Odd this day
Praise be! For it is the 155th anniversary of the discovery of the Cardiff Giant, when (in the Cardiff that’s in New York State, just south of Syracuse, rather than in Wales) definitive proof was found that giants once roamed the Earth, just as it says in Genesis 6, verse 4:
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
(They’re also mentioned in Numbers 13, verses 32–33: “…the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight”.)
On this day in 1869, you see, two men who had been hired to dig a well happened upon a big stone foot three feet under, and one of them said
I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!
Soon, they had uncovered a human figure, ten feet (and four-and-a-half inches) tall. (It would also have taken a 37-inch collar if it had worn a shirt. Basically: cor blimey, it was a whopper.)
It was, quite plainly, a fossilised enormous person from the olden times. Naturally, the man whose land it was, farmer William ‘Stub’ Newell, who had hired the two diggers (even though one of them had apparently lost an arm in the Civil War and “turned to alcohol for solace”), saw the opportunity this remarkable discovery presented. He had a tent put over it, and started charging people 50 cents to come in. Around 300–500 people a day duly did, and one Sunday alone saw 2,600 people filing past.
One of the paying punters was Andrew White, first president of Cornell University, who wrote:
Lying in its grave, with the subdued light from the roof of the tent falling upon it, and with the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle, it produced a most weird effect. An air of great solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper.
He also heard “a very excellent doctor of divinity, pastor of one of the largest churches in Syracuse” saying:
Is it not strange that any human being, after seeing this wonderfully preserved figure, can deny the evidence of his senses, and refuse to believe, what is so evidently the fact, that we have here a fossilized human being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture?
White himself, though, was not entirely convinced. Firstly, he wondered why ‘Stub’ Newell had felt the need for a well in a spot nowhere the house or the barn, which anyway had a stream running past them. He wasn’t the only person asking questions. The National Republican posed the most obvious one:
May it not be a statue?
…but then rather let itself down with:
The decided opinion of nearly every person who has seen it … some of the most highly educated and intelligent people … is that its perfection, the material of which it is composed, and the place in which it was found, are against this hypothesis.
Soon, the great stone man was in Syracuse, sold (for $23,000) to a syndicate who exhibited him there, where he attracted so much attention that Phineas T Barnum himself offered $50,000 for him. The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, where the thing now resides, seems to think it was $150,000, but either way it was a ton of cash — and when it was turned down, Barnum had his people take a surreptitious cast of it, made his own, exhibited it in New York, and declared the original a fake. (Still, at least there’s nobody that dishonest in American public life today...)
Anyway, the whole thing was, of course, a load of old balls. Or, to be more accurate, a big lump of gypsum. It was created at the behest of ‘Stub’ Newell’s relative George Hull, who was, according to historian Barbara Franco:
A confirmed scoundrel … looked the part of a villain … an inveterate rogue … an opportunist
…who had had the idea for the giant in 1866 after a discussion with a “methodist revivalist, Reverend Turk”. Turk felt that the Bible was quite right to say that there had once been giants, and Hull wondered why people would believe such guff. So he
thought of making a stone, and passing it off as a man.
In June 1868, he started looking for a suitable lump of rock in Iowa, and eventually got himself a piece of gypsum “12 feet by 4 feet by 22 inches”. He shipped this to Chicago, where two sculptors turned it — possibly using Hull as a life model — into a human figure, complete with curly hair and beard. Then Hull, consulting a geologist, discovered that if someone had been fossilised, they would not have hair and a beard, so these were removed. When it was finished, it looked too new, so Hull “rubbed a sponge filled with water and sand over the surface”. Then:
To simulate pores of the skin he put hundreds of large darning needles into a block of wood and then hammered the statue all over. To make the statue look old, Hull tried to wash it with ink, but the result left too much colour. A gallon of sulphuric acid applied over the giant left it with the dark, dingy hue that he wanted.
So, we can’t fault him for sheer effort. It apparently took six months in all, and cost $2,600. Then, it went into Newell’s soil, and they waited another year before sending the labourers in to ‘find’ it – which suggests Hull was possessed of admirable patience, too.
Perhaps we can understand, then, why they weren’t too happy when Barnum out-hoaxed them. Smithsonian magazine says:
The owners of the authentic “giant” tried to sue Barnum, but … the judge hearing the case just said “Bring your giant here, and if he swears to his own genuineness as a bona fide petrification, you shall have the injunction you ask for.” In other words: You can’t really have a fake of a fake. By December of 1869 … Hull had confessed to the world that the giant wasn’t real and the hoax was over.
By then, though, a fair bit of cash had been made all round, which must have softened the blow a little. And did the hoax really do any harm? Historian Michael Pettit says:
A contemporary observer perceptively described the feeling the giant evoked as “the joy in believing” in the creature’s purported origins. For those contemplating the giant, knowledge and emotion were not distinct but, rather, reinforced each other. For many viewers, it seems that the giant’s extraordinary nature made it more credible; how could an object that evoked such wonder be a fraud?
And on the subject of people who bought the story, one of my favourite details comes in Jan Bondeson’s A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, which says:
The Reverend Mr. Turk and his colleagues were completely fooled. They paid money to be allowed to hold prayer meetings in the tent before their huge idol.
There are (disputed) claims that it was the Barnum bit of this saga that gave rise to the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute”, but they may be as authentic as the giant.
That set of words, though? Very much true.
