The life and death of an elephant called Jumbo

Posted in America, Animals, Historical articles on Friday, 14 October 2011

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This edited article about animals originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 842 published on 4 March 1978.

Jumbo, picture, image, illustration

Jumbo dies after the train crash

Dust flies into the air. Dozens of elephants shift restlessly around looking for some way out of the compound. A man slips through the forest of legs, dodging the huge feet that could crush him in seconds. His job is to slide a chain noose around the leg of one of the elephants, the first stage in making it captive.

Elephants normally move quietly and carefully, so quietly that a herd may drift by unnoticed only metres from an observation post. In ones and twos, in family groups of males, females and calves, they pass through the jungle like great grey ghosts. At times they spread out, following individual inclinations within a general migration in search of food: in other cases they follow paths driven through the forest by generations of elephants. Elephants are living bulldozers, travelling where they wish.

As the herds move through India, through Sri Lanka. Burma and other parts of Asia, people track them and plan ahead. When properly trained, these living bulldozers will pull and push heavy loads, dragging logs to a sawmill and helping to build roads. So, year by year, the shifting herds are penned in and suitable animals picked out.

During the weeks before the round-up, dozens of workers build the kheddah, a strong stockade of tree trunks. Two long fences stretch out to funnel the herd of elephants towards the entrance. When scouts discover a suitable herd, long lines of beaters, as many as 2,000 people plus 50 worker-elephants, encircle the wild beasts and drive them gradually towards the kheddah.

Day by day the beaters gentle the elephants forward. At this stage everyone moves carefully. Up ahead plentiful water and bundles of sugarcane lure the elephants towards captivity, but if the beaters frighten the herd anything can happen.

A frightened elephant first fans out its ears and raises its trunk as it searches out the threat, then it trumpets shrilly and finally rolls its trunk up between its tusks, tucks its head down and charges. An adult elephant weighs upwards of 5,000 kilograms (5 tons) and can charge at more than 35 km/h (22 mph). If the herd panics, all that the beaters can do is try to jump out of the way.

Usually, however, the roundup succeeds: the elephants walk into the kheddah without suspicion. Now comes the most dangerous moment of all, shackling the 15 to 20-year-old elephants, the ones that are the right age for working. Two specially-trained elephants, called koonkies, with experienced handlers, move up beside each selected youngster. An assistant jumps down to slide a chain round the elephant’s leg. Finally the koonkies nudge the new recruit towards the training school.

All over Asia, elephants have been workers for centuries. But in Europe and America they live in zoos and circuses, amazing onlookers. In Asia the mahout, the rider, shouts and the elephant pushes a log or steps over a tree. In the circus ring the elephant goes through his tricks.

Somehow the size of an elephant, its sheer unlikeliness in the small-scale world of a circus or zoo, makes it endearing. One of the most famous elephants of all even gave his name to anything that was larger than large. In 1865 a four-year-old elephant arrived at London’s Zoological Gardens. His keepers called him Jumbo.

Jumbo grew to an impressive size. As an African elephant he was even larger than the working Asian elephants, standing over 3.5 metres (11 ft 6 ins) at the shoulders and weighing more than 6,000 kilograms (6 tons). Over the years he gave rides to hundreds of children, ambling along the Zoo paths. Everyone loved him. But his keepers worried. They knew about his tempers, possibly caused by the pain of his massive teeth renewing themselves, and they feared he might become dangerous.

Eventually, when Jumbo was around 20, they could no longer face the risks and, in 1882, sold him to the American showman Phineas T. Barnum for £2,000. Yet their troubles were just starting. People wrote letters to the papers saying “Jumbo must not go.” And Jumbo had his own ideas, too. When his new owners wheeled up his specially-built crate he refused to walk into it.

Getting Jumbo into that crate took a whole month. Up to 10,000 visitors a day, more than 20 times the usual number, thronged to the Zoo to say goodbye. Children sent him hundreds of buns. Since an elephant spends most of the day eating, getting through about 40 kilograms (90 lbs) of hay. Jumbo probably appreciated these, although he may have wondered about the seasickness pills a well-wisher sent. At last, on 22nd March. Jumbo started his journey to America. The Times reported:

“At eight o’clock in the morning the officials began to pack him up. Jumbo was led out into his paddock. He stopped for a moment at the entrance of his box, stepped into it and might have stepped through but at the word of command from his keeper ‘Woa Jumbo’ he stopped short. The chains which were upon his front legs were then made fast. When he felt his legs fastened. Jumbo knelt down and put out his trunk to his keeper, as if to implore release from his bondage.”

With a lot of heaving from the huge horses that pulled the crate. Jumbo slowly travelled down to the London Docks and steamed off to America.

In America, Jumbo became one of the main attractions of Barnum’s circus. For three years he kept up the punishing schedule of a nineteenth-century circus star, travelling by rail through the night, parading through the town to the circus ground, performing, then walking back to board the train again. And this was how he died, on 15th September, 1885, after a show in St. Thomas. Ontario, Canada.

Jumbo and Tom Thumb, a smaller elephant, were walking along the track to their coaches when a goods train came along behind them. The driver whistled but was unable to stop the train.

The cowcatcher of the engine caught Tom Thumb and threw him into a ditch. The locomotive then ran into Jumbo and the elephant, with the wrecked train, was pushed along for some distance. He lived for about 15 minutes while efforts were made to haul him from under the wreck. After he died, his keeper, who had come with him from London, lay on the corpse weeping.

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