Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (29 page)

One of the strongest connections many people feel to seashells is the urge, now and then, to collect them, and it’s a time-honoured hobby. One of the oldest known shell collections was preserved in the Roman city of Pompeii. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 ad, it choked and buried the city and its inhabitants in ash. Inside one excavated house, archaeologists found a gathering of shells that came from distant seas, certainly as far as the Red Sea, and they seem to have been kept for the simple reason that they looked pretty.

Anybody who has visited a beach has probably spent time idly browsing the shoreline, poking through flotsam and jetsam, to see what the sea has pitched up. Beautiful, spiralling shells are no doubt among the greatest of beachside treasures. They appeal to the hoarder in us all, the part of us that wants to have and keep things, especially those mementos that remind us of a different place and time, of holidays and sea breeze and sand between our toes.

Then there are people who take shell-collecting much more seriously, the ones who get infected with the need to hunt down new things, to write lists and keep scores. The thrill of discovery was probably what drove Hugh Cuming to do what he did.

As a young boy, he explored the beaches of south Devon, on the heel of England’s south-westerly foot that
points towards France. He was born five miles inland, at the end of a winding estuary in a hamlet called Dodbrooke, on St Valentine’s Day, 1791. His siblings were Jane, Thomas and James, Richard and Mary were his parents, and little else is known about Cuming’s early home life. He was only one when his father died, and by his teens he was apprenticed to a local sailmaker, where he learnt a profession that would eventually lead him to the other side of the world. For now, though, Cuming stayed close to home, where he may well have encountered a trio of men who lived nearby: a magistrate, a colonel and a shoemaker. All three were adventurers in their own way, and together could have shown the young Cuming what possibilities the world had to offer if you just went to look for them.

The first of these men was Charles Prideaux, a gentleman who lived most of his life in a fine, stone-fronted house smothered in vines in the centre of Kingsbridge, a town near Dodbrooke. Prideaux was a magistrate, but his heart lay in the natural world, as it did for many others of his generation. He belonged to a clique of amateur naturalists that swelled in number greatly during the eighteenth century. For those with a little spare time there was no better hobby than gathering fascinating and beautiful objects from the natural world. Prideaux was especially enchanted by animals with shells. He made grand collections of seashells and crabs, and developed a special fondness for bizarre creatures that combine the two – the hermit crabs – including several new species that were named after him. It’s not known whether Cuming ever met Prideaux, but he may have heard stories of the ardent naturalist rowing out into Plymouth Sound and lowering a small wooden dredge into the depths to bring back hidden wonders from the seabed.

Cuming seems to have made a personal connection with another local naturalist. Colonel George Montagu retired from a long army career to live in Kingsbridge, where he
wrote books about birds and molluscs, including hundreds of species that he spotted in Britain for the first time. According to several accounts, Montagu took the young Cuming under his wing, encouraging him to explore the Devon coast and start his first shell collection.

There was one other Kingsbridge man who may have inspired Cuming to pursue more exotic adventures. Compared with the other, wealthier naturalists, Cuming had more in common with John Cranch. Both Cranch and Cuming were sent at a young age to learn a trade – Cuming made sails and Cranch shoes – and both of them turned out to have an adventurous spark.

John Cranch was desperate to become a full-time naturalist. He worked hard at his Kingsbridge shoe business to make ends meet, but escaped whenever he could to sea. He assisted Colonel Montagu, often accompanying him on dredging trips offshore. He wrote articles and papers about his findings and discovered new species that were named in his honour.

In 1816, after his friend William Leach at London’s British Museum put in a good word for him, Cranch was taken on as the zoologist on a Royal Navy expedition to find the source of the River Congo. The voyage got off to a bad start when the brand new, 30-tonne, 20-horsepower steam engine only propelled the vessel at three knots, barely faster than strolling pace. The paddle wheel and engines were stripped out, and HMS
Congo
finally cast off under sail power. On the way to Africa, Cranch gathered zoological specimens, including the living argonauts that would later bear his name. When they eventually reached what is now the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the ship only made it a few hundred miles inland before impassable waterfalls and rapids blocked their way. The only thing the crew discovered about the origins of the Congo River was that the only way to find it would involve a lot of walking. They struck out overland on foot but a terrible illness soon broke
out, probably yellow fever. Cranch fell ill, and for 10 days he was slung in a hammock and carried back to the ship where he soon died, along with more than half the crew.

Shortly before grim news of the Congo expedition filtered back to England, Colonel Montagu met a far less exotic but equally fatal demise. He stepped on a rusty nail at his house in Kingsbridge and died of tetanus; staying at home or exploring faraway lands, either way life was precarious at the start of the nineteenth century. It is easy to imagine which of the two fates Hugh Cuming would have wished on himself, if he had had to take his pick, because he soon set off on overseas adventures of his own. In 1819, aged 28, he left Devon for the first time and set sail for the southern hemisphere to take a job as a sailmaker in Valparaiso, a major seaport on Chile’s mid-west coast, where a new British colony was growing fast.

Life went well for Cuming in Chile. He met Maria de los Santos, who he never married but their daughter, Clara Valentina, was named in honour of her father’s birthday. In his spare time, Cuming scoured the rocky shores and inlets around Valparaiso, and began to amass a considerable collection of shells that were new to him. Both his work and his hobby introduced him to various local characters – port inspectors, customs officers, bureaucrats and fellow shell collectors – who would prove to be immensely helpful in the years to come. It was one of them, a Lieutenant John Frembly, who announced Hugh Cuming to the scientific world in 1825 when he described a new species of chiton.

‘I have named this species after my friend Mr Cumings,’ wrote Lieutenant Frembly. He went on to speculate that Cuming would ‘soon make a large addition to our present stock’. He may have misspelled his friend’s name but Frembly was not wrong in his hunch that there was much more to come from this enthusiastic collector. It would take a few years for the world to find out just how substantial Cuming’s contribution to shell-collecting and science would be.

Cuming had done very well as a businessman in the short time he had lived in South America, and by 1826, aged only 35, he had built up enough savings to retire and devote himself to chasing a grand ambition. Cuming built a small wooden schooner, decking it out with collecting kit and ample storage space. It was probably the world’s first custom-made vessel devoted to scientific research. He hired the services of a Captain Grimwood, and on 28 October 1827 the two of them cast off the ropes of the
Discoverer
, waved goodbye to Maria and Clara, and set sail due west to see what they could find – including as many shells as possible.

By the time Cuming and Grimwood sailed into the Pacific, a new age of scientific discoveries was well underway. Up until the turn of the eighteenth century, explorers travelled the world mainly to try to acquire and expand colonies and to open up new trade routes. Political and economic ambitions never went away, but they were joined by a growing scientific curiosity guided by a new fellowship of scientists. Professional societies were forming in cities across Europe, and they were the driving force behind many great expeditions; scientists became indispensable members of the crew.

Captain James Cook was hired by the Royal Society in London in 1768 to sail to the Pacific Ocean to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. On board with him on HMS
Endeavour
were the naturalists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, who were in charge of gathering plant and animal specimens along the way, including a lot of seashells. Solander was one of 17 young adventurers recruited by Carl Linnaeus to join expeditions around the world, to collect specimens and test out and expand his new binomial formula for naming species (giving them a two-part name, first genus then species, as in
Homo sapiens
). Collecting animals and plants and cataloguing them according to
Linnaeus’s new scheme became a major goal of eighteenth-century exploration, and many global voyages returned with hoards of natural history specimens. The French ships
La Boussole
and
L’Astrolabe
set off in the 1780s with the aim of completing Cook’s exploration of the Pacific, but they both vanished without trace in the Solomon Islands. Numerous voyages attempted to locate the Northwest Passage that was believed to connect the Atlantic and Pacific by a northerly route; other trips made detailed observations along the coasts of India, China and Australia.

All these globetrotting efforts helped uncover a simple and powerful truth about the natural world’s biological riches: they showed that patterns of life vary across the globe. In order to find new varieties of plants and animals, simply go and look carefully in places no other scientists have been before. New places: new species.

The findings of the early scientific expeditions, Cook’s voyage in particular, no doubt gave Hugh Cuming the idea of sailing across the Pacific in search of new and unknown shells. What set Cuming and Grimwood apart from other collecting expeditions at the time was the small scale of their mission. It was just the two of them. There was no big ship filled with provisions and a permanent, supporting crew on hand, and no money from government or scientific societies; just Cuming’s private funds, and the hope that when he got back he could sell some of his shells while keeping the best specimens for himself.

For eight months, Cuming and Grimwood island-hopped across the Pacific on board
Discoverer
. Cuming chronicled their voyage in a journal, of which a copy survives (he probably wrote it up on his return to Chile). It traces their route, and offers glimpses into the other adventures they had along the way besides shell-collecting.

It took them a week to sail 400 miles to their first stopping-off point, the Juan Fernandez Islands, famous as the home of castaway Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration
for Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
. Selkirk was rescued 100 years before Cuming and Grimwood called in; unlike Selkirk’s three years of isolation, they stayed for just a week. During that time Cuming got his collection underway and he had already found some shell species that were different from those he knew from the Chilean coast. He also noted an abundance of goats left behind by visiting sailors and pirates, and lush vegetation with fruit and vegetables introduced from Chile, including ‘radishes of an extraordinary size’.

The
Discoverer
next called in at Easter Island, where Cuming began his collection of anthropological artefacts, bartering cotton handkerchiefs for small wooden idols carved by the locals. He had brought with him a stock of tobacco, wine and colourful ribbons, which he exchanged throughout the voyage for traditional weapons and musical instruments; he was especially fond of his two nasal flutes. Throughout his journal, it is clear that Cuming was fascinated by people and places; he goes into great detail on the local costumes and practices, buildings and food. On Easter Island Cuming found more shells, saw the monumental moai statues, and stocked up on fresh provisions before heading onwards into the Pacific.