Three tons of fun or a behemoth?

Although it was rapidly expanding, the 18th-century European world was still small enough for thousands to marvel at the sight of a rhinoceros or a giraffe. In this book, Glynis Ridley tells us how on a trip to India, Douwemout van der Meer, a Dutch seaman, saw Clara, a young female Indian rhinoceros gracing the household of an acquaintance in Assam. Struck by her docility and winning ways, he bought her, transported her to Europe in 1741 and made a fortune by exhibiting her all over the continent to stunned, admiring and generous audiences.

It was not a simple proposition to travel with Clara: she weighed some 3 tons and ate about 150 pounds of vegetation every day.

Travelling in a specially designed coach pulled by eight horses and with iron-reinforced wheels, Clara trundled across Europe for 17 years before dying suddenly but, as far as one can tell, peacefully in London in 1758.

There had been other rhinos in Europe before her, but none had lived as long or been shown to as many people.

Clara was a hit with everyone from the very first show. All were struck by her appearance and, even more, by her significance. Was this beast the behemoth mentioned in the Book of Job? Was the rhinoceros indeed the deadliest enemy of the elephant, as Pliny had claimed in his Natural History? Clara fascinated Louis XV and Frederick the Great, crept into the works of Oliver Goldsmith, and close study of her appearance led to the correction of Albrecht Durer's famous but inaccurate 1515 engraving of a rhino. Clara was, Ridley argues, "the most influential (rhinoceros) there has ever been in terms of fixing an accurate representation of the animal in the European mind".

All this should have made for a great story, but the book is rather dull.

Part of the reason is Clara herself, who seems to have been far too sweet and quiet to make a very interesting heroine.

The more important failing, however, is the author's. This could have been a much more exciting and entertaining book if, instead of spending so much time with Clara and her colourless owner, Ridley had used Clara's travels to lead us into detailed analyses of the 18th-century societies, personalities and mentalities that this creature passed through. Ridley does not entirely ignore such issues, but her comments are almost always brief. What the book needed was less of Clara herself and more about Goldsmith, Petrus Camper, Louis XV and about the ways in which the very sight of Clara questioned and reshaped their understanding of nature and the world.

Chandak Sengoopta is senior lecturer in the history of medicine and science, Birkbeck, University of London.