In 1873, there weren’t very many options for the public in the United States to see what a real whale looked like.
The occasional whale could wash up on a beach somewhere, of course, but it would rapidly begin to shuffle off its mortal coil, leaving beachgoers with the decidedly unpleasant process of natural decomposition. On the other hand, seeing the animal’s skeleton neatly hung in a museum was a bit incomplete because it required imagination or an artist’s reconstruction to put muscle and skin on the whale. Unlike other large mammals, whales can’t be taxidermied; consequently, stuffed whales weren’t part of the dioramas of charismatic megafauna installed in natural history museums at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. And photographing whales underwater – to see real whales in their natural habitats – was almost a full century away.
So, in 1873, the best possibility for people to see real whales was thanks to Great International Menagerie, Aquarium, and Circus, that touted its exhibit of “A Leviathan Whale, a grand and magnificent specimen, the King of the Deep” as “…the only show in the world that exhibits a WHALE,” per then-contemporary newspaper articles.
By WHALE, the Menagerie meant a real, actual dead whale. This WHALE was quasi-preserved through the constant injection of chemicals and carted around via rail from one American town to the next in a bit of Music Man-like showmanship. Their competitor, the Burr Robbins Circus, exhibited a giant paper-mâché whale a few years later, determined to not be outdone by the Menagerie. The two whales dueled their way across the United States for the better part of a decade, vying for publicity, audiences, and the money to be made from the venture. And the Menagerie’s WHALE was all about just that – turning the public’s awe and wonder at nature’s unknown into spectacle for profit.
Whether visitors knew anything about whales after they had visited the Menagerie was irrelevant. The showmanship, the bustle of activity, the anticipation of the WHALE was something so singularly extraordinary, that it never failed to draw huge crowds. And, yet, the decades-long success of the traveling WHALE largely depended on the experience being personal. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see for yourself. You know what a real whale looks like now because you saw one here and paid for the privilege to do so. It’s as though the Menagerie was able to curry a sense of authenticity or even expertise about whales since that was, technically, what visitors saw.