History Lesson: Mesker Park Zoo's Monkey Ship
Opened the summer of 1933, the Monkey Ship was a popular attraction at Mesker Park Zoo for many decades. A 1/3 scale, concrete replica of Christopher Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria, the ship was christened by Georgia, one of the zoo’s chimpanzees, after a bottle of orange juice was broken over the bow. It was designed to house monkeys and opened with 18 rhesus monkeys that called the ship home from the months April to November. In later years, capuchins and lemurs were added and young alligators once swam in the moat surrounding the ship. The animals were removed from the display in 1991 and housed in enclosures that more closely resembled their natural habitats.
On September 29, 1935, the Evansville Press reported that a female rhesus monkey named Sookie lead a “mutiny on the Santa Maria.” After she began leaping from the ship to the wall of the pond enclosure, a distance of about 15 feet, other monkeys began to mimic Sookie despite the fact she was the only one strong enough to make the jump. She was able to escape the ship and spent a reported 3 hours “vacationing” in a grove of nearby trees.
History Lesson is a pictorial history of Evansville compiled by Daniel Smith, local history and digitization librarian at the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library.