Barnum whopper about Jumbo’s fate finally exposed
BRITAIN: He was the first animal superstar, cherished by millions of people during his life in captivity and glorified after his apparently heroic death.
Now the truth about Jumbo’s final moments – and the mistreatment he suffered – has been revealed by an examination of the giant African elephant’s bones.
Phineas Taylor Barnum, the founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus who controversially bought Jumbo from London Zoo in 1882, claimed he was the world’s biggest elephant. His name became an epithet for anything huge, from jets to boxes of cereal, and he inspired the Disney film Dumbo.
At 3.2 metres and six tonnes, Jumbo was certainly taller than the average African elephant of his age but there were much bigger ones that lived longer.
Size was not the only thing Barnum exaggerated about the star of his ‘‘Greatest Show on Earth’’. In 1885, Jumbo was killed in a collision with a goods train in Canada while being loaded on to a railway wagon after a performance in St Thomas, Ontario.
Barnum rejected some witness accounts that Jumbo had been running away from the train and claimed instead that he had died heroically.
He told reporters that Jumbo had run head first into the train, sacrificing his own life to save his keeper, Matthew Scott, and Tom Thumb, a dwarf elephant. An image showing a head-on collision was widely published and the story spread around the world.
Now scientists at Leicester and Nottingham universities have shown that Barnum’s story was false after examining Jumbo’s skeleton, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Their findings are presented in a forthcoming BBC documentary: Attenborough and the Giant Elephant.
They found no evidence of bone fractures in his skull. This finding, combined with a photograph of Jumbo’s body showing abrasions on his rear, indicates he was hit from behind.
Sir David Attenborough’s documentary also shows an image of the crash painted by an artist three days later. It was found in an antique print gallery and shows, unlike the better known illustration, the train hitting Jumbo’s rear.
Mike Baker, curator of the Elgin County Museum in St Thomas, which has an exhibition devoted to Jumbo, said that Barnum’s story was ‘‘pure bunkum as he would probably say’’.
The scientists also found a possible explanation for Jumbo’s Jekyll and Hyde character, which involved gentle behaviour by day when he gave rides to children visiting London Zoo but rages at night when he would smash his cage and grind down his tusks.
They found he had malformed teeth, possibly a result of sticky buns fed to him by visitors and whisky shared with his keeper. The toothache could have affected him more at night when he had no distractions. The saddle he wore to give rides to visitors, including Queen Victoria’s children, may also have contributed to bone damage to Jumbo’s pelvis.
His night-time rages became so bad that the zoo decided to accept Barnum’s offer to buy him for £2000 (more than £150,000 in today’s money). The sale prompted protests by thousands of people and Queen Victoria was said to be very upset at the departure of Jumbo, who was plied with alcohol to calm him on the two-week voyage to the United States.
London Zoo has acknowledged its poor treatment of Jumbo, but without an apology. –