The Secret Museum Read online

  There were three floors in the museum. The Ark collection was on display on the top floor, along with other natural history artefacts. The ground floor was used for lectures and teaching, and the basement was a laboratory. All the original signs above the doorways on each floor are there, explaining what each room was used for.

  Today, The Ark and the Ashmolean Museum have moved across the city of Oxford, and the original Ashmolean building has been taken over by the Museum of the History of Science. When they renovated the building in 1999, they lifted the floorboards on the first floor. Beneath them were all kinds of treasures from the original museum.

  When the first discovery was made, the current museum curators joined the builders in digging up these secrets. They felt like ‘floorboard archaeologists’, sifting through dust rather than the earth. They pulled out all kinds of simple things, most of them dating from the eighteenth century, rather than from the very beginning of the museum in 1683.

  The ephemera they pulled out of the dust includes: the label from the key that belonged to Dr Plot, keeper of the museum; a letter from J. Chapman, who worked there; labels from portraits; a lizard; a book cover; the remains of a posy of flowers; and an unopened letter -which they aren’t going to open. I’m not sure how they can resist. I liked a small house, cut out of paper, made by someone daydreaming while at the museum, and a sketch of ‘Edward’, a keeper of the museum, with a little flower drawn beneath him.

  There are things which whoever dropped them must have been upset to lose – a ring; a penknife and a child’s tooth with a hole drilled through it which had probably been tied on to a string as a keepsake. Perhaps the child’s father or mother wore it and crawled around on the floor of the museum looking for it when it fell off the string.

  The most everyday things are the eighteenth-century pencil sharpenings and cherry stalks – very mundane at the time, but fascinating now. There are also lots of wax seals and coins. All of these tiny treasures that fell out of people’s pockets or off the walls, or slipped off tables, have survived by chance. They weren’t supposed to have made it into the twenty-first century, but that they did gives us a lovely feel for life in Britain’s first museum. Everything suggests a human touch. These things aren’t on display, because they’re fragile and utterly unique. They’re the only physical memories of the first museum in Britain.

  Now, there are around 2,500 museums in Britain, and more than 55,000 museums in the world, each with unique collections; and most of the items in these collections are kept behind the scenes. More than 100 million people visit museums in Britain each year. I wonder what the Tradescants would have made of that? When they opened The Ark in their home in Lambeth, I bet they couldn’t have imagined the trend they were starting.

  [John Tradescant the elder (c.15705–1638) and John Tradescant the younger (1608–62)]

  The two Tradescants, father and son, were gardeners with a shared passion for interesting plants and strange curiosities.

  [Turret House, Lambeth, London]

  The Tradescants filled their home with so many curious treasures that they decided to charge the public to come and have a look. They called the first public museum in Britain ‘The Ark’.

  [Powhatan’s mantle]

  A visitor to the Tradescant museum in 1638 recorded seeing ‘the robe of the King of Virginia’ and it was later catalogued as ‘Pohatan, King of Virginia’s habit, all embroidered with shells, or Roanoke’. The robe is now on display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

  [Musaeum Tradescantianum]

  John Tradescant junior wrote a catalogue of the collection – the first of its kind in Britain.

  [Found beneath the floorboards]

  Museum curators felt like ‘floorboard archaeologists’ as they found pieces of history that had fallen beneath the floorboards of the original Ashmolean Museum.

  I TOOK A TAXI TO the Museu de Arte Sacra to see the collection. When the taxi driver dropped me off, he said, ‘The museum is down the hill – walk down that little street. When you come out, come straight back up to this main road. Don’t hang around outside the museum, it can be dangerous.’ So, nervously, I legged it down a side street into the pretty courtyard of the museum.

  Once safely inside, I met Francisco Portugal, who has been the curator of the museum for 14 years. He wanted to show me the most precious treasure they have in the collection: a glittering bejewelled cross, which lay hidden under the floor of the building for centuries as buried treasure. It hasn’t been exhibited for 40 years, as the museum is worried, now the area around the museum can be sketchy, that it might get stolen.

  It is kept wrapped in a white cloth under lock and key inside a safe somewhere in the building. I didn’t see where. The curator asked his assistant to fetch it and bring it into his office for me to see. We waited there, looking out at the beautiful views of the ocean until his assistant reappeared. We stood up, and she unwrapped the treasure. It was a golden cross, decorated with precious jewels. As she placed it on the table, the sunlight streaming across the ocean and in through the curator’s office window bounced off the jewels and scattered around the room.

  We gathered around to admire the cross. It’s a processional one, so would have been carried from the base. It was made in Brazil, out of precious gold and jewels. At the top is a circle of golden rays bursting out of another central circle, which looks like a smoothed crystal. The circle opens up to be a cubbyhole for Communion bread. On top of the golden rays sits a small golden cross. The piece is decorated with diamond droplets, amethysts, topaz, emeralds and rubies. Six cherubs float around its edges. You’ll just have to imagine it because there are no published photographs of this most sacred cross.

  Once upon a time, the room we stood in was a monk’s bedroom. The whole museum has been shaped out of the former Convent of Saint Teresa de Avila, which was founded by the Order of Barefoot Carmelites in the mid-seventeenth century in the former capital of the colony. The monks who lived here were Portuguese. They arrived in Bahia in 1660 and built a little hospice by the sea; then, in 1685, they built a convent beside it, with a church modelled on the Church of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (Our Lady of the Remedies), of Évora in Portugal, which dates from 1614.

  The curator didn’t know exactly when the cross was made but, once it was in the monastery, the monks protected, polished and proceeded to the altar carrying it. During Communion, they would open the central crystal to take out the Communion bread with which to feed the souls of their fellow monks.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Bahia fought for independence from Portugal. The convent was taken over by Portuguese troops trying to keep Bahia for their country. The monks were forced out of the monastery, but before they fled they buried this precious cross beneath the floorboards of their home. After the monks, and then the troops, had left the convent, it fell into ruin and was left derelict for many years.

  In 1958, the University of Bahia restored the convent and church and turned it into the Museum of Sacred Art, exhibiting art belonging to the church, and 500 treasures belonging to Brazilian and Portuguese museums, churches, convents and brotherhoods in Brazil. During the restoration, the cross was found in the ground. The restorers were overcome with pleasure at finding the buried treasure and carefully cleaned and polished it until it shone like new. They put it on display in the museum. However, within ten years, the area around the monastery went downhill and became rough and dangerous, so the cross was taken out of the public galleries and hidden away for safekeeping. There is still plenty to see in the museum itself: 1,500 pieces of sacred art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are displayed in the rariefied atmosphere of the monks’ quarters, with a view of the glittering sea. You can see the first fresco painted in Brazil: a lotus flower with a female figure emerging from it.

  The curator also took me into the former monks’ church so I could see how light the space was, with pews of dark wood and a silver altar upon which the cross may once have stood
during a service, dazzling the monks as they prayed. I thought about the monks who worshipped here carrying the bejewelled cross, opening it up during Communion and lovingly polishing it after a service. They could never have imagined where it would end up: inside a safe, locked out of sight, just in case.

  As I left the museum and crossed the courtyard that leads out into the street, I remembered why the cross was tucked away and decided to follow the taxi driver’s advice. I flew up the hill to the main road and hailed a cab, made it safely into the car and was thankful to have seen the beautiful cross safe in its charming museum.

  [The Museum of Sacred Art, Salvador de Bahia]

  The museum is inside what was once the Convent of Saint Teresa de Avila, founded by the Order of Barefoot Carmelites in the mid-seventeenth century. It’s in a beautiful location by the sea, and must have once been a peaceful place to live.

  BLYTHE HOUSE IS A LISTED building, on Blythe Road, in Kensington. It began life in 1903 as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank. The post office building was the first in London to have electricity and was split in half, with men and women working on different sides, each with their own entrance. Today, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum use it as a store and archive. The Science Museum keeps its small objects here (its large objects are kept in a series of aircraft hangars, in an ex-RAF airbase in Wiltshire).

  The Science Museum’s treasure trove in Blythe House includes over 100,000 objects collected in the early nineteenth century by a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a Midas touch, the devoted collector Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936).

  Wellcome owned a pharmaceutical company. He made a fortune thanks to his invention of medicine in tablet form. He called them tabloids – as in a mixture of tablets and alkaloids in a small packet; this is where we get the word we use to describe small newspapers. He used his wealth to set up the Wellcome Trust, which today is one of the biggest medical charities in the world. He loved to collect medical curios and books, and had agents dotted around the globe buying up things they thought would interest him. They collected so much stuff he didn’t get around to unpacking it all before he died. All of his books are stored in the Wellcome Library, on Euston Road, London. His objects were divided up between different museums around the world; some were put on display at the Wellcome Collection, on Euston Road, London (where the library is) and a tenth of his objects was brought over to Blythe House.

  A team of archivists cataloguing the collection I came to see has been working for five years and has sorted over 230,000 items. It’s likely to take them another seven years to go through the lot. No one curator has ever seen it all. I spent three hours walking in and out of rooms, pulling open drawers and looking through shelves of artefacts with Selina Hurley, assistant curator of medicine at the Science Museum.

  The medical treasures are sorted into rooms by theme. Each room has its own smell: the oriental room smells like incense; and the dentistry room like the bright liquid you gargle when you sit up, at the dentist’s. All of the rooms made me feel quite uneasy as they are filled with objects created to help people who were unwell.

  We opened a door that led into a room filled with Roman votive offerings – models of injured parts of the body that were offered to a god to give thanks, or to ask for a cure; all over the walls are little clay feet, arms, legs, ears and even penises. Another room contains folk charms. Selina told me, ‘Every time I come in here I stumble across something different.’ Opening a drawer, she discovers a wizened object; ‘I think that’s a dried mole. Ah, here is a frog – he doesn’t smell too bad – he was used to cure cramp and kept in a little bag. A lot of things like this work through transference. You hold something and transfer your pain into it.’ Beside it is another example of this: a dog’s tooth used as a teething charm for babies (the pain would be transferred from the baby’s tooth to the dog’s). Lots of objects are labelled ‘curious object, use unknown’.

  Another room is filled with piles of forceps to assist in birth; another with large glass storage bottles from pharmacies (one was for leeches). There was a cupboard with intricate Japanese memento moris (reminders that we all will die and to seize life with both hands), and a little ivory skeleton leaning on an alarm clock. I looked at a shelf lined with tiny ivory seventeenth-century anatomical figures. They were all lying flat, and I lifted their tummies off to reveal their insides. Particularly unsettling was a shelf crammed with prosthetic limbs, including a hand with a Bible on the end, and another with a scrubbing-brush attachment.

  We came across the archives of Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic, and artefacts that belonged to Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and father of germ theory. There were items used by Pasteur in his study of anthrax, and some of his earliest preparations for quinine, dating back to 1820. Pretty much anything you could think of related to the history of medicine is in one of the rooms inside the Wellcome labyrinth. If you can’t find it, maybe it is still waiting to be unpacked.

  Of all the objects I saw, I liked a rattle made of cane and puffin beaks the most. It is unlike anything else in the collection, and stood out, even from its nest inside a drawer. It seemed to be filled with life and spirit. At first I had no idea what it was, so I asked Selina, and she told me it was a rattle made by the Haida people, and would have belonged to a shaman.

  The Haida are the indigenous people of Haida Gwaii (‘Islands of the People’), a group of islands off the coast of Canada, which, until 2010, were known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. Their name for a shaman is ‘sGaaga’. The sGaaga is both a medical doctor and a faith healer. The Haida describe the sGaaga as people with a direct line to God. They turn to them in times of sickness and uncertainty or when they want to know the future or explain the past.

  The sGaaga would have made this rattle (some time between 1890 and 1935) after collecting puffin beaks from the shore. Puffins shed their bright orange bills in winter and re-grow them come spring. Without its bill, a puffin looks funny, it has a little pointed beak instead of the rainbow splendour we’re used to seeing. Usually, they hide out at sea at this time of year, so humans rarely see them in this state.

  Puffins were symbolic for the sGaaga, because the birds dive into the water and disappear into another realm; shaking a rattle made from their beaks symbolized moving to another level of existence. The beaks were tied to circles of wood representing a cosmic doorway. The rattle would have been one of a pair and used only by a shaman.

  Selina told me that, in 2009, 12 Haida people came to the Wellcome Collection to look at the puffin bill rattle, as well as two other items made by their people: a pipe and a comb for brushing cloth. Both are made of a rock called argillite, found only on Graham Island in Haida Gwaii. If you see something made of argillite, it was made by the Haida, because they are the only people who use it. The 12 Haida crammed into the tiny room I saw the rattle in, within Blythe House. Selina told me, ‘Their reaction to the rattle was really mixed; the younger generation were quite happy to pick it up and play with it, but the older generation wouldn’t go anywhere near it because it has such a spiritual significance.’

  I checked in with Vince Collinson, a representative of the Haida people who visited the Wellcome archive. He explained, ‘The rattle was originally used by sGaaga, which would explain our elders’ hesitancy and some of our young people’s lack of hesitancy, as there are no “old style” sGaaga left today, so they can’t understand their powers. The last person in Skidegate (a Haida community on Haida Gwaii) who was operated on by a sGaaga passed away in 2007.’

  Vince told me of another dimension to their visit to England. Some museums in England have other artefacts belonging to the Haida, including some of their ancestors’ bones. The Haida Repatriation Committee is working to bring home these treasures so the souls of the ancestors can be laid to rest and the Haida nation healed. Vince explained, ‘We have a very close attachment to the land of Haida Gwaii. The water, animals, birds, thos
e are our identity, our business card. We believe the souls of the dead don’t rest in peace if their bones are not left in their homeland.’

  He told me that, following the visit in which they looked at this beautiful puffin rattle, a Haida ancestor held in the Pitt Rivers Museum for over a hundred years was repatriated and reburied in August 2010, a process initiated over ten years earlier by the Haida. ‘It was truly a momentous, historic day of healing for both the Haida and the British.’ This was not the first time ancestors had been given back to their people. Between 1992 and 2004, the remains of 460 of their ancestors were brought back to Haida Gwaii. An ‘End of Mourning’ ceremony was held on the islands in 2006, in which their souls were released to Gaahlandaay Tllgaay (Spirit Land). The Haida are hopeful that many of their belongings – and not just their ancestors’ bones will be returned to them. Nika Collinson of the Ts’aahl Eagle Clan explained how important is it that Haida treasures are restored to them. ‘As Haida treasures return home, elders come to see them … as [the elders] remember, they begin to talk, bringing the history, use and stories of these treasures out of concealment and passing this knowledge on to the next generations to learn from. Without the return of these cultural materials, so much of this knowledge would not come to the surface and subsequently would not be passed on.’

  There were once tens of thousands of Haida people. When Europeans arrived on the islands, this number quickly fell to fewer than 1,000, because of introduced diseases, including measles, typhoid and smallpox. Today, there are around 5,000 Haida, around 2,000 of whom live in Haida Gwaii, with others in Prince Rupert, the lower mainland of British Columbia, Seattle and Alaska.

  The Haida are known for their tall totem poles, which they call ‘monumental poles’ – or ‘gyaagang.Ngaay’ in Haida. They say the first pole carvers were inspired by and learned from a pole they saw standing out in the ocean. The monumental poles are carved from red cedarwood, and it takes a year to create each one. The totem poles were used to tell stories, to mark important events, to show status and to mock people. This still goes on. In 2007, a shaming totem pole was put up in Alaska featuring the upside-down head of the ex-CEO of the oil company Exxon. The totem pole was made to express anger over the unpaid debt the company owes for the Exxon Valdez oil spillage of 1989. In England, in Windsor Great Park, near Windsor Castle, there is a 30-metre-high totem pole made in 1958 from a 600-year-old tree felled on Haida Gwaii. It was given to the Queen to commemorate the centenary of the founding of British Columbia.