Gargantua (gorilla)

Gargantua (1929 - November 1949) was a captive lowland gorilla famed for being exhibited by the Ringling Brothers circus. He has been credited with saving the business from bankruptcy. An acid scar on his face gave Gargantua a snarling, menacing expression, which the circus management exploited by generating publicity falsely exaggerating his purported hatred of humans. He was also claimed to be the largest gorilla in captivity.

Gargantua was captured as a baby in Africa, and was known as "Buddy" for years. After he was sold to Ringling Brothers by his previous owner, Gertrude Lintz, he was renamed, after François Rabelais's the giant character, to sound more frightening.

He had a "mate" named Toto, but apparently never showed any interest in her. She was nevertheless advertised by the circus as "Mrs Gargantua".

Gargantua was born wild in the Belgian Congo in approximately 1929. In the early 1930s, the gorilla was given to a Captain Arthur Phillips as a gift from missionaries in Africa. The captain was fond of him and called him "Buddy". He was kept aboard his freighter and became popular with most of the crew. One sailor, however, drunk and seeking revenge on the captain's strictness, threw nitric acid in Buddy's face. This did not kill the gorilla but the attack almost blinded him and left both mental and physical scars - leading to much more aggressive behaviour.

Unable to deal with this aggression, the captain gave Buddy to Gertrude Lintz, a wealthy eccentric who looked after sick animals in Brooklyn. Her husband, Dr Bill Lintz, diagnosed Buddy with double pneumonia. Mrs Lintz treated the little gorilla back to health, including chewing his food for him, and along with her kennel-man, Richard "Dick" Kroener, trained and raised Buddy. She cared for Buddy, and other apes, as her children and even arranged for plastic surgery on the scar, leaving Buddy with a permanent sneer. She was known to drive around Brooklyn with Buddy, dressed in clothes, in the passenger seat. The arrangement came to an end one night in 1937 when the 460 lb (210 kg) Buddy, frightened by thunder, the seven year-old adolescent broke out of his cage and climbed into bed with his "mother" for comfort; Mrs Lintz contacted John Ringling shortly thereafter.

...
Wikipedia