Is it any wonder that the feejee mermaid is the official mascot of showhistory.com? Granted ours is a very strange, glass-eyed, cute(?) version of the form imitated and re-imagined a thousand times since Barnum. Nonetheless as classic objects of wonder, author Wolff reaffirms through his scholarship that these “little beasts” are still very much part of our culture. For more information on Feejee’s and their ilk, see our page on Gaffs.
The “Extraordinary Japanese Mermaid” of the Milwaukee Public Museum
The Feejee Mermaid: The Milwaukee Taxidermied Treasure & Others
by Karl Wolff
Introduction
The Feejee Mermaid represents humanity’s attempt to deal with its myths. This physical manifestation of ancient myth harkens back to other works of art, but over time became a myth in its own right, resurrected in the modern sideshows. Modern sideshow professionals keep the myth alive, entertaining crowds and preserving a specific part of American cultural heritage.
Throughout the centuries, there have been alleged mermaid sightings and exhibitions of mermaids before the Fejee Mermaid. The Fejee Mermaid (note the spelling) became Phineas T. Barnum’s greatest humbug and remains a staple in the Barnum literature. The humbug tradition is carried on with the Milwaukee Public Museum’s “Japanese Mermaid” (as seen above). Today modern taxidermy artists make “animal gaffs” for sideshows and a general audience. On the surface, their profession appears peculiar, but they actually carry on a tradition spanning hundreds of years in supplying sideshows and carnivals with fake animals.
Because the “Japanese Mermaid” is a taxidermy hybrid— a combination of fish and papier-mâché— it presents a series of challenges in a number of areas, including: cataloging, conservation, and collections. The fake animal was constructed out of the cheapest of materials for the entertainment of the sideshow audience, but has mythological, cultural, and historical associations that make it one of the more valuable and intriguing artifacts of the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Mermaids in Mythology
The mermaid is a mythical creature. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the mermaid was a “fabulous sea marine creature, half-woman and half-fish, allied to the SIREN of classical mythology, [that] probably arose from sailor’s accounts of the dugong” . An Irish mermaid is called a merrow, from the Irish word murbhach. These merrows “were believed by Irish fishermen to forebode a coming storm.” The sense of foreboding is also associated with the Sirens in Homer’s Ulysses. Unlike mermaids, sirens were “half-woman and half-bird” , but remain mythical figures that seduced travelers into disaster. Siren comes from the Greek word seira meaning ‘rope’ or ‘entangler’. Besides Irish and Greek mermaids, similar mythical creatures exist in other cultures as well. Jan Bondeson mentions Artergatis, the “fish-tailed Phoenician moon goddess” .
The sea’s power and unpredictability are embodied in these figures, whether as a sea goddess, siren, or mermaid. This will become important later in history as the competing forces of myth and tradition collide with the yearning for empirical proof and the growing reliance on science as a method of explanation. The Feejee Mermaid will become emblematic of this tumultuous reassessment of knowledge, science, and mythology.
Mermaid Sightings and Early Mermaid Relics
Prior to the appearance of the Feejee Mermaid in 1822, mermaids made their presence known to Western Europeans. These spectacles came in two varieties: sightings and relics. While the historical accuracy of the sightings is dubious, these phenomena are instrumental in understanding how the public will later react to The Feejee Mermaid.
The mermaid sightings, while easy to dismiss, are analogous to UFO sightings of the present day and other cryptozoological encounters (e.g.: Bigfoot, Chupacabra). What is missing from these encounters is physical evidence. Bondeson cites examples of contact with living mermaids. The popular imagination had yet to be debunked by science, so it was natural to believe these tales. In 1403 a “living mermaid [was] caught off Edam, Holland” . In 1531 a live mermaid was caught off the Baltic coast and was sent as a present to King Sigismond of Poland.
FIGURE 1: A contemporary drawing of Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid, “The Eades Mermaid” (Source: Olalquiaga).
Encounters were not limited to European waters. In 1560 Jesuits in Ceylon caught seven tritons and seven mermaids. Unfortunately, Bondeson does not have much detail about these early “live mermaids.” The lack of details can be attributed to the lack of primary sources and the lack of physical evidence. Given the wide array of marine life, it would be plausible that the Jesuits caught a vaguely human-looking sea animal and gave it the name “triton” or “mermaid”. These early encounters reveal the difficulties of animal classification.
In 1565 a “Mermaid skinne” is exhibited, originating from Thora, a town by the Red Sea. A mermaid also was exhibited in a church in Swartvale, Holland in 1660.
Classification becomes a primary issue when scientists came in contact with the creatures of mythology. In the 1700s, the anatomist Thomas Bartholin possessed a hand and tooth of Sirenica danica, which later sold at public auction in 1826. The anatomist Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of binomial nomenclature, saw two specimens. The first was a mermaid caught off the coast of Nyköping, Jutland. Another specimen, a “siren” from Brazil, was kept in a museum in Leyden and appeared in the tenth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. But this classification of mermaids and sirens is not out of character with taxonomy, since scientists have given animals names like hydra, medusa, and devilfish.
The first mermaid to tour in Britain was in 1737. A live mermaid was exhibited in the market of St. Germains as late as 1759, while two tritons were caught off the Isle of Man in 1800, and well-publicized mermaid sightings were reported in 1809 and 1812. In 1809, more than a decade before the appearance of the Feejee Mermaid, an exhibitor is charged with fraud for displaying a fake mermaid.
Fraud will become a major issue with the appearance of the Feejee Mermaid. The battles between science and mythology, elitism and populism, entertainment and education will be fought in the first half of the nineteenth century. The battleground will be the animal gaff in the form of an ugly mummified mermaid.
The Fejee Mermaid
While literature on earlier mermaid sightings and exhibitions remain sparse, much has been written about the Fejee Mermaid (note spelling). Its association with Phineas T. Barnum is responsible for its well-known status, especially among sideshow professionals and taxidermists. Barnum himself called the Fejee Mermaid “The most famous put-on of all.” Olalquiaga asserts that the fake mermaids were “surrogate relics of ancient dreams” . Its immense popularity reflected “a century obsessed with empirical proof” , functioning in a strange ritual territory as both scientific specimen and mythological relic. Here was material proof that the ancient myths were true. P. T. Barnum would later manipulate truth and reality, destabilizing both in the name of entertainment. But the story of the eponymous Fejee Mermaid is about more than Barnum’s showmanship.
While traveling in Indonesia Captain Samuel Barrett Eades, an American working for the Boston commissioning house Perkins and Co., arrived in Batavia. As one-eighth owner of the merchant vessel Pickering, he was beholden to the majority owner of the vessel, a man named Stephen Ellery. Then Eades saw a two and a half foot animal whose strangeness rivaled its ugliness. As an experienced sailor, Eades must have been familiar with cartographic maps and the monsters depicted in the margins. What he saw was one of those monsters, only this time he could see it with his own eyes and without the bias of a cartographer who heard sea tales secondhand.
FIGURE 2: A contemporary drawing of Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid, “The Eades Mermaid” (Source: Olalquiaga).
Sources disagree on length, but the literature is unanimous in what made up this alleged Mermaid. Its tail was from a salmon, while the head and torso came from a female orangutan (Figure 1). The eyes were artificial and the nails were either horn or quill. But Eades thought it was genuine, which provoked him to sell the ship and buy the Mermaid for 5000 Spanish dollars or 1200 pounds. He thought he could exhibit the Mermaid and make the money back by charging admission to see the wonder.
The Fejee Mermaid was first exhibited in Cape Town in early 1822. It next appeared on exhibit in the Turf Coffeehouse in St. James’s Street from September 1822 to January 9, 1823. Paul Semonin states that “Inns were regarded … for upscale viewing,” [but] “The cheapest shows were those of itinerant showmen who set up their displays in the streets near taverns or coffeehouses.”
Men of science disregarded the exhibition, but the general public thought it was genuine. One of these men was an assistant to the eminent London anatomist Sir Everard Home. Home would later be famous for examining both platypus and mermaid. William Clift, his assistant, debunked the Mermaid on September 21, 1822. Harriet Ritvo asserts how “Exhibited mermaids … concretely challenged the established order of nature, which offered them no places.” The issue of place would later become problematic for scientists attempting to classify the mermaid. When the exploration of Australia was in full swing, Charles Gould stated “many of the so-called mythical animals … come legitimately within the scope of the plain matter-of-fact Natural History.”
Since taxidermists were producing animal gaffs for sideshows (Figure 2) at this time, the scientists thought it conceivable for “an unscrupulous taxidermist” to attach a fake beak onto another animal, possibly a beaver or otter.
Olalquiaga sums up the bizarre status of the Fejee Mermaid: “By the mid-1800s, then, mermaids have turned into the most confusing of beings, adding their amphibious nature this triple crossover between fact and fiction, life and death, real and fake.” When Clift debunked the Mermaid in 1822, he took away the source of wonder and, in turn, Eades’s business.
By November 1822, in a last ditch effort at credibility; Eades advertised that Home said the Mermaid was genuine. By December of that year, the public had lost favor of the exhibit. On January 9, 1823, Turf Coffeehouse shut down the exhibition. During the next year, it toured the provinces, and then from 1825 to 1842 its whereabouts were unknown.
Article by Karl Wolff, master’s student in Public History-Museum Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. During the summer of 2005 he completed an internship at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.
