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Feejee Mermaid

by Oz | 3 years, 4 month(s) ago

Feejee Mermaid - Mid-July, 1842. An English gentleman named “Dr. J. Griffin”, a member of the British Lyceum of Natural History, arrived in New York City bearing a remarkable curiosity — a real mermaid supposedly caught near the Feejee Islands in the South Pacific. The press were expecting him, since throughout the Summer they had been receiving letters from Southern correspondents describing the doctor and his mermaid. So when he checked in to his hotel, reporters were waiting for him, demanding to see the mermaid. Grudgingly he obliged. What they saw totally convinced them of the creature’s authenticity.

Soon after this, the showman P.T. Barnum visited the offices of the major papers where he explained that he had been trying to convince Dr. Griffin to display the mermaid at his museum. Unfortunately, the doctor was unwilling to do so. So Barnum volunteered to give the papers use of a woodcut of a beautiful, bare-breasted mermaid that he had prepared, since it was now useless to him.

this was of course all a hoax though wasn't it?

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Throughout all this, the deception of the public had been three-fold. First, although advertisements had shown the mermaid to have the body of a young, beautiful woman, the creature itself was far less attractive. It had the withered body of a monkey and the dried tail of a fish. As a correspondent from the Charleston Courier put it: “Of one allusion… the sight of the wonder has forever robbed us — we shall never again discourse, even in poesy, of mermaid beauty, nor woo a mermaid even in our dreams — for the Feejee lady is the very incarnation of ugliness.“ In his autobiography, Barnum later described the mermaid as “an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen… its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony.“ he Feejee Mermaid was an example of a traditional art form perfected by fishermen in Japan and the East Indies who constructed faux mermaids by stitching the upper bodies of apes onto the bodies of fish. They often created these mermaids for use in religious ceremonies. The Feejee Mermaid herself is believed to have been created around 1810 by a Japanese fisherman. But although the Feejee Mermaid is gone, her memory lives on in popular culture. “Feejee Mermaid” has become the generic term for the many fake mermaids that can be found around the world in sideshows, behind bars, or at the back of curiosity shops. (For San Diego residents, one can be seen up in Leucadia.) The Feejee Mermaid herself also made an appearance in an episode of the X-Files (“Humbug,“ Season 2, Episode 20).
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