As this is not written for mercenary purposes or financial reward, I think you will perhaps indulge me in whatever may seem peculiar. I shall, like Othello, “Nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice, but a round unvarnished tale deliver.”
The first object that moves me to write this is for the glory of God, the giver of all good. The second, to benefit the people of the United States of America and Great Britain, in both of which countries I have been received from shore to shore with the greatest kindness, and Jumbo with the most unbounded enthusiasm. It is to me a joy and satisfaction also to give out the knowledge I possess, and display before the world God’s great goodness, love, and affection manifested in not only the human family, but in everything, and to prove that the Giver and Provider from whom only all good comes, notes all things. And because, as was said by a worthy divine in an Episcopal church last Sunday night, “Whatever makes known and discloses a knowledge of God to the extent of becoming an instrument of good and benefit to any of God’s creatures, displays God in his own person for the benefit of the world, thereby being a power and antidote to all disease and evil, both to the human-family and the brute creation.”
When I first saw Jumbo I met him on the coast of France. He was about being brought from that country to England for medical care—to your humble servant, the animals’ physician. A more deplorable, diseased, and rotten creature never walked God’s earth, to my knowledge. Jumbo had been presented to France, together with another baby elephant, when they were quite infants.
When he was given in my charge, outside of Paris, his condition was simply filthy. He had been in the care of Frenchmen for several years, and they either did not know how to treat the race of elephants, or culpably neglected his raising. I don’t know which, but when I met him in France I thought I never saw a creature so woe-begone. The poor thing was full of disease, which had worked its way through the animal’s hide, and had almost eaten out its eyes. The hoofs of the feet and the tail were literally rotten, and the whole hide was so covered with sores, that the only thing I can compare it to was the condition of the man of leprosy spoken of in the good old “Guide-book,” or of Job’s state, when he had to scrape himself with a potsherd. However, I received Jumbo as I have received many other of God’s creatures that other people have given up for “a bad job.” I received him kindly, took him tenderly over the Channel, and lodged him in a comfortable, clean bed in my stable. I undertook to be his doctor, his nurse, and general servant. I watched and nursed him night and day with all the care and affection of a mother (if it were possible for a man to do such a thing), until by physicking from the inward centre of his frame I cleared out all diseased matter from his lungs, liver, and heart. I then, by means of lotions of oil, etc., took all the scabs from the roots of his almost blinded eyes. I removed his leprous coat as cleanly as a man takes off an overcoat; and his skin was as fine as that of a horse just from the clipper’s, after the hair had been cut off. I was rewarded by having a clean-shaven looking creature in a perfectly sound state of mind and body; and he required no blanket nor overcoat, although he was far, far from home, in a much more northerly climate than his native element in “Afric’s Sunny Sands.” Taking climate and covering into account, it was like transferring a man from the western shores of the Atlantic to “Greenland’s Icy Mountains.”
CHAPTER II.
JUMBO’S COMPANION ELEPHANT ALICE, AT THE ZOÖLOGICAL GARDENS, LONDON.
Her name is Alice. She is a native of the west coast of Africa, and was born in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four, the same year that Jumbo—nearly four years old—was brought to me.
She was born in the midst of a tribe of wild elephants that roamed about and sported in the freedom of their native element in the region spoken of above.
When Jumbo had grown into a good-sized Elephant Boy, I suggested that we ought to get him a sweetheart, so that, although he was a prisoner, chained and manacled in the Zoölogical Gardens, London, he would have a companion through life of his own race. So, having Jumbo entirely under my own care and management, I persuaded our Garden Directors to send to Africa for a female baby elephant. I must say the Directors were very good to me, at that time. They saw that I had got a fine specimen of the elephant tribe in my Jumbo, and that he was going to beat the world as a curiosity and wonder—which the sequel has proved.