century, zoos were just beginning and needed animals. He was first
purchased for the German zoo market and then he was sold off to France and
ended up in the Parisian zoo, the Jardin des Plantes, where he was so
scabby and messed up that they didn't put him on display. They had two
other elephants, Castor and Pollux. Jumbo was kept in a back part of the
zoo.
He was finally bought by the English zoological garden. The British had a
huge interest in African elephants. They had Indian elephants and rhinos in
but no African elephant. They purchased Jumbo by giving the French an
Indian rhino.
Jumbo was imported into the newly established zoological society gardens on
Regent Square and he became a star attraction. In fact, Jumbo is probably
one of the most famous animals in the 19th century.
It's not natural for elephants to be kept in cages. At night, Jumbo ground
down his tusks because he was so anxious. Really he was in prison at the
zoo. But he became the star attraction. Children could feed him a bun and
sit on his back, and he attracted vast numbers of paying customers, which
did foster the very valuable work at the zoological society in London.
The name Jumbo didn't exist before this elephant was brought to the London
Zoo. What was the origin of the word?
There is a huge controversy about what the name means. It could have been
related to the Swahili name for chief, jumbe, and there is a Swahili
greeting, jambo. At the beginning of the 19th century there was a term
"jumbo" used for unwieldy racehorses.
Now the word is everywhere: anything which is large . . . Jumbo jets; jumbo
drinks; jumbo hamburgers.
Jumbo became more than just a fixture of the London Zoological Society. He
didn't just sit in a cage during the 17 years he lived there.
The English have always been sentimental about animals. Jumbo was looked
after during the day but he was abused at night to make him docile, with
straps and hooks. During the day children would pay him a twopence for a
bun to feed him. And the zookeepers realized they could put a howdah [a
seat carrying several passengers] on him and give people rides on his back.
Why was Jumbo sold to the Barnum and Bailey Circus?
It's an interesting story about how Jumbo became an ordinary citizen.
Elephants become sexual between the ages of 20 and 30 and become impossible
to control. Jumbo entered musth, it's an equivalent of a testosterone
storm, like our adolescence.
Jumbo was turning dangerous and they decided to shoot him. At that point
enters P.T. Barnum, who had a three-ring circus and wanted to buy the
biggest animal in the world. He buys Jumbo for $10,000. Barnum was not a
bad elephant keeper. True, his elephants were abused, there is no other way
of keeping an elephant in line. Sledgehammers and spears and pointed hooks
were used. The elephant hide is two inches thick, so you need something
that will penetrate. But elephants are very sensitive. They can feel flies
land on their skin; they suffer extreme pain and that is used to discipline
them, crush their will.
In fact, Barnum's circus was not necessarily the right place for Jumbo to
go. Jumbo became a lush, so to speak.
One of the ways he kept Jumbo manageable was by giving him vast amounts of
alcohol. Jumbo would knock down a bottle of champagne or whisky. Before he
landed in New York, he was given a bottle of port. His favourite food was
biscuits soaked in whisky. I suspect that vast amounts of alcohol were
given to him because he had a large body mass. He seems to have become
stupefied by it rather than turn into a mad drunk.
In Toronto there was much anxiety about the elephants in our zoo. Last year
the zoo, after much public pressure, let its elephants go to an animal
sanctuary in the United States. Are elephants beginning to disappear in
zoos around the world?
There are two schools of thought. There are those who think the wild animal
park in Africa is the way to go. And there are those who think that because
their natural habits are disappearing we are going to have to compromise
between letting them roam free and confining them in some way.
Why did you become interested in elephants?
I was born in 1938 and one of the few things in Britain during the war
years that gave a boy pleasure was the Disney film, Dumbo. You remember in
the film that Dumbo was first called Jumbo Junior. Dumbo gave me a feeling
of lifelong kinship with African elephants. As a child I had big ears like
Dumbo.
What were some of the things you learned about elephants as you did your
research on Jumbo?
They have bigger brains than us. They have a huge range of vocabulary,
which humans can't actually hear. They have very sensitive feet. In the
2004 tsunami, elephants seemed to panic because they could feel the
trembling in their feet.
They should be allowed to have large spaces where they can be themselves
in. We lavish so much attention on cats, which kill many more birds in
North America than guns do.
Jumbo died in Canada.
The death of Jumbo in 1885 is mysterious. He had just finished performances
in Chatham, Ontario, and St. Thomas and he was being loaded into his train.
The elephants were herded across a fence when they shouldn't have been and
I suspect Jumbo may have been very drunk. An unscheduled freight train came
down the line and Jumbo was hit.
There was a myth that he tried to protect a small elephant who was his
partner. But it is quite apparent that it was an accidental collision.
There is another myth that Barnum set up the whole thing himself. Jumbo was
killed, the train screeched to a halt and there was six tons of elephant
hash on the line. They kept the hide and stuffed it later.
St. Thomas erected a statue to Jumbo in 1977. It has become the noblest
monument to Jumbo in the most unlikely place. It is a fine statue but they
give him tusks not knowing that he wore his tusks down in anxiety every
night. The statue makes him look like a very handsome elephant.
jhunter_at_thestar.ca
Received on Sun Mar 09 2014 - 12:06:17 EDT