Obaysch
Obaysch (* 1849 on the island of Obaysch in the White Nile , today Sudan ; † March 11, 1878 in the London Zoo , United Kingdom ) was the first hippopotamus in England and the first known to be alive in Europe since it was mentioned by Pliny the Elder . Ä. It was captured as a young on its birth island, after which it was named, and brought from Cairo to London in 1850 , where it aroused enormous enthusiasm.
background
Unlike elephants and rhinos, which have been known to the public as gifts for princes or fairground attractions as rare living spectacles in Europe since the 16th century, hippos have only been present in recent history from ancient reports and modern natural history without a living view. Herodotus had in his histories described, as are they dipped in the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder on a hippo in the existence of Rome mentioned. However, the ancient descriptions were not very precise. According to Herodotus, the animal had a horse's mane and Pliny claimed it migrated backwards to make it difficult to pursue it.
The Neapolitan doctor Federico Zerenghi brought the skins of two hippos, which he had caught in pitfalls in Egypt, to Rome from a trip around 1600. In the La Specola Museum in Florence, you can see an old specimen of a hippopotamus, edited by an artist; The animal is said to have come to Florence as a gift to Peter Leopold von Habsburg-Lothringen , who was also Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1765 to 1790, and lived there for a few years in the Boboli Gardens , but no contemporary confirmation exists. The famous French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon described in his Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (from 1749) the hippopotamus after a skull and a fetus that were in the “ Cabinette of the King”.
Life
The khedive of Egypt Abbas Pascha brought the hippopotamus with him from an expedition on the Nile in 1849. One of his hunters had discovered the male calf, probably only a few days old, in the reeds on the Nile island of Obaysch after the mother had been killed. When trying to take on it with its arms, however, the animal, slippery from the mud, had slipped away from him and ran into the water. The hunter was able to pull it ashore with a long fishing hook, but injured its side. The animal retained a scar that can still be clearly seen in a photo from 1852.
The young animal was first brought on the Nile to Cairo in a boat specially designed for its transport, together with an entourage of Nubian soldiers. Abbas Pascha gave the calf, now called Obaysch , to the British Consul General, Sir Charles Augustus Murray , later known as Hippopotamus-Murray , along with some other exotic animals and received greyhounds in exchange . From Cairo the hippopotamus was shipped to Southampton ; it reached London Zoo on May 25, 1850.
Abbas Pasha sent a second hippopotamus to England, which arrived in London on July 22, 1854. It was female, was given the name Adhela and was assigned to Obaysch as a companion. It was sixteen years before the couple finally had offspring in 1871; but the calf died after two days. A second calf also died the following year, only a third, born on November 5, 1872, survived. It was a female and was named Guy Fawkes . After the guards noticed her mistake, it was renamed Miss Guy . Adhela outlived Obaysch by four years; she died on December 16, 1882. Miss Guy remained without offspring.
Obaysch as a crowd favorite
Immediately after his arrival Obaysch became a permanent sensation at the London Zoo. 10,000 people came every day to marvel at the animal, and in the first year after its arrival the number of visitors to the zoo had doubled. With the exception of the African elephant Jumbo , no other zoo animal in England has appeared in the press as frequently and has become as popular as Obaysch. The hippopotamus sparked a lively souvenir trade and inspired the composition of a hippopotamus polka . Lewis Carroll wrote a poem about the hippo's extraordinary appetite. Queen Victoria led her children to his enclosure and left some notes about the animal's behavior in her diary.
Biographical material on Obaysch is in the library of the Zoological Society of London . When entering the library, the visitor encounters a sculpture by Obaysch made of burnt clay from the Nile.
See also
literature
- Charles Knight (Ed.): Natural History or Second Devision of “The English Cyclopaedia”. Volume III, London 1867, Col. 100-103 .
- Nina J. Root: Victorian England's Hippomania . In: Natural History Magazine. February 1993, pp. 34-39.
- John Simons: Obaysch. A hippopotamus in Victorian London . Sydney University Press, Sydney 2019. ( Abstract ) ISBN 9781743325865
- David Friedrich Weinland (ed.): The zoological garden. Organ of the Zoological Society in Frankfurt a. M. III. Year, 1862, pp. 128–129 .
Web links
- A Traveler from Egypt . The Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East; Bulletin 21
- La Specola with the preparation of the Medici hippopotamus from the 17th / 18th centuries. century
- Zoological Society of London: hippopotamus Guy Fawkes (photo, published 1897) ( Memento of December 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- Virtual Hippo World: Obaysch . (engl.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Book 2, Chapter 71, online English edition
- ↑ Book 8, Chapters 95, 96 Latin online edition
- ↑ After Brehm's Thierleben ; The following has been preserved as a description: Vera Descrittione Dell Hippopotamo, Animale Anfibio, que nasce in Egitto. Autore Federico Zerenghi. In Milano 1603 [1] See also: Felicitas Noeske: The hides of the hippopotamus . At: bibliotheca.gym , 06/06/2015 (accessed on April 4, 2020)
- ^ The museums of Florence: Zoological and Natural History Museum "La Specola" ; Write other sources, the Ippopotamo di Boboli the menageries of the Medici to [2] . However, no contemporary evidence of a living specimen in Florence has been found so far.
- ↑ Georges – Louis Leclerc de Buffon: General history of nature . Sixth part first volume, Leipzig 1767; P. 30ff.
- ^ A b c Nina J. Root: Victorian England's Hippomania . In: Natural History Magazine , February 1993
- ↑ DF Weinland (ed.): The zoological garden. Organ of the Zoological Society in Frankfurt a. M. III. Born in 1862
- ^ Charles Knight: Natural History or Second Devision of "The English Cyclopaedia" . Sp. 105