The Elephant Box

In 1903 a behemoth elephant named Jingo was buried at sea. Over the centuries of transporting the great pachyderms, many others have been committed to the deep.

This is the first post of my relaunched blog, focusing on circuses. Why have I renamed these pages The Elephant Box? Read on to find out.

By Russell Working

IN MARCH 1903, newspapers across America trumpeted a tragedy at on the high seas. Jingo, an elephant taller than the famed Jumbo, died on his way from the London zoo to Coney Island.

An American entrepreneur had purchased Jingo, and the titanic tusker was transported in a 14½-feet-tall, lidless crate on a ship called the Georgic. Jingo was too tall for the hold where he was kept. He and his box protruded through an open hatch above, exposing him to wind, rain, and cresting waves.

His mahouts recklessly fed him (and evidently poisoned him with) whiskey and stale bread rolls. The pachyderm, pining for his herd, died on the way to New York. The newspapers parroted the sailors’ narrative about a death by homesickness. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed:

JINGO, RIVAL OF JUMBO, IS DEAD.

Tallest Elephant Ever in Cap-

tivity Unable to Stand

Ocean Voyage.

COULD NOT BE CONSOLED.

Refuses to Eat for Several Days

and Is Thought to Have Died

of Homesickness.

I ran across the story of Jingo while researching my novel The Elephant Box, which takes place from 1916 to 1919 and has multiple circus settings and characters. Jingo inspired a subplot in what surely will be acclaimed as the most stupendous aggregation of words since Don Quixote. My fictional elephant is named George Washington Theodore Roosevelt July Fourth—July for short—and the box where he is imprisoned became a central metaphor for the book.

Multitudinous mastodons

It fascinated me that Jingo’s burial at sea, seemingly a unique and freakish incident, turned out to be one of many such tragedies. This makes sense when you think about it. Humans have been transporting elephants by ship since ancient times, and the prodigious proboscideans are not designed to survive sea voyages.

Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus who lent his name to the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” took elephants across the Adriatic Sea to Southern Italy in 280 B.C., John M. Kistler notes in War Elephants. As the fleet approached Italy, a storm scattered many of Pyrrhus’s ships. Two thousand soldiers, some horses, and two elephants swam ashore.

Elephants can swim? They’re actually quite good at it. Kistler also notes that a gale swept an elephant overboard off the coast of South Carolina in 1856, and the mighty beast dog-paddled thirty-one miles to shore.

During Cooper, Bailey & Co’s Pacific tour in 1877, Babe, a mischievous elephant, died at sea. In Circus Memoirs: Reminiscences of George Middleton as Told to and Written by His Wife, the longtime showman recalls that Babe “ate a box of sulphur matches which one of the men had left carelessly near him and died the next day. We threw the carcass overboard.”

The curse of the Ockenfels

An account from the Atlantic in 1902 relates how a 3½-year-old elephant named Topsy fell ill from pneumonia and died on a ship called the Ockenfels, according to the Daily Press of Asbury Park, New Jersey.

“He was the greatest clown elephant out of a circus, and enjoyed pranks like a schoolboy,” the captain said. “He had a habit of ‘hefting’ members of the crew with his trunk, always letting them down gently, but making them feel uncomfortable for a moment.”

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville frequently refers to sailor superstitions, and what must the crew of the Ockenfels have felt in 1913 when a second elephant gave up the ghost onboard the unlucky ship? As a correspondent for the Fall River (Massachusetts) Globe reported from Boston:

A battle for life with a maddened elephant and a menagerie of other animals that stampeded on deck when the steamer Ockenfels ran into a storm off the banks of Newfoundland was described last night by Capt. Kneppe and his crew of lascars [east Indian sailors] on reaching this port.

Joseph Jabbour, keeper of the animals, was kicked by a camel and badly injured, and members of the crew, as well as the skipper, narrowly escaped death or injury time and again. After an hour’s battle the animals were corralled, although the task of subduing them was made doubly difficult by the rolling of the ship and the combers that washed the decks. The elephant died later. …

The elephant was buried at sea, the crew’ being obliged to rig up a derrick to lower the animal over the vessel’s side.

Tippling tusker

As for Jingo, it suited the tenor of the times to insist that he died of a broken heart—or perhaps the sailors were covering their tracks when they told the Trib they had given him only “one loaf of whiskey-soaked bread.” A post this year on British insurance blog, however, notes that the crew had been dosing Jingo with alcohol three times a day, with a gallon of whiskey at each meal.

At any rate, a second officer told the Trib, “I think Jingo died of grief, or, you might say, homesickness. He had been, I understand, about twenty-two years at the London Zoo, and when he missed all the big and little friends, his heart broke.”

The papers debated the value of the elephant committed to the briny drink. The Trib says he was insured for up to $75,000. The insurance blog notes, “Jingo was described as the largest elephant in captivity and was insured for his journey across the Atlantic for £8,000, or £15,000 if the ship carrying him was wrecked.”

For anyone interested my story of the fictional July, Narrative magazine published an excerpt from The Elephant Box, the greatest story ever written about an elephant burial at sea. Noting an outbreak of sneak-drinking onboard a circus ship, the story states that “Dad and his Cossack and roughrider pals were not in the same league—nobody was—as July the elephant, who’d degenerated into a lush since the Famous Eberhard & Morrison Consolidated Railroad Show, Jungle Oddities, and Congress of Nations had sailed from Seattle in November 1917.”

Read on here.

For more about my novel manuscript, The Elephant Box, click here. Why a circus blog? Learn more here.