Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (31 page)

It was while Cuming was in the Philippines that he came across a molluscan superstar. The Glory of the Sea,
Conus gloriamaris
, is a fairly large cone snail that grows up to 13 centimetres (5 inches) long and is decorated in immensely fine, golden-brown saw-tooth markings. It is undoubtedly a pretty shell, although no more stunning than hundreds of other cone snail species. What drove collectors to distraction was its rarity. Since its discovery in 1777 only a handful of specimens had been found and no one knew where to find more. The Glory of the Sea became one of the most famous and valuable shells in the world.

In 1824, William Broderip almost paid £99 19s 6d for a single Glory of the Sea, but he was outbid at the last minute by another collector who paid £100 (adjusted for inflation that is equivalent to almost £8,000 today). Possibly apocryphal stories reveal how carried away people got about this particular species. One tells of a Danish collector in 1792 buying a Glory of the Sea at auction and immediately stepping on it, smashing it to bits in front of a gawping crowd simply to make the specimen he already had all the more valuable. Whether the story is true or not, the fact that people told it shows how obsessed they were about the Glory of the Sea.

Another story often told revolves around what happened after Cuming found this rare species in the Philippines. He was collecting along the shore off Bohol Island when he turned over a rock and saw nestled underneath it not one but two, or possibly even three, Glories of the Sea. The story goes that Cuming was so overcome with joy at the sight of these rare shells that he danced about in sheer delight.

On returning to the same spot some time later, Cuming supposedly discovered that the island had been struck by an earthquake, and his valuable collecting spot had sunk down out of reach beneath the waves. At the time, this was the only place in the world where Glories of the Sea were known to live, and now it was lost. The Philippines is well known for catastrophic earthquakes, but we simply can’t be sure whether Cuming’s collecting spot really was obliterated; perhaps this was yet another story told to cast shadows around these mysterious and valuable shells.

By 1839, Cuming had packed up his collections and was ready for the six-month sea voyage back to London. In a letter to Richard Owen, he reports having more than 3,000 mollusc species; 500 of them were from forests and rivers, the rest from the rich coastal waters. Cuming may have been the first person to export crates of shells from the Philippines, but he certainly wasn’t the last. Today, the Philippines is a major hub in a multi-million-dollar global shell trade. This really got going in the 1970s, when the Philippines government encouraged people to gather and sell seashells to the growing number of foreign tourists visiting the islands.

Thousands of shell species are involved in various aspects of the modern shell trade. Some are sold in bulk as the raw material to make mother-of-pearl inlays and jewellery; others, especially cowrie shells, are sold for use in shellcrafts, to make into necklaces, chandeliers and ghastly shell figurines and ornaments. There is also a specialist trade in fine and rare specimens that are treated as gems and sold on specialist networks to discerning collectors around the world. But rather than having to wait for an explorer like Cuming to return from an epic voyage, as European collectors did in the nineteenth century, shell enthusiasts today can simply browse through a website, pick the shells they want and have them delivered from the Philippines directly to their front door.

There was one notable omission among the species and specimens Cuming collected. In his letter to Owen, Cuming
confessed that he hadn’t been able to find a whole chambered nautilus with shell and body intact. Owen had a special interest in these animals. In 1832, he had published his first monograph on their anatomy, called
Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus
. It was based on a single preserved specimen given to him the previous year by the British naturalist, George Bennett, who had spent years exploring the Pacific. All Cuming had managed to find was a few empty nautilus shells. He could quite easily have brought back another specimen of this elusive animal from the Philippines for Owen, if he had only known how to catch one.

A nautilus interlude

To catch a nautilus is fairly straightforward: make a wooden or wire trap with an entrance just big enough for a nautilus to swim through; bait the trap with cat food or scraps of chicken, then lower it down into deep water to at least 100 metres (the method does, admittedly, require a lot of rope) and leave it overnight. Scavenging nautiluses will pick up the whiff of food and come to investigate. Once inside the trap, the short-sighted cephalopods can’t find their way back out. All the nautilus hunter need do is return the following morning and pull all that rope back up.

This is how the commercial trade in nautilus shells is carried out today, with tens of thousands of animals caught and killed each year. Gilded nautilus cups may have fallen out of fashion, but these days people use the spiralling, tiger-striped shells to make all manner of other ornaments, lampshades and buttons. There are even people who eat chambered nautiluses; between 2007 and 2010, Indonesia exported 25,000 nautiluses to supply meat markets in China.

The Philippines is a major player in the nautilus trade. Exports have fluctuated; in 2008 around 54,000 nautiluses were recorded in trade; the following year the number tripled; then in 2010 the trade dropped again to around 24,500 animals (figures are grouped together for all the
Nautilus
and
Allonautilus
species). A lot of these nautiluses end up in the United States. Between 2006 and 2010 more than half a million items were imported to America, most of them whole shells.

The Philippines was also one of the first places where nautilus fisheries began to collapse. Anecdotal reports suggest that nautiluses have gone locally extinct in the Tañon Strait between the islands of Negros and Cebu. This happened in the 1980s and since then the fishery hasn’t restarted, suggesting that the nautiluses have not recovered. If they had, fishermen would surely be going out to catch them.

A 2014 study used video cameras baited with chicken to survey nautilus populations in a fishing ground of the Philippines and compared it to three un-fished sites in other countries. Individual nautiluses were identified based on unique patterns of stripes on their shells. The highest numbers were counted in Australia, at Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea (68 nautiluses) and on the Great Barrier Reef (92). Twenty nautiluses were identified at each of two other un-fished sites, Beqa Passage in Fiji and Taena Bank in American Samoa. By contrast, in the Philippines, the drop-down cameras spotted only six nautiluses. Even taking the soak-time of each camera into account, estimates of the total population are still far lower in the Philippines than elsewhere. Several factors could explain these differences, including variety in habitat type and limitations of the filming technique. But most likely is that the Philippines population has been depleted by fishing while the others have so far been left alone.

These results are no great surprise, given a few basic facts of nautilus biology: they don’t become sexually mature until they are teenagers, at least 15 years old; when they do, a female spends a year incubating eggs inside her shell before a meagre 10 or 15 hatchlings emerge. Compared to many other molluscs, there really is no possibility that the ocean will become overrun by nautiluses any time soon – quite possibly the opposite.

Based on this latest research, it seems nautiluses could be far less abundant than anyone ever imagined, even in areas where they aren’t being hunted. People have been admiring and collecting their shells for hundreds of years but now the pressure on them could be too high. Many experts are calling for the immediate control of the global nautilus trade to make sure that this narrow branch of the tree of life doesn’t face one mass extinction too many, and finally get snapped off.

Of gentlemen and disappointment

Cuming returned to London in June 1840, whereupon he hung up his explorer’s hat once and for all. He spent the rest of his life expanding his shell collections from the comfort of his new home at 80 Gower Street in Bloomsbury, a short stroll from the British Museum. He would still visit auction houses and museums across Europe, but never again departed for exotic, faraway shores.

He distributed much of his Philippines material among naturalists and collectors – not just shells but thousands of birds, insects, crabs and reptiles, and 130,000 dried plants, which he hoped would impress William Jackson Hooker, the man who would soon be appointed as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and who Cuming had been writing to for years.

As well as all his plants, Cuming also sent Hooker the journal he wrote during his Philippines sojourn. In the accompanying note, dated May 1841, Cuming refers to his journal as his ‘child’, apologising effusively for his bad spelling and grammar and asking for help in editing and publishing the work. Unfortunately, Cuming had picked the wrong man to ask for assistance. While Cuming was well liked by many throughout his life, there were a few scientists who didn’t seem to take him seriously; Hooker was one of them.

Hooker rejected Cuming’s work and the journal was lost, perhaps carelessly by Hooker or deliberately by a disappointed
Cuming. With the journal gone, Cuming’s hopes of being fully accepted as a gentleman of science were shattered. Perhaps it was his lack of schooling or his refusal to describe any of his collections himself, but throughout his life and for decades afterwards, there were some shell experts who didn’t value Cuming’s work. In 1909, conchologist Charles Hedley described Cuming as ‘an illiterate sailor’ and complained ‘his plans did not regard the advancement of science’. Another shell scientist in 1939 described Cuming’s collection as a ‘pestilential conchological swamp’.

Many argued that Cuming had done a bad job of labelling his collections with localities of where the shells were found, a vital piece of scientific information. These allegations were rather unfair given the nineteenth-century custom of attaching only brief notes to specimens, with locations often as vague as ‘South China Sea’ or ‘India’.

On the contrary, it seems Cuming had an encyclopaedic memory for where his shells came from; the only problem was that he kept most of that information in his head, and not written down. People who watched him at work reported how he would lay out parts of his collection on long tables, then dictate notes to an assistant, all from memory.

There is no doubt that Cuming was incredibly generous with his shells. Dozens of scientists passed through his doors to examine and describe them. One of them was Charles Darwin, and over the course of several years the two men corresponded at length and occasionally met. Cuming identified all of the shells Darwin brought back from the Galápagos, he discussed ideas with him on coral reef formation, and lent him many specimens. One of the most important, although not a mollusc, was
Ibla cumingi
, a barnacle Cuming brought back from the Philippines. In the introduction to his book
A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia,
Darwin thanked Cuming for persuading him to spend time looking at barnacles, and said Cuming had ‘placed his whole magnificent collection at my disposal’.
Cuming even let Darwin chop up some of his precious specimens. When he dissected
Ibla cumingi
, Darwin found bizarre miniature male barnacles clamped tightly to the giant females (a little like male argonauts), giving him vital clues as to how sex evolved.

But Darwin wasn’t always so admiring of Cuming. In 1845 he described him as ‘very difficult to make stick to his work’ in a letter to his friend Charles Lyell. By then, however, Cuming’s health was failing, perhaps from all the years of tropical exploration, which might explain why he was not paying much attention to Darwin. A short time later, Cuming suffered a stroke from which he was not expected to recover.

In December 1846, a letter arrived at the British Museum from the ailing Cuming offering his great collection of 52,789 shell specimens, including at least 18,867 species. The price for his entire collection was £6,000, equivalent to at least half a million pounds today.

His offer to the museum was followed by letters from several eminent zoologists including Richard Owen and William Broderip, urging the trustees to buy Cuming’s shells. They pointed out how bothersome it would be if the collection were broken up and lost overseas, scattering this rich source of study far from British soil. John Edward Gray, keeper of zoology at the British Museum at the time, was less enthusiastic, and perhaps under his influence the museum rejected Cuming’s offer.

Despite his illness, Cuming lived on a further 20 years until he was 74, with his daughter, Clara Valentina, now by his side. He continued to add to his collection, funding younger men to go on collecting expeditions for him, and he still paid visits to local auction houses. In April 1865 Cuming was spotted in Covent Garden bidding on shells, and was remembered by one collector as a ‘somewhat stout, rubicund, good-humoured looking old man’. A few months later, on 10 August, Hugh Cuming passed away at his home in Gower Street. His hair was a jumble of white curls, his
skin creased by years of sun and sea, and he was surrounded by his beloved shells.

By then, his collection included some 83,000 shells, proof that he had surely achieved his lifelong ambition. This was without doubt the largest and most famous collection of shells then in existence. A great number of them were ones he had found himself throughout his extraordinary adventures, exploring places no other shell-collectors had been, island-hopping, dredging the seabed, dipping in rivers, shaking tree trunks and picking over leaves and rocks. While other collectors and museums would eventually bring together more shells, Cuming’s is still the most impressive collection that one person has amassed. But he didn’t live to witness his final wish coming true, to see his fine collection on display at the British Museum.