Widely circulated rumors suggest that
white Americans once used black Americans as bait for hunting alligators. The perception that such rumors may be true
has been bolstered in recent years by otherwise respected sources treating the rumors
seriously.[i]
The stories may make excellent
Crocodiles abound in Ceylon, and in many places the natives will “salaam” in dread to the water. At Galle, in the southern province, a saurian was lately killed, whose stomach was found to contain two human skulls. The crocodiles are very wary, and difficult to kill, and generally manage to sink themselves out of sight.
Our sketches are by Major-General H. G. Robley, who writes: – “My first represents the trail of a big saurian being discovered on a water-side bank. No. 2 refers to the arrangements at a neighboring village for bait, so as to get a sure shot. It is tedious work waiting for the man-eater to come out of the water, but a fat native child as a lure will make the monster speedily walk out of the aqueous lair. Contracting for the loan of a chubby infant, however, is a matter of some negotiation, and it is perhaps not to be wondered at the mammas occasionally object to their offspring being pegged down as food for a great crocodile; but there are always some parents to be found whose confidence in the skill of the British sportsman is unlimited. No. 3 gives a view of the collapse of the man-eater, who, after viewing the tempting morsel tethered carefully to a bamboo near the water’s edge, makes a rush through the sedges. The sportsman, hidden behind a bed of reeds, then fires, the bullet penetrates the heart, and the monster is dead in a moment. The little bait, whose only alarm has been caused by the report of the rifle, is now taken home by its doting mother for its matutinal banana. The natives wait to get the musky flesh of the animal, and the sportsman secures the scaly skin and the massive head of porous bone as a trophy.”
The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, Kansas), September 29, 1899, page 11 (See, "Did Crocodile Hunters Use Babies as Bait in India?," Janaki Lenin, September 8, 2016).
Sometimes, however, “alligator bait” was sometimes just that – alligator bait. In the first cartoon, when a goat swallows a rope attached to alligator bait, the goat inadvertently becomes the bait. In the second, two white guys are served up as alligator bait.
And even when the notion of "alligator bait" (if not those words, specifically) was used figuratively, the "bait" was not always black. Here, a white boy is dangled as bait in a political poster opposing votes in favor of the sale of liquor.
Some advertising images appear to have borrowed from the earlier crocodile hunting stories out of Ceylon - at least in mirror image.
McCrary & Branson's “Alligator Bait” and the copycat images and other items that followed were not the first such images. Earlier images played off the notion of alligator preference even before the idiomatic use of “alligator bait” came into wide usage.
Taking the Bait
There is at least one example of a black child nearly "eaten" in front of a white man for sheer amusement; but only the child was amused -- it was a practical joke and a white man took the bait, hook-line-and-sinker.
“click bait,” but the sources cited do not generally prove the historical truth of supposed, human
“alligator bait.”
“alligator bait.”
The case in favor of a factual basis
of the rumor is generally staked on a few isolated “facts” cherry-picked from two
isolated “news” items; a 1923 article about alligator hunting in Chipley,
Florida, and an account of moving alligators from the winter quarters to their
summer quarters at the Bronx Zoo in 1908.
Taken at face value and in their entirety, however, those articles do
not actually say what the proponents suggest they do, and in any case, it’s not
clear how seriously those articles were taken when they were published, and
there are several good reasons to doubt the factual basis of both stories.
Other evidence cited in support of
the factual basis of the rumor include souvenir postcards, knick-knacks and
other novelty items showing alligators threatening or eating black children,
many of them labeled with the expression “Alligator Bait.” But those items may simply be “jokes,” cruel
jokes in keeping with the casually racist attitudes and language of the day; puns
on the then-current expression, “alligator bait,” an idiom for black
children. The idiom first came into
widespread use in the wake of publication of a wildly successful, mass-marketed
photographic print entitled “Alligator Bait,” produced by McCrary & Branson
Studios of Knoxville, Tennessee, not as the result of sudden, widespread
awareness of dangerous and cruel hunting practices.
“Alligator Bait,” McCrary &
Branson, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1897.
The idiom itself is not evidence of
such hunting practices, but more likely an echo of the old wives’ tale that
alligators (and crocodiles before them) preferred small children over adults,
and black children over white children.
They have a weakness for pigs and puppies, and special
fondness, it is said, for pickaninnies – negro children; but the instances in
which they have been the aggressors in attacks on grown people are rare . . . .
Detroit Free Press, September 15, 1895, page 27.
Similar superstitions about
crocodiles date back to at least as early as the late-1700s. In Egypt, they were said to prefer Muslims
over Christians, and along the west coast of equatorial Africa, they
purportedly preferred “negroes” over Christians.
The Best “Evidence”
Alligator hunters in Chipley,
Florida, they say, used black children as bait.
But what’s conveniently left out of most accounts is the fact that their
mothers willingly rented out their own children for $2 a day, the babies came
out of the water “wet and laughing,” and there was no real danger because the
hunters “do not ever miss their targets.” Perhaps even more damning than such
questionable “facts” is the story’s close similarity to a decades-old string of
dubious “crocodile bait” stories, purportedly out of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka),
East India, India or the Sudan, the first of which was written by a
military-humor cartoonist in 1888. And finally,
the Chipley version of the story was written by an itinerant newspaper
telegraph operator and copy reader a colleague accused of “hooey,” and who
later prospered in a second career as a “sex philosopher” and lecturer with
live demonstration models.
The Bronx zoo story that suggested
two black children were used as “bait” to lure alligators into their summer
pool does not square with a more factual description of the same events
published simultaneously the same day. The
New York Times reported simply that
the “alligators came out willingly into the cage after a prod from the long
sticks.” But even if the more sensational
version is presumed true, the children are said to have “darted around the
tank,” which is consistent with running around the outside perimeter of the
enclosure. And the alligators are said
to have fallen “with grunts of chagrin into the water, disappointed of their
prey,” so it is unclear whether the children, assuming they were there, were
ever in harm’s way.
The case for the truth of the rumors
is also supported by souvenir postcards and novelty items showing alligators
threatening black children, frequently titled or labeled as “Alligator Bait,”
and numerous references to “alligator bait,” once a common idiom meaning “black
children.” But the postcards and novelty
items may simply be visual puns playing off the idiom; jokes, tasteless to be
sure, but not evidence of dangerous or cruel alligator hunting practices. The postcards and novelty items appeared
after 1898, the year in which the expression “alligator bait” first became
widely known and used. The expression
came into widespread use following release of a wildly successful,
mass-marketed photographic image of a group of black babies entitled “Alligator
Bait,” not due to any sudden or growing awareness of any actual alligator
baiting.
Although the expression “alligator
bait” may conjure up images of dangerous hunting practices, there is no evidence
that it was derived from any such practices.
Early, pre-1898 examples of the expression suggest it was used among
black children themselves, as a playful taunt.
In an article about an African-American boy describing his efforts to
capture an escaped pet alligator in Kansas, he was described as having nearly
become “alligator’s bait.” It was also
used as an insult for a couple white, Southern politicians, and as a
description of a group of white boys taking a raft into alligator infested
waters.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the earliest example of the expression was in a punch line of a widely circulated joke in 1883, about white, pasty, anglophiles – referred to by the recently coined term, “Dudes.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, the earliest example of the expression was in a punch line of a widely circulated joke in 1883, about white, pasty, anglophiles – referred to by the recently coined term, “Dudes.”
“I suppose you have heard of our dudes, Miss Clarwa?”
observed a New York swell to a Jacksonville girl.
“Oh, yes,” she answered, “they are becoming very popular in
Florida. We use them for alligator
bait.”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 15, 1883, page 4.
And in the earliest story in which American babies were said to be used as alligator bait, “a nice, fat baby is rented for the occasion from the cracker [(poor, southern white)] mother to whom a half dollar is ample recompense for the risk that her child is to run.” The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, Kansas), September 29, 1899, page 11.
And in the earliest story in which American babies were said to be used as alligator bait, “a nice, fat baby is rented for the occasion from the cracker [(poor, southern white)] mother to whom a half dollar is ample recompense for the risk that her child is to run.” The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, Kansas), September 29, 1899, page 11.
The origin of the idiom “alligator
bait,” referring to black children (and frequently applied to adults as well),
may have its roots in a centuries old superstition, first recorded in the
1700s, that crocodiles (and later alligators, by extension) were discriminating
diners, preferring the taste of Muslims or “negroes” over Christians. The earliest reports of such beliefs came out
of Egypt and “Western Ethiopia,” which under the nomenclature of the time
likely referred to the west coast of Africa, in the region of Cameroon.[ii] So it is possible that the folk tale could
have been transferred to the New World as part of the oral tradition of
enslaved people brought over from the west coast of Africa, or through
references to them in English language texts published in England and the
United States, or both.
Although references to the myth have
persisted for centuries, it’s not clear how many people ever took it
seriously. For example, an enslaved man
on a Georgia plantation gave the following advice on how to avoid the
bloodhounds to a Union soldier recently escaped from Rebel custody.
He assured us that the dogs were fearful of the alligators
with which that river abounded, and that the slaves were taught that alligators
would destroy only negroes and dogs. He
didn’t believe it himself, although his master thought he did.
Captain J. J. Geer, Beyond the lines: or a Yankee Prisoner Loose
in Dixie, Philadelphia, J. W. Daughaday, 1863, page 128.
While tales of using black children
may seem plausible in light of the well-documented history of slavery, Jim Crow
laws and extra-legal mob action like lynching, the specific allegations of
placing children in harm’s way as “alligator bait” are not well
substantiated. Before drawing any
conclusions about the underlying factual basis of sensational rumors, one
should make a comprehensive survey of a wide spectrum of relevant sources and
references from the period, not simply cherry-pick a few purported “facts” from
questionable sources.
You be the judge. But don’t jump to conclusions.
Chipley, Florida, 1923
The most frequently cited piece of
“evidence” in support of the truth of the rumors is a 1923 article about
children used as live alligator bait in Chipley, Florida. But if that article is to be taken seriously
on its face, the children’s parents are at least as culpable as the hunters,
renting their own children to strangers for $2.00 a day. And besides, if, as the article suggests in a
detail conveniently omitted from most discussions of the practice, the babies
“go into the water alive and whole and come out wet and laughing” because
“Florida alligator hunters do not ever miss their targets,” the whole thing
wasn’t as dangerous as one might suppose.
But that, of course, would be ludicrous.
Mobile, Ala., Sept. 14. – Naked pickaninnies are being used
as alligator bait around Chipley, Florida!
But wait. These little black morsels are more than glad to be
led to the “sacrifice,” and do their part in lurking the big Florida ‘gators to
their fate without suffering so much as a scratch.
With the demand for tanned alligator hides far outstripping
the supply, hunters along the Santa Rosa coast of Florida have beset themselves
to helping relieve the shortage and incidentally to fatten their purses. And little negro babies are providing a
necessary part of the ‘gator hunters’ equipment.
No, the pickaninnies are not torn cruelly asunder, like
wiggling worms, and placed bit by bit upon giant fishhooks, but go into the
water alive and whole and come out wet and laughing.
Aside from the novelty of the method, this baiting alligators
with negro babies, a scheme said to have been originated by a Chicago man,
there is nothing so terrible about it, except that it is spelling death for the
alligators.
Above all other things, the alligator is most fond of human
flesh as an item of diet. Hunters say
that while an alligator will risk its safety for young dog, it will jeopardize
every hope of life for a live baby. And
in the matter of color, the additional information is vouchsafed that black
babies, in the estimation of the alligators, are far more refreshing, as it
were, than white ones.
According to reports, the method of baiting with the negro
baby is simplicity Itself. Nothing is needed but the pickaninny and a
Winchester rifle or two. The baby is placed in the edge of the water where it
is shallow, near the alligator's haunts, and the rifle in the hands of expert
shots, who are hidden behind nearby clumps of bushes and dense growths of marsh
grass.
The “bait” is placed in water Just deep enough so that it can
frolic and play and splash its fingers through the water and white sand in
childish glee. The “bait” is used naked,
which adds no little, so the hunters are said to have discovered, to the value
of the “lure.” A black baby, or a baby of any other color, it is well known,
likes to splash in the water when clothed, but stripped naked the child is in a
heaven of delight and makes a great to do, chortling and laughing, which
attracts the 'gator.
Hunters declare that before the “bait” has emitted half a
dozen giggles or laughs, or coos, as his humor may prompt, a slight rustling is
heard in some nearby lagoon, and presently a long, dark, shadowy line is
detected beneath the water, creeping toward the poor little "bait."
Now, the baby is always placed in such a position that there
is shallow water for a considerable distance beyond him, out into the water.
Then as the 'gator draws near he is forced above the surface, wading toward the
“bait” with his head and forequarters well ex-posed. Then –
Bing, bing, bing! Three or four rifle shots ring out, and the
hunters rush into the water to retrieve their prize. For Florida alligator hunters do not ever
miss their targets.
And as they rush, also rushes, usually, the mother of the
“bait,” who almost always accompanies her “coal black rose” to the hunting
place. As the mother gathers up her
offspring the hunters finish off the ‘gator by blows from heavy clubs.
And usually while one of the hunters drags the “game” well up
on the sands another of the group pays off the mother for the use of her negro
baby. There Is a set price. It is:
Two dollars.
Akron Beacon Journal, September 14, 1923, page 4.
Some people took the reports
seriously at the time. The NAACP, for
example, put out a press release about the Chipley story; a shortened version
of the story appeared in several African-American newspapers. Tellingly, perhaps, their account reported on
the supposed events in Chipley, without reference to any historical context of
similar, known hunting practices. In 1923,
the people who worked at the NAACP or wrote and edited African-American
newspapers would have had parents or grandparents who had lived under slavery,
or parents, grandparents, friends or other relations who had lived in the deep
south before migrating north, who would have been familiar with similar events,
assuming they had happened with any frequency, and yet the reports of the
NAACP’s response and accounts of the purported incident in Chipley, Florida made
no allusion to any similar hunting methods ever having been used regularly, or
at all.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, 69 Fifth avenue, New York City, today made public the contents of a
dispatch printed in the Louisville, Kentucky, Herald, of Sept. 23rd, stating that Colored babies were
being used as alligator bait in the vicinity of Chipley, Florida.
The Colored babies are allowed to play in shallow water, with
expert riflemen concealed nearby. When
the alligator approaches his prey he is said to be shot by the riflemen. The dispatch states that “Florida alligator
hunters do not ever miss their targets.”
The price reported as being paid Colored mothers for the use of their
babies as alligator bait, is said to be two dollars
The Buffalo American (Buffalo, New York), October 11, 1923, page 1.
Even Time magazine reported the fact of the article, but without
vouching for its veracity. They
published a rebuttal several weeks later.
On behalf of the town of Chipley, Fla., the Orange County
Chamber of Commerce branded as “a silly lie, false and absurd,” the story
(broadcasted a month ago through the press of the nation) that colored babies
were being used at Chipley for alligator bait. In its issue for Oct. 15, TIME
printed the fact that the report had been circulated, but in no wise vouched
for its authenticity. TIMES story was as follows: From Chipley, Fla., it was
reported that colored babies were being used for alligator bait. “The infants
are allowed to play in shallow water while expert riflemen watch from concealment
nearby. When a saurian approaches his prey, he is shot by the riflemen.”
The Louisville Herald: “Florida alligator hunters do not ever
miss their target”
The price reported as being paid colored mothers for the
services of their babies as bait was “$2.00 a hunt.”
“Were Children Used as Alligator Bait
in the American South?” David Emery, Snopes.com, June 9, 2017.
But not everyone took the story
seriously.
Just a Liar – Macon Telegraph: It takes all sorts of folks to
make up the world, including the blockhead who believes that negro babies are
used as alligator bait in Florida.
The Tampa Tribune, November 2, 1923, page 4.
Similarly, when a
white grocer from Louisiana named Garland Rue told a reporter in 1988 that his
great-uncle had used his father as alligator bait, the reporter expressed
skepticism.
Now Garland is one Crowley old-timer
whose memories I trust. However, he told
one tale that I’m a bit dubious about:
“My father was raised in Cameron
Parish,” he said. “His parents died when
he was very young, and his uncle put him out on the bank for alligator bait,
then would shoot the alligators.”
The Crowley Post-Signal (Crowley, Louisiana), September 13, 1988, page 2.
The original “crocodile bait” story
from Ceylon in 1888 had a similar effect on a reader in New Zealand who claimed
to have spent a lot of time in that country.
All I can say in reference to this is that, though I have
been a great deal in Ceylon, I never saw the parents who would have hired out
their children for such diabolical purposes – one good reason being that in
many cases the alligator comes along so quickly that no hunter, however sure a
shot, could be certain of saving a child bound to a stake under such
conditions.
Otago Witness
(Otago, New Zealand), July 6, 1888.
And even assuming parents actually
did rent out their children as crocodile bait in India, it was reportedly
difficult to rent similar alligator bait in Florida.
I was in Florida a year or so ago, and tried to hire a baby
to experiment with for alligators after the method in India, but folks who
owned babies down there didn’t seem to enter into the spirit of the sport, and
I couldn’t get one. I compromised on a
rather lively complaining dog. He was a
success, and I had quite a lot of fun, although the sport was a good deal tamer
than it would have been if I had only had a baby for bait.
New York Sun, June 24, 1894, page 24.
These earlier skeptics do not
necessarily disprove the stories, but they should give pause to modern readers
eager to believe them as fact based on the thinnest of evidence. If so many contemporary readers did not take
them seriously, perhaps they should be taken with a grain of salt today.
And there may be good reason to take
the story with a grain of salt. The
Chipley, Florida story was written by an itinerant telegraph operator and
newspaper copy reader who later found more success as a self-styled “professor”
and “sex philosopher,” giving sex-education lectures with “live models” to demonstrate
the action, in what was seems to have been a thinly-veiled soft-core strip
tease act. He also hosted radio call-in
shows with a psychic, answering questions about sex and relationships. A former newspaper colleague accused him of
“hooey,” and his models’ brassieres and panties were once confiscated and sold
at auction to satisfy a bad debt.
T. W. Villiers
Thomas Wayland Villiers was born in
Ohio in about 1890, the son of “an illustrious sexologist” and “nephew of
America’s highest salaried Baptist minister.”[iii] At the time of the 1940 census, he lived in
Franklin, Ohio with his wife Alice (25 yrs), and reported his occupation as
“lecturer/salesman” in the “retail” industry.
Years earlier, however, he worked as a telegraph receiving operator for
a newspaper in West Virginia, where he also served as timekeeper for local
boxing matches.[iv]
In 1920, his article, “Trials of a
Receiving Operator,” appeared in an Associated Press service bulletin.
 |
Service Bulletin of the Associated Press, Bulletin 56, September 1, 1920,
page 38.
|
During the year before publication of
his “alligator bait” piece, his name appears in three other articles, all
published as dateline Mobile, Alabama, the same location as the dateline on his
Chipley, Florida piece. In the first of
those articles, he is named as the author of an open letter to the WDAE radio
station in Tampa, Florida. He identified
himself as the “Radio Editor” of the “Register,” presumably the Mobile Register.
Mobile, Ala., Nov. 3. WDAE: Picked up your concert here on
one tube. Cut in with one stage
amplifier and couldn’t keep the phones on my ‘bean.’ T. W. Villiers, Radio
Editor, Register.
Tampa Times,
November 8, 1922, page 8.
Six months later, he penned a
far-fetched article about a textbook supposedly banned by pro-prohibitionists
because of a scientific illustration characterized as a “still.”
Apparently determined to do its part in helping the youth of
Alabama forget there ever was such a thing as whiskey or other “hard”
drinkables in common use in America, the Alabama State Text Book Commission has
ordered discarded a grammar school text book, in use in all of the schools of
the state. It contains a picture of a
still. . . .
The miniature distilling apparatus was used to illustrate the
principle of converting liquids into steam and from steam back to liquids.”
Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, Louisiana), May 15, 1923, page 5.
In early September, less than two
weeks before his “alligator bait” story hit the presses, he was named as a
local dog fancier whose German Shepard, “Rino Von Zavelstein,” performed
wonders on the golf course.
Many stories have been told tending to prove the
extraordinary intelligence of the German shepherd police dog, but T. W.
Villiers, Mobile fancier, has re-named his imported police dog “Golf Hound,”
and incidentally has quit paying caddies to search for golf balls. Rino Von Zavelstein, the canine caddy calmly
stands behind his master until he swings, Villiers says, then dashes off after
the ball. He does not pick it up but
stands over the ball as a living “marker” until the player comes up for the
next shot.
Knoxville News-Sentinel, September 3, 1923, page 3.
Following his “alligator bait” piece,
however, T. W. Villiers disappears from the headlines, at least as a
writer. Years later, he would reappear
as the subject of news articles and in advertisements for his new career as a
sex lecturer.
 |
Knoxville Journal, March 23, 1932, page 8.
|
From as early as 1928, and continuing
through at least 1935, “Professor Wayland Villiers” gave sex lectures in
conjunction with “educational” films, sometimes with one or several “live
models” onstage to give demonstrations.
 |
The Danville Bee (Virginia), March 18, 1933, page 10.
|
Advertised as, “clean,” “moral,” and
“legal,” the performances seem to have been (like his models) thinly veiled
excuses for soft-core nudity.
 |
Vivian Vaughn,
“Miss America” of 1933, Medford Mail Tribune, August 1, 1935, page 7.
|
 |
Nashville Banner, March 1, 1932, page 15.
|
During a run in New York City, famed,
syndicated gossip columnist Walter Winchell recognized him from his newspaper
days.
Prof. Wayland Villiers who lectures on sex at the 42nd
street stand is the same chap who headed the “copy desk” of the old St. Louis Globe a few yrs back.
“On Broadway,” Walter Winchell, Nevada State Journal (Reno, Nevada),
June 7, 1932.
 |
New York Daily News, May 23, 1932, page 31.
|
A former colleague also recognized
him in Knoxville, Tennessee, and outed him as just an old “copy reader,” while praising
him for his newfound business savvy and divulging his personal problems.
You’ve gone a long ways, Tom, since you and I used to sit
side by side at the Press-Scimitar
news desk in Memphis four years ago and write headlines. Your mustache wasn’t waxed then and if
anybody called you “Professor” Villiers you would have haw-hawed him a handful.
. . . You had ‘em leaning forward in their seats when you
told them you’d reveal how they could tell a girl is chilly. I still don’t know how to tell from what you
said last night, tho.
And then the way they ate up those books you sold at $1 for
two. You brought the hoarded dollars,
Tom. You ought to be working for Col.
Frank Knox. . . .
So you got your degree of doctor at the Institute of
Bio-Psychology, New York. I don’t find
it listed in the World Almanac but I suppose it’s all right. . . .
I had a telegram from Jim Joyce, managing editor of the Press-Scimitar, about you
yesterday. Jim says that when you worked
for him you were “bothered continually by affairs of the heart and
pocketbook.” That’s what your name meant
in Memphis. But don’t pay any attention
to Jim. He doesn’t realize like I do now
that you were an artist at heart, Tom, and those little things ought to be
overlooked. . . . “Professor” Steve Humphrey, Authority on ex-copy readers,
sexologists and hooey.
Knoxville News-Sentinel, March 22, 1932, page 1.
Villiers also took his show on the
radio, sometimes hosting call-in shows where he answered sex and relationship
questions while his co-host, a Danish psychic billed as Princess Signe Serene,
addressed listeners’ spiritual questions.
 |
| https://tenwatts.blogspot.com/2014/07/wayland-villiers-radio.html |
Not that someone who gives
light-hearted lectures about sex might not have also done serious work on some
other subject, but in light of all of the circumstances, the arc of his career,
other writings, the factual basis of Villiers’ frequently-cited 1923 story
should at least be called into question.
The story should also be questioned because of its striking resemblance
to a decades-long string of “crocodile bait” stories, all apparently derived
from an 1888 original pen by a military-humor cartoonist named Major-General
Robley,
Crocodile Bait
Villiers’ 1923 “alligator bait” story
appears to be a retread of a decades-long string of “crocodile bait” hoaxes
dating back to 1888, each one borrowing from the last with increasingly far-fetched
embellishments. Within a few months of
the publication of the original story in the British magazine, The Graphic, in late-January 1888,
several variants appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines throughout
the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. No fewer than nine distinct versions of the
original story appeared in hundreds more newspapers on a regular basis for more
than three decades.
The original “crocodile bait” story
of 1888 claimed that British hunters in Ceylon rented small children from
locals to use as crocodile bait. While
not every parent was willing to risk their children’s lives, British crocodile
hunters’ sharpshooting skills were apparently as highly regarded as those of alligator
hunters in Chipley thirty-five years later; they could always find parents whose
“confidence in the skill of the British sportsman is unlimited.” And like the children in Chipley, Florida, no
harm ever came to the children of Ceylon. Following the kill-shot, “[t]he little bait,
whose only alarm has been caused by the report of the rifle, is now taken home
by its doting mother for its matutinal banana.”
Robley’s story, which first appeared
in The Graphic (London), included
nearly all of the basic elements of its later variants.
Sport in
Ceylon — shooting a man-eating crocodile
Crocodiles abound in Ceylon, and in many places the natives will “salaam” in dread to the water. At Galle, in the southern province, a saurian was lately killed, whose stomach was found to contain two human skulls. The crocodiles are very wary, and difficult to kill, and generally manage to sink themselves out of sight.
Our sketches are by Major-General H. G. Robley, who writes: – “My first represents the trail of a big saurian being discovered on a water-side bank. No. 2 refers to the arrangements at a neighboring village for bait, so as to get a sure shot. It is tedious work waiting for the man-eater to come out of the water, but a fat native child as a lure will make the monster speedily walk out of the aqueous lair. Contracting for the loan of a chubby infant, however, is a matter of some negotiation, and it is perhaps not to be wondered at the mammas occasionally object to their offspring being pegged down as food for a great crocodile; but there are always some parents to be found whose confidence in the skill of the British sportsman is unlimited. No. 3 gives a view of the collapse of the man-eater, who, after viewing the tempting morsel tethered carefully to a bamboo near the water’s edge, makes a rush through the sedges. The sportsman, hidden behind a bed of reeds, then fires, the bullet penetrates the heart, and the monster is dead in a moment. The little bait, whose only alarm has been caused by the report of the rifle, is now taken home by its doting mother for its matutinal banana. The natives wait to get the musky flesh of the animal, and the sportsman secures the scaly skin and the massive head of porous bone as a trophy.”
The Graphic
(London, England), January 21, 1888, page 54 (text) and 73 (images).
H. G. Robley
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| Thomas Maclauchlan, History of the Scottish Highlands, Highland Clans and Highland Regiments, Edinburgh, T. C. Jack, 1887, frontispiece. |
Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley
spent the final seven years of his career in Ceylon, where he would have had
the opportunity to observe local crocodile hunting practices. But he was also known as a contributor of
military-humor cartoons to the British humor magazine, Punch, which raises the question of whether his contribution to The Graphic was serious reportage, or
another example of military humor of the sort he submitted to Punch.[v]
In one of his cartoons, a
peace-loving “Ferris Bueller” plays hooky.
Captain of Rural Corps (calling over the Roll). “George
Hodge!” (No answer.) “George Hodge! – Where on Earth’s George Hodge?”
Voice from the Ranks. “Please, Sir, he’s turned dissenter,
and says fighting’s wicked.
Punch, Volume
64, April 12, 1873, page 156 (the script ‘R’ in the corner signifies Robley[vi]).
In another, an officer volunteers to
be taken prisoner to avoid risking his life in a fight.
DIVISION OF
LABOUR.
Facetious Volunteer Sub. “Look here, Captain; I’m tired of
this fun. Do you mind looking after the
men while I go and get taken prisoner?”
Punch, Volume
66, May 16, 1874, page 210.
In a similar vein, the “British
sportsman” in Robley’s contribution to The
Graphic hides “behind a bed of reeds” with a rifle while an unarmed “chubby
infant” sits out in the open near crocodile-infested waters because its
parents’ “confidence in the skill of the British sportsman is unlimited.”
Serious, or hilarious?
Harper’s Bazar
Whether serious or not, Robley’s
story spawned a string of imitators, each one embellishing the story with even
more sensational details, many of them using the same images or poor reproductions.
Two weeks after its initial
appearance in The Graphic, a nearly
identical story appeared in Harper’s Bazar, a weekly magazine with a large,
national distribution in the United States.
The Harper’s article used all three of the images from The Graphic, one of them cropped to fit
in a different arrangement. The
accompanying text borrowed heavily from Robley’s original, while adding a few
more dramatic elements. For example, Harper’s expanded Robley’s description
of the “chubby infants” into “chubby, rice-distended, squally infants.” Harper’s
also dramatized the death of the crocodile, which Robley simply described as, “The
sportsman, hidden behind a bed of reeds, then fires, the bullet penetrates the
heart, and the monster is dead in a moment.”
As the bullet penetrates the heart this enormous rudder flaps
convulsively, the pale fishy eyes are covered with the film of death, the
tongueless cavern of a mouth (the gullet of which is closed with a valve) shuts
with pistol-like snap, the two front lower-jaw tooth (which are longer than the
rest) now show their points through corresponding holes in the snout. (This
makes the difference between the crocodile and the alligator).
Harper’s
Bazar, Volume 21, Number 5, February
4, 1888, page 76.[vii]
Harper’s omitted
the detail about the parents’ “unlimited” confidence in the British sportsman;
it was, after all, an American magazine.
American Newspapers
Less than a week after Harper’s carried its version, yet
another knock-off appeared, introducing what would become recurring themes in
later versions, that the crocodile is “lazy,” suffers from “ennui,” but can be
roused immediately when tempted by a “dark brown infant.” This version begins with an introduction that
pokes fun at the proliferation of American classified advertisements for
anything under the sun, with colorful musings about what a classified ad for
Ceylonese babies might look – “if newspapers abounded in Ceylon as much as
crocodiles do,” but since newspapers didn’t abound in Ceylon, hunters were
limited to “personal solicitation,” a phrase that in one form or another
appears in numerous, later versions of the story.
If newspapers abounded in Ceylon as much as crocodiles do,
advertisements worded like the foregoing would be common in their want
columns. As it is, the English crocodile
hunter has to secure his baby by personal solicitation. He is often successful for Ceylon parents, as
a rule, have unbounded confidence in the hunters, and will rent their babies
out to e used as crocodile bait for a small consideration.
Ceylon crocodiles suffer greatly from ennui. They prefer to lie quite still, soothed by
the sun’s glittering rays, and while away their lazy lives in meditation. But when a dark brown infant with curling
toes sits on a bank and blinks its eyes at them, they throw off their cloak of
laziness and make their preparations for a delicate morsel of Ceylonese baby
humanity. When the crocodile gets about
half way up the bank the hunter, concealed behind some reeds, opens up fire,
and the hungry crocodile has his appetite and life taken away at the same
time. The sportsman secures the skin and
head of the crocodile, and the rest of the carcass the natives make use of.
The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, Kentucky), February 10, 1888, page 3.
This version would ultimately appear
in hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States, Britain, Australia and
New Zealand. The story would later
boomerang back to the United States, with slight variations.
“Decoy” - The Golden Argosy
Two months after Robley’s original
appeared in The Graphic, a second
popular American magazine with national distribution published a short story
apparently based on the original.
Captain Henry F. Harrison’s story, “Decoy,” appeared in the March 24,
1888 issue of The Golden Argosy, an
adventure magazine targeting young boys.
Henry F. Harrison was a frequent
contributor to The Golden Argosy, but
does not seem to have published anything under that name elsewhere; perhaps it
was a pseudonym. At the time, a story
under his name appeared in nearly every issue of the magazine. He claimed to come from a family of sailors
going back two hundred years. Some of
his stories were styled as his father’s stories, some as his
grandfather’s.
“Decoy,” Captain Henry F. Harrison, The Golden
Argosy, Volume 6, Number 17 (Whole Number 277), March 24, 1888, page 268.
“Decoy” was written in first-person,
as though it actually happened to him. “Decoy” was accompanied by the original image
from The Graphic showing the
crocodile being shot. The Golden Argosy used a second one of
Robley’s images (the hunter bargaining with parents) a few weeks later, in
another story by Harrison, but in a completely different context and meaning.[viii]
“Two Queer Adventures,” Captain Henry
F. Harrison, Golden Argosy, Volume 6,
Number 20 (Whole Number 280), page 316. Caption – In Another Moment the Entire
Family Came Out to Meet Me.
Harrison’s story, “Decoy,” differs
from most of the crocodile hunting stories in that the baby-baiting crocodile
hunting technique is practiced by the locals, not by a British colonial. The American protagonist is in East India
hoping to observe a native crocodile hunt.
On his way to the hunt, he sees a toddler tied to a stake near the
river. He sees a crocodile approaching
the child and shoots it to save the child.
He is then set-upon by a number of locals, angry that he had disturbed
their hunt. They had hoped to take the
crocodile alive, and had used the baby to attract the crocodile.
The Captain, angry that locals had
endangered the child, takes it back to the village hoping to reunite it with
its parents, but without luck. “No one
pretended to know anything about it. The
brute had probably bought the baby for a few rupees of some of the very poorest
and most degraded of the natives, and they of course would not let themselves
be known. The man whom I employed as an
interpreter told me very cooly that I mustn’t think anything of such little
affairs – they were common enough in this part of India.”
The American, disgusted with the low
value the locals placed on human life, takes the child into his own custody,
raising him as his own – well, not exactly as his own, but as his ward living
as a close member of his family circle.
He names the boy, “Decoy.” Years
later, when they are back in India, the local hunter whose hunt the American
had ruined years earlier recognizes him and attacks him; his ward, Decoy,
reacts and saves his guardians life, repaying the favor of many years before. It’s all very neat and tidy, and coming so
soon after the basic crocodile-hunting appeared, seems more like a
fictionalized version of the original than fact.
New Zealand
When newspapers in New Zealand picked
up the American newspaper version nearly verbatim, they added the detail that
the story had appeared in the Ceylon
Catholic Messenger. But once again,
the story, at least as it is said to have appeared in Ceylon, did not suggest
that such classified ads actually did exist in Ceylon, it merely imagined what
they would like if they were to exist.
It is not clear whether the American
article had actually appeared in the Ceylon
Catholic Messenger or not, but the authors of an academic paper with a
survey of news accounts of crocodile hunting in Ceylon (including a Sri
Lanka-based herpetologist)[ix]
failed to find the story.
The New Zealand version found its way
back to the United States, where it appeared in dozens of newspapers. The reference to its purported appearance in
a Ceylon publication may have served to lend the new version a gloss of
legitimacy.
Compare:
If mothers in general shared the nerve exhibited by mothers
in Ceylon, trouble would be spared in many a household: “Babies wanted for
crocodile bait. Will be returned
alive.” If newspapers abounded in Ceylon
as much as crocodiles do, (says the “Ceylon Catholic Messenger”),
advertisements worded like the foregoing would be common in their want
columns. As it is, the English crocodile
hunter has to secure his baby by personal solicitation.
Ashburton Guardian (Ashburton, New Zealand), September 14, 1889, page 2.
If mothers in general shared the nerve exhibited by mothers
in Ceylon, trouble would be spared in many a household: “Babies wanted for
crocodile bait. Will be returned alive,”
says the New Zealand Tablet. If newspapers abounded in Ceylon as much as
crocodiles do, says the Ceylon Catholic
Messenger, advertisements worded like the foregoing would be common in
their want columns. As it is, the
English crocodile hunter has to secure his baby by personal solicitation.
Omaha Bee
(Omaha, Nebraska), March 9, 1890, page 23.
Kinghorn
The imagined classified ad versions
of the story seem to have inspired another writer to take it one step further,
and claiming that he had actually seen such advertisements in Ceylon. The narrator, Richard Kinghorn, described his
own crocodile hunts in India with the familiar language of “lazy” crocodiles
suffering from “ennui.”
“When I first saw this advertisement in a Ceylon newspaper,”
said Richard Kinghorn, a guest at the Richelieu, “I thought it was a joke. Afterwards I learned that it was by this
means that the crocodile hunters secured their bait. It is no trouble for an English crocodile
hunter to get these little children. The
Ceylon parents have full confidence in Englishmen, and they will rent out their
babies to be used for crocodile bait for a small sum.
“The Ceylon crocodiles are lazier than any other and are
harder to get. They lie for hours
perfectly motionless, basking in the sun.
Hardly anything can stir them.
But when tempted by a fat Ceylon baby placed on the banks of the stream
they shake off their ennui and their mouths water for a delicate morsel of
brown baby. The crocodile gathers
himself together and starts out for the infant.
When he gets about half way up the bank the hunter, concealed behind
some reeds, opens fire and gets his game. Then the baby is taken home to its loving
parents, to be used for the same purpose the next day. The sportsman secures the skin and the head
of the crocodile and the natives are given the rest of the carcass.
I’ve shot everything from the little prairie dogs to grizzly
bears, but for excitement crocodile shooting with babies for bait is out of
sight.”
Chicago Tribune,
May 28, 1890, page 8; The Weekly
Iberville South (Plaquemine, Louisiana), April 27, 1895, page 4.
It’s not clear whether Richard
Kinghorn was an actual person or not. A
prominent businessman and sportsman from Quebec named Richard Scobell Kinghorn
died in Montreal at the age of 62[x],
but there is no explicit connection between the two, aside from the coincidence
of the name. It’s possible, just
possible, that the name is as phony as the story.
Kinghorn’s version appeared in dozens
of newspapers in the United States in 1890.
When the same version popped up a few years later in alligator country,
Plaquemine, Louisiana, the paper (significantly perhaps) made no mention of any
similarity to alligator hunting practices in the American South.
Atkinson
On May 27, 1891, almost a year to the
day after Kinghorn reportedly told his croc story at the Richelieu Hotel in
Chicago, an “English traveler” identified as V. M. Atkinson is said to have told a similar croc story at the Leland Hotel in Chicago. But this time, the story was moved Egypt, and insead of locally leased babies, kidnapped
Jewish babies imported from Russia were supposedly used as bait.
Other details of the story are more-or-less the same as earlier versions, except that the Egyptian
hunters were not expert marksmen like the renowned British hunters in Ceylon or India; sometimes they missed.
Chicago, May 27. V. M. Atkinson, an English traveler who was
at the Leland yesterday, has recently visited Moscow and other Russian cities.
He declares that the Jews are persecuted most cruelly, and portrays a riot
where a dozen Jewish infants were torn from their mothers’ arms and thrown into
the streets. Mr. Atkinson says that
every stranger coming to Moscow who has a long nose is obliged to go before the
Russian authorities and prove that he is not a Jew. It appears that the Jews cannot leave Moscow
until they have signed a document stating that they have no pecuniary
obligations in the city. Mr. Atkinson
states that London philanthropists are endeavoring to get the Jews to emigrate
to the Arabian shores of the Red sea, and negotiations have been begun with the
Egyptian government.
A Shockingly Inhuman-Traffic.
“You have no Idea of the cruelty inflicted upon the poorer
classes of the Jews,” related the traveler. “For a year or so hundreds of babies have been
stolen and shipped to various ports on the Nile to be used as bait by the
crocodile hunters. Of course they are
not all eaten up by the animals, but now and then one is caught. The crocodile hunters place a baby on the
shores of the stream, and presently the lazy animals come out of their beds
after the infant. When the crocodiles get near the little one, and within
shooting range of the hunters, who are concealed in the bushes, they are shot. The little babes serve as a bait to bring the
animals on the bank.
The Government Runs the Press.
“By this means it is possible to get many animals that could
not be reached in any other way. It has
been said that the hunters have let the crocodiles approach too near the babes
before firing, and their first shot being ineffectual the little one was eaten
up. At any rate they are used for Bait. You think it queer that a wholesale kidnapping
of babies is not noticed in the newspapers. That is not strange. You don't know Russia.
The papers there can only print what the government approves of. If an editor gets any news that is sensational
he must first submit it to some official before using it. That is Russia.”
The Racine Daily Journal (Racine, Wisconsin), May 27, 1891, page 1.
Like the Kinghorn version, the Atkinson variant may have first
appeared in a Chicago newspaper. Most of the newspapers repeating the story list Chicago as its place of origin without naming the newspaper. On its earliest known
date of publication, May 27, 1891, it appeared in several newspapers in the
surrounding states of Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, so a Chicago origin is
not far-fetched. The story would
eventually appear in dozens of newspapers across the United States during every
month from May through September, and at least once in December.
Although the switch from Ceylon to kidnapped Russian babies in Egypt may seem random, it may have been playing off real current events. In May of 1891, Russian Jews had already been widely covered in the news for actual atrocities, even before publication of Atkinson’s croc story.
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| Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1891, page 5. |
 |
| Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1891, page 5. |
It is almost as though a penny-a-line
“journalist” checked their annual calendar of story ideas and combined it with
current events to create a more sensationalistic story; one which is believable
precisely because of the brutal nature of the actual atrocities associated with
it, even if the fictional details are otherwise improbable and almost certainly
untrue.
Similarly, proponents of the literal
truth of the Chipley, Florida “alligator bait” more than a century later find
willing believers because the real history of slavery, failed Reconstruction,
Jim Crow, and Lynch Law make it seem plausible, despite the lack of actual
documentary evidence and obvious holes in what little “evidence” there is. But if true history is so compelling,
promoting false histories would not seem to serve any legitimate purpose. It may even undermine whatever rhetorical points
may be scored by circulating the rumor, due to a possible loss of credibility caused
by championing fictional embellishments which are improbable and almost
certainly untrue.
In another time and place, the crock about kidnapped Russian babies would make great “click bait,” even if it was not evidence of actual human “alligator bait.”
Loud Baby or a “Sulker”
A few years later, an alleged
“first-person” account appeared in the New
York Sun, and was picked up by dozens of other newspapers across the United
States. An unnamed “ex-officer of the
British army” is said to have described the “great sport in India going out
after crocodiles with Hindoo babies for bait.”
The story contains all of the familiar elements of the story, while
adding fresh details that add life to the story; a discussion about the relative
value of a loud baby over a “sulker,” and the “considerate sportsman’s” use of
a “nursing bottle, which is part of a crocodile hunter’s equipment.” He also claims to have tried, unsuccessfully,
to rent babies for an alligator hunt in Florida; “folks who owned babies down
there didn’t seem to enter into the spirit of the sport.”
“We used to have great sport in India going out after
crocodiles with Hindoo babies for bait,” said an ex-officer of the British
army. “The baby wasn’t baited on a hook
like a minnow or a fish worm, but simply secured on the river bank so that it
couldn’t creep or toddle away or tumble into the river. Some babies don’t like their being made
crocodile bait of, but that fact increased their value to the sportsman, for
then they yelled and made a great noise, which was just what the crocodiles
were waiting to hear, and they’d come hurrying from all directions to have a
chance at the babies.
“Where did we get these babies for bait? From their mothers. All the fellow who wanted to go crocodiling
had to do was to noise abroad his intention, and it wasn’t long before native
women would flock in with their babies to be rented out for bait. The ruling price per head for the young
heathen was about 6 cents per day. Some
mothers required a guarantee that the offspring should be returned safe and
sound, but most of them exacted no such agreement. The babies were brought back all right, as a
rule, but once in a while some sportsman was a trifle slow with his rifle, or
made a bad shot, and the crocodile got away with the bait, but that didn’t’
happen often.
“If your bait is in good form for crocodiling, and starts in
with protesting yells, you may expect to get your corocodile very soon, but if
the baby proves to be what is known as a sulker and takes the situation in
quietness and patience, you may have to wait some time before you get a
shot. I used to have the option on an
Indian baby that was the most killing bait for crocodiles in all that part of
India. I killed more than one hundred
crocodiles with that youngster as a lure before she outgrew her
usefulness. She had the most persistent
and far-reaching yell I ever heard come out of mortal being and no crocodile
could resist it. She was a real siren in
luring the reptiles to their fate, and I was sorry to see her grow and get too
big for bait and have to give her up.
That dusky infant always commanded premiums in market and her mother was
very proud of her indeed.
. . . A considerate sportsman, though, will not work his baby
more than fifteen minutes at a time.
Then he will have his native servant soothe it and refresh it from a
nursing bottle, which is part of a crocodile hunter’s equipment. I have killed six crocodiles over that
favorite baby lure of mine in less than a quarter of an hour.
“I was in Florida a year or so ago, and tried to hire a baby
to experiment with for alligators after the method in India, but folks who
owned babies down there didn’t seem to enter into the spirit of the sport, and
I couldn’t get one. I compromised on a
rather lively complaining dog. He was a
success, and I had quite a lot of fun, although the sport was a good deal tamer
than it would have been if I had only had a baby for bait.”
New York Sun,
June 24, 1894, page 24.
Pulitzer - Want Ads Revisited
In 1896, a new version of the Want Ad
variant of the story appeared in more than a dozen newspapers in various forms,
sometimes without the want ads and sometimes with an alternate image. The story must be true, as the copywriter
assured the reader that the supposed want ads were made, “in all
seriousness.”
The earliest example of this new
version appeared in Joseph Pulitzer’s New
York World, one of the newspapers, along with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, that pioneered the
sensational style of news reporting known as “yellow journalism.”
Although the subject matter of
hunting crocodiles with babies as bait might otherwise seem disturbing, the
seriousness with which to take this version of the story may be informed by
other articles sharing space on the same page.
There’s that one about a tussle over possession of a “petrified man,”
between a team of museum archeologists and the son of a Canadian Voyageur named
Le Count who “literally” turned to stone after being shot in the chest by an
insane Englishman.
The New York World, August 16, 1896, page 23.
It must be true, as the copywriter
assured the reader that the story could “be proven by the elder son of Le
Count, who lives at Medicine Lake.”
And then there’s the one about the
man who “hangs himself for amusement” at Parisian
cafes in Montmartre for fourteen hours a day. It was perfectly
safe. The copywriter assured the reader
that an attending physician monitored his pulse, although he did cut the
initial attempt short at ninety-seven hours because, “to hang longer would be
extremely dangerous.”
It was 9 o’clock Sunday evening when Durand first hanged
himself. The café was crowded. He stepped upon the ladder, calmly adjusted
the noose and swung off into space. His
face soon began to grow red, then purple, and was soon almost black. His eyes were closed and the body swung
listlessly to and fro as if life were extinct. . . .
For ninety-seven hours Durand hung by the neck in the café-concert,
while the patrons indulged in rude jests about him and the singers squalled
from the little stage at the end of the room.
At the end of that time the physician watching him cut the rope, saying
that to hang longer would be extremely dangerous.
After resting a few hours Durand seemed no worse for his
experience, and since then he has been hanging himself for fourteen hours each
day.
The New York World, August 16, 1896, page 23.
Pulitzer’s version of the story revisits
familiar themes from other crocodile hunting stories, fat babies, loud babies,
accurate hunters, trusting parents, and babies more startled by gunfire than by
the approaching, open maw of a crocodile.
A good editor might have equally startled by the fact that the copywriter
confused a crocodile for an alligator in the first paragraph. The New
York World’s version differs from other versions, however, in that the
hunter was portrayed as ethnic Ceylonese rather than British.
Crocodiles like to eat babies – not their own awkward
offspring, but human darlings, fat and dimpled.
Skinny babies are not adapted to an alligator’s palate and are passed by
with scorn. But an alligator will crawl
a long distance for a fat one.
This liking of the saurian for babies is used by hunters in
Ceylon to lure the reptiles to death. A
nice, fat baby is tied by the leg to a stake near some pond or lagoon where
crocodiles abound. Soon the child begins
crying and the sound attracts the crocodiles within hearing distance. They start out immediately for the wailing
infant. . . .
THE BABY DOES NOT CARE.
A miss would mean death for the baby, but the hunters are
expert shots and at the short distance at which they fire a miss is next to
impossible. As a rule the sound of the
firearm scares the baby worse than the presence of the crocodile’s jaws and the
rows of sharp and glistening teeth, but after being shot over a few times the
child takes the shooting as a matter of course and pays little attention to
it.
So expert are many of the hunters that they do not shoot the
alligator until it has approached to within a few feet of the baby. Then, with but a few inches of space between
the muzzle of the rifle and the eye of the alligator, the shot is fired that
ends the existence of the reptile and saves the child.
WANTED – Some very fat children as bait for crocodile
hunting; we guarantee to return them safe and sound to the homes of the
parents. Apply to So and So.
This advertisement, which is inserted in all seriousness,
makes its appearance regularly in the Ceylon papers and is said to be
productive of good results. But those
Ceylonese mothers must be different from most mothers, or else they have a high
opinion of the ability and skill of the men who hunt crocodiles with human
bait.
The New York World, August 16, 1896, page 23.
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| Image accompanying reprint of The New York World story, as it appeared in The Monroeville Breeze (Monroeville, Indiana), September 24, 1896, page 3. |
Sailor
Another crocodile-hunting story went
viral (by turn-of-the-century standards) about ten years later. This time it was written as a first-person
anecdote related by a sailor, and generally written in a Cockney-esque
dialect. This version appeared in
hundreds of newspapers between 1907 and 1916, and contained all of the standard
elements of the story, including lazy crocodiles, naked babies, and
sure-shots. But this time, instead of
haggling with the parents, there was a set price, 50 cents (or 2 shillings) a
day, with some parents earning as much as 2 dollars (or 8 dollars) a week. Why not, it wasn’t dangerous.
“Of course,” the sailor went on,” the thing ain’t as cruel as
it sounds. No harm ever comes to the
babies, or else, o’course, their mothers would not rent ‘em. The kids is simply sot on the soft mud bank of a crocodile stream,
and the hunter lays hid near them, a sure protection.
“The crocodile is lazy.
He basks in the sun in midstream.
Nothin’ will draw him in to shore, where ye can pot him. But set a little fat naked baby on the bank
and the crocodile soon rouses up. In he
comes, a greedy look in his dull eyes, and then ye open fire.
“I have got as many as four crocodiles with one baby in a
morning’s fishin’. Some Cingalese women
wot lives near good crocodile streams make as much as two dollars a week
reg’lar out o’ rentin’ their babies for crocodile bait.
The Journal and Tribune (Knoxville, Tennessee), October 6, 1907, page 18.
Hearst’s “French
Traveller”
At least one further variant of
Robley’s original crocodile-hunting story appeared before T. W. Villiers’ frequently-cited
“news” item of 1923. It appeared in
William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco
Examiner (and at least one other newspaper[xi])
in 1908. Hearst’s version moves the
action from the Indian Sub-Continent and neighboring islands to Sudan in
Northern Africa; but the song remained the same. Based on a purported eye-witness account by a
“French traveler,” and supported by several photographs illustrating the
action, one might imagine Hearst paraphrasing himself a decade earlier, “you
furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the story.”
Hearst’s account revisits most of the
standard themes, but with some new details.
Instead of tying the baby up next to the water, it is placed fifty yards
away, so that the crocodile leaves the water, making it easier to catch. And this time it’s the locals using their own
babies as bait, not some “Great White Hunter,” and instead of rifles they used
spears, and instead of infallible hunters the babies sometimes die, which
(purportedly) “causes little excitement in a Soudanese community, where human
life is held cheap.”
Aside from its being the umpteenth
version of the same old story, and suffering from Hearst’s reputation for
sensationalism, the story, as written and portrayed in images, has other problems. The one photograph of the supposed crocodile
hunt bears no resemblance to the description of the hunt as described; no baby,
no spears in hand, and at the water’s edge, not forty yards inland.
It is extremely difficult to catch the crocodile by any sort
of bait or trap, for he is highly suspicious, and as soon as he detects the
handiwork of man he makes for the water.
“There is one bait, however, that the crocodile can never
resist, and that is a live human baby.
As soon as he hears the squeals of a child he throws caution to the
winds and dashes for his tender prey.
Shocking as it must appear, the African natives take advantage of this
fact, and frequently use their own babies as bait for crocodiles.
The natives tie a large, vigorous baby to a stake at a distance
of fifty yards or so from the river.
They then go a short distance away and hide themselves behind bushes,
rocks and other obstacles. The poor
baby, finding himself left alone and tied up, naturally, begins to cry, He has
been chosen on account of his size and vigorous lung-power and his cries are
certain to be heard by any crocodile within a mile or so.
The first crocodile who hears the cries dashes out of the
water and comes running up the ban, his mouth watering at the thought of the
meal that awaits him. The baby has been
purposely tied at a greater distance from the water than the crocodile is
accustomed to venture, but in his ravenous desire for human flesh he forgets
all about this.
Soon the crocodile arrives within five or ten yards of the screaming
baby. A snap of his cruel jaws will
swallow the baby as easily as a man would swallow a cherry. His fierce little eyes glitter with
greediness.
Then the natives spring from their hiding place and attack
the crocodile with their spears. With
wonderful dexterity they avoid the snapping of the huge jaws and the lashing of
the great tail that would knock down a horse.
Working in unison, they turn the crocodile on his back and then plunge
their spears through the soft skin of the underbody into his heart and lungs.
Sometimes, owing to the fact that a number of crocodiles come
at once, or to some other accident, the poor baby is lost, but this accident
causes little excitement in a Soudanese community, where human life is held
cheap.
San Francisco Examiner, October 18, 1908, American Magazine Section; Billings Gazette (Billings, Montana),
February 11, 1909, page 2.
The details of tying up the bait far
from the water and using hand-held weapons to subdue the crocodile could easily
have been borrowed from a more plausible account of an alligator hunt that
appeared in the Chicago Inter-Ocean,
the New York Sun and several other
newspapers nearly a decade earlier, illustrating how a newspaper copywriter
might cobble-together elements from different stories to craft their own
version of an earlier hoax. And the Chicago Inter-Ocean article itself is
nearly identical to an article first published in the Chicago Times another decade earlier, in 1890, further illustrating
how “journalists” of the time repackaged and repurposed old content as new,
making it difficult at times to sort out fact from fiction.
In an article dateline Magnolia
Plantation, North Carolina, August 7, 1900, a “special correspondent” of the Chicago Inter-Ocean described an
alligator hunt he witnessed on the Waucamaw River (he described it as the
Waccamucca) near the South Carolina border.
In an article published in February 1890, a “correspondent of the Chicago Times” gave an account of an
alligator hunt he witnessed on the “Waccamucca River” near Alligator Swamp,
North Carolina.[xii]
It is not clear precisely where the
story took place. There is no
“Waccamucca River” on current maps.
However, the Alligator Swamp is an actual location in Waccamaw, North
Carolina, and the nearby Waccamaw River flows into South Carolina, about twenty
miles further south.
In both accounts, the author is
travelling with a companion (“Denton” in 1890, “Gregory” in 1900) and an
African-American guide (“Caleb” in 1890) and (“Pete” in 1900), but in all other
details the stories are identical.
The group is crossing the
“Waccamucca” river on a ferry when they hear a loud commotion. The ferryman, a black man named Joe, tells
them that group of locals are trying to capture a large alligator that had
recently eaten several pigs a calf.
The group goes to investigate and finds
a dozen men and boys who, like Hearst’s Sudanese crocodile hunters years later,
are “armed with clubs, poles, and axes” and surrounding an alligator on open
ground, about one hundred yards away from the water. They had lured the alligator away from the
water with a “half-grown puppy” tied “to a small tree about 200 yards from the
water.” Alligators, they explained, “are
extremely fond of dog meat, and they will follow a dog far into the fields or
swamp with the hope of catching him.”[xiii]
 |
The Lincoln Republican (Lincoln, Kansas), March 13, 1890, page 2.
|
Ten and twenty years after
publication of the two Waccamucca alligator hunting stories, Hearst’s “French
traveler” version moves the action to Sudan, replaces the dog with a baby, and
substitutes spears with clubs, poles and axes.
Fifteen years after Hearst’s version, T. W. Villiers moved the action to
Florida, swapped out the crocodile for an alligator, and instead of tying the
baby far enough from shore to expose the alligator, placed the baby in shallow
water far enough from deep water to force the alligator “above the surface,
wading toward the ‘bait’ with his head and forequarters well ex-posed.” But the change in distance makes sense in
context, if Villiers’ story is to be given any credence, because Florida
marksmen “never miss” and do not need to be as far from the water as people
hunting with spears or clubs, poles and axes.
The dramatic elements of Villiers’
1923 version were also essentially unchanged from the Robley’s original 1888
“crocodile bait” story; a hunter negotiates with parents, the parents place an
irrational trust in expert skill of the hunter, the babies are best used naked
and fat babies, crocodiles and alligators are generally lazy and difficult to
find, but have an irrepressible appetite for babies (sometimes a specific
appetite for black babies over white), and the hunter is portrayed as
infallible, never missing a shot. But
even if Robley’s story is responsible for launching a string of imitators, his
story might have been influenced by a much older acount about crocodile hunting
in Egypt
Benoit de Maillet was a French
diplomat and naturalist who spent sixteen years as the French general consul in
Egypt. Maillet’s anonymous and
posthumously published work, Telliamed
(his name backwords), contained one of the earliest, pre-Darwinian scientific
speculations about evolution and the origin of species. But in 1735, three years before his death, he
published a less controversial book about Egypt, which included a section about
the dangers of crocodiles.
Maillet described several common ways
in which Egyptians hunted crocodiles.
They dug ditches and covered them with straw, for crocodiles to fall
into; they set snares; or they baited hooks with a quarter of a pig or with
bacon. Maillet also described one
unusual, more sensational method which may have been used only one time.
One of the inhabitants of the Upper Egypt took one of them,
the last year, in a manner which deserves to be mentioned, both on account of
its singularity, and the danger to which the man exposed himself. He placed a very young boy, which he had, in
the spot where the day before this animal had devoured a girl of fifteen,
belonging to the governor of this place, who had promised a reward to any one
that should bring him the crocodile dead or alive. The man at the same time concealed himself
very near the child, holding a large board in his hand, in readiness to execute
his design. As soon as he perceived the
crocodile was got near the child, he pushed his board into the open mouth of
the creature, upon which his sharp teeth, which cross each other, entered into
this board with such violence that he could not disengage them, so that it was impossible
for him after that to open his mouth.
The man immediately further secured his mouth, and by this means got the
fifty crowns the governor promised to whosever could take this creature.
Benoit de Maillet, Description de l’Egypte, Paris, Quay des
Augustins, 1735, Lettre Neuvieme, page 32-33 (English translation from Thomas
Harmer, Observations on divers passages
of Scripture, volume 4, London, J. Johnson, 1787, pages 288-289).
Maillet wrote in French, but English
translations were available and kept alive for decades, frequently in books
mixing scripture with first-hand observations of life in the Middle East in an
attempt to reconcile biblical text with the real world. In his book Observations on divers passages of Scripture, an English minister
named Thomas Harmer used Maillet’s crocodile writings as support for his speculation
that “crocodile” would be a better fit for “whale” in English translations of
the bible. In Book of Job, for example, he felt that “Am I a sea, or a whale,”
would make more sense if translated as, “Am I a sea, or a crocodile.” Further, he believed that that Maillet’s
account of crocodile hunting was consistent with the idea that people in the
region might “set a watch over” a crocodile, as suggested in Job.
Maillet’s story was kept alive
through at least four printings of Harmer’s work, one every ten years after the
original date of publication. The story stayed in circulation in similar books
building on Harmer’s religious theories, like Richard J. Martin’s Sacred Zoology[xiv]
and The Bible Expositor[xv]
published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and others,
quoting Harmer extensively.
For more than 150 years stories about
baiting crocodiles with young children were confined, for the most part, to
obscure religious texts. That all
changed in 1888, with the publication of several similar “crocodile bait”
stories in quick succession, which were then kept alive for decades in a string
of copycat versions before culminating in perhaps its least plausible, but
perhaps most believed, version, T. W. Villiers’ 1923 opus about supposed
alligator hunting techniques in Chipley, Florida.
The Bronx Zoo
The second most frequently cited
article cited as “evidence” of the truth of the rumors that children were used
as alligator bait is a 1908 article describing the scene at the Bronx zoo when
moving the alligators from their indoor winter quarters to their outdoor summer
quarters.
Their greedy eyes eagerly fixed on two plump pickaninnies,
the crocodiles and alligators in the New York Zoological Garden were decoyed
from their winter quarters in the reptile house to the cool and shady tank just
outside the building.
It was the keeper’s idea to bait the saurians with
pickaninnies, knowing as he did their epicurean fondness for the black
man. So as two small colored children
happened to drift through the reptile house among the throng of visitors he
pressed them into service.
The two crocodiles and all but four of the twenty-five
alligators wobbled out as quick as they could after the ebony mites, who darted
around the tank just as the pursuing monsters fell with grunts of chagrin into
the water, disappointed of their prey.
Washington Times (Washington DC), June 13, 1908, page 2.
Outdoor Alligator Pool, Popular Official Guide to the New York
Zoological Park, 12th Edition, 1913.
The New York Times story about the same event, published the same day, paints a less
controversial picture.
Equipped with poles and ropes, Head Keeper Snyder, assisted
by Keeper Toomey and some men drawing moving cages, approached the reptile
house at 2 o’clock and commenced their task.
The small alligators came out willingly into the cage after a prod from
the long sticks, but the older ones had to be lassoed and yanked out by force. As the unwieldly creatures, fighting every
inch of the way, slid down the plank with a rush into the pond, the children
screamed with delight, and wanted Snyder to do it all over again.
New York Times,
June 13, 1908, page 1.
But even if the more sensational
version is taken at face value, it does not necessarily portray anything as
dangerous as those who promote the truth of the alligator bait rumor. The children were said to have merely “run
around the tank,” which may have referred to simply running around the outside
of the enclosure, trying to get the alligators’ attention, in which case there
would have been no danger.
Detail of a Map of the Bronx Zoo
showing the Reptile House and adjacent outdoor alligator pool, Guide to the Nature Treasures of New York
City, New York City, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1917.
A report of lax safety practices at
another New York zoo a decade earlier, however, may shed a light on the low
level of concern zookeepers had for even their own safety. When a chain used to pull up the drain plug
from the alligator tank at the Central Park Zoo became disengaged from the
plug, zookeepers were relegated to using buckets to empty the pool, which they
did with alligators present. Two keepers
were inside the enclosure, while a third stood outside, “ready to empty the
buckets of water as they were handed him.
Paddy stood near the edge of the tank with a pole in his
hands to keep the alligators away.
The men were rapidly emptying the tank when some one in the
crowd suddenly yelled for Paddy to “look out.”
Nick, the old eight-foot alligator, seeing that Paddy was not
paying any attention to him, and thinking he would square an old account, made
for the keeper with his jaws wide open.
As Paddy turned, after receiving the warning, he lost his
balance and toppled over in the tank, disappearing from view.
Only for a second, however, did Paddy remain under water, he
came up spluttering and kicking as if he were a dozen miles out in the ocean,
with no prospects of rescue.
He was soon dragged out by Snyder and Shannon.
The New York World, July 12, 1896, page 33.
In any case, New York City was not
the Deep South and the operators of the Bronx Zoo were not the Ku Klux
Klan. It seems far-fetched that any
children would have intentionally been put in harm’s way, in the open, for all
the world to see, during regular operating hours at the Bronx Zoo.
The Bronx Zoo story also smacks of a
hoax of sorts, an elaborate joke, albeit one based on real events, playing off
the then-common expression, “alligator bait,” an idiom generally referring to
black children specifically, but sometimes applied more broadly to all
African-Americans.
Nature Fakirs
If many of the alligator and
crocodile hunting stories were fakes, they were not the only stories about
animals to be faked. Fake stories about
animal behavior were so widespread that there was an expression for people who
generated the stories, “nature fakirs.”
The problem so offended President Theodore Roosevelt, who was a known
adventurer and nature lover, that he embarked on a brief campaign against
“nature fakirs,” a campaign that may have backfired.
NATURE
FAKIRS
The nature fakirs are having the time
of their lives, and it begins to look like the whole country wants to enjoy the
pastime so strenuously denounced by our strenuous President.
A few days after Mr. Roosevelt denounced the Dr. W. J. Long
and Jack London stories, a fellow broke loose over at Meridian with a story
about a motherly old cat having adopted a family of rats and was tenderly
nursing the rodents. Then the outbreak
commenced. Instead of the Presidential
decree putting a quietus on the nature fakirs, and inspiring the fitting
respect for his high office and lore as a game-killer seemed to demand, the
opposite effect resulted. Nature faking
has become epidemic.
Jackson Daily News (Jackson, Mississippi), August 19, 1907, page 4.[xvi]
Some “nature fakir” stories
exaggerated or invented animal behaviors that did not exist in nature; a monkey
and parrot fought over the parrot’s profanity (the monkey had been reared in a
Christian family), a dog caught a fish larger than himself and dragged it home
to its master, a sparrow committed suicide by hanging himself with a thread
from the rafters of an attic in which he was imprisoned and close to starving
to death. The stories about crocodiles
and alligators “epicurean” preferences seem to fall into this category.
Other “nature fakirs” invented new
animals with fanciful names and characteristics. When Roosevelt went hunting in African after
leaving office, for example, the “nature fakirs” named and described some of
his quarry; the “dinga-linga-dinga, an animal which cannot live on land and
instantly dies in water, its natural habitat being air at a temperature
sufficiently hight to be called hot,” and the “blue-bearded bongo,” “hoogo,”
“tukotuko, wauwau, the wombat and the cuscus.”[xvii] Other examples include the “polar trout” of
Glacier National Park, and the “Jackalope” of the American West, about which
the Early Sports ‘n’ Pop-Culture History
Blog has previously written (see the earlier post, “Civic Pride through Taxidermy – a
Many-Pronged History of Jackalopes”).
A “nature fakir” even invented a baby-eating
monstrosity called the “Snolligoster,” that incorporated some of the elements
of the standard crocodile hunting story in a more obviously fanciful, if
equally distasteful story.
NATURE AS
SHE IS FAKED
“Speaking of faunal naturalism,” said W. T. Cox, nephew of
Palmer Cox and a well known nature fakir yesterday, “there are few animals that
appeal to the lover of nature more than the Snolligoster. . . .
“This creature, which is found chiefly in the Neverglades of
florida, resembles in its general contour an alligator with some remarkable
differences. It is covered with seal
like fur, has neither legs nor fins, and has three, long, powerful tails which
it revolves with inconceivable swiftness while rushing through the water, being
impelled by the gyrations of its tails in much the manner of a boat by a screw
propeller.
“On its back, it has like the Snuff-Wallopus, a long, horny
spike, very sharp, upon which it impales its prey. It prefers above all other edibles fat,
young, wouthern pickaninnies for which it lies in wait along the banks of the
marshes and bayous. After spearing the
screaming alligator bait, the Snolligoster digs a hole with its snout in which
it places its prey and macerates it, into a sort of colored Mulligan stew. . .
.
“Like the Jabberwock and the Frumious Bandersnatch, makes a
plaintive, blood-curdling, groaning cry at night in the marshes which once
heard is never forgotten. This noise can
be heard ten miles and fills the negroes with uncontrollable terror when they
hear it. The Snolligoster is also much
feared by the lumber jacks and others who work in swamps. The animal is fond of the cypress trees and
is most frequent in the cypress swamps.”
Albuquerque Journal, May 5, 1909, page 6.
Alligator Bait
Beginning in 1898, the newly popular
expression spawned hundreds of jokes, songs, postcards and knick-knacks riffing
on the notion that black children were “alligator bait.” The idiom itself, and the jokes, postcards
and memorabilia is inspired, may have been in poor taste, in keeping with the dark
humor and casually racist language and attitudes of the time, but they were not
evidence of the actual use of babies as alligator bait. Instead, they may have been merely an
expression of the centuries old superstition that crocodiles (and later
alligators, by extension) had particular dining preferences, preferring Muslims
or black Africans over Christians or white Europeans.
The expression, “alligator bait,” dates
to at least as early as 1885, but not necessarily as an overt racist epithet. Some of the earliest examples suggest it was
used as a playful taunt among black children themselves.
The expression seemed novel when
heard on the streets of Cherryvale, Kansas in 1885.
The colored people seem to have no trouble to find hard names
for each other. “You great big black
alligator bait!” is frequently heard among the colored boys of the city.
Cherryvale Bulletin (Cherryvale, Kansas), December 19, 1885, page 5.
In 1897, a racetrack reporter
overheard the expression in an exchange between two stable hands during the
opening weekend of Fort Erie Race Track in Fort Erie, Ontario, across the river
from Buffalo, New York.
Interesting Scenes on the Fort Erie
Track.
Visit With the Stable Boys.
All day Sunday these stable boys, most of them black, sat or
lay in the sun dozing or else played craps and poked fun at each other and at
the hundreds of visitors who walked about the stables, picking their way among
the boys and dogs.
“I say, dar! Gimme a nickel, suh, and I’ll gib you good ting
on de fust race tomorrow,” said one little atom of ebony who was lying in the
sun in front of one of the stables.
“G’wan dar, yoh alligator bait,” said a swipe who was
near. “Yoh ain’t got no good ting, an
yoh ain’t got no call to say yoh hab.”
Buffalo Courier,
June 21, 1897, page 10.
Fifty years later, whatever
connotations the expression may have carried in the interim may have faded
away. In the early 1950s, Dr. Marcus H.
Boulware, an African-American speech pathologist who wrote articles for
African-American newspapers encouraging people to learn “standard” English
speech and who also published and sold pamphlets of current slang, noted
without further comment that “alligator bait” was prison slang and student
slang for bad food.[xviii]
But not everyone forgot. When the Hall of Fame pitcher, Bob Gibson, played
minor league baseball in Columbus Georgia, one, particular fan called him
“alligator bait.” The word was
apparently uncommon enough, at least in Omaha, Nebraska where Gibson grew up,
that he initially found it amusing and laughed.
Later, heard that white kids would tie black kids to a rope as bait for
hunting alligators, he realized it was an insult.[xix] The rumor may not have been true, but the
expression had come to be used as a racial epithet, as evidenced by this
photograph from an anti-segregation protest in Texas in 1956.
 |
The Gazette
(Montreal, Canada), September 1, 1956, page 1.
|
Surprisingly, perhaps, the earliest,
widely circulated “alligator bait” joke, which appeared in hundreds of
newspapers, did not refer to black children at all, but to white Anglophiles
with a sense of fashion then referred to by the newly minted word, “Dude.”
“I suppose you have heard of our dudes, Miss Clarwa?”
observed a New York swell to a Jacksonville girl.
“Oh, yes,” she answered, “they are becoming very popular in
Florida. We use them for alligator
bait.”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 15, 1883, page 4.
And “dudes” were not the only white
people proverbially fed to the alligators.
A backwoods-y description of the
Battle of New Orleans remembered reducing the British invaders to “food for
alligators.”
And’twas on Gineral Jackson the British turned their backs on
at the battle of New-Orleans” . . . and he did smash Gineral Packingham . . .
right down into the Mississippi swamp, food for alligators; and the rest they
run away to save their bakin.
The Raleigh Register (Raleigh, North Carolina), November 13, 1827, page 1.
In 1886, a widely circulated item recommended
that a United States Senator from Florida, Charles W. Jones, be used as
“alligator bait” for shirking his duties with an extended vacation in Canada
and Detroit, Michigan, in what was rumored to have been some romantic
entanglement.
Senator Jones is reported to have arrived at the conclusion
that the merry maiden of Detroit for whom he has pined so long was not made for
him, and has decided to return to the everglades of Florida. The old dotard has succeeded in making an
eleven story ass of himself and his constituents should utilize his frame for
alligator bait.
Leavenworth Times (Kansas), October 1, 1886, page 2.
In 1893, a critic believed that the
Secretary of the Interior, Hoke Smith of Georgia (who later served as Governor
of Georgia) was not good enough to be used as “alligator bait” after packing
the pension examining board with all Democrats and no Republicans, which was
believed would result in less favorable decisions for Union soldiers who had
served in the Civil War.
Oh southern patriotism! Thou art a jewel – if you are a specimen. [Hoke Smith] wouldn’t make good alligator
bait; the hungriest crocodile in the swamps of “Jawja” wouldn’t nibble at your
erratic carcass.
Council Grove Republican (Council Grove, Kansas), August 25, 1893, page 4.
When a group of boys (presumably
white; under the journalistic standards of the day their race would generally
be mentioned if they weren’t) from Topeka, Kansas determined to make a Huck
Finn-like trip down the Mississippi on a flatboat. People skeptical of their chances for success
joked that they might just become food for the alligators.
Six Topeka boys, who are willing to surrender themselves as
alligator bait, are going to make a trip to New Orleans on a flat boat. The craft is being built at Lawrence, from
which place the start will be made. It
is expected that it will require two months to make the journey.
The Larned Eagle-Optic, August 24, 1894, page 1.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the earliest Ceylon-style “alligator bait” story, told in language nearly indistinguishable from most of the earlier crocodile hunting stories, referred to renting “cracker” (poor southern white) babies. The story appeared in more than a dozen newspapers. In most cases, it was included as a portion of a a longer report on alligator hunting by United States soldiers returned from Cuba in the Spanish-American War, but sometimes as a stand-alone article describing the similarity between the "familiar" crocodile hunting techniques in Asia and Africa and those sometimes practiced in Florida.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the earliest Ceylon-style “alligator bait” story, told in language nearly indistinguishable from most of the earlier crocodile hunting stories, referred to renting “cracker” (poor southern white) babies. The story appeared in more than a dozen newspapers. In most cases, it was included as a portion of a a longer report on alligator hunting by United States soldiers returned from Cuba in the Spanish-American War, but sometimes as a stand-alone article describing the similarity between the "familiar" crocodile hunting techniques in Asia and Africa and those sometimes practiced in Florida.
Those who are up in
crocodile lore are well acquainted with the fact that in Asia and Africa babies
are rented for bait to crocodile hunters, but there are few, unless they have
had the actual experience, who would believe that a similar practice was in
vogue in the south of Florida. It is a
fact, however, as any experienced hunter will attest.
The alligator is like
the crocodile in this respect. He likes
to eat babies, not his own awkward offspring, but nice human babies, fat and
dimpled. To obtain such a delicacy for
his palate an alligator will travel far and risk much. This fact is so well known that it has become
the practice for alligator or crocodile hunters to use babies as bait to lure
the reptiles to their death.
A nice, fat baby is
rented for the occasion from the cracker mother to whom a half dollar is ample
recompense for the risk that her child is to run. The baby is then taken to the shore of some
pond or river, where it is attached to a stake by means of a stout cord that
has been tied around its waist, while the hunter conceals himself in the brushes
or swamp grass near the place. This
method of treatment is usually too much for even the self possession of a
cracker baby. He is used to being
neglected and even ill-treated, but being tethered to a stake then left alone
is rather more than he is willing to stand, and he voices his indignation to
the full extent of his lungs. . . .
The alligator
has eyes only for the screaming and kicking child, and the hunter realizes how
important is the position in which he has placed himself. A miss would mean death for the baby, but, it
is pleasing to record the fact, such misses are seldom made. On the other hand, some of the hunters are
such crack shots that they allow the monster to come within a few feet of his
prey before they send the single shot that causes instant death, directly into
his eye.
Some of the babies that
are rented out as bait in the alligator regions of Florida have been “shot over”
so many times that they do not mind the experience, but when a child has never
baited a ‘gator before it is pretty thoroughly frightened when the ordeal is
over. As a rule, however, the sound of
the firearms scares the baby worse than the presence of the monstrous jaws and
the rows of sharp and glistening teeth, but with gentle handling after the
alligator has been killed the youngster quickly recovers his normal condition
of endless repose.
Sometimes, however, “alligator bait” was sometimes just that – alligator bait. In the first cartoon, when a goat swallows a rope attached to alligator bait, the goat inadvertently becomes the bait. In the second, two white guys are served up as alligator bait.
 |
| Los Angeles Express, August 18, 1918. |
And even when the notion of "alligator bait" (if not those words, specifically) was used figuratively, the "bait" was not always black. Here, a white boy is dangled as bait in a political poster opposing votes in favor of the sale of liquor.
 |
| He wants the revenue--Is the game worth the bait? / Z.? Deball. , None. [Westerville, ohio: published by american issue publishing company, between 1915 and 1919] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/97503749/. |
The expression, “alligator bait,” did
not come into widespread use until 1898.
But the expression appears to have been based on a much older folk
wisdom, old-wives’ tale or superstition, that alligators (and crocodiles before
them) had specific preferences for one sort of person over another. Superstitions along those lines had been
circulating since at least the late-1700s.
The earliest reports of such believes came out of Egypt and “Western
Ethiopia” (likely referring to the central west coast of Africa), and were as
much about religion as race.
Alligator
Preferences
C. S. Sonnini
Charles Sigibert Sonnini was a French
naval officer, engineer and naturalist who spent significant periods of time in
South America, North Africa and the Middle East during the 1770s and
1880s. His works include four volumes on
reptiles and two travelogues, one of which covered his travels in upper and
lower Egypt.
In Egypt, Sonnini encountered Christians
and Muslims who he says embraced a superstition that crocodiles preferred
Muslims over Christians. Christians, he
said, took undue risk in the crocodile-infested waters, while Muslims
steadfastly avoided them. It’s possible,
however, that it was only the Christians who were actually superstitious; the
Muslims may have just used common sense. Since Egyptian Christians and Muslims were
presumably more-or-less racially indistinct, this superstition was apparently
not based on race.
These same Catholics, who concentrate the superstitions of
various religions, entertain a belief, the effects of which must frequently
prove fatal to themselves. They are
persuaded that the crocodile, connoisseur enough to distinguish the Christian
from a Mussulman, only attacks the latter, but respects the worshipper of
Christ. They are so much prepossessed in
favour of this opinion, that they bathe without fear in the waters of the Nile,
where these huge and hideous lizards exist; whilst the Mahometans, whose
credulity urges them to acknowledge a predilection miraculously occasioned,
dare not expose themselves there.
Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini de
Manoncourt, Travels in Upper and Lower
Egypt, Volume 3, London, John Stockdale, 1807, pages 256-257 Voyage dans la haute et basse Egypte, fait
par ordre de l’ancien gouvernement, et contenant des observations de tous
genres, Volume 3, Paris, F. Buisson, 1799, pages 293-294.
Dufart, Buffon and Sonnini, Histoire Naturelle, Generale et Particuliere
de Reptiles, Paris, F. Dufart,
Volume 2, Plate 27.
Sonnini also wrote that he had read
an account of a similar belief in “Western Ethiopia” (likely in or near
modern-day Cameroon) which was couched in mixed racial/religious terms.
I remember to have read something similar to this in the
first volume of a description of Western Ethiopa. The author affirms that the Christians have
nothing to fear from crocodiles, but that they devour many of the negroes.
Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini de
Manoncourt, Travels in Upper and Lower
Egypt, Volume 3, London, John Stockdale, 1807, pages 257.
Sonnini’s use of “Western Ethiopia”
likely referred to the central west coast of Africa, not to the western
portions of the nation-state now known as Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa near
the Indian Ocean and Red Sea on Africa’s east coast. Brice Andrew’s Grand Gazetteer, or Topographic Dictionary (1759), for example,
describes the “Camarones River” as lying between “Guinea” and “lower or western
Ethiopia, in the Kingdom of Biafara, in Africk.” A map of Africa in the Atlas Ortelius (1584) shows the Camarones River in
the location of what is now called the Sanaga River in Cameroon, a region from
which large numbers of people were enslaved and transported to the New World.
It is not clear whether Sonnini’s
distinction between “Christians” and “negroes” was as ambiguous at the time as
it may seem today. Modern Cameroon is
about 70% Christian, but it is not immediately apparent what the religious breakdown
of Cameroon would have been when the source Sonnini read was written. It is also unclear whether it was Sonnini
himself who made the distinction between “Christians” and “negroes,” or whether
he was mischaracterizing the source material.
If Sonnini did misquote an earlier
reference, he was not the first and will not be the last person to make such a
mistake. Just a few years ago, for
example, Snopes.com mischaracterized
statements in an 1850 magazine piece citing Sonnini. Snopes.com
contributor, David Emery, wrote in his 2017 piece debunking the myth of
children being used as alligator bait in the United States, that Fraser’s Magazine has reported “as a
scientific fact in 1850,” that crocodiles “prefer the flesh of a negro to any
other delicacy.”[xx]
I rate Emery’s statement on Snopes.com as false. Like Sonnini a half-century early, Fraser’s Magazine simply reported the
existence of the belief, not the factual basis of the purported preference. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Fraser’s Magazine also
misconstrued Sonnini’s writings in another way; where Sonnini only implied that
the Christians were white, Fraser’s was
explicit.
. . there goes a saying, that they prefer the flesh of a
negro to any other delicacy. Sonnini,
when he notices the belief above referred to, that the Christian bears a
charmed life against the crocodile, while the Mussulman is devoured, states
that he has read somewhere that in Western Africa the reptile not only prefers
the negro, but never touches the white Christian.
“Leaves from the Note-Book of a Naturalist,
Part XII,” Fraser’s Magazine, Volume
42, December 1850, page 629.
Moreover, if Sonnini’s reporting was
accurate, it suggests that the myth about crocodiles’ (and later alligators’)
race-based dining preferences may have originated in Africa, in which case it
could have been brought to the United States as part of the cultural traditions
of enslaved Africans instead of, or in addition to, writings of European and
American naturalists.
American
Myth
Regardless of where the myth started,
or how it came into being, the old-wive’s tail or folk tradition that
alligators preferred the flesh of black people over that of white people was in
circulation among whites and blacks in the American South in the mid-1800s, but
was not universally believed.
In 1863, a Union Army officer named
Captain J. J. Greer published his accounts of experience he had behind enemy
lines during the Civil War. Greer was
born in Virginia, but grew up primarily in Ohio. A staunch Union man and abolitionist, he
nevertheless harbored what he called “Virginia prejudices against the
negroes.” But while on the run in the swamps
of Georgia after escaping confinement at Macon prison (he had been taken
prisoner at the Battle of Shiloh), he encountered people whose kindness,
intelligence and spirituality helped cure him of his old prejudices. One of the people he encountered was a man he
only knew as “Uncle,” who gave him food, shelter and assistance getting a
“ride” on the Underground Railroad.
“Uncle” realized Greer was one of the
prisoners who had recently escaped from Macon, because someone had come to his
plantation the day before looking for bloodhounds to help hunt them down. He told Greer to keep to the water if he were
closely pursued by the hounds.
He assured us that the dogs were fearful of the alligators
with which that river abounded, and that the slaves were taught that alligators
would destroy only negroes and dogs. He
didn’t believe it himself, although his master thought he did.
Captain J. J. Geer, Beyond the lines: or a Yankee Prisoner Loose
in Dixie, Philadelphia, J. W. Daughaday, 1863, page 128.
The myth was repeated innumerable times
over the years, frequently in non-serious ways, making it unclear whether
anyone actually ever believed it much in the first place.
From a satirical piece written in
southern dialect:
N[-word] babies you must know, ar the favrit bait of the
alligator. A white man may go in
swimmin’ and the alligator won’t tech him, for his skin is so white, an’ shines
so that the alligator gets skeered and scoots away; but let see a n[-word] or a
pickaninny in the water, an’ he jest slips up and licks um up like salt.
The Times-Democrat (New Orleans, Louisiana), May 16, 1871, page 1.
The Brenham Weekly Banner (Brenham, Texas), June 21, 1878, page 2.
A similar story using identical language about "large hooks baited with pickaninnies," also appeared in an article about fishing in Lee County, Florida, calling the veracity of the report into question. See, Janaki Lenin, My Husband and Other Animals 2: The Wildlife Adventure Continues (Westland 2012) (excerpted at "Did Crocodile Hunters Actually Use Babies as Bait in India?" Scroll.in, May 22, 2018).
Several years later, in an article sometimes cited as "evidence" of the practice, a fisherman claims to have been told that he could catch alligators using large hooks and young black children as bait. Setting aside the common reputation of fishermen for stretching the truth, the article on its face does not suggest that anyone actually did so. It even closes with the writer's suggestion that at least in this particular case, no one had and no one would catch the alligators in that manner, or any other manner. It remains an open question whether this incident merely reflects a cruel, racist joke based on the myth of alligators preferring black babies, or actual evidence of the practice.
He was told that the alligators could be caught on large hooks baited with pickaninnies, but none being handy, the experiment had to be abandoned and the alligators are, presumedly, happy yet.
A similar story using identical language about "large hooks baited with pickaninnies," also appeared in an article about fishing in Lee County, Florida, calling the veracity of the report into question. See, Janaki Lenin, My Husband and Other Animals 2: The Wildlife Adventure Continues (Westland 2012) (excerpted at "Did Crocodile Hunters Actually Use Babies as Bait in India?" Scroll.in, May 22, 2018).
Another example of the myth published in the United States appeared in what purports
to be a description of the Southern Press Association’s “annual meeting in
Jacksonville, April 1,” published on April 1st, which was then, as
now, April Fools’ Day.
Thomas Carnegie has invited the members of this association
to pay a visit to Dungeness, his home in Cumberland Island, after which an
alligator hunt is proposed. Alligator
hunting has become one of the regular occupations of the South and they are
captured in larger numbers by fishing than by shooting. They are enticed by
fresh pork, of which they are more fond than colored babies, the traditional
bait.
The Inter-Ocean, April 1, 1885, page
12.
But not everyone agreed. Someone suggested that race made no
difference, at least not in the United States; in India, crocodiles preferred missionaries.
People with infant children from five-eighths to
seven-eighths of a yard long are not particularly recommended to keep many
alligators lying around loose, because there is nothing on a bill of fare that
an alligator prefers to a baby. As to
whether it is white, dark, or even black, it appears to have no choice. I am speaking of the United States alligator,
as every boy knows that the Ganges alligators prefer fresh missionaries; in
fact, missionaries in that section make better alligator bait than any other
substance known.
The Sun (New
York), January 18, 1873, page 4.
On occasion, newspaper writers would
take race-neutral reports of what appear to have been factual incidents and
recast them in racial terms for comedic of political effect, playing off the old
saw about alligators’ preferences.
For example, a report out of North
Carolina in 1851 described the capture of a large alligator, a “whopper.”
We understand that a “whopper” in the shape of an Alligator,
was recently killed in Brown Marsh, Columbus County, which measured eighteen
feet in length.
Our Columbus friends should preserve his hide, Barnum will
doubtless be in want of a curiosity before long. – Wilmington Herald.
North-Carolinian (Fayetteville, North Carolina), June 7, 1851, page 1.
Newspapers hundreds of miles away
appear to have embellished the race-neutral wire reports of Columbus County’s “whopper”
with a cryptic remark and an ugly detail about the contents of the alligator’s
stomach.
A Whopper. – An alligator, only eighteen feet long, was
killed the other day in Columbus county, N. C. He had three little negro babies
in his meat basket. He was one of ‘em.
Camden Phenix
(Camden, Alabama), June 10, 1851, page 2; Athens
Post (Athens, Tennessee), June 27, 1851, page 3.
Similarly, what appears to have
initially been a factual report of a tragic attack during attempts to capture a
rare alligator in Norfolk, Virginia, turned into something uglier a few months
later.
An Alligator Swallows a Negro – He is Captured. The Norfolk Journal of yesterday has the
following bit of exciting news: . . . At a turn in the canal [the alligator]
ran among a crowd of negro boys who were swimming, and notwithstanding the heat
of the pursuit, he took time to lay hold of one of them, which he managed to
swallow as he continued his retreat. . . .
It is seldom one of these fierce creatures is seen so far north.
Richmond Dispatch, July 6, 1868, page 3.
A Democratic newspaper in Doylestown,
Pennsylvania repurposed the basic facts of the event for political effect at a
time when post-Civil War Reconstruction was still a hot topic, with Democrats
opposing the extension of full civil rights radical reconstruction, with
Republicans in favor.
The Doylestown (Penn.) Democrat, edited by a bitter
copperhead, who was defeated three years ago by Gen. Hartranft for Auditor
General, commenting upon the fact that a negro had lately been swallowed by an
alligator in Norfolk harbor, says: “Let us have “more alligators.” A few Forrests[xxi]
might answer the purpose, as they would discriminate in favor of colored
democratic orators.
Fall River Daily Evening News (Fall River, Massachusetts), September 4, 1868, page 2.
Versions of this article appeared in
dozens of newspapers. A Democratic
newspaper in Arkansas doubled down on the statement, putting words in the
alligators’ mouths, “Let us have more n[-words].” Many newspapers repeated this line, with most
of them condemning the remark as an illustration of the cruelty of Democratic,
largely Southern, attitudes on race.
We couldn’t speak this unfeelingly of the death of a dog.
Harrisburg Telegraph (Pennsylvania), September 23, 1868, page 2.
The kindly feeling towards the negro, alluded to by Gen. Lee,
sticks out strongly occasionally in Southern papers. For instance, the Doylestown, Ky. [(sic)], Democrat, after relating how a negro was
lately swallowed by an alligator in some Southern port, adds the pious
aspiration, “Let us have more alligators.”
Burlington Free Press, September 10, 1868, page 2.
“Let us have peace,” said Grant.
“Let us have more alligators,” says the Democrat.
Buffalo Commercial (Buffalo, New York), September 5, 1868, page 2.
Although most of the political
versions of the “whopper” story were critical of the underlying sentiment, at
least one southern newspaper approved, tacking on an more ugly pun on Ulysses
S. Grant’s line, “Let us have peace.”
When [the alligators] saw their companion swallowing the
savory and odorous morsel they with one voice bellowed – “Let us have (a)
piece.”
Fayetteville Weekly Democrat (Arkansas), October 10, 1868, page 2.
In a similar manner, a silly comment
about alligators at the Central Park Zoo was turned into a vehicle for
repeating the myth of alligator dining preferences.
The original comment, which was
picked up by a few other papers, was race-neutral.
The tropical heat of the last few days has infused new life
into the alligators in Central Park, New York.
The largest of which snaps its jaws with great unction whenever a fat
baby looms in view.
The Boston Globe (Massachusetts), July 9, 1872, page 1.
Months later, some “clever”
copywriter revised the old joke. The
new, race-conscious version appeared in more than a dozen newspapers.
The alligators in Central Park are accused of leering
lovingly at the colored babies which are taken to see them.
Buffalo Morning Express, October 8, 1872, page 2.
Actual
Attacks
There are numerous reports of what
appear to be actual alligator attacks on humans throughout the 1800s, with
victims young, old, black and white.
Frequently, even if no black people were known to have been injured, the
reporting nevertheless alludes in some
way to the myth of alligator dining preferences.
One of the earliest apparent
allusions to the myth I came across was an account of the dissection of an
alligator that had invaded a bath house in New Orleans in 1844.
The monster was immediately “roped in” and dragged
ashore. He measured but an inch or two
short of nine feet in length.
Not knowing but this formidable creature might have made a
hearty meal of some hapless n[-word] baby, he was forthwith dissected, and that
too upon the regular principles of anatomy, when lo! No such things as n[-word]
babies, dogs or young shoats were to be seen in his craw, but in their stead
were one pine-know and sundry stones, which the poor starved creature had no
doubt swallowed to keep soul and body together.
The Times-Picayune, August 27, 1844, page 2.
The author’s expectation that an alligator
might have eaten a black baby may have been based on the belief that an
alligator had a specific appetite for them, but not necessarily so. It is possible that the living conditions of
many black people in or near alligator infested waters placed them in harms’
way more frequently, resulting in more reports of attacks on them. Young babies, toddlers or small children
living in more ramshackle conditions, in or near swampy areas, might simply
have been victims of circumstance, more so than any specific preferences (or supposed preferences) of the
alligators.
Young babies were, in fact, reported
as having been eaten by crocodiles from time to time. But even so, some such reports were less
plausible than others. Like the “crocodile
bait” and the “alligator bait” stories of 1888 and 1923, far-fetched “news”
reports were frequently followed by skeptical replies.
In 1848, for example, a baby was
reportedly swallowed whole – and removed alive hours later. The story, which was picked up by several
Midwestern newspapers, purports to have come out Tensas Parish, Louisiana, and includes
a description of what some might consider surprising (for the time) cooperation
between white and black bystanders to save the child. It closes with stark reminder of what life
could bring under slavery.
The child presently crept, it is supposed, close down to the
water, when a large Alligator seized it, and disappeared beneath the turbid
waters! The other children, who were
witnesses of the startling affair, instantly gave the alarm, and the adult
population of the vicinity, black and white, were speedily on the spot. Two or three boats were procured and manned
by full crews, armed with axes, hand spikes, boat-hooks, &c., and a strong
“alligator drag” thrown around the circuit enclosing the spot where his
Alligatorship disappeared.
Several pulls came up “water hauls,” and after two hours’
toil and anxiety, the party concluded to give up the search. One of the crowd proposed to make one more
trial any how, which was accordingly
done; - when, as luck would have it, an “old residenter,” upward of fourteen
feet in length, was dragged to the shore.
His brains were dashed out as quick as wink, and his belly opened with a
Bowie knife. And lo and behold! There,
sure enough, was the little “she n[-word],” still
alive! . . .
After this, I think our State can boast of producing a Jonah
– or rather a Jonahess, as well as the old Scriptural world. I have offered eight hundred dollars for the little critter, as soon as she is
weaned.
The Portage Sentinel (Ravenna, Ohio), July 5, 1848, page 2.
In response, the New York Daily Herald expressed skepticism in an item picked up by
numerous other newspapers.
An account of a negro child being swallowed by an alligator,
retained in the beast’s stomach two hours, and then restored to light, health,
and its mother’s milk, is given by a correspondent of the Cincinnati Dispatch,
writing from Parish Tensas, La. This is
the last whale story[xxii].
New York Daily Herald, June 25, 1848, page 3.
A similar story out of Cuthbert,
Georgia elicited a similar response twenty-five years later. The writer, anticipating pushback, emphasized
that this was “no newspaper lie, but was reported to us by a lawyer (and they
never lie).”[xxiii] The reassurances, such as they were, did not
stop the doubters from doubting.
This story is told the Cuthbert
Messenger by a lawyer, and therefore ought to be true; but we shall feel a
little doubtful about it until that lawyer points out the creek the alligator
crawled out of, or produces a lock of the little negro’s wool.[xxiv]
Interior Journal, April 21, 1876, page 1.
Actual
Bait
In an extensive search of several
newspaper databases and online libraries, Early Sports ‘n’ Pop Culture History
Blog identified only two plausible examples of black people used as “bait”
during an alligator hunt, but in both cases it was done willingly, with consent
and for a price.
In one case, first published in
Detroit, described a hunting party in Mississippi who paid one of the guides or
assistants 50 cents to swim out into alligator infested waters. The story appeared in dozens of newspapers
and at least two magazines over the next six months.
Baiting
Alligators.
We went out to a Mississippi swamp accompanied by several
negroes, and as the Colonel had promised two bits to the first black man who
should sight an alligator there was a feeling of rivalry among them. The day
was awful hot, and though alligators were as plentiful as frogs, we beat around
for an hour without getting sight of one. . . .
As we finally gathered on a long spit of sand which projected
out into the bayou for 200 feet, the Colonel called up one of the blacks and
said:
“Come, Moses, if you’ll swim for it I’ll make the prize half
a dollar.”
“Sure I won’t be cotched, massa?”
“Oh, there’s no danger.
Here are five rifles to protect you.”
. . . “He’s baiting ‘em!” whispered the Colonel.”
“But suppose one of the reptiles seizes him?”
“Then I’ll give the oney to his widow!”
The black swam out about thirty feet, kicking and splashing,
and we walked slowly down the spit. All
of a sudden he screamed out and turned for the shore, and as we looked we saw
from ten to fifteen great saurians making a bee line for him from as many
different directions. Everybody opened fire, and the reports of rifles, the
yells of the swimmers and the shouts of the other blacks made an exciting
scene. . . .
When the battle ended two of the reptiles were floating belly
up, and they were hauled ashore and left to be skinned.
“How did you feel?” I asked the swimmer when he had dressed.
“Didn’t have no feelings t’all, sah,” he replied. “It was jist like my arms an’ legs war’
tryin’ to swim a piece of ice back yere.”
Detroit Free Press, September 1, 1885, page 3.
A similar story, from thirty years
earlier, comes with a surprising twist; an enslaved child demanding money from
his “master” – and getting it.
In the early-1850s, a famous British
hunter named John Palliser toured the United States with his brother, from New
York to New Orleans to Yellowstone, back to New Orleans, and back home again via
Cuba. His detailed account of his
travels and hunting experiences includes an episode his brother witnessed at
Lake Jefferson in Arkansas.
A young boy ran up him and the owner
of a plantation, excited and out of breath.
He had been attacked by an alligator.
During their pursuit, it was proposed the send the boy in as “bait for
the alligator.” But surprisingly,
perhaps, the threats of his “owner” could convince the boy to get in the
water. He eventually agreed, but only
after being offered a dollar. The story
also appeared in at least eight newspapers in Scotland and England.
“Oh, massa! Terrible big alligator; him run at me.”
When we got him to speak a little more coherently it appeared
that he had been bathing in the lake, and that an alligator had suddenly rushed
at him, and when the boy, who luckily was not in deep water, had escaped by
running to land, the brute had actually pursued him for some distance along the
shore. We instantly loaded our rifles
and started off in quest of the monster, accompanied by the boy, who came as a
guide. . . .
[A]s we waited a long time without any result, we proposed
what certainly was a most nefarious project, namely, to make the boy strip off
his clothes and start him into the water again as a bait for alligator. It was
some time before we could get the boy to come round to our view of the matter:
his objections to our plan were very strong, and his master’s threats failed
completely, as indeed they generally did, for he was the kindest hearted man in
the world to his negroes.
At last I coaxed him with a bright new dollar. This inducement prevailed over his fears, and
the poor boy began to undress, his eyes all the while reverting alternately
from the water to the dollar, and from the dollar to the water. We told him we did not want him to go in so
deep as to be obliged to swim. “By
golly, then, me go for the dollare;” and in he walked, but had hardly reached
water higher than his knees, when crash went the reeds, and the little fellow
cut in towards our place of concealment at an astonishing pace, pursued by the
alligator. . . . [W]e nailed him with two capital shots through the head that
effectually checked his career. The
triumph of the boy was complete.
John Pallisser, Rambles of a Hunter in the Prairies, London, John Murray, 1853,
pages 60-61.
The comment about the “owner” being the “kindest hearted man in the world to his negroes” may come across as a bit too convenient, and may cast the rest of the story into doubt. But the story was told by a British visitor for publication in Britain, not an American slaveowner with a motive to sanitize the incident for a domestic audience, so perhaps there would not have been much reason to shade the truth in favor of the “owner” in the first place.
The comment about the “owner” being the “kindest hearted man in the world to his negroes” may come across as a bit too convenient, and may cast the rest of the story into doubt. But the story was told by a British visitor for publication in Britain, not an American slaveowner with a motive to sanitize the incident for a domestic audience, so perhaps there would not have been much reason to shade the truth in favor of the “owner” in the first place.
Hunters not the Hunted
All of this focus on “alligator bait”
may leave the mistaken impression that all alligator/crocodile-related
literature paints the non-Anglo characters in the role of victim or dupe; far
from it. Beginning with Maillet’s
Egyptian crocodile hunters, many, if not most, descriptions of crocodile and
alligator hunts, the hunter or guide displaying the most courage is the
Egyptian, West African, Indian, Sri Lankan or other non-Anglo race or ethnicity.
Hunting techniques varied.
One technique, described in several
sources on several continents, involves placing a stick or large hook inside of
a small pig or dog, attached to a length of chain or rope, or both. When the alligator or crocodile swallows the
animal, then jerk on the line, engaging the hook or lodging the stick inside
the creature.
A “Chinaman, Malay, and Anglo-Saxon” catching
a crocodile in Malaysia, William T. Hornaday, Two Years in the Jungle, the
Experiences of a Hunter and naturalist in India, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula
and Borneo, New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1885, between page 306 and 307.
More daring techniques involved
close-up knife work.
We are assured by Labat, that a Negro, with no other weapon
than a knife in his right hand, and his arm wrapped round with a cow hide,
ventures boldly to attack this animal in its own element. As soon as he approaches the Crocodile, he
presents his loeft arm, which the animal swallows most greedily; and this
sticking in his throat, the Negro has time to give it several stabs under the
throat; and the water also getting in at the mouth, which is held involuntarily
open, the creature is soon bloated up as big as a tun, and expires.
The Natural History of Reptiles and Serpents, Dublin, J. Jones, 1824, page 48.
But even where the hero is
African-American, the storyteller might still trot out the old superstitions.
One such story is said to have been told by an African-American professional hunter and fisherman in Mansfield, Louisiana named “Uncle Ben,” a man known for his hunting stories. He “chuckled with delight” while telling this one.
One such story is said to have been told by an African-American professional hunter and fisherman in Mansfield, Louisiana named “Uncle Ben,” a man known for his hunting stories. He “chuckled with delight” while telling this one.
Uncle Ben had caught a giant catfish
which he intended to sell to some boarding houses, because folks in boarding
houses will eat anything. He wanted to
keep the fish alive in water until he had time to take it into town, so he
built a small pen and tied up the catfish with a string through its gills. The large catfish attracted the attention of
alligators, and one of the alligators killed his dog. Enraged, he baited a stick attached to a
length of chain and a rope with the remains of his dog, eventually capturing
and subduing the alligator in a three-hour struggle. After securing the exhausted alligator on
shore, he taunted a bunch of puppies on its nose, and applied the coup de gras; his grandson.
He was so outdone kase he couldn’t get dat pickaninny an’ dem
puppies dat he jess die ob a broken heart.
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 5, 1891, page 11.
“Alligator Bait” Photographic Print
Although the notion of the religious
or racial preferences of alligators was very old, the expression, “alligator
bait,” as an idiom for black children did not come into widespread use until
about 1898, following the publication of a wildly successful, commercial
photographic print entitled, “Alligator Bait,” showing several black toddlers
in a variety of poses.
The popular image spawned numerous
imitators, postcards and “jokes,” and ensured widespread dispersion of the
previously regional idiom. Many of the
copycat postcards and images even borrowed one or more of the baby images from
the original.
The original “Alligator Bait” image
sprang from the creative team of McCrary & Branson, photographer and
portrait artist. Lloyd Branson, a
nationally recognized fine art and portrait painter, was partners with Frank
McCrary in a commercial portrait studio and framing shop in Knoxville.
McCrary & Branson’s print,
“Alligator Bait,” was displayed at The Art Building in Knoxville, Tennessee in
October 1897. It must have made quite a
contrast with the works by Rembrandt and Corot displayed as part of a “loan
exhibit” at the same time. A reviewer
described McCrary & Branson’s three works (the others were “Yard of Coons”
and “All Coons Look A-Like to Me”) as “very creditable” and “droll and original.”[xxv]
Within a few weeks, prints of those works
and several other “Life Photographs of Southern Darkies,” each one more
cringe-worthy than the next.
Life Photographs of Southern Darkies – “Honey, Does Yer Lub
Yer Man,” “Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose,” “All Coons Look Alike to Me,”
“Alligator Bait,” “Lawd, Chile! You’se Gwine to Marry Rich,” Grand Pap Gib Us
de Base,” “Us Four and No More,” and others, all appropriately framed.
Evening Star
(Washington DC), November 5, 1897, page 7.
McCrary & Branson apparently carried
on a lucrative cottage industry producing similar images for many years. More than a decade later, in 1911, Branson’s
studio placed a job notice for for “energetic women of good appearance to sell
their famous “Koon pictures,” including “Alligator Bait.”
WE start you in business; no capital required; want energetic
women of good appearance to sell Branson’s famous Koon pictures in every town
(“Alligator Bait, &c”)’; answer in own handwriting. Branson Studio,
Knoxville, Tenn.
The Washington Post, November 27, 1911, page 10.
Examples of their work still survive
and come up for sale on occasion. Notice
how individual images from “Alligator Bait” have been placed in other images,
and how in “Alligator Bait” and other images, some people appear more than once
in different poses.
 |
| “Last One In’s a N[-word]” |
 |
| “Gimme de Rine” and “Ain’t Gwine to Be No Rine” |
 |
| “All Coons Look Alike to Me”[xxvi] |
“Alligator Bait” apparently struck a
chord with customers. Within months, the
image had circulated as far away as Hawaii, where a description of the image
included a reference to the old wives’ tale about the discriminating palate of an
alligator.
Alligator
Bait Photographed.
In the windows of the Pacific Hardware Co. is a photograph of
about a dozen negro babies in natural costume and various poses. The title is “Alligator Bait,” and refers to
the special tooth of the alligator for the little pickaninny. J. B. Atherton received the photo from a
prominent Southern statesman. It was
taken from life by an enterprising firm of artists at Knoxville, Tenn.
Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), December 30, 1897, page 1.
The image must have struck some kind
of chord with the public. Notices and
brief descriptions of it soon appeared in newspapers across the entire country,
from New York to California. The photograph
was described variously as, “strikingly funny . . . a laughable lot, and the
title of the picture, ‘Alligator Bait,’ is sure to raise another laugh,” “quite
attractive,” “a cute picture,” “a very comical picture,” “it’s cute,” and “the
funniest picture that ever graced a wall.”[xxvii]
Although, for the most part, these
notices did not refer directly to the hunting of alligators, at least one made
the connection, although it is not known whether the person responsible for the
item had specific knowledge about hunting practices in southern swamps, was
merely projecting based on the title, or misremembering one or several of the
earlier crocodile bait stories they might easily have read over the previous
decade.
“Alligator Bait” at Rundel’s.” The real thing. Just what they use in the
Sunny South to attract Mr. or Mrs. ‘Gator with.
Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York), March 4, 1898, page 12.
But not everyone was a fan of the
image. In Huntington, Indiana, a man
referred to as “Col. Hunt,” described as “the old colored man around town,”
made his displeasure known.
There are two pictures in the window entitled, “Alligator
Bait” and “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” which do not at all suit the
colonel. When speaking his indignation
at such sacrilege, as he thinks it, he says: “Why the man that made them
pictures ought to be ‘rested. He ought
to be put in jail. Dey ain’t right.”
Daily News-Democrat (Huntington, Indiana), September 19, 1898, page 8.
Postcards bearing later variations of
the image received criticism when used in mailings for political campaigns a
decade or so later.
Whether [Judge Raulston] will be able to overcome the
hostility that has sprung up among the negroes lately because of the “alligator
bait” card remains to be seen.
Chattanooga Daily Times, July 6, 1912, page 8.
The colored voters, all of them
Republicans, raised a howl of protest, and the gang bosses yanked Mac on the
carpet. They ordered him to call in
these, “Alligator Bait” cards and burn them up, or at least to only use them
where the colored voters wouldn’t hear of them.
And so McElhaney has been busier trying to gather up his
“Alligator Bait” than he was in circulating it.
Portsmouth Daily Times, November 1, 1912, page 12.
The postcards referred to in these two
incidents could have been one of many postcards playing off the “alligator
bait” theme.[xxviii] Many such cards even reused cropped images of
some of the children from McCrary & Branson’s original “Alligator Bait” print,
sometimes with clothes painted on.
Some advertising images appear to have borrowed from the earlier crocodile hunting stories out of Ceylon - at least in mirror image.
 |
| Left to Right: “Sport in Ceylon – Shooting a Man-Eating Crocodile,” The Graphic (London, England), January 21, 1888, page 54; “Shooting the Game”, The Morning Call (Paterson, New Jersey), February 12, 1888, page 4; Advertisements for Stainilgo laundry soap (1902) and Little African licorice candies, “The Coon Caricature: Coons as Alligator Bait,” HistoryontheNet.com. |
McCrary & Branson's “Alligator Bait” and the copycat images and other items that followed were not the first such images. Earlier images played off the notion of alligator preference even before the idiomatic use of “alligator bait” came into wide usage.
A carnival sideshow at an exhibition
of horses in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1853, for example, had a display,
perhaps taxidermy, showing black people being eaten. But since the animal involved is described as
a “crocodile,” it is not clear whether the choice of victim necessarily relates
to the old superstition or not. The victims
may have been meant to be Africans, who would be more likely to live near
crocodiles, than African-Americans, who would be more likely to live near
Alligators. But still, it suggests the
imagery was used nearly a half century before McCrary & Branson published
their “Alligator Bait” photograph.
“Living curiosities,” a sideshow, with “large men, deformed
children, and fat ladies . . . young ladies, (very appropriately dressed in
Bloomer costume) with beards that a Hungarian might envy” and a display of
“crocodiles, represented swallowing innumerable negroes.”
New York Times,
October 21, 1853, page 1.
A racist punchline at the end of a
long discussion about the pros-and-cons of alligator leather for boots and
shoes (waterproof, so they are good for gout and excellent substitute for
rubber overshoes for people allergies; but the leather doesn’t breath and only
good for cooler weather) suggests that a shoe store had an advertising image or
poster on the wall.
[H]e glanced up at a picture of a long, scaly alligator in
the act of swallowing a pickaninny.
“Yes, they’re good for tender feet, too,” he mused.
The New York Sun, June 10, 1877, page 3 (also several other newspapers).
The shoe store and photograph
described in the article belonged to a man named Henry J. Mahrenholz, a
shoemaker and leather tanner in New York City who pioneered the use of
alligator leather in shoes and boots. He
also owned one of the large alligators on display in the Central Park Zoo.
Mahrenholz’s casually racist comment
about the multiple benefits of
alligators was certainly tasteless, at least by today’s standards, but even
that comment may not be the most tasteless thing he ever did. In 1876, in time for the Centennial of
American independence, Henry J. Mahrenholz made a pair of boots from human skin
which he reportedly sent to the Smithsonian Institution. He also sent a pair of alligator boots, which
were expected to be placed on exhibition during the Centennial.
Mahrenholz was disappointed in the
human skin boots because the originally white skin had turned a “light, brown
color.” But he planned to continue his
experiments, hoping to perfect a process that would “preserve its original
whiteness.” If successful, he planned to
tan the skins of a man, woman and a baby, and have them stuffed “for exhibition
in the Bellevue hospital medical museum.”
But at least he was an equal-opportunity taxidermist, he also planned to
“tan and stuff a colored brother and a sister.”
Years later, Mahrenholz caused a
minor sensation by denouncing his Catholic faith when a Catholic cemetery
refused to bury his daughter because, he said, she died quickly, before last
rites were performed. But given his
history with human taxidermy, perhaps that was just an excuse.
In 1883, ladies’ fashion got into the
act with an item that seems out of place.
A Few Aestheticisms.
Pansy, buttercup, rose and myrtle pins are much worn.
Pretty powder boxes are of bronze or ivory in the shape of a
sea shell.
An alligator swallowing a pickaninny is one of the newest
designs in lace-pins.
The Daily City News (New Castle, Pennsylvania), November 14, 1883, page 4.
Surprisingly, perhaps, as of this
writing, necklaces and earrings with little plastic alligators eating teeny
plastic babies are available for order today on etsy.com, with images available
on pinterest.com. A pro-choice advocate
wearing similar earrings at a rally in Washington DC made minor news headlines in some circles
in early 2020.
But at least the baby was white –
we’ve come a long way (?) . . . baby.
Within about the first two years of
sales, McCrary & Branson’s “Alligator Bait” reportedly earned $5000
($150,000 in today’s money[xxix]). A fellow artist named James Henry Moser, who
had once shared a room with Branson in New York City when they were students,
attributed the success of the image in part to the name, which Branson told him
was chosen from hundreds of entries in a contest to name the picture.[xxx]
Branson’s friend Moser painted a more
flattering and sympathetic image of two black children playing checkers, which
is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.[xxxi]
Smithsonian American Art Museum, James
Henry Moser, Untitled (Two Children Playing Checkers), n.d.,
pastel on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Carolyn A.
Clampitt in memory of the J. Wesley Clampitt, Jr. Family, 2010.10.
Although Branson, a painter not a
photographer, was likely not the artist responsible for creating “Alligator
Bait,” his firm marketed and profited from it and other “Koon Pictures.” But he later mentored Beauford Delaney, an
American modernist painter associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s
and ‘40s, taking him on as a student and encouraging him to move to Boston for
further training.[xxxii]
Like the history of the persistent
rumor of American hunters using black children for alligator bait, the history
of race relations is not clear-cut and not easily reduced to one or two
isolated facts.
“Alligator Bait” Idiom
Before release of the “Alligator
Bait” photographic print in late-1897, there were only a few scattered examples
of “alligator bait” in its idiomatic sense referring to specifically to
African-Americans, and as many if not more examples of white people referred to
as “alligator bait.” But the idiom
proliferated in widespread use beginning in 1898, almost immediately after
McCrary & Branson’s print came onto the market.
The caption of a stereopticon image
copyrighted in July 1898, for example, used the idiom to describe children
diving for money in Key West, Florida.[xxxiii]
 |
| Alligator Bait Diving for Money, Key West Harbor, Fla. U. S. A. |
Although over the years “alligator
bait” most frequently referred to young children, it was sometimes applied to
adults. Several early examples in print
related to troop movements in the early stages of the Spanish-American
War. In one instance, someone seeing off
the troops called some of the black soldiers “alligator bait,” which didn’t go
over well.
It is a heartless cuss who referred to the soldiers en route
for Cuba as “alligator bait.”
Shepherdstown Register (Shepherdstown, West Virginia), June 23, 1898, page 3.
In a separate incident, a white
soldier on a troop train responded to a black woman who had called him a “tin
soldier.”
“Why, you alligator bait, I fought to free you,” he remarked,
to which she replied with considerable vehemence and emphasis, “Yes, and you
will now hab to fight to free yo-self.”
The Atchison Daily Champion (Atchison, Kansas), May 11, 1898, page 5.
And a letter from young soldier from
Pennsylvania on a troop train, riding through the South for the first time, remarked
on the unremarkable Southern Belles meeting them at every stop (they were no
prettier than the women at home) and noted that “the country is thick with
‘alligator bait.’”[xxxiv]
In 1899, songwriters Henry Wise and
Sidney Perrin capitalized on the newly popular expression, with their song,
“Mammy’s Little Alligator Bait” (Charles K. Harris, Publisher, Milwaukee,
1899).[xxxv]
The song is not about hunting. It’s about controlling children through fear. A mother promises to give her son a toy and
take him to the bayou, which “made his eyeballs fairly jump with joy;” but warned him to be good, because of “de
alligators dat ate up black boys dats bad, and wouldn’t mind their mammy dear.”
[Update 5/9/2022. Surprisingly, perhaps, both members of the songwriting team, Wise and Perrin, were black. See my post, "Blackface, Yellow-Face and Alligator Bait - Sidney Perrin's Complicated Career."]
H. L. Mencken
In his autobiography, H. L. Mencken,
the “Sage of Baltimore,” journalist, essayist, editor of The Smart Set and The American
Mercury magazines, and scholar of American English, recounted an alligator
hunting story he once heard from his uncle, a travelling salesman. The anecdote is frequently cited as “evidence”
of the factual truth of the practice of using babies to hunt alligators in the
American South.
But second-hand stories told by
uncles or travelling salesmen are not direct evidence of anything; much less
any such stories recalled fifty years after the fact. According
to the timeline laid out in his autobiography, his uncle told him the story
following a business trip to Florida in about 1890 when Mencken was about ten
years old; which coincides with the time period during which various stories
about hunting crocodiles in Ceylon appeared regularly in newspapers across the
country.
The story was one of many “tall tales”
his uncle told him, and Mencken admitted that he did not know whether it was
true.
My Uncle’s hunting trips extended much further than the
shores of the Chesapeake. Whenever he
made a business journey, which was pretty often, he always took his guns along,
and usually he would come back with many souvenirs and tall tales of the
chase. He went all the way to Florida,
which was then only a wilderness, to shoot alligators, and returned with the
story that he had lured them out of the bayous by tying Negro babies to stakes
along the bank. Whether or not this
story was true I do not know, but my brother Charlie and I believed it firmly
at the time.
H. L. Mencken, Happy Days, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1940 (Sixth Printing, August
1963, accessed via OpenLibrary.org),
pages 221-222.
Conclusions
There is little evidence that
alligator hunters in the United States once used children as bait. And there is no evidence that such dangerous
or cruel hunting techniques were widely practiced, known or tolerated.
The two newspaper articles frequently cited in
support, the 1923 story out of Chipley, Florida and 1908 story about the Bronx
Zoo are not direct evidence of anything of the sort, and have credibility
issues; a questionable source for the former, and conflicting contemporary
reports for the latter. The various
crocodile hunting stories from Ceylon, India or Suday which are sometimes cited
by analogy, in support of the notion that similar hunting techniques might have
been used in the United States, are also suspect, having originated with a
piece by a military humor cartoonist. The
existence of “alligator bait” postcards and knickknacks may merely be visual
puns playing off the idiomatic use of “alligator bait” to refer to black
children specifically and sometimes applied to adults. And the idiom itself is not direct evidence
of dangerous or cruel hunting techniques, but a manifestation of an old
superstition about the discriminating palate of crocodiles and alligators.
But that’s not to say there is no
evidence suggesting that cruel or insensitive hunters might, on occasion, have
used children as bait in hunting alligators or something equally
dangerous.
Better Evidence?
Two separate and unrelated items
published in newspapers in 1849 suggest that children might have been used as
bait to hunt alligators and cougars.
These two items do not prove that any such thing actually happened, but
they are much better evidence that they may have happened than nearly all of
the “evidence” portrayed in the numerous internet memes or articles purporting
to prove that the rumors are true.
The item about alligators is not a
first-hand account, but a negative portrayal of a southern fisherman by an
angry angler in Buffalo, New York, responding to a scathing critique of
northern fishing that appeared in the New
Orleans Picayune.
A Southerner scoffed at fishing up
north.
The people of the North do have some fun in fishing, in a
small way. Fishing for speckled trout in
a mountain stream, with a fly, treading down the tall grass along the banks,
and bending aside the willows and alders, in order to throw into the exact
“good hole” beneath the overhanging bank and adjoining the gnarled roots, is
rare sport in its way. . . . This is,
however, only like shooting robins, when deer and bear are plenty. After fishing all day even with good luck,
your trout basket perhaps weighs five pounds.
The Times-Picayune, September 3, 1849, page 2.
A Northerner defended his regional
honor.
I know nothing of Southern fishing, but am certain it must be
insipid, compared with the varied entertainment here, at the north, among the
most sublime and picturesque scenery ever spread out doors. Plashing about in a swamp, with a deep
sea-leade, a shark hook and a small dog or a cheap negro child, for bait, is
not to be considered amusement, in an extended sense. It is true, you have the excitement of
meeting with an occasional alligator, or now and then intruding upon the
domestic retiracy of a Copperhead, while the odoriferous Buzzard, wheeling
above your head, suggest pleasing anticipations of your fate in case of your
taking a siesta under the glowing cypresses.
Buffalo Courier,
October 1, 1849, page 2.
The accusation was made by someone
who admittedly knew nothing about fishing down south, so it is unclear whether
the reference to using a “cheap negro child” as bait was a product of the
writer’s own imagination, perhaps fueled by a northern abolitionist’s
perception of slave culture cruelty, a reflection of some actual incident the
writer had heard or read about, or a speculation consciously or unconsciously
influenced by familiarity with Maillet’s description of a crocodile hunt in
Egypt a hundred years earlier.
The writer’s characterization of a
young enslaved child as “cheap” may also reflect unfamiliarity with the
realities of the slave economy. In 1857,
for example, “slave babies” were reportedly valued at $200 at birth[xxxvi]
and an average of nearly $800 full-grown,[xxxvii]
nearly $6,000 and $24,000, respectively, in today’s money.[xxxviii] At those prices, even the most heartless
slave-driver might pause, considering that a puppy, young pig or a goat might
do the same job.
Whereas the alligator hunting
reference in 1849 may not come from an obviously credible source, the account
of a cougar in 1849 involved specific people, in a particular place, during a
known historical event, which may lend it more credence, although it may still
not be as nefarious as a casual reading might suggest.
In 1849, pursuant to the Treaty of
Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American War, the United States sent a survey party to
San Diego, California to meet with Mexican counterparts to establish the
boundary line between the two countries.
The group was initially led by John B. Weller, a former Democratic
Congressman from Ohio (the newly elected Whig President, Zachary Taylor, later
replaced him with John C. Fremont).
Weller would settle in California, and later served as a U. S. Senator
and Governor. His brother Charles L.
Weller was also a member of the survey party.
Another member of the party was a
doctor from Ohio named E. K. Chamberlain.
Chamberlain had served as a surgeon during the war with Mexico, where he
was known as “Old Medicine.” Chamberlain
stayed briefly in California, returning to Ohio by 1852, but not before leaving
a mark as an historical footnote in California history; he was a member of California’s first state legislature
following admission of California to the United States, a State Senator from
San Diego and President Pro Tem of the Senate.
In early-1849, Weller, Chamberlain
and the rest of the survey party travelled down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers,
sailed through the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, crossed the isthmus and boarded a
ship for San Diego. While crossing the
isthmus, they encountered wildlife and enjoyed hunting. E. K. Chamberlain shot a cougar, with the
help of a “negro boy.” The story was
taken from a letter home written by a member of the party named Mr. Coleman.
Sport on the
Chagres River.
I almost forgot to mention about the game that abounds in
this country. Coming up, we saw plenty
of parrots, monkeys, alligators and turkeys. – Several of these were shot by
the company. Old Medicine beat all by
shooting a tiger! Or properly, a cougar.
In company with Chas. Weller, he procured a negro boy and proceeded
across one of the many beds of the river.
Learning from the boy there was plenty of tigers, he sent him ahead, as
he says, for “bait,” and in a short time came on a tiger sure enough, which he
brought down the first fire!
The Weekly Mississippian, May 11, 1849, page 1.
Once again, however, it is not clear
what actually happened. The letter
writer chose to put “bait” in quotes, as though it was used in jest or in an
unconventional or non-literal sense. Slavery
had been abolished in Panama, so “procured” here more likely refers to the
hiring of a local guide than to any sort of coercion. The guide may have been familiar with the
area, told him there were plenty of “tigers,” and led them to the game, as
agreed upon. The boy, or guide, may not
have believed he was in any particular or unusual danger, and accepted any
danger there may have been willingly for the going rate.
If you are inclined to look at E. K.
Chamberlain’s Panama hunting efforts in a negative light and take perverse joy
in the pain of others, you might be inclined to see karma at work in his death
four years later, from “Panama fever” contracted while crossing the isthmus
again on his way back to California.
The Indiana Herald (Huntington, Indiana), March 2, 1853, page 2.
Taking the Bait
There is at least one example of a black child nearly "eaten" in front of a white man for sheer amusement; but only the child was amused -- it was a practical joke and a white man took the bait, hook-line-and-sinker.
Will Be Boys.
"Boys will be boys," observed a traveler from the south, "and I guess it doesn't make much difference whether they are white or black, city or country. . . .
"A few days before I leftI was taking a walk down by the shore of the bayou, when I heard a scream. Rushing into the tall grass and weeds that fringe the water I saw the most horrible sight my eyes ever beheld. That colored boy was hanging with his hands to a sapling, and his feet were in the mouth of a huge alligator. . . .
"I was so horrified that it seemed as if my heart would refuse to beat. I wouldn't look upon such a spectacle again for $10,000. It drove me finally wild. . . .
"As I seized a fence rail and rushed up to beat the reptile over the head that boy grinned at me in delight. You see, the alligator was a dead one, and the pickaninny had gone down there and stuck his feet in his mouth and hollered when he saw me walking his way."
"A few days before I leftI was taking a walk down by the shore of the bayou, when I heard a scream. Rushing into the tall grass and weeds that fringe the water I saw the most horrible sight my eyes ever beheld. That colored boy was hanging with his hands to a sapling, and his feet were in the mouth of a huge alligator. . . .
"I was so horrified that it seemed as if my heart would refuse to beat. I wouldn't look upon such a spectacle again for $10,000. It drove me finally wild. . . .
"As I seized a fence rail and rushed up to beat the reptile over the head that boy grinned at me in delight. You see, the alligator was a dead one, and the pickaninny had gone down there and stuck his feet in his mouth and hollered when he saw me walking his way."
Memphis Avalanche (Memphis, Tennessee), October 14, 1885, page 2 (and a dozen other newspapers).
 |
| The Natural History of Reptiles and Serpents, Dublin, J. Jones, 1824, page 45. |
[i]
“Alligator Bait Revisited,” Franklin Hughes, Ferris State University Jim Crow
Museum of Racist Memorabilia, June/July 2017. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2017/junejuly.htm
(“there is compelling evidence to suggest that the practice occurred.”); “Black
Babies Used as Alligator Bait in Florida,” Chuck Strouse, Miami New Times, February 3, 2014, 9:32 am (“[i]t has been
pretty well documented recently that, during slavery and into the 20th
Century, black babies were used as alligator bait in North and Central
Florida.”; Chuck Strouse claims to have “shared two Pulitzer Prizes”); Sharon
Draper, an award-winning writer of historical fiction for children and 1997
Teacher of the Year, included an alligator-baiting scene similar to other
accounts of the method in her book, Copper
Sun (New York, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006, pages 156-160)
which, although fiction, is frequently cited as evidence of the practice based
on her reputation and credentials.
[ii]
Brice Andrew’s Grand Gazetteer, or
Topographic Dictionary (1759) describes the “Camarones River” as lying
between “Guinea” and “lower or western Ethiopia,
in the Kingdom of Biafara, in Africk.”
A map printed in the 1500s shows the Camarones river in the location of
what is now called the Sanaga River in Cameroon.
[iii] Knoxville Journal, March 23, 1932, page
8.
[iv] Charleston Daily Mail (Charleston, West
Virginia), August 10, 1920, page 13 (T. W. Villiers, time-keeper at all recent
bouts excepting the Sheppard-Alexander go, will hold the watch.).
[v] “Punch
and his Artists,” M. H. Spielmann, Contemporary
Review, Volume 60, July 1891, page 67 (Perhaps the best military
contributor of jokes Punch has had is
Major-General H. G. Robley. Keene, as I
have already said, re-drew the majority of his sketches, which dealt, for the
most part, with military life on foreign service. Twenty-seven contributions, many of them
unsigned, and of varying degrees of importance, came from him during the years
1873-8).
[vi] George
Somes Layard, The Life and Letters of
Charles Samuel Keen, London, S. Low, Marston, 1893, page 179 ( “These
drawings in ‘Punch’ you see marked R, are from sketches sent me by a very
obliging correspondent, a Captain Robley, in the 91st Highlanders;
he sketches very well, and sends me lots of suggestions, and, as he naturally
likes to see his name to some of them (that don’t touch Government up too
much), I’m glad to make him that acknowledgement. You see a mess-table makes a very good
‘preserve’ for ‘Punch’ subjects. I don’t
follow his drawings very much, but they are very useful in military subjects,
as it gives me the regulation number of buttons, etc.”)
[vii]
Partial copies of the original Harper’s Bazar article appear in a posting at
Kot-Begemott.livejournal.com. https://kot-begemott.livejournal.com/2217102.html
[viii]
“Two Queer Adventures,” Captain Henry F. Harrison, Golden Argosy, Volume 6, Number 20, April 14, 1888, page 316.
[ix]
“Were Human Babies Used as Bait in Crocodile Hunts in Colonial Sri Lanka?”
Anslem de Silva and Ruchira Somaweera, Journal of Threatened Taxa, Volume 7,
Number 1, January 26, 2015. Anslem de Silva is with the Amphibian and Reptile
Research Organisation of Sri Lanka, Gampola, Sri Lanka; Ruchira Somaweera is
with the Biologic Environmental Survey, North Perth, Australia. https://threatenedtaxa.org/index.php/JoTT/article/view/1790
[x] The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), May 13,
1927, page 5 (obituary of Richard Scobell Kinghorn, age 62, “Belonged to
Football, Golf, Curling, Snowshoe and Fishing Clubs – Had Retired From
Business.).
[xi] Billings Gazette (Montana), February 11,
1909, page 2.
[xii] Angola Herald (Angola, Indiana),
February 19, 1890, page 3.
[xiii]
Chicago Inter-Ocean, August 12, 1900,
page 28.
[xiv] Richard
J. Martin, Sacred Zoology; or, the
Scriptures illustrated by the natural history of animated nature, Intended to
establish the authenticity of the sacred writings in connexion with zoology,
Selected principally from the most esteemed, authentic, and celebrated voyages
and travels into the East, by Bochart, Shaw, Irwin, Chardin, Thevenot, Pitts,
and others, Volume 1 1st American Edition, Richmond, Virginia, 1828, pages
177-179.
[xv] Bible Expositor, Confirmations of the Truth of The Holy Scriptures from the
Observations of Recent Travellers, New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1844,
pages 217-219
[xvi] Jackson Daily News (Jackson,
Mississippi), August 19, 1907, page 4.
[xvii]
The Boston Globe, May 12, 1909, page
10.
[xviii]
Pittsburgh Courier, June 24, 1950,
page 15 (student slang); Pittsburgh
Courier, February 16, 1952, page 7 (“prison slang”).
[xix] Austin American-Statesman (Austin,
Texas), July 8, 1968, page 23.
[xx] “Were
Children Used as Alligator Bait in the American South?” David Emery, Snopes.com, June 9, 2017.
[xxi]
Likely a reference to Nathan Bedford Forrest.
[xxii]
A “whale story” was an idiom with the
same meaning as a “tall tale.”
[xxiii]
St. Albans Daily Messenger (Vermont),
March 17, 1876, page 1.
[xxiv]
“Wool” was at the time a common word
used to designate kinky hair.
[xxv] The Journal and Tribune (Knoxville,
Tennessee), October 14, 1897, page 3.
[xxvi]
The image reproduced here shows a copyright notice from “Atkinson Bros., Toronto.” The Atkinson Brothers of Toronto appear to
have been McCrary & Branson’s agents or partners in Canada. Canadian Patent Office records for March 1898
list the “Atkinson Brothers” as holding the Canadian copyright for both “All
Coons Look Alike to Me” and “Alligator Bait.”
[xxvii]
Daily Times (New Brunswick, New
Jersey), January 28, 1898, page 5; Phillipsburg
Dispatch (Phillipsburg, Kansas), April 14, 1898, page 5; Mendocino Coast Beacon, February 19,
1898, page 8; Evening Herald (Ottawa,
Kansas), May 27, 1898, page 4; Geneva
Daily Gazette (Geneva, New York), September 30, 1898, page 3; Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New
York), March 4, 1898, page 12.
[xxviii]
Historyon theNet.com maintains collection of “alligator bait” imagery. https://www.historyonthenet.com/authentichistory/diversity/african/3-coon/7-alligator/
[xxix]
Currency conversion from an
online currency converter.
[xxx] Washington Times (Washington DC),
January 28, 1900, page 13.
[xxxiii]
United States Copyright Office records for 1898 indicated this image was
copyrighted July 11, 1898.
[xxxiv]
Indiana Gazette (Indiana,
Pennsylvania), June 1, 1898, page 10.
[xxxvi]The Morning Post (London), September 19,
1857, page 3.
[xxxvii]
“The average price of a slave, regardless of age, sex, or condition, rose from
approximately $400 in 1850 to nearly $800 by 1860. During the late 1850s, prime
male field hands aged eighteen to thirty cost on the average $1,200, and
skilled slaves such as blacksmiths often were valued at more than $2,000.” The Texas State Historical Association, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/yps01
.
[xxxviii]
Currency conversion from an
online currency converter.
Revised May 18, 2020, adding a section on H. L. Mencken and references to articles in The New York World, August 16, 1896.
Revised July 21, 2020, adding a reference to an article from the Brenham Weekly Banner in 1878, and to similar language about Lee County, Florida, from a book by Janaki Lenin.
Revised May 18, 2020, adding a section on H. L. Mencken and references to articles in The New York World, August 16, 1896.
Revised July 21, 2020, adding a reference to an article from the Brenham Weekly Banner in 1878, and to similar language about Lee County, Florida, from a book by Janaki Lenin.
"fake news, eh?" awesome, well researched article.
ReplyDeleteThis is a lot of effort to defend a messed up slavery practice
ReplyDeleteIt would be as silly to defend something that didn't happen as it would be to condemn something that didn't happen. Most people addressing the question make no effort to support their claims, so I appreciate your recognition that it took a lot of effort. I am interested in any additional evidence on the subject matter one way or the other. If you have something to add, please let us known.
Deletethose people did every thing else but ain't feed black babies to alligators. Saints lol
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading. If you have any evidence I missed, please share.
Delete