FIGURE 3: Mermaid attributed to Moses Kimball's at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Source: Alderson).

The Feejee Mermaid: The Milwaukee Taxidermied Treasure & Others

by Karl Wolff

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The Mermaid reappeared in 1842, when Moses Kimball, the proprietor of the Boston Museum purchased it from Eades’s son. Barnum leased the Mermaid from Kimball, then exhibited it in his American Museum. To promote the Mermaid, he wrote a pamphlet “A Short History of Mermaids” and forwarded the theory that mermaids were the link between men and fish. While comical by today’s standards, the theory was plausible during the 1840s. Sea horses, sea lions, mermaids. On the basis of form, it made sense. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould explains pre-Darwinian scientific theories, stating:


Since the modes and practices of science inevitably reflect a surrounding social environment, we should scarcely be surprised that the early to mid 19th century world of revolution in politics, and romanticism in art, literature, and music, also inspired a series of biological movements called Naturphilosophie in Germany and romantic, idealistic, transcendental, or philosophical anatomy elsewhere.


These different scientific ideas found a new arena of conflict with the Fejee Mermaid. With Darwin’s Origin of Species to be published a decade later, the public searched for empirical proof that mythical creatures existed. Animals from Australia were already proving that truth is stranger than fiction.


On an 1843 tour of the southern states, Barnum’s uncle, Alanson Taylor, promoted the Fejee Mermaid. Unfortunately, Taylor was not a showman like Barnum and later found himself in a controversy over the Mermaid’s authenticity. Two eminent academics from the University of Charleston and a Reverend found the mermaid fake. The peculiar alliance between religion and science was not odd, reflecting a growing derision by intellectual elites against popular entertainments like sideshows, carnivals, and dime museums.


The Mermaid eventually returned to Kimball (Figure 3) in June of 1859. Here the literature becomes more confused and contradictory. Bondeson discusses the Mermaid being on exhibited until the 1880s, yet saying the Eades Mermaid could have been destroyed in the Boston Museum fire of 1865

FIGURE 4: The Lamb mermaid at Harvard's Peabody Museum is similar in design to the Milwaukee Public Museum's "Japanese Mermaid" (Source: Harvard's Peabody Museum website).

 

FIGURE 5: The “Extraordinary Japanese Mermaid” of the Milwaukee Public Museum (Source: Photograph by Author).

Moses Kimball later had his heirs donate another mermaid to Harvard. This mermaid was a “fake” Fejee Mermaid and not the authentic Eades Fejee Mermaid. Harvard still has the Kimball Mermaid in its collection as well as a mermaid donated by Carrie Lamb in the 1920s. This specific mermaid has many similarities with the “Japanese Mermaid” in the Milwaukee Public Museum’s collection.

The Japanese Mermaid of the Milwaukee Public MuseumThe “Japanese Mermaid” (Figure 4) has a story as sparse as the Fejee Mermaid’s is full. Even with the knowledge of the taxidermist who might have made it, areas remain shrouded in mystery. I hope my research will place the MPM’s artifact in context and allow future researchers the ability to investigate areas that are unknown. One of those areas is donor information.

The MPM’s Japanese Mermaid is similar in appearance to other fake mermaids (Figure 5). Although the mermaids are not identical, this is because they are all handmade. Each has its own individual quirks and differences, but the similarities are in its design and placement of arms and head. Olalquiaga characterizes the manufacturing of mermaids as “belonging to that pre-industrial world which the nineteenth century was both annihilating and pining for.” She continues, arguing “fake mermaids represent a kind of simulacrum whose manual production and scarce multiplication distinguish it from the seriality that characterizes most modern copies.” This individuality of mermaid craftsmanship and scarcity of antique mermaids (not modern gaffs made to look antique, although those exist as well), has made the job of tracking down a single craftsman less arduous.


Bondeson mentions a Philadelphia taxidermist by the name of William McGuigan who produced mermaids in the 1840s to rival the Feejee Mermaid. Olalquiaga does not mention McGuigan by name, but beneath a photograph of a fake merman from the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, Venice, she claims that particular artifact is “one of a series … made by the same artisan”.


In all three mermaids, the number of “ribs”, along with the same arm positions, and the head design are all very similar. The Peabody mermaid and the MPM mermaid have other similarities. The Lamb mermaid has some hair on its head, and the MPM Mermaid’s head is shiny, the substance possibly remnants of an adhesive used to secure the hair. The MPM Mermaid’s hair could have either fallen off or been taken off by sideshow visitors, fascinated by these “surrogate relics of ancient dreams”.


William McGuigan was an assistant to Titian Peale, the son of Charles Willson Peale, the artist and founder of the American Museum. In the 1830s, Jonathan Harrington of Boston, built his own museum which had “a respectable group of McGuigan mountings plus random curiosities.” The holdings eventually ended up in Moses Kimball’s possession, after the Harrington Museum was sold in 1842. It is coincidental, since Phineas T. Barnum leases the “Fejee Mermaid” in 1842, after it had disappeared for more than a decade.

Continued Next Page

Article by Karl Wolff, master’s student in Public History-Museum Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

During the summer of 2005 he completed an internship at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida