On Star Trek (and by this, children, I mean the real Star Trek—the one captained by James T. Kirk, and with cheesy special effects and constant violation of the Prime Directive), a lot of strange things happen (I’m referring to the strange things that the producers intended to happen, not the accidental ones). The audience has to understand these strange things to make sense of the story. But there are no footnotes in a television show, and a voice-over to explain what’s going on would be even more intrusive than mid-60’s hairstyles and encounters with space-hippies.

So how to explain?

Enter Captain Kirk. He’s got the smarts to run a spaceship but doesn’t know a whole lot about the new lives and new civilizations that he encounters. Luckily, he has Mr. Spock, who patiently explains and theorizes about these mysteries to his captain, and hence to the audience. Kirk isn’t stupid—he’s just a military man whose interests lie elsewhere.

Writers of historical fiction face a similar problem. My Princess Anna of Anna of Byzantium wouldn’t think, “Wow, the palace I live in is huge!” But I want my readers to know that it is. Ariadne of Dark of the Moon wouldn’t question the human sacrifice that her religion demands every spring. But I want my reader to picture Anna in a huge palace, and Ariadne being a prime player in the sacrifice. So they need someone to explain to: a slave from a distant part of the empire in the first case, Prince Theseus in the second.

It’s been said that there are only two plots: A stranger comes to town, and Someone takes a journey (some have said that this is really one plot, but from two points of view). I doubt that this is true, but the device is a common one. I wonder if the need for a stranger in town is so the person whose POV informs the story can either explain things to the stranger or be the one who receives an explanation.

As a historian interested in the way that animals and humans have co-existed, I’m forever on the lookout for animal stowaways—the secret passengers lurking in primary sources. I found plenty in Esther Singleton’s The Children’s City, published in 1910. This book, intended for young readers, is the story of two bored young New Yorkers, Nora and Jack, whose adult acquaintance Doodle (these were less anxious times) tours them around the city in an attempt to show them that the place where they live is full of interesting things. Doodle, Nora, and Jack visit the Aquarium, the Bronx Zoo, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Botanical Garden. Along the way, they meet an impressive cast of animal prisoners. Doodle’s storytelling about these trapped beasties isn’t meant to create sympathy, but rather to impress his charges; a modern eye might see things differently.

There’s Silver King, a gigantic polar bear whose transition to captivity didn’t go so well (“twenty men worked ten hours before they could get him off the boat and into his den in the Zoological Park…he fought so desperately that they had to chloroform him and it took four pounds of chloroform to make him quiet!”) Denizens of the aquarium resist captivity as well, Doodle adds. “Sometimes a fish will refuse to eat for days,” Doodle says, “as did the large Moray that came from Bermuda. At one time this great eel fasted for eighteen days, and at another time for twenty-seven, thus causing its caretakers the utmost anxiety.” Was the eel sick, or “moping,” as Doodle calls it? Either way, the children shouldn’t worry—the aquarium has “hospital-tanks” that can deal with the problem.

Then there’s Lopez the Jaguar. Doodle tells the story of how Lopez was captured in Paraguay, then transported on a small boat and “nearly drowned” several times, before saying, confidentially, “I know something about Lopez that does not speak well for his character.” Lopez had killed a female jaguar that was put in his cage. “The murder was fully premeditated,” Doodle adds to his wondering audience. “As a consequence of this act of treachery, Lopez will live in solitude the remainder of his life.” How is this “living in solitude” very much more of a punishment than being trapped indefinitely in a zoo? Doodle doesn’t say.

Plate from Esther Singleton, The Children’s City (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1910)

Rebecca Onion is a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently finishing up a dissertation about popular science and American childhood. Her research blog, Songbirds & Satellites, is at www.rebeccaonion.com