tain Eades permitted me to examine it very minutely, and I

-*-
Even before Captain Eades arrived in London with his mermaid in September 1822, it had already landed in the papers
with a splash. One respected church leader
who saw the mermaid while it was in transit
gave it his endorsement in a widely-reprinted
letter: "I have today seen a Mermaid.... I
have always treated the existence of this
creature as fabulous; but my scepticism is
now removed." He described the mummified
mermaid's monkey-like upper body, and said
that its lower body "resembles a largefishof
the salmon species."
The mermaid was a star before it was
carried off the boat. Eades rented a
large room in London to show the mermaid,
and ran newspaper advertisements with illustrations, inviting the already curious public to
bring their money and pay to see
"THE MERMAID!!!—The wonder of the world, the admiration of all ages, the theme of the Philosopher, the
Historian, and the Poet. .. .every day, Sundays excepted,
from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon. Admittance One Shilling."
For a couple of months, paying customers fiocked to see
this remarkable sight—hundreds more every day. The papers
and even some naturalists treated it as perhaps the real thing,
with the London Times saying "There is certainly no perceptible addition or juncture of discordant parts for any purpose
of deception." But this warm reception was not to last.
In November, the mermaid was dragged into court.
Eades had sold the Pickering to buy the mermaid, but
it wasn't exactly his ship. He only owned a small
share. The other seven-eighths of the Pickering belonged to a man named Stephen Ellery—and
EUery wanted his money back. But when he confronted Eades, the captain threatened to take the
mermaid and leave the country. Ellery had a lawyer
ask the court to stop Eades from selling or leaving
with the mermaid. The judge in the case found this hilarious. "What is it?" he asked, as though he had not
quite heard right. "A mermaid?" The lawyer calmly
replied, "Whatever it might be, it cost the plaintiff
1,200 [pounds]." The judge ordered Eades amd
the mermaid to stay put.
At the same time, science
and the media began to turn
against the mermaid. Naturalist William Clift of
the Hunterian Museum wrote, "Cap-
tain Eades permitted me to examine it very minutely, and I
immediately saw it was a palpable imposition and soon made
out the manner in which it had been prepared." Although it
was an exceptionally well-crafted fake, it was of course a taxidermie hoax made from the remains of afishamd an ape or
monkey. "We lament.. .to tell our readers, that if they go to
see it.. .it must be to observe how admirably such a deception
can be executed," declared one paper that had at first fallen
for the hoax. "So much for this dead mermaid," said the London Times.
The Second Life of the Captain's Mermaid
The big show was over. While the captain's mermaid
toured smaller English towns for a couple more years, it attracted smaller and smíJler crowds who believed it less and
less. Eventually it faded from sight. But it was not lost—and
as it would happen, its greatest role was still to come.
Eades went back to work sailing ships for Ellery to pay back
the money he had "borrowed" for the mermaid. When the
captain passed away, he left the mermaid to his son, who in
turn sold it to a Boston museum owner. In 1842, that museum
owner brought it to the man who would make it a legend.
The Prince of Humbugs
Phineas T. Barnum was the greatest American showman of
the nineteenth century. His business was entertainment—circuses, carnivals, museums, and exhibitions—and his genius
was publicity. Although he was a skeptical person himself, he
didn't much care if the things he exhibited were genuine. All
that mattered was that people pay to see
them (and not demand their money
back afterward). If people thought
of him as a playful and devious
trickster, so much the better. "The titles of 'humbug,' [hoaxer] and the
'prince of humbugs,"'
said Barnum, "were
first applied to me by
myself."
When Barnum saw the
mermaid, he knew it was a gold
mine. It was just the thing to
draw curious crowds to his
American Museum in New York
City. "No doubt" the mermaid
was created by an artist.
likely in Japan, said Barnum. It was clear to him that it was
"well calculated to deceive." But it was a convincing hoax,
which to Barnum was as good as the real thing. He
made a deal to lease the mermaid, and then got to
work to make it a star attraction. It involved
tricks so sneaky that even the Prince of
Humbugs later said, "I confess, I am not
proud."
First, he needed a fake scientist to
tell people that the mermaid was
real. (This same trick has been used
in other big business mermaid
hoaxes as recently as this year—
see pages 72-73.) Over a period
of weeks, letters from Alabama,
South Carolina, and Washington
D.C. appeared in different New
York papers, each talking about local news
in their areas. Each also happened to mention a certain "Dr. Griffin" of the "Lyceum of
Natural History in London" who had an
amazing specimen in his possession.
Could it be a real mermaid?
These letters about Dr. Griffin were
all written by Barnum himself. He mailed
them to helpers in other towns, who then
mailed them back to the newspapers in New
York City. Neither Dr. Griffin nor his museum
existed—but a "Dr. Griffin" soon checked into
a hotel in Philadelphia nonetheless. He was re-
ally a man named Levi Lyman, who secretly worked for P.T.
Barnum. During his stay, "Dr. GrifHn" allowed local newsmen to see the mermaid. News of the "ugly looking little
monster" in the Philadelphia press stirred further media interest in New York. By the time the phoney scientist arrived
in Barnum's hometown, newspapers there were ripe for the
plucking. Barham convinced a New York newspaper that
Griffin had refused to make a deal with him to exhibit the
mermaid. He said he had no use for an illustration of the
mermaid that he had planned to use in his promotion and offered it to them for free. Then he took a second illustration
to another paper and told them the samefib.And then another afrer that.
The next day, the newspapers found Barnum had
scammed them all. As all three promoted the mermaid for
free, ads went out announcing that the mermaid
would be exhibited in a large concert hall on
Broadway "FOR ONE WEEK ONLY!" Barnum
flooded the city with pamphlets promoting
the mermaid—and crowds of customers
flooded into the showroom. "The whole
town seems to beflockingto see the Mermaid," said the New York Tribune. They
urged the curious to hurry so as not to miss
the last two days of the show. But they
needn't have worried. Three days later,
they announced, "Mr. Barnum, the indefatigable proprietor of the American
Museum, has procured the Mermaid for
one week" and one week only! You can
probably guess what happened next. Barnum kept on showing the mermaid at his
museum for about a. year! Finally, "afrer obtaining all the notoriety possible by advertising
and by exhibiting the mermaid at the museum,"
Barnum sent it out on a highly publicized tour of AmerThe "Feejee Mermaid," as it came to be known (Barnum pretended the mermaid was
caught in the Fiji islands) was an enormous business success. "The receipts of
the American Museum for the four
weeks immediately preceding the exhibition of the mermaid, amounted to
$1272," recalled Barnum with satisfaction. "During the first four weeks ofthe
mermaid's exhibition, the receipts
amounted to $3341.93." This "ugly, driedup, black-looking, and diminutive specimen" (as Barnum described it) remains
one of history's most famous hoaxes. Barnum considered the clever, unknown artist
who created the mermaid his colleague, saying
he too deserved the title "Prince of Humbugs."
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