Behemoth

Ronald B. Tobias

• Éditeur: Harper Perennial
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062244864
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: North American History

In the two hundred years since their arrival in America, elephants have worked on farms, mills, mines, and railroads, in Hollywood, and in professional baseball. They've contributed to the national discourse on civil rights, immigration, politics, and capitalism. They became so deeply ingrained in the American way that they were once accorded the rights of American citizenship, including the right to vote and the right to provide testimony under oath—and they have incurred brutal punishments when convicted of human crimes.

In Behemoth, Ronald B. Tobias has written the first comprehensive history of the elephant in America. As tragic as it is comic, this enthralling chronicle traces this animal's indelible footprint on American culture.

1

Seeing the Elephant

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from the Boston Gazette, February 23, 1761

THE GORMAGUNT

Whereas a surprising monster was caught in the woods of Canada, near the River St. Lawrence, and has with great difficulty been tamed, and brought to the house of James ELLIOT, at Curler’s Hook. This is to inform the publick, that it will be exhibited at said house till the curious are satisfied.

The monster is larger than an elephant, of a very uncommon shape, having three heads, eight legs, three fundaments, two male members, and one female pudendum on the rump. It is of various colours very beautiful, and makes a noise like the conjunction of two or three voices. It is held unlawful to kill it, and it is said to live to a great age.

The Canadians could not give a name until a very old Indian Sachem said, he remembered to have seen one when he was a boy, and his father called it a gormagunt.*

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On February 17, 1796, the sailing ship America lay at anchor off St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean, twelve hundred miles from the west coast of Africa. A junior officer noted in the ship’s log that the crew had spent the day loading supplies, which included among other things “23 sacks of coffee . . . several pumpkins and cabbages, some fresh fish for ship’s use, and greens for the elephant.” Then he added, in large bold letters that violated the disciplined margins of his log: “ELEPHANT ON BOARD.”

By the time Jacob Crowninshield, the master of the America, had reached St. Helena, he’d been at sea seventy-six days since leaving India. He was less than halfway across the Atlantic, and it would be mid-April before he’d reach New York. Four months at sea with an elephant in the hold. “We take home a fine young elephant two years old, at $450,” he wrote his brothers in America. “It is almost as large as a very large ox, and I dare say we shall get it home safe, if so it will bring at least $5,000.”

The fledgling American merchant fleet flourished during the revolution in France in 1789. The Crowninshield family of Salem, Massachusetts, began its career in shipping and trade in the West Indies with a few small ships in the early 1790s, and by 1796 the family business had grown so much that each of the five sons of patriarch George Crowninshield captained his own vessel. With larger ships that could sail to the East Indies—and beyond—they sailed the oceans of the world in search of wealth.

When Jacob Crowninshield found an elephant calf for sale in a Calcutta market, he reasoned that if he could get the calf back from India alive, he might get ten times what he’d paid for her. “I suppose you will laugh at this scheme,” he wrote his family, “but I do not mind that, [I] will turn elephant driver . . . so if it succeeds, I ought to have the whole credit and honor too; of course you know it will be a great thing to carry the first elephant to America.”

Crowninshield arrived in New York Harbor on April 13, 1796—not quite twenty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence—and offloaded a dazed two-year-old female elephant that hadn’t seen the sun in 120 days.1 The calf was physically and emotionally traumatized not only from the rigors of the trip but also from being separated violently from her mother. Calves normally stay close to their mothers for two to three years, and although Crowninshield’s elephant could feed itself at two years, she still would have been drinking her mother’s milk. Given the lack of concern or even basic understanding of care, it was a miracle she survived. Many who came after her didn’t. In years following, transoceanic travelers occasionally reported seeing the bloated corpse of an elephant bobbing in the middle of the ocean.

Ten days after he arrived, Jacob Crowninshield took out advertisements in the New York papers announcing he would show an elephant in the Bull’s Head Tavern, in the Battery where Beaver Street ran into Broadway. He touted the elephant as the greatest natural curiosity ever presented. Admission was the princely sum of fifty cents; half price for children.2

People flocked to see the elephant. Within weeks, a Welshman from Philadelphia named Welshaven Owen offered Crowninshield ten thousand dollars—twenty times his investment—for ownership of the elephant.3 Crowninshield took the money and retired from seafaring at the age of twenty-six. He entered politics and served two terms as a congressman from Massachusetts. In 1804 Thomas Jefferson nominated him as the secretary of the navy, and the Senate confirmed his appointment a year later, although Jacob declined to serve, citing his wife’s poor health. In the years following he advised President James Madison on issues of trade with Great Britain, and he died in 1808 at age thirty-eight.

The junior officer on board the America who wrote “ELEPHANT ON BOARD” in the log also died in 1808, of yellow fever in Suriname, but not before he had fathered a girl and a boy. The boy he named after himself: Nathaniel Hathorne. His son later added a w to his last name to become Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jr., author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.4

Crowninshield’s elephant outlived both men. She spent twenty of her first twenty-two years of life touring between Massachusetts and the Carolinas until she disappeared into the fog of history. Until then, newspapers widely reported her comings and goings. In addition, the Welshman Owen gave out handbills so everyone would know the elephant was coming. “It is the most respectable Animal in the world,” read his handbill, which paraphrased the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc—the Comte de Buffon—who’d declared the elephant closest to man relative to intelligence and a soul. People slogged by foot, wagon, and horseback through snowstorms, hail storms, lightning and thunder, and rain so heavy the ground turned into sucking mud for a glimpse of Crowninshield’s elephant. Then they went home and told their friends and neighbors, I have seen the elephant!

For many the elephant was living scripture. As the marvelous beast of Job, Behemoth lived in the space between celestial and bestial. Her eyes, yellow as spice, embodied ancient wisdom, and her skin mapped out countless treks across the Sinai. She even swayed to a gospel only she could hear.

Crowninshield’s elephant was as big an attraction in its time as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show would be a century later. Or Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus for the first half of the twentieth century. She tramped between Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and dozens of smaller communities between them, and every day from sunrise to sundown (except the Sabbath), crowds swarmed to see her. In December 1796, she appeared in Philadelphia to support the relief effort for the victims of the fire that had razed much of Savannah, Georgia. Welshaven Owen promised to donate his gate receipts for the day to Savannah. “Generosity is Requested,” he begged the public. By the time she appeared on stage at the New Theatre in Philadelphia in the following summer—fifteen months after landing in America—Crowninshield’s elephant had grown to three thousand pounds and measured fifteen feet, eight inches from her trunk to the tip of her tail. Her attraction grew with her size. Her character also changed. Rather than a character from the Bible, more people recognized her as a fellow traveler in the American genesis story. She shared their hardships, their frustrations, and their desires. And she drank excessively. “[She] drinks all kinds of spirituous liquors,” reads a handbill promoting her appearance in Boston. “Some days [she] has drank 30 bottles of porter, drawing the corks with [her] trunk.”5

In 1805 Hachaliah Bailey, an enterprising cattleman from Westchester County, New York, found an elephant for sale among the cattle in the New York City stockyards.6 Her previous owner, Edward Savage, about whom little is known, had made a living for a year touring his elephant in Hudson Valley, and for some reason had abandoned the idea and put her up for sale for a thousand dollars, the market price for seventy head of cattle.7

In addition to his cattle business, Hach (pronounced “Heck”) Bailey was part owner of a sloop that ferried cattle, hogs, and sheep down the Hudson River to the slaughterhouses in New York City. He was also the director of the Croton Turnpike Company, a toll road that linked Bailey’s hometown of Somers to the Hudson River at Sing Sing (present-day Ossining). Bailey was an innovative man and an aspiring entrepreneur. He decided to prove an elephant was worth more than seventy head of cattle by working her as a draught animal. She could plow deeper, and haul and carry more than any team of horses; she could pump water. With an elephant, he reasoned, he could reduce the number of horses he needed and thus feed fewer mouths.

Hachaliah is an Old Testament name that can be translated either as “enlightened by Jehovah” or “troubled by Jehovah.” Whatever the source of his inspiration, Bailey bought the elephant, shipped her upriver on one of his barges, and then walked her seventeen miles to his farm at Somers.8 By the time he got home, however, he knew his plan wasn’t going to work. The animal, which measured seven feet high and thirteen feet around, had an insatiable appetite. The day she arrived she ate Bailey out of all his corn and potatoes and then started on his hay. He also learned that elephants process food less efficiently than horses or cattle, and she’d defecate as often as twenty times a day, leaving behind huge boluses of partially digested grass that weighed anywhere from ten to forty pounds.9 It didn’t take Bailey long to realize his idea was worth less than what he’d paid for her, and that the longer he kept her, the more she’d cost.

He came up with an alternate plan, a plan that would make him, in P. T. Barnum’s words, the Father of the American Circus.10

A natural-born showman, Hach Bailey followed in the footsteps of Owen and Savage and took his elephant to the road.11 He named her Bet, perhaps as a tribute to his infant daughter, Elizabeth, and for three years they walked up and down New England looking for barns and taverns to show her to the paying public.12

Bailey charged an admission of between fifty and twenty-five cents for adults and half price for children—the same price Crowninshield had set for when she first landed in New York. For those who didn’t have cash, he bartered for knives, farm implements, foodstuffs, and even rum. Together with his dog and some trained pigs, he traveled from town to village, mostly in the middle of the night so as to avoid giving a free show. Still, when people heard the elephant was coming, they lined the road at night to see her.

People came from farms and communities as far away as thirty miles (a considerable distance in those days) to see the elephant. So many came that Bailey had to hide Bet behind a canvas to keep nonpaying customers from getting a glimpse of her, thus creating a prototype of the circus tent. He embellished his eighth wonder of the world with stories about India, Africa, and the Holy Land, and how her ancestors had marched with Alexander and Hannibal and with Assyrian, Egyptian, and Babylonian kings. A LIVING ELEPHANT, he wrote as the headline of a newspaper ad in 1808. “Perhaps the present generation may never have the opportunity of seeing an Elephant again,” he predicted, “as this is the only one in the United States, and perhaps the last visit to this place.” People often paid to see her several times, each time with more family in tow.

Bet paid handsomely, but Bailey itched for greater wealth. In 1807, he franchise...