Episode 211: Cutting and Ned

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This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

There was a hole in the boat.

It was put there by a guy named J.

Ambrose Cutting, a Boston inventor who was particularly good at working with metal and glass.

He developed a photographic technique using glass negatives and a special

You know what, it doesn't matter.

What does matter is that his technique, the ambrotype, was extremely popular among photographers during the middle of the 19th century.

And surely less important, but not not important I mean this is not germane to the plot, but certainly helps us understand his character, as the name ambrotype comes from Ambrose, his name.

Which I kind of find likably goofy, like there are a million scientific innovations named after their inventor, the Geiger counter, Doppler radar, the daguerreotype, speaking of old photography, the Heimlich maneuver, but it's always the last name.

There isn't a stevometer or a Debigraph.

So J.

Ambrose Cutting invents the Amber Type and patents it.

And he is one of those guys who is super smart but doesn't really have a head for business.

But luckily he has a partner who decides that they should license the amber type and soon they are collecting fees from pretty much every photographic studio in the United States.

The money is rolling in, but after a while it just starts to be a drag for Cutton.

So much of the business is about sales and contracts and chasing down people who were neg on contracts and filing patent infringement claims and all sorts of nonsense that he, a tinkerer, a dreamer, and by all accounts a great hang.

he was a big, affable dude, he'd slap you on the shoulder, light your cigar kind of guy, he gets sick of it.

He sells his patent.

He takes the money and runs and doesn't look back.

And this will not come back to haunt him.

This is not that kind of story.

The guy just cashed out.

He wanted to enjoy his life more.

And he did.

He spent a big chunk of that money on a boat, also called the Amber Type.

which was a thing a rich person would splash their money out on back then, a private jet of its day, a big, beautiful touring boat that you can park in the harbor and then use to sail your friends from place to place.

But this was no ordinary boat,

because of the hole in it.

Cutting, you will recall, had a particular genius at working with metal and glass, and so he figured out a way to put a window into the side of his boat.

This is a true novelty for the time.

And he would take people out and show them what life looked like underwater.

An incredible treat.

It also made fishing easier.

Someone would watch through the glass and spot a shimmering school swimming by, and down would go the lines, and up would come haddock and cod and herring, and he'd have his chef de-bone and grill fresh fish for his guests right there on the deck.

It was a blast.

But for cutting, it was something more.

He fell in love with the creatures he saw through that window.

In those brief glimpses he caught when the water was clear and the the light was just right, and luck was in his favor.

He wanted to see them all the time.

And so, he, as a glass guy and a metal guy,

he built fish tanks.

Big ones like the world had never seen before, with filters and water pumps.

And he opened up the first aquarium in North America.

A space in downtown Boston where land lovers could come and watch the marvels of the sea up close.

Even the most dedicated sailor, the saltwater wader, the avid tide pooler, had never seen fish that way.

There was no rippling surface, no refraction to look through, and it wasn't just top-down.

You could just sit and look and watch them swim.

It was wonderful.

Fish are incredible.

Scientists came to Cutting's Aquarium, finally able to observe animal behavior in a more natural setting.

It was revolutionary.

And Cutting was, if you will pardon the pun, hooked.

He was utterly in love with these creatures.

He traveled farther and farther, his boat loaded with nets, with giant tanks to hold new fish and turtles, to bring them back to Boston and share them with the world.

Tanks big enough to hold two beluga whales captured during a trip to the Arctic Circle, and another to hold a pair of harbor seals from Newfoundland.

He called them Fanny and Ned.

And back on land, getting the two seals acclimated to to their new home in a circular tank and a building in downtown Boston with some temperature-controlled seawater and a couple of boulders to hang out on, J.

Ambrose Cutting became one of the first people to realize that a seal, the so-called sea dog, could be trained like a regular dog.

You shouldn't train a seal.

I firmly believe that wild animals should be wild.

And though there might be some unknowable way in which a seal in captivity might gain something from the interaction and stimulation of learning tricks beyond just getting fish in exchange, they shouldn't be captive.

But I will also say that when looking back at the people of the 19th century in their myriad misguided, messed up, and often immoral and murderous beliefs, I'm having a hard time begrudging J.

Ambrose Cutting the pleasures he took in having adorable creatures jump on command.

He was very good at at it.

At training and just caring for all of these creatures from different waters and different ecosystems and keeping them healthy.

And this was a time when natural history museums and even zoos barely saw it in their mandate to keep animals alive.

And it seems he was really good at training these seals.

Had a real bond.

Within a few months, they could do all sorts of tricks.

They could wave to the audience, they could bark on command, balance a ball, all the classic trained seal stuff.

Boston went crazy for the pair.

But possibly not enough.

The aquarium was an expensive proposition, and cutting, never one for the business part of business, needed a little help.

But this time he picked the wrong partner.

His new one was a colleague of P.T.

Barnum.

And performing SEALs, Beluga Whales, that was box office, that was show business.

And so soon this guy had cutting expanding his aquarium.

The guy brought in land animals and just generally made it more of a circus.

And this wasn't what Cutting wanted.

Cutting loved training the seals and doing the shows, but it was science to him.

He was performing experiments in animal intelligence that just happened to be in full view of the public.

And the rest of it, the rest of his aquarium, in his mind, was pure education and wonder, just letting people see fish being fish.

The business started to fall apart.

The guy was kind of crooked.

Cutting was in debt.

He couldn't afford the upkeep.

He had to sell off some of the creatures.

And at one point, and there is a hole in the historical record, we do not know what happened.

Fanny, Ned's companion, died.

Other creatures did too.

One writer described the sad scene of Ned waving to all the passers-by in the thinning crowd in this collapsing institution.

Ned looked like he was was lonely.

And the only option Cutting had left was to sell what remained of the aquarium.

And there was only one buyer, and that was P.T.

Barnum himself, who quickly rebranded Cutting's Boston Aquarial Gardens as another outlet of his own entertainment conglomerate.

Cutting stayed on for a while, working with Ned, overseeing the care and feeding of all the creatures that he'd collected in his travels.

He had a real passion and expertise, but he he didn't last long.

There is another hole in the historical record here.

There's nothing that really explains what happens or why he left.

Just that suddenly his name was off the books and off the broadsheets.

When you try and look through, you can catch a glimpse of him trying to start up another aquarium, but he didn't have a head for business.

He winds up with one of those 19th-century deaths, destitute in an asylum.

Though I would suggest we look backwards and remember him at sea, finding Ned and Fanny, or in the aquarium he built, finding out what amazing creatures they were, and finding himself along the way.

Barnum's Boston Aquarium didn't last long, and closed up shop and consolidated his aquatic holdings by bringing the residents of his New England aquarium to swim in the mammoth tanks of his American Museum in New York.

It was an extraordinary place.

A massive monument to amusement.

Took up half a block of Lower Manhattan.

Five stories of wonders of all kinds.

Animals live and taxidermied.

Curiosities real and phony from all over the globe.

Human beings born with physical anomalies on display as freaks.

Genuine historical artifacts, waxworks.

Performers drawn from an extraordinary range of disciplines taking any of several stages six days a week, and a creature now known as Ned the Learned Seal, doing his tricks again and again for adoring audiences throughout his 15-hour workday.

He was a star, though there were many stars.

General Tom Thumb, a little person and internationally renowned performer.

Chang and Ng, the so-called Siamese twins.

There was that famous fake mermaid that someone made by sewing the body of a monkey to the body of a fish.

And at the end of the Civil War, now near the end of our story, a wax figure of Confederate President Jefferson Davis wearing a dress.

There was an exaggerated story circulating at the time that when he was on the run from Union authorities, he tried to sneak away and drag, using his wife's clothes as a disguise.

Historians think that he probably grabbed his wife's overcoat, this kind of a cloak thing, because it was cold and maybe the buttons were on the other side and maybe didn't fit great, but it was basically just a black coat.

But the story got exaggerated and then the cross-dressing was weaponized in all the ways you can imagine.

There was an enormous banner hanging outside the museum on Barnum's orders of Jeff Davis in a dress.

And later, Barnum would claim that Confederate sympathizers set fire to that banner that set fire to the museum on a July day in 1865.

But that probably wasn't true.

That fire probably started in the engine room of the basement.

where the machines that ran the museum's innovative air conditioning system were.

That room was right below the aquarium.

And though the building burned down, with tens of thousands of people running down to watch it go,

and watch performers, bearded ladies, and strong men escaping to the street, watch the wax figure of Jeff Davis being tossed down from a high window, his skirt a billowing parachute.

We know that there are creatures in there.

And so did the fire department, who I'm sad to say thought they could put out the fire at its origin in the basement by breaking holes in the tank that held the beluga whales, but it didn't work.

The whales died as the water drained out.

But a fireman from Brooklyn knew where to look for Ned, and he grabbed him and carried him, fought through the smoke and the beams collapsing, flames everywhere,

and ran out into the street with a seal in his arms.

And this is just about the last time we see Ned, the learned seal.

One of those holes again.

There are sources that claim that Barnum put him back to work in some other venue.

There are some that claim he died young, others at a ripe old age.

Some that his stardom extended posthumously, that he was stuffed and mounted and took his place among the other wonders in another venture from P.T.

Barnum, as the man rebuilt his collection after the fire.

But I am not really sure what happens to him.

Those sources have all sorts of errors.

We don't really know much about Ned after this.

But I guess that was the case even before.

So let me leave you with one last verifiable sighting.

The last glimpse, as though, through a hole cut in a ship passing by.

Of Ned, the learned seal,

in a tank teeming with fish and lobsters and shellfish at the Fulton Market.

In the stall owned by Alfred Dorlawn, the oyster king of New York.

It was the only place the firefighter could think to put him.

I hope Ned ate well.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in January of 2024.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

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