From Mark Rosenthal

16-20110111-jp-animalship-embed480px, a photo by bucklesw1 on Flickr. Among the millions that entered America through the Port of New York in the 20th century, one group stood out in especially high relief. Some, in fact, were 17 feet tall. Even the stodgy New York Times paid attention when a new shipment of animals landed, usually from Africa, most on their way to zoos around the country. The marvelous incongruity of such photogenic, sentient cargo on the industrial Brooklyn waterfront must have been a godsend to photographers more accustomed to shooting pallets full of flour and coffee sacks. However, the anthropomorphic news accounts and photo captions of the day could not fully cloak the hardships that some animals endured in crossing the seas. For instance, the giraffes pictured below had come through a storm in the Mozambique Channel so fierce that it smashed their crates on the deck of the freighter Lombok, granting them — at least briefly — the run of the ship. Five years later, in 1962, the same freighter took 50 days to reach New York from Cape Town, by way of the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. Only one spur-winged goose died from a manifest that included five rhinoceroses, a lion named Tulla, four elephants and four giraffes and three zebras.