The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

  I was lucky enough to be allowed to see them. The egg curator laid the eggs out on the floor. Each one is wrapped in cotton wool in its own box and labelled with its history. The eggs are quite large: if you cup your hands in front of you they’d just about fit inside. They’re smooth and oval shaped and come in shades of white, green, blue and brown. This particular creamy white egg is covered in wiggly lines that make it look like a toddler has been scribbling with a felt tip. No two eggs ever have the same pattern.

  It’s impossible to put a value on them. In a way, they’re priceless, as there are so few of them in existence (only 75 in the world) and they very rarely come up for auction.

  Seventy-five eggs in the world is actually quite a few. There are far rarer eggs in the back rooms of the museum in Tring. The curator showed me a tiny egg that belonged to the Samoan wood rail (Gallinula pacifica) collected on the island of Savai’i, Samoa, in October 1873. The birds nested on the ground and were gobbled up by greedy rats and pouncing cats which Europeans had introduced to the island. This mini egg, the only one in the world, is cracked. There is a handwritten label with it, dated 1971, which says, ‘This egg was already broken,’ from a previous curator to the present one, as if to say, ‘It wasn’t me!’ He wanted future generations of curators to know that it wasn’t broken on his watch, when the egg collection was moved from the Natural History Museum in London to Tring in the 1970s.

  The great auk eggs are not only precious because they are rare. Much of the reason they are so valuable is because they are iconic. In the Victorian era, it was quite a fashion to collect interesting things from around the world and display them at home in a ‘cabinet of curiosities’. The idea was that it was possible to create a microcosm of the world in one room, which could be used to amaze and impress visitors.

  This had been going on since the Renaissance in Europe, where ‘cabinets’ were entire rooms (rather than a piece of furniture), and would be stuffed full of paintings, sculptures, curiosities from overseas and unusual animal specimens. Royals and aristocrats created the cabinets as a sign of their good taste, and as an obvious display of the reach of their power.

  Across Europe, many museum collections began life as the private collections of wealthy individuals. In England, the British Museum was founded with books belonging to George II and a variety of books, prints, drawings, medals, coins and other treasures belonging to Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), the Irish physician who introduced hot chocolate into England from Jamaica – you can still buy the chocolates named after him in the British Museum shop. Later, the natural history part of his collection became the foundation for the Natural History Museum.

  The great auk egg became a must-have curiosity because of its beautiful patterns; any serious collector wanted an egg, or more than one if they could find them, and they changed hands for vast amounts of money. Captain Vivian Hewitt, the first person to fly across the Irish Sea, once owned 13 eggs, the most anyone has ever owned. He liked creatures that can fly, set up a bird sanctuary on Anglesey and at one time travelled with a pet parrot.

  Robert Champley, an oologist, or egg collector (from the Greek for ‘egg’), from Scarborough, was a keen collector and had nine by the late 1800s. This particular egg was one of them. Champley found it in the Museum of Anatomy in Pavia, Italy. It was covered in dirt and pushed into a wooden cup so it looked like an acorn. He bought it for five Napoleons (the old name for lire), which was probably less than it was worth at the time: ‘I borrowed the amount from my Russian friend, and, after packing the egg carefully, left the museum, they seeming sorry that they had no more specimens and considered that they had got a good bargain … I had a box made for the egg the next day. The egg is perfect and thickly pencilled at the thick end.’

  Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–99), an Italian priest, had donated the egg to the University of Pavia. As a priest, he had ample leisure time and used it to work out why things that interested him occurred. He began the study of echolocation in bats, described animal reproduction, was the first to perform IVF (with frogs) and showed that newts can regenerate parts of their body if injured. He also worked out why stones skip on water when you skim them. His greatest work was on digestion, showing that gastric juices in the stomach do a lot of the work. He died of a bladder infection and asked that the bladder be put on public display in the Museum of Natural History at the University of Pavia.

  The great auk was a brilliant bird. They were 75–85 centimetres tall and, like humans, stood upright on two feet. They were one of very few flightless birds that were native to the northern hemisphere in recent times. There were others, like the spectacled cormorant, which was bad at flying and reluctant to do so; the Syrian ostrich, which couldn’t fly at all; and several flightless rails and grebes, all of which are now extinct. Now, the only flightless birds in the northern hemisphere are the North African ostrich and the Okinawa, Guam and Zapata rails.

  Great auks had black wings, a white tummy and a white head and went by many names, including geirfugl, gearbhul, aponar, binocle, moyack, ‘The Wobble’, garfugel (from gar, the Old English word for ‘spear’, because of the great auk’s prominent and impressive beak, and fugel, for ‘bird’, from which we get the word ‘fowl’). It was also known as a ‘penguin’, which meant ‘white head’ in Welsh.

  Great auks were the original penguins. English and Spanish mariners who sailed the South Seas saw the birds we now call penguins and named them after the great auk. Pingouin is still the French word for the great auk and its relative the razorbill. The original French name for the southern birds is manchot, which means ‘armless’, because of how they look when they waddle.

  There used to be millions of great auks around the shores of Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Great Britain, foraging in shallow waters eating fish, crabs and plankton. Once a year, they’d land on rocky offshore islands and lay an egg. Then they would incubate it in an upright position in a nest made from droppings until it hatched. The parents would then take turns feeding the chick, for up to two weeks, until the chick was ready to take to the sea alone.

  The species was so abundant, it is almost like us trying to imagine that in the future there will be no seagulls, except for stuffed ones buried in museum archives. Unfortunately, being flightless, great auks were also terribly easy to catch and delicious to eat. The last great auk recorded in Britain wasn’t even eaten. It was caught in the summer of 1840 on the remote Atlantic island of St Kilda. Imprisoned for three days in a bothy, blamed for a storm, tried as a witch and sentenced to death, the poor bird was beaten for an hour with two large stones before it died.

  Thankfully, there are still some stuffed great auks at Tring for us to see, including one in a case that is sometimes loaned to other museums. The eggs curator once took it to Madrid for an exhibition; he flew with easyjet and kept it in a metal suitcase, which he thought about handcuffing to his arm for safekeeping.

  [A great auk egg]

  This egg is one of the most valuable and the oldest in the Natural History Museum’s behind-the-scenes egg collection. An oologist called Robert Champley found it in the Museum of Anatomy in Pavia, Italy. It was covered in dirt and stored in a wooden cup. It’s covered in wiggly lines that make it look like a toddler has attacked it with a felt tip.

  [Sir Hans Sloane 1660–1753]

  Sloane was an avid collector and lots of people came to his house to see what he had. Handel supposedly visited and annoyed Sloane by placing a buttered muffin on one of his rare books. Sloane’s collection became the foundation of the British Museum.

  [Monument to one of the last great auks]

  On the northern tip and highest point of the island of Papa Westray – one of the Orkney Islands of Scotland – there is a statue of a great auk. It was one of the last places in the world where the great auk was found before the last one was killed in 1813.

  THE MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY was founded in 1859, making it one of the oldest museums in America. Its storage rooms are fille
d with 21 million specimens that will rarely, if ever, be displayed. Among these are the 430 fantastic glass models of beautiful marine creatures painstakingly made between 1886 and 1936 by the father and son glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka in their studio in Dresden.

  The museum displays 3,200 glass models of flowering plants lovingly created by the German duo; they are visited by over 100,000 people a year. However, not many visitors to the museum know that there are glass creations not on display: the marine creatures, which are behind the scenes.

  When the curator and I walked through the room in which they live, hundreds of tiny jellyfish and marine mammal tentacles and spines shivered in time with our steps. The sea slugs, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and squid are kept in drawers and storage cupboards, on shelves labelled ‘Blaschka glass invertebrates, please do not disturb’.

  If they were in a public area of the museum, all the human traffic would be too much for the delicate creatures and they might break apart. Also, the colours are at risk of fading from exposure to light. So, in storage they remain. But how did they get there?

  The intricate pieces look contemporary, but in fact they were made over a century ago. They were used for teaching students and were, at first, on public display. The Blaschkas made hundreds of glass creatures for museums and universities all over Europe. They copied drawings in books, created things they saw with their own eyes out at sea, and kept specimens for reference in an aquarium in their workshop. They also made glass eyes, beakers and test tubes.

  That was until George Goodale, the first director of Harvard’s Botanical Museum, hired them on an exclusive contract to make more than 4,000 models of plants. It was too big a commission to refuse, and they never made zoological models again.

  The twosome grew American plants in their own garden, which they rendered in glass, and made trips to the Caribbean for more samples. They worked on the plants together until Leopold’s death, after which Rudolph carried on alone, heating and shaping glass into plants, until he died, 40 years later. The plants collection they created is called the ‘Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants’, and even today they are the most popular exhibits in the museum. When 25 were taken to New York City for an exhibition, they were driven in a hearse, as this was the smoothest ride the curators could find for them.

  The Blaschkas’ marine creations, which pre-date the flowers, still amaze scientists with their anatomical accuracy, and they last longer than real specimens that are stored in spirit, like the anglerfish and his fishy pals.

  I saw a cannonball jellyfish (Stomolophus meleagris), stored in spirit. It was collected in 1862 by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz (1807–73) as a new genus, and a new species. Agassiz sent a description and illustration of the creature to the Blaschkas’ studio in Germany, where they crafted this exact glass model of the specimen. I compared the two, real and glass, both kept in storage, and, while the creature stored in spirit had clearly seen better days and looked like nothing so much as a large white blob, the glass reproduction’s features are still as clear as can be. It is in such perfect condition it seems almost alive.

  Beside it is a miniature glass replica of a Portuguese man of war, with long blue tentacles. These creatures aren’t jellyfish, they are sinophores, made up of a colony of creatures called zooids. They can’t swim properly and rely on currents and winds to push them along.

  Sadly, there isn’t a ‘fried egg jellyfish’ (Phacellophora camtschatica). They look exactly like their name suggests. Their sting is so weak, you can’t feel it, and neither can the little crustaceans that hitch rides on their bells and eat the plankton that gets trapped in their arms and tentacles.

  Although the glass marine creatures can’t be displayed, they will be kept for future generations in the museum collection, along with thousands of other behind-the-scenes specimens. These include the elephant skeletons in the attic, which can’t be taken downstairs because the lift that was used to take things up is no longer there, and magic mushrooms collected by ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, that kicked off a psychedelic revolution.

  New things are discovered in the collection all the time. When reorganizing the worm collection several years ago, the curators came across a lot of parasites arranged by street names in Boston. It turned out that the parasites were collected by a local doctor who was recording the health of high society in Boston. Poor Miss Lottie Fowler, from Hayward Place, could never have imagined she would be best remembered for a tapeworm, 14 metres long, that once lived inside her and now forms part of the museum’s back-room collection.

  [Glass models of marine creatures]

  430 intricate glass models of sea slugs, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and squid are kept in storage in drawers and on shelves labelled ‘Blaschka glass invertebrates, please do not disturb’.

  [Leopold Blaschka (1822–95) and Rudolph Blaschka (1857–1939)]

  Father and son glass artists in their studio in Dresden.

  [Portuguese man of war]

  A Portuguese man of war isn’t actually a jellyfish – each one is made up of a colony of creatures called zooids.

  [Cannonball jellyfish]

  The Blaschka’s glass model looked far more realistic than the real specimen the museum stores in spirit.

  IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO MISS THE Vasa Museum in Stockholm. If you go down to the beautiful waterfront of the city, you’ll see the masts of the only surviving seventeenth-century wooden warship in the world, sticking out of the top of the museum built especially to house it. That is Vasa. I’m not very into boats, and definitely not in any way into war, but I like the museum because, stripped of all its colours and beautifully lit, Vasa looks majestic, more like a piece of art than a warship.

  The ship is lavishly carved, decorated with all kinds of images to impress the enemy and to appease the weather gods. There are lions holding the Swedish coat of arms, fruit to symbolize plenty, the figure of Hercules and the heraldic symbol of the Vasa dynasty of Swedish kings. ‘Vasa’ is the Swedish word for fasces, which means ‘bundle of sticks’. Mussolini’s Fascists took their name from the same word, and as a symbol used a bundle of sticks and an axe. An image of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden with his arms outstretched, who reigned at the time and commissioned Vasa, is carved into the stern of the ship.

  As a work of art it is a masterpiece but as a warship it was a disaster. You can see the entire distance it ever sailed from the roof of the museum. The day Vasa left Stockholm’s harbour, bound for the navy’s summer fleet base out in the Swedish archipelago, it sank in full view of the city just 1,200 metres into its maiden voyage. The top of the mast was visible above the water, just as it is now visible poking out of the roof of its current home. British and Danish spies who had come to investigate the warship reported back that it now lay stuck in the mud of the harbour. Several people on board were killed – 15 skeletons were recovered from the wreck. Ten of these are on display, which I thought was weird, but, apparently, kids love to see them.

  Vasa remained in the mud for 333 years. Then, in 1961, the ship was raised, with the assistance of the navy and a commercial salvage firm. The water inside the wood of the ship was replaced with a waxy chemical – now commonly added to cheap milkshakes, chocolate and cosmetics – which stabilized the wood so that the boat didn’t turn to dust as it dried out. If you look closely at the ship, you can see the white wax dripping along its sides. When I touched it, it felt as though it had been dipped into melted candle wax.

  A lot of Swedes think that, when they were kids, they climbed on board the ship. Fred Hocker, director of research at the museum, who showed me around, said, ‘I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me they’ve been on board, but really, they haven’t, it’s just that when Vasa was in its first museum building, the platforms were arranged so it felt as though you were on board. You can’t really trust people’s memories, to tell the truth. They remember what they think they saw.’

  The reality is that very few
people have ever been allowed on board. The museum is in a part of Stockholm that is still owned by the king: if he wants to bring anyone on board, he can, of course. He usually brings visiting heads of state. A trip below decks is also offered to Nobel Prizewinners, as a bonus, if they’d like to have a look. At the Vasa Museum, it is the inside of the ship that is the great secret, the hidden treasure.

  I was allowed to climb aboard Vasa to see what lies beneath the deck. A flight of steps leads down on to the ship from the sixth floor of the museum. Fred Hocker tapped a code into an alarm system, swung open a gate at the top of the steps and we walked down on to the main deck. At the foot of the stairs was a row of smooth-soled bowling shoes – a pair for every curator, to keep their feet from marking the decks. I put a pair of blue plastic covers over my shoes and we set off to explore the ship’s seven storeys.

  We began with the admiral’s view, high up on the sterncastle, looking down on to the deck. The deck was curved upwards, and I felt all at sea looking down over the deck and beyond to where people wandered around the museum floor gazing up at the sides of the ship. The admiral of Vasa nearly died, below deck, as the ship sank. If he had ever known what would happen to his ship, that one day, others would stand in his place, inside a museum, it would have surprised him, I’m sure.

  Next, it was down some steps to the upper gundeck. From the museum floor, it looks as if there were lots of windows in the ship but, when the ship sailed, out of each one poked a cannon. The 64 cannons – on this deck and on the one below – divided the spaces into rooms, each one for eight people. They had no hammocks, so everyone ate and slept directly on the gundeck.

  We walked to the forward end of the gundeck and looked out over the beak-head of the boat. I saw two square boxes that once had lids on – the ship’s bathroom. I poked my head through a window and saw to my right, carved into the ship, a caricature of a Polish nobleman with the tail of a fish under a table, being squashed by the cathead (a crane for lifting the anchors). This was a joke, for the enjoyment of the 450 crew on-board heading into battle with Poland. A punishment in Poland for behaving badly was being made to sit under a table and bark like a dog. When Vasa was designed this little feature was added in so that the Swedish sailors would see the humiliated face of their enemy when they were sitting on the loo. The carving was propaganda for the crew, invisible from the outside of the ship.