Americans have long been fascinated with “jumbo” things: jumbo shrimp, jumbo jets, jumbotrons. Perhaps few know, however, that the word and the imagery it invokes of larger-than-life objects is rooted in the legacy of Jumbo, a celebrity elephant of the 1880s made famous by the London Zoo, P.T. Barnum and the Barnum & Bailey Circus.
While Jumbo is remembered for his ability to entertain circusgoers, the elephant also left a nuanced legacy in our language. For example, jumbo mortgages are loans exceeding the limits set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Unlike ordinary mortgages, jumbo-size loans are also not fully securitized or guaranteed, elevating risks to the lender. In other words, jumbo mortgages are both excessively large and excessively risky. This apparent double meaning for “jumbo” better captures the legacy of Jumbo the elephant in American pop culture than simply his size alone.
The public has long been captivated by elephants because of their immense size, remarkable strength and ferocious temper. None of these adjectives were appropriate to describe Jumbo when he first arrived at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, in late 1862. Captured in Sudan, Jumbo was the first African elephant in Europe in nearly two millennia, but he lived in relative obscurity. He was a scrawny calf at just four feet tall, with a disposition described as “filthy and miserable,” and was overshadowed in Paris by two larger Asian elephants and two new African elephants — Castor and Pollux — brought to the Jardin des Plantes in 1863. It was an inauspicious start for the world’s most famous elephant.
Abraham Bartlett, then the superintendent of the London Zoo, arranged Jumbo’s purchase from the Jardin des Plantes in 1865 for 450 pounds, accomplished by trading Jumbo for a rhinoceros and several other rare animals. Acquired sight-unseen, Jumbo’s poor initial health came as a startling surprise to Matthew Scott, who was destined to become the elephant’s longtime keeper. When he first saw Jumbo in June 1865, Scott described him as “full of disease, which had worked its way through the animal’s hide, and had almost eaten out his eyes.” Undeterred, Scott slowly nursed Jumbo back to health, and the gamble by the zoo paid off. By the time Jumbo reached adulthood, he was 11 feet tall and close to seven tons, the largest of his kind in captivity.