Chunee
Chunee (born around 1808 in India , † February 23, 1826 in London ) was a male Indian elephant who first appeared on stage and later became a zoo attraction. He was shot in his cage when he could no longer be controlled.
origin
Chunee probably grew up in captivity in India and was bought by Captain Hay in 1810 and shipped from Bombay to England. At that time the animal was about two or three years old. Hay sold the elephant to Astley's Circus immediately upon arrival . This circus loaned the elephant for 900 guineas to the Covent Garden Theater , where he was to appear in the play Harlequin and Columbine .
Chunee in the theater
With the engagement of an elephant, Henry Harris, the theater's manager, followed a trend of the times to have trained animals appear on the stage. The Sultan of Kashmir was to ride on the stage on Chunee's back and then dismount after the elephant had kneeled. But on his first appearance in 1811, Chunee was panicked by the noise from the audience, jumped up before the actor and the Indian elephant driver, who was sitting on his neck, could dismount, and stormed off the stage. No one was seriously injured in the incident, but the press reacted with scorn and derision to Henry Harris' experiment. But he was not discouraged, and eventually Chunee got used to the applause and whistles of the audience. However, he always remained nervous on stage, which was reflected in loud flatulence . The audience was not exactly happy about this, but on the other hand they were amused when the elephant hit the trunk or swept off the neck of the man who plagued him with an iron hook. After forty appearances, Chunee's stage career was over. Astley's Circus owned enough other elephants and refrained from having Chunee perform. In 1812, the elephant was owned by Edward Cross and Stephen Polito, who ran an indoor zoo at Exeter Change House.
The Exeter Change Menagerie
In 1793 Gilbert Pidcock , who had initially operated a traveling menagerie , set up a zoo in a four-story building on The Strand in London . The building, Exeter Change , was named after its predecessor on this site, Exeter House, which had partially supplied the building materials. Probably Pidcock had initially only acquired the building as winter quarters for his animals and showmen and then discovered that it was more lucrative to use it as a zoo. Shops were located on the ground floor, and the animal cages were on the three upper floors. Pidcock started his zoo with a rhinoceros, a zebra, a kangaroo, a lynx and various birds and gradually increased his populations.
How the rhinoceros and, in 1812, the elephant Chunee got to the first floor is unknown. The supporting structure under Chunee's cage was stabilized to support the weight of the animal, but the rest of the building was not.
Pidcock died in 1810. In 1814, Edward Cross took over Stephen Polito's share of the zoo and became the sole owner. Though the idea of housing a complete zoo in a four-story downtown building sounds strange, the Exeter Change menagerie had a certain reputation among scientists. Several offspring of tigers and lions succeeded, many animals survived the keeping in the building for decades. Cross was in correspondence with natural scientists like Sir Everard Home , who received all interesting deceased animals for examination and processing, Sir Astley Paston Cooper and Joshua Brookes , and artists like Sir Edwin Landseer and Jacques-Laurent Agasse used the animals in the menagerie as models. The tame lions Nero and Chunee were particularly popular with the audience.
Chunee in the Exeter Change Menagerie
The menagerie was open to the public from nine in the morning until nine in the evening; general feeding took place at 8 p.m. Chunee, who had his cage on the first floor, rang this public attraction with a big bell. His caretaker Alfred Copps had taught him other tricks that Lord Byron , who visited the menagerie on November 14, 1813, saw. He noted in his journal that the animal handed him a coin tossed into the cage and took off his hat and put it back on, and joked that he would like to hire this elephant as a butler . Other celebrities also liked to visit the elephant in the menagerie, including actors like Charles Mayne Young , who already knew him from the stage, and Edward Kean . The poet Thomas Hood also went in and out of Exeter Change.
Everard Home was of course also interested in the elephant. In 1823 he examined the effects of music on animals in Exeter Change. While Chunee listened with interest to the sounds of the piano and horn, the experiment with the lion Nero had to be broken off because the animal began to rage.
Chunee did well in the menagerie. In 1820 a new cage had to be built for him because its size had more than doubled since moving in - Cross praised him as the largest elephant in Europe in his new catalog of the menagerie from 1820. The animal weighed over five tons at the time. The same catalog also claimed that Chunee was extremely gentle and docile. However, this was not entirely true. Serious incidents have occurred over the years.
As early as 1815, Chunee had suddenly attacked his guard Copps, who until then had seemed to have him under complete control, and pushed him into a corner of his cage. Fortunately, the man was not pierced by the elephant's tusks, but sank unconscious to the ground and was worked by Chunee with his trunk until Edward Cross was able to distract the elephant. Copps' lifeless body could be pulled out from between the bars. Copps left the menagerie after this incident. He later worked in the Tower Menagerie.
George Dyer, who apparently had no experience with elephants, took his position as elephant handler at Exeter Change. Chunee's behavior quickly became unpredictable. Cross gave Dyer an elderly, experienced zookeeper to assist him: John Taylor, a former circus performer whose right arm had been torn off and eaten by a lion, was able to correct Dyer's mistakes to some extent and restore the elephant to calmer behavior. When free tickets were distributed to soldiers and police officers after the Battle of Waterloo and one of these guests irritated the elephant, he was almost dragged into the cage by Chunee. Taylor was able to prevent this at the last moment.
One night, George Dyer, dressed as a devil, returned from a masquerade ball and was about to cross the elephant's cage to reach his own quarters, which was immediately beyond. Chunee, who probably did not recognize his carer, smashed his nose with a blow with his trunk, was brutally punished for it and subsequently attacked Dyer again and again. This complained to Edward Cross. Cross, however, also listened to John Taylor's demonstrations, announced Dyer, and promoted Taylor to senior elephant caretaker. His assistant became a young German named Johann Tietjen. Taylor's luck didn't last long, however. He fell out with the other employees, was finally fired and was replaced by a man named Richard Carter, Cardwell or Cartmell, who had previously worked for a short time in the Tower menagerie. Carter treated the animal extremely brutally without incurring the resentment of Edward Cross.
There were particular problems with Chunee during the annual musth . Carter and Cross tried to overcome this difficult period by treating Chunee with huge amounts of laxatives , which was unsuitable and unsuccessful. The keepers had long since been instructed to enter the elephant cage in pairs and armed with a long spear.
Another serious incident occurred on November 1, 1825. Carter and Tietjen entered the cage. Apparently Tietjen wanted to prove that Chunee was still easy to control, and instructed Carter to put down the spit, which he did. Chunee took the spit in his trunk and played with it, but put it down again at Tietjen's instruction. At that moment Cross passed the cage and shouted a joke at Tietjen, while the keeper who was cleaning the elephant instructed the animal to turn around. Chunee apparently obeyed this order hastily; one of his tusks pierced Tietjen's chest. While Carter fled from the cage in horror, Cross hurried over and pulled the orderly out. Chunee didn't stop him: he hadn't tried to trample Tietjen's body either, but was apparently standing in a corner of his cage over the incident.
Any help came too late for Tietjen, and so, following the customs of the time, Chunee was brought to court because his caretaker had died. However, the incident was classified as an accident and resulted in a symbolic fine for Chunee.
Chunee was still a crowd favorite. Queen Victoria saw him as a child, as did Charles Dickens and Robert Browning . Thomas Hood had him suggest in a funny poem to appear together with the actor Charles Mathews , who represented a certain competition with his appearances in the English Opera House very close to the menagerie. But Edward Cross has not enjoyed his elephant since Tietjen's death: He feared further accidents and wanted to get rid of Chunee before another accident happened. Still, no contract was signed when an American offered him £ 500 for the animal. The negotiations probably failed because of the difficulty of getting the elephant from the first floor onto the street and finding a captain who was ready to transport the heavy, unpredictable animal across the Atlantic. Cross wanted to avoid a catastrophe like the one that had occurred a few years earlier with Garnier's elephants .
Chunee's end
On February 20, 1826, a Sunday, Chunee started running against the walls of his cage and slowly but surely demolished it. In order to calm the elephant down or at least to tire it out, laxatives were used again, but this time it no longer had any effect. Then you tried ale , which actually calmed the elephant for a short time. But on the following Wednesday he started raging again and the stable cage began to give way. Fearing that not only Chunee but also a number of lions, tigers, snakes and crocodiles would be set free if Chunee left his cage and broke through the floor, Cross and Carter decided - against the resistance of Cross' wife - to poison the elephant .
Cross bought up all the potent poisons available at a pharmacy with some difficulty. But Chunee never touched hay that had been treated with caustic sublimate , nor did he consume arsenic in a porridge. He also refused a poisoned roll and refused to eat at all after this attempt. A little later he continued the attempts to destroy his cage.
Cross had the menagerie evacuated and the cage strengthened and first sought help from the Paddington Police Station. The alerted police officers, including Mr. Herring, a relative of Cross, found Exeter Change surrounded by a crowd of onlookers and the animals in an uproar. The attempt of the three policemen to shoot Chunee failed - the animal attacked them and hit them with its trunk.
Meanwhile, Cross got his old friend Joshua Brookes from a lecture to show the police where the elephant was vulnerable and alerted a group of soldiers. They were inexperienced recruits, unable to even load their rifles properly, but needed the help of the police. They also had few cartridges and most of them missed their target. Herring ordered more weapons and ammunition with which 14 men finally shot the elephant. It was a long time before Chunee collapsed on her knees. But when Herring made to climb into the shattered cage, the elephant jumped up again and hurled him into the crowd. So Chunee continued to be shot at and attacked with harpoons and spears. However, there was no success. In memory of the killing of Garnier's elephants, Cross went to find a cannon. Meanwhile, Carter ordered the elephant to kneel, as he had always done during the demonstrations. Indeed, Chunee obeyed orders. Now Carter was able to drill a bayonet into Chunee's flank and Herring managed a shot at close range in the elephant's ear. Chunee was slaughtered by numerous more stabs and shots at close range before Edward Cross returned with the cannon.
Disassembly
The staff persuaded Cross to let the curious in and let the dead elephant, which lay in its blood in the smashed cage, open for inspection. The menagerie stayed open until after midnight that day. There was also a large crowd on the following days. Humphry Davy , President of the Royal Society of London , toured the carcass, as did the Bishop of London and the "legislator" Lord Stowell . Many people lamented the death of the elephant, others thought more about profit: soon recipes for elephant steaks and similar dishes appeared in the Mirror , and Joshua Brookes was selling expensive tickets for the expected autopsy of the elephant. But Chunee was still dead on the first floor of Exeter Change.
There the phrenologist James De Ville measured the skull of the animal and made a cast of the head and shoulders of Chunee. Another scientist, Dr. Johann Spurzheim , wanted to examine Chunee's brain, which Cross did not allow. Everard Home took some muscle samples, but most of the dead animal remained in its cage for days. The stench rendered the surrounding buildings unusable in the days that followed. The animals at Exeter Change suffered too, of course; a sick tiger had to be transported on a stretcher. On Saturday, March 4th, Cross received an unequivocal threat if the dead elephant was not removed by Monday.
The carcass was then twisted using rope, the eyes removed and the trunk cut off. These parts had been sold to spectators. Brookes then cut open the abdominal cavity so that the innards could be removed. Nine butchers then dismantled the body. The animal's skin was brought to a Mr. Davis, who had paid 50 guineas for it, on Sunday March 5th. Cross had probably dumped the elephant's digestive tract in the Thames by this time . On Sunday morning, Brookes, Spurzheim, the zoologist Ryals, and several other scientists began the dissection. Under the circumstances, it had to be done quickly and had little teaching value for the 100 or so students who were present. They carried the pieces of meat to the ground floor, where they were further cut up by butchers. At least the autopsy showed that Chunee was in good health.
Recovery
Cross refused to feed the rotten meat to his big cats, so Chunee's leftovers were given to the cat food manufacturers. There were several interested parties for the elephant's skeleton, but Cross decided to keep it. It was placed in the shattered elephant cage and attracted numerous visitors over the next few months.
Chunee's death appears to mark a turning point in the fate of the Exeter Change menagerie. Edward Cross refused to buy a new elephant to replace Chunee. In 1828 the road was to be widened and Exeter Change torn down. Cross moved his animals to another house in Charing Cross . On the way, a hyena and an antelope escaped, which again caused a great response from the public.
Chunee's skeleton made the move, but was sold for £ 300 to a Mr. Bentley in 1829, who put it on display in various cities. Pictures from this period show that Chunee's tusks on this skeleton had been replaced by others: one had been badly damaged in his youth, the other broken off when the cage was demolished. In 1830 the skeleton was loaned to the University of London. In May 1831, William Clift bought the skeleton, including the original tusks. He was the curator of the Hunterian Museum and subjected the skeleton and tusks to a thorough examination. He found that one of the two tusks showed signs of severe inflammation that had spread to the jawbone. So Chunee's frenzy was probably a result of the excruciating pain this inflammation caused. Frank Buckland wrote in his work Curiosities of Natural History that the elephant would have been easy to calm down if the pus had been paved the way outside through a cut. How this would have to be done, however, he did not explain.
Whereabouts
The trunk, eyes and heart of the elephant were initially preserved, but have not been preserved. His skin, bought by Mr. Davis in 1826, was re-offered in 1829 and relaunched in 1832. A small piece of it ended up in the Saffron Walden Museum in 1837 , where it is still located today. It is possible that after the third sale, the entire skin was dismantled and sold as a souvenir.
Chunee's skeleton remained in the Hunterian Museum until it was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941. Rumor has it that the tooth residue that showed traces of inflammation was rescued by a firefighter and is now privately owned. Jan Bondeson also remembers seeing in another collection an old elephant tusk with the marks of a bullet, which is said to have belonged to a teacher in Eton for a long time and possibly came from Chunee.
Reactions to Chunee's death
Chunee's death sparked a deluge of articles and pictures about the life and death of the elephant. Former warden John Taylor wrote a long memoir in which he presented himself as Chunee's only and last friend. Taylor was unemployed after his release and tried to make a living with the pamphlet. The work was widely read and negatively influenced public opinion towards Carter, Cross and Brookes. The latter was portrayed as a cruel corpse molester in a play. Another play, Chuneelah; or, The Death of the Elephant of Exeter Change , was successfully performed for six months.
Fate of the menagerie
Edward Cross and his menagerie had to leave their new domicile in Charing Cross in 1829 to make way for the new building of the National Gallery. Critics of keeping animals in the closed building at the time presented more modern zoos such as the Jardin des Plantes in Paris as a model and condemned Cross' concept. He offered his entire animal herds including his own services to the Zoological Society of London , but was turned away. Thereupon he went to influential and above all wealthy people like the Archbishop of Canterbury , the Duke of Devonshire and Queen Adelaide for support, bought a plot of land near Walworth and opened the Surrey Zoological Garden there in 1831 . This company had great success. Cross showed giraffes, a giant tortoise, numerous birds and reptiles, but probably no more elephants. However, it appears that in the late 1820s he once again briefly owned an elephant, which in turn was named Chunee. This animal was sold to a Mr. Massey, who demonstrated it in Oxford and other cities and later apparently toured with him in France. In 1844, Edward Cross retired from professional life. The zoo was taken over by his longtime collaborator William Tyler. Under Tyler, the Surrey Zoological Garden quickly went downhill. In 1856 the last of the animals were sold at bargain prices after the zoo was closed. The bears were used by a hair care company, and the last remaining giraffe that had been sold on the continent broke its neck while being loaded onto the ship.
The Strand Palace Hotel now stands on the site of the former Exeter Change and nothing reminds of the former menagerie. A short distance away, however, is Trafalgar Square with the Nelson column . The lion figures on this monument are by Edwin Landseer. He may have used his drawings of Nero, the tame lion in Exeter Change.
The Victoria and Albert Museum has a group of figures that was created in Staffordshire around 1830 and is called Polito's Menagerie. It shows an elephant, which, surrounded by big cats, monkeys and exotic birds, stands above the entrance gate to a house that is surrounded by musicians - apparently a reminiscence of the Exeter Change, which was adorned with a picture of the elephant.
literature
- Jan Bondeson, Animal Freaks , Tempus Publishing Ltd., Chalford 2008, ISBN 978-0-7524-4595-3 , pp. 63-92
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Georges Cuvier et al., The Animal Kingdom. Arranged in conformity with it's organization. Vol. III: The Class Mammalia , London 1828, p. 358 shows this spelling. Here also a detailed description of the killing of the elephant.
- ↑ http://users.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/romnat/zoos.htm
- ^ John Taylor, The Life, Death, and Dissection, of the Largest Elephant Ever Known in This Country , London (W. Watling) 1826
- ↑ Jane Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin , Routledge, Chapman & Hall 2002, ISBN 978-0415243780 , p. 31
- ↑ http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O85689/figure-group-politos-menagerie/