Part 12 (1/2)
The dauphin being desirous to see Barsabas exhibit some of his feats, the latter said, ”My horse has carried me so long that I will carry him in my turn.” He then placed himself below the animal and raising him up, carried him more than fifty paces, and then placed him on the ground without being the least hurt.
Barsabas' sister was not unique in her century. I quote from a magazine called The Parlor Portfolio or Post-Chaise Companion, published in London in 1724:
To be seen, at Mr. John Syme's, Peruke maker, opposite the Mews, Charing Cross, the surprising and famous Italian Female Sampson, who has been seen in several courts of Europe with great applause. She will absolutely walk, barefoot, on a red-hot bar of iron: a large block of marble of between two and three thousand weight she will permit to lie on her for some time, after which she will throw it off at about six feet distance, without using her hands, and exhibit several other curious performances, equally astonis.h.i.+ng, which were never before seen in England. She performs exactly at twelve o'clock, and four, and six in the afternoon. Price half-a-crown, servants and children a s.h.i.+lling.
From the spelling, I judge that the person who selected this lady's t.i.tle must have been more familiar with the City Directory than with the Scriptures.
In Edward J. Wood's Giants and Dwarfs, London, 1868, I find the following:
A newspaper of December 19th, 1751, announces as follows:
At the new theatre in the Haymarket, this day, will be performed a concert of musick, in two acts. Boxes 3s., pit 2s., gallery 1s.
Between the acts of the concert will be given, gratis, several exercises of rope-dancing and tumbling. There is also arrived the little woman from Geneva, who, by her extraordinary strength, performs several curious things, viz. 1st. She beats a red-hot iron that is made crooked straight with her naked feet. 2ndly. She puts her head on one chair, and her feet on another, in an equilibrium, and suffers five or six men to stand on her body, which after some time she flings off. 3rdly. An anvil is put on her body, on which two men strike with large hammers. 4thly. A stone of a hundred pounds weight is put on her body, and beat to pieces with a hammer. 5thly. She lies down on the ground, and suffers a stone of 1500 pounds weight to be laid on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, in which position she speaks to the audience, and drinks a gla.s.s of wine, then throws the stone off her body by mere strength, without any a.s.sistance. Lastly, she lifts an anvil of 200 pound weight from the ground with her own hair. To begin exactly at six o'clock.
At present the stunt with the two chairs and the six men is being exhibited as a hypnotic test.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni, the famous Egyptian archeologist, who was a man of gigantic stature, began his public career as a strongman at the Bartholomew Fair, under the management of Gyngell, the conjuror, who dubbed him The Young Hercules. Shortly afterward he appeared at Sadler's Wells Theater, where he created a profound sensation, under the name of The Patagonian Samson. The feature of his act was carrying a pyramid of from seven to ten men in a manner never before attempted.
He wore a sort of harness with footholds for the men, and when all were in position he moved about the stage with perfect ease, soliciting ”kind applause” by waving a flag. He afterwards became a magician, and after various other ventures he finally landed in Egypt, where his discoveries were of such a nature as to secure for him an enviable position in ”Who's Who in Archeology.”
[1] Interesting accounts of Topham's career may be found in Wonders of Bodily Strength, New York, 1873, a translation from the French of Depping, by Charles Russell; Sir David Brewster's, Letters on Natural Magic; London, 1838; Wanley's Wonders of the Little World, London, 1806; Wilson's Wonderful Characters, London, 1821, (but not in the reprint of 1869).
[2] Or William Joy.
[3] This is the spelling used by Joyce, Eckenberg and others, for the Samson of the Bible.
[4] Wonders of the little World, by Nathaniel Wanley, London, 1806.
Vol. I., page 76.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CONTEMPORARY STRONG PEOPLE: CHARLES JEFFERSON; LOUIS CYR; JOHN GRUN MARX; WILLIAM LE ROY.--THE NAIL KING, THE HUMAN CLAW-HAMMER; ALEXANDER WEYER; MEXICAN BILLY WELLS; A FOOLHARDY ITALIAN; WILSON; HERMAN; SAMPSON; SANDOW; YUCCA; LA BLANCHE; LULU HURST.--THE GEORGIA MAGNET, THE ELECTRIC GIRL, ETC.; ANNIE ABBOTT; MATTIE LEE PRICE.--THE TWILIGHT OF THE FREAKS. THE DIME MUSEUMS.
Feats of strength have always interested me greatly, so that in my travels around the world I have made it a point to come in contact with the most powerful human beings of my generation. The one among these who deserves first mention is Charles Jefferson, with whose achievements I became quite familiar while we were working in the same museum many years ago. I am convinced that he must have been the strongest man of his time at lifting with the bare hands alone. He had two feats that he challenged any mortal to duplicate. One was picking up a heavy blacksmith's anvil by the horn and placing it on a kitchen table; for the other he had a block of steel, which, as near as I can remember, must have been about 14 inches long, 12 inches wide, and 7 inches thick. This block lay on the floor, and his challenge was for anyone to pick it up with bare hands. I noticed that it required unusually long fingers to grasp it, since one could get only the thumb on one side. Though thousands tried, I never saw, or heard, of anyone else who could juggle his anvil or pick up the weight. True, I saw him surrept.i.tiously rub his fingers with resin, to a.s.sist in the gripping, but that could have been only of slight a.s.sistance to the marvelous grip the man possessed.
It is generally conceded that Louis Cyr was, in his best days, the strongest man in the known world at all-round straight lifting. Cyr did not give the impression of being an athlete, nor of a man in training, for he appeared to be over-fat and not particularly muscular; but he made records in lifting which, to the best of my knowledge, no other man has been able to duplicate.
John Grun Marx, a Luxemberger, must have been among the strongest men in the world at the time I knew him. We worked on the same bill several times; but it was at the Olympia, in Paris, that he shone supreme as a strongman--and at the same time as a weak one. For, in spite of his sovereign strength, Mars was no match for a pair of bright eyes; all a pretty woman had to do was to smile and John would wilt.
And--Paris was Paris.
Marx's strength was prodigious, and he juggled hundreds, and toyed with thousands, of pounds as a child plays with a rattle. He must have weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds, and he walked like a veritable colossus. In fact, he reminded me of a two-footed baby elephant.
Always good-natured, he made a host of friends both in the profession and out of it. After years of professional work he settled down as landlord of a public house in England, where, finally, he was prostrated by a mortal illness. Wis.h.i.+ng to die in his native city, he returned to Luxemberg. He did not realize that he was bereft of his enormous strength, and those about him humored him: the doctor and the nurses would pretend that he hurt them when he grasped their hands. He died almost forgotten except by his brother artists, but they (myself among them) built a monument to this good-natured Hercules, whose only care was to entertain.
Among the strongmen that I met during my days with the museums, one whom I found most interesting was William Le Roy, known as The Nail King and The Human Claw-Hammer, whose act appealed to me for its originality. So far as I could learn, it had never been duplicated.