An Elephant named Jenny Lind

In January 1868, for the sum of one shilling, visitors could view a menagerie that was temporarily housed inside Dunedin’s Polytechnic Hall.  Among the animals exhibited there was a female Asiatic elephant named Jenny Lind. Named after the famous Swedish Opera singer, Jenny the elephant had spent her entire life on display, firstly in America then in Australia.   When she arrived in Sydney in 1851 Jenny was the first elephant ever seen on the Australian continent and in 1868 when she disembarked from the brigantine ‘Swordfish’ in Port Chalmers Jenny became New Zealand’s first pachyderm immigrant.             Her exhibition can’t have been a success.   The March 16^th edition of the Otago Daily Times contained the following advertisement: 

 

Nine days later – a second advertisement appeared:

Jenny was sold, possibly at a knocked down price, to an owner who had probably never even seen an elephant before, let alone cared for one. Difficulties arose almost immediately. In 1868 there were limited options for transporting large, exotic animals – Railways were non-existent and roads were poorly maintained.  Jenny may have been obliged to pull her own waggon or at least disembark from it whenever rivers, bogs and ruts made the northern road impassable.                                                                        

Progress was made however and on the 21^st of April 1868, after travelling some considerable distance, Jenny and her keeper arrived at the Southern bank of the Waitaki River.  Here, the ferryman was unsurprisingly unwilling to allow an elephant to board his punt. The crossing was delayed and Jenny was turned loose.  The elephant keeper can be forgiven for not knowing that elephants are excellent swimmers, but can’t be forgiven for allowing his charge to forage on the river banks.  Fresh new foliage had emerged there after a previous season’s ‘burn off’ and among the sprouting vegetation was a fine crop of the native shrub Tutu – a plant that was easily identified and well known to be extremely poisonous.  Newly sprouted Tutu resembles asparagus fronds and Jenny must have found it palatable.  She browsed for around four hours on the riverbank, took a great drink of water from a nearby creek and then began to stagger.  Three hours later she fell and died  – becoming one of New Zealand’s more famous (and certainly the largest) victim of Tutu poisoning.                                                                                                                                   The plant had been the scourge of pastoralists ever since Cook’s first landing.  Cook released five goats, two ewes and a ram in Queen Charlotte sound in 1773 however his hopes of stocking New Zealand with livestock were soon dashed.  The sheep were promptly poisoned (probably by Tutu) and at least one of the goats was eaten by local Maori – thus preventing the earlier proliferation of one of New Zealand’s more harmful introduced species.    

      

Almost every part of the Coriaria plant is poisonous; livestock are attracted and poisoned by the foliage whereas humans are attracted by its shiny, sweet tasting black berries and are poisoned by its seeds.  The plant was well known to early Maori, who used the berry juice after cautiously straining out the seeds.  Following their example a few early European settlers used filtered and fermented ‘Toot’ juice to make wine but for the most part the plant was deliberately avoided.  Its victims were generally inexperienced or unaware, newspapers published ‘warnings to mothers’ when the berries ripened in November, because the majority of Tutu poisoning victims were children.                     

In comparison to the dozen or so recorded cases of human Tutu fatalities, stock losses were enormous. Tutu thrives in fertile coastal soils, - sought after locations for early settler farmers.  Animals that were in poor condition were especially susceptible to the toxin; hungry sheep and cattle that were offloaded from ships and allowed to forage died in their hundreds.  Stock losses of twenty five percent were common and some particularly unlucky run holders reported finding up to three quarters of their stock dead, poisoned, or ‘tooted.’

Human lives could be saved if vomiting was induced quickly, whereas poisoned cattle or sheep were bled in an effort to release the poison from circulation.  Sheep that survived were said to “lose their gregarious instinct,” becoming hermit animals that were slaughtered for ‘station mutton.’ No harm came to those who ate this meat – an effect that was noted by a Doctor Malcolm of the Otago Institute who carried out a series of investigations into the plant’s toxic properties in 1914.                  

Doctor Malcolm experimented on rabbits using the “painless method, sometimes employed with recalcitrant suffragettes” of feeding (poison in this case rather than food) through a stomach tube.  His choice of experimental subject was interesting, rabbits were known to be averse to eating Tutu, but Doctor Malcolm demonstrated that they were not immune to its toxic effects.  He determined the size of a fatal dose (between a half and a full pound of leaves), confirmed that the toxin passed into the bloodstream and discovered that transfusing poisoned blood produced different symptoms. Doctor Malcolm acknowledged that he “had expected to glean much more useful information” from his experiments.  An antidote had been hoped for, but the good Doctor was correct in presuming that there was not “much chance of getting a practical remedy” - none exists today.

Even in death Jenny Lind the elephant remained an object of curiosity.  Her skeleton was prepared by Doctor Hector, a member of the Wellington Philosophical Society and put on display in Wellington’s Colonial Museum.  While her remains may have taught a few generations of children a little about anatomy, her demise did not serve as a warning to circus owners.  In 1956, an elephant travelling with the Bullen Brothers circus died in remarkably similar circumstances – poisoned while foraging on the banks of the Mangawhero River.  Tutu’s second pachyderm victim was quickly and quietly interred in an anonymous grave, somewhere behind the railway houses at Ohakune Junction.

Remarkably, a third case soon followed.  In the nineteen sixties, two elephants were poisoned while being transported through the Tutu infested Buller gorge.  Their death was prevented by the quick thinking actions of a veterinarian named David Marshall who administered barbiturates and later reported (standing in?) spectacular waist high piles of elephant vomit. 

Pachyderm passing problematically prevented.