In Search of Eden – Chapter 2

Before there were Zoos

Clara was orphaned as an infant, but raised in elegant surroundings in a well-to-do household in India. By the age of eight, she had sailed more than ten thousand miles from Calcutta to Rotterdam, complements of the Dutch East India Company, and had begun a tour of Europe that would have been impressive by any measure – but in the 1740’s it was downright astonishing, especially considering that Clara was an Indian rhinoceros. Her story was chronicled in the book Clara’s Grand Tour by Glynis Ridley.

People have been capturing wild animals and bringing them into captivity for as long as we have had the capacity to do so. Part of the plunder of early explorers was a selection of the strange creatures that inhabited far-off lands. It seems that there is something in our nature that causes us to be fascinated by the rare and unusual.

 The first giraffe ever seen in France, according to Michael Allin in his 1998 book Zarafa: A Giraffe's True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, was a royal offering from Muhammad Ali of Egypt to King Charles X of France. Her name was Zarafa, the Arabic word for giraffe, and she had already traveled two thousand miles down the Nile and across the Mediterranean by the time she arrived in Europe in October of 1826. The young, female had been captured by Arab hunters in Sudan, taken to Khartoum on the back of a camel, and transported by boat down the Nile to Alexandria. She sailed to Europe standing in the hold of a ship with her head protruding through a hole cut in the deck and walked from Marseille to Paris. Zarafa was presented to the King of France in Paris on July 9^th, 1827 and took up residence in the Jardin des Plantes. She was seen by over 600,000 visitors in the first six months alone. This behavior of the French people may seem excessive, but it was not unlike the response to circus menageries in America fifty years later.

The Animal Trade

In the mid-19^th century, as the international trading companies began to fade, a new type of animal dealer appeared. Capitalizing on the proliferation of zoological gardens in Europe, the animal trade picked up in the early 1860s and German seafood dealer, Carl Hagenbeck Sr., was ready to step in.

Hagenbeck family legend has it that his animal trade began with six harbor seals caught in a fisherman’s net and dumped with the rest of the take on the doorsteps of the Hamburg fishmonger. Whether this is true or not, Hagenbeck certainly maintained a small animal dealership, along with his wholesale seafood business, through the 1850's. His animal dealership continued to prosper until it became wholly independent of the seafood store in about 1863. 

Hagenbeck’s eldest son, Carl Junior, expanded the animal dealership. In 1874, he moved the business from its crowded quarters to a small zoo in Hamburg which included a lion house, an elephant house, a monkey house, a reptile house, and a birds of prey aviary. In the 1890's, Hagenbeck revolutionized the zoo business when he created his first "panorama" exhibit, a concept he later patented and expanded. He surrounded animal exhibits with water moats and empty pits that he determined the animals could not cross. These moats allowed people to look across an expanse of the zoo and see many animals at once, as if in the wild. Hagenbeck junior died in 1913 and was succeeded by his sons Heinrich and Lorenz who kept the firm solvent until it went out of business shortly after the First World War.

Hagenbeck wasn’t the only animal dealer profiting by the proliferation of European zoos and American circuses in the mid-1800’s, and there is even some question about whether he was the largest. When the menagerie of Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Fairgrieve was auctioned in Edinburgh Scotland in 1872, a local newspaper reported that the buyers were a Mr. Jamrach “the most extensive dealer in wild animals in the world” and “Jamrach’s almost equally great rival”, Mr. Reiche. Both Jamrach and Reiche had shops which were packed from floor to ceiling with exotic animals of every stripe. The Reiche Brothers were well known animal dealers in New York who dealt primarily with circus menageries. Jamrach operated out of an office in London.

Jamrach’s Menagerie

Author, Carol Birch, imagines the atmosphere of one of those old shops in her 2011 novel, Jamrach's Menagerie. The story is told through the eyes of eight-year-old Jaffy Brown who comes face to face with an escaped tiger in the streets of 1857 London and lives to tell about it.

 

As a result of the encounter, Jaffy was drawn to work in the shop of the tiger’s owner, animal importer Charles Jamrach. Though a work of fiction, the author conjures a vision of what those animal emporiums must have been like.

On Jaffy’s first visit to Jamrach’s shop he describes the air as “heavy, lush and rotting, filled with traces of bowels and blood and piss and hair, and something overall I could not name, which I suppose was wildness”. The shop, as imagined by Birch, would likely have had many rooms stockpiled in conditions that would be considered inhumane by modern standards but in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, would have been quite acceptable. There might well have been a parrot room (“a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes”), other quieter bird rooms, rooms with monkeys, rooms with reptiles, and an outdoor space out back for the large animals like camels, baby elephants, and big cats.  The animal business was, in those days, a heartless, brutal affair in which animals were little more than a commodity. A customer was anyone who had money – a wealthy landowner, a monarch, or, in America at least, a circus.