Over the course of sword swallowing history, there have been several couples who gulped steel together and lived happily ever after to tell about it. In the 1890s and early 1900s, The Victorinas, were one of the most famous. Joe Van Victorina (better known as Kar-Mi – the “Prince of India” and a “high priest of conjurors and spirit workers”) would swallow a loaded gun barrel and, while it was down his throat, shoot a cracker off a man’s head. Miss Victorina was said to have swallowed a record 16 swords at once around the turn of the century.
Kar-Mi was born as Joseph Bryant Hallworth in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on April 30, 1872. He claimed to have been a child prodigy who learned to read at three, finished the Bible by four, and consumed most of the English classics by age six. At 14 he ran away from home and soon found himself in British Columbia learning to hunt, camp, shoot, and ride horses from a Cherokee Indian trapper. A year later he entered the world of entertainment by joining a small circus in Kansas as a sharp-shooting cowboy. The circus eventually folded, and Hallworth moved on to a medicine show before getting work with Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show and later with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
In 1891, his act expanded with his marriage to Kitty Fisher, a sword swallower who started at age 12 and became known as the Viennese Venus. As one article described, “her astonishing feats are executed gracefully and rapidly, and cannot give the slightest offense to the most sensitive beholder.”
Soon after, the young couple began their act as The Victorinas. Aside from swallowing swords, they added song-and-dance routines, snake charming, fire eating, fortune telling, and acts of magic, illusion, and mind-reading.
The Boston Herald once said of Victorina’s sword swallowing ability: “Her throat and food passages have become so expansive that she can swallow three long swords almost up to the hilts, and can accommodate a dozen shorter blades.”
Skilled as she was, Miss Victorina had a few accidents that nearly put an end to her career. In 1894, while performing at Kohl & Middleton’s Dime Museum in Chicago (alongside a young Harry Houdini), she swallowed a long, thin dagger which snapped in two on its withdrawal. She dropped the hilt and immediately reached her finger and thumb down her esophagus to catch the blade and extract it. On another occasion in Boston, a sword pierced a vein in her throat. The blade was half-way down, but instead of immediately pulling it out, she pushed it further in. She was hospitalized for three months.
Despite these near-disasters, The Victorinas penned a pamphlet in 1899 outlining methods of sword swallowing for anyone curious. They titled it, Text Book on the Art of Sword Swallowing – Explaining How To Do It Sixteen Different Ways. However, the “sixteen different ways” were seemingly just another piece of entertainment, for example:
- Tip #4 suggests the performer swallows a rubber tube before showtime, so the when the sword is swallowed for the audience, it will be slip safely within the tube.
- Tip #9 recommends using a sword with a detachable handle, so the handle goes in the mouth but the steel is hidden in the sleeve.
- Tip #15 tells readers to hire someone else to swallow swords for you in order to spare oneself the annoyance of learning on their own.
Offstage, Joseph and Kitty began a family in 1898 with the birth of a daughter. Two sons followed soon after and were eventually brought in the acts. One dressed as a female assistant to aid Kar-Mi’s illusions, and the other was made to levitate.
Though The Victorinas began performing in vaudeville and Kar-Mi expanded his showmanship by being buried alive (for 32 days, according to his colorful poster), they put an end to their career when their two sons were drafted into World War I. The Hallworths retired near Boston, Massachusetts, where Joe found less daring work as a printer and engraver. They remained there for the next forty years.
The Victorinas and tales of many other sword swallowers will be part of an upcoming book called To The Hilt: A Sword Swallower’s History of Sword Swallowing by your Weird Historian, Marc Hartzman, and Dan Meyer, sword swallower and president of Sword Swallowers Association International.
