Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (30 page)

By December, they reached Pitcairn Island, calling in on John Adams, the last of the mutineers of HMS
Bounty,
who had sought refuge on this remote volcanic outcrop several decades earlier. After a few uneventful days in Pitcairn, they left behind the remote reaches of the central Pacific and made their way to a string of idyllic, palm-fringed islands and coral atolls that nowadays lure in legions of sun-seeking holidaymakers. Back when Cuming was there, the only visitors to French Polynesia were whaling ships and the occasional naturalist passing through, as well as the Christian missionaries who came and stayed.

Not everywhere they went were Cuming and Grimwood welcomed by friendly locals and expat missionaries. In some
places they were met with ferocious war dances, blood-curdling yells and displays of menacing weapons. On Temoe Island, in the south-eastern fringes of the Tuamotu archipelago, a clumsy scene unfolded that could have ended in disaster. Cuming and Grimwood, along with four locals hired from a nearby island, were rowing in a small boat towards the beach when two islanders spotted them and dashed down to the water’s edge, spears in hand. It was Captain Grimwood’s idea to frighten them off by firing a few musket shots over their heads; all this did was draw a bigger crowd of shouting, dancing men wearing war helmets topped with feathers, their bodies painted black and white.

Spying a gap in the coral reef on the other side of the lagoon, Cuming’s small crew tried to make their escape but encountered a wide stretch of dry sand and rocks between them and their exit. Their only option was to pick up the boat and scuttle as fast as they could towards open water while the islanders swarmed after them.

Even when they reached the water Cuming and his men were still not in the clear. A wave broke over the side and capsized the boat, scattering their belongings in the sea. Cuming was flipped out of his seat, the boat landed on his leg, knocked him unconscious and he sank to the bottom.

Rescue came from one of their hired hands, who swam down and dragged the sodden Cuming back to the surface. The crew righted the boat, only for Cuming to get washed overboard, and rescued, a second time. The islanders ignored the commotion in the sea because they were too busy fishing out the hats, jackets, oars, collecting baskets and bottles that had fallen from the rowing boat and were floating towards the beach.

It’s quite possible that Cuming and Grimwood were imagining the savagery of the Temoe islanders, and clearly the two groups of people were bemused and confused by what the other was up to. As the visitors limped away using the single emergency oar they found strapped to the boat,
two islanders ran along the beach after them waving the jettisoned oars. They threw the oars in the water and Grimwood ordered a strong-swimming member of the crew to go and fetch them. As he did, one of the islanders also jumped in the water, frightening the boat boy into turning tail and scrambling back to the boat as fast as he could. Cuming left Temoe with a single shell that he had found under a stone and that somehow hadn’t fallen out of his pocket during his multiple dunkings in the sea.

In February 1828, after finding lots of pearl oysters in the lagoon of South Marutea Island, Cuming halted the expedition for a month, built a small house under the palm trees and hired a team of men to dive for pearls. He writes in his journal about several other Pacific lagoons that had already been stripped of their pearls. Nevertheless, his men gathered 40 tonnes of oysters and 27,000 pearls from South Marutea, although they were later deemed to be too small and ugly to have any great value in Europe.

The
Discoverer
called in at several other islands across the Tuamotu archipelago, all of them sandy atolls ringed by limpid lagoons and fringed by coral reefs – Tureia, Nengonengo, Motutunga, Anaa – with Cuming adding to his collections at each one.

By April, Cuming and Grimwood had arrived in Tahiti, where they were welcomed by Queen Pomare. The 15-year-old royal, along with the queen mother and several attendants, all boarded the
Discoverer
. They were accompanied by Mr Kimpson, a local missionary, and while he was there the royal party behaved themselves, genteelly sipping fine Chilean wines and indulging in a little light conversation. But as soon as Mr Kimpson left, things got considerably more lively. Bottle after bottle of wine was drunk and the guests showed no signs of wanting to leave. After dinner, the tipsy queen collapsed in one of the
Discoverer
’s bunks and slept off the partying, while her escorts waited patiently on deck until sunset, at which point the ladies finally left Cuming in peace. The following
day, back on land, the royals had recovered from their hangovers and welcomed Cuming and Grimwood with lavish tropical fruits. They also agreed to the men’s request to halve the normal duty on visiting ships from twelve to six dollars, on account of the
Discoverer
being such a small vessel (although roomy enough for a good knees-up).

Tahiti was the westernmost point on Cuming’s Pacific journey, and it proved to be a treasure trove of shells; his journal records 98 species that he hadn’t already found elsewhere on the trip. Swinging the bows of the
Discoverer
eastwards, they began the 5,000-mile trek back to Chile, stopping off at more islands, and all the while Cuming’s collection continued to grow. By the time they arrived back in Valparaiso in June 1828 they had visited more than 50 islands, weathered only a single storm, met hundreds of missionaries and Pacific islanders, and laid the foundations for a shell collection that would transform the world of conchology.

Cuming continued his explorations on a subsequent voyage along the Pacific coast of Central and South America. Much less is known about this trip since no journal survives, but piecing together a picture from letters he wrote, it is clear that he once again ventured on board the
Discoverer
and followed the course of the Humboldt Current, a cool oceanic river that sweeps up the coast from Chiloé Island in southern Chile to Peru. He continued north into Panama and Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras, then picked up the trail of the Humboldt again as it swings offshore towards the Galápagos Islands, where Cuming arrived some two or three years before Charles Darwin on HMS
Beagle
. The paths of these two men would cross again, and more closely, in the years ahead.

One thing Cuming did differently on this trip compared to the eastern Pacific voyage was to use a dredge, presumably an idea he had brought with him from Devon and his mentor Montagu. Rather than just collecting by hand and
occasionally hiring the services of local skin-divers, Cuming fixed a small dredge behind the
Discoverer
and towed it along to bring up samples from much deeper down. In a letter written years later to Edgar Layard, a fellow collector, Cuming recommended: ‘You must carry with you when you go dredging a fine sieve, a hand bucket, and a large coconut shell.’ The coconut shell was to scoop off the mud and sand, and the sieve to gently sift out the shells, including tiny specimens that were the treasures of the dredge-spoil and otherwise virtually impossible to collect. Cuming also gave instructions on how to prepare shells for transport; one should boil bivalves alive then pick the animals out, and carefully tie their shells closed with a piece of string; gastropods can be left in a glass jar to rot for a month or so, somewhere ‘the stench will not offend’. The snails entirely decompose, leaving their shells ready to be washed clean.

Throughout his Latin American travels, Cuming was assisted by letters of recommendation from Chilean dignitaries that he met along the way and clearly struck up good friendships with; he was also granted exemption from port fees and taxes. However, in Jipijapa in southern Ecuador he did run into a spot of trouble. Cuming was arrested and thrown in jail. Local authorities somehow mistook his little boat for a Peruvian frigate, and didn’t want to take any chances since Peru had recently laid siege to the city of Guayaquil. The incarcerated collector calmly explained that his boat was far too small to be a frigate, and his only scheming was of the molluscan variety. They let him go, shaking their heads in disbelief at his devotion towards such apparently insignificant creatures.

Cuming would begin to discover the true value of his collection on his return to England in 1831. He left Valparaiso and never went back, even though by then his mistress Maria had given birth to a son, Hugh Valentine.

In London, Cuming immediately immersed himself in the gentleman’s world of conchology. From the outset, he
resolved not to write anything about his shells himself; he never described or named a single one. He would leave that to the experts. As he saw it, his role was simply that of collector, to provide material for others to work with.

His collection was always open to any and every naturalist who wanted to use it. He mailed shells to experts in America, he welcomed visitors to his home and he set about a lifelong collaboration with several prominent gentlemen in London.

In February 1832, a selection of Cuming’s shells was put on display at a meeting of the newly formed Zoological Society of London. The shells were accompanied by drawings and written descriptions by George Brettingham Sowerby and William Broderip (the same man who had written about argonauts and ‘fairy boats’ a few years previously). They would become two of Cuming’s most trusted friends. Broderip and Sowerby (later followed by his son and then his grandson, G. B. Sowerby II and III) sat down to describe, draw and name thousands of Cuming’s shells. In 1832 alone, in the pages of the Zoological Society’s journal, Broderip named 247 new mollusc species from the great collection, and he continued to add many hundreds more each year.

A few months after those first species were named, Cuming was elected as a fellow of the Linnaean Society of London, a distinguished institution dedicated to the study and discussion of natural history. It was a triumph for this unschooled boy from Devon, but he was far from finished with his conchological adventures. He spent a few years in London, selling his duplicate shells at auction houses and acquiring new specimens of species he hadn’t already found himself. Then he gave in to his itching feet, and began making plans for a third great journey.

Into the Coral Triangle

Cuming decided to go to the Philippines, a cluster of islands in the far west Pacific that naturalists were just beginning to explore. And it was a perfect destination because, even though
it wasn’t known at the time, this archipelago is crammed with species and many are endemics, found nowhere else on the planet.

The islands lie within a region that has come to be known as the Coral Triangle. A rather misshapen triangle admittedly, it stretches from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the east to Bali, Kalimantan and Sabah in the west and northwards to the Philippines. This is
the
global epicentre for marine biodiversity, home to 40 per cent of all fish species in the world, and three-quarters of all the coral species; in the Coral Triangle, one hectare (2½ acres) of reef (the same area as Trafalgar Square in London) contains more coral species than the whole of the Caribbean Sea. That’s not to mention six of the world’s seven sea turtle species, dozens of marine mammals and a throng of other varieties of life all crammed in together. If an antique map showed where all the sea creatures live, there should be a label pointing to the Coral Triangle saying ‘Here be beasts (
lots
of beasts).’

Scientists are still trying to explain this remarkable phenomenon. Theories include the possibility that the Coral Triangle is a ‘cauldron’ of speciation, where more species have evolved than anywhere else. Equally it could be that fewer species have gone extinct than in other areas. Alternatively, species that evolved elsewhere could have accumulated in the Coral Triangle, either by drifting on ocean currents or by moving with the slow shift of islands on drifting continental plates. A fourth option is that the Coral Triangle is a region of overlap between species in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, like the middle part of a Venn diagram. It’s not known if any of these ideas are correct; perhaps there is no single reason but instead a mix of many different things going on. Even with modern techniques, including genetic analyses looking at how species are related, the puzzle of the Coral Triangle and its outrageous biological riches still remains unsolved.

When Cuming and Grimwood were sailing westwards from Chile into the Pacific, they were following a gradient of increasing diversity; the closer they approached the Coral Triangle, the more species they were likely to encounter. Arriving in the Philippines, Cuming had jumped right into the middle of things. Around 3,500 species of marine molluscs are known to live in these islands. Add in the undiscovered species and the estimated total reaches 15,000 in shallow waters, with another 20,000 deeper down, plus many thousands more on land. Cuming was not going to have any trouble finding new and interesting molluscs in the Philippines.

In January 1836, Cuming set sail for Manila, although not on board the
Discoverer
; for this voyage, he would island-hop in relative comfort as a guest of the Spanish government, who at that time ruled the Philippines. Spanish priests around the islands provided him with places to stay, large boats to sail on and hordes of eager schoolchildren, who were conscripted to his collecting efforts.

Few details are known about the three and a half years Cuming spent in the Philippines. He did write a journal but, as we will see, there are no known copies. Letters to friends and scientists back in Europe, and accounts of his life written by those who knew him, give a few vignettes into his time in the region.

As in his previous journeys, local residents in the Philippines were puzzled by what Cuming was up to. They wondered why this gentleman from Europe paid people to find shells for him (most white men took money
away
from them). And why did he sit up late into the night cleaning and sorting the shells? Cuming tried and failed many times to explain the enthusiasm back in his home country for collecting natural history specimens. In the Philippines, Cuming saw people had a rather different use for shells: they burnt and crushed them, mixed them with betel nut, wrapped them in leaves and chewed them (betel nut remains
the fourth most widely used drug around the world, especially in Asia, after nicotine, alcohol and caffeine; the burnt shells produce calcium hydroxide, which helps extract the active chemicals in the nut). Eventually Cuming gave in and told people he was planning to sell his shells to Europeans who had the same nut-chewing habits.