All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  Just as the police detective is rarely presented with the same set of clues in any two cases, so the collector must be prepared to pursue each historical hare along different paths and through unfamiliar thickets. Budding Sherlock Holmeses know that fingerprints are good things to look out for and that powder burns around the wound make stabbing the wrong thing to list as cause of death; similarly, the novice collector quickly learns that makers’ marks are helpful, and that books and contemporary records are the places to learn more about them. But which book, which records? That they can learn only from experience. In the examples I have discussed, I have tried to demonstrate the diversity of the potential sources: wills, inventories, newspapers, diaries, trade tokens, bills, labels, city directories, encyclopedias, dictionaries, court records, contemporary novels—and these are but a few. My examples have not made use of the British city apprentice lists and burgess rolls which have so much to say about individual tradesmen and craftsmen. I have not mentioned the lists of people who died in the Great Plague of London in 1665, yet they certainly should be checked if one is looking, say, for the death of a tavern keeper in business there in the mid-seventeenth century. If, instead, one is trying to determine the fate of a patient confined to the lunatic asylum in Williamsburg in 1850, the place to begin is in the hospital’s annual reports published in the Journals of the Virginia State Legislature. It is up to each of us to learn what we need and where to find it, and for that there is no substitute for practical experience.

  There is, however, something else that the novice collector-historian can do without first acquiring a large, catalytic collection; he can compile his own reference books, catering precisely to his own interests. For more than twenty years my wife has spent two or three hours a week cutting up magazines, newspapers, and sale catalogues, filing and indexing pictures and articles on antiques, architecture, archaeology, history, rural customs, and suchlike, to create a library of more than a hundred volumes. Particularly valuable are the photographs of thousands of antique objects advertised in such magazines as the American Antiques, and the British Connoisseur, Apollo, Country Life, and half a dozen others. Mounted on sheets and annotated in volumes under scores of categories (e.g., lighting, silver, architectural hardware, furniture, seventeenth-century paintings, brassware, stoneware, delftware, eighteenth-century glass), the pictures are made easily available for chronological study. Occasionally, we are confronted by an angry book lover who expresses horror at the destruction of magazines and catalogues and threatens to spear us on her hatpin. But in reality there is no other way to put the material to work and to store its information in a reasonably manageable space. Besides, sale catalogues are never indexed, nor are the advertisements which today take up two-thirds of the pages in most antique-oriented magazines.

  114. Stalls in London’s Portobello Road—anything and everything from silver to celery.

  Although the kind of catholic approach to the paste-and-scissors surgery that I find necessary is equally valid for curators, dealers, and collectors with broad interests, specialists may well be content with less, and if they balk at damaging magazines just to extract pictures of enameled etuis (or whatever it is they collect), photocopying will make fileable substitutes that can be cross-referenced to the still-intact publication. In this way, for example, a silver collector can arrange in chronological order every dated candlestick he can find illustrated, and in doing so assemble a volume of diagnostic examples unequaled in any published book.

  While most contributors of articles to the popular antiquarian magazines are content to keep using the same old photographs of well-known specimens in major museums, vastly more examples yearly pass through the hands of dealers and auction houses, surfacing just long enough to be advertised or illustrated in catalogues before disappearing once again into private collections. These are the prizes, and sometimes it is only the hope of landing them that keeps us subscribing to an otherwise dreary magazine. It does not follow that advertisement captions will be accurate; on the contrary, the same item may show up two or three times in a decade as it passes from dealer to dealer and acquiring different attributions each time. Capturing these variations (though not very instructive) can be part of the sport and as satisfying to a cynical cutter-and-paster as being dealt the ace, king, and queen of trumps. Indeed, assembling a pictorial library of antiques becomes such an absorbing occupation that it can rank, in its own right, as a legitimate and highly educational collecting pursuit—one that is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying the antiques themselves!

  TWELVE

  Of Mermaids, Fakes, and Other Grave Matters

  BECAUSE ARCHAEOLOGY is a sunshine occupation, most of my visits to London occur in the winter and usually in the rain, not as a rule a hard, authoritative downpour, but a chilling drizzle just persistent enough to cause the mouths of Londoners to droop at the corners and their poodles to smell like wet spaniels. The stall-holders in the street markets huddle under the eaves of dripping canvas roofs, and on Kensington’s Church Street the steep sidewalks are slippery and the numerous small antique shops appear less inviting than one had remembered them to be. On such a day an early-nineteenth-century powder horn lay on a Church Street dealer’s shelf, wrapped in its memories of equally miserable days in an entirely different clime. Wearing its past like tattoos on a sailor’s arm, the horn was inscribed with the emblem of the 33rd Regiment of Light Infantry, with the name J. MITCHELL, and an address: Stony Hill, Jamaica, West Indies (Fig. 115). To most browsers in a shop dealing primarily in ceramics, the horn probably attracted little attention. For me, however, it was to rekindle memories of my first evening in Jamaica—a terrace beside the yacht harbor at Port Royal, colored lanterns swaying overhead in a warm Caribbean breeze, the last pleasure boats returning from the cays, cutting their way homeward through the silver water, all beneath a backdrop of blue-black mountains and the firefly lights of Kingston twinkling at their feet. It was a setting as close to a P.R. man’s vision of travel-folder paradise as could be imagined. Between sips of my gin and tonic I asked the hotel owner my standard traveler’s question: “Are there any snakes, spiders, or biting bugs we should watch out for?”

  115a, b, & c. J. Mitchell of the 33rd Regiment of Foot left a powder horn as his only memorial. He presumably served with the regiment at Stony Hill, Jamaica, in the 1820s, though his name has not survived in British army records. Figures 115b and 115c show the horn’s lively renderings of a mermaid, a monkey, a centipede, and a scorpion, details which are less self-explanatory than they at first appear. Length of horn 13½ inches.

  “None,” he assured me. “There’s nothing like that to bother you here.” The words were still wet on his lips when what felt like a hot needle jabbed my instep, and looking down, I saw an enormous brown centipede backing away. Its brother’s portrait is engraved on the side of J. Mitchell’s powder horn.

  The 33rd Regiment (later the 1st Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment) landed at Kingston on February 13, 1822, with an additional detachment arriving on the 17th, in all seventeen officers, twelve sergeants, nine corporals, seven drummers, 362 privates, along with thirty women and thirty-seven children.1 Somewhere among them was J. Mitchell, but whether he marched ahead or brought up the rear I have been unable to discover. I know only that his absence from the army list precludes him from having been an officer. One wonders what he expected lay ahead, and whether he remained with the regiment for its full tour of duty which would not end until 1832. It took up its station at the barracks on Stony Hill six weeks after landing, and although this encampment was situated at an altitude of about 1,200 feet, seven miles behind the hot and unhealthy Kingston, and was considered a relatively pleasant billet, it was far from being an English country garden (Fig. 116). On April 24, 1802, Maria, Lady Nugent, wife of Jamaica’s Lieutenant Governor, noted in her journal that “It is extraordinary to witness the immediate effect that the climate and habit of living in this country have upon the minds an
d manners of Europeans, particularly of the lower orders. In the upper ranks, they become indolent and inactive, regardless of everything but eating, drinking, and indulging themselves, and are almost entirely under the domination of their mulatto favourites. In the lower orders,” Lady Nugent went on, “they are the same, with the addition of conceit and tyranny….”2

  116. Part of Stony Hill Barracks in Jamaica, now used as a reform school. The steps belonged to the men’s quarters, the building which may, for a time, have been home to J. Mitchell. An inscribed stone dates the steps to 1808, but the wooden barracks above has probably been rebuilt a number of times.

  The Mitchell powder horn tells its own story of a side of life in Jamaica that his travel agent forgot to mention. On the underside of the horn and seen only when, like a stone, you turn it over, lurks an unpleasantly lifelike scorpion, along with a snake, an iguana, and the centipede which climbs out from beneath in a remarkably natural rendition of the insect’s rippling movement, all recalling Lady Nugent’s observation that “The late rains have made the insects and reptiles appear in swarms innumerable.”3 To one side, scratching its ear, sits a monkey resembling the kind that has outlasted the British soldier and is still to be seen scampering through the ruins of his fortress on the island of St. Kitts. There are, however, no monkeys in Jamaica and no real evidence that they ever were indigenous to it, though their bones have twice been found by archaeologists in the middens of Arawak Indians. But just as British troops took occasional monkeys with them to Jamaica in the Second World War so earlier garrisons may have done the same, perhaps having brought them from St. Kitts. Dr. Bernard Lewis, director of the Institute of Jamaica, has noted that even those were not native to the Caribbean but were the offspring of African green monkeys taken to St. Kitts at the end of the seventeenth century. A somewhat unlikely legend has it that a British merchant in Bristol ordered two such monkeys to be shipped to him from Africa as pets, but a practical joker changed the figure to two hundred. When the monkey cargo reached Bristol the merchant hastily transferred the lot to a ship then leaving for St. Kitts.

  Below J. Mitchell’s monkey is engraved another enigmatic portrait, this of a human hand reaching up to grasp a froth-topped glass; beside it stands a bottle with a corkscrew inserted and waiting only to be pulled, and beneath both are the terse words TAKE HOLD. It is hard to believe that these are nothing more than an invitation to pull the cork or grab the glass, but if there is more to them I have been unable to find out what it may be. I know only that it is not the motto of the 33rd Regiment. The British warship that enjoys pride of place on the horn is seemingly easier to interpret, and I like to think that it was the artist’s imagined ship that would one day carry him home to England. The vessel, like most of the creatures and devices, is relatively well executed and easily recognized—which makes it odd that there should be one outstanding exception, the black-armed mermaid. More monster than siren, her tail is barbed with sharklike fins, and her hair streams out to one side from a head more fish than human, yet she holds in her hands the mirror and comb, the traditional attributes of feminine beauty (Fig. 115b). Why did the artist choose to include this one mythical creature in what was otherwise a gallery of realities? It is true that mermaids are common subjects in scrimshaw work by seamen, but from the tail up they are generally provocatively human; yet this one, presumably drawn by a soldier, repels more than it beckons. Her lack of neck, and her flat, slit-nostriled and otherwise noseless face render her less human than is the monkey sitting at her side—and one wonders why.

  It is just possible that Mitchell (if it was he who decorated the horn) actually saw such a creature, not the mermaid of mythology but the manatee of the Caribbean. This smaller relative of the so-called sea cow has been credited with giving rise to most of the alleged mermaid sightings. The creature has little or no neck, has prominently slit nostrils, a bald and high-domed head, dark-colored arms or flippers, and a yellow belly, all features of Mitchell’s mermaid. Furthermore, the fact that the manatee is still to be seen basking in Jamaican bays and estuaries leaves no doubt that it could have been spotted by the credulous soldiers of the 33rd.

  I have dwelt on the horn at some length not because it is one of the world’s great treasures but because it can fit into a surprising number of collectable categories. Its ship and mermaid can earn it a place in any collection of maritime antiques, while its regimental emblem and association with firearms makes it desirable to the military or gun collector. Then again, it is of interest to students of West Indian and Jamaican history, to herpetologists, to natural history enthusiasts in general, as well as to those of us who collect contemporary illustrations of bottles. Finally, but certainly not the least important, the horn is a work of what is loosely termed “folk art”; by which one means, I suppose, the relatively successful product of an untrained artist—though just where the patronizing of peasants and the recognition of bad art divide remains open to extended debate. There is no knowing whether J. Mitchell took art classes at school. In any case, working with pencil or brush is very different from scratching on horn. But if we judge him by his monkey or his centipede, Mitchell did a good job, and the same is true if his mermaid is derived from the manatee. If not, and he was trying for a stock, seductive, sex-symbol-of-the-deep-type mermaid, he gets few marks for art and none for anatomy. To me, however, the horn remains an original artistic effort, its interest resting not so much on the competence of the engraving but in its preservation of a soldier’s thoughts.

  Although original works of art of high quality are likely to be beyond the financial range of the modest collector, much of lesser stature survives in sketchbooks and scrapbooks, scratched on ivory and even window glass, and in my favorite haunt, the flyleaves of old books, particularly old school books. Thus to the connoisseur of doodles Nicholas Wakeham’s portraits of his tutor (?) in the back of his 1721 edition of Aesop’s Fables (Fig. 117) are of greater human interest than a print from the plate of a celebrated engraver. Nicholas Wakeham began his doodles in 1729 and ended them in 1732, and somewhere in between he wrote: “Nicholas Wakeham is my name and England is my Nation and Modbury is my dwelling place and Christ is my Salvation.” Suffice it to say that Modbury is a small town in south Devonshire, ten miles east of Plymouth, and that the quest for Nicholas Wakeham is a treat still in store.

  117. Something for the doodle collector. Nicholas Wakeham drew these caricatures of his teacher (?) in the back of his 1721 edition of Aesop’s Fables.

  The woods are not full of doodle collectors, and consequently treasures of this kind can still be secured at little cost, particularly if the books themselves are of no interest. It is only when other collectors begin to find the same things equally desirable that the supply sinks and the prices soar. Luckily for antique dealers and junk-shop proprietors, there are now collectors of just about everything from cast-iron manhole covers to tobacco tokens and bits of barbed wire. I confess that I have scoffed at all three, just as I have at glass collectors whose interest centers not on the creations of such masters as Verzelini or Amelung but on insulators from late-Victorian telegraph poles. Although I have never encountered a manhole cover aficionado, I have met collectors of insulators, tobacco tokens, and barbed wire, and from listening to them I have learned to appreciate the educational value of them all.

  The idea of adults excitedly bidding up to $100 for an eighteen-inch length of “Burrow’s Four Point” (1877 patent) barbed wire is initially hard to swallow, but it remains so only until you realize what it is that makes that particular wire so special. The first United States designs for wire to control cattle were patented in 1867, and in the next decade or so literally hundreds of different types were introduced, many of them commercially impractical and so made only in small quantities. These, therefore, have acquired the value of scarcity if not of significance.

  Although I have yet to be convinced that barbed wired can be attractively displayed “framed, as a picture, with soft contrasting bac
kground and an illuminating light mounted above,” as one enthusiast advocates, I readily concede that wire provides an extremely interesting link with the American past and merits the attention both of Americana collectors and of social historians. Numbered among the four inventions that won the West (the others being the revolver, repeating rifle, and windmill), wire was used by homesteaders to keep the ranch herds out of their crops, by ranchers to keep their cattle in, and by everybody to disenfranchise the Indian, the buffalo, and the mustang (Fig. 118). To the archaeologist and local historian, the rusting strands of old wire lying along abandoned fence-lines in the Plains and Western states provide valuable clues to the age of property boundaries, and the discovery of a piece of “Scarlett’s Wire-locked Barb” (Patent 190081) shrieks 1877 to anyone who knows his wire. Collectors are not so isolationist as to exalt only over American wire; they have been known to pay up to $40 for eighteen inches of British “Tommy Atkins” wire from the First World War, half as much for a bit of Kaiser Bill’s, and less for a nice piece of Nazi. Thus, in wire collecting, as in the more traditional vineyards of antique collecting, the specimen has interest not only for being what it is, but for having been where it has been.