Whale on a Train!

Nathan Connolly: Okay Brian here’s a question for you. What would you do if you really wanted to see a whale and the Discovery Channel wasn’t due to be invented for another hundred years?

Brian Balogh: You know Nathan I’ve really never thought about that question before.

Nathan Connolly: You just wait for the train.

Brian Balogh: The train?

Nathan Connolly: Check it out. For two years between 1880 and 1882 a whale toured the Midwest on the back of a train. People came from far and wide to see the sideshow attraction like no other. And the best part it was called The Prince of Whales.

Brian Balogh: You’re making that up Nathan.

Nathan Connolly: No there’s more, because of course the longer the whale was on the tour the worse it smelled. Jamie Jones is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And she has traced the story of the whale and the two entrepreneurs’ that put it on the train.

Jamie Jones: The two proprietors were George Newton a lawyer and sometimes a real estate agent from a small town in Massachusetts called Monson. And he’d had an idea for a long time that it would make a great Barnum-esk sideshow exhibition to get away all and tour it around the country. In fact George Newton wrote to P.T. Barnum and initially in 1880 before he eventually teamed up with his with his partner, to see if Barnum did want to get to him. And Barnum secretary wrote back to him and said, “that Barnum’s time was so taken up that he could not give any speculation such attention”. Although I think we can read between the lines and see that Barnum thought this was a bad idea, a smelly idea.

Jamie Jones: Eventually George Newton partnered with a man named Fred Engelhardt, who was a sports promoter and a former sports journalist in the Midwest in St. Louis in Chicago. Fred Engelhardt had a lot of connections, he knew how to set up these pop up exhibitions, he had a lot of contacts in the Midwest. And he partnered with George Newton and they formed the Pioneer Inland Whaling Association in 1880.

Nathan Connolly: Now you have to walk me through the logistics of something like this. How do you take a living animal the size of a whale from the ocean, presumably on the East Coast and get on a train heading west toward Chicago?

Jamie Jones: What happened is George Newton went up and down the East Coast meeting with whaling captains. And by this point in 1880 the US commercial whaling industry is really on the decline. Starting in the 1860s petroleum petro oleum, it’s a rock oil came into the market to replace whale oil as a source of machine lubrication and illumination. And so commercial whaling for whale oil was really on the decline. And I think that Newton might not have been able to find a whale and captain to bring in a whole whale, if in fact the market for whale oil had been stronger. So in some ways the fact that this whale made it to shore at all I think is a testament to the decline of this industry and the rise of fossil fuel mineral extraction and consumption.

Jamie Jones: Newton goes up and down the East Coast looking for a whaling captain who’s willing to harpoon a whale as close to shore as possible, tow it back to him on shore. It sounds like from Newton’s letters that he tried a lot of different whaling captains before he finally found one in Provincetown. Then in November of 1880 he got a telegram saying that his contact in Provincetown had captured him a whale. Newton then hired someone to tow the whale from Provincetown Harbor to Boston Harbor, which is a good distance. And there at Boston, they contracted with the dry dock people to create a kind of cradle, something that might be used to lift a large ship out of the water and bring into dry dock for repairs, but they adapted all of this sort of dockside infrastructure for a whale.

Jamie Jones: They lifted it out of the water and put it on two specially reinforced rail cars that had been built for the purpose of exhibiting this whale. From what I understand although the proprietors are very cagey about the details for reasons you can probably imagine. It seems like the whale was at least partially cut open and gutted and filled with a combination of salt and ice.

Nathan Connolly: This sounds like an extraordinarily expensive proposition.

Jamie Jones: It does seem like a very expensive proposition, but it also seems like for a while at least it was a money making proposition. During the whales exhibition in Chicago especially in January it made a lot of money. There it seems thousands and possibly even on some days tens of thousands of visitors who are paying something like 25 cents a head to come into this exposition hall and view the body of the whale. So for a while at least I think that the whale also made a lot of money.

Nathan Connolly: The whales debut is in Chicago is that right?

Jamie Jones: The whale was debuted at this huge exposition building in Chicago which was very near the lake and near a lot of the railroad connections at the time. It’s actually on a site that is now the site of the Chicago Institute of Art. So the sort of place where there were a lot of industrial trade shows in Chicago, and it was a place where big public exhibitions like this could be staged. The whale debuted to great acclaim. A lot of people came. Visitors were invited to come and peek inside the mouth of the Whale, which was called the place where Jonah went in. This whale’s body as it’s being exhibited, is also being embedded in all of these cultural stories about whales from the 19th century going all the way back.

Nathan Connolly: A visitor begins his observation generally at the head of the fish, looks into his capacious mouth, feels of the long bony hair that supply the place of teeth. Hunts for the eyes, the snout and then the ears. Walks along the side of the creature. Catches hold of the huge fin, punches the monster in the side as if to ascertain if it is rib-less. And finally brings up at the tail of the huge fellow where the broad flukes are spread.

Jamie Jones: After Chicago the whale goes to Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit. Now in April things were starting to go bad, the whale is starting to smell. From the very, very beginning Newton is very anxious about how long this show’s going to last. And in his letters home to his son, he nicknames the whale the bird. He writes constantly, “If the bird gives out, we go out of business for a while.” So he’s very worried about the bird giving out. And in April of 1881 in Cleveland the bird was giving out.

Jamie Jones: Newton and Engelhardt tried their first big spectacular effort to try to preserve the body of the whale and make it fit for exhibition. They hired a team of butchers to treat the whales body with some kind of chemical substance, and they said in some reports that they fumigated the whale or that they coated it or that they embalmed it. There’s a lot of these, this language of decontamination or even kind of preparing the body as if for a funeral. And because Newton and Engelhardt are masters of publicity, they’re writing about their efforts to remediate that whale, to sort of save the whale from its own putrefaction. And they’re making a kind of another press event out of the whales decline because they are such geniuses of publicity and promotion.

Nathan Connolly: Now in spite of these efforts, I have to imagine that as the whale starts to rot, people do start to slow down to a trickle.

Jamie Jones: That’s right, and the news coverage of the whale show really changes. Starting even as early as February, but intensifying around April and May. And the coverage is less about the spectacle of the whale and what a marvelous exhibition it is, and more about how ungodly it smells. And how you can smell the whale for miles before you see the whale.

Nathan Connolly: I can only imagine.

Jamie Jones: I can only imagine too. I had the opportunity to see a beached whale in Connecticut a couple years ago in fact, and just the smell is just … It really is over overpowering. So I can only imagine how … It’s been what? From November to April. It’s been six months that the whale’s been out of the water and decomposing. It seems as though the whale show itself was thrown out of Toledo because of the enormous smell, and civic leaders were getting involved in treating the show as a public nuisance in some places.

Nathan Connolly: Toledo, what a smell, fishy smell. To the heavens it seemed to swell. We asked our friend if he is acquainted here, he says “No.” So to do no good to ask why this aroma. But passing along a handbill is thrust into our hands telling us of the whale dead and in bad odor being in the city, and then we understood whence this all pervading perfume. The Kalamazoo Telegraph, May, 1881.

Jamie Jones: They tried their second last ditch effort to preserve the whale, or rebuild it, or keep it a kind of going to show in the summer of 1881. And again a very highly publicized event. Engelhardt set up in rural Michigan a site that he called a camp a Beilein, again kind of publicizing and making myth even out of the disaster of this show. Where he hired a team of taxidermists from Detroit to come up and rebuild the whale from the inside out. And Engelhardt’s account of Camp Beilein is very colorful. Newton by this point has gone home to Massachusetts, who can blame the guy. And Englehart writes home to Newton to give him a report on how the project of rebuilding the whale is going.

Jamie Jones: At one point Englehart says this. We are here, in saying that, I say almost all that can be said. Mosquitoes, flies, bugs and snakes predominate and form the largest part of the atmosphere. The work is terrible, you have no idea. But to the press, who are trying to find this site and visit it, and see exactly what kind of alchemy is going on at Camp Beilein Englehart is nothing but positive, talking about the genius of these Detroit taxidermists, and the fact that the whale will be ready for its grand re-debut in just a few short weeks or months. And again Englehart is making of this a great spectacle of publicity even as the whale itself is rotting down to nothing.

Nathan Connolly: And the fact that I guess that whaling itself was literally a dying trade is also not lost on some of the observers.

Jamie Jones: Right, absolutely. Whale oil production reached its peak, peak whale oil in the 1850s. In the 1840s and ’50s were when the US commercial whaling industry was booming. For example during the decade of the 1840s we know that at least 2363 whaling voyages were launched from US ports. By the 1880s when the Prince of Whales is making its tour across the US, only 736 whaling voyages are leaving. And that’s I think because the market for whale oil in the US is declining very rapidly given the abundance and the relative cheapness of producing petroleum that’s coming from the oil fields in Pennsylvania.

Nathan Connolly: What’s the ultimate fate of this giant carcass?

Jamie Jones: It’s hard to know. The archive starts to run cold in the spring of 1882 and 1883. I know that things are not always what they seem is exemplified in the case of this whale. The skin and tail of this monarch of the vasty deep was all that it purported to be, but its frame alas was of iron in Hickory and its flesh of sawdust and other deceptive light weights. Which I think in some ways allows us to reverse engineer what happened perhaps at Camp Beilein or in Cleveland when Newton and Englehart were frantically trying to remake the body of a whale to keep it on the road as it decomposed.

Nathan Connolly: I was talking to Jamie Jones, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She’s working on a book about energy, obsolescence and the decline of the US oiling industry.