Mermaid controversy

Popular culture and pre-Darwinian natural history collided in January 1843 when Phineas T. Barnum’s notorious “Feejee Mermaid” made its way to South Carolina after several months of controversy and acclaim in New York City. The three-foot “mermaid” (actually a gruesome forgery cobbled together from a monkey torso and the bottom half of a fish) was exhibited at Charleston’s Masonic Hall from January 17 to January 21. A ventriloquist and an orangutan were among the other curiosities.

Shortly after the mermaid’s arrival, the city’s rival newspapers, the Mercury and the Courier, lined up on opposite sides of a heated and complex debate about the exhibit’s authenticity, the authority of expertise, and the relationship between commercial entertainment and scientific knowledge. Beyond its popular appeal, the mermaid touched on disputes among natural historians over the fertility of “hybrid” creatures, the existence of intermediate species in the “great chain of being,” and the unity of humankind. The Reverend John Bachman, a Lutheran minister and naturalist, led the antimermaid assault in the Mercury, writing under the pseudonym “No Humbug” to denounce the exhibit as a “vice manufacture . . . palmed on our community as a great natural curiosity.” Alanson Taylor, Barnum’s uncle and manager of the exhibit, replied with a letter of his own suggesting that “No Humbug” could not possibly be a legitimate scientist or a physician, and that his mermaid was too fragile for dissection anyway. Taylor earned the support of the Courier, whose editors dismissed Bachman and his supporters as unqualified skeptics who discounted the mermaid without having seen it. Bachman continued to ridicule both the exhibit and the gullibility of the Charleston public. The controversy pitched back and forth, and Taylor was forced to spirit the Feejee Mermaid away before it could be destroyed by angry visitors.

Bachman, John. The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science. Charleston, S.C.: C. Canning, 1850.

Bondeson, Jan. The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. “Entrepreneurs and Intellectuals: Natural History in Early American Museums.” In Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum, edited by William T. Alderson. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1992.