His real name was Jumbo and he was born in 1860 in Sudan. After the death of his mother, killed by hunters, the little one was captured by another Sudanese elephant hunter, Taher Sheriff. It was then sold to Lorenzo Casanova, an Italian animal trader and explorer. Also known as Jumbo the Elephant and Jumbo the Circus Elephant, he was an African elephant rescued from his homeland and taken to Jardin des Plantes, a zoo in Paris, before being transferred in 1865 to the London Zoo, England.
Here the poor elephant suffered the breaking of both tusks when he crashed against the stone of his enclosure. His travels did not end there. After being brought from Africa to Europe, despite numerous protests, Jumbo was sold to the Barnum & Bailey circus. Even then his story, the true one, touched everyone’s hearts: 100,000 children wrote to Queen Victoria begging her not to sell the elephant but the poor animal was brought to the United States anyway. In New York, Barnum exhibited Jumbo at Madison Square Garden, sponsoring the event as “Jumbo, the largest animal in the world” and earning enough in three weeks to recoup the money spent buying him.
Jumbo, the poor ‘crazy’ elephant
Unfortunately, the animal is also sadly known as the crazy elephant. If during the day he was the living image of kindness and even carried children on his back, at night Jumbo had outbursts of violence and destroyed the area where he was locked up to sleep.
The explanation of Bartlett, director of the zoo, was somewhat questionable. Jumbo was reaching his 20s, his hormones were to blame. His keeper was Matthew Scott, who often gave him whiskey to calm the animal. Scott himself told the story in his autobiography.
The trick worked because the elephant got drunk. Today we know that the attacks of anger were caused by the constant intake of sweets, which were so harmful and far removed from the diet he should have followed. This was the conclusion reached by Richard Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, after examining Jumbo’s remains for the BBC documentary “Attenborugh and The Giant Elephant”.
Analysis of the skeleton by English archaeologists established that “Jumbo” had “injuries that must have been very painful, probably caused by the burden of transporting thousands of visitors”
Thomas also discovered that, in addition to his teeth, other parts of his body had unusual features, particularly his joints. Jumbo at 20 actually had the skeleton of a 50 year old elephant.
His shoulder height was approximately 3.23 meters at the time of his death, although Barnum claimed it was 4 m. It was a half-truth. Jumbo was certainly large for his age, over three metres, when most of his peers were 2.70 m tall. Probably if he hadn’t died young he would have reached that height.
His tragic death
His death, like his life, was sad. It was 1885. The circus had finished its show in Saint Thomas, a Canadian city. The animals were already in their cages, ready to leave. There are two versions here. The first claims that only Jumbo and a baby elephant were missing. Suddenly, a locomotive appeared in the little boy’s direction. Jumbo tried to protect him with his body and he died instantly. The second story says that while Jumbo was boarding the train, another locomotive coming in the opposite direction pushed her forward, injuring the animal and causing internal bleeding that would lead to her death at just 24 years old.
A very sad story indeed, without the happy ending of the version produced by Walt Disney.
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