The Feejee Mermaid

The public who queued in 1842 to see a genuine mermaid were promised something lovely and shown something appalling. The Feejee Mermaid, exhibited in New York by the showman P. T. Barnum, was no fair-haired maiden of the deep but a shrivelled, grimacing horror perhaps three feet long, its withered face frozen in a snarl, its clawed hands raised as if in torment.

The thing was a fabrication, and an old one even then. It had been stitched together, most likely by craftsmen in the East Indies or Japan, from the dried upper body and head of a monkey joined seamlessly to the tail of a large fish, the join disguised with skill and the whole cured into a hard, blackened relic. Such composite creatures were made for sale to credulous sailors and collectors, and this specimen had passed through several hands before reaching Barnum.

Barnum’s genius lay not in the object but in its promotion. He seeded the newspapers with letters from a fictitious authority, a supposed English naturalist named Dr Griffin, who vouched for the creature’s authenticity, and he circulated engravings of exactly the beautiful, bare-breasted mermaid the specimen was not. Curiosity thus inflamed, audiences paid their admission and confronted the grotesque truth, and Barnum’s takings reportedly soared.

The original is generally thought to have perished in one of the fires that repeatedly destroyed Barnum’s museums, though various institutions hold specimens claimed to be it or its close kin, and the attribution is disputed. What survives beyond doubt is the template: a lesson in how eagerly a paying public will believe a wonder, and how little the wonder itself need resemble the promise.

Provenance: exhibited by P. T. Barnum in New York, 1842; the object was likely of East Asian manufacture and is believed lost to fire.