I’ll be honest: this isn’t a very happy story.
It begins in 1810, with the voyage of a recently commissioned East Indiaman merchant ship, the Astell, under Captain Robert Hay. The ship sailed to both Chennai (then Madras) in India and Bengal. And at some point in its adventures, it acquired a large, youngish elephant, who was given the name Chunee (sometimes spelled Chuny). Accounts disagree on the exact date, but in July of 1810 or 1811, Chunee arrived in London – and this is his story, even if it can’t possibly be the version he might have told himself if he could.1
This was at a time when demand for exotic animals in the capital was high: the Tower of London had had one since the 13th century, but by the mid-18th, there were numerous establishments showcasing global fauna to the paying public.
An English edition of French naturalist Georges Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom – a book which influenced Charles Darwin – contained this description of our particular pachyderm:
The fine specimen of the Asiatic… measures between ten and eleven feet in height, and weighs at least, by computation, between four and five tons. This huge mountain of flesh consumes daily three trusses of hay, and about two hundred weight of carrots and other fresh vegetables, together with from sixty to eighty gallons of water; this animal is observed, when turning the proboscis up to the mouth in feeding, to incline it always on the left side, which may be a specific and not an individual character, though certainly unimportant.
Chunee was quickly snapped up for public show. His first owner was Thomas Harris, who had been the proprietor of Covent Garden Theatre for about 40 years and always had a keen eye for a spectacle. He paid 900 guineas for the privilege (£945 then, around £50,000 now).
By December 1811, Chunee was in his first pantomime, Harlequin and Padmanaba, or, the Golden Fish, performed on Boxing Day. He wasn’t the only animal on the bill: in the same show, the clown was none other than the legendary Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) – now at the height of his career2 – who had hitched up a spaniel (some accounts say two) to four wheels of cheese to create a crazy pram to ride in. Yes, like this:
Disconcerting company for anyone, let alone an elephant.
A later account gives a little more detail on Chunee’s role:
Mrs. Henry Johnstone was his graceful rider, and he was ‘played up to’ by the celebrated columbine, Mrs. Parker, whose husband had a joint interest with Mr. Harris in the new performer.
Another show Chunee appeared in was Blue Beard, alongside the actor Edmund Kean (shortly before his fame as a Shakespearian actor – proving there’s sometimes hope for escaping panto). An 1878 account recalled how Chunee “had kept up an intimate acquaintance with Edmund Kean, whom he would fondle with his trunk, in return for a few loaves of bread”.
One of Chunee’s fans at these shows was Stephen/Stephano Polito, who had recently acquired a long-standing menagerie at the Exeter Exchange (aka Exeter ’Change) in the Strand; he renamed it the Royal Menagerie and Chunee was signed over to him to be part of it.
Our old friend Lord Byron was another celebrity met by Chunee. He notes in his journal in 1813:
There was a ‘hippopotamus,’ like Lord L—l in the face; and the ‘Ursine Sloth’ hath the very voice and manner of my valet—but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again—took off my hat—opened a door—trunked a whip—and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor antelopes were dead.
After Polito died in 1814, this establishment was taken over by Edward Cross (father-in-law to Polito’s brother John), who had been the superintendent there for 20 years.3 And there Chunee would be based for the rest of his life. He was known in these early days for his gentle nature, and one keeper, John Taylor, later wrote of how we would sleep in close proximity to his beloved charge.
The engraver John Thomas Smith (1766–1833) wrote a memoir in which he recalled an encounter with Chunee when he was strolling down The Strand with a friend at night:
… just as he and I were approaching Temple Bar, about one o’clock, a most unaccountable appearance claimed our attention,—it was no less an object than an elephant, whose keepers were coaxing it to pass through the gateway. He had been accompanied by several persons from the Tower Wharf with tall poles, but was principally guided by two men with ropes, each walking on either side of the street, to keep him as much as possible in the middle on his way to the menagerie, Exeter Change; to which destination, after passing St. Clement’s Church, he steadily trudged on with strict obedience to the commands of his keepers. I had the honour afterwards of partaking of a pot of Barclay’s Entire [a dark porter ale] with this same elephant, which high mark of his condescension was bestowed when I accompanied my friend the late Sir James Winter Lake, Bart., to view the rare animals in Exeter Change—that gentleman being assured by the elephant’s keeper that if he would offer the beast a shilling, he would see the noble animal nod his head and drink a pot of porter. The elephant no sooner had taken the shilling, which he did in the mildest manner from the palm of Sir James’s hand, than he gave it to the keeper, and eagerly watched his return with the beer. The elephant then, after placing his proboscis to the top of the tankard, drew up nearly the whole of the then good beverage. The keeper observed, “You will hardly believe, gentlemen, but the little he has left is quite warm;” upon this we were tempted to taste it, and it really was so.
An 1814 advert for the Royal Menagerie gives us another detail of Chunee’s life, so profoundly divorced from its origins, as neighbour to a rhinoceros:
… in the adjoining den, in the same apartment, there is a fine large Male Elephant (indisputably one of the finest specimens of its species ever brought from India, and adorned with long ivory tusks); those, the two most formidable enemies in nature, are so closely united, and so reconciled, as to suffer to take their food from each other.
Astonishingly, the Royal Menagerie was upstairs in the building, too – and as Chunee grew, so his guided walks down the Strand came to an end, and he was fully imprisoned.
Should we be surprised, then, that things eventually went wrong?
The most detailed account we have is by Edward Cross himself – hardly an unbiased witness – and ran to nearly 5,000 words in William Hone’s Every-Day Book of February 1827. I’ll give just a few extracts. First, he sets the scene “when the animal’s increasing bulk and strength rendered it necessary to enlarge his den”:
With Mr. Harrison, the carpenter, who built his new den, and with whom he had formed a previous intimacy, he was remarkably docile, and accommodated himself to his wishes in every respect. He was occasionally troublesome to his builder from love of play, but the prick of a gimblet [gimlet – a sharp point] was an intimation he obeyed, till a desire for fresh frolic prompted him to further interference, and then a renewal of the hint, or some trifling eatable from the carpenter’s pocket, abated the interruption. In this way they went on together till the work was completed, and while the elephant retained his senses, he was happy in every opportunity that afforded him the society of his friend Harrison…
About six years ago this elephant indicated an excitement which is natural to the species, and which prevails every year for a short season. At the period now spoken of, his keeper having gone into his den to exhibit him, the animal refused obedience; on striking him with a slight cane, as usual, the elephant violently threw him down: another keeper seeing the danger, tossed a pitchfork to his comrade, which the animal threw aside like a straw.
Cross describes how he whacked Chunee with a shovel and rescued the man. He notes: “This was the first appearance of those annual paroxysms, wherein the elephant, whether wild or confined, becomes infuriated.”
What he appears to be describing here is ‘musth’, a long-known, huge rise in testosterone which causes bull elephants to become aggressive and seek dominance.4 Not ideal when stuck in a cage on an upper floor in central London.
Cross describes how he tried giving vast quantities of ‘medicine’ (mostly emetics) to Chunee with limited effect, and how as the years went on, Chunee’s temper got worse. And Chunee, being an intelligent animal, was quick to spot when Cross and his staff were trying to dose him.
Things escalated.
On 1st November 1825, Chunee killed one of his keepers, one Johann Tietjen – although this was in fact an accident, impaling the keeper when turning round quickly. But the damage was done – not least when early the following year Chunee began charging the entrance to his cage. Bribery began to fail:
In order to soothe him, some oranges, to which fruit he had great liking, were repeatedly proffered; but though these were in a pure state, he took them, one after the other, as they were presented to him, and dropping each on the floor of his den instantly squelched it with his foot, and having thus disposed of a few he refused to take another.
And Cross’s narrative describes the drama coming to a head:
The keepers faced him with long pikes or spears, to deter him as much as possible from efforts to liberate himself from the confinement, which at ordinary periods he had submitted to without restraint. When he lunged furiously at the bars, they assailed him with great bravery, and their threats and menaces prevented the frequency of his attacks.
Eventually, on 1st March 1826, soldiers with muskets were summoned to destroy the elephant. In Cross’s words:
he instantly received two bullets aimed from the rifles towards the heart; they entered immediately behind the shoulder blade, at the distance of about three inches from each other. The moment the balls had perforated his body he made a fierce and heavy rush at the front, which further weakened the gates, shivered the side bar next to the dislodged story-post, and drove it out into the menagerie. The fury of the animal’s assault was terrific, the crash of the timbers, the hallooing of the keepers in their retreat, the calls for “rifles! rifles!” and the confusion and noise incident to the scene, rendered it indescribably terrific. The assailants rallied in a few seconds, and came pointing their spears with threats. Mr. Tyler having handed two other rifles, they were discharged as before; and, as before, produced a similar desperate lunge from the enraged beast at the front of his den… The maddened animal turned round in his den incessantly, apparently with the design of keeping his head from the riflemen, who after the first two discharges could only obtain single shots at him. The shutter inside of a small grated window, which stood in a projection into the den, at one of the back corners, was now unshipped, and from this position Mr. Herring fired several shots through the grating. The elephant thus attacked in the rear as well as the front, flew round the den with the speed of a race-horse, uttering frightful yells and screams, and stopping at intervals to bound from the back against the front. The force of these rushes shook the entire building…
After the discharge of about thirty balls, he stooped and sunk deliberately on his haunches. Mr. Herring, conceiving that a shot had struck him in a vital part, cried out—“He’s down, boys! he’s down!” and so he was, but it was only for a moment: he leapt up with renewed vigour, and at least eighty balls were successively discharged at him from different positions before he fell a second time.
It goes on – but in the end it took around 150 shots to kill poor Chunee, like some sort of pachydermatous Rasputin. Soon afterwards, his body was dissected at the Royal College of Surgeons (watched by a crowd of the paying public),5 where his skeleton, after a brief tour, was then exhibited. But even this was finally destroyed when the museum was hit by a bomb in 1941. So it goes.
Chunee was a cultural phenomenon in death as well as life: plays, poems and pamphlets abounded as all of London discussed the drama. And there were some better outcomes, at least: within three years, Exeter ’Change was demolished (by decline, not by animal rage). Only a month after the death of Chunee, the Zoological Society of London was founded, and its new London Zoo in Regent’s Park opened in 1828, absorbing some of Cross’s collection (others went to his new Surrey Zoological Gardens) and at least giving them a better quality of life. London Zoo remains there to this day.
Perhaps, 200 years on, we have a better way of treating such amazing animals. Or perhaps we don’t.
(With thanks to Phil Wood, whose recent article in one of the magazines I edit sent me down this elephantine rabbit hole.)
We’ve had the autobiography of a tortoise here before, of course. Well, sort of.
Our old friend Charles Dickens was a great admirer of Grimaldi, and edited his memoirs. Grimaldi is still remembered today in the clowns’ memorial service every February in Hackney.
Confusingly, Cross renamed the enterprise the Royal Grand National Menagerie – talk about keyword stuffing.
The quandaries this creates for elephant–human relations were explored by George Orwell in his 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’.
There are stories, too, that Cross and another man availed themselves of an elephant steak, but this may be apocryphal.