The Sea Inside

and for whose club foot he prescribed a corrective boot, advice which went unheeded by the poet’s mother. For both of these patients, as enthusiastic swimmers, Hunter’s procedure for dealing with the nearly drowned might have come in useful: he recommended electrical stimulation to restart stopped hearts.
    Hunter’s curiosity knew no bounds. His motto was to experiment, rather than merely ask questions. He was the first to scientifically describe teeth, and transplanted them, still living, from one patient to another. He even experimented on his own body, dipping his lancet in the lesion of a prostitute, then incising his glans and prepuce, aiming to inoculate himself with gonorrhoea, only to contract syphilis too. Less dramatically, he also commissioned his pupil Edward Jenner to take the temperature of a hedgehog.
    Hunter was a great teacher, but his blunt-speaking manner did not endear, nor did his apparent thirst for blood: Blake portrayed him as ‘Jack Tearguts’ in his satirical burlesque
An Island in the Moon
. In London, Hunter lived in a grand house on Leicester Square, where guests were greeted in his dining room by the gilt-framed specimen of an erect penis; but his country residence – to which he would drive in a cart pulled by a buffalo – was in Earl’s Court, described by
The Gentleman’s Magazine
as ‘about a mile beyond Brompton, in the midst of fields’, a rural scene – inhabited by ‘animals of the strangest selection in nature’. Here Hunter was surrounded by a living museum, one giant experiment-in-progress,

    On gizzards of gulls, hawks and owls,
    The heat of lizards, spurs of fowls,
    Bones of pigs, air-sacs of eagles,
    Moaning dingos, barking beagles;
    Sleek opossums, prickly hedgehogs,
    Buffaloes, dormice, wolves and dogs

    Leopards and jackals lurked in dens, zebra and ostrich roamed the lawns. There were eagles chained to rocks, buffaloes in the stables, and giraffes nibbling the trees. There was also a boiler for rendering down carcases, both animal and human, and an underground cell which I hope did not contain live specimens – although, if the engravings of the menagerie at Exeter Exchange are to be believed, I suspect it probably did.
    Menageries had been part of London life since the thirteenth century, when King John kept his collection at the Tower, including Barbary lions whose remains have since been identified as an extinct species, as well as elephants, leopards and a polar bear which was allowed to fish in the Thames for its food while tethered by a long chain. In the eighteenth century, exotic animals excited a city alert to every new sensation; they were a kind of theatre. At the ’Change, as it was known, bonneted ladies and high-booted dandies were entertained by lions, tigers, monkeys, crocodiles, sea lions, rhinoceros and even an Indian elephant named Chunee, all displayed in cages barely bigger than their captives’ bodies and housed on the upper floor of a building on The Strand, a veritable department store of beasts. Horses passing on the road below would rear up at the roars of the lions above, and a zebra was once ridden from there to Pimlico.
    Visitors included Jane Austen and Lord Byron. The latter recorded: ‘The elephant took and gave me my money again – took off my hat – opened a door –
trunked
a whip – behaved so well, that I wish he were my butler.’ In 1826, after accidentally crushing his German keeper when he turned in his cage, Chunee, suffering a septic tusk, tried to break open his iron bars and shook the walls so that the owners believed the entire menagerie might be set loose on London’s streets, ‘there being several lions, tigers and other ferocious beasts confined in the same apartment, all of which he might easily have liberated’. Soldiers from nearby Somerset House were summoned, and, as its keeper ordered his obedient charge to kneel, fired into the elephant’s cage, while the other animals growled. ‘The animal, finding himself wounded, uttered a loud and piercing groan,’ and tried to free itself with its trunk, then hid at the back of its cage, only to be stabbed by long spears.

    After 152 musket shots – and with crowds assembling outside and people offering to pay to see the beast die – Chunee had to be finished off by the keeper with a harpoon. His demise was as chaotic and agonised as that of any hunted whale; his remains were equally coveted. His carcase was dissected by students from the Royal