The Feejee Mermaid — a monkey sewn to a fish, sold as a marvel

In the summer of 1842, in New York City, the showman P.T. Barnum exhibited what he advertised as a preserved mermaid taken from the waters near the Feejee (Fiji) Islands. It was no such thing. The object was a manufactured specimen — the desiccated head and torso of a monkey stitched to the dried tail of a fish — most likely made by craftsmen in the East Indies and acquired decades earlier by a Western sailor. Barnum knew it was false; before he displayed it he had consulted a naturalist who told him plainly that it was a fabrication. He exhibited it anyway, having engineered the public into demanding to see it.

What makes the Feejee Mermaid a landmark is not the crude object but the campaign Barnum built around it. He had leased the curiosity from the Boston showman Moses Kimball, and rather than simply put it on display, he constructed a fictional authority to vouch for it. An associate, Levi Lyman, was installed in a New York hotel as “Dr. J. Griffin,” a supposed naturalist of the (entirely invented) “British Lyceum of Natural History,” carrying the mermaid as a scientific prize. Barnum then planted letters in New York newspapers, ostensibly mailed from Alabama and South Carolina, mentioning the eminent Dr. Griffin and his specimen, and distributed woodcuts of beautiful, bare-breasted mermaids — images that bore no resemblance to the shriveled object itself.

The illusion was deliberately self-debunking only in retrospect; at the time it worked. Griffin “lectured” on natural history, the press relayed the controversy, and crowds poured into the exhibition — first at a Broadway concert hall, then at Barnum’s American Museum, where receipts reportedly tripled. The specimen, when finally seen, was a small, blackened, agonized-looking thing that Barnum himself described as ugly; the gap between the advertised maiden and the actual relic was part of the entertainment. Naturalists and a skeptical southern press denounced it as a fraud within the year, and the mermaid’s authenticity collapsed even as Barnum’s fame grew.

The Feejee Mermaid became the template for Barnum’s career: not the sale of a believable object, but the orchestration of curiosity through a fake expert, manufactured news, and seductive imagery, with the public half-aware it might be humbugged and paying to find out. The original specimen’s fate is uncertain; it is generally believed to have been destroyed in one of the fires that consumed Barnum’s and Kimball’s collections in the nineteenth century, with a related specimen later associated with Harvard’s Peabody Museum.