Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (32 page)

In a room lined with tall mahogany cabinets I can’t decide where to start. Jon Ablett, one of the curators at the mollusc section at London’s Natural History Museum, helps me out and picks a cabinet. He swings open the doors, revealing two rows of drawers with brass name-plate holders on each one. Carefully, I slide out a drawer and find it stuffed full of shells, sealed inside small clear plastic bags and nestled inside open card trays that look like giant matchboxes. Jon rummages through the boxes, pulls one out and puts it on a table top in front of me.

There are two spiralling snail shells, a few centimetres tall, cream-coloured with a brown stripe coiled around them. With them are a few bits of paper covered in minuscule, neat handwriting. Jon explains that no notes are ever thrown away; even when experts re-identify a specimen as a different species they simply add their notes to the paper trail of ideas and discoveries.

A tiny square of yellowing paper falls out onto the table with the letters MC written in fading ink. ‘That’s how we
know this was one of Cuming’s,’ Jon tells me. The MC stands for Museum Cuming, the name he gave to his gigantic shell collection.

After he died, the British Museum eventually agreed to buy Cuming’s shells for the same £6,000 he originally asked for. A story has often been told of the day when his shells were eventually brought to the museum. The weather was blustery, so the story goes, when John Gray’s wife carried tray after tray of shells across a courtyard. As she went, the air around her was filled not only with a swirl of autumnal leaves but with hundreds of paper labels from the shells, mixing them up and whisking away the names, collecting locations and all scientific value from his shells. However, investigations by Peter Dance for his book
A History of Shell Collecting
revealed these tales to be completely made up. It wasn’t Mrs Gray who fetched the shells, and the labels didn’t get mixed up. Perhaps people spread these rumours to try to fuel antipathy towards Cuming and his shells.

Back in the museum, Jon and I open up more cabinets and drawers, and we keep finding more MC shells. Some of them have reference numbers that identify each individual shell in the museum’s enormous catalogue; in the past this was a handwritten ledger, which the curators are now working their way through and digitising. Normally, when new specimens arrive at the museum they are logged in with a reference number, but that didn’t happen with Cuming’s shells because there were simply too many of them. Instead they were distributed, species by species, through the rest of the museum’s mollusc collection. Only when someone takes out one of his shells, studies it, then writes and publishes something about it is it given a number. There are still masses of unnumbered shells that haven’t yet made it into print.

‘People are still identifying new species from Cuming’s shells,’ says Jon. Of those that have been identified, many bear his name, including Cuming’s Cowrie, Cuming’s
Scallop and Cuming’s
Spondylus
. He has all sorts of other animals also named after him, including a starfish, a gecko, a beetle and a tree-climbing rodent from the Philippines called a cloud rat.

I must admit that I had expected Cuming’s shells to be all kept together in one place, but actually I prefer that they’ve been split up and absorbed into this living, working collection. There are approximately nine million shells in the Natural History Museum – this is one of the biggest mollusc collections in the world – but there’s no hiding the fact that nobody really knows how many shells they have. Thousands more are added each year, and Jon and his colleagues have to keep finding more space to squeeze them all in.

The main use of the museum’s shell collection is to study the diversity and evolutionary relationships of the immense mollusc lineage. Together these specimens form reference points in time and space that people can keep coming back to in the future, to ask questions no one has thought of asking yet and to answer them in ways that haven’t been invented.

It’s easy to think of museums as dusty places, frozen in time, but they are constantly changing and embracing new techniques and technologies. Most of the Natural History Museum’s molluscs are empty shells, because that was the easiest way of collecting them, and in the past there was no way of extracting genetic information from them. But recent advances in DNA amplification mean that even minute scraps of dried mollusc meat stuck inside a shell can now be used to sequence the animal’s genome.

Other unexpected and powerful insights come from whole specimens kept in alcohol. Jon tells me he recently had a visit from researcher Justin Gerlach who came to study the preserved remains of a snail species from Tahiti that went extinct in the wild decades ago. A few living
Partula
snails were taken into captivity for a breeding programme that it was hoped would save them from total extinction, but it’s not going well; there are only 15 snails of this particular species left, and even those
are now dying. By dissecting the historic specimens from the wild it’s hoped researchers can identify their final meal and work out if the captive-breeding efforts are failing because the snails are being fed the wrong food.

It’s not just scientists who use the collection. The mollusc department welcomes in all sorts of people: artists, designers and engineers all come through to the back rooms of the museum to learn about and seek inspiration from the shape and form, architecture and beauty of these many millions of spirals.

Art historians also visit the department to examine an extraordinary series of shell books. Lined up along one shelf in the mollusc section’s library are 20 huge volumes, their titles and contents embossed in gold on the spines: ‘Vol. 1.
Conus
,
Pleurotoma
,
Crassatella
,
Phorus
,
Pectunculus
…’, ‘Vol. 2.
Corbula
,
Arca
,
Triton
…’ all the way through to ‘Vol. 20.
Solemya
,
Mya
,
Clausilia
,
Cylindrella
…’. They aren’t in alphabetical (or even taxonomic) order, but that would probably have been asking too much for a project that took more than 30 years to complete. I pull down volume three, ‘
Murex
,
Cyprae
,
Haliotis
…’ and carefully open the pages.

The beautiful colour illustrations are vivid and lifelike, almost as if the book were filled with real shells. The polished humps of cowries seem to perch on the page; an abalone bigger than my hand shimmers with many colours. This is the
Conchologia Iconica
by
Lovell Augustus Reeve
, one of Cuming’s closest friends and associates. He began the book in 1843 and continued until his death in 1865, at which point George Brettingham Sowerby II took over, finishing the work in 1878. There are other splendid copies of the book in museums and libraries around the world and you can browse a digitised version online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The
Iconica
series illustrates around 27,000 shells. Between the illustrations are written descriptions of each species, including many delightful common names. There’s a
Greenish Cowrie and Yellowish Terebra, a Differently-bristled Bulimus and a Somewhat-distorted Triton; I spot a Grinning Cockle, an Ambiguous Murex, a Flea-bitten Cone, a Lovely Cone, a Melancholy Cone, and I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for the Dismal Limpet.

The bulk of the shells that Reeve and Sowerby used for their drawings and descriptions came from Cuming’s collection. The books include details about who found each particular shell and where. Repeated throughout, more often than any other name, is ‘Mr Cuming’.

When Reeve started this great work, the Sowerbys had already begun to publish a five-volume shell guide,
Thesaurus Conchylorium
. I glance through a copy of this in the library and see why the
Iconica
was set apart as something quite different. The
Thesaurus
is illustrated with etchings, fine black lines painted in colour by hand. They are quite beautiful but give more of a stylised view of the shell rather than a realistic impression. Most of these drawings are also much smaller than the shells themselves. In contrast the
Iconica
illustrations are all life-size or bigger, which is one reason why it runs to 20 volumes (Reeve also wanted to include every known species at the time). And these are lithographs, a technique that allows for more subtle lines and shading. Until the invention of colour photography, this was probably the world’s finest and most accurate book of shells.

The pictures in
Iconica
are so detailed and accurate it’s possible to search through the museum’s cabinets and find the actual, individual shell from the collection that Reeve or Sowerby drew. And I can’t resist going back for one last look at Cuming’s shells.

In a small side room off a long corridor, Jon directs me to the cabinets of cones and I open a few drawers before spotting what I’m after:
Conus gloriamaris
, the Glory of the Sea.

For a long time it was thought that the Glory of the Sea was extinct. For 60 years, from 1896 onwards, no specimens were found; it was obviously rare to begin with, and perhaps
too many greedy collectors had exhausted the last wild stocks. Eventually, though, with the increase in bottom-dredging and the invention of scuba-diving, more specimens started showing up from deeper waters. Today, Glories of the Sea have become so common they aren’t nearly as valuable as they once were. There are hundreds on offer at online auction sites, where you can snap one up for a fraction of their former price.

I pull open the drawer to reveal several specimens of
Conus gloriamaris
. It is the first time I’ve seen one myself and the first chance I’ve had to look up close at the intricate markings that Bard Ermentrout, George Oster and colleagues modelled on a computer. I browse through the shells until I find two that are rather smaller than the rest, only a few centimetres long. The handwritten note with them has the scrawled initials MC. As I turn them over in my hand I begin to understand how easy it is for objects to become highly revered – sacred even – because of the connections they can trace to a person, a place and a moment in time.

Even here at the Natural History Museum, an institution founded on science and reason, the curators know only too well there are certain objects that are quite simply special. Walk through the entrance into the main hall with its lofty ceilings and stained-glass windows and it has the same awe-inspiring feel as a great cathedral. At the top of the stairs, past the seated sculpture of Charles Darwin, is a small gallery. On display are 22 objects selected from the museum’s 70 million specimens, all of them with wonderful stories to tell.

Among them are some of William Smith’s ammonite fossils that helped him work out that rocks are layered through time; there is a nautilus shell intricately carved in Holland in the seventeenth century, which was one of 400,000 objects in Hans Sloane’s collection that formed the basis of the British Museum; there is the skull of a lion that lived 700 years ago at the Tower of London as part of an exotic royal menagerie; and there are intricate glass models of phytoplankton and
jellyfish made in the mid-nineteenth century by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who pioneered a sculpting technique that has since been lost and forgotten. These aren’t just any old fossils, shells, skulls and glass ornaments but things infused with history, human endeavour and ideas.

My own personal pick of treasures from the museum would include some of Hugh Cuming’s shells (with a note pointing out just how many thousands more there are down in the basement). He may not have been a man who came up with great thoughts and theories of how the world works, but his limitless passion for one group of animals opened up an astonishing view of the natural world that no one had seen before.

The Glory of the Sea drawn by Reeve in volume one, plate six of the
Conchologica Iconica
was found by Cuming on ‘Jacna Island of Bohol, Philippines (found on the reefs at low water)’. Reeve goes on to explain that he chose to illustrate a small specimen found by Cuming because of its especially rich markings. There was, Reeve wrote, another even smaller shell that Cuming collected that same day ‘scarcely exceeding an inch and a half in length’. But he confessed the patterns on that one were so extremely fine they defied his drawing skills.

How strange it is to imagine that moment, 175 years ago, when Cuming stood on a beach in the tropical heat of the Philippines, lifted up a rock and for the first time saw the very shells that I’m holding now.

I wonder if finding them really did make him do a little dance.