We know everything and nothing about celebrities, be they human or animal. Jumbo the elephant, for example, has been with us for so long that we hardly remember that he was a real elephant and not just a marketing or animation conceit. Yet 135 years ago, he was such a celebrity that his owner would not even allow him to be photographed for fear of ruining his carefully planned public image. Ham had no problem with that. He was the first chimpanzee astronaut, so he was happy to be paraded in front of the media, but other celebrities had to put up with it too.
Little Jumbo enjoyed a childhood in East Africa with his mother, from whom the baby elephants are not separated until they become teenagers and go their own way, when he became an orphan in 1862, just a year old. Poachers killed his mother and captured him. He met a similar fate to many other captured wild animals, except that he became famous and the others did not.
Then still nameless, it and its new owner first made their way from Sudan to Suez, and from there by boat to Europe. Miraculously, he survived the voyage and landed in Trieste, but there was no warm home waiting for him. He was passed from hand to hand for a little while, until he finally settled in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
The elephants that once attracted visitors have died. He was all alone, which would not have bothered him in the wild, where males are often solitary, but here he is, and he has become accustomed to human company. And he didn’t lack for it, for he has become not only a Parisian landmark, but also a European one.
However, as fame is usually short-lived, he was soon overshadowed by two younger rivals. When the two young elephants arrived at the zoo, Jumbo had to go on the road again. This time he went to London and found a new home at the London Zoo in 1865, aged four.
He arrived there sick and exhausted, but soon recovered and grew into a true giant: he stood 3.25 metres tall, although at the time of his death it was claimed that he was even a little taller, at four metres.
Even though it was huge, it was friendly. He got on well with other elephants, especially his friend Alice, and was trained to carry visitors on his back without too much trouble. He was particularly fond of children, and became their riding horse, so he and his parents were very upset when they heard that London Zoo was planning to sell him.
Jumbo, as he was called by his London guardian, was a teenager in his 20s. He had become capricious and unpredictable. The zoo no longer wanted to deal with him, and an offer from an American, P.T. Barnum, the owner of the circus, was too good to refuse. He was prepared to pay, in today’s money, about 250,000 dollars for Jumbo.
Stubborn or not, Jumbo was a star and had his price, and Barnum wanted this “tall elephant” in any way he could, but only if he could be transported to New York despite his stubbornness. How? “With a kind attitude and lots of chains”, as he put it, convinced that he was very gracious to his animals.
From today’s point of view, he was cruel, but from then, he really treated them well compared to other zoo owners. London’s children were not interested. They fiercely resisted the zoo’s decision. Hundreds of thousands of them reportedly wrote to Queen Victoria herself to ask her to intervene, but in vain. The decision was overturned and Elephant Bill, as Barnum called the caretaker of his 20 elephants and a few others, arrived in London.
Stubborn Jumbo
For two weeks, they built a cage as big as a van and attached wheels to it so that Jumbo could kindly hop in and ride in it to the ship. But he had other plans. Once he saw the cage, he didn’t move, even though his London guardian, Matthew Scott, was standing by his side. Jumbo trusted him completely, but now even he could not persuade him to say goodbye to his elephant family, to whom he had become so attached over the past 16 years, without rebellion.
But somehow it had to be brought to America. He and Elephant Bill tied a chain around his leg and started dragging him towards the cage. Jumbo got upset. He tried to yank the chain off, but they put new ones around him. They wrapped one around his head until he really couldn’t move anymore. He went mad, and when they heard the sound of his suffering, the other elephants got upset too.
But Jumbo could not resist indefinitely. He got tired and calmed down. Matthew Scott started bribing him with biscuits and Jumbo did follow him willingly, but only as far as the cage door. He did not and refused to enter it. Now Scott and Elephant Bill were exhausted. They had had enough and took Jumbo back to his quarters at the zoo.
The next day, they took a new tactic. They tried to persuade him to walk to the boat alone. They had difficulty getting him to the zoo gates, but when he passed through them and they closed behind him, it was all over again. The ground beneath his feet was different from what he was used to in the zoo, so he decided not to move again.
He lay down on the floor and wailed sadly. Scott squatted in front of him. He was tormenting him now, but he also loved him immensely. Together they listened to his elephant family crying for him and Alice, who was particularly inconsolable. Elephants are extremely attached to each other, so Jumbo was even more disturbed now.
So they tortured each other for a few days until Jumbo just gave in and went into the cage. Several strong men dragged her to the river, which finally brought her to the harbour. There, the cage was hoisted on board for eight minutes, but finally it was ready to sail across the ocean.
They filled his rooms with tons of hay, three sacks of oats, a sack of parsnips and a sack of onions. That was his favourite, apart from Scotch whisky, which he enjoyed even more. He drank it regularly, because in those days nobody thought that was objectionable.
Now his whisky was being carried by the ship’s passengers, who were making sure he wasn’t alone all the way. He really wasn’t too bad, except that he was a bit seasick and not very comfortable in his cage.
So he came to New York and immediately started working. His new owner was determined to capitalise on his fame and the sadness that had spread among the children in England, and when he left he put him on display in Madison Square Garden. Jumbo recouped the money he had invested in it in a single year.
Now he was no longer the difficult elephant he had been in London. He coped well with the North American tour and calmly crossed the Brooklyn Bridge when ordered to do so. On opening day in 1883, 1 800 cars and 150 300 people crossed the new bridge, then the only one linking Manhattan and Brooklyn . They continued to walk across it enthusiastically for days afterwards, but six days after it opened, the news that the bridge was being demolished spread, unknown to the pedestrians.
They ran away. They fell and trampled each other. The end result was at least 12 dead. In people’s minds, the bridge had become a death trap. Resistance to it grew stronger over time, rather than diminishing, and the New York authorities had to prove that it was safe. They asked Barnum to cross it with his 20 elephants as a demonstration. It was a welcome publicity stunt for him, but he put Jumbo at the head of the elephant procession and on 17 May 1884 “proved” that the authorities were not lying.
Death of a celebrity
The following year, Jumbo was due to embark on another North American tour, but luck finally deserted the giant elephant, who has had many difficult moments in his life, in Toronto.
The circus management has set up a circus tent right next to the tracks. To cross them where they were, railway officials allowed them to remove the protective fence. So, at half past ten in the evening on 15 September 1885, Jumbo returned to his cage with his favourite keeper, Matthew Scott, and his elephant, Tom Thumb.
They were just approaching the tracks when they saw the train. It was immediately clear to Scott that they were in danger. He tried to quickly divert the elephant, but was unable to turn them around. He started to urge them to walk faster. Jumbo walked in front, Tom Thumb behind him.
There are several stories about what happened next. One says they were still on the tracks when the train hit Tom. He was knocked sideways and Tom lay there with a broken leg. Then he crashed into Jumbo. The impact was supposedly as violent as if two trains had collided, but certainly strong enough to derail the train.
According to this version, Jumbo was badly injured but still alive when he lay on the rails and put his ricer on Matthew Scoott’s hand. He then wrapped his arms around his most loyal human companion and pulled him towards him. Scott had been with Jumbo for 14 years. He cried like a child as he watched Jumbo slowly say goodbye. Five minutes after the accident, he was gone. Exhausted, Scott lay down beside him in shock and fell asleep.
Another version of the story says that Jumbo was practising by the railway sleepers when he slipped and accidentally fell under a train. He died on the spot. According to a third version, spread by his owner, he sacrificed his own life to save Tom’s when he ran in front of a locomotive.
Newspapers dutifully reported the tragic death, and one said: “Jumbo is dead! The friend of the young, the one adored by all, the pride and wonder of our time is gone. All that is left for us to do is to accept our loss with resignation.”
But Barnum refused to let his star cheater leave even after his death. He continued to promote it as his greatest attraction, but had to take it apart to do so. He had his skin taken off and stuffed. He displayed such a Jumbo in one location. In another, people stared at Jumbo’s skeleton for money, in another at his heart.
Eventually, the skeleton was donated to the New York Museum of Natural History, Jumbo’s heart was sold to Cornell University, and the stuffed Jumbo ended up at Tufts University, where it was displayed until 1975, when he died for the last time. This time he was burnt in a fire, but again he did not disappear completely. His ashes were saved and now rest in the Director’s office.
Only its skeleton survived completely, and partly its tail, which was cut off just before the fire by students desperate to have something of their own for good luck.
Thanks to Barnum’s publicity skills, Jumbo was a celebrity when he was alive and remained so after his death. Like a true celebrity manager, Barnum consistently controlled his public image. For example, he did not allow his photograph to be taken. In photographs he thought he looked too ordinary, preferring promotional drawings in which he could point out the difference in size between an elephant and a human.
Jumbo was also depicted on utility products and cards, but Barnum did not benefit much from this. Disney also had its eye on him, but there was a problem: Disney wants to control the stories of its characters completely. Since Jumbo’s life is already known, the company invented Jumbo Junior and created his own story. But this Jumbo was so different from the real Jumbo that the elephant was soon renamed Dumbo.
They have done a worse job than Barnum. The latter marketed the size of the Jumbo so well that to this day, anything that is extremely large is still called a jumbo. And not only in English, but also in Slovene jargon: for example, we call jumbo posters jumbo posters at home.
Space Hero
Jumbo lived so far back that he has almost become part of folklore, but Hum the chimpanzee probably never will, even though he earned an eight-letter article in the New York Times on 19 January 1983:
“Ham, the first chimpanzee to fly into space on a rocket, died at the age of 26 after a short career with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The animal passed away on Monday at the North Carolina Zoological Park, where it had lived for two and a half years…”
It was newsworthy. Although 22 years had passed since Ham’s “short career” at NASA, Americans had not forgotten that, with his suborbital flight, he had “shown man the path to follow”. On January 31 1961, scientists did not yet know whether man could survive a flight into space, or whether he could think clearly and act reliably during it. Ham’s mission was “life-threatening” and extremely important.
Blue light. Press the lever. You have five seconds. Different colour light. React within 20 seconds. If Ham succeeds, he gets a banana and a sip of water. If he didn’t, he’s got electricity running through his soles. But not just him. US Army training scientists trained forty chimpanzees at Holloman Aerospace Medical Centre so that Project Mercury, launched in 1958, would one day see the light of day.
Dr Rufus R. Hessberg had to find out how chimpanzees, which he called “metabolically, physically and temperamentally” the most similar to humans, respond to sudden acceleration, weightlessness, confinement and isolation in a capsule, in order to pave the way for humans in space.
Chop Chop Chang, as the chimpanzee was affectionately called at the time, patiently endured countless trials. He followed the instructions so successfully that he first made it to the top 18 chimpanzees, then to the top six, and was finally chosen to be the one to be sealed in the MR-2 capsule, which is a hair’s breadth from that of a human. Swaddled in a nappy, dressed in a specially designed spacesuit and fitted with measuring instruments to monitor his vital signs, he was launched from Cape Canaveral
“Is he alive?” was the anxious question on board the rescue ship when the three-year-old, born in July 1957 in the West African nation of Cameroon, then still French, landed in the Atlantic after 16 and a half minutes. He was brought to America by the same fate as Jumbo the elephant: he was captured by poachers and sold to Florida, only he was bought by the US army, not by a circus.
But now his space mission has gone awry. The rocket flew at the wrong angle, the instruments reported a drop in oxygen levels, the capsule reached an altitude of 254 kilometres above Earth instead of 185 kilometres, and ended up landing in the sea much harder than planned, and in the wrong place.
“He’s alive,” Major Richard Benson exclaimed with relief, shaking the hand of the good-humoured chimpanzee, officially named number 65. He had not been publicly named by NASA before the flight. They didn’t want him to get into people’s hearts with a cute name. If they opened the capsule lid and found him dead inside, the publicity would have been too negative, so he had to remain a number until medical examinations showed him to be cognitively dehydrated, tired and a little scratched, but healthy.
That’s when he became Ham. Not a very charming name, made up of the initials of the centre where he was trained, but otherwise known to the public as the Space Hero. He spent six and a half minutes in weightless space and earned himself an apple as a reward.
It has become a national landmark. It was the first animal to perform its tasks on the road, demonstrating how stress affects the functioning of a human, i.e. a chimpanzee. If his reactions in the air were almost no slower than those on the ground, neither will man’s, the scientists concluded.
However, due to a number of complications during the flight, they did not dare to put a human inside the capsule. Major Alan B. Sheperd had to wait for the problems to be fixed, but in the meantime Yuri Gagarin overtook him and became the first man to fly into space on 12 April 1961.
Shepard did not realise the American dream, paved by Ham the chimpanzee, until 5 May with Freedom 7. “Just a first step, but it leads to bigger and better things,” he said of his 15-minute experience, which began with an unusual problem.
He had waited so long for his flight that he felt a little urge. He was in an astronaut suit. I have to take a leak. No, was the answer. I have to. No! May I do the needful in a spacesuit? You mustn’t, there may be a short circuit on the sensors.
“Tell them to turn off the electricity!” the astronaut despaired just before the flight. He set off, relieved. “Man, what a ride!” he commented on his return. Exactly 10 years after Ham’s trip, on 31 January 1971, he achieved another success: he flew to the Moon on board Apollo 14 and played golf on the Moon.
Ham was already living at the Washington Zoo, but not quietly, as befits a celebrity. Two and a half years before his death, he was transferred to North Carolina and, after his life, his remains were buried at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo.
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Born Free
Ham lived and died as a celebrity, while Elsa the lioness lived first as a human adoptee, then as a free animal, and finally rose to fame when she became the star of Born Free.
She was a baby when she was orphaned, only her mother was taken not by poachers but by conservationist and park ranger George Adams. He and his wife Joy lived in Kenya and chased poachers, but he too had to shoot when he was attacked by a ferocious lioness.
It was only when she lay dead at his feet that he realised she had been defending her three puppies. Now they were orphans because of him, and he and his wife had taken all three home. They cared for them for about two years before two of them found a new home at Rotterdam Zoo, leaving Elsa as their only adopted puppy.
She immediately got used to her new family. She fell asleep most peacefully when she sucked on the finger of her bread mother Joy. She was incredibly attached to her, and even later she had a treat in the form of her finger. When she was excited, her paws would get sweaty, but otherwise she was like a “perfect manners” fluffball. The hard soil of African nature did not smell of anything to her. She preferred to lie on her back on a bunk bed and sleep on it, as if she were a real lioness being forced into the wilderness.
Joy loved her like her own child, but she refused to take away what she believed was most important to her: her freedom. She was born free and she will die free, she told her husband when he asked her in astonishment why she wanted to give it up. It was true that Elsa didn’t know how to live as a lioness because she had never had the chance to know it, but Joy was sure that she would like it once she knew a different life.
She started teaching her how to survive in nature. Her tame lioness was three years old when she and George decided it was time to return to the wild. They took her to what is now Masai-Mara Nature Park in northern Kenya and returned home with her. Elsa fell ill. Maybe the climate wasn’t right for her, maybe something else was in the way, but she couldn’t stay there.
But Joy hasn’t thrown in the towel. She cured Elsa and took her and her husband to what is now Meru Nature Park. Then she left with him. They left Elsa to herself for a week. Meeting her again gave them hope: she was able to find food for herself and even killed a bypass antelope in front of them.
Things were looking up, but every time George visited her in 1958 and 1959, he returned home worried: Elsa was able to survive, but she was unable to find company. The other lions seemed to have no interest in her. She did not even look at the males that were around. But he could not arrange a social life for her, he could only wait for her to find herself.
And he lived to see her as a true lioness in the company of men. When she suddenly disappeared in mid-December 1959, he immediately suspected that she had given birth to cubs. Curious Joy wanted to follow her to her den when she finally came to visit, but Elsa refused to share this secret with her. She ran away and that was that until she decided it was time to meet her.
Elsa’s ghost
At the beginning of February 1960, Joy was writing in her tent when one of her African employees informed her that Elsa was standing on the riverbank, making an unusual howl. She rushed to her and saw her with three little cats in front of her. She returned home.
They named her boys Jespah and Gopa and her doll Little Elsa, but unlike Big Elsa, none of them immediately took to Joy or George. Elsa tried to get them to play with them, but they shyly backed away each time. Joseph allowed himself to get closer over time, but not Gopa and Little Elsa.
But they also had no say in having to stay in George and Joy’s care at night when their mother went into the wilderness. She was threatened that her habitat would be taken over by other lionesses, so she had to fight for it, while George and Joy unsuccessfully tamed her cubs. They would crawl into empty beds and sleep on them, knocking over anything in their path and turning the camp into chaos.
But at least they were safe in it, they were not in nature without their mother. Poachers shot everything they could sell. They bribed officials and did whatever they wanted. When George stepped on their toes a little too much, the Kenyan authorities did not go after them, but in 1960 offered Elsa and George a choice: either leave Kenya or take Elsa and her cubs and go to another reserve.
Elsa, who was considered dangerous by the authorities because she is partly domesticated, started looking for a new home. Joy was in Nairobi when she received the news: Elsa had contracted a tick-borne disease. She hurried home with medicine, but was too late. On 24 January 1961, Elsa died with her head in George’s lap, aged just five.
Now her puppies were orphans. They were still a year away from independence, but none of them had grown attached to Joy or George as their mother once had. They had become even more distant and relatively wild. They rarely came to camp at night, and the Adamses soon learned that small livestock were being killed less than 13 kilometres away. They hunted them for three months to prevent them being shot by furious locals, and then moved all three to the Serengeti.
They seemed happy in their new environment, but the Adamses were not at peace: they were still too young to live independently. They wanted to help them learn to hunt for food with confidence, but they didn’t need their help. In June 1962, they disappeared. They searched for them for a long time but could not find them. I guess they had adapted so well to the wilderness that they were no longer missed.
She and Elsa would probably remain anonymous if Joy Adams hadn’t written three books about their mother. The first, Born Free, immediately became an international bestseller. Joy used the money she made from it to fight for wildlife conservation.
Through books and the film Born Wild, people have started to realise that animals also have different personalities. That they express joy, regret, happiness, sadness and love. The spirit of Elsa, who successfully returned to the wild and lived a free life, moved people so much that they are still working in her name to protect not only lions, but all endangered wild species.
