Abstract
On 25 May 1850, a large crowd of onlookers congregated at Southampton docks to greet the P&O steamer, Ripon, recently arrived from Alexandria. The Ripon was carrying ‘the heavy portion of the India mail’ and ‘166 passengers, 101 of which were first-class’. The ‘great curiosity’ that the crowd had come to see, however, was not a human passenger but a zoological wonder: the first hippopotamus to be transported alive to Europe. The animal was ‘a male specimen, in good health, about ten months old and 500lbs weight’.
We feed the Giraffe on Milk in the Winter but can’t do so in the Summer because it has so far to go it turns sour before it gets to the stomach. (Harry Hunter, Manders’ Menagerie, 1876)
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Notes
For a discussion of exotic animal dealers in eighteenth-century London, see ‘Chapter 1, Animal Commodities’ in Plumb Exotic Animals, pp.36–102. For discussion of the evolution of this trade in nineteenth-century Europe and the USA, with a particular focus on Hamburg dealer Carl Hagenbeck, see Rothfels, ‘Catching Animals’ in Savages and Beasts, pp.44–80; and Richard W. Flint, ‘American Showmen and European Dealers’ in R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp.97–108.
For a discussion of exotic animal dealers in eighteenth-century London, see ‘Chapter 1, Animal Commodities’ in Plumb Exotic Animals, pp.36–102. For discussion of the evolution of this trade in nineteenth-century Europe and the USA, with a particular focus on Hamburg dealer Carl Hagenbeck, see Rothfels, ‘Catching Animals’ in Savages and Beasts, pp.44–80; and Richard W. Flint, ‘American Showmen and European Dealers’ in R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss (eds), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp.97–108.
On the close links between empire and specimen collecting see Narisara Murray, ‘From Birds of Paradise to Drosophila: The Changing Roles of Scientific Specimens to 1920’ in Kathleen Kete (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp.113–134.
Arthur Patterson, Notes on Pet Monkeys and how to Manage them (London: Upcott Gill, 1888), pp.96–97.
Johann Baptista von Spix and Carl Friedrich von Martius, Travels in Brazil in the Years 1817–1820 (London: Longman and Hurst, 1824), Vol.I, p.212. On the wider relationship between collecting, empire and identity, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 2005).
For a discussion of the relationship between trade and empire in Victorian Britain, see Martin Lynn, ‘British Policy, Trade and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.101–121.
See Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005).
For more on the role of indigenous people in the creation of natural knowledge and the procurement of specimens — as well as their representation in (or omission from) European accounts — see ‘Indian Sagacity’ and ‘African Magi, Slave Poisoners’ in Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp.215–306; Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain’, The Historical Journal 48:1 (2005), pp.27–63;
and Fa-Ti Fan, ‘Victorian naturalists in China: science and informal empire’, The British Journal for the History of Science 36 (2003), pp.1–26.
The processes involved in collecting exotic beasts have been examined in other European contexts. Louise Robbins discusses the practical difficulties of transporting exotic animals in eighteenth-century France, through a case study of Louis XVI’s attempts to procure a zebra for the menagerie at Versailles, while Michael Allin chronicles the journey of a giraffe that walked to Paris from Marseilles as a present from Mohammad Ali Pasha of Egypt to Charles X. Nigel Rothfels has studied the collecting channels employed by Hamburg-based animal trader Carl von Hagenbeck, who became one of the premier animal merchants in the world at the end of the nineteenth century. See ‘Live Cargo’ in Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, pp.9–67 and 44–80; Michael Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story (New York: Delta, 1998); Rothfels, ‘Catching Animals’ in Savages and Beasts, pp.44–80.
On the history of steam travel at sea, see Stephen Fox, The Ocean Railway (London: Harper Collins, 2003).
William Walton, The Alpaca: Its Naturalisation in the British Isles considered as a National Benefit (New York: Office of the New York Farmer and Mechanic, 1845), p.15.
Philip Lutley Sclater, Guide to the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London, Fourth Edition (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1860), p.52.
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© 2014 Helen Cowie
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Cowie, H. (2014). Animals, Wholesale and Retail. In: Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384447_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384447_5
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