I love weird stuff. I think I get it from my Dad, who has always had a fondness for the ghastly and the ghoulish. He tried to instil this love in us kids from a young age. I took to it like a duck to water. My brother, alas, is a little more normal, but that’s his loss.
During my twenty-two years I have collected an impressive collection of weird and wonderful things. I do, in fact, have a wunderkammer. Oh, yes, I do.
A wunderkammer, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is more commonly referred to as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Also known as a Cabinet of Wonder or a wonder-room.
I have now generously decided to share some of these wonders here on my blog. I know, I know - I’m just too good to you, my two or three multitude of readers. Gather round, people, gather round and witness the astonishing, unparalleled spectacle of the bizarre and the fantastic, here (and only here) at www.alex-bell.co.uk:
Okay - moving straight on to my first curiosity, which I found quite by accident when I was six. As a little kid running around in my ribbons and bows I loved Disney’s The Little Mermaid. For years Ariel epitomised the way I imagined mermaids to look. But then I learnt about the Feejee Mermaids. Now that I’m all grown up, I get much more excited about them than I ever did about Ariel. Over the years, my tastes have veered away from the sweet and the sugary towards the macabre, the grotesque and the horrible (my Dad is so proud). And Feejee Mermaids, in case you don’t already know, are shrivelled, semi-mummified, ugly-looking things.
In 1842, a man called Dr J. Griffin arrived in New York with a real mermaid he was said to have caught near the Feejee Islands in the South Pacific. Circus luminary P. T. Barnum persuaded him to showcase her in his travelling circus, where she was viewed by hundreds of people all over America.
Later it was said that the whole thing was a hoax and that Griffin and Barnum had known each other all along and come up with the scam together. Apparently they learnt that the mermaid was a fake soon after they acquired it from a seaman because it wasn’t a mermaid at all but rather a fish tail sewn onto an ape’s upper body.
Eh? Now, all right, Feejee Mermaids are fiendishly ugly things, but I find it hard to believe anyone would be fooled by a fish tail sewn onto an ape. Still, the fact remains that the term Feejee Mermaid is now pretty much synonymous with fake mermaid. The original Feejee Mermaid was said to be lost in the fire that destroyed Barnum’s museum so it will never be known for sure whether she was genuine or not.
Personally, I believe that she was real, but that’s probably only because when I was six, playing on a beach in Singapore with my little brother whilst my parents sipped cold beers nearby, I found what appeared to be a fossilised/mummified mermaid washed up on the sand. Without my parents’ knowledge, I took her back to the hotel, packed her in my bag and brought her home with me. Now she lives in my bedroom and is a constant source of fascination for my cats.
And here she is, the first wonder in my wunderkammer - my very own, marvellously ugly Feejee Mermaid. Feast your eyes and be amazed:
