On Saturday 27 April 1706, an elephant died beside the road that leads from Broughty Ferry to Dundee. Accompanied by its keeper, it had been on the march from the northeast of Scotland, when it collapsed from exhaustion. A mature elephant being a hard thing to shift with ease, the keeper and sundry others dug a deep ditch at the feet of the animal, so that it could at least recline in a relatively upright position. Sadly, these well-meaning people did not factor in the Scottish weather: it rained heavily overnight, the ditch filled with water, and the unfortunate animal drowned.
The event triggered considerable excitement in the busy town of Dundee. It was not every day, after all, that an ‘animal so considerable for its bigness and strength’, as one local described it, could be seen close-up. The corpse captured the interest not only of the common people, but also of one of the town’s most important citizens: a local surgeon who saw a golden opportunity for making his name in scientific circles. Patrick Blair had long been interested in the insides of mammals, so he was reasonably well-equipped to dissect a dead elephant. And a fine job he made of it.
Part 2 of this study will focus on Blair’s work on the deceased elephant. In this opening article, however, we need to establish how this particular elephant came to be near Dundee.We now know much of its history, which is a remarkably long and detailed one, marked by a peculiarly complex tangle of custodianship.
An elephant on the road
The elephant, as Patrick Blair was soon to establish, was a female, and she was of the Indian species, rather than the African. She was occasionally described in contemporary advertising as being from Siam (Thailand), but she was possibly from India or Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It is also likely that she was between 26 and 28 years old in 1706; that, at least, was what her keepers had told Blair, before they hot-footed it out of town. And, sad to say in a world that prefers tame animals to have names, there is no record of her ever having been named.
She first appears in historical records in October 1688, in the accounts for the annual Michaelmas Fair at Leipzig in Saxony. There, a man identified as ‘Barthel Verhagen, from Amsterdam’ had displayed an Indian elephant, charging a fee from those who wished to gaze upon it. In the same month, Anton Verhagen, also from Amsterdam and most probably Barthel’s brother, exhibitedin August of that year (the advertisement is not effusive; squashed between a lengthy notice for a missing person and a lengthier one for a missing nag, it reads simply: ‘These are to give notice, that at Captain Francis Willsher’s at Debtford, is an Elephant to be Sold’).
