Diary of George Templeton Strong, Friday, March 2, 1860

Stopped at Barnum’s on my way downtown to see the much advertised nondescript, the "What-is-it.”¹ Some say it’s an advanced chimpanzee, others that it’s a cross between nigger and baboon. But it seems to me clearly an idiotic negro dwarf, raised, perhaps, in Alabama or Virginia. The showman’s story of its capture (with three other specimens that died) by a party in pursuit of the gorilla on the western coast of Africa is probably bosh. The creature’s look and action when playing with his keeper are those of a nigger boy. But his anatomical details are fearfully simian, and he’s a great fact for Darwin.

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¹ This “What-is-it.”—shortly to be viewed by the Prince of Wales—became the most famous circus freak in America. Often called "the missing link," he was really a Negro of distorted frame and cone-shaped head named William H. Johnson, who survived until 1926.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 12