Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture: Commodifying the Ocean World 9781501352782, 9781501352812, 9781501352799

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Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture

Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design Series Editors Charissa N. Terranova (University of Texas at Dallas, USA) Meredith Tromble (San Francisco Art Institute, USA) Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design publishes books about the history, theory and practice of art and design as they comingle with the natural sciences. The series title reclaims the Greek meanings of the roots bios, conveying life, the living or citizen-life and techne, conveying art, skill or craft. Biotechne thus names the folding of ‘art’ and ‘science’ into complex and hybrid practices that transcend a human-centred ‘engineering’ worldview. ‘Interthinking,’ a neologism invented by art and science visionary György Kepes, describes knowledge informed by ecological, systemic and cybernetic connections, defining the active engagement among fields central to the Biotechne series. This engagement is the source of the cultural creativity and resourcefulness necessary to thrive in the rapidly changing world conditions of the Anthropocene. Biotechne welcomes proposals treating art and design subjects from any time period, antiquity to the present, which speak directly to these contemporary concerns. We seek inventive, cross-pollinating works about the arts and their engagement with sciences from astrobiology to zoology, wherever that engagement occurs, in art or design studios, scientific laboratories, natural habitats, the museum and gallery worlds, performance spaces, medical practices and the political realm. By identifying significant intersections of art, humanities and science, and tracking rigorous paths through the cross-disciplinary information jungle, Biotechne serves audiences of both experts and lay readers while substantiating the role of aesthetic insight within the natural sciences. Advisory Board James P. Crutchfield, Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California at Davis, and President, Art and Science Laboratory, USA Deboleena Roy, Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (NBB), Emory University, USA Sha Xin Wei, Director of the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering, Arizona State University in Phoenix, USA Titles in the Series D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture: From Forces to Forms, edited by Ellen K. Levy and Charissa N. Terranova (2021) Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation and Queer Feminist Technoscience, edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (forthcoming)

Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture Commodifying the Ocean World Edited by Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins, 2023 Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xvii–xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Visitors at the Asakusa-koen Aquarium. Fuzoku Gaho 風俗画報 204, 1900. Frontispiece. Kansai University Library. Unknown illustrator. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5278-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5279-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-5280-5 Series: Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements 1

Commodifying the Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century  Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins

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1

Part One  Wave: Circulating Marine Products 2 3 4 5

Scent from the Sea: Ambergris in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Medicine, Perfume and Natural History  Georgina Cole Imperial Coral: The Transformation of a Natural Material to a Qing Imperial Treasure  Pippa Lacey Echoes of Empire: The Painted Museums of Leroy de Barde  Jessica Priebe ‘Native Manufactures’: Sailors’ Valentines and the Caribbean Curio Trade  Molly Duggins

21 39 61 81

Part Two  Shore: Coastal Economies and Ecologies 6 7 8 9

Reading the Wrack Line: Ecology and Visual Culture on the French Atlantic Shore  Maura Coughlin An Intense Curiosity: Marine Research Stations and Marine Specimens in the Late Nineteenth Century  Jude Philp The Tears of Pearls: Archaic Labour, Fisheries and Waste in Ceylon and Beyond  Natasha Eaton Culture Keeping and Money Making: Aboriginal Women’s Shellwork from the South Coast of New South Wales  Priya Vaughan

101 121 139 153

Part Three  Seabed: Materializing Submarine Environments 10 Their ‘Colours are Brilliant, but Fugitive’: Coral Concerns from Imperial Expeditions and the British Museum to the Royal Academy and Drury Lane  Kathleen Davidson

173

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11 Aquariums Under the Rising Sun: A Cultural History of Early Public Aquariums in Japan, 1882–1903  Yuichi Mizoi 12 Merging the University Museum and Volksbildung: The Curatorial Strategies of Berlin’s Museum für Meereskunde in 1900  Stefanie Lenk

191 209

Part Four  Oceanic Objects: Museum Case Studies 13 ‘An Imitation of Seaweed’: Nature and Design in a Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Cotton  Ann Christie 14 Fashioning Whalebone: Scrimshaw and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition of the Decorative Busk  Martha Cattell 15 The Ornamental Glass Window of the Maison de l’Océan in Paris: A Celebration of Evolution  Jacqueline Goy and Robert Calcagno 16 Trade Connections: The Acquisition of Blaschka Marine Invertebrate Models in Australia and New Zealand  Jan Brazier Bibliography Index

237 243 249 255 264 293

­List of Illustrations Plates   1 ‘Specimens of Articles in Common Use’, Great Britain, c. 1830, one tray from a wooden box containing 141 specimens, 16.0 × 25.0 × 9.0 cm overall. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund   2 Crystal snuff bottle with a coral twig stopper, Qing Dynasty, nineteenth century, 8.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 50.145.180a,b. Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950   3 Alfred Concanen, ‘Lounging in the Aq’, c. 1880, colour lithograph, 36.0 × 25.5 cm. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, S.444–2012   4 ‘Flowers of the Sea’, late nineteenth century, shells, seaweeds, corallines, decals, paint, ink, paper, 72.5 × 59.0 × 8.0 cm. Australian National Maritime Museum, 00055180. ANMM Collection Gift from Jean Piggott (née Walker) and John Walker on behalf of the Walker family ancestors   5 Ambergris, nineteenth century, 5.5 × 7.3 × 6.0 cm, 50 gm. Australian National Maritime Museum collection, 00006547   6 Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, ‘The Whale’, plate XIII in Graphic Illustrations of Animals, Showing Their Utility to Man, in their Services during Life and Uses after Death, London, 1850, coloured lithograph. © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum   7 Portrait of Express Xiaoxian (detail), Qianlong Period (1736–1795), 1777 with later repainting, Ignatius Sichelbarth (Ai Qimeng), Yi Lantai, and possibly Wang Ruxue. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 251.8 × 115.5 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, E33619, Gift of Mrs Elizabeth Sturgis Hinds, 1956. Photography by Walter Silver   8 Red coral ruyi sceptre, Qing Dynasty, eighteenth century, red coral, 27.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 02.18.623d. Gift of Heber R. Bishop, 1902   9 Alexandre Isidore Leroy de Barde, A Selection of Shells Arranged on Shelves, 1803, watercolour and gouache on paper glued to canvas, 125.0 × 90.0 cm. D.A.G. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photography by Gérard Blot

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10 Sarah Stone, Shells, 1781, watercolour painted over underdrawing in black pencil on paper, 43.0 × 58.0 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © NGA 11 ‘Souvenir from Barbados’, c. 1884–9, Barbados, seashells, seeds, cedarwood, glass and bronze, 23.2 × 45.0 × 3.5 cm. The Mariners’ Museum and Park, 1987.07.01 12 Fish-scale ornament, Barbados, 1881, fish scales, wire, fabric, beads. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, AP.36–1881 13 Jules Breton, The Washerwomen of the Breton Coast, 1870, oil on canvas, 135.3 × 201.3 cm. Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering 14 Elodie La Villette, The Beach at Lohic and the Souris Isle, near Lorient, Slack Tide, 1876. © Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, Photography by P. Guenat 15 Salvatore Lo Bianco (preparator), Holothuria tubulosa. Courtesy of the Stazione Zoological Anton Dohrn Napoli (SZN), ECN010. Photography by Akira Kihara 16 Euastacus serratus (now recognized as Euastacus spinifer, Heller, 1865), one of a series of wax teaching models showing the growth of the Australian freshwater crayfish. Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney. SC2001.42.13 17 Eye in a crescent-shaped setting, early nineteenth century, watercolour on ivory, half pearls, glass cover sealed to ivory by gold beaters skin. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, P.55–1977 18 Pair of model slippers, 1951–2, shells and fabric, La Perouse, New South Wales, Australia. Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Gift of Phyllis Steain, 1987. Photography by Michael Myers 19 Samuel Calvert, ‘Will You Buy? Engraved from the Picture by N. Chevalier, in the possession of Mr J. M. Bruce, Melbourne. Supplement to “The Illustrated Australian News”, November 1883’, colour wood-engraving by Charles Troedel & Co. in the album Illustrated Australian News Proof Plates, 1880–3, 41.9 × 30.0 × 5.5 cm overall. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, PXE 867 20 Samuel Calvert, ‘What You Give? From a Picture by N. Chevalier, in the possession of Mr. J. M. Bruce, Melbourne. Supplement to “The Illustrated Australian News”, November 1884’. State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. Gift of Troedel & Cooper Pty Ltd 1968 21 Henry Emden, Set model for the ‘City of Coral’ scene in the pantomime Humpty Dumpty, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1903, 47.0 × 90.0. × 52.0 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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22 Fuzoku Gaho 風俗画報 204, 1900, frontispiece. Kansai University Library 23 Dress of block-printed cotton, c. 1800, purple on white fabric designed by William Kilburn, 160 × 70.0 × 70.0 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, T.84–1991 24 Scrimshaw stay busk, 1780–1880, whalebone, 36.6 × 6.1 cm. Courtesy of the Hull Maritime Museum, Hull 25 Window, Maison de l’Océan, Paris, n.d., glass and lead. Courtesy of the Institut Océanographique, Monaco 26 Leopold Blaschka, Model of the sea anemone Tealia crassicornis (now recognized as Urticina crassicornis), c.1880, glass, 10.0 × 11.0 × 8.5 cm. Australian Museum Archives, AMS582/MA863, Photography by C. Bento 27 Leopold Blaschka, Model of a branch of coral Corallium rubrum, c. 1883, 20.5 × 7.0 × 2.2 cm. Australian Museum Archives, AMS582/MA777. Photography by Stuart Humfreys

F ­ igures 1.1 Philip Henry Delamotte, ‘Preparing case for marine objects’, 1854, albumen silver photograph, 27.0 × 23.0 cm., Photographic Views of the Progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, Crystal Palace Company, London, 1855. British Library. Courtesy of Alamy 2.1 Pomander, 1600–1700, gold filigree enclosing a ball of ambergris, 4.1 × 2.9 × 2.9 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2.2 ‘L’Origine des Parfums’, frontispiece, Simon Barbe, Le Parfumeur Royal, ou L’Art de Parfumer, Paris 1699. The Wellcome Collection 2.3 Attributed to C.H. Wood, scrimshaw whale tooth, 18.0 × 7.5 cm. Australian National Maritime Museum collection transfer from the Wildlife Protection Authority, 00029555 3.1 Official court necklace, Qing Dynasty, nineteenth century, amber, jade, imitation coral, 104.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 02.18.924. Gift of Heber R. Bishop, 1902 3.2 Snuff bottle depicting the immortal Liú Hǎi, Qing Dynasty, late eighteenth–early nineteenth century, porcelain with overglaze enamel colours and coral stopper, 78.0 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.40.569a. Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913 3.3 Penjing bowl with red coral berries and nephrite jade leaves, Qing Dynasty, Qianlong period, nephrite and red coral, 28.6 × 39.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 02.18.742. Gift of Heber R Bishop, 1902

2 24 27

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3.4 Detail of court robe embroidered with coral and pearls, Qing Dynasty, Tongzhi period (1862–74), silk, metallic thread, coral and pearls, 139.7 × 231.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29.36. Gift of Robert E. Tod, 1929 3.5 A pair of carved red lacquer boxes, Qing Dynasty, Qianlong period (1736–95), 10.5 × 20.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 13.100.143a,b and 144a,b. John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913 4.1 Alexandre Isidore Leroy de Barde, Still Life of Prunes, Peaches and a Bird, c. 1797, watercolour on paper, 41.1 × 50.9 cm. D.A.G. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais. Photography by Harry Bréjat 4.2 William Skelton after Sarah Stone and Charles Reuben Ryley, Interior View of the Leverian Museum, Southwark, London, c. 1795, engraved frontispiece. © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd and Alamy 4.3 Alexandre Isidore Leroy de Barde, Crystallized Minerals, 1813, watercolour and gouache on paper glued to canvas, 126.0 × 80.0 cm. D.A.G. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photography by Jean-Gilles Berizzi 4.4 Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, Bullock’s Museum (Egyptian Hall or London Museum), Piccadilly, 1810, coloured aquatint, 12.2 × 19.5 cm. The Wellcome Collection 4.5 Attributed to William Bullock, Exhibit of a Royal Tiger Being Suffocated by a Snake, c. 1814, taxidermy tiger and two snakes fitted together with a wooden head and enclosed in a glass case with artificial plants. Whitaker Museum, Lancashire. © The Whitaker 4.6 Raphael Gaillarde, Director of Louvre Museum, Henri Loyrette Session Portrait in Paris, 10 March 2007, digital photograph. © Getty Images 5.1 ‘Trinket-Seller’, 1899, photoprint from Robert Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico, with the Other Islands of the West Indies (1899). New York Public Library Digital Collections 5.2 ‘Curiosity Shop’, 1893, photoprint from James Stark, Stark’s History and Guide to Barbados and Caribbee Islands (1893). Collection of author 5.3 Charles W. Blackburne, ‘Cooper’s Photo Studio and Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop, Bridgetown, Barbados’, 1897–1912, photo-negative-glass plate, 10.0 × 12.5 × 0.2 cm. International Center of Photography, 2013.81.16. Gift of John Noll in honour of Richard Waldmann 5.4 Centennial Photographic Co., ‘Shellwork from Bahama Islands’, 1876, albumen silver print. J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XC.729.431

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­List of Illustration 6.1 Claude Joseph Vernet, Loading Barrels of Salted Fish at the Port of Dieppe, 1765, Musée de la Marine, Paris. Photography by author, April 2014 6.2 Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Fishwife of Dieppe (Femme de Pêcheur à Dieppe), 1823, oil on paper mounted on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon), © MBA Lyon 6.3 Eugène Isabey, Surroundings of Dieppe, 1833, lithograph from the series Six Marines, published by Victor Morlot, printed by Charles Motte, 26.3 × 32.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art 6.4 Camille Biendiné, Les Quilles en l’Air d’Equihen: Habitations Faites avec la Coque d’un Bateau Retourné. (Equihen’s Keels in the Air: Inverted Ship Hulls as Dwellings), 1906, black and white print from glass plate negative, 18.0 × 24.0 cm. Courtesy of the Archives of the Somme (Archives Départementales de la Somme, S.P.C.P., 35 FI 6848) 6.5 Dieppe: Fishermen’s Homes in the Cliff, early-twentieth-century postcard. Collection of the author 7.1 Ernst Haeckel, ‘Nauphanta Challengeri’, 1880, colour lithograph, plate 27 in Monographie der Medusen (1879–81). Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library 7.2 Detail of the third-floor laboratory, preparation areas and façade, revised floor plan of Naples Marine Station in Charles Atwood Kofoid, Biological Stations of Europe. Bulletin 1910, No. 4, 1910. Freshwater and Marine Image Bank 7.3 Étienne Jules Marey, ‘Mouvements de Natation de la Raie’, La Nature 21.1 (1893). Photography by the author, 2020 7.4 Detail of leaflet advertising the finished Watson’s Bay Marine Station, Sydney. Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney 7.5 A floral display featuring three-dimensional printed ‘coral’ used to repopulate reefs. University of Sydney 8.1 Jahangir Bichitr, Prince Salim, c. 1630, opaque watercolour on paper, Minto Album. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, IM.28–1925 9.1 Maker once known (Australia), Heart-shaped box, c. 1940s, assorted shells, fabric, cardboard, 14.0 × 14.0 × 7.0 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 226.2010. Gift of a private collector, 2010. Photography by Diana Panuccio 10.1 Antony Gepp, ‘Coral Cases’, 20 April 1895, f. 50 in Gallery Photograph Album 1. Natural History Museum, London. Courtesy of Alamy

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10.2 ‘The Coral Finders. Engraved by C.W. Wass from the Picture by W. Etty R.A. in the Possession of the Engraver’, The Art Union, April 1848. State Library of Victoria, Melbourne 11.1 Tsunenobu Fujita 藤田経信 and Sotaro Enomoto 榎本惣太郎, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku 第二回水産 博覧会附属水族館報告, ed. Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce 農商務省水産局 (1898), fig. 2. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency 11.2 Fujita and Enomoto, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku, fig. 3. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency 11.3 Fujita and Enomoto, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku, fig. 1. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency 11.4 The Sakai Aquarium with traditional figures of dolphin-like fish on the roof, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai: Shashin-cho 第5回内国勧 業博覧会―写真帖 (c. 1903), n.p. Kansai University Library 11.5 Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai: Shashin-cho, n.p. Kansai University Library 11.6 Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai: Shashin-cho, n.p. Kansai University Library 11.7 Office of the Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Sakai Aquarium 第五回内国勧業博覧会堺水族館事務所, ed. Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Sakai Suizokukan Zukai 第五回内国勧業博覧会 堺水族館図解 (1903), 32–3. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency 12.1 Copy of the bridge of the liner ‘Braunschweig’, Reichs-Marinesammlung, Museum für Meereskunde. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q II.36 12.2 View into the seafaring section and whaling section of the Focke Museum in Bremen. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q IX.23 12.3 Room I on the history of the German navy, Reichs-Marinesammlung, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q II.9 12.4 Replica of a first-class cabin, room 1, history and economics collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q III.13 12.5 Working model of a ship model basin in room 6, history and economics collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q III.19a

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­List of Illustration 12.6 Diorama of the coral reef off the Sinai, room 13, biology collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q VII.20a 12.7 Alcoholarium, ecological display of the seabed nearby Helgoland in 25 metres depth, biology collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q VII.35 12.8 Room 17, oceanography collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q V.5a 12.9 Wave generator after A. du Bois Raymond, room 17, oceanography collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q V.15 13.1 Detail of fabric design by William Kilburn. Printed cotton. England, c.1790. T.84-1991. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 14.1 Detail of whaling scene, scrimshaw stay busk, 1780–1880, whalebone, 36.6 × 6.1 cm. Courtesy of the Hull Maritime Museum, Hull 15.1 ‘Institut Océanographique de Paris’, 1911, photogravure, Librairie Centrale d’Art et d’Architecture: L’Architecture au XXe Siecle. Courtesy of the Institut Océanographique, Monaco

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­Notes on Contributors Jan Brazier is Curator of History, Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum, at the University of Sydney. Before joining the then Macleay Museum, she was archivist at the Australian Museum, Sydney. Her research interests are in the history of museums and photography in nineteenth-century Australia. Robert Calcagno is Government Advisor, Ministry of Equipment, Environment and Urban Planning for the Principalité of Monaco. Since 2009, he has been Chief Executive Officer of the Institut Oceanographique, Fondation Albert Ier, Prince de Monaco. He organizes and chairs international meetings towards mobilizing political and socio-economic actors and creating synergies with the scientific community for Marine Protected Areas, protection of endangered species and sustainable ocean management. He is head of the Monaco Exploration Campaign around the globe, undertaken with the purpose of reconnecting humankind with the sea. He is also the author of many books for the general public. Martha Cattell is a researcher and creative practitioner, whose PhD, University of York, explored the ethics of visual representations of the whaling industry. She has been awarded visiting scholarships at New Bedford Whaling Museum and Yale Center for British Art. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions around related topics, including Turner & the Whale, Hull Maritime Museum (2017), contributing chapters for the accompanying publication; Here be Whales, Left Bank Leeds and Hull Maritime Museum (2019); Refuse/Refuge (2018), an exploration into the role of visual politics in shaping the public’s reactions to the refugee crisis; Animal Hauntings (2020), Scarborough Art Gallery. Ann Christie is a freelance researcher in the history of design with a particular interest in the persistence of craft skills in factory production. She graduated in 2010 from the MA programme in History of Design at the Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum, and recent research includes the Norwich textile industry and the London silversmith Edward Barnard and Sons. Georgina Cole specializes in eighteenth-century art and intellectual history, with a particular interest in the senses. She has recently published articles on representations of blindness in the work of George Romney and Nathaniel Hone and is presently working on the cultural history of ambergris. Her research has been supported with fellowships and grants from the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She is currently Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the National Art School and a member of the International Advisory Board of British Art Studies.

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Maura Coughlin is Teaching Professor, Northeastern University. For the past decade, her interdisciplinary research and publications have focused on the visual and material culture of the Brittany and Normandy shorelines, with particular interest in ecological relationships and women’s mourning practices in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ­ athleen Davidson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney. K She has been awarded fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art (2014) and University of Texas, Austin (C.P. Snow Visiting Fellow, 2012–13). Recent publications include ‘Speculative Viewing: Victorians’ Encounters with Coral Reefs’, Victorian Environments (2018); Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-Century Museum: Exchanging Views of Empire (2017); ‘Photography and the Triumph of Science in European Vision and the South Pacific’, The Legacies of Bernard Smith (2016); ‘Colonial Science and Photographic Portraits’, The Photograph and Australia (2015). Previously, she was Curator of International Photography, National Gallery of Australia. Molly Duggins is a lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory, National Art School, Sydney. She has been awarded fellowships at the Strong National Museum of Play (2015), Yale Center for British Art (2021, 2012) and State Library of New South Wales (2022, 2011). Recent publications include ‘Pacific Ocean Flowers: Colonial Seaweed Albums’, The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (2017); ‘“The World’s Fernery”: New Zealand and Nineteenth-Century Fern Fever’, New Zealand’s Empire (2015) and ‘“Which Mimic Art Hath Made”: Crafting Nature in the Victorian Book and Album’, Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists’ Books and the Natural World (2014). Natasha Eaton is Reader in the History of Art, University College London, and is currently a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. Her research focuses primarily on British and Indian art, notions of cross-cultural exchange and material culture. Her current projects include art and indenture in the Indian Ocean; collecting and empire; the agency of light in empire. She has published three monographs – Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765–1860 (2013); Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation (2013); and Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia: Vertiginous Exchange (2020). Jacqueline Goy holds a Doctor of Science and is an affiliate of the Oceanographic Institute, Monaco. She began her career at the National Museum of Natural History, Paris, researching jellyfish in the Mediterranean then in different oceans by taking part in scientific campaigns as far as the Antarctic. She collaborated on the Traité de Zoologie of P.P. Grassé, and has published numerous works, in particular the manuscript of the Méduses de Péron et Lesueur. Pippa Lacey is a postdoctoral researcher. Her PhD in Art History, University of East Anglia, examined the trade and uses of shanhu, red coral, in Qing dynasty China. Her research explores the construction of identity and status through material culture, focusing on coloured materials. Her publications include ‘The Coral Network: The

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Trade of Red Coral to the Qing Imperial Court in the Eighteenth Century’, The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (2016). She is a curatorial researcher for the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and a trustee of the Costume & Textile Association. Stefanie Lenk is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Göttingen. She works on religious art and material culture in the late antique and medieval Western Mediterranean. She also has a strong interest in the history of university museums and curatorial practices with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. Stefanie has worked as Empires of Faith project curator at the British Museum and curated the international exhibition Imagining the Divine. Art and the Rise of World Religions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (2017–18). Yuichi Mizoi is a professor at Kansai University, Faculty of Letters, General Department of Humanities. His interest has focused on cultural history, combined with the study of human-animal relationships. His publications cover various subjects such as zoos, aquariums, cabinets of curiosities and folktales. Suizokukan no bunka-shi: Hito dobutsu mono ga orinasu majutsu-teki sekai (The Exhibition of Oceans: The Cultural History of Public Aquariums in Europe, the United States and Japan), one of his latest books, received the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 2018. Jude Philp has been the senior curator at Sydney University’s Macleay Museum for the past ten years. Prior to this, she worked in the anthropology divisions at the Australian Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, where she also undertook her PhD. Her research centres on nineteenthcentury collections and cultural interactions of people from the Torres Strait and southeast coastal Papua New Guinea. Jessica Priebe is a lecturer in art history, National Art School, Sydney. She is a former research fellow in Enlightenment Studies, Sydney Intellectual History Network. A specialist in eighteenth-century visual and material culture, her research interests include collecting, museum studies and Caribbean decorative arts. She is the author of François Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France (2021). Her essays appear in British Art Studies (2021), PMC Notes (2021), Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (2021), The Journal of the History of Collections (2016) and Un Abrégé du Monde: Savoirs et Collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville (2012). Priya Vaughan uses visual art and material culture as a frame through which to explore Australian cultures, experiences, ideologies, identities and histories. Priya is a postdoctoral fellow at the Black Dog Institute, University of New South Wales and a lecturer at the National Art School, Sydney.

A ­ cknowledgements The initial suggestion for this collaborative project came from Tim Barringer, Yale University, who has been a generous advocate of the work of both co-editors. Several chapters in this volume are developed from papers presented in the ‘Sea Currents: The 19th-Century Ocean World’ session at the Annual Conference of the Association for Art History held at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2014. These have been augmented by further essays and object studies. We wish to thank all our conference panel participants and contributors to this volume for their incomparable dedication to the project. The book’s progress from conference to publication has been supported through grants from the Association for Art History, which assisted with travel costs for the co-editors to participate in the 2014 AAH Conference as panel co-convenors, and the National Art School, Sydney, which assisted with the costs of producing the book’s colour plate section. We are grateful to our colleagues at the University of Sydney and the National Art School, Sydney, who have been inspirational, encouraging and patient, and provided valuable feedback during the development of this publication, especially Mary Roberts, Anita Callaway, Vanessa Smith, Michael Hill, Simon Cooper and the NineteenthCentury Interdisciplinary Study Group. This book draws on numerous collections and has benefited from the assistance of object curators and other collection specialists. Our express thanks to Elizabeth Fairman, formerly at the Yale Center for British Art; Emily Jateff, Linda Moffatt, and Myffany Bryant, Australian National Maritime Museum; Jude Philp and Jan Brazier, Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum; the State Library of New South Wales; State Library of Victoria; Australian Museum, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales; National Gallery of Australia; Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney; Victoria and Albert Museum; Tate Gallery; British Library; Wellcome Collection; Whitaker Museum, Lancashire; Hull Maritime Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York Public Library; International Center of Photography, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum; Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, Winterthur, Delaware; Mariners’ Museum and Park, Newport News, Virginia; Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering; Musée du Louvre; Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; Archives Départementales de la Somme; Institut Océanographique, Monaco; Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency; Kansai University Library; Naples Marine Station; Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin. At Bloomsbury, we wish to thank our commissioning editor, Margaret Michniewicz, former Visual Arts Acquisitions Editor, and also the Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design series editors, Charissa N. Terranova and Meredith Tromble,

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for seeing potential in this volume, and, subsequently, the Bloomsbury editorial and production staff who provided guidance along the way. Thanks also to our anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and constructive suggestions. Finally, on a personal note, we want to acknowledge our families for their unfailing love and forbearance throughout our Sea Currents project. Willa, Edie, Jason and Ashley, this book is for you.

­1

Commodifying the Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins

Two men take a break from their work preparing a display case for marine objects so as to pose before a camera (Figure  1.1).1 The resulting photograph, taken by Philip Henry Delamotte for his series documenting the construction of the relocated Crystal Palace at Sydenham during 1852–4, effortlessly encapsulates the intersecting realms of art, science and culture during the long nineteenth century.2 Similarly, its subject exemplifies popular representations of the ocean world in this period and its transformation into numerous commodities for a global audience of consumers. Delamotte’s masterly composition depicts the ocean floor surrounded by a large wooden picture frame which, itself, is exhibited within the vast glass showcase of the Crystal Palace. The presence of the men amid their labours – the seated figure most likely James Bowerbank, prominent naturalist and a pioneer of the aquarium – creates a tableau vivant of the sea’s depths under construction and readied to be populated with marine specimens so arranged as to ensure their visual appeal and educational interest.3 The Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park advises that this display, located within ‘The New World’ section of the Palace’s natural history department, is ‘a case of West Indian marine objects, exhibited in order to afford an idea of the nature of the sea bottom in that region’.4 This rare group of molluscs, corals and sponges was from Bowerbank’s collection, which he had offered to lend to the Crystal Palace and to oversee its installation. Strewn about the men’s feet are pieces of bedrock – selected and hewn to create this diorama of the ocean floor – along with sundry other materials and natural history specimens. A casual survey of the guide to the Sydenham Crystal Palace and that of its forerunner, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (1851), reveals the abundance and breadth of marine products, organisms and associated scientific investigations represented in nineteenth-century visual and material culture, which today are preserved in a diversity of collections. Among the myriad contents of a nondescript mid-nineteenth-century wooden box in the Yale Center for British Art, for instance, are a number of items derived from the ocean, including whalebone, spermaceti, isinglass, mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, sponge, coral and seaweed (Plate 1).5 Labelled, ‘Specimens of articles in common use’, the box was compiled

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Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture

Figure  1.1  Philip Henry Delamotte, ‘Preparing case for marine objects’, 1854, albumen silver photograph, 27.0 × 23.0 cm, Photographic Views of the Progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, Crystal Palace Company, London, 1855. British Library. Courtesy of Alamy.

as a teaching aid subscribing to Pestalozzian principles of education that advocated learning through looking, a visual strategy spectacularly materialized in the panoply of object lessons on display at the Great Exhibition.6 The collection is arranged in three removable trays lined with numbered compartments corresponding to a handwritten list in an accompanying booklet; largely animal and vegetable in nature, the specimens are illustrative of raw and processed natural materials from Britain and its colonies employed in Victorian manufacturing. Products of the lucrative whaling industry, whalebone (article 5) provided an armature in women’s corsets and hooped skirts, while spermaceti (article 6), a substance found in the head cavity of the sperm whale, was used in candles, ointments and lubricants. Obtained from fish bladders, isinglass (article 8) was a common ingredient in confectionary, glue and beer-making. Prized for their ornamental value, mother-of-pearl (article 14), tortoiseshell (article 16) and coral (article 26) were used in the decorative arts and for personal adornment. Bleached coral was also important for agricultural lime and as a building material. Sponges (article 25) had a plethora of applications: they were employed as a general cleaning aid; in personal hygiene and as a contraception; in surgery to administer medicine, absorb fluids and dress wounds; in the military to clean the barrels of artillery pieces; and in the artisanal practices

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of painting, tanning, printing and metalwork as an indispensable, multipurpose implement. Seaweed (article 104) was a similarly ubiquitous ocean product that was used as a form of nutrition and a fertilizer, while its extracts produced soda ash (sodium carbonate), bromine and iodine, which were widely applied in the industrial arts.7 Waxy and opaque, rubbery and gelatinous, iridescent and gem-like, these specimens on display reveal the diversity of marine material culture – from the mundane to the marvellous – that infiltrated Victorian daily life. While the ocean products featured in this specimen box were acquired through international networks of maritime trade and industry, their use and value were culturally specific. Mediterranean red coral (Corallium rubrum), for example, believed to have talismanic and medicinal powers in Europe, was also highly esteemed at the Qing imperial court (1644–1911) where it was considered one of the ‘eight precious things’, a group of Chinese motifs representing auspiciousness and prosperity. Imported coral was incorporated by Chinese craftsmen into a broad range of sacred, martial and decorative objects, as exemplified in a Qing-dynasty crystal snuff bottle embellished with a delicately painted aquatic scene and topped with a coral twig stopper (Plate 2).8 The European habit of snuff-taking was introduced into China during the early Qing period and was well established during the nineteenth century. Such snuff bottles functioned as material emissaries within the nuanced culture of gift and diplomatic exchange at the Qing court. Pearl shells (Guwan), the predominant source of mother-of-pearl, were similarly part of a traditional currency and exchange network integral to the Yawuru, Karajarri, Bardi-Djawi and Worrorra peoples of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Custodians of the engraved pearl shell (Riji), these communities traded shell parcels for millennia along routes that stretched over a vast area of Australia. Ornaments worn around the waist or neck suspended from belts or necklaces often woven from human hair, Riji were incised with meandering geometric linework symbolic of seasonal events associated with indigenous cosmologies.9 As the Karajarri and other First Peoples contributed to globalization, Riji were also decorated with figurative designs that catered to colonial economies and growing international audiences. Nineteenthcentury marine products were thus both local and global; inflected with localized significance, through their transnational exchange they were imbricated in cultures around the globe.10 Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture focuses on such marine material culture – its circulation in networks of knowledge and trade, and its shifting currency in regimes of value and taste – in the long nineteenth century. It takes as its starting point the European mania for shells acquired from East and West Indian trade and its entanglement with rocaille design exemplified in Albertus Seba’s Thesaurus published in 1758. This shell craze coincided with the peak of the coral network from the Mediterranean to China epitomized in the Qianlong Emperor’s sumptuary decree in 1759 to limit coral ornamentation to the imperial family. From Cook’s voyages in the 1770s to the growth of the whaling industry in Britain and North America in the 1780s following the revolutionary wars, Sea Currents traces the development of marine sciences and the commodification of marine products across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the nineteenth century during the height of the industrial revolution

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and imperial expansion. It concludes with the establishment of nationalist institutions of oceanography and marine sciences in Germany, France, Monaco and Japan in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the heyday of the international pearl market fuelled by Asian and Australian pearling industries in the 1910s. Foregrounding the materiality, cultural entanglements and exchange value of marine flora and fauna, Sea Currents is anchored in Arjun Appadurai’s seminal study on commodification, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986), which urges scholars to ‘follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories’.11 Applying Appadurai’s conceptual framework of commodification to the global turn in the humanities, Sea Currents addresses the intersection between global history and material culture. In doing so, it builds upon the analytical model set forth in Anne Gerritson and Giorgio Riello’s The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (2016).12 Examining networks of commodity exchange between Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia through a historical lens, Gerritson and Riello consider how the social lives of things in the early modern period transcended national geographies. Extending this scope of analysis to the long nineteenth century, Sea Currents tracks the movement of marine products through extraction, harvesting, manufacturing and deployment within the overlapping spheres of science and industry, commerce and colonialism, art and spectacle, culminating in the banal wonder of the material world presented in miniature in the specimen box. Reorienting such material history to the oceanic rather than the terrestrial world, this volume hones in on Allan Sekula’s critical observation that ‘the sea always exceeds the limits of the frame’, positing the ocean as central to globalist discourse.13 Following in the wake of Sekula’s Fish Story (1995), Sea Currents contributes to the developing interdisciplinary field of the blue humanities, which envisions the connected systems of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans not only as a matrix for market capitalism, a critical theatre of social relations and an active agent of aesthetic experiences, but also as an expansive relational domain that challenges the constraints of imperial and nationalist frameworks.14 Mobile and unmoored, the vantage points of marine space not only provide a globalist perspective, but also offer a decolonizing approach to the investigation of historical material culture previously siloed in narratives of empire and nationhood. In its obscure expanse and depths, the ocean, furthermore, is a space obstinately resistant to the humanist paradigm, despite the extensive human impact on marine lifeforms and environments. Responding to the mounting evidence of climate change, Sea Currents draws upon increasing environmental and ecological concerns interwoven into the blue humanities, coupled with the revival of materialist ontologies, which contest anthropocentric frameworks of analysis.15 Emphasizing the materiality of the sea, it conceives of the ocean as a nexus of physical spaces crossing human and nonhuman worlds, encompassing diverse littoral contact zones, interconnected traversed surfaces and fluid submarine ecosytems.16 Moreover, Sea Currents acknowledges that liquidity is a factor affecting not only the spatial parameters of the sea but also its chronology. The legacy of the nineteenth-century commodification of the ocean

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world continues to impact ocean ecologies, while transnational, cross-cultural and interspecies marine environments have become critical, multivalent sites of the Anthropocene, suggesting the sustained relevance of the historical ocean.

Marine Science, Industry and Empire In addressing the intersecting realms of art, science and culture, Sea Currents embraces wide-ranging popular and specialized encounters with marine organisms, materials and environments, and their dissemination through visual and material culture. The nascent marine sciences, in which collections-based research founded in systematics was shifting to laboratory-based research anchored in comparative anatomy and morphology, involved both avocational and professional researchers during much of the nineteenth century.17 This enabled a multiplicity of practitioners to contribute to the formation of new knowledge about the ocean who then circulated their discoveries through a correspondingly wide variety of intellectual and commercial channels. This volume investigates the diverse ways in which this scientific heterogeneity contributed to an expanded repertoire of visual media through which audiences could observe, simulate and physically immerse themselves in aspects of the ocean world. It also considers the junctures between such scientific activity and the development of marine industries, which, while framed within the discourse of empire, were driven by globalizing capitalist currents. Prior to the nineteenth century, the oceans were treated mainly as thoroughfares between trading ports and only sporadically were they considered as spaces to be studied in their own right. As Michael S. Reidy and Helen M. Rozwadowski note: That changed significantly in the nineteenth century, in a transformation of scientific perspective that conformed to the larger geopolitical ambitions of maritime nations. The change required a re-conception of the ocean as a physical and intellectual space full of imperial and commercial significance.18

An example of the gradual change in attitude to a greater interest in the ocean itself as a rich source for scientific and artistic study, and economic importance, was the 1852–61 voyage of the British survey ship, HMS Herald, with its official purpose of surveying the sailing routes between Sydney and California that would lead to more efficient and increased trade during the Australian and North American gold rushes.19 A further objective was to facilitate passage for those engaged in the increasing activities of church missions on the islands of the south-west Pacific. On this expedition, the ship’s artist, James Glen Wilson, produced drawings of fish that complemented other scientific data collected during the journey, and also produced photographs as records of natural history specimens.20 It was not until the voyage of HMS Challenger (1872–6), led by naturalists John Murray and Charles Wyville Thomson on its circumnavigation of the globe, that oceanography became the primary purpose of a major, official expedition. This floating

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laboratory extended marine explorations from the sea surface down to the ocean floor and gathered an unparalleled volume and range of data about the ocean’s features and organisms.21 Concurrently, many other cultures across that vast geographical expanse were producing their own distinct, often divergent, views and knowledge of the ocean and its lifeforms, and utilizing its natural resources.22 These seldom occurred or developed as isolated entities and practices, however, but operated within – or were taken up into – the cross-currents of knowledge production and resource exploitation that distinguished the global nineteenth century. The development and uptake of new visual and display technologies combined with the unprecedented introduction and augmentation of efficient industrial processes – including, for example, the upscaling of glass production, the emergence and popularization of photography, and expansion and enhancement of the illustrated press – allowed researchers to extend their investigations exponentially by expanding their networks across empires and transnationally, creating burgeoning global audiences for their explorations and discoveries. Such technological innovations were not only employed in the institutional sector of museums and universities, but also were promoted in and disseminated through the commercial sphere in lecture halls, zoological gardens, curiosity shops, specialist emporia, natural history publications and illustrated periodicals, ultimately infiltrating the home.23 Propelled along currents of collection and communication, commerce and consumption, nineteenth-century oceanic objects were thus both mobile and malleable; beyond their contribution to scientific research they encountered communities of technicians, artists, manufacturers, marketing and shipping agents, dealers, vendors, lecturers, tourists and amusement seekers who engaged with them through a range of exhibitionary, mercantile and aesthetic frameworks. Some, such as the intricate glass models of marine invertebrates, laboriously crafted by German artisans Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka – and widely marketed – to facilitate the study of fugitive soft-bodied marine invertebrates pioneered by German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, were initially conceived of as drawing-room ornaments in addition to scientific visual aids and, through their transcription into architecture and design, contributed to the evolution of the Art Nouveau style.24 Similarly, the public aquarium was both a structured space for the formal, systematic study of living marine species and a popular site for rational amusement from the 1850s, and soon accommodated other entertainments. The Royal Aquarium and Winter Garden for example – with its glass and iron roof designed to resemble the Crystal Place – opened in 1876 with not only thirteen large display tanks and multiple cisterns supporting an assortment of freshwater and marine organisms but was simultaneously launched as a spectacular new venue for musical and theatrical performances, exhibitions and all-day variety acts such as the aptly named Lounging in the Aq[uarium] (1880) performed by the music-hall star, George Leybourne (Plate 3).25 From Bowerbank’s collection of rare Caribbean marine objects intended for the scientific edification of the British public at the Sydenham Crystal Palace, the aquarium had morphed into a modern urban amenity worthy of the flâneur. The apotheosis of the oceanic extravaganza and its significance for industry and empire was London’s Great International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883.26 This was

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located in South Kensington as near as possible to the site of the Great Exhibition and, at 8.5  hectares (21 acres), was just as immense.27 At the time, it was generally considered to be the most important exhibition held in Britain since 1851, with twentyfive nations and colonies represented and attracting well over two million visitors.28 The exhibition was broad in scope, addressing, for example, marine zoology; sea and freshwater fishing, with displays of fishing gear and craft from different nations; models of harbours, piers and lighthouses; life boats and submarine cables; the economic circumstances of fishermen and their apparel, dwellings and equipment; fish culture; aquaria; and the preparation and preservation of fish. The exhibition made visible an entire economic sector and associated physical space that were normally remote from view, whether it be fishermen labouring across the seas or marine life inhabiting ‘the quiet depths of the ocean’.29 As the official catalogue noted: Everything connected with the industry is, in fact, almost wholly concealed from the view of those not directly employed in carrying it on. Its principal scene of maintenance is on the desolate ocean, out of sight for the most part, not merely of the dwellers upon the shore, but even of the passing ships which traverse the watery wastes.30

Accordingly, the exhibition commissioners – ranging from scientists and museum directors to industrialists and policymakers – sought to bring under one roof for public edification and consumption the breadth of traditional and modern maritime practices, knowledge, infrastructure and equipment from across the British Empire and around the globe, and an astonishing array of natural specimens and commodities originating from the oceans.

Material Transactions and Translations: The Marine Picturesque The material transactions and translations of nineteenth-century marine products were manifold; straddling the intersecting spheres of science, art, industry and trade, they undertook significant cultural work both in the public and private domains. A brief analysis of their deployment in picturesque imagery, one of the most widely circulated artistic genres of the nineteenth century, and one that was intimately entangled in colonial strategies of collecting and displaying natural objects and environments, reveals how the arrangement of marine products was enlisted in domesticating the ocean world. The material legacy of this picturesque trajectory of domestication, from the assemblage of immersive grottos to spectacular aquariums, is embodied in an ornate late-nineteenth-century shell and seaweed collage fashioned into the form of a lyre in the collection of the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) (Plate 4).31 An emblem of nineteenth-century feminine accomplishment, this collaged lyre is indicative of the ornamental education of its maker; the translation of marine materials into an exacting replication of a fashionable neoclassical motif was valued for its tasteful design, skill of execution and harmonious arrangement.32 Composed

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of alternating rows of clam, cockle, scallop, whelk and limpet shells interspersed with feathery branches of coralline algae, the lyre encircles a poem, ‘Flowers of the Sea’, inscribed in medievalist calligraphy, which describes algae as vibrant, submarine floral blooms.33 This metaphor is materialized in the undulating fronds of seaweed embellished with gilded shell rosettes that sprout from the tips of the lyre’s shellencrusted arms. Chromolithographic scraps of bustling maritime craft, including a steamboat, framed with garlands of spirula (Spirula spirula), periwinkle shells and mother-of-pearl surround these lines of verse. Mass-produced, inexpensive colour prints, they offer a glimpse of a commercial seascape in counterpoint to the subaqueous bower, hand-crafted from natural materials, in which they are affixed. An example of Victorian natural fancywork – in which natural materials were incorporated into feminine traditions of textile art and assemblage – marine collage lies at the interstices of natural history and craft practices, which emerged as elite forms of rational amusement in the mid-eighteenth century, and which shared a set of overlapping practices engaged in cleaning, sorting and arranging natural specimens acquired through expanding maritime colonial networks.34 Bringing exotic nature into the domestic sphere, both natural history and natural fancywork made tangible the material accumulation of empire, naturalizing and familiarizing the scientific colonization of foreign specimens through their collection and classification in European museums, as epitomized in Sir Hans Sloane’s encyclopaedic collection which created the foundation for the British Museum collections.35 Geometric conchological displays in cabinets of curiosities and shell-festooned boxes and brackets vied with the proliferation of fluid, organic rococo design indicative of a fluctuating marine epistemology.36 For the natural philosopher and craft practitioner alike, shells, seaweeds and corals were not only specimens and decorations but also romantic consumables, the arrangement of which formed a pleasurable exercise in acculturation and worldmaking exemplified in the assemblage of a grotto.37 As Griffith Hughes, a Welsh clergyman and naturalist stationed in the British West Indian colony of Barbados, opined, ‘What can be more delightful to the Imagination than a Grotto … ? With what truly romantic Ideas must it inspire one, to sit in a Room furnished with the Riches of the most distant Shores and Oceans!’38 Viewed through a romantic lens, oceanic objects not only offered a tangible medium to redefine the shifting parameters of the natural realm, but also embodied fragments of a sublime, once unfathomable, sea that elicited a haptic aesthetic experience.39 The textural surfaces of marine collage evoke a grotto in miniature, providing an intimate framework to contemplate a globalizing ocean world through the artful arrangement of oceanic material culture. With the emergence of the seaside as a site for convalescence in the nineteenth century, grottos morphed into spaces of modern leisure and spectacle, enfolded into the commercialized seascape of coastal tourism, wherein marine objects were consumed en masse by a broadening sector of society.40 Facilitated by developments in steam transport, middle- and working-class Victorians escaped from dense, urban living to become ‘common objects at the sea-side’.41 Their extraction, removal and recontextualization of marine products, including seaweeds, shells, corals and pebbles, enacted the colonial appropriation of natural objects on an individual and

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collective level, embedding nationalist ideologies of empire in everyday experience.42 In developing coastal tourism industries, marine fancywork was produced for the commercial market with designs circulating globally through social exchange, vendor’s catalogues, women’s art manuals and magazines, charity bazaars and exhibitions, contributing to a set of transnational craft practices.43 Colonial iterations represented performative objects of cultural mediation: they engendered European cultural constructs of the ocean and its products, offered an accessible avenue to familiarize local marine environments, were employed to promote emerging local identities, and were creatively adapted and marketed by indigenous communities to support local economies.44 In this commercial context, Victorian marine fancywork became an emblem of the domesticated ocean, rather than a cipher for the exotic and sublime, viewed through the pervasive lens of the picturesque. Mid-century natural history field guides, narrated as diverting coastal tours, eschewed scientific illustration in favour of picturesque scenes of the seashore and seabed framed with rustic rockwork and teeming with diverse marine lifeforms increasingly rendered in dazzling colour.45 Landscapes and specimens were juxtaposed via a scopic pendulum into a pictorial combination of vista and detail, which encouraged a roving, pleasurable consumption of wondrous marine objects made tantalizingly legible. Submarine imagery, in particular, was enfolded into pastoral discourse as revealed in the ‘Flowers of the Sea’ verses inscribed in the ANMM collage, wherein luxuriant seaweed fronds and anemone-like shell rosettes are envisioned as part of a cultivated marine garden ‘nursed by the ocean and rocked by the storms’.46 Marine fancywork, in its emphasis on the selection and arrangement of natural media, offered a material variant of the picturesque’s cut-and-paste landscape. Its collage elements – individual specimens – were combined to form an environmental assemblage, providing a tactile terrain for exploration and reverie. Through such tangibility, the application of the picturesque to marine material culture translated the visual survey of the ocean and its objects into an intimate, multisensory act. A foil to and product of the industrialized nineteenth-century landscape, marine fancywork – along with souvenirs and furnishings bearing marine motifs – invaded the Victorian drawing room, enshrining the domestication of the ocean within the middle-class home.47 Employed to blend art and nature indoors, marine products were incorporated into industrially manufactured décor as an agent of cultural harmonization sanctioned by Victorian tastemakers, as exemplified in James Shirley Hibberd’s Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste (1856).48 Described by Hibberd as ‘an assemblage of delightful and ever-changing pictures’, the aquarium translated the material marine picturesque into a spectacle consonant with the fluidity and dynamism of urban modernity as epitomized in Leybourne’s Lounging in the Aq.49 Within this theatre of glass, which as Judith Hamera has argued appropriated the perceptual allure of the shop window, garden and panorama, marine products were showcased as cultivated and colonized living commodities.50 In vivifying the marine picturesque, the aquarium facilitated the active domestication of aquatic life, and through its daily maintenance, transformed it into an exemplar of domestic industry encoded with imperial, national and gendered ideology.51 At the nexus of scientific, artistic, industrial,

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and technological engagement with the ocean and its objects, the aquarium presented a versatile vehicle for Victorian consumers to mediate a transforming ocean world in microcosm; it brought not only the sea into the home but the home into the sea.

Wave, Shore, Seabed The chapters in Sea Currents include longer contextual essays and shorter object case studies. Arranged into three permeable thematic parts – ‘Wave’, ‘Shore’ and ‘Seabed’ – eleven contextual chapters highlight the interconnectivity, fluidity and diversity of oceanic environments through the examination of circulating marine products; littoral economies and ecologies reliant on such products; and the technologies of representation involved in their embodied display. These are followed by a fourth part, ‘Oceanic Objects’, comprised of four case studies that closely consider the materiality of individual museum objects entangled in nineteenth-century marine networks. Combined, these chapters and object studies interrogate the interstitial flows of nineteenth-century marine material culture, traversing disciplinary boundaries within the discursive matrix of the ocean world. ‘Wave’ charts the mobility of nineteenth-century marine products – both in terms of material flow and shifting cultural significance – beginning with Georgina Cole’s chapter on ambergris, a bile secretion formed in the intestines of the sperm whale excavated from whale carcasses and harvested from the shore. A stateless object, shaped and distributed by the ocean, ambergris, as Cole argues, was lodged at the intersection of aesthetics, natural history and commerce as its use in Europe shifted from a pharmacological drug of ambiguous origins to a valued ingredient in perfumery at the turn of the nineteenth century. The trade, refinement and cultural inscription of marine products is also the subject of Pippa Lacey’s chapter that traces the transformation of Mediterranean red coral, which travelled to China from the Mediterranean along maritime trade routes, into potent decorative objects fashioned by skilled craftsmen for the imperial court, the deployment of which was strictly regulated by the Qing-dynasty emperor. The final two chapters in ‘Wave’ address the circulation and commodification of Pacific and Caribbean shells in metropolitan and colonial contexts. Jessica Priebe’s chapter on Leroy de Barde’s still life painting, Shells (1803), explores how Australasian conchological specimens, brought back to London from Captain James Cook’s second and third voyages, were rendered palpably legible for a European audience through their incorporation into museological frameworks of display. Sensitive to the painted specimens’ slippage from objects of scientific curiosity to emblems of national cultural hegemony, Priebe argues for the shells’ status as contested transnational objects that were dually implicated in British and French collections of natural history and art. The legacy of European conchlyomania provides the foundation for Molly Duggins’s essay on the transaction of Barbadian shellwork plaques produced for the burgeoning British West Indian tourism industry at the end of the nineteenth century. Conceived as commodities in motion, these inexpensive, artfully arranged miniature shell collections embody the transition in value of Caribbean shells from scientific specimens to commercial souvenirs promoting island identity.

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‘Shore’, the second part of the volume, hones in on nineteenth-century coastal industries and the increased human intervention in managing and exploiting marine resources that evolved in tandem with capitalist and colonial expansion.52 The contributors in this part not only stress the inextricable connections between human, animal and botanical actants within the littoral ecologies under examination, but also underscore the impact of coastal rim economies on metropolitan consumers of marine products.53 Maura Coughlin explores the encultured landscapes interweaving human and non-human life on the French Atlantic coast in representations of working-class coastal fishing culture and the intertidal assemblages of Camille Corot, Jules Breton and Elodie La Villette. Examining the rise of marine research stations – coastal facilities equipped for the in-situ preservation, analysis and display of marine specimens – in Italy, Australia and Papua New Guinea, Jude Philp considers their role as hubs of exchange in an international research network for marine zoologists, and their contribution to the development of institutional marine sciences in European and colonial metropoles. Indigenous coastal economies and their autonomy under nineteenth-century colonial rule are addressed in the remaining chapters in ‘Shore’. Natasha Eaton scours the Gulf of Manaar to investigate how pearls were implicated in circuits of slavery, indenture, nomadism and magic in British Ceylon.54 Scrutinizing the persistence of archaic forms of labour in industrializing fisheries, she considers the implications of diving by members of the Parawa caste for the creation of a post-pearl economy of waste in makeshift beach camps, where pearl shells were employed as ornament, dietary supplements, culching and land fill. In her analysis of First Nations women’s shellwork from the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, Priya Vaughan employs the oral testimony of contemporary practitioners to demonstrate that shellwork production at La Perouse was and continues to operate as a wholly indigenous cultural product, facilitating the maintenance and transmission of First Nations’ knowledge of local ecologies, aesthetic traditions, familial networks and community-building. ‘Seabed’ is concerned with the materialization of submarine lifeforms and environments through developing technologies of representation in nineteenthcentury exhibitionary and commercial contexts. Kathleen Davidson’s chapter addresses the attempts by naturalists, natural history illustrators, artists and designers to capture the brilliant yet fugitive colours of living coral in contrast to the bleached, dead relics displayed alongside faded classical antiquities in museums. Inspired by reports of coral reef encounters by scientific expeditions and their elision with fantastical underwater realms in literary and theatrical imagery, corals’ vibrant hues were commodified in Victorian visual culture, as Davidson suggests, in explicit acknowledgement of their impermanence. The final two chapters in ‘Seabed’ consider how curatorial strategies of displaying the ocean world were driven by nationalist agendas. Yuichi Mizoi’s chapter tracks the adaptation of the aquarium in Japan as an emblem of imperial power and modernity. Innovative and immersive, Japanese aquariums were hybrid products that employed European aquatic life support systems to envision the ancient Japanese myth of Ryu-gu, or the dragon palace under the waves, catering to Japanese audiences. Similarly, Stefanie Lenk’s chapter on the Berlin Museum für Meereskunde (Museum of Ocean Studies), founded in 1900 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, explores how exhibits

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illustrating the interdependence of marine ecosystems, including aquaria-like glass boxes filled with alcohol and specimens arranged to give the illusion of a sea, were employed as a form of educational development and nationalist promotion.

Oceanic Objects: Museum Case Studies The final part of Sea Currents – ‘Oceanic Objects’ – features a number of short investigations that bring into dialogue disparate museum objects with material narratives of the ocean world. Ann Christie explores the entanglement of botany, seaside leisure, printing technology and the textile trade in her examination of an early-nineteenth-century cotton dress printed with marine plants and corallines. Investigating the use of scrimshaw busks in corsetry, Martha Cattell traces the joint commodification of whales and women in the nineteenth century, drawing into focus the interspecies bodily intimacy created by such sartorial convention. Jacqueline Goy and Robert Calcagno shed light on a rarely illustrated window in the Maison de l’Océan, Paris, ornamented with marine invertebrates based on illustrations by Ernst Haeckel, and its connection to Prince Albert I of Monaco’s contribution to the developing field of oceanography. The final object study by Jan Brazier follows the trade circuits between Europe, Australia and New Zealand of glass models of such marine invertebrates produced by Leopold and Rudolf Blasckha, which were used around the world as biological teaching aids in universities and museums. Nineteenth-century marine material culture continues to underpin contemporary artistic, scientific and cultural engagements with the ocean world. Conservation initiatives combat the degradation of marine ecosystems, curatorial programmes showcase ecological and decolonial narratives of oceanic objects, and more-thanhuman ontologies foster new aesthetic considerations of undersea realms. Scientists have increasingly turned to nineteenth-century marine specimens as time capsules of past ocean ecology and biodiversity. Evolutionary biologist Drew Harvell, for instance, has attempted to locate the marine invertebrate specimens represented in Cornell University’s collection of Blaschka models through diving expeditions in the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Mediterranean to assess oceans at risk, while tissue sampling of preserved Victorian Gelidium (red algae) specimens at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Ocean Memory Lab has been employed by Kyle van Houtan and Emily Miller to measure the shifting levels of seaweed nitrogen in relation to historical cycles of upwelling in Californian currents.55 Oceanic objects have also taken centre stage in curatorial practice invigorated by the urgency of ecological crisis and the push to decolonize museums. At London’s Natural History Museum, curators Miranda Lowe and Richard Sabin have embarked upon a redisplay campaign of historical collections to prioritize anthropogenic extinction narratives and sustainability culminating in the central installation of a Victorian blue whale skeleton and a giant Turbinaria bifrons coral specimen collected from Shark Bay Reef in Western Australia by William Saville-Kent.56 As part of the Encounters exhibition (2015) a Tasmanian kelp water-carrier – first displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – was transported from the British Museum to the National

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Museum of Australia wherein, through consultation with the Tasmanian Oyster Bay community, it revealed elements of lost design in the current production of kelp carriers to revitalize traditional indigenous craft practices.57 New Materialist explorations into interspecies entanglement have mobilized the nineteenth-century ocean world and its inhabitants in scholarship and contemporary art. Focusing on the confluence of science and aesthetics, Stacy Alaimo has considered the environmental ramifications of posing jellyfish as living art inspired by Haeckel’s plates in Kunstformen der Natur (1904), advocating human accountability to and interconnection with such seemingly alien creatures dwelling in pelagic and benthic zones.58 For her multimedia installation, Deep See Blue Surrounding You, at the 2019 Venice Biennale, French artist Laure Prouvost imagined a liquid and tentacular space in which visitors were invited to corporally dissolve into a vibrant assemblage of seaweeds, shells, detritus and glass marine invertebrates floating in a seabed of resin, to experience the shared realities of exchange and connectivity in a globalized world.59 Such fluid thinking combined with the resuscitation of nineteenth-century marine environments and lifeforms are redefining multispecies ways of being through submersion in the historical ocean. The nineteenth century ultimately represents a critical turning point in humankind’s relationship with the sea. Through scientific revelation, technological revolution, industrial production and capitalist enterprise, the ocean was made anthropocentric as never before. It infiltrated the terrestrial world through the mass consumption of its marine products, and was itself, in turn, infiltrated on an unprecedented scale. Beyond operating as a chronological and spatial framework, the nineteenth-century ocean world, Sea Currents argues, is a relational construct that continues to inform geopolitical, economic, ecological, and aesthetic initiatives predicated on transnational and transcultural fluidity.

Notes   1 Philip H. Delamotte, Preparing Case for Marine Objects, c.1854, published 1855, British Library.   2 Philip H. Delamotte, Photographic Views of the Progress of the Crystal Palace (Sydenham, London: published for the directors of the Crystal Palace Company, at the Photographic Institution, 1855).   3 C. Tyler, ‘Memoir of Dr. Bowerbank’, in A Monograph of the British Spongiadae by the Late J. S. Bowerbank, LLD., FRS., &c, edited by A.M. Norman, 4th edn. (London: Ray Society, 1882), xiii–xvi.   4 Samuel Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854), 105.   5 ‘Specimens of articles in common use’, Great Britain, c.1850, Yale Center for British Art.   6 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s holistic approach to education was introduced in England by Elizabeth Mayo in 1830. See also Charles Dexter, Animal and vegetable substances used in the arts and manufactures (1857). Pestalozzi’s method of visual education also informed the life-size models of extinct animal species displayed in

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Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture the gardens of the Sydenham Crystal Palace (1854) – see Waterhouse Hawkins, ‘On Visual Education as Applied to Geology: With a Special Reference to the Geological Restorations at the Crystal Palace’, Journal of the Society of Arts 2 (19 May 1854): 444–9. Shirley Hibberd, The Seaweed Collector, A Handy Guide to the Marine Botanist (London: Groombridge & Son, 1872), 19; Samuel Joseph Mackie, ‘Sea-Weeds as Objects of Design’, in Art-Studies from Nature, as Applied to Design, edited by. F.E. Hulme (London: Virtue & Co., 1872), 94–5. Crystal snuff bottle with a coral twig stopper, nineteenth century, Qing dynasty, Metropolitan Museum of Art 50.145.180a, b. Bequest of Mary Stallman Harkness, 1950. Our thanks to contributing author Pippa Lacey for bringing this object to our attention. See, for instance, the striking pearl shell ornament, Karajarri people, c. 1930, shell, human hair, pigment, La Grange area, Kimberley region, Western Australia, Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney, ETA. 2009. https:// www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/#search-results&view=details &modules=ecatalogue&irn=525&id=eefe (accessed 17 December 2021). Shawn C. Rolands, ‘Interlocked: Aboriginal Australian Exchange Patterns and Incised Pearl Shells’, in Everywhen: The Eternal Present of Indigenous Art from Australia, edited by Stephen Gilchrist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2016), 60–7; Kim Akerman with John Stanton, Riji and Jakuli: Kimberley Pearl Shells in Aboriginal Australia (Darwin: Northern Territory Government Printing Office, 1994), 1. Tricia Cusack, ‘Introduction’, in Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space, edited by Tricia Cusack (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 3. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5. Ann Gerritson and Giorgio Riello, ‘The Global Lives of Things: Material Culture in the First Global Age’, in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, edited by Ann Gerritson and Giorgio Riello (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 23. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 43; Julia Lum, ‘Weighing Anchor: European Vision and the Return Journey’ (paper presented at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference, Sydney, 8–10 December 2021). https://www.aaanz21.live/. See, for instance, Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds., Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (Mumbai: Routledge India, 2019); Steven Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas, eds., The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); H.V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke and John G. Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Michael S. Reidy and Helen M. Rozwadowski, ‘The Spaces In Between: Science, Ocean, Empire’, Isis 105, no. 2 (June 2014): 338–51; Richard Fulton and Peter Hoffenberg, eds., Oceania & the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013); David Lambert, Luciana Martins and Miles Ogborn, ‘Currents, Visions and Voyages: Historical Geographies of the Sea’, Journal of Historical Geography 32, no. 3 (2006): 479–93. Steven Mentz, Break Up the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Jamie Jones, ‘Fish Out of Water: The “Prince of Whales” Sideshow and

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the Environmental Humanities’, Configurations 25, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 189–214; Stacy Alaimo, ‘Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of the Sensible’, in Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 139–64. 16 Jones, 191; Virginia Richter and Ursula Kluwick, ‘Twixt Sea and Land: Approaches to Littoral Studies’, in The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, edited by Virginia Richter and Ursula Kluwick (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 3. 17 Lynn Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17. 18 Reidy and Rozwadowski, The Spaces In Between, 340. 19 ‘Admiralty Instructions to Captain Denham’ (PRO, Adm 2/1560, pp. 292–307) (Given 17 May 1852) in Andrew David, The Voyage of HMS Herald to Australia and the South-west Pacific 1852–1861 under the Command of Captain Henry Mangles Denham (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 434–40. 20 Henry Mangles Denham (Paintings and sketches made in Fiji and the South Pacific 1852–68), Micro-Art-016, National Library of New Zealand. Preceding this, the Austrian artist Ferdinand Bauer produced a large body of natural history illustrations during Matthew Flinders’s circumnavigation of Australia in 1802–3 aboard HMS Investigator, including detailed, precisely coloured sketches and watercolours of a variety of marine species. 21 Great Britain Challenger Office, Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger during the Years 1873–76 (Edinburgh: Neill, 1880–95). ­22 Reidy and Rozwadowski, The Spaces In Between, 340. 23 Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2. 24 Massimiano Bucchi, ‘Images of Science in the Classroom: Wallcharts and Science Education 1850–1920’, British Journal for the History of Science 31 (1998): 169–71. 25 Alfred Concanen, Lounging in the Aq, c.1880, lithograph (music sheet cover), 36.0 × 25.5, Gabrielle Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum. Accession No. S.444–2012. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1246716/lounging-in-the-aq-sheetmusic-alfred-lee/ (accessed 19 December 2021). 26 This was preceded by the fisheries exhibitions in Amsterdam (1861), Bergen, Norway (1865), Arcachon, France (1866), Boulogne (1866), the Hague (1867), Aarhus, Denmark (1867), Vienna (1867), Gothenburg, Sweden (1867), Le Havre (1868), Naples (1871) and Berlin (1880), which were followed by British fisheries exhibitions held in Edinburgh, Norwich and Tynemouth – George Brown Goode, ‘The International Fisheries Exhibition’, Science 1, no. 16 (25 May 1883): 450. 27 Ibid., 447. 28 Ibid., 450; George Brown Goode, ‘The International Fisheries Exhibition – Fourth Paper’, Science 2, no. 40 (9 November 1883): 612. 29 Great International Fisheries Exhibition. Official Catalogue (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1883), xxxi. 30 Ibid. 31 ‘Flowers of the Sea’, late nineteenth century, shells, seaweeds, corallines, decals, paint, ink, paper, Australian National Maritime Museum, Object No: 00055180. 32 Ann B. Shteir, ‘“Fac-similes of nature”: Victorian Wax Flower Modelling’, Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 2 (2007): 660. 33 This poem, attributed to Elizabeth L. Aveline of Lyme Regis, was used to describe the artistic arrangement of algae and shells in Mary Matilda Howard’s, Ocean Flowers

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35 36 37 38 ­39 40

41 42

43 44 45 46

Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture and their Teachings (Bath: Binns & Goodwin, 1846) and Elegant Arts for Ladies (London: Ward and Lock, 1856). It was reproduced in Victorian albums, including ‘Specimens of Seaweed’, c. 1840, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and the Morrison gift albums, 1850s–1902, National Herbarium of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Molly Duggins, ‘Craft and the Colonial Environment: Natural Fancywork in the Australian Album’, in Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture, edited by Grace Moore and Michelle Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 185; Hannah Robertson, The Young Ladies School of Arts: Containing a Great Many Practical Receipts (Edinburgh: Wal. Ruddiman junior, 1766), 172–3. Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 136–8. Margaret Cohen and Killian Quigley, ‘Introduction: Submarine Aesthetics’, in The Aesthetics of the Undersea, edited by Margaret Cohen and Killian Quigley (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 3. Ariane Fennetaux, ‘Female Crafts: Women and Bricolage in Late Georgian Britain, 1750–1820’, in Women and Things, 1750–1950, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Burlington, VT and Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009), 92. Griffith Hughes, Natural History of Barbados (London: Griffith Hughes, 1750), 267–8. Susan Pearce, ‘Material History as Cultural Transition: A La Ronde, Exmouth, Devon, England’, Material History Review 50 (Fall 1999): 30–1. Andrea Inglis, Beside the Seaside: Victorian Resorts in the Nineteenth Century (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1999), 3; David Elliston Allen, ‘Tastes and Crazes’, in Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 395–6. John Leech, ‘Common Objects at the Seaside – Generally Found upon the Rocks at Low Water’, Punch 35 (August 1858): 76; John George Wood, The Common Objects of the Sea Shore (London: Routledge, 1857). See, for instance, Philip Henry Gosse’s, A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (London: John van Voorst, 1853); Aileen Fyfe, ‘Natural History and the Victorian Tourist: From Landscapes to Rock-Pools’, in Geographies of NineteenthCentury Science, edited by David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 387; Richter and Kluwick, Twixt Sea and Land, 6. Duggins, 204. See, for example, Priya Vaughan’s chapter on the Aboriginal shellwork of La Perouse, New South Wales and Molly Duggins’s chapter on Barbadian shellwork plaques, both in this volume. See, for example, Gosse’s description of Calliostoma zizyphinum in a cove at Brixham. Gosse, A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, 46–7. Aveline, ‘Flowers of the Sea’, second verse, fourth line. A parallel is established in this verse between ‘plants of a summer parterre’ and seaweeds in a subterranean garden. See also John Harper, Notes on Glimpses of Ocean Life, or, Rock-Pools and the Lessons They Teach (London: T. Nelson & Sons, Paternoster Row, Edinburgh and New York, 1860), 22–3. Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas, ‘Introduction: The Hungry Ocean’, in The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture, edited by Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 9.

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47 Charles Kingsley, for instance, praises ‘the young London beauty… with her heart pure and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells and fossils, flowers and sea-weeds [sic].’ Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, or, The Wonders of the Shore (London: Macmillan and Company, 1879), 55–6. See also H.G. Adams, Beautiful Shells: Their Nature, Structure and Uses (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1856), vi. Peep Egg Viewer of Weymouth, Dorset, Great Britain, c. 1855, painted alabaster and glass, Yale Center for British Art; Louis Prang & Co. 48 James Shirley Hibberd, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste (London: Groombridge & Sons, 1856), 2. 49 James Shirley Hibberd, The Book of the Aquarium (London: Groombridge & Sons, 1860), 9–10. 50 Judith Hamera, Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 1–2, 17. See also Silvia Granata, The Victorian Aquarium: Literary Discussions on Nature, Culture, and Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). 51 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 157. 52 Grace Moore and Michelle Smith, ‘Victorian Environments’, in Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture, edited by Grace Moore and Michelle Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3; Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart, ‘Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture’, in Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 8. 53 Richter and Kluwick, Twixt Sea and Land, 1, 3. 54 ‘Manaar’ is a historical spelling that is now more commonly denoted as ‘Mannar’. 55 Drew Harvell, A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschkas’ Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Emily Miller, Susan Lisin, Celia Smith and Kyle van Houtan, ‘Herbaria Macroalgae as a Proxy for Historical Upwelling Trends in Central California’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 287, no. 1929 (June 2020). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.0732. 56 Pandora Syperek, Sarah Wade, Miranda Lowe and Richard Sabin, ‘Curating Ocean Ecology at the Natural History Museum’, Science Museum Group Journal, no. 13 (Spring 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/201314; Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade, eds., ‘Curating the Sea’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 9, no. 2 (2020): 157–61. On Saville-Kent’s Turbinaria bifrons coral specimen, see Kathleen Davidson’s chapter on coral concerns from imperial expeditions and the British Museum to the Royal Academy and Drury Lane in this volume. 57 Thérèse Osborne and Julie Simpkin, eds., Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2015), 204–5. 58 Stacy Alaimo, ‘Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics’, 140, 143; Alaimo, ‘New Materialisms, Old Humanisms, or, Following the Submersible’, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19, no. 4 (2011): 283. 59 Martha Kirzenbaum, ‘Introduction’, in Laure Prouvost: Deep See Blue Surrounding You, edited by ARTER (Paris: Flammarion and Institut Français, 2019), 13, 15; Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 160; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), ix, 23.

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Wave: Circulating Marine Products

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Scent from the Sea: Ambergris in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Medicine, Perfume and Natural History Georgina Cole

Ambergris is one of the few perfume ingredients that come from the sea.1 Formed in the intestines of the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), it starts as a bile secretion that protects the gut from the sharp, indigestible beaks and pens of squid, which make up the bulk of its diet.2 Over time, the secretion hardens and can build up into obstructive boulders filling the entire rectum. Enormous pieces weighing up to 420 kilograms have been excavated from the carcasses of sperm whales taken by the whaling industry.3 Smaller lumps are occasionally found floating on the surface of the sea or washed up on beaches. A fragment of ambergris weighing 50 grams in the Australian Maritime Museum, Sydney, and dating to the nineteenth century (Plate 5), reveals the striated formation of ambergris, which acquires successive layers as it grows in the gut. The shiny, pointed hooks of squid beaks are also visible, showing that this hardened block was once a malleable mass in the digestive tract.4 Alongside squid beaks and pens, more recent ambergris finds often contain pieces of plastic waste, evidence of the sperm whale’s ingestion of bags and other detritus littering the oceans.5 Once voided from the rectum, ambergris is transformed by exposure to air, sun and seawater. A piece can be carried by ocean currents and gyres for up to a thousand years, and during this time, its aromatic chemistry changes dramatically. From a soft, fetid mass, it hardens into a fine aromatic concretion; the concentration of faecal steroids lowers and its ambrein content (the molecule that gives its characteristic odour) predominates.6 While fresh black ambergris smells pungently of ammonia, manure and wet tobacco, older grey, brown and white pieces develop a complex woody, leathery and musty odour with balsamic and floral facets.7 Samples taken directly from sperm whales as a by-product of the whaling industry often have a different aroma profile as they have not been weathered by the sun and waves.8 This odour can be extracted for use in perfumery by grinding ambergris to a powder and macerating in oil or tincturing in alcohol. After ageing for six months and in high dilution (often 3 per cent of the solution), some tinctures develop an earthy and musky character with mossy and briny overtones, while others have high-keyed, ethereal notes of sandalwood and jasmine. The aroma also suggests a plush, velvety texture that lends it an unusual depth and diffusion.

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Ambergris is affined by the waves, and also rendered by them a stateless object. As sperm whales and ocean currents do not observe international boundaries, the production of ambergris cannot be developed, controlled or regulated by a nation state.9 Storms at sea occasionally cast it onto beaches where it lies hidden among seaweed, rocks, shells and rubbish.10 Here it is avidly collected by local ambergris hunters with specialized knowledge of its appearance and occurrence.11 Borne along by the winds and the tides, the sea renders this valuable commodity mobile, unpredictable and difficult to identify. In Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ambergris was used both as a drug and as a perfume ingredient. Prescribed in remedies for low spirits, disorders of the head, heart, stomach, nerves and loins, it was thought to have a fortifying and restorative effect on the body. However, its widest application was in perfumery, where it featured in formulas for scenting clothes, accessories, hair and cosmetics. Within a fragrance composition, ambergris contributed a musky and woody base note with an animalic tenacity. It also served as an important fixative for more volatile floral odours like rose, orange flower, jasmine and lavender, heightening their aromas and making them slower to evaporate.12 As Eugene Rimmel writes in his 1867 Book of Perfumes, ‘blended with other perfumes it imparts to them an ethereal fragrance unattainable by other means’.13 Animal-derived base notes like musk and civet tend to exalt the perfume composition, contributing to radiance and projection; ambergris, however, has a synergistic effect in cohering and rounding out a perfume’s layers. Despite the ubiquity of ambergris in pharmacopeia and perfumery, its provenance remained obscure. The oceans, which shaped and distributed it, also veiled it in mystery. As The Medical Repository for 1804 mused, ambergris may be ‘found floating on the sea, without telling its full history, or declaring what the substance truly was’.14 At the Royal Society in London and in the wider European Republic of Letters, the origins of ambergris were regularly disputed, and attributed to all manner of animal, vegetable and mineral causes. Within this forum, natural philosophy was put into conversation with folklore and commerce: mythic explanations of ambergris mingled with the methods of experimental science and the practical testimony of commercial whalers. These attempts to position ambergris within the system of nature were paralleled by its shifting categorization from the physiological domain of medicine to the ornamental arts of perfumery. By focusing on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we approach ambergris at a turning point in its use and interpretation. Studies of the historical and literary significance of ambergris have largely addressed the Renaissance and early modern periods when it played an important role in conspicuous consumption. Sophie Read has explored the contradictions of ambergris in seventeenth-century English poetry, and Holly Dugan has surveyed its use in the manufacture of perfumed gloves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.15 Work on ambergris in the eighteenth century has primarily addressed the debate over its origins. In Karl Dannenfeldt’s comprehensive examination of ambergris from the ninth-century Islamic world to the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century progress towards the identification of ambergris with the whale is carefully described.16 However, the use and perception of ambergris in this period are neglected. Contrary to the assumption that Enlightenment

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science debunks the efficacy of ambergris as a medicine, there is substantial evidence of its continued significance in pharmacology and personal well-being. Despite the significance of ambergris in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sensory experience, there are considerable difficulties in studying it. As a raw material that is consumed as a medicine, evaporated from the skin or clothes as a perfume, or burned as incense, ambergris has no lasting material presence. While there are specimens in museum collections all over the world, some of which have been studied for their chemical composition and age, they tell us mainly about the physical properties of ambergris, not the meanings it acquired by circulating in society, culture and commerce. The variety of ambergris types and aroma profiles also makes it difficult to establish common organoleptic criteria. One person’s experience of ambergris may be profoundly different from another’s not only because of the subjectivity of odour perception, but also the composition and age of each sample. Ambergris leaves, however, a verbal wake in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century primary sources. Accordingly, this study focuses on the textual traces of ambergris, examining its description, perception and interpretation in formula books, empirical philosophy and reports on its discovery or commercial value. Throughout this period, ambergris is a substance in motion, slipping between categories and definitions. Its shift from medicine to perfumery, and from mineral to animal classification, involves some complex overlapping of these criteria. In what follows, I consider the impact of Enlightenment empiricism on its perception and interpretation, and the question of its origins. Indeed, the Enlightenment interest in where ambergris comes from put different kinds of empiricism into conflict: the results of the natural philosopher’s physical and chemical analyses were increasingly challenged by the first-hand accounts of commercial whalers. This friction between micro and macro empiricisms eventually gives way in the early nineteenth century to the widespread acceptance of the origins of ambergris in the bowels of the sperm whale.

Ambergris and Materia Medica Ambergris was introduced into European medicine, cooking and perfume via trade with Islamic Spain.17 Mentioned in Arabian medical and chemical treatises as early as the ninth century, it was one of the principal aromatics of perfume and medicine alongside musk, aloeswood, camphor and saffron.18 The rich odour of ambergris and its rarity contributed to its special status in Islamic culture, where it was used to fragrance clothing and jewellery, burned as an incense and presented as a precious offering on pilgrimages to Mecca.19 Via the Aristotelian theory of the four properties, it was determined to be a substance with hot and dry qualities: hot because of its waxy texture and affinity with fire (it melts quickly and can hold a flame) and dry because of its affinity with air (it is porous and floats on water). In Arabian materia medica, ambergris was therefore prescribed to help balance excessive coldness and dampness in the body, to reinvigorate the humours of the elderly, and as an aphrodisiac.20

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By the fourteenth century, physicians in Germany, Spain and France were advocating the use of ambergris as a defence against plague.21 Burned to fumigate the air, worn in pomanders around the neck or waist (Figure 2.1), or rolled into paternoster beads, its odour cast a protective aura that warded off the corrupt air thought to cause disease.22 According to a French manuscript of 1348 the power of ambergris as a prophylactic lay in ‘its fortitude as an aromatic’ and its ability to give ‘substantial comfort to the spirit and the principle membranes’.23 While ambergris might be combined with storax, myrrh, aloeswood and sandalwood in the pomander of an aristocrat, the treatise recommended the highest grade of pure ambergris for the protection of a king or

Figure 2.1  Pomander, 1600–1700, gold filigree enclosing a ball of ambergris, 4.1 × 2.9 × 2.9 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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queen. Furthermore, its warming properties were thought to strengthen the heart, liver and brain.24 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English medicine, ambergris was endorsed as a remedy for infertility and frigidity. Along with other animal aromas such as civet and musk, it was thought to heat and sexually stimulate the womb, increasing female desire and improving the conditions for conception.25 In addition to its physiological benefits, the rich odour of ambergris was a luxurious indicator of elite social status in European courts. Fine leather gloves scented with ambergris were favoured by Catherine de’ Medici and Elizabeth I, forming a key part of Renaissance gift giving.26 Charles I was anointed with an unguent containing ambergris at his coronation, and Charles II was fond of a dish of ambergris and eggs.27 Ambergris thus belonged to the materials that separated royalty from commoners. Writing nostalgically in the 1730s of the heavily perfumed lives of the seventeenthcentury elite, the medical doctor Thomas Fuller opines, ‘their Cloaths and Gloves were perfum’d; their Canes had Civet Heads; all the Powder for the Hair was sweet-scented; every one carry’d in their Pockets Apoplectic Balsam; many of the fine Cakes, Puddings, and Sweet Meats had Ambergrise in them’.28 In Renaissance and early modern cuisine, ambergris was one of the most expensive and exclusive spices used to flavour wine, sweets and savoury dishes.29 Ambergris retained its medical applications and association with the social elite into the eighteenth century. In medical treatises and domestic manuals, it was largely referred to as a drug and prescribed for improving bodily vitality and curing disease. Fuller recommended ambergris ‘as our most universal and generous Cordial, from which no Detriment (if rightly given) ever happens, but great Benefits ensue from the taking of it’.30 A cordial, in eighteenth-century usage, strengthens the heart and increases the circulation.31 When ambergris was consumed, he claimed that the ‘stomach rejoiceth therewith, and sendeth its delightful Perfumes into the whole Body; whereby the Spirits, especially the Animal, are not wasted or heated, but increas’d, refreshingly cherish’d, strengthened for their proper Functions, and for the Ejectment of foreign morbific Taints’.32 In Fuller’s account, it is not simply the warming properties of ambergris that contribute to its efficacy, but the way its aroma restores the animal spirit seated in the brain, which is responsible for neurological functions.33 This view of ambergris as a broad-spectrum health tonic was supported into the 1770s by Charles Alston, whose Lectures on the Materia Medica gives a comprehensive account of the health benefits ambergris can bestow. According to Alston: Ambergrise is a mild aromatic and balsamic sulphur, or solid balsam; and reckoned anodyne [pain relieving], cordial, antiseptic. It is said to chear [sic] the spirits, quicken the senses (internos & externos) and repair the decays of nature: and is recommended in vertigoes, apoplexies, palsies, syncopes [fainting], nervous disorders, &c. but especially in such lowness of the spirits, and weakness of the functions, as commonly accompany old age; so as to be instrumental even in prolonging life itself.34

Though many of these virtues are traditionally ascribed to ambergris in older materia medica, Alston insists that ‘really it seems to rarify the juices or relax too tense fibres,

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and correct acrimony, or contribute to the preservation of the natural balsamic softness or sweetness of the blood’.35 As he possessed a piece of ambergris himself and was familiar with its smell, taste and use in flavouring wine, Alston may have been drawing on personal experience.36 As well as contributing to general well-being, ambergris was also indicated in the maintenance of sexual health. It was the key ingredient in Paul Hermann’s recipe for ‘tablets provoking to venery’, and Dr Radcliffe’s prescription of six to ten drops of ambergris essence in six ounces of sack and two egg yolks ‘in defect of seminal matter’.37 John Armstrong, in his 1737 Synopsis of the History and Cure of Venereal Diseases, claimed that ambergris tincture could be used as a treatment for gonorrhoea, and into the nineteenth century, ambergris was suggested as a homeopathic remedy for hysteria.38 As these recommendations suggest, the distinction between perfume and medicine was not clearly drawn in physic, indeed the stronger the aromatic, the greater its potential as a purgative or prophylactic. Though texts on materia medica continued to describe the benefits of ambergris for the head, heart, stomach, nerves and libido, they also note its dwindling use. While William Lewis reasoned that ambergris’s ‘sensible qualities’ suggest it to be ‘an active medicine’, he acknowledged that it ‘is now very little employed in practice, and has no place in the London or Edinburgh Pharmacopoeias’.39 This may be attributed firstly to the general disavowal of the humoral system, in which foods, climates and aromas were prescribed for their ability to balance the relative heat, dryness, coldness or moistness of the body, and secondly to scepticism regarding the role of odours in medicine.40 As William Tullett has shown in his work on smell in eighteenth-century England, the aroma of a particular substance was increasingly separated from its medical efficacy, which was understood in terms of chemical composition rather than sensory properties.41 Perhaps to prove this point, the physician Franz Xavier Schwediawer consumed 30 grains (about 19 grams) of ‘pure unadulterated ambergrise … without observing the least sensible effect from it’.42 Though ‘formerly in great repute’ as a medicine, ambergris was little prescribed in modern practice and, as Donald Monro put it in his 1788 Treatise on Medical and Pharmaceutical Chymistry, ‘now almost only used by the perfumers’.43

Ambergris and Perfumery With its medical efficacy in doubt, ambergris nonetheless retained a key place in perfumery. In Simon Barbe’s Le parfumeur royal, ou l’art de parfumer (The royal perfumer, or the art of perfuming) of 1699 it is celebrated as ‘the most precious of all the perfumes and one of the most noble works of nature’.44 It also featured in the accompanying frontispiece, ‘L’Origine des parfums’ (The origin of perfumes), which depicts the gathering of the principal raw materials of perfumery from their sources (Figure 2.2). While labdanum is combed from the beard of a goat (D), and glandular secretions collected from musk deer (F) and a civet cat (G), a lumpy mass of ambergris (E) is floating on the sea in the background, warmed by the blazing sun. Barbe subscribed to the theory that ambergris was dried sea foam ‘baked and hardened by

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Figure 2.2  ‘L’Origine des Parfums’, frontispiece, Simon Barbe, Le Parfumeur Royal, ou L’Art de Parfumer, Paris 1699. The Wellcome Collection.

the heat of the sun’.45 The inclusion of ambergris here acknowledges its foundational role in perfumery, but also the importance of the sun and sea in its production. In London, the perfumers Lillie, Bayley, Courtenay, Rigge and Rothwell all advertised readymade perfumes and essences of ambergris, and numerous pomatums, wash-balls and perfumed powders in which it featured as an ingredient. The papers of the perfumer Charles Lillie, who was active in London and Barcelona in the 1730s and 40s, provide detailed instructions for authenticating ambergris, choosing the best grade  and using it in various formulae. His notes, published in book form in 1822,

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include methods for producing spirit of ambergris (a tincture of 4 per cent ambergris, 2 per cent musk and 1 per cent civet in alcohol), as well as ambergris lozenges, hair powders, wash-balls and soaps, and numerous scented waters, sachets and pomatum in which spirit of ambergris is called for as a base note and fixative. Lillie championed the value of ambergris in the perfumer’s repertoire for its fragrance, strength and projection. Ambergris, musk and civet, he declared, ‘yield the most diffusive and lasting perfumes in the whole catalogue of drugs used by us’.46 For homemade cosmetics and toiletries, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century recipe books directed at a popular audience include ambergris in dozens of formulas for powders, pomades, wash-balls and splashes. A typical recipe for fragrant powder in Pierre-Joseph Buc’hoz’s 1772 The Toilet of Flora contains musk, lavender, civet and ambergris, while a wash-ball for the face and hands includes orris, storax, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and ambergris.47 Ambrose Cooper’s Complete Distiller of 1757 gives a recipe for ‘Chypre water’, a diluted tincture of ambergris ‘for those who are fond of that Perfume’.48 Into the nineteenth century, ambergris remained an important fixative and base note in formulae for hair-curling fluid and cologne. A refreshing toilet water might include bergamot, lavender, lemon, rose, jasmine and ambergris. Indeed Susan C. Dunning Power’s The Ugly-Girl Papers; or Hints for the Toilet of 1874 declared that ambergris was preferred to musk in ‘modern taste’.49 Though the amounts called for were often small, ambergris remained a ubiquitous component of professional and homemade perfumes.50 How, then, was the odour of ambergris perceived? The sources are unfortunately reticent on this point. Ambergris was most often described as smelling ‘fragrant’, ‘agreeable’, ‘grateful’, ‘sweet’ and ‘peculiar’. To Alston, its smell ‘is quite specific, and not to be compared with anything else in the world’.51 Likewise, Jean Pierre, in an 1854 volume of The Homeopathic Examiner, called it a ‘peculiarly pleasant odour, not easily described or imitated, and which is exceedingly diffusive’.52 While the odour of ambergris appealed to many, most writers were quick to acknowledge it was not universally enjoyed. Schwediawer noted that though ambergris is added ‘to scented pillars, candles, balls or bottles, gloves, and hair-powder; and its essence is mixed with pomatums for the face and hands, either alone or mixed with musk, &c’, its smell ‘is to some persons extremely offensive’.53 Although Steven Blankaart in The Physical Dictionary of 1726 recommended ‘little pastilles of Japan earth, ambergrease [sic], and sugarcandy’ to ‘sweeten the breath and preserve the teeth’, Peter Shaw in A New Practice of Physic of 1745 complained that they ‘make the breath more nauseous; and externally are easily discovered, and render the person suspected who uses them’.54 Indeed, the powerful, animalic aroma could have adverse effects. The French chemist Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy, warned that ‘the odorous principle, in which alone the virtues of this medicine consist, is often too active, too penetrating, and injurious. Several persons cannot endure the smell without suffering all the affections peculiar to irritations of the nerves’.55 In his 1767 work on nervous disorders, Robert Whytt considered it responsible for throwing ‘some women into hysteric fits’, a claim refuted by Alston and Lewis.56 Clearly, the aroma had a polarizing effect. This perhaps reflects the variety of grades on offer and their wide spectrum of woody, leathery and faecal notes, but also changing tastes in perfume.57

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Along with musk and civet, ambergris was waning in popularity in the eighteenth century. In the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, the chevalier de Jaucourt claimed that ‘at one time, perfumes made with musk, ambergris and civet were sought after in France, but they have fallen out of style since our nerves have become more delicate’.58 The potency of ambergris, which made it so valuable to a professional like Lillie, also allowed it to penetrate the noses of those less fond of it, or who proclaimed a greater sensitivity to odours in general. In their evocation of the nerves, both Jaucourt and Fourcroy seem to suggest the influence on aroma perception of sensibility, the state of heightened receptivity to internal and external stimuli. In George Cheyne’s influential treatise on medicine and nerve theory, The English Malady (1733), smelling is described as ‘the Action of an odorous Body, or the Steam or Vapour emitted from it, giving a determin’d Impulse to the Nerves or Fibres of the Nostrils, which, by their Mechanism, propagate this vibration and Impulse, thro’ their length to the Intelligent or sentient Principle in the Brain’.59 Smells could therefore exacerbate nervous dispositions. As the sensitivity of the nerves was associated with physical, moral and emotional refinement, reactions to heavy or complex odours may have been part of the performance of sensibility, particularly among the educated middle classes. Among these consumers, a preference for lighter colognes and simple floral waters came to be expressive of bodily health and moral virtue, especially for women, while earthier, more sensuous fragrances began to signal personal corruption and a lack of concern for the social atmosphere.60 As Tullett has argued, a number of prominent writers, including Catherine Macauley and William Cowper, expressed an aversion to strong perfumes for the way they dominated the spaces of polite sociability.61 In a culture that valued genteel restraint and moderation, a powerful, animalic perfume was received as selfish disregard for harmonious social relationships. The way that perfumes might mask the smells of decay and disease also aroused suspicion. Complex perfumes liberally applied came to be identified with the exaggerated artifice of the prostitute, as well as male sub-cultures such as the macaroni and the jessamy in England, and the muscadin in France.62 While ambergris continued to be available for purchase from perfumers and apothecaries at the same high prices, and to feature in the lighter toilet waters, its prominence as a note gave way to the floral and herbal aromas of rose otto, lavender, violet and thyme. In perfumery, it was better appreciated for its cohering and fixative effect in a blend than its particular aroma. Indeed the ‘secret’ of using ambergris, according to Lewis, ‘consists in adding the perfume so sparingly, that while it heightens and improves the smell of the substances it is joined to, it may not betray its own’.63 Ambergris remained a key part of the perfumer’s palette, but, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, was less often the principal aroma of a perfume.64 Objections to the smell of ambergris are important in that they reinforce its transition from a type of medicine for strengthening the body to an aesthetic choice. Over the eighteenth century, ambergris’s use-value progressively capitulates to its ornamental qualities. As a perfume note, it was an expression of one’s taste; wearing it revealed a subjective pleasure in its complex odour, and membership of group identity. In regard to the latter, those who consciously wore ambergris perhaps signalled a tacit

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allegiance to the extravagance of the seventeenth century and the artifice of courtly culture.65 Those who didn’t perhaps thought themselves adherents of the newer priorities of naturalness and artless simplicity.66

Ambergris and the System of Nature The shift in the use of ambergris from medicine to perfume is paralleled by an increasingly philosophical interest in its origins. What most occupied the European scientific community was not the peculiarity of its aroma but where ambergris came from and how it fitted into the system of nature. An amazing variety of explanations had heretofore circulated in both scientific and popular literature; a total of eighteen were surveyed in Justus Klobius’s 1666 book on the history of ambergris.67 Among these were the theory common in Persia that ambergris was petrified sea foam or ‘the seed that comes out of large fish’, and the view held in India that it was a type of vegetable gum or resin, or a solidified mass of honey and beeswax washed into the sea by monsoonal rains.68 Along the coast of Morocco, the large quantities of ambergris that washed ashore were identified as whale’s dung or sperm, but, in the Maldives, it was thought to be the droppings of a large bird, which were subsequently eaten by whales.69 In Europe, the main concern was identifying its place within the system of classification established by Carl Linnaeus in 1735, and determining whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral.70 The chief competition was between the mineral and animal hypotheses. Those in the mineral camp primarily argued that ambergris was a type of bitumen or pitch that flowed from fountains or springs in the sea floor. The initial softness of this material allowed it to envelop harder detritus, hence its frequent inclusion of squid beaks and pens. It was therefore related to yellow amber (known as succinum or electron), which also contained inclusions and washed up on the beaches of the Baltic. To explain its occurrence in whales, the mineral proponents claimed it was eaten by whales and then excreted. By contrast, advocates of the animal thesis were mainly interested in proving its fundamental association with the sperm whale. They saw ambergris not as a substance consumed by the whale but something unique to its physiology. To establish ambergris’s origins, these natural philosophers harnessed the new methodologies of experimental science. A powerful argument for the mineral basis of ambergris was elaborated to the Royal Society by Caspar Neumann and evidenced through the use of physical and chemical analysis. Neumann explored its taste, feel, smell and appearance, and subjected it to heat, distillation, dissolution in various media, rectification and reconstitution. As ambergris did not produce ‘any thing [sic] animal’, Neumann came to the conclusion that it is ‘truly a Bitumen of the Amber kind’ that trickled into the ocean or bubbled up from the sea floor.71 Concerns about the quantity and quality of the sample used by Neumann prompted the Royal Society to commission a repeat of the experiment, with inconclusive results.72 Despite the reservations of the scientific establishment, the mineral theory found wide support in Johann Reinhold Forster’s Introduction to Mineralogy (1768), Alston’s Lectures on

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the Materia Medica (1770) and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771). Even Ambrose Cooper, author of The Complete Distiller, allied himself to the mineral hypothesis, claiming ambergris to be ‘a light and frothy substance, which generally bubbles up out of the earth in a fluid form, principally under water, where it is by degrees hardened into the masses we see it in’.73 Perhaps the earthy rather than excremental provenance of ambergris appealed more to his customers. The animal origins of ambergris were argued on the basis of a different kind of empiricism. Rather than chemical analysis, proponents of this theory made substantial use of the testimony of commercial whalers. Ambergris was an important by-product of an industry that hunted whales for oil, spermaceti and whalebone. Oil from the blubber and spermaceti from the head cavity of sperm whales were used in making candles, soaps, ointments and pomades (Plate 6). The discovery of a mass of ambergris in a sperm whale carcass was a lucrative windfall as it sold for about a pound to twenty-five shillings an ounce to brokers in an international market.74 A scrimshaw sperm whale tooth from 1821 in the Australian Maritime Museum suggests the momentousness of such a find. In an ornate hand above an Australian coat of arms, the engraver has recorded: This tooth was taken from a monstrous whale struck by the ship John of London on the S.W coast of Australia, July 1821. After a long and desperate chase, of 40 miles, with loss of two boats and one man. Its blubber produced 98 barrels of oil with an additional 30 barrels from the head, also 100th [weight of] Ambergris.

Incised into a relic of the ‘monstrous whale’, the text reveals the difficulties and dangers of pre-industrial whaling, which was typically undertaken from small boats carrying six to eight men equipped with a single hand-held harpoon, a lance, large quantities of rope and enough provisions for days at sea (Figure 2.3).75 If the men were lucky, back on board the whaling ship or the shore-based station, the stink of a freshly extracted ambergris boulder might mingle with the smoke from the viscera-fuelled tryworks rendering the blubber into oil. While Neumann dismissed the reports of whalers and merchants as unscientific hearsay, others based their hypotheses on such first-hand encounters.76 Both Dudley and Boylston presented to the Royal Society in 1724 reports on finds of ambergris in sperm whales by New England ship’s captains, Dudley priding himself particularly on the contribution of the American colonies to this debate.77 In 1791, William Fawkener read to the Society an interview conducted by the Committee of Privy Council with Captain Joshua Coffin, who had discovered ambergris in a female whale off the coast of Guinea, and Alexander Champion, the principal merchant of the Southern Whale Fishery. The captain confirmed that ambergris was a waste product of sperm whales, male and female, and the merchant its high market value in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East.78 In Schwediawer’s extensive treatise on ambergris addressed to Sir Joseph Banks, the questioning of those involved in its discovery, extraction and sale was of vital importance. The whalers of New England, he insisted, ‘have long known that ambergrise [sic] is to be found in the spermaceti whale; and they are so convinced of

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Figure  2.3  Attributed to C.H. Wood, scrimshaw whale tooth, 18.0 × 7.5 cm. Australian National Maritime Museum collection transfer from the Wildlife Protection Authority, 00029555.

the fact, that whenever they hear of a place where ambergrise is found, they always conclude that the seas in that part are frequented by this species of whale’.79 More particularly, ambergris was often to be found in dead whales or those that looked ‘torpid or sickly’ and was therefore ‘a source of disease’.80 Thanks to the first-hand experience of the whalers Schwediawer and his predecessors consulted, he was able to accurately hypothesize: [A]ll ambergrise is generated in the bowels of the Physeter Macrocephalus, or spermaceti-whale, and there is mixed with the beaks of the Sepia Octopodia, which is the principal food of that whale; and we may therefore define ambergrise to be the preternaturally hardened dung or faeces of the Physeter Macrocephalus, mixed with some indigestible relics of its food.81

Identifying ambergris as a product of the sperm whale thus brought commercial whaling to bear on philosophical discourse, creating a new dialogue between these areas of expertise. Indeed, ambergris encapsulated the challenges posed by commerce to philosophy, and colonial experience to methodologies of natural history. The key information regarding its animal origins was contributed, not by the scientific community, but captains from America or the British colonies in charge of workingclass, mixed-race crews of ships owned by middle-class men of commerce. Despite their empiricism, the methods of chemical analysis employed by Neumann were

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insufficient without the fuller context of ambergris’s occurrence, which was provided by those who dealt with it directly in the hunting of sperm whales. We might think of these differing approaches as micro and macro empiricisms; one studied ambergris in isolation, disinterestedly, and within the parameters of scientific method, while the other observed it in situ and with a view to capitalizing on its value. It was only when both empiricisms coalesced that progress could be made on the question of ambergris’s material properties and its animal origins. By the early nineteenth century, the link between ambergris and the sperm whale had been largely accepted by the philosophical community.82 According to Bouillon Lagrange, writing in the Philosophical Magazine in 1804, ‘it is now almost generally admitted that ambergris is found in the stomach of the cachalot, called by naturalists Physeter macrocephalus, and that it seems to be the product of its digestion’.83 The Medical Repository agreed, underlining the contribution of American whaling by claiming ‘the experience of the Nantucket whaleman elucidates the history of this precious drug, of which so many accounts have been given’.84 However, this information created a troubling connection between an expensive perfume ingredient and animal excrement, replacing the appealing mysteries of ambergris with its unsavoury reality. In this sense ambergris stood apart from the other animal sources of perfume, musk, civet and castoreum, which were derived from the scent glands used to mark territory, identify individuals and attract mates. While these aromas resulted from essential animal behaviours, ambergris was a pathological rectal blockage. Lady Annie Brassey put it best in her 1885 travel narrative, In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties: ‘it is not a very agreeable idea to entertain, that a substance of such unpleasant provenance should be the foundation of almost all the scents which we use’.85 Ambergris therefore possessed disconcertingly contradictory qualities. As Joan Samson has argued, it was an amalgam of opposites. In Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, ‘Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!’86 The ambivalence of ambergris seemed thus to express the contradictions of class identity: the elite distinguishing themselves from the ordinary with a rarefied form of excrement. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ambergris had, therefore, a potent duality. It was a valuable medicine to some and useless quackery to others; and while its fragrance was agreeable to many, there were those who found it offensive and injurious to the nerves. Within the field of experimental and empirical science it was classified with equal vigour as a mineral and an animal substance. As a product of the sea, it appealed as much to the intellectual curiosity of members of the Royal Society as it did to the commercial prerogatives of whalemen and merchants, who also had a stake in the explanation of its origins. Subject to the experimental methods of the chemist and the first-hand observation of the whaler, the explanation of ambergris was fraught with underlying tensions between the scientific establishment and commerce. Finally, as a product of the sperm whale’s digestion, it was an expensive marker of status and taste found amongst the valueless refuse of the animal’s bowels. Despite the discoveries that would eventually confirm its origins in the sperm whale, ambergris remained an ambiguous substance difficult to categorize. As a sensorially potent and

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philosophically equivocal substance, it occupied the intersections of aesthetics, natural history and commerce. Like the waves that rendered it mobile, aromatic and stateless, the meanings of ambergris were similarly fluid and changeable.

Notes   1 The other marine-based perfume ingredients are seaweed and opercula. Seaweed absolute is a solvent extraction of various species including Fucus Vesiculosus and Dictyota Dichotoma used sparingly in modern perfume. See Steffen Arctander, Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin (New Jersey: self-published, 1960), 351–2. Opercula are part of the shell of Muricidae molluscs from the Red Sea. They were burned as incense in the ancient Mediterranean and are likely the onycha mentioned in the recipe for incense in Exodus 30. See Bijayalakshmi Devi Nongmaithem et al., ‘Volatile and Bioactive Compounds in Opercula from Muricidae Molluscs Supports Their Use in Ceremonial Incense and Traditional Medicines’, Scientific Reports 7, no. 17404 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17551-3. James McHugh has suggested that the widespread use of opercula in Indian incense and attars may have paved the way for the popularity of ambergris in perfumery, ‘Blattes de Byzance in India: Mollusk Opercula and the History of Perfumery’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23, no. 1 (2013): 66.   2 Robert Clarke, ‘The Origins of Ambergris’, LAJAM 5, no. 1 (2006): 7, 18. DNA studies of ambergris have now confirmed that it originates in the sperm whale. See Ruairidh Macleod, Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding, Morten Tange Olsen et al., ‘DNA Preserved in Jetsam Whale Ambergris’, Biology Letters 16, no. 20190819 (2020): 1–6. http://dx.doi. org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0819.   3 See Robert Clarke, ‘A Great Haul of Ambergris’, Nature 4421 (24 July 1954): 155–6.   4 Clarke describes the formation of ambergris in ‘The Origins of Ambergris’, 14–18.   5 See for example Dan Riegler, ‘Ambergris: How to Prepare an Oil, Attar, and Tincture’, Apothecary’s Garden, 22 August 2019. https://apothecarysgarden.com/2019/08/22/ ambergris-how-to-prepare-an-oil-attar-and-tincture/ (accessed 31 January 2020). For a critical perspective on ambergris and human–whale relations, see Erin Hortle, ‘Historicising Ambergris in the Anthropocene’, Australian Humanities Review 63 (2018): 48–60.   6 A specimen found on Chiloé Island, Chile in 2017 has been dated as 1000 years old. Steven John Rowland, Paul Andrew Sutton and Timothy D.J. Knowles, ‘The Age of Ambergris’, Natural Product Research 33, no. 21 (2019): 3139.   7 On the difficulty of describing the smell of ambergris, see Sophie Read, ‘Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent’, The Seventeenth Century 28, no. 2 (2013): 224–5.   8 On the composition of whale ambergris relative to jetsam ambergris finds, see Rowland et al., ‘The Age of Ambergris’, 3135.   9 CITES legislation, however, prevents members of signatory counties from collecting or selling ambergris. 10 Ambergris finds are extremely rare, and the vast majority of objects presented for identification to museum curators are found to be something else entirely. A 1929 pamphlet produced by the Technological Museum (now the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) attempted to furnish the interested public with the information needed to identify ambergris, perhaps to stem the flow of enquiries. See F.R. Morrison, Ambergris and How to Recognise It (Sydney: Technological Museum, 1929).

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11 See Christopher Kemp, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 33–49. 12 G.W. Septimus Piesse, The Art of Perfumery and the Methods of Obtaining Odours of Plants (London: Longman, Green, and Roberts, 1862), 169. 13 Eugene Rimmel, The Book of Perfumes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867), 248. Though costly and rare, and often substituted with synthetic analogues, ambergris continues to be used in modern perfumery for its fixative value and harmonizing effects. See Kemp, Floating Gold, 78, 85. 14 ‘History of Ambergris’, The Medical Repository I, February–April (1804): 418. 15 Read, ‘Ambergris and the Modern Languages of Scent’, 221–37; Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 126–53. 16 Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Ambergris: The Search for Its Origin’, Isis 73, no. 3 (1982): 395–7. 17 Dugan, Ephemeral History of Perfume, 131. See also Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155–6. 18 Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev, Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 148–52. 19 Dannenfeldt, ‘Ambergris’, 383–4. See also Sami K. Hamarneh, ‘The First Known Independent Treatise on Cosmetology in Spain’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 39, no. 4 (1965): 310–11. 20 Martin Levey, ‘Ibn Māsawaih and His Treatise on Simple Aromatic Substances: Studies in the History of Arabic Pharmacology I’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 16, no. 4 (1961): 394–410. 21 Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 64–5. 22 See Constance Classen, ‘Following the Scent: From the Middle Ages to Modernity’, in Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, edited by Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott (London: Routledge, 1994), 59. 23 Compendium de Epidemia per Collegium Facultatis Medicorum Parisius ordinatum, Paris, 1348, quoted in John M. Riddle, ‘Pomum Ambrae: Amber and Ambergris in Plague Remedies’, Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 48, no. 2 (1964): 120. 24 Katelynn Robinson, The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages: A Source of Certainty (London: Routledge, 2020), 133. 25 Jennifer Evans, ‘Gender, Medicine, and Smell in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Smell and History: A Reader, edited by Mark M. Smith (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018), 132–4. 26 Ambergris was rubbed into the skins to mask the offensive odours of the tanning process. See Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume, 131–3. For its place in Renaissance gift giving, see Evelyn Welch, ‘Scented Buttons and Perfumed Gloves: Smelling Things in Renaissance Italy’, in Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, edited by Bella Mirabella (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 17. ­27 On the formula for coronation oil, see Read, ‘Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent’, 224. On eating ambergris in early modern England, see Kemp, Floating Gold, 175–6. 28 Thomas Fuller, Exanthematologia: Or, an Attempt to Give a Rational Account of Eruptive Fevers, Especially of the Measles and Small Pox (London: Printed for Charles Rivington and Stephen Austen, 1730), 256.

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29 Freeman, Out of the East, 63–4. For its continued use in eighteenth-century cookbooks, see Mr Borella, The Court and Country Confectioner: Or, the Housekeeper’s Guide (London, 1770), 158 and 160; also Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife; or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion (London, 1729); and Hannah Glasse, The Compleat Confectioner; or the Whole Art of Confectionary Made Plain and Easy (London, c1760). 30 Fuller, Exanthematologia, 259. 31 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edn., vol 1 (Dublin, 1775), n.p. 32 Fuller, Exanthematologia, 259. 33 See Richard Palmer, ‘In Bad Odour: Smell and Its Significance in Medicine from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century’, in Medicine and the Five Senses, edited by W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 63. 34 Charles Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica: Containing the Natural History of Drugs, Their Virtues and Doses, vol 1 (London, 1770), 241. 35 Ibid. 36 ‘I have a piece about thirty years old … and may be said to consist of very subtle parts, a small grain of it being able to perfume and give a rich flavour to more than a bottle of spirits which are drank’, ibid. 37 John Armstrong, A Synopsis of the History and Cure of Venereal Diseases (London, 1737), 517; Pharmacopoeia Radcliffeana; or, Dr Radcliffe’s Prescriptions (London, 1718), 425. 38 Jean Pierre, ‘Ambra Grisea’, The Homeopathic Examiner I, no. I (1845): 507. 39 William Lewis, The Edinburgh New Dispensatory (Edinburgh, 1789), 125–6. 40 On the shift from the humoural to the nervous body, see Anne C. Vila, ‘Introduction: Powers, Pleasures, and Perils of the Senses in the Enlightenment Era’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Anne C. Vila (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 7–12. 41 William Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 97–8. 42 Franz Xavier Schwediawer, ‘An Account of Ambergrise, by Dr Schwediawer, Presented by Sir Joseph Banks, P.R.S.’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 73 (1783): 239–40. 43 Donald Monro, A Treatise on Medical and Pharmaceutical Chymistry, and the Materia Medica, vol 2 (London, 1788), 273. 44 Simon Barbe, ‘Discours sur l’odorat, avec l’origine des meilleurs parfums’ in Le Parfumeur Royal, ou l’Art de Parfumer (Paris, 1699), n.p. 45 Ibid. 46 Charles Lillie, The British Perfumer, Snuff-Manufacturer, and Colourman’s Guide (London: Printed for J. Souter, 1822), 86. The British Museum has a trade card of Charles Lillie printed before 1736. 47 Pierre-Joseph Buc’hoz, The Toilet of Flora (London, 1772), 151, 222–3. 48 Ambrose Cooper, The Complete Distiller (London, 1757), 257–8. ­49 Susan C. Dunning Power, The Ugly-Girl Papers; or, Hints for the Toilet (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874), 154. 50 Eugene Rimmel reminds the reader of recipe books that many of these formulae were probably never used by professional perfumers. See Rimmel, The Book of Perfumes, ix. 51 Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica, 233.

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52 Pierre, ‘Ambra Grisea’, 506. 53 Schwediawer, ‘An Account of Ambergrise’, 226. 54 Steven Blankaart, The Physical Dictionary (London, 1726), 71; Peter Shaw, A New Practice of Physic, vol 1 (London, 1745), 77. 55 Antoine Françoise, comte de Fourcroy, Elemental Lectures on Chemistry and Natural History, trans. Thomas Elliot, vol 2 (Edinburgh, 1785), 171. 56 Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Those Disorders Which Have Been Commonly Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (Edinburgh, 1767), 170. See also Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica, 241, and William Lewis, An Experimental History of the Materia Medica, or of the Natural and Artificial Substances Made Use of in Medicine (London, 1761), 39. 57 Mid-nineteenth-century commentators also had reservations about ambergris’s odour. Piesse claims the fragrance ‘is most incredibly overrated’, The Art of Perfumery, 168. 58 Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, ‘Perfume’, in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Gillian Stumpf (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2010). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo. did2222.0001.161 (accessed 27 January 2020). Originally published as ‘Parfum’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers 11:940 (Paris, 1765). 59 George Cheyne, The English Malady, ed. Roy Porter (1733; London: Routledge, 1991), 71. 60 See Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England, 179–200; and Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination (London: Picador, 1994), 182–6. 61 Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England, 184–5. 62 On the macaroni’s use of perfume as a signifier, see William Tullett, ‘The Macaroni’s “Ambrosial Essences”: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38, no. 2 (2014): 1–18. Les muscadins were politically reactionary, elegant aristocrats of the late eighteenth century in France who wore heavy fragrances of musk, ambergris, frankincense, tuberose, thyme, jonquil and sandalwood. They gathered at the premises of the perfumer Houbigant in 1792. See Richard Stamelman, Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin: A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 56. 63 Lewis, An Experimental History of the Materia Medica, 40. 64 The same can be said of musk, which continued to play an important role in perfumery despite the protestations of polite consumers that they could not abide it. See Piesse, The Art of Perfumery, 121. 65 See Stamelman, Perfume, 62–3. 66 Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England, 190–1. 67 Dannenfeldt, ‘Ambergris’, 392–3. See also Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica, 237. ­68 Sir John Chardin, A New and Accurate Description of Persia, and Other Eastern Nations (London, 1724), 59–60. See also Levey, ‘Ibn Māsawaih and His Treatise on Simple Aromatic Substances’, 400. 69 Dannenfeldt, ‘Ambergris’, 385–6. A number of these theories became the basis of European investigations into its origins, and can indeed be grouped into vegetable, mineral and animal hypotheses.

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70 Carl von Linné, A General System of Nature, Through the Three Grand Kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals, ed. William Turton (London, 1806). 71 Caspar Neumann, The Chemical Works of Caspar Neumann, M. D. (London, 1759), 241. 72 ‘An Account of Experiments Made on Ambergrease; by Mr. John Browne, and M. Godfrey Hanckewitz, Philosophical Transactions. No. 435, 437. Translated from the Latin’, in Memoirs of the Royal Society; Being a New Abridgment of the Philosophical Transactions, vol 10 (London, 1738–41), 71–3. 73 Cooper, The Complete Distiller, 260. 74 William Fawkener, ‘On the Production of Ambergris, read 20 January 1791’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 81 (1791): 47. 75 See Max Colwell, Whaling around Australia (London: Angus and Robertson, 1970). 76 Caspar Neumann, ‘Of Ambergrease; by Dr. Neuman’, Memoirs of the Royal Society (London, 1741), 46. 77 Paul Dudley, ‘An Essay upon the Natural History of Whales, with a Particular Account of the Ambergris Found in the Sperma Ceti Whale’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 33 (1724): 256; and Boylston, ‘Ambergris Found in Whales. Communicated by Dr. Boylston of Boston in New-England’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 33 (1724): 193. 78 Fawkener, ‘On the Production of Ambergris’, 43–7. 79 Schwediawer, ‘An Account of Ambergrise’, 230–1. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 237–8. 82 Clarke, ‘The Origins of Ambergris’, 8. See also William Brande, A Dictionary of Science, Literature, and Art (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847), 39. 83 Bouillon Lagrange, ‘Analysis of Ambergris’, The Philosophical Magazine (1804): 167. 84 ‘History of Ambergris’, The Medical Repository 1 (February–April, 1804): 417. 85 Lady Brassey, In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885), 291. 86 Joan P. Samson, ‘The Ambiguity of Ambergris in Moby-Dick’, College Literature 2, no. 3 (1975): 227.

3­

Imperial Coral: The Transformation of a Natural Material to a Qing Imperial Treasure Pippa Lacey

Immortality, the desire for eternal life, has been a potent aspiration throughout history. In China, natural hardstones – rocks, crystals and organics – have long been associated with possessing, embodying, or bestowing human qualities and desires, as well as offering apotropaic protection and prolonging, or preserving life. The most esteemed are known as baoshi, 宝石 – ‘precious stone’, ‘gem’, ‘jewel’ or ‘treasure’.1 The most ‘precious and potent of all materials’, jade, yu, 玉 – jadeite or nephrite – is known as the ‘immortal stone’.2 Another prized baoshi, red coral, shanhu, has an ancient history of use in imperial China, although this brightly coloured marine organism is less studied. Shanhu, too, has been linked with auspiciousness and longevity since ancient times. Precious red coral – along with jade – appears in Chinese sacred texts, literature, poetry and the visual arts linked with heavenly paradises, magical realms, earthy imperial power and astonishing wealth, as well as a desire for immortality. An appreciation of coral came from India via Tibet along the trade routes and was regarded as an indicator of nobility in Mahayana Buddhism.3 Shanhu is incorporated in groups of Chinese motifs representing good fortune and prosperity: the ‘Seven Treasures’, the ‘Eight Precious Things’, ‘One Hundred Antiques’ and other visual schema.4 This powerful bundle of beliefs, and the agency it assigns, offers potent reasons for how this colourful organic baoshi came to be at the centre of the imperial court; and why, during the mid-Qing dynasty (1644–1911), red coral became restricted for, and strictly regulated by, the emperor. The most prized variety – Corallium rubrum, Mediterranean red coral – reached China via ‘the coral network’, transported along sea-trade routes from Europe to China in the long nineteenth century.5 On arrival in China, skilled craftsmen incorporated shanhu into a range of sacred, courtly, martial and decorative objects for the court. The enclaving of coral, imperial restriction and the considerable distance it travelled, all added to red coral’s appeal, mystique and desirability.6 This chapter demonstrates how coral was one of the most prized hardstones at the Qing court through its placement on the imperial body, as well as an indicator of both worldly and spiritual success. It focuses on red coral’s physical qualities and its uses at court, both as a valued material and as an auspicious representational motif. I examine some

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of the beliefs surrounding this mysterious marine commodity in order to explore coral’s transformation from a living organism and natural marine material from the Mediterranean into a Chinese imperial treasure. At the hierarchical court of the Qianlong emperor (1735–96), red coral was found at its imperial heart. On official occasions, the emperor’s body was adorned from neck-to-toe in coral, with various-sized beads forming the imperial necklace, and decorating his belt, pocket purses, as well as his stiff-soled Manchurian boots. Furthermore, coral motifs were embroidered into the borders of imperial silk brocade robes. At these events, the empress and empress dowager – mothers of imperial dragons – were virtually wrapped in red coral, donning four sets of court necklaces, all incorporating shanhu (Plate 7). Imperial military armour, weapons and saddlery (snu) were decorated with coral – as well as jade and seed pearls – adding layers of apotropaic and spiritual protection on their bearers. When attempting to reconstruct the period-eye of the Qing dynasty, in order to explore some of the powerful associations ascribed to coral in various contexts, one must consider the abundant layers of history, myths, ideas and accumulated beliefs about coral’s auspiciousness and sacredness.7 Shanhu features in classic tales about mortals permitted to enter into heavenly, or otherworldly, realms where the fabric of these worlds is created from the most beautiful and expensive materials of the known world – coral, pearl, ruby, turquoise or jade. Such mortals are invariably overcome with awe, wonder and fascination when attempting to take in the richness – both spiritual and worldly – of the magical realm. They are enchanted by the material wonder, as well as the realization of the economic value of such gems. Often the journeys taken by the mortal heroes are themselves voyages of discovery and transformation, from one level of spiritual understanding to another. Coral, along with other esteemed materials, was instrumental in the transformation of the soul to a deeper, more enlightened state. In other words, coral was considered to have powerful transformative energy. There is great fluidity of ideas and concepts in Chinese culture across time. Some of the boundaries between the major religious beliefs – Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism – are blurred, and red coral was considered important in more than one sacred context. The notion of attempting to privilege one quality above another is a Western approach. While it is possible to examine the various layers of understanding attached to shanhu, the privileging of these in a particular context is more problematic. In Chinese culture, materials are multivalent and take on different meanings in various contexts. Furthermore, many artisanal practices taken for granted in Europe, such as gemstone faceting, operate under a different philosophical logic.

Coral at the Imperial Court An exceptional example of coral usage at the Qing court can be seen in the honours awarded to British General Charles Gordon, known as ‘Chinese Gordon’. He was distinguished with the honour of tidu, chief military commander, by the Tongzhi Emperor, in 1864, in gratitude for Gordon’s help in quelling the devastating Taiping Rebellion (1850–64). Tongzhi presented Gordon with two sets of court robes

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pertaining to the Chinese first-rank military officer, including chao guan, a court hat with a coveted red coral button, peacock feathers and sable tails.8 This was all the more remarkable since Gordon had participated in the destruction of Yuanming Yuan, the imperial Summer Palace, albeit ruefully, four years earlier, during the second Opium War. A century before, in 1759, the Qianlong Emperor introduced a comprehensive and prescriptive sumptuary code, Huangchao liqi tu shi, the Illustrated Precedents for the Ritual Paraphernalia of the Imperial Court.9 This code specified formal dress, chao fu; festival dress, ji fu; regular dress, changfu gua; and travelling dress, to be worn by the court.10 Formal attire was controlled through strict regulations, with permitted materials and colours laid down in the Precedents.11 Red coral appears in the decree for Grand Imperial Ceremonial Dress: Emperor’s chao zhu [court necklace]: As designated in this dynasty: total one hundred and eight pieces containing, fotou [Buddha-head beads], commemorative head, beiyun [back pendant], and assorted different sizes of jewellery, to be used in Grand Imperial Ceremonies. For the Prayers to the Sky, there is lapis lazuli; for Earth, amber, for the Morning Sun, coral; for Dusk, green seed stone [jade]. This is Ceremonial Dress and a Palace Treasure. The strip should be bright yellow.12

This succinct precedent reveals a great deal about the Qing dynasty and the role of red coral at court; we learn that coral was prescribed as part of the sacred regalia and that it was considered as a ‘Palace Treasure’. The ceremony refers to the sacrifice for the Prayers to the Morning Sun held at the Altar of the Sun, Ritan, east of the Forbidden City, Beijing, to mark the spring equinox, the season of fertility.13 The colour associated with this altar is red, hence the emperor’s sacrificial robes, chao pao, were red, his necklace and his belt were of red coral. Qing rulers were ambivalent to wearing red robes, since red had been the dynastic colour of the preceding Ming; the Qing imperial colour – yellow – reflected ‘the belief that earth overcomes fire’.14 Clothes didn’t just ‘maketh the man’, correct dress and accessories with the prescribed colours, gemstones and motifs were essential components of sacred rulership.15 In his introduction to the Precedents, Qianlong states that the previous nonHan dynasties that turned their back on their sartorial traditions eventually failed. This observation underlines Manchu anxieties about the importance of dress and accessories to the governing and functioning of the Chinese world. The Qing were minority Manchu rulers of a predominantly Han Chinese empire, who took control of the Middle Kingdom from the Ming in 1644. According to costume historian, John Vollmer, while the Precedents were ‘ostensibly … concerned with preserving Manchustyle clothing and, with it Manchu identity’, the changes indicate an eighteenth-century shift towards Confucianism and ‘the ideas of the Chinese imperial model’ and reflect Chinese tastes.16 The tendency, therefore, was more towards balancing Manchu traditions with the preferences of the majority Han subjects. Court necklaces, made of coral, or with coral embellishments, were introduced by Shunzhi (1644–61), the first Qing emperor. These carried great symbolic weight as the colours and gems accorded with the status of the wearer. The association between

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Figure 3.1  Official court necklace, Qing Dynasty, nineteenth century, amber, jade, imitation coral, 104.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 02.18.924. Gift of Heber R. Bishop, 1902.

beads and imperial status was an ancient one; the character for king 王, wang ‘may have symbolised a string of jade beads’.17 James Lin notes that the similar character for jade, yu, 玉 represents the linking of heaven and earth.18 Qing necklaces were derived from Tibetan Buddhist rosaries and consisted of four groups of twenty-seven beads, separated by four large fotou, with three counting strings and a long ‘back cloud’, holding the necklace in place (Figure 3.1).19 Imperial women wore similar necklaces to their menfolk, plus a neck torque, lingyue, and a further pair of necklaces worn crossed at the chest (Plate 7). Only the Empress dowager and the Empress were permitted red coral; the emperor’s mother and his consort therefore wore more coral than the emperor himself. This indicates the close relationship between senior women to the imperial axis, under whose control coral was both worked and distributed. The wrapping of imperial women in coral may relate to a less elitist practice, namely the emphasizing of objects through the use of red ribbons.20 This was both a physical wrapping and a representation of the act of framing, at the same time foregrounding and adding importance to the item in question; red being auspicious and coral considered to be metamorphic. This corresponds with the role of the empress as the metamorphic phoenix. The phoenix, the mythical ‘king of birds’, was associated with the empress and is sometimes confused with the stellar Vermilion Bird of the South.21 The empress produced the next generation of imperial dragons, as Chinese emperors were known, and was an active agent in the emperor’s desire for dynastic immortality. Red coral was given prominence in the formal attire of imperial women, with coral beads teamed with the ‘crown jewels’, dongzhu, eastern Manchurian freshwater pearls.

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Pearls, also one of the ‘Eight Precious Things’, represent wealth and good fortune.22 A balance of yin yang is a fundamental desire in Chinese philosophy; therefore, with the understanding that ‘[t]he Chinese believe that pearls embodied the yin essence of the moon, and like the Indians believed that pearls protected against fire as the yang essence of the sun’, the teaming pearls with coral becomes obvious. The female yin of white pearl is modified and balanced by the male yang of red coral, the latter being linked to the sun, to fire and to the colour red.23 The combination of imperial dongzhu with shanhu alluded to creating balance and harmony in the universe and indicated the proximity of the imperial women to the emperor himself.24 Court hats with coral buttons, or the allusion to coral through the use of redcoloured materials, are another item of apparel that carried symbolic freight. The character for hat, guan 冠, and official, guan 官, are homophones. The character chao denotes imperial, therefore chao guan literally means both ‘imperial hat’ and ‘imperial official’. Winter hats were covered in red yak- or horse-hair, summer hats with red silk gauze.25 Coral buttons with peacock feathers marked the wearer out as being favoured; hence a coral branch and peacock motif indicated worldly success.26 It seems there was further spiritual significance through connections with Tibetan Buddhism, a religion closely associated with the Qing.27 Buddha figures sometimes have red coral beads on their crowns; this may be connected with the idea that having ‘a pure mind’ was like a clarifying gem.28 Similarly, the popular Daoist immortal, Liu Hai, in the shape of a porcelain snuff bottle has a coral stopper (Figure 3.2).29 Coral embellished belts, chao dai, were another aspect of dress that was both highly practical and held deeper meaning. On ritual and official occasions, the emperor was girded with coral in some form, either on his belt clasp or the ornamental beads of his attachments. It seems likely that the auspicious hue of coral, its connection with magic and medicine was a major motivation behind this practice. Like imperial women, the emperor was wrapped in materials that had both spiritual associations, such as the chao zhu with Buddhism, and more practical chao dai. It could be argued that both encircle vulnerable parts of the body, the waist and the neck – parts requiring the special protection of a magical substance like coral because of their susceptibility to injury. Belts kept robes together and also allowed items to be carried, such as seal boxes, chopsticks, purses and flint carriers.30 At the same time, a belt encircles the body at its most vulnerable point, where the spine supports the upper body without protection from ribs or the pelvis. Chao dai were only worn by men; they consisted of coloured silk decorated with four metal plaques, set or inlaid with gemstones, metal or horn. Most commonly, belts were designed with a hook to fasten at the front, a plaque at the rear and two side-plaques with hanging hooks. This style of belt was developed for the practical Manchu nomadic horsemen.31

Marine Origins Corallium rubrum, the exoskeleton of marine polyps, grows in colonies in the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea – off modern Tunisia, Algeria and Italy. In the early modern period, living coral was harvested during the late spring and early summer, then

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­ igure  3.2  Snuff bottle depicting the immortal Liú Hǎi, Qing Dynasty, late eighteenth– F early nineteenth century, porcelain with overglaze enamel colours and coral stopper, 78.0 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.40.569a. Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913.

brought to the Italian ports of Livorno and Genoa to be cleaned, sorted, semi-processed and traded. The British East India Company’s Price Current at Canton 1764 indicates that ‘Coral Beads and branch Coral’ were judged ‘according to their goodness’.32 Large, undamaged ‘trees’ of coral were particularly prized in China, consequently special care was taken when packing brittle branches to protect them on the 10,000-kilometre journey, in the hope of realizing the best return on the commercial investment.33 In the long nineteenth century, Corallium rubrum arrived in China in several forms: as raw coral pieces, semi-processed beads and, most desirable of all, as ‘trees’. Given the right conditions, coral can mature to sizes from fifty centimetres to one metre high and with diameters of between three to ten centimetres.34

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The most complete Chinese description of coral collecting dates from the Southern Song dynasty, the Qing Chao Wenxian Tongkao (Great Study of Literary Remains), a medical encyclopaedia by Ma Duan-lin (1245–1322): The inhabitants of Ta’tsin [Roman Syria] use large sea-going ships having on board nets of iron. They get a diver first to go down and look for corals; if the nets can be let down, they drop them. When the corals first appear they are white, and by degrees they resemble sprouts, and break through. After a year and some time has elapsed they grow through the meshes of the net and change their color into yellow; they will then throw out branches and intertwine, having grown to a height of three or four ch’ih, and the larger ones measuring over a ch’ih in circuit. After three years, their color has turned into a beautiful carnation red. They are then again looked after to ascertain whether they can be gathered. The fishers thereupon get at the roots with iron pinchers and fasten the net with ropes; they let the men on board turn the vessel round, raise the net and take it out, and return to their country, where the corals are polished and cut according to fancy. If not fished for at the proper time they are liable to be worm-bitten.35

This indicates that the gathering of coral was semi-agricultural, with the harvesting calculated to await the maturity of the colonies. Metal nets were thrown over living coral to encourage the young colonies to grow up through them. Divers would cut the coral ‘roots’ when it came to harvest time, probably to facilitate the haulage of valuable ‘trees’. Both Pliny and Ma Duan-lin detail medicinal uses for coral, which adds a further layer of mystical and apotropaic qualities.36 By the early modern period, an alternative method of harvesting had been devised using an instrument named an ingegno, ingenious.37 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1606–89), a French jeweller, describes the process: The fishers bind two rafters together in the form of a cross, and place a large lump of lead in the centre to make them sink to the bottom … They then allow the wood to drift with the current across the rocks, and the hemp becoming entangled about the coral, it sometimes requires five or six boats to hoist the rafters; and when exerting the great strain necessary, if one of the cables breaks all the rowers are in danger of perishing; it is a very risky trade.38

Coral fishing was strenuous and dangerous, with the risk of capsize, pirates and unpredictable weather. The ingegno process was also inefficient; according to Tavernier, half the crop fell to the seabed, where it had to be retrieved rapidly to prevent it being eaten by worms. Nevertheless, the sheer longevity of the industry – enduring from antiquity up to the modern era – indicates that coral colonies were allowed to remain fallow and recover from seasonal culling. The length and width, hue and condition of harvested coral were ascribed an economic value. Tavernier identifies Sardinian coral as the ‘best and most beautiful coral’ with excellent, deep red colour and long thick branches.39 The most commercially valuable was considered to be ‘living coral’, followed by ‘dead but attached’, ‘dead

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but fallen’ and, the lowest in value, ‘worm-eaten’ coral.40 In 1793, the scholar, Ji Yun (1724–1805) commented on the vagaries of price, and of supply and demand, for luxurious products: The value of things is dependent on the fashion of their time and [hence cannot be] fixed. [I] recall when I was young, ginseng, coral and lapis lazuli were not expensive, [but] today [they are] increasingly so; turquoise and tourmaline were extremely expensive, [but] today [their prices are] increasingly reduced.41

From the mid-nineteenth century, Pacific corals, Corallium japonica and other species, were harvested off Japan, in large quantities, leading to a broadening of uses for red, pink and white coral and an apparent loosening of control of the coral trade.42

Natural Material Qualities An exploration of the physical properties of coral, its vivid colour and innate dendriform shape can aid an understanding of the role played by this marine organism and exotic within the cultural domain of the Chinese court and why it was so admired. Red coral has an inherent opacity, vitreous quality, a brightness and smoothness when polished, and plant-like surface patterning. It presented craftsmen with interesting physical characteristics: plasticity, a dendriform profile and scale. The inherent hue of Corallium rubrum was a significant motivation for it being so admired by the Chinese. In her essay, ‘The Colour of Things’, social scientist, Diana Young, discusses ways in which previous studies have approached the subject of colour – from a scientific perspective, through language and perception, to the symbolic.43 Anthropologist, Alfred Gell’s ideas about objects and agency influenced Young, who proposes a cultural examination of colour through materiality. She advocates that asking what coloured materials do in social practice helps to shine fresh light on the role of materiality and colour in culture. Young argues that colours are active, that they have agency; colours distinguish, transform, are used as analogies and are dialogical in relationship with other colours.44 Patricia Bjaaland Welch concurs: ‘Colors in Chinese art and design are not used haphazardly, but rather signal or convey a variety of meanings from messages concerning status, virtue, fortune and personality, to mood.’45 By adopting a material and ‘active’ colour approach to the concept of red, we can explore the agency of coral and its relationship in Qing China. This allows us to discover how the Manchu rulers employed and manipulated red coral for their own self-fashioning purposes. This exploration allows us to gain an understanding of Qing social and iconographical uses of coral, as well as to enable discussion about value, colour and materiality, based on a specific hue. Humans tend to be attracted to visually appealing materials and objects, particularly ones that are brightly coloured, with lustre, reflectivity or shine.46 At the same time, colour perceptions are social constructs. It is well known that red has powerful agency in Chinese culture. Conceptually, red carries ancient and long-established connections to blood, fertility and celebration.47 Red, hong, has potent associations with Chinese

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New Year which celebrates a cycle of renewal and rejoicing. In ancient times, fresh lamb’s blood was daubed onto doorframes to celebrate the coming Spring.48 Over time, blood’s positive, life-sustaining associations were apparently transferred from its materiality onto the concept of red. In other words, the agency of blood transformed into the concept of its colour; red paper and cloth banners therefore represent an earlier custom. Once agency moved from the material (fluid) to the concept (colour), it was possible for various ‘bloody associations’ – including apotropaic protection, joyfulness and fertility – to be attached to other red materials: silks, paper, ink.49 Additionally, once red had become an independent concept, other red objects, flowers and firecrackers could be assigned similar agency. Thus, red becomes indelibly incorporated into the customs of festivities. Divorced from its original materiality, the concept of red developed an agency of its own. In a flamboyant penjing arrangement in the Palace Museum, Beijing, dating from the Yongzheng period (1723–35), a female immortal rides on a phoenix. The creature has been created from carefully selected coral ‘twigs’; the natural form of coral has been transformed into flaming phoenix feathers and tail.50 Over time, shanhu became linked with Daoist goddesses, the peaches of immortality, as well as phoenix. Mythical peaches grew in the orchards of the Queen Mother of the West, Xiwangmu, on Mount Kunlun.51 It was said that they ripen every three thousand years; and those invited to eat them become immortal. Xiwangmu is often depicted riding a phoenix, or flying a chariot pulled by a mythical creature.52 Two fabled paradises, Penglai, the eastern island of the eight immortals, and the western Mount Kunlun are both linked with coralline trees. Sinologist, Edward Schafer suggests that the Chinese imagined coral were precious trees from fairyland or paradise. Wei-Ying-wu (c.737–c.792) wrote verses praising them: A crimson tree, lacking flowers and leaves, Neither stone nor yet a gem-mineral, In what place may the men of our age find it? – For it grows on the summit of P’eng-lai.53

Here, coral’s hue, its lack of flora and its mysterious origin are emphasized by the Tang poet. This indicates a perception of coral’s unusual materiality, and its desirability and elusiveness at a time when red coral reached China via overland routes. One fundamental characteristic of red coral that distinguishes it from other baoshi, is its dendritic form. The analogies made between coral and trees were longstanding. According to historian, C.A.S. Williams, red coral ‘was anciently supposed to represent a tree called the T’ieh shu, which grows at the bottom of the sea, and flowers only once a century’.54 This indicates marine origins and rarity, and suggests a link with a supernatural nature. Further, according to Daoist belief, red coral was categorized as yang, traditionally a wood element, demonstrating fluidity in the wuxing system.55 The tree is an ancient conceptual form in China with early cults of trees.56 This developed into beliefs that there was a tree at the axis of the world; beliefs that found their way into Buddhism and Daoism. The practice of attaching red cloth or paper strips to a tree derives from the belief that ‘spirits of evil … always avoid that particular colour of happiness and good fortune’.57

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Figure  3.3  Penjing bowl with red coral berries and nephrite jade leaves, Qing Dynasty, Qianlong period, nephrite and red coral, 28.6 × 29.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 02.18.742. Gift of Heber R Bishop, 1902.

Early Mahayana Buddhist texts illustrate how trees of precious minerals were believed to comprise the realms of paradise.58 Buddhist heavens are filled with non-withering vegetation of jade, coral and turquoise. These texts appear to be the inspiration of penjing, miniature scenes from nature, so popular at the Qing court, typically with trees or berries of red coral and jade leaves (Figure  3.3). Miniature landscapes – signifying the cosmos – with coral flora, represented the imperial wish to contain small paradises and to have dominion over both this life and the everlasting.59 In the context of the penjing, coral trees in potted landscapes also make reference to an earlier imperial garden with a legendary coral tree – between eight and thirteen feet high, with 462 branches – in the royal hunting park of Emperor Han Wudi (141–87 BCE) of the Western Han.60 According to the Han Wudi gushi (Tales of the Emperor Wu of Han), a temple in the garden had a fabulous tree built to imitate the trees of Mount Kunlun: In the front courtyard stood a jade tree, created by fashioning branches from coral and leaves from green jade. Its flowers and fruits, some green and others red, were made of pearls and jade; the fruits were all hollowed like little bells to make tinkling sounds.61

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It can be speculated that the Qing practice of ‘planting’ coral in penjing has a plausible visual, if not ideological, connection between the use of clay trees in a model fishpond from the tomb art of the first- and second-century Han.62 Coralline trees appear in stories of mysterious submarine worlds. In the Qing fairytale by Pu Songling (1640–1715), The Rakshas and the Sea Market, Ma Jun’s boat is blown off course to a land of barbarians.63 Ma is invited to the Dragon Lord’s watery kingdom and where he marries his beautiful daughter; the sea princess’s bridal couch is coral, studded with eight jewels.64 At the end of the story, the princess brings her daughter dowry gifts, including an eight-foot coral tree.65 This story connects coral with a supernatural kingdom, otherworldly furniture, beauty, fertility and marriage. At the same time, coral remains magical, associated with high-status individuals. Within such stories, the very experience of seeing coral in its natural habitat precipitated an act of metamorphosis, where the human need for oxygen is suspended. It may be that such tales had their origins in the myths of Greek and Roman sea-gods, Poseidon and Neptune, and their coral kingdoms. Certainly, stories circulated in China from the Han period onwards that in the palaces of Ta-ts’in (Roman Syria) coral beams were supported on crystal columns.66 Distant echoes of Greek and Roman regard for coral and its transformative properties may have traversed the trade routes, along with the commodity itself. In addition to actual coral displayed in elite palaces, branching motifs were placed on courtly robes, as part of the babao pingshui, ‘eight treasures and smooth water’ hem border.67 These representational branches were woven or embroidered alongside the earth mountain and other treasure motifs – pearls, rhino horns and rhombus shapes. Higher on imperial robes, five-clawed dragons chase the flaming pearl of enlightenment; the flames indicating mythical status. On exceptional garments, such as a late-Qing robe, dating to the Tongzhi period (1862–74) now in the Metropolitan Museum, the flames – which are visually similar to the branching coral motif – are ornamented with actual tiny coral beads (Figure 3.4). As motifs became stylized, it was difficult to differentiate between flames and coral, particularly as both were popularly coloured red. There is a direct elemental connection between fire and coral, and it may be that the Chinese accepted the ambiguity of these motifs, since they both indicate masculine yang energy and the active fire element. Coral branches, along with other auspicious motifs, were found popularly on buzi, rank badges, placed on bufu, surcoats, of civil and military officials.68 These badges echoed the ‘eight treasures and smooth water’ hem border of robes, with coral motifs alongside the earth mountain and waves. For example, an eighteenth-century embroidered silk and metallic thread silver pheasant rank badge of a fifth-ranking official in the Metropolitan Museum collection (30.75.988), displays a range of positive motifs including red coral. The combination of four bats, peony, a peach tree bearing nine peaches and Buddhist symbols was intended to spell out the rebus of longevity and happiness.69 A pair of circular lacquer boxes, dating to the Qianlong period (Figure  3.5), exemplifies coral’s importance at court and the power of the coral motif as auspicious.70 The two boxes, created by imperial craftsmen, are entitled, ‘Peaceful Boxes of Treasure’, shengping baohe. On each lid is depicted an elephant, accompanied by two foreign attendants. Both animals carry treasure bowls; placed prominently atop each pile of

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Figure 3.4  Detail of court robe embroidered with coral and pearls, Qing Dynasty, Tongzhi period (1862–74), silk, metallic thread, coral and pearls, 139.7 × 231.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29.36. Gift of Robert E. Tod, 1929.

treasure, is a large coral ‘tree’ planted in a vase: ‘This scene envisions the traditional Chinese fantasy of foreign countries [that] bring treasures to pay tribute in times of peace.’71 Tse Bartholomew describes treasure bowls as the ‘Chinese equivalent of a horn of plenty’.72 The intricately carved boxes, possibly made as New Year’s gifts, are red lacquer, a material that is both auspicious and luxurious.73 Elephants are linked with Buddhism, wisdom and strength; an elephant with a vase on its back is a wish for peace.74 The foreigners indicate that the world’s treasures are being brought peaceably as tribute to the emperor, the centre of the Chinese world. These boxes represent the

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Figure 3.5  A pair of carved red lacquer boxes, Qing Dynasty, Qianlong period (1736–95), 10.5 × 20.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 13.100.143a,b. John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913.

agency of red coral, both as a material and as a motif, that has a potency of its own, even when divorced from physical coral. The ubiquitous Qing motif of a red coral branch paired with peacock feathers, lingding huihuang (literally, ‘brilliant topknot and feather’), appears on porcelain, screens and woodblock prints and indicated the wish: ‘May you achieve the highest official rank’.75 The motif makes reference to actual branches placed on the desks of literati, a practice that dated to at least the Ming period. A scene common on porcelain plates depicts a mother watching young boys playing; on the table behind them is a vase containing two peacock feathers and twigs of coral.76 This infers a desire that these boys will grow to become officials and wear a coral button and honorific peacock feather. As we have seen, the positive agency of red coral transferred to the representation of a coral branch. Over time, the potency of the coral motif was such that this symbol did not necessarily even have to be red to be both easily recognizable and imbued with the auspicious agency of the actual red material. The coral motif acquired its own agency and was popularly found across Chinese culture, both at court and in everyday life. In this way, even those who could never acquire a real coral branch were able to enjoy shanhu’s positive benefits by having objects or images decorated with a coral representation or motif. The fact that branching coral visually evokes the antlers of a stag was not lost on the Chinese, with their love of visual and verbal puns.77 Deer and antlers are associated with longevity.78 As we have seen, Chinese material culture in the late imperial period was profoundly influenced by ancient concepts, many of which had lost their original meaning; nonetheless, a basic concept or visual form endured, even when the original significance may be long forgotten.79

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Little is known about Qing craftsmen’s understanding of red coral. For jade at least, material properties have had long-standing links with virtues, thus the esteemed stone acted as an exemplar and as a didactic tool.80 Red coral may have been assigned similar qualities, since it shares a certain opacity, glossiness, brittleness, resistance to sharpening and a glassy sound. Red coral was possibly similarly considered to be virtuously consistent; that is, the same on the inside and outside. Certainly, pellucidity – the quality of allowing light to shine through – played an important role in the ranking of materials, exemplified by Qing hat buttons, where colour and translucency featured in the hierarchy. The emperor’s crown was topped by opaque pearls. Red coral indicated the highest non-noble rank, as exemplified by Charles Gordon’s court hat. Its hierarchical value was second to that of translucent ruby worn by first-ranking princes or nobles. Third-ranking officials wore sapphire; fourth, lapis lazuli; fifth, crystal and sixth, white jade. This indicates a red/blue/white hierarchy of baoshi and their translucent/opaque properties. Costume historians, Gary Dickinson, and Linda Wrigglesworth, suggest that the grading can be understood as the colours representing the elements of fire, wood and metal respectively, with each having an active yang phase and a passive yin aspect.81 Coral is highly flexible – it can be used in its natural form, treated like a gemstone, or carved.82 Chinese imperial craftsmen made full use of shanhu’s form. This flexibility is evident from the variety of objects, sometimes combining several pieces into a single artefact. A small carved lion sculpture in the Palace Museum, Beijing, demonstrates the high degree of creativity achieved for court.83 The freestanding lion stands on a sandalwood ‘mountain’. The lion looks over its left side, with its head snarling, and raises its right front paw aloft. The craftsman has made use of the structure of coral. The lion’s paws and torso are crafted out of interlocking pieces, to indicate texture, form and movement; the animal’s tail is a natural coral twig, positioned to create the effect of a flicking gesture.84 Long coral twigs were suited to elongated objects, such as honorific ‘according to your wishes’ ruyi sceptres. A particularly fine example in the Palace Museum, Beijing, dates to the eighteenth century. The 32-centimetre-long handle is crafted from several slender twigs.85 The craftsman has incorporated coral’s natural irregularities, giving the ruyi a rustic appearance and imitating the irregularities of a tree branch. Another less delicate, although nonetheless prestigious, example (Plate 8) is a coral ruyi, which would have been considered particularly splendid. This has a 27.9-centimetrelong handle with twin interlocking coral pieces.86 Its head, shaped in the form of the longevity fungus, lingzhi, is decorated with an auspicious wan symbol, encircled by five red bats, a rebus for ‘Five Blessings’.87 During the Qing period, ruyi – made of materials ranging from rare coral to abundant bamboo – were produced in enormous quantities for presentation to courtiers and diplomats. Such gifting served to tie both nobles and foreign dignitaries to the Middle Kingdom and demonstrated the emperor’s command of the supply of materials. Qing lapidarists inherited considerable experience of exotics, such as coral, ivory, rhino horn and amber. Over time, craftsmen developed an intimate understanding of, and mythology about, the physical qualities and cultural and creative possibilities offered by each. Elite zaobanchu craftsmen were also proficient at working with the

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characteristics and flaws of materials. ‘Smart’ carving is where the lapidarists worked with the natural lines or forms of a material, thus turning a defect into a benefit. For example, in a small coral snuff bottle in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, blemishes have been utilized to represent flower stamens adorning a bottle that is shaped in the form of a chilli pepper.88 As we have seen, the various artefacts created by Qing craftsmen – and the materials they used – were tailored to the specific needs, tastes and motivations of the elite.

Conclusion This exploration has focused on the physical properties of red coral, a marine organism and unusually coloured natural commodity, with an ancient and multi-layered history of use in China. The very nature of coral itself has been misunderstood and mythologized over the centuries. It was considered a plant, or a tree, something that turned to stone when removed from the ocean.89 In fact, we now understand coral to be animal, one that is slow-growing and sensitive to environmental conditions. The transformation of Corallium rubrum was initiated by its movement from the Mediterranean to the Qing court. Red coral underwent commercial selection as well as a physical transformation, in order to conform to Chinese beliefs and cultural preferences. At the same time, red coral’s inherent properties both informed and influenced the production of elite objects and courtly accessories. It is clear from extant objects that craftsmen carefully selected particular pieces of red coral to carve, sculpt and create skilful and imaginative sculptures, penjing and other items. The metamorphosis of coral can be traced in the languages – Italian, English, Chinese – and the terms used along the stages of ‘the coral network’. Natural coralli was harvested in the spring and summer, then transported to Genoa and Livorno. In these locations, coral became a commodity to be sorted, graded and traded. Coralli was valued according to colour, size and condition, before being packed into crates for trans-shipment to China, via London and India. On arrival in China, coral was transformed once again, becoming shanhu, a ‘Palace Treasure’. Craftsmen in Guangzhou and Beijing fashioned shanhu into an astonishing array of courtly objects, commissioned by, or presented to, the emperor. Red coral had an active agency at the Qing court accrued over centuries of sacred and elite use. Shanhu is considered one of the spiritual treasures of Buddhism and was inserted into ritual devotional paraphernalia. Within Daoism, but overlapping with Buddhism, coral stood for unfading trees and eternal life, representing time both stilled and infinite. At the same time, coral was magical and metamorphic: the stuff of fairy tales and otherworldliness. Coral’s physical attributes – its redness, form, lustre and opacity – were admired and valued for their distinctive properties. Coral’s characteristics also worked in combination with those of other rare materials. For example, its dialogical relationship with pearls, added a further dimension to coral’s appreciation. By interspersing white pearls with red coral in imperial necklaces, the female yin essence of the pearls was modified and protected against the male yang essence of coral; the latter linked with

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the sun and to fire. Further, red, hong, is an active, positive colour, associated with regeneration and celebration, whereas white, bai, is associated with death in Chinese culture. The combination of pearls and coral worn around imperial necks alludes to the creation of harmony in the universe. It also indicated the proximity of the principal imperial women to the emperor. The placement of red coral on an imperial body was significant. Vulnerable parts of the torso were wrapped or encircled for protection and emphasis – the neck, waist, head and nape. Imperial female necklaces drew attention to the function of the wearers as mothers. This use of coral was at the same time decorative, auspicious and apotropaic. Indeed, coral objects at the Qing court need to be understood in terms of their proximity to the corporeal body of the emperor; a body which was a physical link to, and therefore a manifestation of, the intangible, the heavenly, the divine.90 There was a difference between intimate items worn on the imperial body and those objects used or handled by the emperor in his daily or religious practices. Objects displayed in the imperial palaces are a third category. There is also a distinction between the pieces commissioned for imperial use and those distributed by the emperor to courtiers and foreign ambassadors. The link between these various coral objects and their uses is their purpose in demonstrating the emperor’s position at the centre of the Qing world, the Middle Kingdom, and his ability to command and control the treasured resources in this world. The Qianlong emperor achieved considerable longevity, living to the age of 87, having reigned for sixty years.91 While physical immortality may have been beyond his reach, Qianlong’s desire to control the image his empire projected and associated symbolism through the specification of colour, hardstones, dress and accessories – as well as the fathering of twenty-seven children – indicates that he was heavily invested in and concerned about his dynastic longevity. To become an ancestor, to be honoured and remembered by one’s successors is another important form of immortality in China. Whether it was worn, meditated upon, or gifted, precious shanhu played a significant role in the daily and ritual lives of the imperial elite during the Qing dynasty, helping to preserve and protect them in the hope of everlasting posterity.

Notes My thanks to Kathleen Davidson, University of Sydney; Molly Duggins, National Art School, Sydney; Anne Haour, Patricia Hewitt, Steven Hooper, John Mitchell, Maggie Tan and Margit Thofner, UEA; Sun Yue and Liu Yue, Department of Ancient Utensils, Palace Museum, Beijing; Tung-Ho Chen, National Palace Museum, Taipei; Matthew Owen, Beijing; and Polly Kwong, Hong Kong.   1 Pippa Lacey, ‘The Coral Network: The Trade of Red Coral to the Qing Imperial Court in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London & New York: Routledge, 2016), 81–102. The concepts of preciousness and treasure are fundamental in China. Both materials and motifs carry auspiciousness and apotropaic protection.

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  2 James Lin and Timothy Potts, The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Jade burial suits (206 BC–AD 220) illustrate how precious materials have been connected to a longing for immortality for centuries.   3 Patricia Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery (Vermont & Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2008), 61.   4 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 61–2, 78–9, 161–2, 228–9.   5 Lacey, ‘The Coral Network’, 81–102.   6 Ibid.   7 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).   8 Gary Dickinson and Linda Wrigglesworth, Imperial Wardrobe (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2004), 114, 153,183. The latter were worn by the military.   9 Huangchao liqi tu shi (Illustrated Regulations for Ceremonial Paraphernalia of the Qing dynasty), 1736–95. https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer. aspx?ref=or_9430_f001r (accessed 31 December 2021). 10 Yan Yong, ‘Imperial Dress in the Qing Dynasty’ in Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City, edited by Ming Wilson (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), 13–17. 11 Yong, ‘Imperial Dress’, 13–17. Anni Yin, ‘Women’s Informal Wear at the Imperial Court in the Late Qing Dynasty’, in Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City, edited by Ming Wilson (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), 67. 12 Huangchao liqi tushi (Illustrated Precedents for the Ritual Paraphernalia of the Imperial Court), 1759 (Yangzhou, 2007) 107, printed in 1766 by the Wuying dian (Hall of Military Glory). Fourth scroll, Guanfu 1, 107. https://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=or_9430_f001r (accessed 31 December 2021). 13 The Prayers to the Sky were held on winter solstice, Earth on summer solstice and Dusk at autumn equinox. 14 John Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne: Costume of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press 2002), 82–3; Dickinson & Wrigglesworth, Imperial Wardrobe, 58–9. ­15 Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne, 97–103. It was through the wearing of the yellow ji fu, worn by the emperor that imperial power was most symbolic, as this robe represented a schematic diagram of the universe. 16 Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne, 97–103. 17 Lois Sherr Dubin, The Worldwide History of Beads: Ancient, Ethnic, Contemporary (London: Abrams, 2009), 166. 18 James Lin, www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/jade-stone-of-heaven (accessed 9 January 2021). 19 A back cloud (beiyun) is a single string worn at the back that functions as a counterweight for the long necklace of coral beads – https://thingsthattalk.net/nl/t/ ttt:TDUYoW/m/a-cloud-as-counterweight (accessed 14 April 2022). 20 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 258. 21 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 80–2. Within the philosophical five elements system, wuxing, and its corresponding five colours, wuse, red is associated with the active yang of fire, the direction of south and to summer. 22 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 63. 23 Robert Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols & Motifs (London: Serindia Publications, 1999), 209; Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 63.

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24 Coral was teamed with lapis, turquoise or kingfisher feathers on sacred mandala and in women’s headdresses. The red and blue pairing represented the Tibetan Buddhist combination of fire and air. Vidale Massimo and Cristina Del Mare, Coral in Indian Ethnic Jewellery (Naples: Electa, 1998), 52. 25 Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne, 76. 26 Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne, 76. Peacock ‘eyes’ indicated merit, single for first grade, triple for top grade. 27 Evelyn S Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 244–63. 28 For example, a porcelain figure of a Vairocana Buddha, eighteenth century, ROM, Toronto: 922.20.303 (2011). Dickinson & Wrigglesworth, Imperial Wardrobe, 106. 29 Metropolitan Museum of Art. Qianlong period (1736–95) H. 3 1/16 in. (7.8 cm) 14.40.569a, b. www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/41328 (accessed 9 January 2021). 30 Valery Garrett, A Collector’s Guide to Chinese Dress Accessories (Singapore: Times Editions, 1997), 66–8, Pl 6. 31 Ibid. 32 Patrick J.N. Tuck, Britain and the China Trade 1635–1842 (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), 119; Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600–1834 (London: The British Library, 2001); British Library: R/10/5 Factory Diaries Record, 1761–1769; vol 5 ff 61 – 18 October 1764. 33 Ethel Sainsbury, A Calendar of Court Minutes etc. of the East India Company (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 52–3, 72; British Library: Robert Ball, Francis Gosfright and Co. at Leghorn, 15 June 1677, Letter Book vol vp.443 [IOR/E/3/88 f. 221 (2): India Office Records and Private Papers]. 34 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wil Fauna and Flora, CoP14.21 2007, 1–22, https://cites.org/sites/default/files/eng/cop/14/prop/E14-P21. pdf (accessed 9 January 2021). The Chinese were aware of coral’s origins from at least the Han period. Texts dating from the Tang contain resonances of earlier Roman texts. In Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder (AD 24–79), gives an extensive account of the metamorphic quality of coral and how it was harvested. Pliny describes coral’s colour transformation, the use of nets and instruments to harvest ‘berries’, and that smooth branches are most valued. 35 East Asian History Source Book: Chinese Accounts of Rome, Byzantium and the Middle East, c. 91 B.C.E. – 1643 C.E. (New York: Fordham University) – https/depts. washington.edu/silkroad/text/romchin1.html (accessed 9 January 2021); a chi is equivalent of approx. 23.1–24.3 cm, a li indicates approximate 0.4158 kms. Ta’tsin translates to Da Qin, ch’ih to chi in Wade Giles. 36 John E Hill, Through the Jade Gate to Rome (Charleston: BookSurge Publishing, 2009), 25. Various Chinese versions are consistent in their assertion that coral took three years to grow. In fact, it takes 7–12 years for coral to mature. Perhaps the threeyear cycle fits with numerological lore? What is clear is that coral came from western seas, where collecting took planning, patience and skill. Coral was metamorphic in its nature and acquired by effort. It was understood that the Roman Empire was a great distance and coral an exotic commodity. 37 Giovanni Tescione, The Italians and Their Coral Fishing (Naples: Fausto Fiorentino, 1968), 105–7. 38 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, eds. Valentine Ball and William Crooke, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Low Price Publications 2000), 105–6.

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39 Tavernier, Travels in India, 104–6. 40 CoP14.21 2007, 1–22 – cites.org/sites/default/files/eng/cop/14/prop/E14-P21.pdf (accessed 9 January 2021). 41 Lichen Sun, From Baoshi to Feicui, Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, eds. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011), 203–20. 42 According to Nozomu Iwaski of Rissho University: ‘Entering the Meiji Period (1868–1912), Japanese coral fishing began first in Kochi Prefecture.’ Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 61–2; Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne, 64. 43 Diana Young, ‘The Colour of Things’, in Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Webb Keane et al. (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 173–85. 44 Young, ‘The Colour of Things’, 173–85; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998), 5–27. 45 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 219. 46 Gell, Art and Agency, 5–27. 47 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 221. Red is predominantly positive in China, nevertheless, it does have less positive associations, i.e. red clouds augur disaster. 48 Charles Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 76–9. 49 Terese Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2008), 238. 50 Beiing Palace Museum, Gugong Bowuyuan Cang Wenwu Zhenpin Quanji 57: Gongting Zhenbao, The Complete Collections of the Treasures of the Palace Museum 57: Jewellery in the Imperial Court (Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 2005), 50. No 43 – overall height 37 cm. The Gugong catalogue identifies Magu, the Hemp Lady, Goddess of Longevity, a popular birthday motif. Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 203–4, asserts that the presence of a phoenix is an attribute of Xiwangmu. 51 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 203–4. 52 Ibid. 53 Edward H Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 246. ­54 Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism, 87 ‘iron tree’. Dorothy Perkins, Encyclopedia of China: History and Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 106. 55 Red is associated with the fire element. 56 Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism, 406–8. 57 Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism, 408. 58 Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 2007), vol 1, 406–7, n.57. In Sukhavativyuha XVI (Translated by F Max Muller): ‘there are trees made of gold, silver, beryl, crystal, coral, red pearls, diamonds and various combinations of these, etc.’ 59 Edward H. Shafer, The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Metropolitan Museum, 02.18.742, Qianlong Period (1736–95), Nephrite with coral 11 1/4 in. (28.6 cm); W. 15 1/2 in. (39.4 cm). Shafer, The Vermilion Bird, 337 n. 259; Siu, Victoria M. Gardens of a Chinese Emperor: Imperial Creations of the Qianlong Era, 1736–1796, xxiii. Shafer states ‘the revered many-branched coral tree … had been a gift from Chao T’o of Nam-Viet’. 60 Victoria M Siu, Gardens of a Chinese Emperor: Imperial Creations of the Qianlong Era, 1736–1796 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013), xvii.

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61 Thomas E. Smith, Declarations of the Perfected, Part One (St Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2013), 188. The Han Wudi is said to have been written in the third century AD. David R. Knechtges and Tong Xiao, Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, Volume I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 124 (note L 204) says ‘wrongly ascribed to Ban Gu’. 62 British Museum 1930,0718.1, Han Dynasty, earthenware model fish-pond, H 35.5 cm × D 39.4 cm. www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1930-0718-1 (accessed 9 January 2021). 63 Cyril Birch, Anthology of Chinese Literature (New York, Grove Press 1972), 160–70; Pu Songling, ‘The Lo-Ch’A Country and the Sea Market’, in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liazhai zhiyi), vol 2, LXIII. http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/43628/43628-h/43628-h.htm (accessed 9 January 2021). 64 Eight is an auspicious number in China, considered the origin of all things. 65 Birch, Anthology of Chinese Literature, 160–70. 66 Encyclopedia of Ma Twanlin (Tuan-lin/Duanlin) 1849. https://depts.washington.edu/ silkroad/texts/romchin1.html (accessed 31 December 2021). Early 7th century AD. 67 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 62. 68 Vollmer, Ruling from the Dragon Throne, 116. 69 Beverley Jackson and David Hugus, Ladder to the Clouds: Intrigue and Tradition in Chinese Rank (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1999), 210–11. 70 Metropolitan Museum, 13.100.143a,b and 144a,b. A pair of non-identical circular carved red lacquer boxes, Qianlong period (1736–95), H. 4 1/8 in. (10.5 cm); Diam. 8 1/8 in. (20.6 cm). https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/60919 and https:// www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/60920 (accessed 31 December 2021). 71 Ibid. 72 Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, 163. 73 Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 61. 74 Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, 237–8. 75 Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, 107. 76 For example: Porcelain famille rose dish with woman and children, mid-eighteenth century, Qing dynasty. Dimensions 21.3 cm × 3.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art 14.40.252. Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913. www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/50034 (accessed 9 January 2021). 77 Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, 16–19. 78 Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, 61. Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism, 115–16; Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 61; 116–18. Deer were believed to be long-lived and virtuous animals, able to locate the sacred fungus of immortality, which they stored in the soft velvet of their antlers. Antler is also an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine. 79 While it is not possible to link prehistoric representations of red-tipped antlers directly with the Qing use of coral, such usage hints at deep-rooted connections between the dendrite antlers and the distinctive form of coral, with its unusual colouration and its branching nature. 80 Jessica Rawson, Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing (London: British Museum Press, 2002); Learning and Audiences Department British Museum, ‘Chinese Art: A guide for teachers’: Jade as a stone has five virtues. Its glossiness and warmth is like benevolence. Because inside and outside is the same, so that knowing the outside one knows the inside, this may be likened to righteousness. Its far-reaching sound (when struck) may be heard from afar, like wisdom. It is not easily bent but can be

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85 86 87 88

­89

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broken, which may be likened to courage. Jade may be sharpened, but not to a point when it can injure people; this quality is like self-regulation or restraint. https:// www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2019-10/Chinese-Art-Teachers-guide.pdf (accessed 9 January 2021). Dickinson and Wrigglesworth, Imperial Wardrobe, 106. 3–4 on the Mohs scale. Powdered coral was used in earlier periods as a medicine and a pigment. Gugong 57, Jewellery in the Imperial Court, 55, No. 48 – H 14.3 × L 23 cm. Evelyn Rawski and Jessica Rawson, China: The Three Emperors, 468. Gugong, Jewellery in the Imperial Court, 30–32 No 24 H 19.5 × L23 × W20 cm (Gu116747). Also, in the Palace Museum is a spectacular red coral on gold box in the shape of a giant peach, commissioned by court officials to celebrate the Qianlong emperor’s eightieth birthday, in 1790. The intricately carved surface incorporates auspicious dragons frolicking within a dynamic cloud design. The lid of the peach-shaped box has the ‘long life’ character shou with a red bat – together, dragons, long (prosperity) and bats, fu (good fortune), these symbols are puns emblematic of Qianlong, the emperor’s name. His reign name means ‘lasting eminence’. Evelyn Rawski and Jessica Rawson, eds., China: The Three Emperors 1662–1795 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), 369 & 465. Gugong 57, Jewellery in the Imperial Court, 30–1 (Gu105840). Metropolitan Museum: Accession No: 02.18.623d. www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/773235 (accessed 9 January 2021) (see Plate 8). Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, 225. The ‘swastika’ is a good-luck symbol originating in India. The character ‘wan’ is a homophone for ten thousand or infinity. Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art, 55. Jason Sun, ‘Chinese Hardstone Carvings’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000). www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/hard/hd_hard.htm (published June 2016) (accessed 9 January 2021). Snuff bottle, Qing, coral with malachite top, 5.75 cm. Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, Accession No: 2006.24. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, editor John Bostock. Book XXXII, Chapter 11 – ‘Coral: Forty-Three Remedies and Observations’ www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D32%3Achapter%3D11 (accessed 9 January 2021). Steven Hooper, Captain Cook’s Bones, Lord Nelson’s Hair and other Strange Stories: Reflections on Relics, Reliquaries and Celebrity, Professorial Inaugural Lecture, Sainsbury Research Unit, UEA, December 2009. Qianlong abdicated in 1795 after sixty years, not wishing to reign longer than his grandfather, Kangxi’s 61 years, 1661–1722.

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Echoes of Empire: The Painted Museums of Leroy de Barde Jessica Priebe

In the Louvre’s Cabinet des Dessins lies a watercolour and gouache painting of a collection  of shells that offers a series of serendipitous findings on the global peregrinations of both its subject and its maker. Executed in London in 1803 by the French émigré artist Alexandre-Isidore Leroy de Barde (1777–1828), A Selection of Shells Arranged on Shelves depicts a collection of seventy-one marine specimens neatly arranged across eight wooden shelves (Plate 9). Painted on paper glued to a canvas support, Shells belongs to a series of six large watercolours (all in the Cabinet des Dessins) executed by Leroy de Barde in London between 1803 and 1814. Featuring different collections of shells, birds, minerals, antique vases and even a tiger being strangled by a snake, the Louvre series (as it is hereafter referred) signals the epistemological shift from the old regime of collections of curiosities to the new visual order of systematic display that emerged with the expansion of the public museum at the end of the eighteenth century.1 Combining scientific accuracy with idealized aestheticism in the form of still life, de Barde’s descriptive treatment of the objects in the Louvre series conveys a specificity of type. With subtle uses of trompe l’oeil contributing to the appearance of reality, the viewer is invited to experience these collections as they exist within the space of the museum. A phenomenological reading of Shells is fundamental to its interpretation. The watercolour is an analogue for the real, having been painted from a display of marine specimens at Sir Ashton Lever’s (1729–88) Leverian Museum. One of the largest collections of natural history in England, the museum housed Lever’s collection of 26,000 natural curiosities, antiquities and ethnographic material.2 A significant portion of the collection was sourced from the South Pacific expeditions of Captain James Cook.3 Indeed, five of the shells pictured in de Barde’s watercolour of 1803 were brought back by officers on board Cook’s second (1772–5) and third (1776–80) journeys. The provenance of the shells was confirmed in June 1814, when the English exhibitor William Bullock (1773–1849) staged a retrospective exhibition of de Barde’s work at his London Museum. The six watercolours formed the centrepiece of the exhibition, which was brought to life through accompanying displays featuring many of the original objects and specimens depicted in the series. An illustrated catalogue

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written by Bullock in collaboration with de Barde testifies to the accuracy of the artist’s portrayal of the subject matter.4 Additionally, the catalogue provides historical data on each of the 213 items that appears in the series, including information on the location of the specimens in Shells following the sale of Lever’s collection in 1806. Taking into consideration the epistemological concerns of this kind of image making, this chapter explores the intersection of art, science and commerce in de Barde’s painting, particularly as it relates to the European circulation and commodification of Pacific shells in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Central to this analysis is de Barde’s extraordinary rise from an amateur artist exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the Bullock Museum in London to his appointment as First Painter of Natural History to Louis XVIII (1755–1824) following his return to France in 1814 in the wake of the Bourbon restoration. As his later work in France reveals, de Barde’s artistic style developed in response to his exposure to museums and collections in London, as well as in relation to his activities as a collector of shells, vases and ethnographic material. This chapter also considers transnational issues as they relate to the Louvre series, which entered the French royal collection in 1816. Hung together in the royal apartments at the Château de Saint-Cloud, the works were sent to the Salon of 1817 where they were deemed the property of the king. Despite picturing natural objects from English collections, there is no mention of this connection in the Salon literature.5 Instead, the series, together with an additional watercolour of minerals commissioned by the king in 1819, came to represent a symbol of Bourbon authority over art, science and maritime expeditions under Louis XVIII. In its current home in the Louvre, the series continues to assert a binary rather than multi-sited history, an effect of the various personal, political and institutional decisions that have both facilitated and encumbered its meaning. With a few notable exceptions, Leroy de Barde has remained largely absent from the field of art history.6 His small oeuvre, the majority of which was produced in England when the exiled de Barde was relatively unknown, traverses the turning of the century and shifting political regimes. A former soldier in the counter-revolutionary Armée des Princes, de Barde emigrated with his family to London in 1792. Despite having no formal artistic training, de Barde established a reputation as a talented still life painter. Early works such as Prunes, Peaches and a Bird from c.1797 (Figure 4.1) depict a conventional still life arrangement of objects on a covered table that is reminiscent of the northern tradition of still life with its attention to illusionistic detail. Between 1797 and 1802, de Barde exhibited botanical and zoological watercolours at the Royal Academy as an honorary exhibitor, a category that prohibited him from selling his works.7 Beginning with Shells in 1803, de Barde experimented with new subjects and techniques. The first painting in the Louvre series, Shells features a group of marine specimens plucked from their natural habitats and placed on display in a museum setting. Painted in crisp lines and with tight brushwork, the shells and corals in de Barde’s watercolour are identifiable species. This is central to de Barde’s aesthetic mission, which was to convey an accurate record of Lever’s collection. As the description in the 1814 catalogue attests, Shells was ‘executed at the Leverian Museum

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Figure  4.1 Alexandre Isidore Leroy de Barde, Still Life of Prunes, Peaches and a Bird, c. 1797, watercolour on paper, 41.1 × 50.9 cm. D.A.G. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais. Photography by Harry Bréjat.

and gives an exact idea of the manner in which these objects were arranged’.8 Although the museum did not adhere to Linnaean classification, for which Lever was criticized, the objects and ethnographic material were categorized by type, origin and in the case of the shells and corals also by size.9 Organized thematically across multiple rooms at the Blackfriars Rotunda, the collection promoted a totality of vision whereby the viewer was immersed in a visual panorama that delivered information on distant places and maritime discoveries. The shift in de Barde’s artistic style responds more broadly to his exposure to natural specimens and art objects on display in private and public museums across London during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1803 and 1814 de Barde painted objects in the collections of the British Museum, John Hunter’s Cabinet of Curiosities, Joseph Banks, Charles Grenville, William Hamilton, Thomas Hope, William Bullock and Ashton Lever.10 Details of the provenance of these collections are revealed in the 1814 catalogue, which confirms that Lever’s Museum was the inspiration for three of the paintings in the series, including Shells. Amassed over twelve years, Lever’s collection first opened to the public in Manchester in the 1760s. Known originally as the Holophusicon, Lever’s museum of wonder attracted large numbers of visitors. The popularity of the museum prompted

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Lever to move the collection to his London residence in Leicester Square, where it opened to a wider audience in 1775. It was later disposed of by a public lottery after Lever fell into financial difficulty. The lottery took place in March 1786, with the winner emerging as James Parkinson, a fifty-six-year-old land agent with no prior museum experience.11 With limited financial resources, Parkinson initially found maintaining Lever’s museum challenging. Unable to afford the rent at Leicester House, he moved the collection in 1787 to the Rotunda building south of the Thames in the less-fashionable area of Southwark.12 The collection remained at the Rotunda until 1806 when Parkinson auctioned it off over sixty-five days in 7,879 lots.13 Among the visitors to the Rotunda was de Barde, who studied the shell and bird exhibits that had been enlarged and partially reorganized by Parkinson to furnish the new space. De Barde was not the first artist to paint natural history exhibits at the Leverian Museum. During the 1780s, Lever hired the artist and honorary exhibitor Sarah Stone (1760–1844) to document his collection in more than 300 works on paper. They include a watercolour drawing from 1781 of eleven shells (Plate 10), six of which appear in de Barde’s painting of 1803.14 While Stone’s watercolour anticipates de Barde’s painting, her artistic arrangement of shells pays little attention to Lever’s system of ordering specimens by size and colour. Consequently, the shells float across the surface of the paper with no reference to place or classification. A comparison between these two works is further complicated by the fact that Stone’s watercolour relays information about the collection when it was under Lever’s supervision at Leicester House and not at Parkinson’s Rotunda, the site of de Barde’s painting. William Skelton’s engraving of the interior of the Rotunda after a lost watercolour by Stone and Charles Reuben Ryley (Figure  4.2) offers a more fruitful comparison with de Barde’s Shells. Used as the frontispiece for Parkinson’s A Companion to the Museum (1790), the engraving depicts a panoramic view of the Rotunda’s Grand Saloon.15 Lining the circular walls of the room are glass cases filled with an impressive array of taxidermy birds. The floor of the museum is populated with small groups of well-dressed men, women and children. Their thoughtful expressions and pointing gestures activate the museum as a site of wonder and discovery. Welcoming visitors at the entrance to the exhibit is an elegantly attired man holding a black tricorn hat in his right hand. The hat is similar to the one worn by Lever in William Nutter’s (1754–1802) portrait of the collector (1787; London, National Portrait Gallery) after Samuel Shelley’s (1756–1808) stipple engraving. While the man’s facial features are not a match for Lever or Parkinson, the central and solitary position that he occupies, together with the reference to Lever’s hat, conveys his authority and proprietorship.16 In contrast to de Barde’s Shells, which offers a telescopic view of a recessed shell cabinet in an unspecified room at the Rotunda, the engraved frontispiece represents the Leverian Museum as a discursive site of sociability, spectacle and learning. Both Skelton’s engraving and de Barde’s Shells present a historical record of Lever’s collection at the Rotunda. Similarly, these works convey how a museum is perceived as a space that privileges vision as a form of education and entertainment. This interpretation can be explored further in the context of Svetlana Alpers’s well-known line of inquiry in which she describes the museum as ‘a way of seeing’.17 For Alpers,

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Figure 4.2  William Skelton after Sarah Stone and Charles Reuben Ryley, Interior View of the Leverian Museum, Southwark, London, c. 1795, engraved frontispiece. © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd and Alamy.

this ‘way of seeing’ is conditioned by what she refers to as ‘the museum effect’, which occurs when an object enters the museum after being removed from its prior context. As Alpers argues, the museum display augments ‘the tendency to isolate something from its own world, to offer it up for attentive looking and thus transform into art like our own’.18 The subject matter of Skelton’s engraving and de Barde’s Shells falls into Alpers’s definition of natural specimens-turned-museum objects as the shells and birds have been removed from their natural environment and made available to the viewer for visual and aesthetic appreciation. Despite these similarities, the watercolour and

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the engraving are set apart by the way in which they represent vision. For instance, Skelton’s frontispiece depicts figures engaged in the act of looking at the Rotunda’s bird exhibit. By comparison, de Barde’s watercolour replicates the visitor’s experience of seeing Lever’s collection of marine objects at the same address. While the 1814 catalogue capitalizes on the global provenance of these marine specimens, de Barde’s painting is focused on seeing shells as they existed in the Leverian Museum. To this end, the painting is not concerned with visualizing the social history of museum objects, as the visitors’ encounter with bird exhibit in Skelton’s engraving represents; rather de Barde’s painting offers direct access to his sensory awareness and perception of the collection at a specific moment in time. Shells draws on de Barde’s experience as a museum visitor and as a painter of still life. As Madeleine Pinault Sørensen argues, the impression of realism evoked in his art points to the influence of Flemish, Dutch and German use of trompe l’oeil that de Barde practised early in his career.19 As such, the pictorial space of the painting is organized in a coherent way that allows for the shells and corals to be thrust into relief by their placement on, and protrusion over, the recessed wooden shelves. These specimens create volume and depth by drawing attention to the fictive space of the museum. For example, the Venus fan gorgon in the middle of the third shelf from the bottom appears to curl and float between the white Studded Paper Sailor shell in front and the rough unpainted wall of the cabinet niche behind. The intermediary space occupied by the gorgon enhances the illusion of depth, whilst the trompe l’oeil effect of the shells in front gives the impression that these objects can be viewed from multiple angles. De Barde’s highly descriptive treatment of the shells and corals combines naturalistic details with careful modelling of form and subtle tonal graduations as a way to bolster the legitimacy of objects within the space of the museum. Similarly, the interplay of patterns, profiles and textures, which sees rounded forms contrasted against more linear shapes, activates the eye as the prime agent in the exploration of Lever’s marine collection. In this way, de Barde’s museological still life reflects the aesthetic conventions of arrangement seen in eighteenth-century books on conchology.20 In both style and composition, Shells simulates the museum effect by synthesizing the conventions of still life painting within the context of an actual museum display. De Barde achieves this by focusing on the frequently overlooked aspects of an exhibit. While other paintings in the Louvre series include well-known still life tropes such as a trapped fly and objects covered in a fine layer of dust, Shells captures the structural framework of the display. For instance, the shelving brackets – complete with drill holes – are left exposed. Similarly, the underside of the top shelf can be seen from the viewer’s perspective below. By making these details visible, de Barde not only authenticates the museum setting but also invites the viewer to imagine the room in which these specimens were displayed. De Barde’s use of contrasting light and shade further enhances the naturalism of the painting. Moreover, it alerts the viewer to the experience of seeing the collection as it appeared at the Rotunda. For example, an unseen light source captures the nacreous interiors and apertures of the shells reinforcing their status as aesthetic objects in a museum. The staging of the collection is augmented by the realistic shadows cast by the marine objects on the shelves and the back wall of the cabinet. De Barde uses reflected

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light as a way to problematize the dilemma between representing the permanence of the Leverian Museum as the home to this collection of shells and, by contrast, the transitory nature of seeing these objects as part of a larger exhibition at the Rotunda. As the burst of light on the cabinet rail on the top left of the painting makes clear, de Barde is just as interested in picturing the interior space of the museum as he is in facilitating the aesthetic appreciation of the shells. Take for instance the aperture of a large Bull Mouth Helmet shell in the centre on the top shelf. The shell is imbued with a patterned sheen that is not intrinsic to its profile but rather reflects a directional light source emanating from the space outside the frame. In this way, de Barde calls attention to himself as a witness to Lever’s collection at the Rotunda, as well as his awareness of the specific environmental conditions attached to viewing natural objects as part of a museum display. As both a still life painting and a scientific illustration that documents objects associated with a prominent English collector, de Barde’s watercolour introduces a new interdisciplinary approach to the representation of shells in art.21 On the one hand, the watercolour is a powerful manifesto of artistic expression that draws on de Barde’s experience as a painter of still life; a tradition devoted to the immortalization of all earthly things. On the other, the shells are rendered with objectivity, cultivating a perception of truth about these objects and the museum to which they once belonged. In this way, de Barde’s image is a product of the era of scientific art from which it hails. As Bernard Smith has shown, European representations of the Pacific issuing from Cook’s voyages and beyond reveals inconsistencies between the aesthetic and empirical practices of artists.22 For Smith, the gap is not due to a lack of skill, rather a result of the artist’s conscious or unconscious ‘aesthetic vision’ in representing the people, places, animals and objects of the Pacific.23 Smith’s theories are useful in thinking about de Barde’s claim of accuracy. To be sure, the 1803 watercolour presents a record of Lever’s collection. However, it too bears the imprint of de Barde’s aesthetic vision through his use of trompe l’oeil and in the halations that appear on the objects and on the walls and shelves of the recessed cupboard in which they are placed. This brings into focus de Barde’s experience of the museum and highlights the role of imagination in the artist’s process of imaging. Any discrepancies between the scientific and aesthetic practices are reconciled in de Barde’s painting by acknowledging that for the artist – as opposed to the scientist – the process of representing Lever’s collection institutes what Smith calls a ‘spectrum of mental activity’ that allows for continuity in the application of perception, skill, memory, invention and imagination.24

Pacific Shells, Cook and the Cult of Celebrity De Barde’s pursuit of realism and his adherence to delivering a faithful reproduction of the objects in the Louvre series provided his contemporaries with important visual documentation of certain species. For instance, the naturalist and shell collector Edward Donovan (1768–1837) observed that de Barde’s Shells depicts a rare view of Lever’s fragile sea urchin (Echinus Lamarckii).25 The ornamented white and violet ringed urchin, a colour illustration of which appears in Donovan’s Naturalist’s Repository

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(1834), can be seen in de Barde’s painting in the middle on the second shelf from the bottom.26 According to Bullock, the urchin was given to Lever by a gunner on board the Resolution, which sailed on Cook’s second and third voyages to the Pacific.27 At Lever’s 1806 sale, it sold to the collector Henry Jennings (1731–1819) for a considerable sum.28 After entering into Jennings’s collection the urchin subsequently broke apart, leaving de Barde and Donovan’s illustrations the only known visual records of this particular organism in its original state.29 Lever’s urchin was not the only marine object in de Barde’s painting that had links to Cook’s Pacific expeditions. As Bullock reveals, Cook brought three of the shells in the 1803 watercolour to England in his personal cargo: [N]o. 1: A Clouded Persian Crown Melon from northern New South Wales’, the same melo shell pictured on the far right of Stone’s watercolour (Plate 10); ‘no. 2: A Nautilus shell found off the coast of New Guinea in the Endeavour straights’; and ‘no. 69: A Neptune Trumpet shell from Tahiti.30

­ ook and his officers were indirectly responsible for determining the economic and C social value of Pacific shells in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Beth Fowkes Tobin argues, Pacific shells associated with Cook were valuable commodities for dealers and collectors, underpinning London’s thriving market for natural history during this period.31 The cult of celebrity surrounding Cook was equally important for museum owners like Lever, Parkinson and Bullock, all of whom promoted their links with Cook in the wake of his death as a way to maintain the public’s interest in their collections.32 A testament to the economic agency of Cook can be found in de Barde’s watercolour, which features a ‘unique variety’ of the Imperial Sun shell (Astraea helioropium, Martyn).33 Pictured third from the left on the fourth shelf from the top, this highly sought-after Pacific shell was originally thought to have been brought to England by Cook. According to Donovan, author of Lever’s sale catalogue (1806), Cook fished it out of the water in New Zealand and upon his return to England presented it to his friend Ashton Lever.34 Under the stewardship of Parkinson, the shell moved to the Rotunda in 1789 where it was valued at 100 guineas.35 It eventually sold in 1806 for the much-reduced price of £24. 3s. The low price reflects both the declining value of Pacific shells and its artificial inflation by Parkinson.36 Nothing was known of the shell’s whereabouts until April 1815, when it appeared at the sale of the personal effects left behind by Louis-Henri-Joseph, the duc de Bourbon (1756–1830).37 The journey of the Imperial Sun shell provides insight into the broader issues surrounding the global circulation and economic value attributed to Pacific shells at the turn of the century. Equally significant are the lesser-known facts surrounding Bullock and de Barde’s attempt to correct the inaccuracies of its provenance by way of the 1814 catalogue. According to Bullock, Cook did not bring the Imperial Sun shell in de Barde’s 1803 watercolour to England; rather it was ‘drawn up the cable of the ship Adventure ….in Cook’s Strait [sic] New Zealand at a depth of sixty fathoms, and was preserved by an officer, of [sic] whom it was purchased by Mr. G. Humphrey, who sold it to Sir Ashton Lever, for £10. 10s’.38 An accurate account of the Imperial

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Sun shell’s introduction to England was probably relayed to de Barde by the purchaser George Humphrey (1739–1826), whose collection of minerals de Barde painted in 1813 (Figure 4.3).39 A natural history dealer and collector, Humphrey specialized in objects brought back by ships’ crews on Cook’s Pacific voyages. He sold shells and minerals from his store in Leicester Square and through his sister the mineral dealer Elizabeth Forster (1735–1816), whose shop in the Convent Garden Piazza was right around the corner from de Barde’s residence in King Street.40 De Barde’s close contact with shells, minerals and other objects of art and natural history in private collections across London drove the development of his artistic practice. This knowledge was also instrumental in the establishment of his collection of 2,640 objects, of which 2,192 were natural specimens.41 Despite forming a significant collection of natural specimens and cultural artefacts, de Barde did not possess a single painting (other than his own).42 This suggests that his interests lay in collecting the types of objects – shells, minerals, birds, vases – that appear in his paintings. The correlation between these collected objects and the subject matter of the Louvre series

Figure  4.3 Alexandre Isidore Leroy de Barde, Crystallized Minerals, 1813, watercolour and gouache on paper glued to canvas, 126.0 × 80.0 cm. D.A.G. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photography by Jean-Gilles Berizzi.

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strongly indicates that his collecting practices were grounded in pedagogy, rather than simply representing a form of aristocratic self-fashioning. The extent to which de Barde’s experiences in England shaped his attitude towards collecting is revealed in the fate of his collection. In 1816, he converted his house in Paris into a ‘little museum’.43 Open to the public on Thursdays, when de Barde was present in the capital, the museum came to the attention of officials from Boulognesur-mer, a coastal town approximately 30 kilometres north of de Barde’s ancestral home in Montreuil. The meeting resulted in the sale of de Barde’s collection to the town for 10,000 francs.44 A royal ordinance issued in October 1825 confirmed the purchase and declared that the objects would form the nucleus of a new museum dedicated to ‘Public instruction’.45 Housed in a former seminary, the Musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer was visited by distinguished collectors, naturalists and enthusiasts such as the duchesse de Berry (1798–1870), the well-connected daughter-in-law of Charles X (1757–1836). Writing ahead of the museum’s official opening, the duchesse expressed her excitement to see the shells and other objects from ‘distant lands’.46 Modelled on the museums of Paris, the directors of the Musèe de Boulogne-sur-Mer were informed on modern curatorial practices.47 Although the museum faced strong competition with the opening of the Marine Museum of the Louvre in 1827, de Barde’s collection played a prominent role in the public’s education about South Sea collections during the nineteenth century.

Leroy de Barde at the Bullock Museum De Barde’s insistence on the authenticity of objects and their provenance in both the rendering of his work and the accompanying catalogue of 1814 is representative of his larger aesthetic mission of delivering precise knowledge about certain types of specimens and cultural artefacts through the artifice of his brush. While his choice of subject and composition relays details of various sites across London, his use of illusionary devices such as trompe l’oeil activates a visual disruption that tricks the eye into a mediated experience of these collections. To this end, the eye becomes an agent of exploration within the imaginative space of the museum. The urge to experience these objects as they might appear in these settings is emblematic of new technologies of display that were being explored at the turn of the century, in particular those seen at William Bullock’s London Museum; the location of de Barde’s 1814 exhibition. Established in Piccadilly in 1809, the Bullock Museum contained around 32,000 objects of natural history, ethnography and archaeology. Central to the experience of the museum was the ability for viewers to immerse themselves within the displays. Bullock’s Pantherion featured large zoological specimens, including a lion, elephant, giraffe and rhinoceros staged together in scenes that recreated ‘their native wilds’ (Figure 4.4).48 Bullock enhanced this ‘novel’ arrangement with artificial plants to further ‘give the appearance of reality’.49 Such immersive demonstrations were considered innovative and were among the first dioramic displays recorded in England. Bullock’s exhibitions simulated the natural habitats of animals and foreign cultures so that the viewer could be virtually transported from the busy urban metropolis of London to a remote and exotic place elsewhere. In this way, the interior of the Bullock Museum was

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Figure  4.4 Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, Bullock’s Museum (Egyptian Hall or London Museum), Piccadilly, 1810, coloured aquatint, 12.2 × 19.5 cm. The Wellcome Collection.

both spatially and functionally ambiguous to the extent that it possessed a plurality of changing meanings about the world. Bullock’s exhibitions broke new ground in a congested market for museums in nineteenth-century London. He became increasingly interested in combining local popular attractions with global scientific enterprise. On 4  June 1814, the Morning Post reported the opening of a new show at the Bullock Museum featuring seventeen works by Leroy de Barde, including those he exhibited at the Royal Academy.50 At the centre of the exhibition were the six paintings in the Louvre series, which sought to capture the public’s fascination for Pacific shells, minerals, birds and antique vases. For the cost of one shilling, visitors could purchase a copy of the illustrated catalogue featuring engravings of the Louvre series by the natural history author and illustrator Thomas Bewick (1753–1828). Each object depicted in Bewick’s engravings was assigned a number that corresponds to a description written by Bullock on the facing page. Using the legend, readers were invited to decode the paintings through Bullock’s analysis, which was informed by de Barde, Bewick and contemporary texts on natural history. Most importantly, they were able to trace the objects to past and present-day collections, including those in the Bullock Museum. The exhibition’s promise to reveal the secrets of the Louvre series played a key role in the curation of the show. De Barde’s paintings were shown alongside original objects from the series to demonstrate the reality of the paintings.51 This was made possible by the fact that Bullock owned a significant portion of Lever’s shells and birds.

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Moreover, two watercolours in the Louvre series were painted from animal exhibits at the Bullock Museum. These include Containers of Birds (1811) – drawn partially from Bullock’s live bird display – and A Royal Tiger Suffocated by a Boa Constrictor (1814), after Bullock’s hyper-real jungle exhibit of a snake attacking a Bengal tiger (Figure 4.5).52 While the tiger is a genuine specimen, preserved using Bullock’s recipe, the snake was made of two reptiles joined together and fitted with a wooden head for dramatic effect.53 The applied techniques and naturalism of the scene attest to Bullock’s innovation as a museum operator and showman. As the final painting in the series,

Figure 4.5  Attributed to William Bullock, Exhibit of a Royal Tiger Being Suffocated by a Snake, c. 1814, taxidermy tiger and two snakes fitted together with a wooden head and enclosed in a glass case with artificial plants. Whitaker Museum, Lancashire. © The Whitaker.

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A Royal Tiger forms a bookend with Shells. Together they tell the story of the space of the early museum as a modern heterotopia, as well as art’s facility to be both a historical record and a gateway to the realm of the imagination.

­Return to France De Barde’s exhibition at the Bullock Museum in June 1814 coincided with a significant event for the artist. The signing of the Treaty of Paris on 30 May 1814 ended the war between France and the Sixth Coalition and paved the way for the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy. After the exhibition, de Barde returned to France, taking the Louvre series with him. Initially, he had hoped to revive his military career, joining the king’s bodyguards and accompanying Louis XVIII to Ghent during the 100 Days War. He was later dismissed from the military due to his short stature and given a pension for two years.54 Records show that in 1816 de Barde presented the six watercolours to Louis XVIII, upon which he was conferred the title of First Painter of Natural History.55 The series hung together in the Salon de service in the queen’s apartment on the first floor of the king’s favourite residence, the Château de Saint-Cloud.56 The Louvre series was exhibited once more at the Salon of 1817, where the paintings were identified as ‘the property of his Majesty’.57 Despite the 1814 catalogue providing extensive details of the objects and their provenance, there is no mention in Salon literature of Shells being painted in England or that it depicted objects from English collections.58 Instead, Salon critics such as François Miel (1775–1842) praised de Barde for his ‘rare talent’ in ‘arranging shells on shelves’.59 Miel also commented on the naturalism of the series: ‘at the sight of these imitations, it seems that we have before our eyes cabinets dedicated to science and furnished by nature’.60 While the reception of these works marks a similar response in French audiences as it did in England three years earlier, the absence of any obvious engagement with Bullock’s 1814 catalogue obfuscates their English history. In the case of Shells, viewers at the Salon of 1817 would have been forgiven for thinking that de Barde’s painting represented Louis XVIII’s shell cabinet, executed in his capacity as First Painter to the king. The lack of information in the Salon literature regarding the provenance for the objects depicted in Shells proved beneficial for the king. In 1817, Louis XVIII approved Louis-Claude de Freycinet’s (1779–1842) proposal for a new scientific voyage to the Pacific focusing on the study of natural history, botany and geography. The Uranie set sail from Toulon on 17 September 1817, marking the recommencement of Pacific expeditions under Bourbon rule. This new global campaign restored France’s maritime power in the Pacific, which had been truncated by the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Indeed, the timely exhibition of the king’s painting of Shells at the Salon of 1817 signalled a return to active scientific investigation and maritime trade. The French exhibition of the Louvre series, together with its proximate display at Saint-Cloud, indicates Louis XVIII’s high opinion of the works and his desire to claim ownership of a group of pictures depicting objects from English collections. It led to the commission of another watercolour from de Barde, this time drawn exclusively from the Royal Mineral Cabinet. Exhibited at the Salons of 1819 and 1822 under the titles Minéraux and Minéraux tires du Cabinet particular du roy (whereabouts unknown),

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de Barde’s painting relays the Bourbon vision for the expansion of the natural sciences under Louis XVIII within the public sphere of the Salon.61 The exhibition of this type of state-sponsored art was increasingly important for Louis XVIII, whose government had been heavily criticized for their controversial handling of the shipwrecked naval frigate the Medusa in 1816. Such criticism formed the subject of Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19; Musée du Louvre), also shown at the Salon of 1819. Like the exhibition of Shells in 1817, the public display of the king’s new mineral painting at the Salon of 1819 functioned as an apparatus for royal authority, legitimacy and imperial conquest. De Barde’s 1819 watercolour forms a pendant to his earlier mineral painting of 1813 (Figure 4.3). Similar in subject, they are linked conceptually through their owner Louis XVIII and his chief mineralogist Jacques Louis, comte de Bournon (1751–1825), who sold his collection to the king following the Bourbon restoration.62 Much of the king’s new collection was formed during de Bournon’s exile in England, including a piece of Siberian black rock crystal that he loaned de Barde for his painting of 1813.63 While the commission represents a symbol of royal power, the connection with de Bournon and the earlier 1813 painting unearths a productive friction within de Barde’s oeuvre. The king’s acquisition of the Louvre series and order of a new painting of his French mineral collection ostensibly strips these works of their English heritage. Similarly in Shells, the king’s repatriation of the 1803 watercolour obfuscates the significance of the Pacific shells in the work, now the cultural property of France. The need to assert control of this maritime narrative may be emblematic of France’s mixed fortunes in the Pacific region. Nonetheless, piecing together these relationships shows how interpretations of de Barde’s art reflect major political shifts in Europe during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, along with advancing artistic and royal ambition. Undertaking a revisionist history of Shells by way of its royal provenance, and its public and political effect offers a methodological solution for addressing the painting’s fragmented history. In England, the painting celebrated the achievements of the British Empire through its portrayal of Ashton Lever’s collection and later via its exhibition at the Bullock Museum. Conversely in France, Shells acknowledged Louis XVIII’s authority over the arts and natural sciences, along with the recommencement of maritime expeditions under the Bourbon monarchy. An investigation of the global context of the painting’s subject matter, namely the collation and display of Pacific shells in England at the turn of the century, is therefore dependent on the knowledge of de Barde’s movement across national borders and the various geopolitical events that have both aided and impeded its meaning. Despite the series’ function as an instrument of French power, both English and French audiences were united by the aesthetic response to Shells as a work that simulates the experience of viewing a collection of marine objects in a museum setting. This interpretation has become more nuanced with the painting’s entry into the Louvre in c.1819.64 After languishing in the museum’s reserves, the series was transferred to the Cabinet des Dessins in 1969. More recently, three of the watercolours were chosen by Henri Loyrette, the former director of the Louvre (2001–13), to decorate his office in the administration wing of the Pavilion Mollien (Figure 4.6).65 A favourite artist of Loyrette’s, de Barde took his place in an office described by Bloomberg as epitomizing

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Figure 4.6  Raphael Gaillarde, Director of Louvre Museum, Henri Loyrette Session Portrait in Paris, 10 March 2007, digital photograph. © Getty Images.

‘the splendour and tradition of France’s cultural heritage’.66 Although Shells was not among those works chosen by Loyrette, its historical ties to the other works in the series create a sense of shared agency that refers self-reflexively to the processes of visual investigation that is central to the experience of viewing art and objects in museum exhibitions. Inside the Louvre, Shells serves as an auspicious reminder of the complex history of exhibiting practices and the role of the museum in mediating the relationship between the object and the viewer. While the Louvre’s acknowledgement of the English origins of the series seeks to redress the painting’s transnational history, it does not specify a connection to Lever, instead attributing ownership of the shells to Bullock.67 Despite having the benefit of a descriptive catalogue that identifies the precise content and origins of its subject matter, Shells continues to be characterized as having a binary rather than multi-sited past. This is at its most problematic when the painting is viewed as both a visual record of a marine collection and an artwork embedded with illusionistic tricks that promise to transport the viewer into the museums of the past.

Notes I would like to thank the Sydney Intellectual History Network (SIHN) for supporting my research on Leroy de Barde through the fellowship programme in Enlightenment Studies. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the 16th David Nichol Smith Seminar in Brisbane and the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA)

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conference in Dallas. I am grateful to SIHN and HECAA for assisting with my travel to these events. The images in this book have been generously funded by the National Art School in Sydney. My thanks are also extended to the anonymous reviewers of this volume and to the editors Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins for their formative comments on this chapter.   1 On formation of the modern museum, see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).   2 On Lever’s collection, see Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Holophusicon The Leverian Museum: An Eighteenth-Century English Institution of Science, Curiosity, and Art (Altenstadt, Germany: ZKF, 2011); and Clare Haynes, ‘A “Natural” Exhibitioner: Sir Ashton Lever and His Holosphusikon’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24, no. 1 (March 2001): 1–14.   3 See P.J.P. Whitehead, ‘Zoological Specimens from Captain Cook’s Voyages’, Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 5, no. 3 (1969): 161–201.   4 William Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Different Subjects Represented in the Large Water Colour Drawings by the Chevalier de Barde (London: Whittingham and Rowland, 1814), 44–56 (cat. 6). The British Library copy was consulted for this chapter.   5 The exception to this is the entry for Greek and Etruscan Vases (1812), which confirms William Hamilton as one of the owners. Explication des Ouvrages de Peinture (Paris, 1817), 22 (nos. 191–6).   6 The scholarship on de Barde is limited. See Auguste Braquehaye, Un peintre d’histoire naturelle. Leroy de Barde et son temps, 1777–1829 (Abbeville: Fourdrinier, 1896); Jacques Foucart, ed., French Painting 1774–1830: The Age of Revolution exh. cat. (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1974), 534–7; Madeleine PinaultSørensen, The Painter as Naturalist: From Dürer to Redouté (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 181–2, 209, 230–1; Roger Boulay, ‘Les collections océaniennes du musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer’, Journal de la Société des océanistes 90 (1990–1): 29–34; Sylviane Jacquemin, ‘Les débuts des musée de curiosités’, in La Déçouverte du Paradis: Océanie Curieux, navigateurs et savants, edited by Annick Notter (Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 1997), 30–2; Roger Boulay, ‘Le chevalier Leroy de Barde et les cabinet de curiosités anglais’, in La Déçouverte du Paradis, 33–5; Madeleine Pinault-Sørensen, ‘Les Oeuvres de Leroy de Barde au Musée du Louvre’, in La Déçouverte du Paradis, 37–40; Martine Denoyelle and Dietrich von Bothmer, ‘Naturalisme et Illusion: Les Vases Grecs et Etrusques, une Oeuvre d’Alexandre-Isidore Leroy de Barde (1777–1828)’, La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France 52, no. 2 (2002): 33–42; and Isabelle Lemaistre and David Brenneman, eds., The Louvre and the Masterpiece exh. cat. (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2008), 106 (cat. 49).   7 The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London, 1797), 21 (no. 754) and 29 (no. 1081); and The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London, 1802), 17 (nos. 336 and 339).   8 Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 45.   9 Haynes, ‘A “Natural” Exhibitioner’, 2. 10 De Barde was added to the British Museum’s register in December 1810. As cited in Martin Myrone, ‘Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State’, British Art Studies Issue 5. 11 See Christine E. Jackson, Sarah Stone: Natural Curiosities from the New Worlds (London: Merrell Holberton and the Natural History Museum, 1998), 42. 12 On the history of the Rotunda building, see Christina Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular Politics in London, 1790 – c.1845 (Canberra: ANU Press, 2010), 190.

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13 Edward Donovan, Catalogue of the Leverian Museum (London: Hayden, 1806). 14 Running clockwise from the left in Plate 10, the shells are identified as no. 45: A Studded Paper Sailor Shell from the Cape of Good Hope; no. 42: A Devil’s Claw Strombus from Madagascar; no. 1: A Clouded Persian Crown Melon from northern New South Wales; no. 62: A Broad-winged Alatus from the Maluku Islands; no. 37: Turban Sea Urchin from the Mediterranean; no. 5: A Great European Tun Shell from Sicily. See Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 45–54. 15 George Shaw, A Companion to the Museum, (Late Sir Ashton Lever’s) Removed to Albion Street, the Surry End of Black Friars Bridge (London: James Parkinson, 1790). See also, Parolin, Radical Spaces, 185–8. 16 Jackson, Sarah Stone, 56. 17 Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 25–32, 27. 18 Ibid. 19 Pinault-Sørensen, The Painter as Naturalist, 182. 20 See for example, Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, La Conchyliologie (Paris: De Bure, 1780). On arranging shells for engraved plates, see Emma Spary, ‘Scientific Symmetries’, History of Science 62 (2004): 1–46, esp. 5–6. On the visual and material culture of eighteenth-century conchology, see Jessica Priebe, François Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). 21 Madeleine Pinault-Sørensen was the first to suggest that Shells occupies these twin states of existence. See Pinault-Sørensen, The Painter as Naturalist, 230. 22 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960); Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), esp. Preface. 23 Bernard Smith, A Pavane for Another Time (South Yarra: Macmillan, 2002), 371. ­24 Smith, Imagining the Pacific, ix. 25 Edward Donovan, The Naturalist’s Repository (London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1834), 3: Plate LXXXIX. 26 Ibid. 27 Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 52 (no. 56). 28 Jackson, Sarah Stone, 98. On the high price, see Donovan, The Naturalist’s Repository, 3: Plate LXXXIX. 29 Donovan, The Naturalist’s Repository, 3: Plate LXXXIX. 30 Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 45, 54. 31 Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 151. 32 Ibid., 174. See also Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ‘Cook Voyage Provenance of the “Artificial Curiosities” of Bullock’s Museum’, Man (New Series) 9, no. 1 (March 1974): 68–92. 33 Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 48 (no. 25). 34 Donovan, The Naturalist’s Repository, 1: Plate XI; Guy L. Wilkins, ‘Captain Cook’s Imperial Sun Trochus’, Journal of Conchology 24, no. 1 (1954): 7–12; S. Peter Dance, Rare Shells (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 49–50; and S. Peter Dance, A History of Shell Collecting (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 78–9. 35 Donovan, The Naturalist’s Repository, 1: Plate XI. 36 Ibid. See also Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 175–9.

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37 Donovan, The Naturalist’s Repository, 1: Plate XI. 38 Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 48 (no. 25). 39 Humphrey’s variegated Egyptian silica can be seen on the second shelf on the far right of the de Barde’s painting next to minerals from the Leverian and British Museums. Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 17 (no. 23). 40 Together with her husband, the renowned Prussian mineralogist Jacob Forster (1739–1806), Elizabeth opened a second shop in Gerrard Street Soho, a short walk from de Barde’s later residence in Rathbone Place. 41 Boulay, ‘Les collections océaniennes du musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer’, 30. 42 Foucart, French Painting, 535. 43 As quoted in Marie Hoffmann, ‘Appréhender les Collections Ethnographiques dans un Musée au Début du XIXe siècle: Le Cas de Boulogne-sur-Mer’, Arts Premiers dans les Musées de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest (Belgique, France, Pays-Bas), edited by Thomas Beaufils and Chang Ming Peng (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Publications de l’Institut de recherches historiques du Septentrion, 2018). 44 De Barde’s collection can be seen today in its new location in the Château-Musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer. On the history of the museum, see ibid and Boulay, ‘Les collections océaniennes du musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer’, 29–34. 45 As quoted in Boulay, ‘Les Collections Océaniennes du Musée de Boulogne-surMer’, 29. 46 As quoted in ibid. 47 Instruction sur la Manière de Recueillir, de Conserver et de Transporter les Objets Destinés au Muséum (Le Roy-Maybille, 1828). 48 William Bullock, A Companion to the London Museum and Pantherion (London: William Bullock, 1813), Preface. 49 Ibid. 50 Morning Post (London, England), Saturday 4 June 1814. Issue 13531, 1. British Library Newspapers, Part II: 1800–1900. 51 Foucart, French Painting, 535. ­52 Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 40–2 (cat. 5). 53 Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 129. 54 Foucart, French painting 1774–1830, 535. 55 Feuille d’Affiches de l’Arrondissement de Montreuil (12 May 1829), as cited in Braquehay, Leroy de Barde, 33, note 1. That same year de Barde received a Knighthood of Saint Louis in recognition for his military service, although he had long been styling himself this way with Shells signed Le Chevalier de Barde. 56 On the location of the paintings, see J. Vatout, ‘Palais de Saint-Cloud’, in Souvenirs Historiques des Residences Royales de France (Paris: Didot, 1842), 5: 412; and Théodore Bachelet and Charles Dezobry, ‘France (Peinture en)’, in Dictionnaire Général des Lettres, des Beaux-arts et des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 4th edn. (Paris: Ch. Delagrave, 1876), 1: 936. On Saint-Cloud as a source of royal pride, see Etienne-Léon baron de Lamothe-Langon, Private Memoirs of the Court of Louis XVIII (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), 1: 334–5; and Edward Baines, ‘Letters from the Continent, 1825–1826’ (London, 1833), 393. 57 ‘Ce tableaux appartiennent à sa majesté’. Explication des Ouvrages de Peinture (1817), 22 (nos. 191–196). 58 Ibid. (no. 193).

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59 ‘ses coquillages rangés sur des tablettes, sont rendus avec un rare talent’. François Miel, Essai sur Les Beaux-arts, et Particulièrement Sur Le Salon de 1817; or Examen Critique Des Principaux Ouvrages d'art Exposés Dans Le Cours Cette Année (Paris: Didot le Jeune, 1817–18), 374. 60 ‘À la vue de ces imitations on dirait qu’on a sous les yeux ces armoires consacrées à la science et meublées par la nature’. Ibid. 61 Explication des Ouvrages de Peinture (Paris, 1819), 10 (nos. 35); and (Paris, 1822), 10 (no. 41). 62 Gordon L. Herries Davies, ‘Jacques-Louis, Comte de Bournon’, in The Making of the Geological Society of London, edited by Cherry Lewis and Simon J. Knell (London: Geological Society, 2009), 105–13. 63 Bullock, A Descriptive Catalogue, 19 (no. 37). 64 One period observer reported seeing de Barde’s A Royal Tiger at the Louvre in 1819. See E. G. Hancock, ‘One of those dreadful fights: a surviving display from William Bullock’s London Museum, 1807–1818’, Museums Journal 79, no. 4 (March 1980): 175. 65 Guy Boyer, ‘Qui va remplacer Henri Loyrette au Louvre?’, Connaissance des Arts (19 December 2012). https://www.connaissancedesarts.com/art-contemporain/quiva-remplacer-henri-loyrette-au-louvre-1120321/ (accessed 27 October 2019). 66 ‘Online Extra: Q&A with the Louvre’s Henri Loyrette’, Bloomberg Businessweek (17 June 2002). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-06-16/online-extraq-and-a-with-the-louvres-henri-loyrette (accessed 28 October 2019). On Loyrette’s interest in de Barde, see Christian Schubert, ‘Der Abstauber des Louvre’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zietung (5 October 2009). https://www.faz.net/-gyp-140tn (accessed 28 October 2019). 67 Choix de Coquillages, D.A.G., Musée du Louvre. http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/ detail/oeuvres/1/9573-Choix-de-coquillages (accessed 9 May 2021).

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‘Native Manufactures’: Sailors’ Valentines and the Caribbean Curio Trade Molly Duggins

An unassuming, hinged wooden case in the Mariners’ Museum, VA, opens to display two octagonal plaques decorated with a striking, tessellated array of Caribbean shells (Plate 11). While the left-hand plaque features a heart motif of overlapping tellin shells framed by jequirity seeds (Abrus precatorius) and emerald nerite shells (Smaragdia viridis) crowned with a tellin rosette, the right-hand plaque is dominated by an inscription, ‘Souvenir from Barbados’, articulated in mitre shells on a bed of rice shells, evoking a form of marine embroidery.1 In both plaques, the shellwork is composed according to principles of radial symmetry.2 Semicircular and rectangular segments of limpet, tellin, dove and moon shells, arranged in densely overlapping rows, extend outwards to the edges of each octagonal frame. These shell segments are glued to paper supports lined with cotton batting and partitioned by blue, green and gilt papercovered cardboard strips. Secured in a protective glazed and slotted cedarwood (Cedrella odorata) case, equipped with brass hinges and a hook for closure, this double shellwork plaque, when shut, would have fit comfortably in a portmanteau for ease of travel, attesting to portability as a key factor in its design. It was likely acquired in Barbados by David Chapin Warren, captain of the Boston-based schooner, the Edward Johnson, which carried lumber and manufactured goods to a number of Caribbean and South American ports between 1884 and 1894, returning to the eastern seaboard of United States with cargoes of sugar, pitch, rum, molasses and mahogany.3 As its inscription suggests, Warren’s double shellwork plaque was intended as a souvenir, the ultimate commodity in motion.4 Conjuring a material remembrance of the Caribbean through its intimate, tactile terrain of shell colour and pattern, it was placed on display at Warren’s summer residence in Hillsboro, Maine.5 This double shellwork plaque is one of hundreds in collections in the United States, Britain and Europe. Erroneously known as sailors’ valentines, these relics of Victorian maritime trade continue to enthral through their circulation in museological and commercial networks.6 Nevertheless, they are occluded in art historical discourse because of their unruly status as a form of commercial, colonial craft. Offering a case study in the adaptation of circulating cultural and artistic practices into creolized

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material forms, they are objects that impact our understanding of the itinerant visual culture of the nineteenth-century ocean world. In the 1960s, decorative arts specialist, Judith Hughes, dispelled the myth that shellwork plaques are a type of European shipboard craft, suggesting instead that they were manufactured in the Caribbean as a cottage industry due to their high degree of standardization, the variety of materials required for their production, and the predominance of Caribbean shells employed in their design.7 An 1880s trade label affixed to a number of extant plaques points to Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop in Bridgetown, Barbados, as a principal manufacturer and retailer.8 Active from 1878 to 1925, the Curiosity Shop was the enterprise of brothers Benjamin Hinds Belgrave and George Gordon Belgrave, natural history dealers from a family of brown merchant-planters, who specialized in ‘Marine Specimens and Native Manufactures in Fancy Work’.9 The latter, which encompassed a variety of stitched, sculpted and collaged handicrafts derived from European feminine craft practices, was made from local natural materials by island labour. Such fancywork was part of the stock of marine curios at the Curiosity Shop and marketed as ‘native’ products to Victorian middle-class consumers such as Warren, including naval officers, sailors, whalers, steamer passengers and other travellers visiting the British West Indies, in addition to merchant-marines. As a collection of Caribbean shells and an exemplar of Caribbean fancywork, Warren’s double shellwork plaque belongs to both classes of objects – marine specimens and native manufactures – for sale at the Curiosity Shop. Its form and function are entangled in the cultural history of Caribbean shells in the European marketplace and their incorporation into systems of collection and display via colonial expansion and trade. Shellwork plaques evolved in particular out of the interface between eighteenthcentury conchology, the study of molluscs and their inhabitants and the feminine craft practice of shellwork, the ornamental application of shells to cardboard, wooden and wired supports.10 Both interests shared a set of material processes engaged in sorting, cleaning and arranging shells, and were considered rational amusements associated with the cultivation of taste.11 Shellwork, moreover, embodied feminine values of domestic industry, cultural refinement and artistic accomplishment materialized through the process of transforming nature into art.12 By the Georgian era, Caribbean shells performed nuanced cultural work in the domains of conchology and craft. Associated with exotic locales, colonial dominion and the identification of the wild seascape as a source of the sublime, they represented romantic consumables offering a pleasurable exercise in acculturation and world-making for the collector and craft practitioner alike.13 Once the purview of elite society, these amateur pursuits were commercialized in the Victorian era and popularized among the broadening middle classes. The Victorians’ changing relationship to the natural world in the face of industrialization and urbanization propelled the shellwork industry. As ornamental natural products, shells and shellwork were employed in domestic design to harmonize the natural and artificial.14 With the rise of seaside resorts in Europe, Britain and the United States, marine fancywork – often made with imported Caribbean shells – was produced in large quantities and sold as coastal souvenirs that embodied the domesticated Victorian seascape as a material variant of the marine picturesque.15 Through

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the expansion of international maritime trade and travel in the second half of the nineteenth century, the commercial production of shellwork in conjunction with marine tourism extended beyond Britain, Europe and the United States to heavily trafficked colonial ports where it was creatively adapted by coastal communities to support local economies. As Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest have suggested, Caribbean material culture has been overlooked in the global turn of the humanities despite the key role it has played in shaping contemporary Western consumerism as a node for the flow of goods, bodies and representations of landscapes in the transatlantic world.16 The nineteenthcentury Caribbean curio trade, in particular, has not received the same attention as commercial handicrafts produced by colonial communities in North America and the South Pacific.17 Nevertheless, it was integral to burgeoning island tourism economies after the abolishment of slavery in 1838, which resulted in a surplus of labour from the plantation system and the development of Caribbean industry and retail sectors, especially tourism. Enveloped in an internationalizing Victorian seaside industry, and the visual and material culture such tourism generated, island handicrafts worked to rebrand Caribbean culture through the material elision of a landscape of labour with a landscape of leisure. This chapter considers the material agency of Barbadian shellwork plaques and related marine fancywork as a type of ‘native manufacture’. Focusing on Barbadian manufacturers and vendors, it explores how the production and transaction of island handicrafts provided income and agency for brown and black Barbadians in a postemancipation labour economy. Composed of fragments of the Caribbean landscape, fancywork not only embodied island experience, but, through the decorative arrangement of shells, fish-scales, corals and seaweeds, also invoked European values of industry and cultural refinement inscribed in such craft production. Catering to the tourist market, it evoked a form of decorative island labour in contrast to the legacy of indentured labour, packaging a picturesque vision of Barbadian productivity. Enfolded into the Caribbean curio trade as an extension of the curiosity, marine fancywork was employed to showcase the natural resources of the British West Indies and their potential for refinement, while promoting island identity on a regional and international level through its display and circulation.

Tourism, Trinkets and Decorative Labour in Barbados In Barbados it is nearly impossible to forget the sea. Go where you will, it is in sight … To the Barbadian, it affords more than a picture pleasing to the eye. To him [and her], it is a source of revenue.18

When George McLellan made this observation in Some Phases of Barbados Life: Tropical Scenes and Studies (1909), the Barbadian post-emancipation economy, while still dependent on plantation yield, was distinguished by a robust marine tourism industry. Given its strategic location on maritime routes crossing the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, Barbados – the easternmost island in the Caribbean – became

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a global trading hub in the nineteenth century. Not only was it a regional centre of supply and distribution to European, American, South American, East Indian and Chinese trade, but it was also a port of call for whaling ships returning from the Pacific. Barbados’s tourism industry was galvanized by the advent of steamship travel, the increasing American economic reliance on Barbadian sugar production, and the perceived salubrious benefits of its seaside environment. By the late nineteenth century, passenger transport options were plentiful: steamer lines departed regularly from England and the east coast of the United States, while a network of smaller sailing vessels provided inter-island and regional transit. In addition to American, British and European visitors, travellers and workers from Trinidad, British Guiana and Brazil frequented Barbados, facilitating the transmission of goods, materials and skills that contributed to the developing tourism economy. Marine resources in particular generated significant income for Barbadians. Well before the Spanish, Portuguese and British invaded Barbados, aquaculture played a primary role in the sustenance economies of the Amerindians and Kalinago peoples of the Lesser Antilles, who lived on crustaceans, shellfish, and fish and fashioned adzes from the inner whorl or lip of the queen conch (Strombus gigas).19 Some of these shell tools date to the Caribbean Archaic Age (c. 3000–500 BCE), suggesting Barbados was one of the earliest settled islands in the region.20 Eighteenth-century travellers’ accounts of Barbados remark upon the substantial shell remains of prior indigenous settlements. In The Natural History of Barbados (1750), for example, Griffith Hughes comments upon the ‘great number’ of these ‘scooping chisels’ dug up on the island.21 Under British colonization, marine products harvested from the sea, foreshore and cliffs supplemented the diet of slaves and, subsequently, plantation day labourers after the abolishment of slavery.22 Marine industries, especially lime production, which was used extensively throughout the British West Indies, exploited the island’s expedient location and rich reef systems, built up from the debris of shells, corals and other marine organisms.23 Barbados’s tourism industry was centred around the sea. ‘Sea bathing there’ is decreed ‘the finest in the world’ in Stark’s History and Guide to Barbados and the Caribbee Islands (1893), while the waters around Bridgetown are delightfully described as ‘a huge aquarium … so pellucid that the fish can be seen at a great depth issuing from their hiding places among the coral and luxuriant sea mosses that surround the submerged coral reefs’.24 As James Stark observes, Barbadians capitalized on these marine assets: ‘With an influx of visitors whose chief occupation would be how to spend their time in the most agreeable manner, there is no doubt, they would be quickly followed by those whose business it would be to cater for their amusement.’25 Tour operators ran sport fishing expeditions for flying fish, barracoota, kingfish and sharks, while on the Bridgetown docks Barbadian youths caused a spectacle by diving for coins tossed into the sea.26 Travelling further afield, visitors took the scenic railway to the picturesque seaside outpost of Bathsheba. Here, and at other popular resorts such as Worthing, Barbadian beachcombers harvested the shore and shallows ‘in search of shellfish, or pretty shells, or sea-fans, or something else which might’, as McLellan suggests, ‘fetch a nimble shilling as a curiosity, in later years to be treasured by the purchasers as a memento of a lazy, happy holiday’.27

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Stemming from a rich history of specimen acquisition associated with scientific colonialism, this trade in marine curiosities was enfolded into a rhetoric of commercial exoticism in Caribbean tourism. Evoking a landscape of tropical abundance and idyllic tranquillity, curios contributed, as Mimi Sheller has argued, to the material staging of the West Indies as an Eden ripe for consumption.28 Once precious and rare, curiosities intended for the collector’s cabinet became affordable mantlepiece ornaments with souvenir status emblematic of island experience. Tourist guides published by steamer companies promoted curio collecting to their middle-class European and American passengers looking for a bargain. ‘One of the chief delights of the tourist’, according to the Tourist Guide to the West Indies, Venezuela, Isthmus of Panama and Bermuda (1909) published by the Hamburg-American Line, ‘will be found in the variety of curiosities to be had throughout the West Indies at very low prices’.29 As American journalist, Frederick Haskin, notes in his review of Barbados for the Washington Post, ‘Crowded Little Isle’ (1904), by the turn of the twentieth century the island economy was thoroughly dependent upon this tourist market: ‘When a tourist ship calls at Barbados it is bargain day for the whole population, many of the poor people earning enough in a few hours to keep them for months.’30 Island fancywork represented an extension of the curio. Barbadians appropriated the model of commercial Victorian fancywork for sale at seaside resorts in Britain, Europe and the United States to produce local handicrafts featuring natural products associated with Barbados’s island identity. Targeting the tourist market, island fancywork was produced from cheap and accessible materials and was promoted in contemporary travel literature as a type of trinket, a small ornament of little value. Nevertheless, it was often singled out for its ingenuity of design, skill of execution, the demand it elicited among tourists, and the profit it generated for the Barbadian manufacturer and vendor. Haskin, for example, emphasizes the ‘cleverness’ of Barbadians ‘in manufacturing all kinds of curious trinkets and souvenirs’ which ‘brings them a considerable revenue’.31 Similarly, Harry Johnston highlights the proficiency of island manufacturers in The Negro in the New World (1910): Special attention … should be called to their taste and skill in ornamental work, made out of brightly coloured sea-shells [sic], fish-scales, feathers, wood, dried plants, which is sold to eager tourists in the form of artificial sprays of flowers for dress embroidery or table decoration; doyleys, necklaces, filigree brooches, etc. etc. I know it is the fashion to laugh at such arts at present as not to be dissociated from the ‘forties and ‘fifties of the last century; but personally I think this modern work in Barbados is often beautiful, and instances a remarkable taste in colour and design which possesses an originality of its own.32

While Johnston acknowledges that island handicrafts are often viewed by Victorian tastemakers as derivative and retrograde, he contends that the beauty and taste of ‘modern’ Barbadian fancywork are distinguishing factors in its commodification. The key traits of such island fancywork are embodied in a delicate, fish-scale hair ornament manufactured in Barbados in 1881 (Plate 12). An example of fish-scale work or ‘scale embroidery’, as described in Florence Hartley’s The Ladies’ Hand Book of

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Fancy and Ornamental Work (1859), the ornament consists of ribbed, petal-like scales strung onto wire in rosettes embellished with glass beads and woven into a wreathlike garland.33 Scale embroidery was fashioned into necklaces, bracelets, brooches and purses, in addition to hair decorations by women in coastal communities and metropolitan centres around the globe in the Victorian era. Like Johnston, Hartley extolls the virtues of such island ornaments compared to their European counterparts: Their effect at night is that of the most brilliant set of pearls, and they are as much superior in splendour to the small specimens of fish-scale flowers manufactured in Ireland, and exposed in the Sydenham Palace, London, as the diamond surpasses the glisten of cut-glass.34

Tactile, intricate and luminescent, such island fancywork was lauded for its remarkable assemblage. An embodiment of painstaking work and its inherited craft associations with industry and refinement, it materialized a form of decorative labour symbolic of Barbadian productivity in the post-emancipation era. As Rozika Parker has demonstrated, fancywork was both a disciplined and disciplining process: as a form of physical labour, it required dexterity and meticulousness, while enforcing subservience through sustained sedentary work.35 In the colonial context of the British West Indies, fancywork was both civilizing and controlling. Yet it was also a malleable medium that offered the craft practitioner the potential for creative agency.36 Such creative – and profitable – adaptation was for Johnston, an inveterate colonial administrator critical of racial governmentality in the British Empire, evidence that Barbadian manufacturers contributed to modernizing colonial societies.37 In densely populated Barbados where the majority of inhabitants were of African origin engaged in plantation labour, the sale of curios offered a degree of autonomy and flexibility. Post-emancipation labour patterns point to a mobilizing workforce in which brown and black Barbadians withdrew from the rigid schedule of estate labour. The tenancy system combined with a low-wage policy for day labourers forced many to sell provisions, handicrafts and curios – harvested or manufactured in small, family-run cottage industries – to augment their income in order to purchase land or establish a business.38 Portrayed as quaint spectacles of production in comparison to the industrial modernity of the West, such cottage industries also offered a palatable alternative to the harsh – and considerably less picturesque  – conditions of plantation labour. As exemplified in the production of pottery at Chalky Mount, they are viewed in Stark’s History and other tourist guides through a primitivist and colonial lens.39 A femininized marketplace often serves as a counter to masculine estate labour in such literature. ‘The part taken by the women of the family is that of distribution,’ according to Joseph Moxley in An Account of a West Indian Sanatorium and a Guide to Barbados (1886). ‘It is wonderful,’ Moxley continues, ‘to see how they descend the steep hills, with enormous loads of ware stacked on large trays upon their heads … remaining in the town and its vicinity till they have sold off their stock.’40 For Robert Schomburgh in ‘Steam-Boat Voyage to Barbados’ (1847), the female vendor incarnates

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the ‘confusion and clamour’ of the trade in local goods to which he is first introduced at the doorstep of his hotel: ‘A brown lassey [sic], dressed in virgin white, as if it wanted a strong contrast to set off her dark complexion, with a kind of head-dress resembling a turban, … and a smile on her face, offers a selection of neat fancywork.’41 Within Victorian travel guides the feminine circulation and sale of provisions, curios and trinkets is thus cast as an exotic performance. Such exoticized – and eroticized – narratives conform with late-nineteenth-century ethnographic photography of Caribbean types as revealed in the series, ‘Barbadian Negroes’, published in Robert Hill’s Cuba and Porto Rico, With the Other Islands of the West Indies (1899).42 In a triptych entitled, ‘Group of Overseers, Trinket-Seller, PotteryVendors’, in which masculine estate labour is contrasted with a femininized handicraft marketplace, the central female vendor embodies Schomburg’s earlier description. Seated next to an array of marine curios, she proffers a conch shell and sea fan to the viewer while a basket of fancywork rests at her feet (Figure 5.1). Conflated with the curios on offer, this vendor is staged as another type of ‘native’ commodity available for consumption. Her confident, direct engagement with the camera, however, suggests she is somewhat complicit in the staging of this exotic fiction. Such enterprising vendors sold their wares to travellers at hotels and markets, on wharfs, in boats surrounding steamers, and at a Women’s Self-Help Association established in Bridgetown to ‘assist native women in disposing of their work’.43 Convenience and economy played a key role in transactions, with vendors often setting the terms of exchange, and placing, as Schomburgh notes, significant value upon their fancywork.44 While the tourist consumption of such souvenirs no doubt represented a form of cultural imperialism in which fancywork materialized a symbolic form of decorative labour, the Barbadian capitalization of the trinket trade nevertheless developed into a profitable local industry.

­ igure 5.1  ‘Trinket-Seller’, 1899, photoprint from Robert Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico, with F the Other Islands of the West Indies (1899). New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop and the Exhibition of Caribbean Identity Beyond offering economic agency to a post-emancipation itinerant workforce, the manufacture and sale of Barbadian fancywork was co-opted by island retailers in Bridgetown. Employment in this bustling retail sector provided growth opportunities for emerging brown middle-class Barbadians with capital who had little prospect to advance within the rigid social stratification of Caribbean society dominated by the class hegemony of the residual European plantocracy.45 Descended from brown planters  – a minority that suffered cultural exclusion throughout the nineteenth century in Barbados – Benjamin Hinds Belgrave and his brother George Gordon Belgrave were retail entrepreneurs who capitalized upon Bridgetown’s burgeoning tourism economy to found a curio dealership in Bridgetown.46 They employed a cabinet-of-curiosities aesthetic characteristic of colonial curio shops, which were distinguished, according to Johnston, by an aura of ‘stuffed toads and strange fish’.47 Within this atmospheric environment, the Belgraves integrated marine specimens and fancywork into a visual narrative of exotic spectacle that conflated retail with tourism. Offering a convenient destination for Barbadian marine products – as well as mahogany furniture, Sheffield plate and chinaware – the Belgraves commodified island handicraft production through the manufacture of shellwork plaques as island mementos conceived for circulation.48 In 1878 Benjamin Hinds, the proprietor of the West End Villa Museum, established a Curiosity Shop in the tourist precinct below the Ice House, an American-owned hotel. Upon the death of Benjamin Hinds in 1888, George Gordon took over the enterprise, which operated in various Bridgetown premises until 1925. According to a c. 1880 trade label, the Belgraves dealt in ‘Marine Specimens and Native Manufactures in Fancy Work’, suggesting that the Curiosity Shop enfolded island handicrafts into its natural history repertoire, a strategy typical of the colonial curio trade.49 Marketed as ‘native’, fancywork supplemented the marine specimens on show, representing the bounty and variety of Barbadian marine wonders. Through the term, ‘manufacture’, it was emphasized as a product of local labour. While the convention of showcasing the natural and human resources of territories and colonies under British control belongs to the rhetoric of Empire, by the late nineteenth century this form of promotion was appropriated by the Caribbean tourism industry to endorse island identity. The Curiosity Shop sold marine specimens through its ‘W.I. Curio Department’, which featured ‘rare specimens of Shells, Crabs, Fish [and] pink and white Coral &c’.50 Also on offer were tortoise shells, cured snakes and taxidermied alligators from British Guiana, the latter suggesting some products were procured through a Caribbean natural history network. A testimonial written by Albert Gunther, the Keeper of the Zoological Department of the British Museum, and published in a turn-of-the-century brochure for the Curiosity Shop, reveals the Belgraves also sent specimens to London: Dear Sir, I have examined the collection of Marine Specimens from Barbados, which you have brought to England, and selected from it for the British Museum

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those which are desirate [sic] for our collection. It is not every day that we get such a series of rare and excellently preserved Specimens, and I hope that you will continue to collect for us when you return to Barbados.51

Included in this brochure is a price list of natural history specimens that provides the market value of the Belgraves’ marine products. ‘A large variety of deep sea shells [sic] and sea specimens of over one hundred varieties’, for instance, sold ‘from twenty dollars a collection’ with ‘special attention paid to orders for exportation’.52 In conjunction with showcased marine specimens indicative of Barbadian natural resources, the fancywork department symbolized the cultivation of these resources, while materializing labour through the intricate arrangement of colonial natural products. Advertised fancywork included ‘Fish Scale, Shell, Sea Fern Bouquets, Mimosa Seed and Spanish Bayonet’ as well as ‘Native Dolls, Lace Bark Work in Doilys [sic], Fans, Lamp Shades and Whips’ and ‘turtle shell work done to order and repaired’.53 Some of these ‘native manufactures’ – such as the doilies made from the lacebark tree (Lagetta lagetto) endemic to Jamaica, Cuba and Hispaniola – were possibly imported from other islands in a pattern similar to the dealers’ natural history stock. Shellwork predominated with shell wreaths, necklaces, chains and brooches selling for twenty-five cents to one dollar each, as well as by the dozen, as recorded in the Curiosity Shop’s price list.54 Shellwork plaques lie at the juncture of the dealers’ natural history and fancywork departments. Collapsing conchology and craft into a single souvenir format, they combine a collection of decoratively encased Caribbean shells with geometric and figural collages typical of Georgian and Victorian shellwork as exemplified in Warren’s double shellwork plaque. Distinct from other island fancywork because of their protective wooden casing and glazing, these hybrid souvenirs were durable, compact and portable – ideal qualities for maritime transport. Their production, requiring the diverse skill sets of joinery and shellwork, also distinguished them from local cottage-industry manufactures. Given their combined stock of specimens, fancywork and furniture, the Belgraves were well-equipped to manufacture shellwork plaques: through their employment of black and brown Barbadians. Shells were harvested in quantity from Barbadian beaches, such as Bathsheba and Worthing, or obtained via trade. Hired workers covered strips of cardboard with coloured paper for the cases’ partitions, which were filled with crumpled newspaper and topped with cotton batting. Shells were then applied with hide glue to this layer, each meticulously placed according to the same orientation into radiating rows.55 Wooden cases were fabricated from endemic cedarwood (Cedrella odorata) and veneered with West Indies Mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni). Beyond expediency, the use of local types of wood reflects the colonial interest in economic botany and the practice of displaying indigenous species through craftsmanship, just as collections of shells were intended to highlight the diversity of Caribbean conchology.56 Once the shellwork was complete, glass was slotted into the inner band of the frame to protect the shells, while brass hinges and a hook and eye were attached with screws. Indicative of their souvenir status, plaques frequently incorporate inscriptions as epitomized in the text in Warren’s double shellwork plaque, ‘Souvenir from Barbados’. Other common inscriptions include sentimental dedications signalling their exchange

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value, including ‘To My Sweetheart,’ ‘From a Friend,’ ‘Truly Thine,’ ‘Forget me Not’ and ‘Think of Me,’ which derive from generic messages inscribed on Victorian souvenirs hawked at British and American tourist sites.57 A few notable examples with inscriptions featuring islands besides Barbados suggest shellwork plaques were sold through inter-island networks, like some of the stock available at the Curiosity Shop, or were customized on demand.58 Customization was not uncommon; several extant plaques feature personalized inscriptions with initials, dates or the replacement of central shellwork motifs with cartes-de-visite.59 While the Curiosity Shop’s price list does not ostensibly include shellwork plaques, their mass production suggests that they were sold at a competitive price in line with other ‘native manufactures’ for middle-class consumers in search of off-the-shelf souvenirs and gifts for those back home. They are visible in a 1904 postcard published by Otto Leder, which depicts a series of double shellwork plaques lining the bottom shelf of a cabinet beneath an assortment of tortoiseshell ornaments.60 Strikingly similar in composition, the plaques on display reveal the seriality of their production. In Leder’s postcard, along with an earlier photograph of the jumbled interior of the Curiosity Shop reproduced in Stark’s History, such ‘native manufactures’ and marine specimens are artfully juxtaposed around the premises, evoking a three-dimensional cabinet of curiosities reminiscent of the seventeenth-century wunderkammer of Ole Worm (Figure 5.2).61 Rows of conchs on shelves topped with sea fans, a central cabinet against which a shark-bone cane jauntily rests, fancywork under glass domes and taxidermied marine specimens arranged on the walls and floor, form a promiscuous assemblage of island products for sale. This spectacular interior guaranteed that a

Figure 5.2  ‘Curiosity Shop’, 1893, photoprint from James Stark, Stark’s History and Guide to Barbados and Caribbee Islands (1893). Collection of author.

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visit to the Curiosity Shop went beyond commercial transaction to become a tourist experience in its own right. In its turn-of-the-century premises on Broad Street, the premier thoroughfare in Bridgetown, the Curiosity Shop featured a tourist bureau offering a list of ‘Favourite Drives for Picturesque Scenery’ and sold ‘Pictorial Post Cards in Coloured and Black and White’ along with its natural history and craft merchandise.62 A photographic glass plate of the façade taken by Charles Blackburne, an American importer of Caribbean goods, displays a doorway opening onto Broad Street dramatically flanked by two shark carcasses (Figure 5.3). In this image, signage for Cooper’s Photography Studio on the floor above and the Ice House establishment next store situate the Curiosity Shop amongst Bridgetown’s principal tourist amenities. By the early twentieth century, it was advertised in The Red Book of the West Indies (1922) as ‘the leading business in West Indian curios … well remembered by hundreds of visitors to Barbados’, including the future King George V, who visited the Curiosity Shop while the Duke of York, the ultimate imperial legitimization of colonial enterprise.63 According to this guide, the shop’s ‘wonderful stock’ offered ‘an eloquent and instructive object lesson in the strange shapes and designs by which Nature expresses itself in its various kingdoms of life’.64 In such promotional material,

Figure 5.3  Charles W. Blackburne, ‘Cooper’s Photo Studio and Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop, Bridgetown, Barbados’, 1897–1912, photo-negative-glass plate, 10.0 × 12.5 × 0.2 cm. International Center of Photography, 2013.81.16. Gift of John Noll in honour of Richard Waldmann.

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a perusal of this Barbadian cabinet of curiosities was framed as a rational amusement much as Victorian public aquariums, museums and exhibitions filled with spectacular assortments of natural products were promoted as a form of ameliorating leisure. Advertisements, commercial ephemera and imagery of the Curiosity Shop represent, as Rodney Harrison suggests in his study of the Australian curio market, object emissaries with agency similar to the Curiosity Shop’s wares.65 Circulating promotional material not only extended the reach of the Belgraves’ trade, but also propagated a vision of the Caribbean as a marine wonderland for consumption overseas. Through such promotion and the movement of merchandise through trade and exhibitionary networks, Barbadian curios were consumed in an increasingly international marketplace. Island fancywork, in particular, became a stock item at international exhibitions, which offered a marketing platform for post-emancipation Caribbean commerce and tourism. At such exhibitions, ‘native manufactures’ not only highlighted the economic potential of the island materials from which they were made – and the capacity for island productivity without the taint of slave labour – but also became synonymous with Caribbean identity.66 While a number of Caribbean islands sent shellwork to international exhibitions, including Barbados, that produced by Bahamian manufacturers was particularly commended in exhibition coverage.67 Shellwork from the Bahamas was a feature of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Frothy confections of shell ‘epergnes, crosses, wreaths, fruit-baskets, and sets of jewelry [sic]’, made by stringing rice shells onto wired supports in a process similar to fish-scale work, are visible in a souvenir stereograph produced by the Centennial Photographic Company (Figure  5.4).68 Items on display were available for purchase or commission in bulk, ranging in price

Figure 5.4  Centennial Photographic Co., ‘Shellwork from Bahama Islands’, 1876, albumen silver print. J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XC.729.431.

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from three dollars a dozen for shellwork sprays to a single shellwork cross selling for 100 dollars, revealing that such exhibits served as advertisements for Caribbean manufacturers.69 They also responded and contributed to overseas fancywork trends. Rice shells, ‘brought from the West Indies’, were favoured in Victorian fancywork and were ‘sold by measure, or by the box, at most conchological repositories’, according to the British art manual, Elegant Arts for Ladies (1856).70 The promotion of Caribbean ‘native manufactures’ at such exhibitions culminated in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 wherein the West Indian and Atlantic Pavilion presented a marketing spectacle mirroring the showmanship of colonial curio shops. The Times describes the Pavilion as a hyperbole of exotica reminiscent of a cabinet of curiosities: ‘the first impression being of a glorified mixture of a museum and a spice market, with a bewildering profusion of turtles and flying fish, rum, brilliant seedwork, plaited hats, and live toucans and agousti.’71 In addition to targeting consumers, the sophisticated exhibits in the Pavilion sought to transport metropolitan visitors to the tropics as a tourism initiative. The Barbados court, designed by Lady Gilbert-Carter, wife of Sir Gilbert Thomas, the former governor of the colony during 1904–10, resembled a plantation house veranda with potted palms and artful alcoves filled with island manufactures, including pottery from Chalky Mount, fancywork from the Women’s Self-Help Association, and an alluring assortment of marine products from Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop. These displays along with the trade in marine curios mediated the tourist encounter of the Caribbean both at home and abroad. Warren’s double shellwork plaque provides just one example of the multitude of island souvenirs that circulated within an international curio marketplace at the turn of the twentieth century. Designed for portability, its octagonal case also functions as a framing device – resembling a porthole at sea – transforming the plaques into grotto-like, material seascapes that contributed to the staging of Barbados as a marine wonderland. The examination of such commercial material culture is integral to understanding the entangled agency of manufacturers, vendors and consumers within emerging tourism economies and modernizing colonial societies. Embedded with imported cultural significance and transformed through local initiative, island curios represent a multivalent emblem of empire and Caribbean identity in their tangible embodiment of ‘native’ industry. Through their manufacture, promotion and sale, Barbadian vendors such as the Belgraves contributed to the commodification of the nineteenth-century ocean world.

Notes I would like to extend my thanks to Dr Elisabeth Fairman, former Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, for her support of this research project during visiting scholar fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art in 2012 and 2021; Christopher Bensch, Chief Curator, Strong National Museum of Play, for his assistance during a Strong Research Fellowship in 2015; Jeanne Willoz-Egnor, Mariners’ Museum; Jeanne Solensky, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Library; Emma Rocha, New Bedford Whaling Museum; and the Barbados Historical Society.

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  1 See, for instance, the frontispiece to volume I of Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–53), in which the words, ‘British Algae Vol. I’, are composed out of woven seaweed fronds.   2 Emma Spary, ‘Scientific Symmetries’, History of Science 62 (2004): 1–46.   3 Richard Malley, ‘Captain Warren’s “Souvenir from Barbados”’, Mariners’ Museum Journal 14 (1987–88): 11; Boston Post, 17 July 1889, 3; Boston Post, 9 August 1889, 3. Warren’s wife occasionally accompanied him on voyages and thus might have been involved in the acquisition of the double shellwork plaque.   4 I rely on Susan Stewart’s theoretical framing of the souvenir. See Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 135–9.   5 Mariner’s Museum object file, 1987.07.01.   6 See, for instance, Carole and Richard Smyth, Neptune’s Treasures: A Study and Value Guide (Huntington: Carole Smyth Antiques, 1998); John Fondas, Sailors’ Valentines (New York: Rizzoli, 2002); Grace Madeira, ed., Sailors’ Valentines: Their Journey through Time (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2006); John Whitenight, Under glass: A Victorian Obsession (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2013).   7 Judith Hughes, ‘On Sailors’ Valentines’, The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society XXIX, no. 1 (November 1961): 3–6; Judith Hughes, ‘The Most Common Used Shells’, n.d., col. 875, box 5, fol. 5, Judith C. Hughes Papers, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.   8 ‘B.H. Belgrave, Dealer’, trade label, c. 1880. Extant plaques with this label are in the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the Maine Maritime Museum. The label is illustrated in Hughes, ‘On Sailors’ Valentines’, Figure 4.   9 Excerpt from the c.1880 trade label. The Belgraves were of mixed African and European heritage, identified by the colloquial nineteenth-century term ‘brown’. 10 See, for instance, Hannah Robertson, The Young Ladies School of Arts: Containing a Great Many Practical Receipts (Edinburgh: Wal. Ruddiman junior, 1766), 172; John Mawe, The Voyager’s Companion, Or, Shell Collector’s Pilot (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Greene, 1821). 11 For more on the connection between natural history collecting and cultures of taste in the late eighteenth century, see Ann Christie’s chapter in this volume. 12 Amanda Vickery, ‘The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment’, in Mrs. Delany and Her Circle, edited by Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 94–109. 13 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 7; Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Susan Pearce, ‘Material History as Cultural Transition: A La Ronde, Exmouth, Devon, England’, Material History Review 50 (Fall 1999): 30. 14 Shirley Hibberd, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste, intro. John Sales, 1st ed. (1856; reprint, London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987), 2. 15 For more on natural fancywork as a material embodiment of the picturesque, see Molly Duggins, ‘Craft and the Colonial Environment: Natural Fancywork in the Australian Album’, in Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture, edited by Grace Moore and Michelle Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 186. 16 Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest, ‘Introduction’, in Victorian Jamaica, edited by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 23.

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17 See, for example, Priya Vaughan’s chapter in this volume as well as Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Maria Nugent, ‘An Economy of Shells: A Brief History of La Perouse Aboriginal Women’s Shell-Work and Its Markets, 1880–2010’, Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies II (2012): 211–27. 18 George H.H. McLellan, Some Phases of Barbados Life: Tropical Scenes and Studies (Demerara: The Argosy Co. Ltd, 1909), 1. 19 For more on the indigenous history of the Caribbean, see William F. Keegan, Corinne L. Hofman and Reniel Rodriguez Ramos, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 20 Scott Fitzpatrick, ‘Verification of an Archaic Age Occupation on Barbados, Southern Lesser Antilles’, Radiocarbon 53, no. 4 (2011): 595. 21 Griffith Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados (London: Griffith Hughes, 1750), 7. 22 ‘Life in Barbados’, Kansas Agitator, 21 October 1904, 3. 23 James H. Stark, Stark’s History and Guide to Barbados and Caribbee Islands (Boston: Photo-Electrotype & Co., 1893), 159. Stark suggests that the production of lime and cement could become important export industries for Barbados, with its lime in particular ‘quite equal in quality to the best Bristol lime’. 24 Stark, Stark’s History and Guide to Barbados and Caribbee Islands, 57, 115. 25 Ibid., 113. 26 ‘Life in Barbados’, 3. 27 McLellan, Some Phases of Barbados Life: Tropical Scenes and Studies, 2. 28 Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 5. 29 Tourist Guide to the West Indies, Venezuela, Isthmus of Panama and Bermuda (New York: Hamburg-American Line, 1909), 14. 30 Frederick J. Haskin, ‘Crowded Little Isle’, Special Correspondence of The Sunday Post, 10 July 1904, 4. 31 Ibid. 32 Harry Hamilton Johnston, The Negro in the New World (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1910), 226. 33 Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work (Philadelphia: G.G. Evans, 1859), 222. 34 Ibid. Hartley here writes of the fish-scale ornaments produced on the island of Santa Catarina in Brazil. 35 Rozika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1986), 10. ­36 Constance Classen, ‘Feminine Tactics: Crafting an Alternative Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Book of Touch, edited by Constance Classen (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 229. 37 Khwezi Mkhize, ‘Empire Unbound – Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa’ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015), 181–2. 38 Henderson Carter, ‘Resisting Hegemony: Black Entrepreneurship in Colonial Barbados, 1900–1966’, Business and Economic History On-line 14 (2016): 3; Aviston Decourcei Downs, ‘Barbados, 1880–1914: A Socio-Cultural History’ (PhD diss., University of York 1994), 80. 39 See, for instance, Johnston, The Negro in the New World, 225.

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40 Joseph Moxley, A West Indian Sanatorium and Guide Book to Barbados (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886), 99. 41 Robert Schomburgh, ‘Steam-Boat Voyage to Barbados’, Bentley’s Miscellany 22 (July 1847): 41. 42 Robert Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico, with the Other Islands of the West Indies; their Topography, Climate, Flora, Products, Industries, Cities, People, Political Conditions, etc (New York: Century, 1899). New York Public Library Digital Collections. http:// digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-6e84-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 (accessed 5 April 2020). 43 ‘Women’s Self-Help Association Price List’, Barbados Museum and Historical Society. http://www.barbmuse.org.bb/web/?portfolio=womens-self-help-association-pricelist (accessed 16 June 2020). 44 Schomburgh, Steam-Boat Voyage to Barbados, 41. 45 McLellan, Some Phases of Barbados Life: Tropical Scenes and Studies, 50; Barringer and Modest, 4. 46 For more on the Belgrave family history, see Robert Morris, ‘Progenitors and Coloured Elite Families: Case Studies of the Belgraves, Collymores and Cummins’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 47 (2001): 52–63. I’d like to thank Patricia Stafford for bringing this reference to my attention. 47 Johnston, The Negro in the New World, 226–7. 48 Neville Connell, letter to Judith Hughes, 8 August 1959, col. 875, box 5, fol. 6, Judith C. Hughes Papers. 49 Rodney Harrison, ‘Consuming Colonialism: Curio Dealers’ Catalogues, Souvenir Objects and Indigenous Agency in Oceania’, in Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, edited by Anne Clarke et al. (New York: Springer, 2011), 67. 50 ‘B.H. Belgrave, Dealer’, trade label. 51 ‘Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop’, sales brochure, n.d. Hughes Papers, Winterthur, col. 875, box 5, fol. 8. 52 Allister MacMillan, ed., The Red Book of the West Indies (London: W.H. & L. Collingridge, 1922), 383. 53 ‘Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop’, sales brochure. 54 Ibid. 55 Hughes, ‘How They Were Made’, n.d., col. 875, box 5, fol. 5, Judith C. Hughes Papers, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. See also, Susan R. Williams, ‘A Gift from a Friend: Sailor’s Valentines’, exhibition pamphlet, Strong National Museum of Play, 1985, n.p.; Fondas, 10. 56 Mark Nesbit, ‘Botany in Victorian Jamaica’, in Victorian Jamaica, edited by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 221–4. ­57 Certain inscriptions combined the plaques’ souvenir and gift status such as ‘A Present from Barbados’. 58 See, for instance, ‘A Gift from Trinidad’, double shellwork plaque, c.1905, Strong National Museum of Play, 74.696. 59 See Fondas for examples of such personalization. 60 Otto Leder, ‘Curiosity Shop, Barbados’, postcard, 1904, private collection. 61 The photograph of the Curiosity Shop appears on page 178 of Stark’s History. G. Wingendorp, ‘Musei Wormiani Historia’, engraved frontispiece in Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum (Leiden: Elzevier, 1655). British Museum collections online.

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https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1872-0511-1004 (accessed 18 November 2020). 62 ‘Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop’, sales brochure. 63 ‘Belgrave’s Old Curiosity Shop Barbados’, catalogue and pricelist, n.d. private collection. 64 MacMillan, The Red Book of the West Indies, 383. 65 Harrison, Consuming Colonialism, 55–6. 66 While Wayne Modest has suggested that fancywork was ‘eclipsed by raw materials’ at such exhibitions, the significant number on display implies their value. Modest, ‘“A Period of Exhibitions”: World’s Fairs, Museums and the Laboring Black Body in Jamaica’, in Victorian Jamaica, edited by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (Duke: Duke University Press, 2018), 529. 67 See, for instance, ‘The Great Exhibition’, London Daily News, 21 June 1851, 3; ‘Dublin International Exhibition’, The Illustrated London News, 14 January 1865, 6; ‘The West Indies’, Art Journal (December 1886): 28. 68 J.S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition, Described and Delineated (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1876), 427. 69 Charles Henry Gordon-Lennox, Reports on the Philadelphia International Exhibition of 1876, vol 2 (London: G.E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode, 1877), 363; ‘Mrs. R. Hewett Evans, Manufacturer of Shell-Work’, The Nassau Guardian, 8 July 1876, 4. 70 Elegant Arts for Ladies (London: Ward and Lock, 1856), 16. 71 ‘British Empire Exhibition’, The West Indian and Atlantic Pavilion (London: West India Committee, 1924) as quoted in Tom August, ‘The West Indies Play Wembley’, New West Indian Guide 66, no. 3/4 (1992): 197.

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Shore: Coastal Economies and Ecologies

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Reading the Wrack Line: Ecology and Visual Culture on the French Atlantic Shore Maura Coughlin

Ecology is profoundly about coexistence.1 Throughout the nineteenth century, France’s northern Atlantic coast drew masses of summer tourists and it was endlessly described, drawn and painted. Impressionist paintings from the 1860s and 1870s helped to popularize coastal towns in Normandy and on the English Channel; by the 1880s, sites on the previously inaccessible Brittany coast were destinations for both artists and summer tourists. In the social history of art, canonical paintings of the French Atlantic coastline depicting the vacation culture of modern, urban people on the shore have long been viewed through the aesthetic and economic concerns of tourism.2 This chapter casts a broader net, gathering up images and sites outside the overlapping spheres of the artist colony and beach-front holiday. Stepping away from art historical narratives of the shoreline as a site exclusively devoted to modern leisure, this chapter considers intertidal ecologies, the human communities of itinerant seafarers, seaside dwellers and workers of the shore, and artists who directly engaged with these subjects. To bring insights from the environmental humanities to the study of visual culture, I have turned to ecocriticism, archaeology, anthropology and marine science for both the vocabulary and the imagery to adequately describe and to make visible the relationships of people, animals and other living things in their coastal environments. This chapter applies an ecologically informed, interdisciplinary dwelling perspective to examine representations of working-class coastal fishing culture and the intertidal zone of the shore by artists such as Camille Corot, Jules Breton, Elodie La Villette, Eugène Isabey and popular photographers and illustrators.

Ecological Approaches to the Coast As a field of environmental science rooted in late-nineteenth-century natural history, ecology is the study of the interaction of living creatures with each other and with their surroundings.3 Whether in the natural sciences or humanities, an ecological perspective assumes the inseparability of all life that Charles Darwin so poetically

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evoked in the ‘entangled bank’ of earth, worms, plants, insects and birds that concludes his Origin of Species.4 Ecocriticism tracks the migration of ideas across fields of knowledge, communities of creators and categories of cultural production. Since the 1990s, especially in literary criticism, ecocriticism has moved into visibility as a crucial mode of practice to meet the challenges of our changing world. In art history and visual studies, ecocritical approaches, in concert with the recent ‘material turn’ from anthropocentric and textual approaches to culture, have much more slowly gained traction.5 However, ecocriticism offers new ways of looking at representations of coastal landscapes and inhabitants that have previously been treated as either social constructions – analysed through a range of discourses – or as mirror inversions of urban concern, caught in binary splits between nature and culture, modern and primitive, city and country, tourist and peasant, authentic and constructed.6 In its re-engagement with the politics of consumption and materiality, ecocriticism offers a return to politically engaged social art history such as that articulated by Linda Nochlin, T.J. Clark, Robert L. Herbert, Griselda Pollock and John Berger in the 1970s.7 Their formative work, for example, on Realists Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet focused on the ‘actual, complex links which bind together art and politics’.8 My analysis in this chapter weaves together many strands of insight, offered by this early generation, of social art history with ecocritical approaches to visual culture. The environmental humanities offer relational approaches to the ways that landscapes are inhabited and perceived. Jane Bennett’s influential writing on the vibrant interaction of people and things in ‘assemblages’ has led me to research coastal ecology not only as subject matter but also as material presence that demands an ethical engagement with present and past human relations with the environment.9 To describe the quasi-agency of non-human materials in temporary or shifting combinations, Bennett borrows sociologist and theorist Bruno Latour’s term ‘actants’; as she describes the coming together of people, animals and things in assemblages: ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts’.10 To think about the interweaving of human and non-human life on the French Atlantic coast, I have borrowed archaeologist Andrew Jones’s notion of ‘encultured landscapes’ and historian Jeffrey Bolster’s model of ‘human maritime communities’ that interact with ‘marine biological communities’.11 Like the people and resources that moved over, through and across the water, their networked ecologies and communities were sustained by the richness of their ecosystems that were ever moving and in material flux. Stacy Alaimo’s ecofeminist concept of ‘trans-corporeality … material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world’ further opens up possibilities of reading the shoreline as an ideal space for the enactment of networked relationships between tide, animals, people, plants and stone.12 And, most influential for my argument is anthropologist Tim Ingold’s call for a ‘dwelling perspective’ in the viewing of landscape which entails a conceptual shift from ‘the sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities, and the culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space’ in order to ‘focus on the temporality of the landscape’.13 Ingold explains how a place develops a perceivable character through the sensory experiences it offers inhabitants, who then enter into a relationship with the place they come to

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shape through their activities within it.14 This relational engagement allows us to read ‘the landscape … as an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves’.15 These methodologies are compatible with philosopher Timothy Morton’s proposition of considering ‘ecology without nature’ which emphasizes the embedded, inseparability of human ‘culture’ from the ‘natural’ world.16 In addition to looking at how people represented the coast or told stories about it, I am interested in putting images and narratives in dialogue with the ways that fishing and coastal ecologies materialized and sustained culture, how sea travel moved people and resources: how the coast itself moved and shifted and how agriculture and marine technologies developed to serve travel across water. This chapter applies an ecologically informed, interdisciplinary dwelling perspective to examine representations of coastal culture and the ways in which it depended upon the richness of its ecosystems that were ever moving and in material flux, just like the people and resources that moved over, through and across the water.

Maritime Communities on the North Atlantic In a letter of 1867, the novelist George Sand asked Gustave Flaubert for advice about travelling on the Normandy coast: I need to see a part of the region that hasn’t been dealt with by everyone else, and where there are real local people in their own surroundings: peasants, fishermen, a genuine village among the rocks … You told me the people who live on the coast are the best there are in those parts – the salt of the earth, some of them. I’d like to see their faces, their clothes, their houses and the landscapes they live in.17

Flaubert suggested that she visit the cliffs of Etretat and Dieppe in autumn, to avoid the summer crowds of Parisians. At that time, this stretch of Upper Normandy was hardly off the beaten track for tourists: its development as a seaside resort had begun in the 1820s. The maritime communities that she wished to see, in their natural landscape and climate, had already been the focus of nineteenth-century travel literature and visual arts. Careful visual inventories of provincial costumes, types of labour, regional dialects, moral character and local dwellings were made in late eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century illustrated travel texts like Charles Nodier and Baron Taylor’s Voyages Pittoresques, Léon Curmer’s Les Français Peint par Eux-Mêmes and Jules Janin’s La Normandie. These sources characterized residents of the shore as timeless features of the place, just like the local geology, architecture and weather.18 Like Sand – whether due to or despite these encyclopaedic descriptions – many tourists were driven by the desire to consume a ‘primitive’ spectacle of cultural difference, to confirm or exceed familiar visual and literary descriptions of the shore. Dieppe’s harbour was typical of where one might find the people of the coast and experience the sights, smells, activities and relationships of a maritime community, as

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Figure 6.1  Claude Joseph Vernet, Loading Barrels of Salted Fish at the Port of Dieppe, 1765, Musée de la Marine, Paris. Photography by author, April 2014.

popularized by one of Joseph Vernet’s large paintings: the carefully mapped Loading Barrels of Salted Fish at the Port of Dieppe (1765) (Figure 6.1). In this panorama, the harbour’s vibrant assemblage of people, things, animals, boats and architecture make it a meeting point for global trade and local products and labour. Fish (including ray and monkfish), a dead dolphin and shellfish are being unloaded, displayed and sold at the port.19 Ropes, sails, nets, barrels and dogs are portrayed together with the mix of cargo and human activity. The morning sun illuminates the classical facades of the orderly and recently rebuilt seaport on the left while the vernacular forms of the fishermen’s village of Le Pollet – that seem a more organic result of this community living on the site – remain in shadow on the right. Beyond the harbour, the great chalk cliffs can be seen in the distance. As in most European marine painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dieppe’s docks are populated with character types – rather than portraits – who mark the landscape as a worked place, just like the identical workers who make visible the labours of catching and preserving fish in Louis Duhamel du Monceau and Jean-Louis de la Marre’s global encyclopaedia of fishing, Traité Général des Pesches (1769–82).20 From the 1820s through the nineteenth century, tourism came to dominate the seaside towns of Normandy and the Channel from Trouville (positioned south of the estuary of the Seine) north to Boulogne-Sur-Mer. The fishing community of the coast was not fully visible to summer tourists: the towns seemed to be populated only by women, children and old men. Working-age local men were strikingly absent in the warm months: fishing took them either off-shore on short trips to pelagic fishing grounds or across the Atlantic for half the year to fish for cod in the cold waters of the

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Figure 6.2  Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Fishwife of Dieppe (Femme de Pêcheur à Dieppe), 1823, oil on paper mounted on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon (Musée des BeauxArts de Lyon), © MBA Lyon.

Northern Atlantic. Boys shipped off when very young, conditions on the ships were squalid for all and many died at sea. As Luce Irigaray notes, men of the sea returned to port with ‘just enough dreams from their trip to last until they set sail again … [and] enough illusions to live a moment on land’.21 In the off-season, men who had been at sea were ill at ease and were often unemployed and habitually drunk.22 With their lives tied to the shore, women in fishing communities featured prominently in coastal painting. Camille Corot’s Dieppe, Fisherman’s Wife (c. 1822) (Figure 6.2) is an early-nineteenth-century coastal type: the strapping, muscular ‘fish wife’ who would be repeatedly painted by later academic naturalists such as Jules Breton, Antoine Vollon, Auguste Feyen-Perrin, Francis Tattegrain and Alfred Guillou.23 As beach

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tourism became a subject for Realist, Naturalist and Impressionist images – from the 1860s onward – coastal residents found themselves regarded as actors in a growing seaside heritage spectacle.24 Older fishermen and women of all ages were pressed into performing a set of pre-determined, picturesque identities – selling their fish on the beach, for instance – for the benefit of visitors, and this subject, in turn, created a genre of painting that could be sold again and again to tourists.25 However, there are some striking examples of writers and artists who, in contrast, engaged with the shoreline as an ‘encultured landscape’ by depicting the specific, local and material ways in which it was inhabited and worked. For instance, the precarious community of those who work on the beach at Dieppe is the subject of some of romantic-era landscapist Eugène Isabey’s drawings, prints and paintings from the 1830s. Isabey, who spent decades on the Normandy coast, often depicts the ephemeral structures – the material evidence of those who work the shore – that are built into and on lower ledges, and on the loose shingle of the beach (Figure 6.3). Like Monet’s much later paintings depicting caloges – thatch-covered hulks of boats on the beach at Etretat that served as fishermen’s homes or sheds – Isabey’s many images from the 1830s and 1840s of fishers eking out an existence on the margins speak to a nineteenth-century fascination with peasant thrift and an aesthetic of the ramshackle picturesque. This dwelling perspective is echoed in Camille Flers’s

Figure  6.3  Eugène Isabey, Surroundings of Dieppe, 1833, lithograph from the series Six Marines, published by Victor Morlot, printed by Charles Motte, 26.3 × 32.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Normandy Shore (1848, Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg), in which he pictures subsistence living – barnyard animals live beside fishermen, nets, boats – and the thatched and rickety structures that comprise the dwellings of the poor on the edge of the water.26 Although romantic-era texts on the French provinces such as Voyages Pittoresques and Les Français Peints par Eux-Mêmes classified rural people as rigid types with specific trades, house types, costumes, traditions and temperaments derived from their particular environment or terroir, many historical accounts of subsistenceliving on the coast show that peasant families did not survive solely on their income from fishing.27 Early paintings by Isabey, Corot, Paul Huet and others from the first half of the nineteenth century are reminders that today’s historic port towns have been stripped of the architecture of the poor and working classes that temporarily dwelt there. When the coast was commodified for summer tourism, a property’s proximity to the water determined its value. As a resident artist who understood the cost of modern tourism, Francis Tattegrain lamented the loss of the maritime community at Berck-sur-Mer as he witnessed seaside villas and hotels replacing his beloved fishing village from 1870 to 1890.28 Material remains of the architecture of the poor, especially in coastal communities, rarely survive modernity; one exceptional example can be seen on the outskirts of Boulogne-sur-Mer. In Equihen, the fishing families who lived in shacks topped by inverted former fishing boats-turned huts called ‘quilles en l’air’ (keels in the air) were repeatedly photographed by tourists and reproduced on for postcards around 1900 (Figure 6.4). Several of these structures have been remade as holiday cottages; their current use appropriates indigent dwelling to suit bohemian desires of seasonal tourism. Photographs, journal illustrations and early-twentieth-century postcards depict the rag-pickers, vagrants, fishermen, shrimpers, mussel and stone pickers who lived side by side – with an array of animals – in picturesque misery in ‘Les Gobes’, a series of abandoned, horizontal stone quarries in the striking limestone cliffs near Dieppe. First-hand accounts of expeditions to visit the ramshackle abodes, such as those published in 1896 in the Revue Illustrée, in 1897 in the Magasin Pittoresque and in 1904 in L’Illustration mockingly describe a curious spectacle of savage and filthy, free-thinking outsiders who refuse (or cannot afford) the comforts of modern life.29 Photographs that illustrate these accounts depict fishing gear, nets and baskets along the paths and in front of the wooden ‘vestibules’ added to the rock face (Figure 6.5). The romantic primitivism of these essays and selected images masks the contradictory status of the coast as a desired modern site of both escape and poverty, with a neverquite articulated, but crucial, distinction between the miserable resident and the entitled tourist of Dieppe. As an alternative to the patronizing language of primitivism, Ingold’s ‘dwelling perspective’ asks us to contemplate the ways in which meanings can be gathered from a landscape and to ‘attend to those clues which the rest of us might pass over … and which make it possible to tell a fuller or a richer story’.30 Speaking from this informed position, in a series of essays from 1897 published as Sur la Côte, Gens de Mer (On the Coast, People of the Sea), Breton writer Charles Le Goffic set the record straight on

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Figure 6.4  Camille Biendiné, Les Quilles en l’Air d’Equihen: Habitations Faites avec la Coque d’un Bateau Retourné. (Equihen’s Keels in the Air: Inverted Ship Hulls as Dwellings), 1906, black and white print from glass plate negative, 18.0 × 24.0 cm. Courtesy of the Archives of the Somme (Archives Départementales de la Somme, S.P.C.P., 35 FI 6848).

Figure  6.5  Dieppe: Fishermen’s Homes in the Cliff, early-twentieth-century postcard. Collection of the author.

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touristic descriptions of Les Gobes that were making the rounds of popular journals. In ‘Gens de Mer: Le Pollet d’Aujourd’hui’ (Men of the Sea: Le Pollet today), he clarifies that Dieppe’s ‘troglodytes’, were the formerly independent and proud inhabitants of Le Pollet who were living precariously among the indigent residents of the cliffs.31 What Vernet had so clearly shown in his eighteenth-century painting (cited above) is that the fishermen’s quarter had once been an independent town. However, as le Goffic notes, its autonomous identity was broken by post-Revolutionary urban centralization, the modernization of fishing and the demolition of over 100 houses in Le Pollet to make way for the industrial expansion of Dieppe’s harbour in the 1880s. By challenging the romantic primitivism of the shore, Le Goffic acknowledges the vulnerability of shoreline communities to erasure and marginalization.

Shifting Baselines in Brittany In contrast to the Normandy coast, the Brittany coast was much less accessible to visitors until the later nineteenth century. It would be overstating the case, however, to view it as isolated: modernity did not suddenly arrive when expanded rail lines opened Brittany to overland travel through France, for its seaports had been connected to the rest of the ocean world for centuries. Like Sand, artists and writers who wanted to avoid the hordes on the Normandy beaches sought out remote destinations, travelling by water, just like everything else that moved through Atlantic ports. Throughout the nineteenth century, steam-powered packet boats followed the coastline, calling in to each harbour. If not on the scheduled boats, travel happened more informally on the boats of fishermen, especially to the offshore islands. In the 1850s, painter Eugène Boudin, a native of Honfleur and the son of a fisherman and steam-boat captain, first travelled by packet boat along the Brittany coast, painting the ports and peasant culture of Brittany as early as the 1850s, long before the region had attracted other artists and the summer tourists who followed.32 From 1880 to 1910, just as the fishing industry was hitting its peak, the southwestern Brittany coast fishing ports of Douarnenez, Camaret-sur-Mer and Concarneau attracted large numbers of artists, some of whom settled there year-round. The culture of fishing and the human life of the shore were bound together in ecological relationships with local and global implications: industrialization of the former produced rapid, but uneven growth of the latter. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the preservation of sardines shifted from an artisanal to an industrial practice: canning was developed during the Napoleonic wars – for troop supplies – allowing the oily fish to be preserved at the port of catch and shipped via rail and sea. The favoured French ‘Pilchard’ sardine was an immature fish caught close to shore during the summer fishing season by small boats. After 1845, canned sardines were an international export from the ports of Douarnenez and Concarneau; fish were caught using modern gill nets while bait was cod roe imported from Norway that was mixed with peanut meal and flour. Because oily fish cannot be dried and salted like cod, sardines were fried in oil and then packed in inexpensive peanut oil that came from Bordeaux, Fécamp and Marseilles; peanuts

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were sourced from India, Senegal and other African countries. By 1898, the globally connected sardine fishery in Finistère employed over 31,000 people.33 Especially in Douarnenez, different human uses of the coast collided: the industrialization of fishing coincided with the new appeal of the beaches of Brittany and the growth of its coastal artist colonies. Jobs in the new canning factories drew local populations from impoverished rural villages to the booming town as they moved from farming to factory work. At the early-twentieth-century peak of the sardine fishery, the flow of people and things through and across Brittany’s coastline accelerated.34 A monoculture of production ruled the town, and because Douarnenez’s port was industrial, smelly and crowded, tourists who visited to sea bathe were encouraged to shift to the neighbouring village of Tréboul, away from the busy fishing docks. The poorly paid sardine-canning labour force was comprised almost entirely of peasant women and girls who came from the surrounding countryside, and who were packed into squalid housing like the fish they canned. In 1906, Breton writer Auguste Dupuoy noted that ‘the fields have emigrated toward the sea’.35 Class and gender divisions intensified: as historian Anne-Denes Martin notes, the gender ratio of women to men in Douarnenez was about thirty to one just before the famous Sardine Workers Strike of 1924. A very localized, industrial culture of modernity developed in the port: French rather than Breton was spoken by the women of the factories, who also took up the factory-sanctioned costume of the La Sardinière, which replaced their locally specific traditional dress. The wives and daughters of fishermen did not work in the factories, had a slightly higher status in the town, and dressed to mark this difference.36 On the shoreline, it is a commonplace of our own era to mourn the loss of ‘traditional fisheries’, which as Bolster describes is a ‘shorthand for preindustrial activity [that] remains a mythic trope obscuring historic changes in marine ecosystems. It plays to the indefensible but commonplace assumption that the ocean has existed outside of history’.37 In travel writing on Brittany, there is very similar nostalgia for isolated, pre-modern Brittany: this often takes the form of condemning the increasingly dirty and smelly streets near the fish canneries of Concarneau and Douarnenez. And yet, along with the dense population of cannery workers, both towns also had wellestablished summer artists colonies, as suggested by Henry Blackburn in Breton Folk: An Artistic Tour in Brittany (1880): Douarnenez, the headquarters of the sardine-fisheries, has a population of about 9000, almost entirely given up to this industry; the men in their boats, and the women and girls in the factories. It is a busy, dirty, and not very attractive town, with one principal street leading down to the port; but walk out of it in any direction, so as to escape the odours of the sardine factories, and the views from the high ground are most rewarding.38

Writers like Thomas Trollope (1846) Fanny Palliser (1869), Herbert Adams Gibbons (1915) and Blackburn found the streets of Brittany’s fishing towns cramped, noisy and squalid.39 Disappointed visitors to the coast who had sought the ‘authentic’ life of the peasantry there bemoaned either the touristic colonization of the beach or the

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industrialization of the fishing industry. Likewise, late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury travellers regretted the loss of local culture, expressed in costume and religious customs, as a loss of legibility. This closely parallels a phenomenon in fisheries management science: when an observer of a marine environment makes the naïve assumption that his or her first memories or perceptions of a place represent an ‘untouched’ or ‘natural’ state that precede the depleted, reduced, corrupted or well-trodden present; this is referred to as a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’.40 This is an apt term to use when thinking about the ecological complexities of artistic encounters with ‘shifting baselines’ on the Brittany coast. However, this nostalgia for times past was not shared by peasant residents, for, as Hopkin remarks, theirs was a difficult existence requiring ingenuity and flexibility for survival. Seasonal work was variable, and coastal working people profited by seizing opportunities and recovering quickly from disaster. As summer tourism grew steadily over the course of the nineteenth century from the beaches of the Channel and Normandy coasts, and later to Brittany, residents found new ways to make a living in service industries – as bathing instructors, chamber maids, laundresses, artist’s models, etc. – there were very few coastal peasants crying about change.41

Jules Breton’s Peasant Bodies on the Tideline In 1865, a sardine worker in Douarnenez became a favourite model of the painter Jules Breton when he first visited as a guest of Breton painter Emmanuel Lansyer. The town at the time was becoming known as the ‘Breton Barbizon’; like many who were to follow, he was drawn to its landscape and peasant culture, noting in his autobiography that on his arrival: Douarnenez, whose women and whose beach I had heard so highly extolled, impressed me but little at first … [b]ut how different everything looked the next day when, after winding our way through a network of fetid streets permeated with a nauseating odour of sardines, we suddenly found ourselves in sight of the bay that stretched before us in its dazzling beauty!42

He would return many times to this town of stark contrasts; one of the themes that he pursued here as an artist of open-air compositions was that of women washing clothing in a spring by the sea. Jeanne Calvet, a young sardine processor, posed for many of the female figures in Breton’s Salon paintings such as The Washerwomen of the Breton Coast (1870) (Plate 13). Breton combined his studies of Calvet with open-air observations of women washing clothing just outside the centre of Douarnenez, on the beach below the fishermen’s village of Ploumarc’h. On this spot, fresh water ran from the ancient communal lavoir – a spring-fed washing pool on the cliff above – across the exposed intertidal strand to meet the sea. No doubt he studied women crouching at the stoneedged rectangular pool above the cliff – scrubbing, wringing and hauling bundles of laundry – but he placed his figures in a seemingly wild landscape further down on the beach. These heroically strong, barefoot women are bleached of the dirt and

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odours of everyday labours; Douarnenez’s fish, waste, packaged food and global trade are erased as they launder improbably white – and relatively few – items.43 In his academic composition, Breton fashioned this landscape as an ecological space of the past, inhabited by Arcadian laundresses rather than factory workers, dipping their garments into a natural source where contrasts of clean and dirty, of land and sea, of the gaze of the outsider and that of the peasant are tidied and levelled to the surface of the academic finish. Fantasies like this function by both idealization and omission: critic Alfred Sensier, in his review of Breton’s painting in the 1870 Salon, pointedly commented that its superficial beauty, with ‘pretty laundresses who are not washing’, spoke to urban viewers’ pastoral desire.44 Women like Jeanne Calvet would have been only too familiar with the oily, sickening smells that clothes take on when one works with fish (and that flow from them in the communal waters). Yet by locating the heavy and unpleasant work of washing laundry by hand in a spring on the coast, Breton perpetuates a celebration of ‘timeless’ and ‘natural’ female labour that has become a feature of the local landscape. Breton’s images of working women are frequently celebrated by conservative art historians such as Gabriel Weisberg, who blur the lines between realist artists who were committed to social justice and those like Breton who painted a sentimental peasant world.45 This apolitical approach was summed up in a pithy review by Neil McWilliam: ‘[l]abour, in the work of Breton, is endowed with an antique dignity, and is transformed into an almost sacerdotal communion of man with nature. The prevailing order of things receives legitimation, parameters of the real are asserted with a bland authority that eradicates contradiction.’46 Weisberg’s approach to the artist is echoed in Annette Bourrut-Lacouture’s Breton monograph in which she describes the artist’s interest in ‘timeless’ female labour: ‘washerwomen and water-carriers have always occupied a privileged place in the work of writers, poets and painters because they are often linked to our first memories, the memories of childhood.’47 This ‘privileged place’ merits disambiguation for its elision of class and gender privileges: if Breton’s bodies summoned memories of labouring maternal bodies, they also must imply a presumptively bourgeois male gaze upon a domestic servant. Breton’s primitivism of the female body is thus rationalized as universal, male experience. On the beach in Douarnenez, Breton simply could not find the language for – or did not see the artistic merit in – depicting Calvet as a cannery worker. Weisberg and Bourrut-Lacouture’s approach to Breton avoids any critique of the class and gender privilege of the artist – or viewer – in watching working women. Feminist art historians Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin first articulated the conventions by which the nurturing or seemingly natural body of the working-class rural woman became a long-standing ‘woman as nature’ trope of nineteenth-century visual culture. Nochlin’s 1988 essay ‘Women, Art and Power’, describes the ‘assimilation of the peasant woman to the realm of nature’ in Jean-François Millet’s painting The Gleaners: [T]his particularly unrewarding labor must be read as ordained by nature itself rather than brought about by specific conditions of historical injustice … as women they slide more easily into a position of identity with the natural order. Millet

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emphasizes this woman-nature connection in a specific aspect of his composition: the bodies of the bending women are quite literally encompassed and limited by the boundaries of the earth itself. It is as though the earth imprisons them, not feudalism or capitalism.48

In 1984, Pollock, reviewing several works by Weisberg that feature Jules Breton, notes that the category of ‘peasant’ is often taken as a given in the author’s texts, notwithstanding the fact that in the nineteenth century there were many ‘different kinds of peasantry’ as [T]he social systems based upon agriculture as the most widespread mode of life were being transformed by new techniques and practices or were being challenged by a radically different social and economic system based on production for exchange often, though not exclusively, resulting in industrial machine production. Changes in social relations and economic systems in and between town and countryside had diverse effects on peasantries.49

In a later essay, Pollock describes the working-woman-peasant trope in the works of Breton, noting that ‘over these selective bodies a range of stylistic possibilities were played out, probing the dense freight of meaning the feminized countryside could carry within both a bourgeois political and a sexual economy’.50 In academic naturalist painting, the female rural worker is ubiquitous, but her implied industrial counterpart – the waged factory worker – is less common a subject. This critique is especially cogent in the case of the laundresses in Douarnenez and has significant ecological relationships at play that we may unpack with the more recent critical tools of feminist ecomaterialism. Both feminist scholars Pollock and Nochlin made insightful critiques of class and gender lacunae in the scholarship of realist art, yet as Stacy Alaimo has recently noted, in this foundational generation of feminist scholarship there is often a profound discomfort with the notion of ‘nature’ being allied to the female body. She writes that ‘the feminist flight from nature … leaves the nature/culture dualism intact, along with the entire constellation of dualisms that have associated women with emotion, corporeality, and animality’.51 Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality ‘traces the material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world … Trans-corporeality is a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments.’52 Inspired by Alaimo and by Anne Harris’s ecocritical reading of a medieval fountain in Brittany, I made several visits to the Ploumarc’h village and its surrounding landscape (today an open-air heritage site) between 2013 and 2016.53 Although I had at first assumed that Breton’s composition was a fantasy, I found many early-twentieth-century photographic postcards that depict laundresses at work on the beach. Why would a laundress avoid the easily accessible communal lavoir in preference for the seaweed-covered strand? Perhaps stagnant mid-summer waters above made freshwater pools below, even if among the seaweed, more appealing. While stepping from rock to rock and wondering where the artist might have stopped to draw

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the profiles of the inlet’s outcroppings, it occurred to me that as Breton self-consciously staged his figures on the beach, he also flattened the rocky, slippery, lively quality of the shoreline itself. The only hints of seaweed are indicated by a hint of green dragged across the canvas in the areas of sand by the women’s feet. Yet despite whitewashing the everyday life of the busy fishing port full of women, this painting implies some of the vibrant material actors that flow and work together on the coast as part of the productive movement of things (fish, water, art, dirt and odour) across the tide line. Today, the visitor to the lavoir in Ploumarc’h can read on a placard (in French, Breton and English) about the day-long washing that women would perform here, with ‘the dirty working clothes from husband and sons coming back from the sea’. For artists who came to Douarnenez after Breton, the view from the heights of Ploumarc’h looking back towards the busy Port Rosmeur was a favoured theme (and a place where one might also ‘escape the sardines’ as Annaïg Pors, the director of the site told me). Unlike Breton, who was uninterested in painting the town, so many artists and photographers depicted this spot, which integrated shore and town, that it became a repeated motif signifying the place. The vital assemblages of everyday life on this spot often included ships on the bay, the fishing port, girls herding sheep, laundresses, women carrying water from the spring, and women and girls watching for the return of the fishing fleet.54 However, with the exception of the slim volume on painters in Douarnenez recently published by André Cariou, Breton’s painting of the washerwomen is rarely mentioned in the context of the town’s relationship to the ecology and economy of the shore.55

­Elodie La Villette’s Ecological Shores In contrast to the tidy and classical stage that Breton made of Douarnenez’s bay, the paintings of Elodie La Villette are close observations of the ‘interchangeability of land and sea in this marginal world of the shore’, to use the words of Rachel Carson.56 Although La Villette’s work is mostly known in a local context today, a recent exhibition in Morlaix and the accompanying catalogue by Denise Delouche have assembled the small amount of Salon criticism written on her works and have brought to light many unknown images from public and private collections.57 From 1870 to the Great War, La Villette exhibited to great acclaim, praised, for example, as a ‘powerful painter of the coast and sea’ and as a marine landscapist ‘of the first order in international salons as a realist marine painter of grand format studio paintings’.58 She lived year-round for much of her adult life – from 1892 to 1917 – facing the Atlantic in the small town of Portivy, on the Quiberon Peninsula in Brittany. There, the sea’s presence was constantly seen, heard, smelled and felt in her daily practices of sketching and swimming. She painted during winter storms – beach walkers might encounter her wrapped in a large black shawl – and she felt the energy and affective power of the water as it hit the land. According to one account, even on frigid days she would emerge from her house in an outmoded bathing costume, cross the quay, descend to the port and plunge into the icy waves.59 Like many other critics, painter François Hoffmann in 1891 was struck by the multiple senses she evoked, writing, ‘in her marine paintings there is the particular

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scent (parfum) of being painted from nature’ and that ‘with these rocks with yellow seaweed, tell me you do not smell the wind bringing the acrid, salty smell of the sea?’60 Human agency is radically de-centred in La Villette’s trans-corporeal perspective: the entwined maritime communities and ecologies of the Atlantic coast fill her landscapes. Unlike the looming bodies of most sea gleaners, her figures are small in scale and function as distant staffage.61 This sets her apart from her academic peers – whose shorelines were peopled by heroic workers – such as Breton and his daughter Virginie Demont-Breton, Guillou, Vollon or Tattegrain. Moreover, there are no hard distinctions drawn between the lives of those on the shore and those on the water: some linger to look at, as well as dwell in, that interstitial space of the shore characterized by crashing surf, industrial change and productivity. At low tide, many are in the landscape at once; the seaweed gatherer, tidal pool shellfish picker or fisherman looks down into, not over, the water to find value. They share the posture of the modern gleaner that filmmaker, Agnes Varda, in The Gleaners and I (2001), called the ‘modest gesture of stooping to glean’. In a large Normandy coast painting by La Villette, Gust of Wind on the Beach at Villerville (1878, private collection), the wind is a forceful actor that fills the sails of small sailboats tacking northeast (to the right) and blows spindrift from the tops of waves. At the same time, a le Havre-line packet boat steams (to the left of the composition) into the wind, heading southwest along the coast. La Villette’s titles specifically focus our attention on exact place names, weather conditions and tidal heights, and her details are attentive to the active processes of erosion, decay and growth within the tideline, whether on sandy or rocky shores. She articulates the physical process of waves breaking; as they approach shallow water, their speed slows, the following waves catching up to those ahead, and their crests spill over into the trough before them. This is complex ecomateriality: this body of water is so much more than water plus salt. Her waves are full of stuff, a living brine with brownish seaweed contained within them; this active sea is tugged by the moon and riled by the wind and slowed by the drag of the land. Like most of her tideline paintings, the shore is an inhabited, liminal space: its material constituents are a hybrid of human work, intertidal geology and marine plant life. A shrimp fisher walks along the water’s edge with his gear, among wooden breakwaters and fish traps; a basket left in the foreground implies the work of gathering is already done. In La Villette’s Larmor-plage (1879, private collection) human figures are just barely discernible as they work within the intertidal zone. Berger noted on the realist images of Millet that his innovation was to show the ‘physicality of a peasant’s labour on, instead of in front of, the land’; I suggest that La Villette shows us labour embedded deeply within the intertidal zone.62 Moreover, there is an ecological awareness in the artist’s shoreline images: she calls our attention to place names, weather and tidal height by the titles of her paintings, such as The Beach at Lohic and the Souris Isle, Near Lorient, Slack Tide (1876) (Plate 14). Arrested at the moment of its lowest point of the diurnal cycle, the tide is slack, unmoving for the moment, before its stream reverses and the water surges again to cover the exposed rocks, the seaweed and finally, the sand at the highwater mark. As our eyes scan from left to right, sailboats move across the shimmering surface and a church steeple rises from the land in the distance, as if grown from the stone

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below it; this landmark is seen from the sea as a sailor might read it. We follow the low water to its rim: a modest sailboat with one passenger, its keel perhaps scraping the bottom, rests at the edge of land and sea. Further to the right of the composition is the wrack line, where the low tide has exposed ochre seaweed at the painting’s centre. Here we can discern unmoored seaweed and flotsam left by the last high tide and the granite rocks of the shore. In the way that her brushstrokes conjure the matter of the sea and describe the human communities of the littoral zone that depended upon shoreline ecologies, she connects both her style and content to those of her heroes, Courbet, Monet and Corot. La Villette was not interested in a modernist approach to the sea that viewed its expanses as formally abstract, and she had scant interest in foregrounding touristic consumption or conviviality as signs of the modern. The innovation of her work lies in its prescient expressions of the intertwined and vibrant forms of life that meet at the edge of the sea, just as her audiences were just coming to grasp this biological diversity. In contrast to a recent discussion of La Villette’s work that suggests that she deliberately avoided busy sites such as Lorient’s port to paint an ideal image of the shore – an argument better supported by Breton’s painting – I am interested in the complexity of what she specifically chose in her provocations to ask us to look more closely.63 Our attention converges in the immersive embodiment of her images; what she shares is a lived experience, an awareness of what the sea has done and can do. La Villette’s ability to conjure the physical matter of the sea, to describe the human communities that depended on shoreline ecologies and to be attentive to ecological relationships has encouraged me to ask how ecological thinking can not only invite us to look for different priorities in art, but also look anew at artists otherwise marginalized for their apparent failure to be modern enough, according to standards canonized forty years ago and more. Valuing an artist’s descriptive attention to material ecology is not to naively assume that their work is merely illustrational or purely indexical, but, as I have argued, ecocritical modes of looking at images of the shore (such as the relational coastal ecologies of dwelling, washing and fishing on the water’s edge, examined in this chapter) afford possibilities of rethinking the ecological and, thereby, the social agency of nineteenth-century visual culture.

Notes This paper would not have been possible without the many collaborative projects I have pursued with Emily Gephart; her attentive reading of previous drafts of this chapter were invaluable. This research was generously funded by Bryant University. Many thanks are due to the scholars, curators and librarians who assisted me in my research, especially Béatrice Riou at the Musée de Morlaix, Caroline Boyle-Turner in Pont Aven, Pierre Ickowicz at the Chateau Musée, Dieppe and Marie Rose Prigent at the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique in Brest. Thanks for permission to reproduce images from the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee, the Archives of the Somme, the Lyon Musée des Beaux Arts and the Besançon Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie. Special thanks also to Laurence Hermann, Elodie La Villette’s great-granddaughter.

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Toby Everett was ever enthusiastic about accompanying me on shoreline research. Librarians Sam Simas and Maura Keating at Bryant University were very helpful in researching texts and images. Many thanks to Molly Duggins and Kate Davidson for their patient editing and constructive advice. All translations from French are mine unless noted otherwise.   1 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 4.   2 Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Robert L. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867–1886 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Gloria Groom, ‘The Sea as Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Manet and the Sea, edited by Juliet Wilson-Bareau, David C. Degener and Lloyd DeWitt (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2003), 35–54; Impressionists by the Sea, ed. John House (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2007); John Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Tricia Cusack, ed., Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).   3 Peter J. Bowler, The Earth Encompassed: A History of the Environmental Sciences (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 309.   4 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 489.   5 Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart, Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019), 6–12; Andrew Patrizio, The Ecological Eye: Assembling an Ecocritical Art History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 9.   6 Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, ‘Les Données Bretonnantes: La Prairie de Représentation’, Art History 3, no. 3 (1980): 314–44; Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).   7 Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); John Berger, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative, 1960); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972); John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1977); T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 2nd French Republic 1848–1851 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973); T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois, Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973); Robert L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976); Griselda Pollock. Millet (London: Universal Books, 1977); Orton and Pollock, ‘Les Données Bretonnantes’ (1980).   8 Clark, Image of the People, 10.   9 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 23. 10 Ibid. 11 Andrew Jones, ‘Where Eagles Dare: Landscape, Animals and the Neolithic of Orkney’, Journal of Material Culture 3, no. 3 (1998): 302; W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 6.

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12 Stacy Alaimo, ‘States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea’, ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 3 (2012): 476. 13 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 189. 14 Ibid., 192. 15 Ibid., 189. 16 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 17 Gustave Flaubert, George Sand and Alphonse Jacobs, The Flaubert / Sand Correspondence (London: Harvill, 1989), 83–4. 18 Nodier, Charles, Isidore-Justin-Severin Taylor and Alphonse Cailleux, Voyages Pittoresques et Romantiques dans l’Ancienne France: Ancienne Normandie (Paris: Impr.de J. Didot l’Aine, 1820); Léon Curmer, Les Français Peint par Eux-Mêmes, and Jules Janin’s La Normandie. 19 Laurent Manoeuvre and Éric Rieth, Joseph Vernet: 1714–1789: les Ports de France (Arcueil: Anthèse, 1994), 36; Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23. 20 Henri-Louis Duhamel Du Monceau et al., Traité Général des Pesches, et Histoire des Poissons qu’elles Pournissent, Tant pour la Subsistance des Hommes, que pour Plusieurs Autres Usages qui Ont Rapport aux Arts et au Commerce (Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1769). 21 Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 50. 22 David Hopkin, ‘Fishermen, Tourists and Artists in the Nineteenth Century: The View from the Beach’, in Impressionists by the Sea, edited by John House (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2007), 32. 23 Jacob Venedey and Frederic Shoberl, Excursions in Normandy: Illustrative of the Character, Manners, Customs, and Traditions of the People (London: Colburn, 1841), 154. 24 Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast, 2. 25 Patrick Young, Enacting Brittany 1871–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 87; Hopkin, ‘Fishermen, Tourists and Artists’, 34. 26 Thatched peasant cottages were a favourite motif of naturalist artists who emerged from the Barbizon School, working in the French countryside in the 1830s and 40s; the theme continues in painting, popular illustration and photography well into the twentieth century. Anne-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin et al., Le Pêcheur En Normandie: 1820–1920 (Honfleur: Musée Eugène Boudin, 2006), 143. 27 Stéphane Gerson, ‘Parisian Litterateurs, Provincial Journeys and the Construction of National Unity in Post-Revolutionary France’, Past and Present 151 (May 1996): 141–73. Many examples are illustrated in Bruno Delarue, Caroline Chaine and Pierre Ickowicz, Les Peintres À Dieppe Et Ses Environs: Varengeville, Pourville et Arques-LaBataille (Yport: Delarue, 2009), 60–102. 28 Claire Montaigne, Francis Tattegrain, 1852–1915 (Berck-sur-Mer: Musée de Berck sur Mer, 2007), 49. 29 Adolphe Brisson, ‘A Travers Champs: Les Hommes des Cavernes’, Revue Illustrée 22, no. 253 (1896): 125–8; A. Hergé, ‘Une Curiosité Dieppoise: Les “Gobes”’, Le Magasin Pittoresque 17 (1 September 1897): 274; Louis Forest, ‘Les Troglodytes de Dieppe’, l’Illustration 3211 (1904): 764; also see the later painting by British Painter Harold Gilman, Cave Dwellers, Dieppe (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1907). 30 Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 192.

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31 Charles Le Goffic, Sur la Côte: Gens de Mer (Paris: Colin, 1897), 285. 32 André Cariou, Douarnenez et ses Environs: Vus par Les Peintres (Spézet: Coop Breizh, 2018), 17. 33 D.H. Cushing, The Provident Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 28–30. 34 Cushing, Provident Sea, 29. 35 Auguste Dupuoy, ‘La Crise Sardinière’, Pages Libres 206 (10 February 1906): 134. 36 Female sardine factory workers were known as Penn Sardines – sardine heads – because of the small head covering, derived from a local style, that they were required to wear in the factories. This costume was a frequent motif of postcards and popular illustration c. 1900. By the early 1920s, more than 2,000 women worked in the sardine factories of Douarnenez. Anne-Denes Martin, Les Ouvrières de la Mer: Histoire des Sardinières du Littoral Breton (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 52. 37 Bolster, Mortal Sea, 87. 38 Henry Blackburn, Breton Folk: An Artistic Tour in Brittany (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880), 119. 39 See an excellent analysis of these travel writers in Patrick Young, Enacting Brittany, 87. 40 Daniel Pauly, ‘Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10, no. 10 (1995): 430. 41 Hopkin, ‘Fishermen, Tourists and Artists’, 35. 42 Breton’s remarks about the ‘fetid streets’ of the town were already a commonplace of travel writers; like them he turned to the bay. Jules Breton, The Life of an Artist: Art and Nature (New York: Appleton, 1892), 310. 43 As André Cariou has recently noted, the women of Douarnenez did not take kindly to being watched or sketched while working and occasionally gave visiting artists a good whack with their wet laundry. One artist recounted: ‘One day, I was drawing a lovely stone lavoir, at the edge of a pond. One of the washers supposed that I was doing her portrait; she arrived like a fury and, with all the strength of a devil, she whacked me with wet cloth on my back and neck.’ André Beaunier, Les Souvenirs d’un Peintre (Paris: Charpentier, 1906) qtd in Cariou, Douarnenez, 29. 44 Alfred Sensier, ‘Les Peintres de la Nature’, Revue Internationale de l’Art et de la Curiosité (15 June 1870): 387. For an excellent analysis of Sensier’s attack on Breton and support of Millet, see Neil McWillliam and Christopher Parsons, ‘“Le Paysan de Paris”: Alfred Sensier and the Myth of Rural France’, Oxford Art Journal 6, no. 2 (1983): 45–6. 45 His approach to Breton and other naturalists has remained consistent since the early 1980s. See Gabriel Weisberg, The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830–1900 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981), 34. 46 Neil McWilliam, ‘Look at Life’ Art History 4, no. 4 (1981): 468. 47 Annette Bourrut-Lacouture, Jules Breton: Painter of Peasant Life (New Haven: Yale University Press and the National Gallery of Ireland, 2002), 150. 48 Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 22. 49 Griselda Pollock, ‘Revising or Reviving Realism?’, Art History 7, no. 3 (1984): 361. 50 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Writing of Arts Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 53. 51 Stacy Alaimo, ‘Nature’, in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Jane Disch and M.E. Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 533.

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52 Stacy Alaimo, ‘States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea’, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) 19, no. 3 (2016): 476. 53 Anne Harris, ‘Water and Wood: Ecomateriality and Sacred Objects at the Chapel of Saint-Fiacre, Le Faouet (Brittany)’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44, no. 3 (2014): 585–615. 54 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23. 55 Cariou, Douarnenez, 2018. 56 Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (Staples Press: London, 1955), 6. 57 Denise Delouche, Élodie La Villette, 1842–1917 & Caroline Espinet, 1844–1912: Soeurs et Peintres (Quimper: Palantines, 2014). 58 André Michel, ‘Le Salon Alsacien et Lorrain’, Revue Alsacienne 9 (1886): 298. 59 From Alfred Carlier’s journal (c. 1907–14), qtd. in Marie-Madeline Martinie, Elodie La Villette, Caroline Espinet: Deux Soeurs Peintres (Auray: Hengoun, 2008), 43. 60 François Hoffmann, ‘Notes sur le Salon de 1891’, Le Phare Du Bretagne (27 May 1891): 1–2. 61 Marxist art historian John Barrell asserted that the convention known as staffage moved the potentially problematic presence of working-class harvest labour to the far distance, reducing human subjects to tiny accessorial figures to indicate an inhabited and worked landscape. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16. Maura Coughlin, ‘Elodie La Villete’s Ecocritical Painting’, Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes 23, no. 4 (2019): 247. 62 John Berger, About Looking (London: Writers and Readers, 1980), 77. 63 Simon Kelly and April M. Watson, Impressionist France. Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 27. Coughlin, ‘Elodie La Villette’s Ecocritical Painting’, 244.

­7

An Intense Curiosity: Marine Research Stations and Marine Specimens in the Late Nineteenth Century Jude Philp

The charm lay here, that it was unknown.1 Imagine building a sandcastle with perfect connections and detail for each tower and wall. Just as all the features are delineated, suddenly buckets of sand are poured over the erection. This illustrates what happened to zoologists in the nineteenth century who, when endeavouring to reach a broad consensus of philosophical understanding about the logic of their constructions to describe and classify the natural world, were at the same time inundated with new specimens from across the globe, requiring them to refine, rebuild and renegotiate their categories.2 Focusing on British and German-trained men active in the nineteenth century, this chapter concentrates on two aspects of this volatile period of theoretical modelling and taxonomic classification – the establishment of highly specialist marine research facilities, and the fabrication of replicas for taxonomic and theoretical purposes. While the marine station functioned to support the work of the zoologist, the material culture of their work acted like scientific publications to demonstrate ideas and illustrate ‘facts’.3 In an age of technological wonder, fabricated replicas, manipulated specimens in jars and images of natural phenomenon invited curiosity through the static ‘replay’ of scientific processes to an engaged public audience. From the 1850s, an increase in public expenditure on education and ‘rational entertainment’ was determined to be necessary to give the public access to, and an understanding of and interest in, the natural world.4 Correspondingly, marine zoologists were involved in publicizing their work to a general audience.5 Their success in popularizing marine zoology, I argue, was achieved through engaging the public to the extent that they experienced a direct involvement in the naturalists’ work. To this end the lively intellectual environment of marine science did not deter but engaged with the curiosity of an eager audience. I conclude by noting the many parallels between these strategies of replication and involvement and those of today as marine scientists engage us, through current technological means, with the construction of ever more replicas, three-dimensional printing and film capture of underwater events.

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The expense of natural history research included the equipment needed for preservation, dissection and analysis,6 along with the educational training. This meant that for generations such study was physically located in the home, the university or in the field,7 and limited to the wealthy and with those with whom they chose to work.8 Charles Darwin’s work on the Beagle and subsequently at Down House is an example of this financial model. Working from the state-supported expeditionary vessel, he used his own funds to maintain research independence from the state’s enterprise. He equipped himself with a library, laboratory tools and a technician to preserve and catalogue the specimens that would remain central to his work on his return to the United Kingdom.9 The preservation techniques for specimens involved either drying or bottling in spirit of wine, and had not extensively changed from the previous century when, in 1735, Carl von Linné developed the binomial system for classifying the natural world to bring order to the enormous range of exotic species coming into European private and public collections from colonial outposts.10 By the 1850s there were established methods to store most botanical and zoological material, but subsequent scientific discoveries continued to raise new problems in preservation.11 As zoological subjects increased, refinements were sought throughout the nineteenth century to communicate the contemporary state of the science.12 At the same time, research involved the cataloguing, classification and description of a huge variety of natural specimens, which raised new problems within existing schemes. Responding to the need for expanded classifications and revisions of ‘missing’ areas in Linné’s system, such as deep-sea species, marine-zoologists had to not only solve complex intellectual problems raised by the physical material of their studies and their descriptions of it but also had to address the difficulty of long-term storage for perishable, soft-bodied specimens in order to do their work and seek funding. Here, I follow leading scientists of the age before looking to their influences and the establishment and work of marine stations. Thomas Huxley (1825–95) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) are crucial to this story for their role in theoretical debates and the advancement of Darwin’s ideas which stimulated marine zoology academically. Huxley and Haeckel were also adept teachers, popularizers and networkers who influenced the development of the marine stations examined here. Haeckel’s student Anton Dohrn (1840–1909) was the founder of the Naples Stazione Zoologica (1872) and its shortlived companion station at Rabaul (1894) on the northern tip of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago. Another Haeckel student, Nikolai Miklouho-Macleay (1846– 88), established the Watson’s Bay Marine Station in Sydney Harbour (1882). Huxley’s students, Thomas Jeffrey Parker (1850–97) and William Haswell (1854–1925), went on to write a highly successful zoology textbook of the twentieth century. All of these zoologists had a profound influence on zoology into our current era and shared an application of science that was largely separate to religious or moral views, yet their own work owed much to the evangelical taxonomist and field collector Philip Henry Gosse (1810–88). The reverberations of this work were shown to the public in new and exciting ways through the technological advancements in glass manufacture and particularly the development of achromatic (colourless) glass which enabled Philip Henry Gosse and Anton Dohrn to entice audiences by exhibiting marine organisms

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in a living state within aquaria, while Salvatore Lo Bianco and William Haswell demonstrated the application of scientific thought through innovative models and manipulated specimens.

The Sea Indoors Philip Henry Gosse’s work in popularizing marine zoology to urban and rural dwellers in the mid-nineteenth century was outstanding. Although containers for living sea fauna and flora were shown and enjoyed sporadically from the 1820s, Gosse’s work in the creation of glass boxes to contain living marine fauna and flora was a turning point in popularizing marine zoology to urban and rural dwellers. To study the life history of marine fauna, Gosse needed to be able to look at them closely over a long period; but without air circulation, living species quickly died in tanks. Gosse’s experiments at the Fish-House of the London Zoological Society led to his realization of the relationship between oxygen, sea fauna and sea flora.13 When the Fish-House opened in Regent’s Park in 1853, he set about making the opportunity for others to enjoy the sea indoors through the creation of commercially available domestic aquariums. In his colour-filled books he guided his readers to Britain’s shores informing them about what they were seeing, what to look out for and how to collect for home study. He implored the British public to take up the challenges of a modest aquarium to pursue the rudiments of scientific investigation of the British seashore at home. He published practical guides for enthusiasts such as the highly successful The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1854).14 This provided the reader with the basic tools (chemistry, biology and physics) to sustain marine life in the home, some hints as to how exciting and intriguing it could be, and a dose of moral theology to enhance the purpose of the endeavour.15 Only in 1860 did Gosse feel ready to publish his natural history of British corals and anemones, Actinologia Britannica.16 The text mostly follows an established system of dry taxonomic writing, but one which involved the reader in a microscopic investigation of the animals and seduced them with elaborate lithographs crowded with multi-coloured soft-bodied organisms with waving tentacles.

Understanding Life British zoological study as it emerged from the 1850s was experiential, fieldwork-based and theoretically exciting. Embryology became a key point of study and theorization, particularly with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).17 Earlier that decade Huxley was taking live jellyfish from tropical waters and dissecting them in his tiny cabin on board HMS Rattlesnake (1846–50) in his spare time from medical duties as Assistant Surgeon. This five-year period of intensive study during the voyage to coastal areas of Australia and New Guinea produced two important papers that underscored the necessity of studying embryology from marine life in situ. With no

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known method for the long-term preservation of gelatinous life forms like jellyfish and their eggs, zoologists like Huxley were wholly dependent on ready access to fresh specimens from juvenile and adult populations. Working with natural light and a simple microscope in his cabin, Huxley conducted the intricate work needed to formally describe, draw and disseminate the anatomy of medusa to make known his discovery of their anatomical structure and the function of their stinging cells.18 Huxley’s great strength as a professional biologist lay not only in his observational capabilities but also in his ability to explain the complexities of natural history, which, in part, was because he never took for granted an audience’s knowledge of his subject which he recognized involved ‘pursuits remote from the common ways of men’.19 Similarly stirred up by Darwin’s ideas, Ernst Haeckel saw huge potential in the advance of general biological knowledge that it offered. Theoretically Haeckel is known for his now refuted recapitulation theory which argued that an evolutionarily advanced form ‘replays’ its evolutionary distant adult ancestral form in its embryonic development.20 Haeckel’s wider fame arose in part from his utter enthusiasm for and joyful pleasure in portraying the complex forms of marine life. His hugely popular, anatomically detailed, coloured drawings made to accompany his theoretical and taxonomic papers of marine life were radical in their style and composition. Jellyfish appear like the frills of a Folies Bergère dancer’s skirt; black backgrounds were used with dramatic effect for colourless species; others were placed on the page as if in danger of swimming off, as revealed in the undulating tentacled Nauphanta challengeri (now recognized as Nausithoe chanllengeri [Haeckel, 1880]) described and drawn by Haeckel from a species dredged on HMS Challenger (Figure 7.1). Although known for their work with Haeckel, it was Gosse’s taxonomic drawings from Actinologia Britannica that had first enticed the Blaschka glass makers to create a new business model for their industry by translating two-dimensional marine fauna into three-dimensional colourful glass forms for educational pleasure.21 Glass was an ideal vehicle for capturing translucent and iridescent marine creatures, particularly for students and museum visitors less able to recognize a species in a marine environment or bleached specimens in display jars. By working with Haeckel’s no-less lively images and by conducting similar microscopic investigations to recreate in glass what Haeckel drew, they had the advantage of being able to market the latest scientific knowledge that was taught in universities across the world.22 These were not just stand-ins for physical specimens, they were also crucial visualizations of scientific theory. The dissemination of Haeckel’s illustrations, as well as the models based on his drawings, furthered the popular fascination with marine fauna, and, because they often detailed aspects of theoretical thinking, also brought to his classes at Jena University students who were enraptured by his passion.

Stazione Zoologica, Naples Ernst Haeckel’s work was, like Huxley’s, dependent upon the direct examination of marine species. Even with the advantages of university laboratories Haeckel led his students to lakes and the seaside to study directly from nature. The scientific merit and

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Figure  7.1  Ernst Haeckel, ‘Nauphanta Challengeri’, 1880, colour lithograph, plate 27 in Monographie der Medusen (1879–81). Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

need for knowledge of marine fauna to substantiate greater theoretical ideas, along with the health benefits of fresh air, promoted an almost evangelical zeal in his students to encourage others to study in similar ways. At one meeting between fellow students following one of Haeckel’s field trips in 1865, Anton Dohrn and Nikolai N. MiklouhoMaclay discussed the opportunities and obstacles in this method of field study. Change was needed, they believed, because of the difficulties of communicating their specialized needs to fisherfolk, dealing with inefficient equipment and the intolerance of seaside innkeepers towards wet specimens, fishing gear and scientific paraphernalia entering their establishments.23 Their conversation led them to envisage establishing a chain of marine stations across the world that would remove all such inconveniences for the serious researcher.24

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Figure 7.2  Detail of the third-floor laboratory, preparation areas and façade, revised floor plan of Naples Marine Station in Charles Atwood Kofoid, Biological Stations of Europe. Bulletin 1910, No. 4, 1910. Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.

No place was comparable to the archetype of this concept in the Stazione Zoologica of Naples that Dohrn carefully ushered into existence in 1872, largely using his own funds assisted by international support from luminaries, such as Charles Darwin (Figure 7.2). The establishment of this coastal facility quickly demonstrated how valuable it was for the development of new scientific concepts and furthering appreciation of the physical aspects of nature that underpinned them. There were benefits for the comfort of researchers in their domestic arrangements, and the provision of a library and convivial atmosphere for the enjoyment and stimulation of like-minded scholars.25 The success of the Stazione lay in the economic model on which it functioned, and Dohrn’s absolute determination for it to be a centre of practical purpose, rather than one formed around pure research. The Stazione rented space to institutions worldwide so that marine biologists from all countries could have unlimited access to both living and preserved specimens to do their work.26 Moreover, like another modern haven of natural science research – the museum – it had an outward public face: in this case, an extensive aquarium.27 This feature was not only part of the economic model, it could serve to publicize the need for this expensive institution by giving the public unprecedented, exhilarating access to aspects of the ocean world, and in close proximity to the work of marine scientists.28 So that the scientists had a ready supply of the specimens they requested, the Naples Stazione Zoologica employed a preparator. The self-trained Salvatore Lo Bianco (1860–1910), whose father was a porter at Dohrn’s hotel in Naples, was the most famous during Dohrn’s time. Lo Bianco began working at the Stazione at fourteen years of age under the tutelage of August Müller, curator of the preparation department and library (1876–81), and assumed the role of curator on Müller’s death.29 Lo Bianco’s most

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famous publication was on the preparation methods he had developed for twenty-two phyla and individual species of marine specimens, a publication considered valuable enough for the international scientific community to be translated by the Smithsonian Institution.30 The influence of Müller’s chemistry background on Lo Bianco’s practice is evident throughout the publication, with tailored preparations made for killing and preserving each of the various kinds of fauna and their eggs. For the order Actiniaria, for example, Lo Bianco admitted some difficulty in suggesting Anemonia sulcata was easiest to kill with chrompicric acid under running water to keep the animal distended, and then placed in a jar until it falls away from the walls – dead. In preparing the Anemonia for preservation, he advised a specimen jar with ethanol and 0.5 per cent of acid. Employing a hook for easy lifting in and out, he directed the specimen be placed upside down in the jar, with a gentle shake helping to extend the tentacles. Over subsequent days weaker solutions of ethanol, he advised, should be introduced to ensure the longevity of the specimen. Other species defied death and had to be subdued with infusions of tobacco smoke or cocaine to do the necessary ‘narcotizing’. Lo Bianco’s specimen techniques also demonstrate his crucial place within the research life of the Stazione by aiming to not only preserve the specimen but maintain its critical anatomical features that were key to the research of naturalists of the day, such as the extended tentacles of coral polyps and the clear ‘hood’ of the sea-slug, Tethys leporine, through which it feeds.31 With such care given to preserving the features of the animals, marine specimens prepared at marine stations could finally match the Blaschka glass versions as replicas displaying zoological understanding. For, while their living colours could not be retained – and no colour was introduced to bring an aspect of life to the specimens – the anatomical features of greatest interest to scientists were carefully coaxed and removed from the bodies of the animals after death, and skilfully arranged within rectangular glass bottles of spirit. Lo Bianco used hooks, thread and transparent glass shelves to display specimens, and blackened backgrounds to emphasize their details. For specimens like the semi-transparent Janolus cristatus, the results seemed as miraculous as the Blaschka glass marine models. Lo Bianco incorporated scientific observations through the positioning of specimens, such as the Holothuria, displayed upright to demonstrate the spawning position and genital orifices (Plate 15). The careful preparations of specimens were made both for the in-house research collection and on consignment to other institutions worldwide. Within the first five years, the export of specimens generated a useful income for the Stazione.32 The first official client, in fact, was Huxley, who ordered Chimaera (ghost shark) and Heptanchus (cow-shark) specimens.33 The cultural and scientific milieu of the Stazione also inspired entirely novel projects. Due to the well-constructed adjacent aquarium, students could also observe animals’ living forms and study their interrelationships, they could monitor variations and changes in the colouration of ghost sharks and other luminous animals along with their movement. Understanding animal locomotion is certainly what interested the inventor-filmmaker Étienne-Jules Marey who studied at the Stazione and assisted Dohrn in its development. His ‘Mouvements de Natation de la Raie’ (Swimming Movements of the Ray) published in the popular magazine La Nature in 1893, exemplifies this zoological interest in anatomy and movement.34 For

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Figure  7.3 Étienne Jules Marey, ‘Mouvements de Natation de la Raie’, La Nature 21.1 (1893). Photography by the author, 2020.

the study on the skate’s movements, Marey built a small aquarium. To photograph the live specimens plucked from the Bay of Naples, he made an apparatus for the aquarium that fixed the skate’s head and tail. Marey then put a metal plate on top of the skate’s back and carefully photographed the fin movements silhouetted against the blue sky behind (Figure 7.3).35

­Marine Stations in the Southern Hemisphere Naples continued to offer students of marine science a place for detailed analysis in convivial surroundings, in no small part aided by its financial structure where nationstates would purchase a dissecting table for their scientists to use over the course of a year. Many marine stations followed in its wake.36 Two marine stations established in the Southern Hemisphere provide a geographical and imperial counterpoint to the Naples Stazione: the Watson’s Bay Marine Station in Sydney Harbour (1882) and the Rabaul Marine Station at the northern tip of New Britain (1894). The Naples Stazione Zoologica was intended to be one in a chain of similar operations. Nickolai Miklouho-Maclay, Anton Dohrn’s relatively impoverished university colleague, maintained the original ambitions for this within his own vision for a national (Russian) scientific agenda and an international community of scientists. Travelling for eleven years throughout the Pacific, with Java, Singapore and Sydney as his bases, Miklouho-Maclay was highly reliant on sympathetic strangers to realize his goals. On his arrival in Sydney in 1878, the Russian biologist took the idea to Australian Museum trustee, William John Macleay, a pastoralist and politician with a family heritage of natural history study. Maclay sought to replicate in Australia what Dohrn and others had achieved in Europe; that is, build personal natural history collections and influence institutional collections, fund expeditions, form scientific societies and publish and endow further study through institutional benefaction.37 It was by no means an understatement for the Austrian marine biologist Robert von Lendenfeld (1858–1913) to call Sydney ‘the Eldorado for the spongologist’.38 His claim was not solely because of the wealth of species available from the harbour and in the collections of Macleay and the Australian Museum, but also because of the personal support, financial interest and institutional influence Macleay could offer.39 These

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factors were also fundamental to Miklouho-Maclay’s success in the founding of the Marine Biological Station in Watson’s Bay, Sydney. One part of the marine station idea, which was to establish a place for scholars to discuss their discoveries with a group of knowledgeable peers, was already available in Sydney before Miklouho-Maclay arrived. From 1874 in the meeting rooms of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, amateur gentlemen and specialist collectors interested in the rich marine life of Sydney Harbour and its coastline would regularly meet and discuss their weekend finds, publishing their research in the Society’s Proceedings.40 As one recounted, the comradery of the laboratory existed even on the harbour in the midst of collecting. The state-of-the-art scientific expedition HMS Challenger was mid-way in its worldwide exploration of the ocean floor when it arrived in Sydney Harbour on 6  April 1874. Dredging the harbour one day, the Challenger officers entangled their dredge ropes with the whaleboat of Linnean Society members William Hargraves and John Brazier dredging on top of the Sow and Pigs Reef. Both parties were in search of Trigoniidae, a kind of salt-water clam found only in Australian waters. The locals’ twenty-five specimens were of significant interest, some also had other, new species of shell (Myochama) attached to them. The Challenger officers’ requests to purchase the lot were refused, instead they were presented to them as gifts, the local naturalists proud to have secured sought-after specimens the like of which the Challenger, with its advanced collecting techniques, had been unable to acquire.41 Sydney at this time was caught up in the excitement caused by this highly ambitious floating international marine station which replicated the Naples Stazione’s social side through HMS Challenger’s scientific crew’s collegiate dredging with the eminent biologists of the town off the harbour headlands and more formal hosting of balls and tours of the ship.42 Following Challenger’s departure from Sydney, a small cohort of Linnean Society men continued their work in the harbour and adjacent coasts; the specimens they selected were brought into museums and home laboratories. Convivial the Linnean group may have been, but for Miklouho-Maclay it would not serve. A marine station was no place for ‘mere collecting’, he argued.43 Rather, a marine station should be a place for observation and investigation and was needed to study ‘upon the spot’.44 Yet Miklouho-Maclay lacked Dohrn’s money, patience and singular ambition. He no sooner presented his outline for a marine station when he departed on more travels, leaving the task of raising funds, securing a site and constructing the building with a committee of Sydney gentlemen. On his return, seeing nothing done, the Russian blasted the men for their lack of action.45 Most of the works were completed by September 1881, the modest building designed by fashionable architect John Kirkpatrick for the Sydney Marine Biological Station was not intended to be comparable to the Villa Reale that housed Dohrn’s Stazione. As relayed at the time by William Stephens of the University of Sydney ‘it has been reserved for the present generation to provide for the student of small means but high ambition’.46 He went on to say that while devoid of luxury even of comfort it was ideally placed for naturalists to observe a large variety of marine subjects (Figure  7.4). It operated for only five years, with Miklouho-Maclay its first tenant. Six rooms for potential students were built, although Miklouho-Maclay lamented that they were unfurnished, and that the

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Figure 7.4  Detail of leaflet advertising the finished Watson’s Bay Marine Station, Sydney. Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

workroom was unfinished. Positioned on Birrabirragul land at Camp Cove a short row from the Sow and Pigs Reef inside the harbour and a short walk to the Pacific Ocean, it was also not far from the New South Wales Premier’s own residence.47 This last point is pertinent as Miklouho-Maclay married the Premier’s daughter Margaret in 1887 and shortly after left with her for his homeland. The following year the marine station building and land were turned over for military purposes. Although the spectre of war ultimately closed the station, from the beginning it had plenty of supporters but lacked a monied champion.48 Without financial independence it was vulnerable to closure, and while Miklouho-Maclay

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did not have to worry about cranky landladies as he and Dohrn had done in their youth it is evident that there was little in the way of equipment and library to support Miklouho-Maclay and William Haswell in their marine research. William Haswell was a star graduate of Edinburgh University where he trained under Huxley and the Challenger expedition leader Wyville Thomson, leaving for Australia in 1878. Alongside Miklouho-Maclay, he initially worked on a series of taxonomic papers at both Elizabeth Bay House and the Sydney Marine Station. Undeterred by the closure of the Watson’s Bay station, by 1890 Haswell was campaigning for a replacement, by 1909 campaigns for an aquarium began. Haswell went on to direct the biological sciences at the University of Sydney, leading through education and publishing with his New Zealand colleague, T. Jeffery Parker, one of the most successful biology textbooks of the next century.49 At the university he established a teaching collection of marine fauna and flora from which the students could learn preparation methods, anatomy and principles of classification.50 One wax model of Euastacus serratus crayfish from Australian waters was clearly remodelled from an early 1870s impression used by Huxley of the developmental stages of Astacus fluviatilis, the common European crayfish. It demonstrates Haswell’s emphasis on visual aids for teaching and also his homage to Huxley who structured much of his public lectures on natural sciences around this species (Plate 16).51 If the Sydney Marine Station failed due to a robust financial model, the brief establishment in the 1890s of a research station at Ralum, New Britain (in German New Guinea), demonstrates that money itself is not enough. New Britain must have seemed a long way from most places for Europeans in this period, but by the mid1870s a small group of foreigners had established themselves in the Gazelle Peninsula on the fringes of Blanche Bay, at Duke of York Island and on the shores of New Ireland further north. The group included men with an interest in natural history – such as Methodist missionary Rev. George Brown – as well as traders like Hersheim & Co. and businesswoman Emma Coe, both instrumental in Germany’s growing Pacific presence. The figures ultimately involved in the New Britain station’s establishment were typical of the network that was needed for the international trade in natural history and included an academic scientist, a professional museum worker, a selftaught established field collector and two recruits from the local population who were trained for the work.52 The New Britain station was the vision of Richard Parkinson, a man of EnglishGerman descent who had moved to the Pacific to take up opportunities with the international import and export firm Godeffroy & Sohn. His marriage into the family of American Jonas Coe and his Samoan wife Le’utu Malietoa, expanded Parkinson’s opportunities considerably, particularly when the family moved to New Britain under the care of his sister-in-law, the formidable businesswoman Emma Coe. New Britain had already been singled out in the Challenger expedition’s instructions as being a site in need of study for its potential to advance scientific knowledge. Dohrn, and indeed most of the men mentioned in these case studies, were by the 1890s authors of publications that catalogued, described and provided theoretical understanding of the tens of thousands of specimens from the Challenger expedition brought back to Europe that eventually went to the British Museum. The potential of a station on

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the shores of the rich biodiverse waters of the archipelago must have been obvious to Dohrn in order to fill gaps in knowledge that the Challenger collections raised and to realize nationalist goals; indeed, this would be the first tropical station within the German Empire.53 In their communications and brief meetings at Naples, Dohrn and Parkinson determined that Dohrn would plan for some of the financial underpinning that was needed to pay for everything from salaries to negotiating with the major shipping line, Norddeutscher Lloyd, to lower their prices for scientists travelling to work at the station and for their specimens travelling back to European centres.54 In New Britain, Parkinson could take on Dohrn’s role of able host through the Coe property at Ralum. From here he could assist the researchers with their practical requirements, including communication in the local languages (via his multilingual wife Phoebe), food and equipment. What was needed was someone like Salvatore Lo Bianco to furnish the scientists’ research needs. Given the profitable outcome of Lo Bianco’s work, this was possibly another reason for Parkinson’s interest. By the 1880s Parkinson, Coe and her consort Farrell had already made good profits in down-years selling objects and specimens to the Australian Museum. Towards this end Parkinson and Dohrn determined to send two New Britain locals to train at Naples and return to recreate Lo Bianco’s role at Ralum. Although the records appear to acknowledge two boys travelling to Naples, it is more likely a man and a woman went together to learn the techniques of collecting and preserving marine life.55 Arriving in July 1895, they were set to work to learn fishing, locating specimens and preparation techniques. They also joined in the social side of the station, teaching songs and dances from their homelands. By November, suffering from homesickness and with a fair knowledge of the work, they returned to New Britain. Parkinson meanwhile had organized a small laboratory with a room on each side for guests; now all that was needed was a scientist.56 For the few years only that the Ralum station lasted, over a thousand specimens were prepared and sent to Europe, principally to Berlin’s Zoological Museum. By 1897 Dohrn was considering whether, ultimately, the enterprise was too expensive and too far away to support, particularly because he could see no scientific profit without the work of the international network of specialist scientists created through the Naples station. Although Parkinson had funding secured through the German state, and trained personnel, the lack of scientific investment and pathways for scientists to be involved meant Ralum was a station for ‘mere collecting’ that would enrich the national collections in Berlin.

Fin In a world dominated by the sea for transport, communication and commerce it is not surprising that science during the nineteenth century would similarly focus on ocean environments. Marine stations offered a mechanism for the networks of knowledge that needed to be created to investigate the complex scientific questions of the age; they also addressed many of the issues of marine biologists’ work and their dependency

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on physical specimens. This may have gone unheeded by the non-scientific society at large were it not for the creation of aquaria as popular destinations and the creation of beguiling, preserved specimens that both reflected and sustained the scientists’ work. The novelty of the marine world enjoyed by public and intellectual alike is again today being employed by scientists for moral and social benefit to engage us all in the acidification and warming of the marine environment. To support their work at the University of Sydney’s One Tree Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef and Sydney Harbour, marine biologists exploited their work in photogrammetry and modelling developed to track growth and erosion of reef systems to educate, involve and engage the public in a picturesque and succinct way as revealed in a floral display featuring three-dimensional printed ‘coral’ used to repopulate reefs (Figure  7.5).57 Today’s citizen scientists can join any number of groups to contribute observations for academic study. Like the aspirations of the nineteenth-century zoologist in physically connecting citizens, scientists and marine species to affect change is the virtual Great

Figure 7.5  A floral display featuring three-dimensional printed ‘coral’ used to repopulate reefs. University of Sydney.

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Barrier Reef created at Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum and Institute. Here threedimensional photographic species move ‘naturally’ around the visitor thanks to technical and academic knowledge of species behaviour and computer modelling. The huge spectacular is set to whale song merged with the latest recorded sounds of reef fauna for a twenty-minute sequence from day to night.

Notes   1 Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860), 271.   2 David Williams and Malte Ebach, Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography (New York: Springer Science+Business Media LLC, 2008); Mary Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish and the Order of Life: Issues in Nineteenth-Century Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 17–18.   3 Janet Owen, ‘Towards a Methodology for Analysing Nineteenth-Century Collecting Journeys of Science and Empire, with Charles Darwin’s Activities in Tierra del Fuego as a Case Study’, Notes and Records 73 (2019): 400.   4 J.E. Gray at the British Museum called this ‘rational amusement’ while W.H. Flower used the term ‘diffusion of knowledge or popular education’. William Henry Flower, Essays on Museums: And Other Subjects Connected with Natural History (London: Macmillan & Co, 1898), 37–8.   5 Roy MacLeod estimated the membership of British metropolitan scientific societies alone went from five to ten thousand members between 1850 and 1870. Roy MacLeod, ‘The Support of Victorian Science: The Endowment of Research Movement in Great Britain, 1868–1900’, Minerva 9, no. 2 (April 1971): 198.   6 Molly Duggins, ‘Pacific Ocean Flowers: Colonial Seaweed Albums’, in The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture, edited by Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (London: Routledge, 2016), 120.   7 Jim Endersby writes that the popularity of Linné’s sexual system of plant classification lay in its simplicity for use by amateurs and scholars alike, combined with the pocketsized cheap editions of his Systema Naturae. https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/ collections_search/imu/request.php?request=Multimedia&method=fetch&k ey=153810   8 Daniel Solander (1733–82), for example, was supported by several wealthy individuals including the Duchess of Portland and Joseph Banks; while Thomas Huxley (1825–95) received little financial support for his limited education, but his abilities were championed by influential and wealthy natural philosophers William Sharp Macleay and Charles Darwin. See Huxley, The Oceanic Hydrozoa; a Description of the Calycophoridae and Physophoridae Observed during the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake in the Years 1846–50 (London: Ray Society, 1859), ix–x.   9 Janet Owen, ‘Towards a Methodology’, 400. Richard Keynes, ed., Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes & Specimen Lists from H.M.S. Beagle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 10 From 1638 the colonial outpost ‘New Sweden’ was established in Delaware, USA. Diplomatic work with France in 1784 saw St. Barthélemy in the Caribbean briefly transform to a Swedish colonial possession. Both were hotspots for the supply of fauna. Gunlög Fur, ‘Colonialism and Swedish History: Unthinkable Connections?’, in

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Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2013), 17–36. 11 French chemist Jean-Baptist Bécoeur (1718–77) recipes for arsenic soap became public by 1800. L.C. Rookmaaker et al., ‘The Ornithological Cabinet of Jean-Baptise Bécoeur and the Secret of the Arsenical Soap’, Archives of Natural History 33, no. 1 (2006): 146–58. 12 For an example of the making and use of botanical science objects see Caroline Cornish et al., ‘Between Metropole and Province: Circulating Botany in British Museums, 1870–1940’, Archives of Natural History 47, no. 1 (2020): 124–46. 13 Chemist Robert Warington is widely credited with the invention of the aerated aquarium. Gosse’s simultaneous discovery was credited in Edmund Holdworth, Handbook to the Fish-House in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1860). 14 Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (London: J. Van Voorst, 1854). 15 Silvia Granata, ‘Let Us Hasten to the Beach: Victorian Tourism and Seaside Collecting’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 27 (2016): 92, 95. 16 Philip Henry Gosse, Actinologia Britannica: A History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals (London: John van Voorst, 1860). 17 The geological study of fossils had provided the direction for the study of marine embryology in the second half of the nineteenth century particularly around ideas of extinction, the mechanisms of species change, the idea of evolution and the history of the earth Williams and Ebach, Foundations of Systematics. 18 Peter Williams, Jellyfish (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 30. 19 Huxley, Discourses, 9. Thomas Huxley’s lectures were so popular that a nine-book series of collected essays was published in the United Kingdom and United States. For ‘On the study of biology’ see Huxley, Science and Education Essays (New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1897). 20 Jane Maienschein, ‘Why Have Biologists Studied at the Seashore? The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory’, in Why Study Biology by the Sea?, edited by Karl Matlin, Jane Maienschein and Rachel Ankeny (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 8. ­21 Henri Reiling, ‘The Blaschka’s Glass Animal Models: Origins of Design’, Journal of Glass Studies 40 (1998): 105–26. Drew Harvell A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschka’s Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). For more on Blaschka marine invertebrate models see Jan Brazier’s chapter in this volume. 22 Matthew Shaw et al., ‘Ideas Made Glass: Blaschka Glass Models at Canterbury Museum’, Records of the Canterbury Museum 31, no. 7 (2017): 5–84. 23 Christiane Groeben, ‘Impact of Travels on Scientific Knowledge: Ralum (New Britain): A Research Station (1894–1897) sponsored by the Naples Zoological Station’, Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 55 (2004): 63. 24 Ibid. 25 Groeben, ‘Anton Dohrn: The Stateman of Darwinism. To Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Anton Dohrn’, Biological Bulletin 168 (June 1985): 4–25. 26 Alberto Monroy and Christiane Groeben, ‘The “New” Embryology’ (1985): 41. 27 A vivid description from a zoological perspective is given by Maxwell Smith in ‘The Zoological Station at Naples’, The Nautilus 23 (1913–14): 4–6.

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28 Groeben, ‘Anton Dohrn’, 10–11. Christine Groeben, ‘Marine Biology Studies at Naples: The Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn’, in Why Study Biology by the Sea?, edited by Karl Matlin, Jane Maienschein and Rachel Ankeny (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 2020): 29–67. 29 Christiane Groeben, ‘The Stazione Zoologica: A Clearing House for Marine Organisms’, in Oceanographic History: The Pacific and Beyond, edited by Keith Benson and Philip Rebock (Washington: Washington University Press, 2002), 537–45. 30 Salvatore Lo Bianco, The Methods Employed at the Naples Zoological Station for the Preservation of Marine Animals, Bulletin No. 39, Smithsonian Institution (Washington: Government Printing Office 1899). 31 Ibid., 19. 32 Groeben, ‘The Stazione Zoologica’, 2002, 540. 33 Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish and the Order of Life, 1976, 73; Groeben, ‘The Stazione Zoologica’, 2002, 542. The year before this Huxley was working on Plagiostome fishes (sharks and rays) for his paper ‘On Ceratodus fosteri, with Observations on the Classification of Fishes’, Proceedings of the Zoological Society 44, no. 1 (1876): 24–59. 34 Étienne-Jules Marey, ‘Mouvements de natation de la raie’, La Nature 1029 (1893): 177–8. Two short films about movement were also made by Marey during his time in Naples, one documenting the fishing boats’ course in the Bay, Barques sur la Mer, the other, La Vague, records the crashing of waves against a rock (both 1891). 35 Massimiliano Gaudiosi, ‘Marey’s Aquarium: The Underwater World and the Archaeology of Cinema’, in Underwater Worlds: Submerged Visions in Science and Culture, edited by Will Abberley (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 183; Etienne-Jules Marey ‘Des Mouvements de Natation de la Raie’, Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie de Sciences 116 (1893): 77–81. 36 P.H. Yancey, ‘Marine Biology through the Ages’, Bios 19 (1948): 81–5. For a summary of French marine stations following Dohrn’s model, see M. Caullery, ‘Les Station Françaises de Biologie Marine’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 8 (1950): 95–115. 37 Simon Ville et al., ‘Macleay’s Choice: Transacting the Natural History Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Biology 53, no. 3 (2020): 53, 352; Aaron Novick, ‘A Reappraisal of Charles Darwin’s Engagement with the Work of William Sharp Macleay’, Journal of the History of Biology 52, no. 2 (2019): 245–70. 38 Robert von Lendenfeld, A Monograph of the Horny Sponges (London: Royal Society, 1889), 2. 39 Ibid. 40 The Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales began in 1875 and continue today. 41 W.H. Hargraves, ‘Reminiscences of the “Challenger” Expedition’, The Australian Museum Magazine, 1 part 7 (1922): 212–13. 42 Frédéric Aitken and Jean-Numa Foulc, From Deep Sea to Laboratory 1: The First Explorations of the Deep Sea by HMS Challenger (1872–1876) (London: ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 105–6. 43 The phrase ‘mere collecting’ was an accusation that the Australian Museum’s Gerard Krefft had levelled at William John Macleay during a Parliamentary enquiry into the Museum. For a summary of the enquiry and its effects on the small scientific

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community see Roy Macleod, Archibald Liversidge, FRS: Imperial Science Under the Southern Cross (Sydney: Royal Society of NSW, 2009), 142–9. Nicolai Miklouho-Maclay, ‘Proposed Zoological Station for Sydney’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 3 (1878): 144–50. Nicolai Miklouho-Maclay, ‘The Proposed Zoological Station at Sydney’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 4 (1879): 103–6. William Stephens, ‘Australian Biological Association’, Sydney Morning Herald, Tuesday, 7 (February 1882): 7. Sir John Robertson was reportedly not pleased when his widowed daughter, Margaret Clarke, married Miklouho-Maclay in 1884. William Macleay at this period was spending his wealth on the expansion of his collection and the creation of a natural history museum at the University of Sydney. See Ville et al., ‘Macleay’s Choice’. Rosi Crane, ‘Creating Parker & Haswell’s A Textbook of Zoology (1897)’, Script and Print 39 (2015): 221–40. The Haswell Museum continues its educational role in the University today. https:// haswellmuseum.wordpress.com/tag/haswell-museum/ https://www.sydney.edu.au/ science/about/locations-and-facilities/museums.html Jan Brazier (curator) True to Form: Models Made for Science exhibition (25 March–9 August 2013), Macleay Museum, University of Sydney. As with Lo Bianco, internationally locals were trained in technical skills as support staff to scientists. Vivienne Lo et al., ‘Visualisation in Parasitological Research: Patrick Manson and his Chinese Assistants Shang-Jen Li 李尚仁’, in Imagining Chinese Medicine, edited by Vivienne Lo and Penelope Barrett (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2018), 466. Christiane Groeben, ‘Impact of Travels’, 64. Ibid., 64–5. Groeben, ‘Impact of travels’ writes of two boys arriving at Naples, although the person depicted in her article (Figure 13) appears to be a woman in her twenties. With thanks to Max Uechtritz for alerting me to this. Groeben, ‘Impact of Travels’, 68. Renata Ferrari et al., ‘3D Photogrammetry Quantifies Growth and External Erosion of Individual Coral Colonies and Skeletons’, Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–9. The University has two associated marine research stations: Tree Island on the Great Barrier Reef and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

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The Tears of Pearls: Archaic Labour, Fisheries and Waste in Ceylon and Beyond Natasha Eaton

This chapter examines the pearl as a palimpsest of the nacreous – its layers of tears, how it tears.1 Although studies of vibrant matter, materiality, photography and waste are very pertinent in our present time of ecological awareness and the challenge of decolonizing the history of art and material culture, pearls and pearlescence have been strangely neglected. Possibly this is due to their ubiquity: their perceived association with the bourgeoisie and the kitsch.2 They might now seem gaudy, predictable, anachronistic: to be smiled upon as the uniform of America’s ageing politicians or London’s pearly queens and kings.3 Pearls can be said to constitute what Georges Bataille envisages as unstable matter.4 Perhaps it is the impenetrability of the pearl which still captures our eyes. The calcite concretions of pearls manifest a certain anomaly, a desire for the monstrosity of the Baroque, the Pearl of Allah and other such rare, cursing gems. At the same time, pearls’ artificial manufacture and woeful coerced living conditions can be read as an allegory of colonial labour. Allegory, as Michael Taussig in his critique of Walter Benjamin reminds us, is a space of tragedy but also of magic, surrealist ethnography redux or of bricolage.5 Colonial labour, whether it be mining or diving, allows for the archaic and for aqueous lines of flight. Whilst Benjamin favoured the fragment and a delicacy of similarities which could reach from the minute to the vast, distant stars, Taussig turned to the pearl – to which I shall return. As Taussig has pointed out, pearl divers proved to be important informants (even co-photographers) for early anthropologists such as Branislau Malinowski. For Roy Wagner, pearl shells ‘epitomise a kind of cultural metamorphosis that has been central to our understanding and misunderstanding of Melanesian life’.6 In the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, prospectors in planes dropped pearl shells in their thousands. Kina – the Melanesian pidgin for pearl shell – stimulated complex patterns of ornament and exchange.7 Pearl shells could be said to be ‘good in themselves as [the] Daribi [people of New Guinea] say the sun and the moon are good in themselves’.8 Without them, the Sun Man’s gardens would not grow and the world would turn cold. The sun and the moon are deemed by the Daribi to be pearl shells. As well-guarded secrets, pearl shells are something the Daribi believe to be frequently revealed in dreams; their origin is associated with an egg-laying creature not dissimilar to the crocodile. Tales of their acquisition are closely guarded as are shell spells and

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their association with birds with bright feathers. Whilst, for scholars of Papua New Guinea, pearl shells operate as an ambivalent form of currency – being dumped in the thousands as an attempt to create and to isolate a pearl-shell driven economy that petered out in the 1960s in part due to missionary coercion – the shape of the pearl economy in nineteenth-century South Asia is one of colonial anxiety. My own quest for pearlescence scours the seas of the Persian Gulf and Manaar in search for the aura of pearls.9 For thousands of years, the Gulf of Manaar, or Salubham – The Sea of Grain (most often associated with the Buddha’s third eye, a pearl as the highest essence of wisdom) – constituted the world’s most important oyster shell, chank shell, lime and pearl sources. The last independent ruler of the Carnatic Nawab Muhammad Ali (r.1749–95), refused to allow any pearl fisheries during the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) occupation of Ceylon. After his death and the British conquest of Ceylon the following year, the English East India Company attempted relentlessly to extract pearls from the Gulf of Manaar as an important new resource aimed at expanding markets for luxury goods in Russia and Europe. Although recent exhibitions have fetishized the pearl and its brutal re-engineering under capitalism, here my concern is with the pearl broadly defined in relation to the shimmer, magical forms of labour and its status as waste.10 For Walter Benjamin the pearl has the aura of what is hidden – embodying the mystery of aura: ‘The removal of the object from its shell, the fragmentation of the aura is the signature of a perception whose sensitivity for similarity has so grown that by means of reproduction it defeats even the unique.’11

Pathos and the Labour of Pearlescence For the Persian poet Rumi, it is the sigh of the stroke of the eyelash, its tear which raises ‘my soul upward like a cloud’ for ‘[i]n the silence of love you will find the spark of life’.12 For the poet Hafiz, the pearl and the tear invoke the art of punning (gowhar) through which two things might mean the same. This doubling treats ‘the tear’ as either the dewdrop emanating from the angels of Islam weeping, or as the lightning that tears across heaven and sears the ocean so as to fertilize the waiting shell whereby the pearl is seen as an essential truth which is beyond the ‘shell’ of everyday existence. A dual definition of ‘tear’ can serve as a means for navigating Islamic, Hindu and British colonial ideas of the pearl. According to Islamic writers and mystical Suhrwardi, Saadi, Al-Ghazali, Nizami and Rumi, tears are shed in Heaven. These might be the tears of angels, but they are also the tears of Adam and Eve. As such, they are conveyed by descending chains of angels. When tears are shed in Heaven they then fall through the skies where they are transformed into dew that fertilizes the waiting shell to make pearls. Dew and pearls, as beautifully described by Friedrich Ohly, share a lunar quality.13 Heavenly dew falls at night so as to bestow upon pearls luminous powers. It would seem that pearls in medieval Islam convey great love, pathos of the ethereal and deep sadness. In Nizami’s Layla and Majnun (1188) – one of the epics of the Islamic Middle Ages – impossible lovers Majnun and Layla wish ‘to mend the torn veil, to protect their naked love in the world’.14 Layla, who is frequently compared to the moon or seen to be a pearl, cannot be united with her lover. After her death, Majnun weeps ‘pearls of sorrow’ which are

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followed swiftly by Layla’s own demise. According to Nizami, ‘the white shell, its pearl vanished, is washed clean’, as the ‘jewelled tears of mourning flow into it’; ‘hear what the deep-sea diver sounding the ocean of the soul has to tell you!’15 The pearl is late Enlightenment’s ‘pathogenesis of the arts’.16 The sheen of ivory and porcelain during the Enlightenment had a quality of pearlescence. As a mirror to the soul, the pearl pertains to tears (Plate 17). As brooches, lockets, keepsakes, pearl-framed miniatures now glimmer with lost stories of the eye – an eye which seeks out a mise en abyme. This fashion for tiny eye miniatures betrays an intimacy which we will never know. If the eye glistens – possibly painted with pearl infused pigment on Indian ivory – it might be elliptically reciprocal. The tiny eye might be read as a portrait object. Perhaps, then, the frame of pearls seen in this early-nineteenth-century miniature not only enhances but usurps pictorial representation and its claims to be viewed as a mirror. If for Emperor Jahangir pearls could be beads of prayer and objects of devotion, here in the portrait of his son Prince Khurram (c.1616) the gift of a surpatch of pearls becomes akin to The Beloved (Figure 8.1). The Beloved is the mystical notion of the

Figure  8.1  Jahangir Bichitr, Prince Salim, c. 1630, opaque watercolour on paper, Minto Album. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, IM.28–1925.

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lover and of God. Through this association, for the later Mughals, pearls came to signify devotion even in architecture (most notably the Pearl Mosque – the Moti Masjid in the Red Fort, Delhi) whilst for court artists the nacreous palm of the oyster shell made the perfect container for pigments.17 Possibly given their pathos and vulnerability, the rarity of the poetry and virtue of the pearl, pearls became the subject of British imperial aggression. As I have written elsewhere, Queen Victoria coerced Indian rulers to sport her likeness.18 Sometimes forced to pay for these ropes of pearls and to modify their own representations, rulers were in fact shackled to the glistening trappings of empire. As ersatz manacles, pearl necklaces spoke to a certain similarity between divers tied by ropes and African labourers shackled by chains to signify as broader reflections on the submarine as a theatre in the history of slavery.19

‘Ornament’ and ‘Crime’: The Case of Baroda To be decked in jewels might incite ornament and crime.20 Predicting revolution in Baroda, Dinshah Ardeshir Talagarkhan published an inflammatory pamphlet condemning both the Gaekwad Malhar Rao and British colonial intervention into local politics.21 Arrested by the British and forced to appear before the Supreme Court of Baroda in March 1875, Malhar Rao was accused of attempting to poison the British Resident Colonel Phayre with a sherbet of arsenic and diamonds.22 In fact, this was a medicine of ‘large ants, serpents of the urine of the black horse’ intended for the stallion of the rajah.23 Although on this occasion Phayre and his infamous boil lived on, it would suffice for the British to force Malhar Rao into exile. Mass riots incited the cut-off of food supplies and the smashing of the public infrastructure. The real motive for the trial was not surprisingly driven by colonial enslavement to luxuries – in this case pearls. The seven-stranded Baroda Pearl Necklace, perhaps the most famed of all pearl necklaces, was the outstanding piece in the Baroda family’s extensive collection of art and jewels that once belonged to Malhar Rao’s father, Khande Rao Gaekwad of Baroda, the ninth in the line of succession of thirteen Gaekwad Maharajahs. Khande Rao Gaekwad’s collection also included a belt of 100 rows of pearls, a triple-tiered diamond necklace that incorporated the 129-carat ‘Star of the South’ diamond, the 78.53-carat English Dresden diamond and the seven-stranded diamond and emerald ‘Hindu Necklace’. At his trial, Malhar Rao appeared in the Baroda pearls. Very few likenesses of Malhar Rao survive and those that do are based on an oil portrait and bust which have been replicated by later generations on several occasions. Although subsequently written out of history by the British it would appear that for the Baroda royal family, he remained very much part of the royal pantheon. A cursory visit to the royal palace, art gallery and museum in Baroda attest to his imposing presence, festooned in the Baroda pearls. The most (in)famous necklace of the nineteenth century, the Baroda specimen is believed to have contained up to 350 pearls of the finest quality from the Persian Gulf.24 It is unclear whether Malhar Rao wore the pearls by choice or whether he was forced by the British given that he had been imprisoned for some time. For the Hindu

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royal family of Baroda, the pearl was associated with the moon, Chandra and Krisna. Often taken as a more generic term for jewel (ratna), the pearl was set in royal amulets alongside other planetary stones such as ruby, emerald, topaz, coral, red zircon and cat’s eye. While the ruby-as-sun acted as the life-giving force and means of harmonizing planetary energy, the pearl-as-moon held an unprecedented magnetic attraction so much so that pearls had to be hidden in the tomb of the royal temple.25 Baroda occupied the privileged position of having fresh water and coastal access to fine sea and freshwater pearls and held exclusive trading rights with the Gulf and Iran so much so that Malhar Rao’s predecessor, Khande Rao (r.1856–70), intended to gift a magnificent pearl-encrusted carpet to the tomb of the Prophet Mohamed at Medina. Exquisitely embroidered with well over 1.5  million Persian Gulf ‘Basra’ seed pearls, 2,500 table and rose-cut diamonds, gold, emeralds and sapphires, this would have been the world’s most illustrious carpet. Khande Rao’s choice of seed pearls from the Gulf demonstrates the political agility of Baroda to negotiate off the colonial radar. Even though the British forced Malhar Rao’s successor Sayajirao Rao III (r.1875–1939) to exhibit the carpet at the 1903 Coronation Durbar, to Lord George Curzon’s anger, the Gaekwad ordered it to be sold as pieces.26 At the next imperial durbar of 1911, Sayaijirao Rao III turned his back on Queen Mary and more importantly he refused to wear the Baroda pearls. As a proponent of Swadeshi (self-sufficient economy), the Gaekwad did not wish to cooperate with the sly duality or blatant coercion of the imperial durbar. As for pearls, British attempts to control the pearl trade repeatedly failed to materialize. Hyderabad and Bombay remained and still are leading pearl marts – markets which are largely controlled by Indian merchants. To wear or not to wear pearls became an act of maharajah/maharani defiance.

­Peril, Waste: Shark Charm Miasma Working in Baroda supposedly at the invitation of the Gaekwad during the 1920s (during a period of intense photographic surveillance in and of the region), James Hornell trawled the sea beds and estuaries so as to investigate the state of fisheries: ‘the diver must skim over the mud much as a swimmer uses his feet in the water to get rid of the dead oysters’.27 He concluded that two thirds of the oysters, with their ‘untold gems’ nestled in mud, were dead. Is it possible that such gems had been condemned by the work of a shaman? A shaman who sought the sludge, the dredge of the dive, flies and the culch? In 1885, the British colonial authorities in the Gulf of Manaar attempted to stamp out the presence of what they considered to be a dangerous, roguish, miasmic figure – the Shark Charmer. Known also as shark ‘binders’ (kadal-kotti in Tamil, hai-banda in Hindustani), these shamans travelled for the seasonal pearl fishing. Perceived to have extraordinary powers, the Shark Charmers often worked in pairs at a distance: One goes out regularly in the head pilot’s boat. The other performs certain ceremonies on shore. He is stripped naked and shut up in a room, where no person

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sees him from the period of the sailing of the boats until their return. He has before him a brass basin full of water, containing one male and female fish made out of silver. If any accident should happen from a shark at sea, it is believed that one of these fishes is seen to bite the other. The divers likewise believe that, if the conjurer should be dissatisfied, he has the power of making the sharks attack them, on which account he is sure of receiving liberal presents from all quarters.28

Associated with volt sorcery and sympathetic magic, the Shark Charmer had for centuries held Portuguese, Dutch and British authorities in thrall. For Edgar Thurston, curator of the Madras Museum and bricoleur of the shamanic, he very much hoped (with recourse to Marco Polo) ‘their charm holds good for that day only; for at night they dissolve that charm, so that the fishes could work mischief at their will’.29 To work with divers who were mostly of the Parawa caste, the charmers encouraged these men to carry a charm made from a dried palmyra leaf on which was inscribed mystical characters. The British attempted to reduce their activities and rewards by stipulating that each Shark Charmer was only to receive one oyster from each diver per diem. Of course, this was impossible to regulate as divers carried oysters on their bodies or were able to hide them in discrete waters to be recovered on a later occasion. Nonetheless, they needed the charmers to be present, paying them nine pence a day and allowing them a choice of the best oysters. Only the charmers – also known as ‘binders’ as they had the ability to close the mouths of sharks during daylight hours – could keep divers safe. Mostly Christian, the Parawas held elaborate rituals in their churches and shrines in northwest Ceylon. From 1855, the British colonial authorities tried to override the autonomy of all Parawa public spaces including churches, temples and mosques within the vicinity of Manaar’s fisheries. Annual reports on the fisheries, as well as detailed monographs commissioned by the government, explored the shifting status of the oyster beds, piracy, looting and water temperature as well as conjecturing on the origin of the pearl and whether it could or should be manufactured artificially. The figure of the diver came, during the epoch of British colonization of the ocean and the shoreline of the Gulf of Manaar, to be increasingly romanticized through the lens of technology qua underwater. The birth of the aquarium and ‘tragedy of the commons’ measured the rise of regimes which viewed the sea as another form of enclosure. Stone in this case was not necessarily pearl but ‘culch’ (the waste of shells used for building) or the diver’s 15 to 20 pound (7 to 9 kilogram) ‘Christ Stone’. It also resonated with the world of sharks, shamans and the diver. The pearl trade was after all primarily concerned with culching (building oyster beds and land reclamation through the use of discarded shells). If pearls were rare commodities, their shells constituted both the waste and the currency of British colonialism. Certainly, in the Gulf of Manaar the need for lime (chunam) made from oyster shells (essential to building) long predated the market for seawater pearls. According to James Hornell, ‘poverty was the compelling power’ to dive.30 Many men went blind from diving. It seems to have been a common colonial practice to make the blind and the crippled dive late into old age or until their death. Often the British forced divers to dive way too deep – with fatal consequences. In return for

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their hard labour – which included having to lie on their hard-won bluebottle-infested open oysters, waiting for the oyster to rot which enabled pearls to be extracted – divers could buy small pieces of stone from the local rajahs to establish their own villages. The purchase of local ‘waste’ stone brought with it a certain authority in that the Parawas could then negotiate their own headsman if they gifted the local rajah an annual present in lieu of ‘other’ taxes. They could then elect their own chief known as the King of the Parawas. The King, or ‘Don’, acquired revenue from districts as far afield as Quilon and Bengal although the British attempted to reduce his influence and revenue as much as possible. Hornell cited what he believed to be an agreement between the Parawa divers and the local rajah: [G]uards and tribunals were to be established to prevent all disputes and quarrels arising from this open market, every man being subject to his own judge, and his case being decided by him; all payments are then also divided between the headsmen of the Parawas, who are the owners of that fishery […]. They had weapons and fisheries of their own, with which they are able to defend themselves.31

Shifting sands, migrating oysters, unpredictable currents and so forth allow us to characterize these colonial fishing grounds in terms of what Michael Taussig has called miasma – that is, the unruly, ambiguous space of the abject commons that blurs land, sea and an invisible city.32 Not in Taussig’s case the morass, the sludge, like a ‘lunar zone of rot and decay’, which he identifies with the Atlantic coast of Colombia’s mangroves, but rather the stinking, shifting ‘fly coast’ of Manaar and the dead oyster beds of Baroda. The Manaar pearl fisheries sprung up as sporadic ‘heterotopias’ of up to 50,000 men, women and children who set up home and shop around the town of Marichchukkaddi. Living in thatched mud huts they gathered en masse through word of mouth or after the colonial government posted annual advertisements in the press announcing the immanent opening of the fisheries. Travelling from Malabar, Ceylon, the Malay Archipelago, Canton, Madras and northeast India, this cosmopolitan, subaltern crowd was reviled by the British ‘as the scum of the East and the riffraff of the Asiatic littoral’.33 The camp-as-heterotopia soon came to be highly regulated by colonial officials. They regularly doused the camp-city with cheap disinfectant whilst proudly announcing the presence of a police court, jail, bank, post and telegraph offices, auction room, hospital and cemetery. Heterotopia, as is well known, can be as much a counter- or crisis space for beaches, ships, brothels, colonies or rites of passage. The beach camp population was counted as part of an attempt in the name of ‘public peace’ to avoid any potential sedition although regular riots and illicit trading took place. Avoiding the purview of the colonial gaze, divers swallowed pearls, hid shells on their bodies and in the ships’ sails; they returned to shore to open shells when they knew the colonial supervisor and his attendants would not be present. Then they could open as many oysters as possible and avoid the ordeal of being forced into stinking tanks to chuck oysters in their thousands. Deemed looting if caught, the removal of shells led to imprisonment. In an attempt to alleviate some of the stench of rotting oysters in this ‘black mass of flies’ brought to camp daily,

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the colonial government agreed to finance amateur inventor G.G. Dixon’s ‘Washing Machine’. In 1906, under pressure from the British government, colonial authorities in Ceylon and Madras had to agree to lease its fisheries out to the private Ceylon Company of Pearl Fisheries Limited and to sell the machine. Although yielding the south Indian and Ceylonese colonial authorities’ largest single source of income, the fisheries repeatedly failed to produce a regular harvest. Within three years of taking over the Manaar fishery from the Dutch, the British had succeeded in depleting the number of oysters entirely, which led to a spate of articles, public addresses and reports on the rapid collapse of a potentially lucrative luxury monopoly. Despite this ‘archive fever’, throughout the nineteenth century only thirtysix fisheries were established. Colonial officials concluded repeatedly that ‘the pearl fishery is a branch of revenue too precious a nature to be comprehended at present’. Manaar oysters were believed to generate the best pearls when seven years old – just one year before their anticipated death. Their shells, being thin and brittle, were not suitable for the mother-of-pearl market; rather, they ended up as ‘camp filling’, chunam, or they were ground up and digested along with betel nut (tiny pearls were also chewed, ingested or spat out in this way). Chunam and betel with areca nut constituted ‘a luxury of which all ranks partake’.34 Given his commitment to the economy of pearls and conch shells, Hornell sought to advocate the disciplining and punishment of crowds. Including a detailed plan of what should constitute the built environment of the shell auction at Tondi, Hornell chose to make Tondi the modular makeshift city. The Tondi camp-city Hornell advocated was rigorously regulated in terms of its spatial layout. The presence of a colonial police force, he believed, was necessary as ‘[t]he chief trouble experienced was in preventing nuisances along the sea front; after a few examples were made the people learned the necessary lesson and behaved satisfactorily’. Aside from the coercive implications of ‘being made an example of ’, the camp included a resident medical officer who was supposed to assist in the eradication, or at least in the containment, of cholera and other diseases which the colonial authorities feared were being spread by the nomadic travels of the camp inhabitants. The hospital should in the case of all camps be located at the outer most edge – in Tondi’s case beyond the northern creek. Additionally, the fishery city should include a telegraph, latrines and a water tank as well as some kind of ‘lighting arrangements’: ‘Instead of a large number of miserable oil lamps, a dozen Kitson lights were hired.’ These vaporized oil burners, according to Kitson Empire Lighting & Co., were six times more powerful than oil lights. Such an industry of light might seem to officials like Hornell a way of disciplining the shoreline camp but light ‘is devious’ as luminosity ‘in itself only makes blacker and more opaque the surrounding darkness’.35 Although seemingly dissatisfied with the lighting conditions, Hornell and fellow colonial officials did not seem too much concerned with the aesthetic of these makeshift cities or with colonial architecture for that matter. As the beacon for the returning fishing boats, casting its shadow over the shore where small girls were made to winnow the sand for pearls (as they also did at Foul Point), stood the Doric. The Doric – a former British governor’s house once admired by colonial pearl inspectors

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for its polite layout and for its glistening oyster chunam – soon collapsed, returning its shell substance to the ocean and to the wind. Whiteness, so exigent to the creole aesthetic of neoclassicism in the colonial cities of Calcutta, Madras and the Anglican churches of Zanzibar and Singapore, had its origin in the use of ground and burnt shells as plaster in southern Indian temples and shrines. Although in Manaar considered auspicious for millennia, the whitewashing of local villages, temples and shrines led British colonialists to complain that chunam was too ephemeral, too unstable and not suited to the desired intricacies of their architectural ornamentation. Culching involved both government-regulated work and a gleaning of the commons. Even if not represented photographically, Parawa women mostly undertook the labour of culching working under the license of government contractors who rented the shell pits from the Public Works Department. As payment for their labour, the women could open the molluscs and remove their flesh which could then be sold to those who ate oysters. Women’s marriage jewellery also helped to construct the local villages, shrines and temples as the waste from chank shell bangle-making factories at Korkai at the mouth of the Tambaraparni was used in lime making, as can be seen in the mortar of local temple walls. In certain districts in the Gulf of Manaar everyone had the right to gather shells from seabeds although the collection of shells from other sources was increasingly controlled by the colonial authorities. Hornell lamented that ‘At present no control is exercised; the miners dig where they like … The ground is unsystematically and wastefully worked’.36 Not surprisingly given his desire for a modular pearl fishery camp-city, he advocated government-regulated digging. Culching usually took place during the dry season when water levels went down. To walk upon the sward means that: The visitor is at first scarcely aware that the nice sward he walks over is but the surface covering millions of millions of pearly surfaced shells. In digging foundations for buildings or cutting lines for the enclosures in which the oysters are placed to putrefy and be examined, the nature of the subsoils is at once shown. Indeed, the surface over large areas glistens with fragments of shells. I may add that the shells, when bleached by exposure to sun and rain, assume the beautifully white, lustrous colour which is always associated with the “oriental pearl”, as counter-distinguished from the somewhat pinky hued gems of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.37

To culch is also to fill ravines with oyster shells; to make anew the ocean and the shoreline with waste: The heaps of shells from past fisheries [are] utilized for this purpose, as no great profit could be obtained from removing them to a distance for burning into lime or exporting them to Europe as a material for mother of pearl. The iridescence of the Ceylon pearl-yielding oyster is very beautiful, but the smallness of the shell detracts from its commercial value.38

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The Manaar shoreline, made up of millions of half-buried shells, still dazzles and shimmers. Is it possible that this waste can be redeemed?

Conclusion Marx writes on how jewels might delude the senses.39 Jewels best embody his general theory of society and labour. Aside from the dumping of opened and unopened oysters in Papua New Guinea and the Gulf of Manaar, it can be said that oysters contributed to the formation of the light of modernity. The Third Reich’s experiments with colour and light (the best-known example being the concentration camp-based dyes and rubber projects of I.G. Farben) relied on oyster shells. In 1930s Germany, the pioneering of radiolitic paints produced the desired fluorescence that ‘allowed Nazi eyes to penetrate the darkness’ in ways unknown to British colonial authorities in Sri Lanka.40 Pearl-as-material, as has become apparent in the discussion above, is very much associated with colonial regulation, speculation and coercion. It can be said to be the material embodiment of obsolescence. Obsolescence is most usually defined as that which is discarded – even when still of value – whether in relation to Malhar Rao’s kingship or the oyster shells of Manaar. But pearls themselves also began to fall into the prime aesthetic associated with obsolescence – kitsch. Kitsch might be seen as a failed or all too successful commodity; it can also be a dialectical image, whereby to die or to be outmoded is to have relevance for the present in all its obsolescence. Kitsch then is ‘nothing if not an extended memory whose elusiveness is made even more keen by its extreme iconicity’.41 Pearl is like kitsch in that it ‘is dead from the moment it is born’.42 The British imperial pearl industry, which was increasingly directed from Queensland from the 1870s due to the conflicts and impoverishment of Manaar, brought thousands of Melanesians to the Torres Strait – many of whom were subsequently missionized. Images of their deities were removed to the London Missionary Society Museum – their eyes plucked out because they were made from mother-of-pearl. Perhaps the nacreous lining of shells, which is of the same substance as pearls, was too ‘lively’ a material to be left intact. By 1904, most shells from the Torres Strait (which counted for 85 per cent of the world’s market) were processed in America. Following the Second World War, the United States asserted jurisdiction over the resources of the continental shelf in its search for oil. This was heavily disputed by Japan and Australia – the latter setting out what it deemed by its governmental legislature to be proclaimed areas. Meanwhile in the United States, the grinding of shells to make pearl buttons ended up as factory dust from up to 90 per cent of the shell. Although some of this pearl waste went into chicken feed or road construction, local US authorities paid to have it removed and, in some cases, buried.43 These factors contributed to the end of much of the pearl trade in Ceylon. Today, the Parawa caste still exists as a Christian fishing community with vibrant Catholic shrines dedicated to or in the form of the Holy Sepulchre – but pearl fishing is no more.

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Notes   1 This essay makes reference to aspects of my book Natasha Eaton, Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia: Vertiginous Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2020), chapter 1.   2 See, for instance, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).   3 Apart from Robert A. Carter’s Sea of Pearls: 7000 Years of the Industry That Shaped the Gulf (London: Arabian Publishing, 2012), there has been relatively little close study of the pearl in relation to South Asia. For a lovely exception see Friedrich Ohly, Sensus Spiritualis: Studies in Medieval Significs and the Philology of Culture, trans. K.J. Northcott (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) and Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).   4 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (London: Zone Books, 1990), 45.   5 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 18, 19.   6 Roy Wagner, Lethal Speech: Daribi Speech, a Symbolic Obviation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1984), 64.   7 The Kina is today the official currency of Papua New Guinea.   8 Wagner, Lethal Speech: Daribi Speech, 65.   9 ‘Manaar’ is a historical spelling that is now more commonly denoted as ‘Mannar’. 10 See for instance, Pearls exhibition, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2013–14. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-pearls/ (accessed 2 July 2021). 11 Walter Benjamin, ‘Walter Benjamin’s “Short History of Photography”’ trans. Phil Patton, Artforum 15, no. 6 (1977): 46–51. 12 Ohly, Sensus Spiritualsis, 23. ­13 Ibid., 24. 14 Nizami, Layla and Majnun (Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1966), 21. 15 Ibid., 106 and 214. 16 Ohly, Sensus Spiritualis, 34. 17 Although not much feted for his architectural practice, Jahangir’s successor Aurangzeb commissioned the exquisite Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) which is located in the Lal Qila, the Red Fort of the imperial capital of Delhi. It was intended for his second wife Nawab Bai. Although the outer wall of the mosque is in symmetry with the outer walls of the fort, the inner walls are aligned to Mecca. In contrast with much of the rest of the Lal Qila, the mosque gleams entirely white and is an intensely private space – a space intended for use by women from the imperial zenana. In terms of its pictorial representation, the Moti Masjid is alongside many shrines Sufi in intent, depicted in albums in the early nineteenth century when there appears to have been a fashion for albums of devout, often white, spaces of worship. See for instance the work of artist Ghulam Ali Khan. The painter Mazhar Ali Khan’s self-portrait (British Library) shows his use of both European watercolours and Indian oyster shells. For more discussion, see Natasha Eaton, Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2013), 145–7. 18 Ibid., chapter 4; Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). See also

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Hanneke Grootenboer, ‘Treasuring the Gaze: Eye Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision’, The Art Bulletin 88, no. 3 (2006): 496–507 and Marcia Pointon, ‘Surrounded by Brilliants: Miniature Portraits in 18th-Century England’, The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2004): 48–71. 19 James Delbourgo, ‘Divers Things; Collecting the World Underwater’, History of Science 49, no. 163 (2011): 149–85; 162. 20 ‘Ornament’ and ‘Crime’ here makes obvious reference to Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime (New York: Penguin, 1950). Loos and his supporter Walter Benjamin condemned ornament for its enslaving degeneracy. 21 Dinshah Ardeshir Taleyarkhan, The Revolution at Baroda, 1874–1875 (Bombay: Messrs., Hromusjee Soabjee & co, Fort; Messrs. Almoram Sagoon & co, Kalbadavie, 1875). 22 At the trial according to British colonial sources, Malhar Rao ‘looked pale and seemed rather nervous […] His jewellery was in keeping – a necklace of pearls fringed with rubies and emeralds. He wore no rings but pearl pendants hung from his ears’, Proceedings of the Baroda Commission (1875) 3 Mss Eur F/126, 3, British Library. 23 Proceedings, 101 and Rao Ms Eur D870. 24 Two strands of the Baroda pearls were auctioned at Christie’s New York, April 2007 fetching over $7 million. Amongst the most famous jewels in India, the Baroda pearls are well documented in a series of photographs in the India Office Library, London: Photo 1000/(5476–86). 25 Katherine Prior and Glenn Adamson, The Maharaja’s Jewels (London: Thomas and Hudson, 2000). 26 Lord George Curzon, Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111, British Library, no date; f.23. 27 James Hornell, Report on the Marine Fisheries of the Baroda State (Baroda: Baroda State Press, 1930), 88. ­28 G. Kunz and C.H. Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science, and Industry of the Queen of Gems (New York: The Century Co., 1908), 116. 29 Edgar Thurston, Notes on the Pearl and Chank Fisheries and Marine Fauna of the Gulf of Manaar (Madras: Government Press, 1912), 198. 30 James Hornell, Report of the Government of Madras on the Indian Pearl Fisheries in the Gulf of Mannar (Madras: Government Press, 1905), 45. 31 James Cordiner, A Description of Ceylon, Containing an Account of the Country, Inhabitants, and Natural Production with Narratives of a Tour Round the Island in 1800, the Campaign in Candy in 1803, and a Journey to Ramisseram in 1804 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807), vol 2, 33–4. This is substantiated by V. Govindan, ‘Fishery Statistics and Information: West and East’, Madras Fishery Bulletin, no. 9 (1916): 120–40. Stone was considered to be an inferior building material to shells. Govindan’s careful survey of the Gulf of Manaar fisheries noting the high level of poverty in almost every diving community. By 1891 the King/Don was only allowed by the government to have one boat for pearl diving; Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, Madras, no. 702 (1889). 32 Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. 33 Kunz and Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl, 109. 34 Cordiner, Description, vol 2, 98. 35 James Hornell, ‘The Utilization of Coral and Shells for Lime Building in the Madras Presidency’, Madras Fisheries Bulletin 8 (1914–15): 84. 36 Ibid., 85.

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37 A.M. and John Fergusson, All About Gold, All About Gold, Gems, and Pearls (also Minerals Generally) in Ceylon and Southern India, 8 vol, 2nd ed. (Colombo: A.M. & J. Ferguson, 1888), 381. 38 Ibid., 324. 39 See Esther Leslie, Synthetic World: Nature, Culture and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion, 2005), 72. 40 Ibid., 235. 41 Celeste Olalaquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (New York: Bloomsbury, 1991), 27. 42 Ibid., 67. 43 This is the first time that the idea of the Continental Shelf had been used in the search for oil within a political arena. The United Nations International Law Commission began to formulate international fishing rights codes on the basis of the Continental Shelf concept. A fascination with shell collecting on the part of one fishing magnate led to the establishment of Shell Oil. After the death of this magnate – Marcus Samuel, his collection of shells fetched so much money that the company he owned was able to buy its first oil tanker which they named The Murex.

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Culture Keeping and Money Making: Aboriginal Women’s Shellwork from the South Coast of New South Wales Priya Vaughan

La Perouse – or ‘Larpa’ to the locals – is a suburb in the southeast of Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia, which sits on the peninsula that forms Bunnabi (or Bunnabri, Bunnabee); the northern headland of Kamay (Botany Bay). Fringed on almost all sides by the ocean, and surrounded by lush bushland, La Perouse is coastal Country, defined by, and profoundly connected to, the sea. Appropriately, given its proximity to and connection with the water, La Perouse has become strongly associated with the making and purchasing of shellwork – a craft which celebrates the geometry, luminescence and jewel-like beauty of seashells. Since the final years of the nineteenth century, Australian Aboriginal women from La Perouse and the South Coast of New South Wales have created and sold shellwork: boxes, booties, models and ornaments adorned with shells arranged in elaborate patterns. La Perouse shellwork is profoundly anchored to place; made from local materials and embodying knowledge of particular tracts of coastal Country, its history is intertwined with the British colonization of Sydney and sustained by generations of women who have lived in, passed through, or whose ancestors came from, the area now known as La Perouse. Shellwork is created by craft practitioners across various parts of the world through the application of shells in elaborate patterns onto bases of various materials including ceramics, cardboard, wood and plaster.1 Rarely utilitarian and usually ornamental, common forms include shell flowers and flower arrangements, shelled boxes, shell mosaics and shell figurines of animals and humans.2 Considered to be a ‘civilizing’ craft and a suitable pastime for women in the Victorian era, shellwork was first produced by Aboriginal women at La Perouse in the 1880s. The production and sale of shellwork was encouraged by missionaries, who sought to supplant art and cultural practices traditionally enacted by women in the region that were perceived to be ‘heathen’. Shells, however, were a key material used by women on the South Coast in the creation of both tools and artworks for adornment and ceremony. Thus, missionaries unwittingly encouraged women to take up a practice which had a profound continuity with those enacted prior to colonization. The regular production of these works

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enabled shellworkers to maintain an unbroken connection to culture that may not have otherwise been possible, in view of assimilationist and other repressive policies enacted since the earliest years of colonization. This chapter traces the early history of shellwork created in La Perouse and outlines the various ways that shellwork connects to, embodies and maintains culture for the women who make it. Drawing on writing and oral testimony from shellworkers and their families, and on contemporary shellwork practice, this chapter seeks to move beyond an analysis of shellwork as an ‘introduced’ or a hybrid cultural product to acknowledge shellwork as an important Aboriginal cultural object whose historical roots both emerge in and yet reach into the precolonial past long preceding, the close of the nineteenth century.

A Brief History of La Perouse The history of La Perouse shellwork is inextricably linked to, and shaped by, the human, socio-political and ecological geographies of La Perouse itself. In order to comprehend the meaning and trajectories of La Perouse shellwork, it is important to engage with the history of the place in which it is made. Bidjigal elder and prolific woodworker, Laddie Timbery (the nephew of renowned shellworker, Esme Timbery) was fond of quipping that his family has been living at La Perouse for a long time, and that they were there, watching, as ‘little Jimmy Cook came into the harbour’ in 1770.3 Indeed, evidence of Aboriginal inhabitancy of coastal areas of NSW, including La Perouse (known as Gooriwal), prior to British settlement of Australia is found not just in the oral histories of elders such as Laddie Timbery, but reiterated in accounts from Captain James Cook and others, and confirmed in the archaeological record.4 Prior to British colonization there were over twenty Aboriginal groups living on the South Coast of NSW, differentiated largely by language. Each language group was made up of several clans who acted as the custodians of the specific areas of land on which they lived.5 In the Sydney area, the region first settled by the British colonizers, there were several language groups including the Darung, Dharawal and Gundungurra people. It is estimated that between 3,000 and 8,000 Aboriginal people lived in the area around the time of settlement.6 Making the most of the rich resources of their Countries,7 these communities subsisted on plentiful seafood, game and fruit and vegetables found along the coastline.8 Shellfish, including molluscs such as abalone, were central to southeast Australian coastal aquaculture and their collection was often undertaken by women.9 From the first years of colonization, British settlers viewed the cultures of Aboriginal Australians as ‘valueless, primitive, inferior, lacking civilization’.10 Aboriginal peoples lived upon, cultivated and cared for their Countries in a manner which did not match British socio-legal conceptions of ownership, dwelling or agriculture. As result, Aboriginal people were seen to have no legal rights to the continent.11 The British doctrine of Terra Nullius sought to deny Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, making void the legal, cultural and moral rights they had to the land on which they lived.12 Despite this, when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788 contact between local Aboriginal people and the British settlers was cordial. However, as settlement progressed and it

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became clear that the British did not intend to leave, tensions escalated and violence erupted. There is scant information about Aboriginal people living in La Perouse at this time.13 It is known, however, that the colonial administration undertook systematic attacks on Indigenous peoples in the Sydney area who were deemed a threat, and that Aboriginal leaders, such as the famed Pemulwuy, led a concerted resistance.14 In 1789 a devastating outbreak of smallpox hit the Gwawgal and Kameygal nations (who lived around Sydney Harbour) and all but decimated these communities; killing hundreds and leaving the few remaining survivors isolated and without the support of family or community.15 It is estimated that half of the Aboriginal population in Sydney was killed by the smallpox epidemic.16 Due to violence or disease, many Aboriginal people living around Sydney were driven from their traditional homelands, moving either further south along the coast or into camps near the British settlement on Sydney Harbour.17 In 1881 the Protector of Aborigines addressed ‘the Aboriginal Problem’ – namely the presence of Aboriginal people in central Sydney – by putting an end to the distribution of food rations at a camp at Circular Quay.18 Camp members, many of whom had been displaced from their Country by dairy farming enterprises set up along the South Coast of NSW, made their way to La Perouse, an area known to be a good place to fish.19 La Perouse was already permanently occupied by several Aboriginal families since at least the 1870s,20 and had a long history of Indigenous occupation prior to colonization. The establishment of this larger settlement at La Perouse is closely tied to the genesis of Aboriginal shellwork in Sydney. In 1894 a Methodist mission house, which would later become the headquarters of the United Aborigines Mission, was established in La Perouse with the aim of evangelizing to the Indigenous people in the vicinity.21 In 1895 the New South Wales Protection Board, an organization mandated to guard the welfare of Aboriginal people in the state, reserved seven acres (3 hectares) of land in La Perouse for the use of Aboriginal people.22 At this time various proscriptions were placed on access to the area, with missionaries and police attempting to discourage Aboriginal and white Australians mixing as it was felt that Aboriginal people were in grave danger of being corrupted by white settlers.23 In 1899, a large portion of the foreshore on Botany Bay lying on the headland opposite the Aboriginal reserve at La Perouse, including the site of Captain Cook’s landing in 1770, was reserved by the NSW Government with the intention of preserving it as an historic site.24 Maria Nugent, a specialist in the history and culture of La Perouse, notes, with some irony: [T]he creation of the two reserves within a few years of each other resulted in an odd, albeit unplanned, arrangement whereby Aboriginal people occupied and even possessed one headland while the memory of an historical figure and an historical event implicitly associated with the dispossession of Aborigines imbued the other.25

Nevertheless, the creation of these reserves ultimately facilitated the establishment of productive spheres of industry in which Aboriginal women utilized the natural resources of their coastline to enter the tourist economy.

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Early Years of Shellwork, 1880–1900s As early as 1882, Indigenous women from La Perouse were travelling to Circular Quay and other Sydney suburbs to sell shellwork baskets to tourists and locals.26 As the senior constable at Botany Bay police station noted in 1882, ‘girls assist to earn a living by making shell baskets, which they sell in Sydney’.27 Unfortunately it appears that no shellwork objects have survived from the nineteenth century; the earliest known example, a single slipper dated from 1918, is in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) in Sydney.28 However, contemporary reports show that from the 1880s onwards shellworkers regularly made baskets, flowers, booties (babies shoes, or perhaps miniature adults shoes) and boxes (sometimes heart-shaped) (Plate 18).29 The single shellwork slipper from 1918 gives a tantalizing sense of the aesthetics governing early forms of shellwork, as well as demonstrating the strong continuity between extant shellwork and objects made in the present. Covered in what would once have been vibrant, peach-coloured, velvet-style fabric, the slipper is elegant and dainty. The insole, cut in the shape of a gentle hourglass as if intended to accommodate the curve of a high-arched instep, is decorated with a twinkling base layer of white and brown shell-grit (small remnants of crushed shell forming a coarse sand-like mixture, which has largely been replaced by glitter in contemporary shellwork). Small round, cream-coloured shells, known colloquially as fingernails (shells from the Lucinidae family) ring and adorn the shell grit, and form a floret around a small, inverted abalone shell (perhaps a juvenile Haliotis rubra), its opalescent, spiralling form drawing the eye.30 Abalone has historically been an important food source for Aboriginal people living along the coast of NSW, so the prominence of the abalone shell here is fitting.31 The shield-shape vamp at the toe of the slipper is also fringed by layers of fanning fingernails, supplemented by a prominent line of brown and white striped shells from the Patelloida family. Although the shells on the face of the shield have mostly been lost, the remaining shells, and patterns left in the glue (likely made to the maker’s own specialized recipe), suggest that it was decorated by a mosaicked layer of fingernails, and starries (Scutellastra chapmani).32 The overall effect is striking, with the brightly coloured velvet contrasted by the white, cream and brown of the shells. The form of the slipper is well constructed and the shell patterns are precisely laid suggesting this is the work of an experienced maker. It is not clear how the practice of making shellwork began amongst Aboriginal women from La Perouse, as there are various intersecting narratives which account for its inception in the suburb. Given that shellwork was a popular pastime amongst the non-Indigenous women of Sydney in the 1880s, it may be that Aboriginal women learnt about shellwork as a result of their relationships with such women, in the context of ‘schooling, or living in white households, either through being “adopted” or by employment as domestic servants’.33 In accounts about the history of the craft from contemporary shellworkers, such as Wreck Bay artist Julie Freeman, the introduction of the practice is often associated with Christian missions. Historians and others have also suggested that shellwork was introduced by missionaries living and working at La Perouse, perhaps by those who had seen examples of South Pacific shellwork.34

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Indeed, from the nineteenth century onwards it was quite common for missionaries to undertake to teach Aboriginal women the mannerly recreational hobbies of European gentlewomen.35 Regardless of how shellwork was introduced at La Perouse, in the earlytwentieth-century shellwork production and distribution was monitored and enabled by missionaries living at La Perouse, with their influence reflected in the production of new shellwork forms including biblical mottoes adorned with shells which were produced for sale.36 In keeping with what Sylvia Kleinert has called their ‘ambivalent’ relationship to Aboriginal people – due to their dual role as both ‘protectors’ and the authorities who controlled Indigenous actions and activities – missionaries appear to have had several, sometimes paradoxical, motivations for encouraging Aboriginal women at La Perouse to engage with shellwork.37 Shellworker Julie Freeman, who draws on her knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century shellwork in her own art practice, notes that shellwork was considered suitably ‘non-heathenish’ and hence could be introduced to Indigenous women as part of the ‘civilizing’ project of colonial missionaries.38 In facilitating the production of shellwork, missionaries thus felt that they were also facilitating Indigenous assimilation into Euro-Australian society.39 Similarly, shellwork was encouraged as it was thought to affirm the positive influence of missionaries on Indigenous peoples. In the early twentieth century, displays of Aboriginal craft – including shellwork – were organized by religious groups such as the Church Missionary Society. The presentation of this material was intended to display the power of the mission to teach ‘the skills and arts of feminine domesticity’ to Aboriginal women.40 The introduction of shellwork may also have connected with a desire to dissuade Aboriginal people from their traditional patterns of movement across Country with Aboriginal women at La Perouse being encouraged to produce artefacts because such ‘work involved a relatively sedentary lifestyle’ and therefore made nomadic living difficult.41 In view of this, it can be argued that shellwork was deployed by missionaries as a way to keep Aboriginal women stationary and under their control.42 Women from La Perouse took up shellwork in order to make money to provide for themselves and their families.43 Missionaries also appear to have supported the making of shellwork because it facilitated Aboriginal women’s entry into the economy.44 The introduction of shellwork as an aid to economic subsistence can be understood as another facet of the ‘civilizing’ project of colonization. As Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner have suggested, the production of objects made for economic exchange can be said to ‘signal the entry of colonized peoples into industrial age consumerism, an economic integration forced on many by the destruction of their former modes of subsistence’.45

Shellwork’s Transition to Aboriginal Souvenir, 1900s–1940s In the years following the Federation of Australia in 1901, there was increased public interest in Captain Cook, who was conceived as the founding father of the Australian nation. Thus, the site of his landing at Botany Bay became a popular spot for tourists.46

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Botany Bay and its surrounds were best accessed by boat until, in the early twentieth century, a tram line was installed which ran from central Sydney to La Perouse, terminating at ‘the Loop’ which was a circular portion of track on the headland enabling the tram to turn around.47 As a result it became fashionable, especially after 1905 when the area was declared a public reserve, to take a tram to La Perouse on the weekend.48 A local tourist industry grew up around ‘the Loop’, with visitors often finding, upon arrival, a snake show, dog shows, a tomahawk thrower, boomerang throwing and other performances.49 By this time, La Perouse had become strongly associated with the Indigenous Australians settled there and so the area’s identification, in public consciousness, with the past was twofold: La Perouse came to represent both the birth place of modern Australia and a ‘prehistoric’ past from which Aboriginal people at La Perouse were believed to be relics.50 While tourists came to La Perouse in part to visit a site associated with Captain Cook and British settlement, they also came to experience a lost, exotic past as embodied by the Aboriginal people who lived there.51 In response to this fascination with Aboriginality, Indigenous people at La Perouse ‘positioned themselves as one of the tourist attractions on offer at Botany Bay and as tourist traders, making and selling souvenirs’.52 The opportunity to purchase shellwork or a boomerang became one of the great selling points of La Perouse as a tourist destination with Aboriginal people.53 During the first decade of the twentieth century artefacts sold at La Perouse souvenir stalls gained in popularity and the renown of shellworkers such as ‘Queen’ Emma Timbery – great-grandmother of renowned shellworker Esme Timbery – grew. Indeed, in 1910, an exhibition of Timbery’s work was held in London, where, according to The Advocate, her shellwork ‘was almost fought for’.54 Various kinds of shellwork were produced for purchase at La Perouse and makers experimented with form, branching out beyond boxes, baskets and booties, to create works that satisfied the tourist market, hence the production and sale of shellwork items such as boomerangs, and later, shellwork models of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.55 Examples of shellwork made in the 1930s and 1940s can be found in museum collections across Australia. For example, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has a well-preserved heart-shaped box created by a once-known shellworker in the 1940s (Figure 9.1).56 The box – the base and lid formed in the shape of two hearts – is moderate-sized and perfectly suited for storing jewellery. Covered in a rich, forest green velvet-style fabric and intricately patterned with shells, the box is delicate and decorative. Continuity with earlier shell objects – including the shell slipper from 1918 described above – is evident. Sparkling shell grit fills the small gaps formed between rosettes of white fingernail shells. The centre of each rosette is adorned by a round of small, spiral-shaped shells (Bankivia fasciata) brightly coloured in various shades of pink, brown, purple and coral. A strip of velvet bisects the shell patterning on the lid. It has been glued to form ripples of fabric which rise like lapping waves from the top of the box; perhaps an evocation of the sea, or simply an ornate flourish making the box more sumptuous. Rosettes of shells also decorate the sides of the box. There is a strong symmetry across the object – with shell patterns placed with a sense of balance around the box. The working is neat but not mechanical: shells are placed in wavering lines rather than

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Figure  9.1  Maker once known (Australia), Heart-shaped box, c. 1940s, assorted shells, fabric, cardboard, 14.0 × 14.0 × 7.0 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 226.2010. Gift of a private collector, 2010. Photography by Diana Panuccio.

perfect rows, giving the viewer a sense of the hand of the maker. At the back of the box, where the lid hinges, the cardboard base has been covered with a bright yellow and white gingham fabric – a surprising, even playful addition – which contrasts strongly with the sober green cover, and which accommodates the hinging action more easily than the thick velvet. The commercial appeal of the item is clear, especially if one imagines it amidst a group of glimmering shellwork, laid out like sea-hewn jewels. In their capacity as tourist attractions and the producers and purveyors of souvenirs, Aboriginal people at La Perouse partook in a performance of their Aboriginality for visitors. These performances, particularly those which involved the purchase and subsequent throwing of a boomerang by a stall holder, are likely to have confirmed popular racial stereotypes of Aboriginal people as primitive.57 However, the sale of shellwork items can be said to unsettle such stereotypes. As Nugent points out, unlike the wooden boomerang, shellwork was ‘neither sufficiently nor unambiguously Aboriginal’.58 Though made by Aboriginal women and sold by Aboriginal stall holders at a site associated with Indigeneity, shellwork did not meet non-Indigenous expectations regarding the forms and aesthetics of ‘pure’ Aboriginal visual culture. The influence of non-Indigenous art and craft was all too clear. By extension, women who

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made shellwork were presumed to be not adequately traditional, but too tainted as it were by contact with white Australians.59 The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner expressed an apparently common academic contempt for the touristic objects produced at La Perouse, observing, ‘spurious boomerangs are still made for tourists, and others only slightly less spurious for innocents who visit the encampment at La Perouse, but most of these artefacts are so inferior that even tourists pass them by’.60 Despite the attitudes of scholars like Stanner, and whatever the opinion of tourists, regarding how ‘genuine’ Aboriginal people at La Perouse were, tourists purchased shellwork and woodwork from ‘the Loop’ in great numbers. Tourist excursions to La Perouse facilitated high levels of cross-cultural contact. Thus, the segregationist policies of government and missionary bodies were transgressed by the tourist trade.61 Aboriginal women making shellwork strategically exploited the confluence of two public fads connected to their coastal headland – the fashion for shell crafts and an interest in ‘exotic’ Aboriginal culture – to earn an income, drawing on the natural resources of the sea to do so.

Recent Histories: Beyond the Long Nineteenth Century From the 1960s onwards, with the gentrification of the suburb, tourism at La Perouse began to decline.62 However, shellwork continues to be made by Aboriginal women in La Perouse, and along the South Coast of New South Wales, with those material forms popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as boomerangs, boxes, bridges and booties still being produced. Shelled objects are still sold at La Perouse and elsewhere, including at various markets and at festivals or political events associated with Aboriginal Sydney (such as the Yabun Survival Day festival).63 In tandem with this process of reorienting the sphere of sale of shellwork, there has been a reorientation regarding the artistic merit and symbolic meaning of the craft. Daphne Nash argues that this shift occurred as a result of a general reassessment of Aboriginal art and cultural practice which took place in the 1970s and 1980s across Australia.64 The seeds of this change can also be connected to events occurring in Australia in 1988, when the Bicentenary of British settlement was celebrated widely – under the auspice of state and federal funding – across the nation. In response to what was perceived to be inappropriate and insensitive celebrations around this event, Indigenous academics, public figures and artists created various works which reflected upon Aboriginal life, history and culture post-contact and celebrated ongoing Indigenous survival.65 Various public and oral histories created specifically in response to the Bicentenary made mention of La Perouse, identifying shellwork as a central part of the suburb’s cultural heritage.66 Further, the permeation of postcolonial discourse regarding the material cultures of First Nation peoples globally must also account, at least in part, for this reassessment of the value and meaning of shellwork.67 This shift has moved shellwork out of the realm of the souvenir and into the sphere of fine art, where the craft is conceptualized as signifying and embodying artistic and political agency and active engagement and

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negotiation with colonization.68 It is important to note that this re-conceptualization of the meaning and merit of shellwork cannot be said to have achieved a complete disassociation of shellwork with kitsch or tourist art. Indeed, some authors who celebrate shellwork still feel discomfort classifying shell objects unproblematically as fine art.69 In 2005 a large-scale, majestic shell Harbour Bridge by Esme Timbery won the inaugural Parliament of NSW Indigenous Art Prize cementing shellwork’s place in the sphere of fine art.70 Accordingly, shellwork is now increasingly exhibited and sold in galleries. Indeed, Aboriginal art curators such as Tess Allas and Djon Mundine have spoken about making a conscious decision to lift up shellwork into the fine art milieu.71

Cultural Containers: Shellwork’s Changes and Continuities As the brief history outlined here demonstrates, while the material qualities of shellwork have remained largely unchanged, the manner in which shellwork has been conceptualized by makers, curators, historians and others has shifted. The external classifications used to define shellwork have always been partial and unstable, with shelled objects moving from the embodiment of (white) women’s domestic craft to tourist object and finally to cultural, fine art object. New appraisals of shellwork as fine art have also been accompanied by new explorations of the cultural significance and cultural identity embodied and embedded in shell objects. In the scholarly literature addressing the significance of La Perouse shellwork there has been a tendency to identify the craft as ‘introduced’, in the sense that shellwork forms produced and sold at La Perouse by Indigenous women in the late 1880s do not ‘correspond to any pre-contact artefact’ made by Aboriginal women prior to British settlement.72 In a literal sense this appraisal is correct: shellworked boxes or booties were certainly not being made in Sydney prior to 1788. However, as shellwork continued to be made by Aboriginal women at La Perouse (while largely ceasing to be made by non-Aboriginal women in Sydney), shellwork began to be understood – if not wholly then at least partially – as an Aboriginal practice.73 Shellwork then has often been positioned as a hybrid object – originating from one culture – and being amended or utilized by another. Setting aside the intellectual baggage the loaded term hybridity has accumulated, conceptualizing shellwork in this way does have its merits.74 For example, an analysis of shellwork as hybrid positions the craft as material evidence that two peoples, previously separated by a great distance, met and that, subsequently, change – sometimes gradual, sometimes violent and disruptive – occurred.75 In effect, it acknowledges colonialism and its manifold impacts. Further, as Nugent has argued, engagement with the differing and intertwined cultural origins of shellwork is important and fruitful, illustrating the way shellwork is implicated in, and constitutes, shared Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories, activities and actions.76 Finally this position helps to highlight the extraordinary resilience of Aboriginal women at La Perouse, who utilized a craft practice intended to aid assimilation in order to make and keep their culture.

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However, a shortcoming of this approach is that it contrasts markedly with accounts about the meaning and significance of shellwork by the women who make it in the present. These women have inherited from the first La Perouse shellworkers the skills and systems of knowledge key to the craft. Statements from these women indicate that shellwork is conceived – despite its European origins – as an unambiguously Aboriginal cultural product.77 The hybrid approach also tends to ignore the various continuities and resonances that shellwork has with various pre-colonization knowledges and practices connected to both sacred and secular activities. With this in mind, the remainder of this chapter will seek to move beyond a hybrid analysis of shellwork, focusing on the Aboriginal cultural knowledge embodied by shellwork as a wholly Aboriginal cultural product. Acknowledging the cultural significance, aesthetic continuities and spheres of commerce reflected in shellwork made across the nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first centuries helps explain the persistence in La Perouse of an art form which, in other locales in Australia and abroad, is practised only by a few. Further, attending to the narratives of contemporary shellworkers and reading shellwork as an Aboriginal cultural product is a means of reading against the grain of the colonial archive, in order to acknowledge the autonomy and creative power of women making shellwork at La Perouse across the long nineteenth century. Interrogating the colonial archive by amplifying the voices of those observed, recorded and classified within this archive is a powerful decolonizing strategy. This approach has been pioneered and refined by numerous Indigenous Australian poets, artists, writers and academics including Fiona Foley, Jeanine Leane, Judy Watson, Natalie Harkin and Julie Gough.78 As the material record of nineteenthcentury shellwork no longer exists, and the voices of nineteenth-century makers were not recorded, it is necessary to work with contemporary accounts from shellworkers, and the archaeological and historical record, to build a picture of the cultural connections maintained and fostered by shellworkers. Specifically, the following will be examined: the centrality of shells in coastal material culture; shellwork and knowledge of Country; and shellwork’s connection to modes of maternal knowledge transmission.

Shellwork: History, Country, Family and Knowledge Shellworker Julie Freeman, reflecting on the early history of the craft, contends that ‘[shellwork] was allowed [by missionaries] because they didn’t really look at it as being traditional or Aboriginal, but in fact it kept a whole range of Aboriginal ways intact so it was very special’.79 As Freeman’s statement suggests, there are various strands of pre-contact Indigenous practices and traditions which are utilized in the creation of shellwork. Prior to British settlement, Aboriginal women in Sydney collected shells and crafted them into various implements such as fish hooks and scrapers (for gutting fish), to facilitate fishing and to undertake other subsistence activities for which they were responsible.80 For example, Watkin Tench, a British naval officer on the First Fleet, described watching Barangaroo, the wife of famous Aboriginal diplomat Bennelong, making shell fishhooks.81 He wrote, hooks are ‘chopped with a stone out of a particular shell, and afterwards rubbed until they become smooth. They are very much curved,

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and not barbed. Considering the quickness with which they are finished, the excellence of the work, if it be inspected, is admirable.’82 Shells commonly utilized by Aboriginal peoples across Sydney include the Turban Shell (Turbo torquata), Sydney Cockle (Anadara trapezia), Venus Shell (family Veneridae), Tapestry Shell (Turbo petholatus), Pearl Oyster (Pinctada radiata) and Mud Oyster (Ostrea angasi).83 Shell fishhooks, scrapers, spearheads, spear barbs and tools for the repair of weaponry or for rock engraving, have all been excavated at various archaeological sites across the Sydney region.84 There is also archaeological evidence that both modified and unmodified shells were utilized to transport water, and in medical procedures, notably for the cutting of umbilical cords. Shell tools were also used in ceremonies, including scarification rituals and initiation ceremonies, where shells were used to make lacerations on the gums to facilitate the removal of teeth.85 Thus, as Djon Mundine asserts, shells can be said to have a ‘deep place in Aboriginal spirituality’.86 Archaeologists have also uncovered what are believed to be shell ornaments that were intended for bodily adornment.87 Historical accounts also support this notion, for example John Harper, a Wesleyan missionary, recounted being gifted, during a trip along the South Coast of NSW, several presents ‘of kangaroo teeth … [and] shells’ intended to be used as ornamentation.88 There is also evidence that shell fishhooks were worn by women as pendants.89 Hence, as Val Attenbrow contends, the shell constituted one of the most important raw materials in the ‘coastal tool kit’ of the Aboriginal people of Sydney.90 Such archaeological evidence illustrates that shellwork had several pre-British contact resonances which may have facilitated the ready embrace of shellwork by Indigenous women, and which were simultaneously maintained by the production of shellwork. This is exemplified in the collection and use of shells for activities associated with subsistence (either the collection of food or the sale of shellwork for money). There are other aspects of shellwork production, beyond the ongoing use of shells, which affirm the cultural continuities embodied in its creation. For instance, shellwork is produced exclusively by women and as such is considered ‘women’s business’, with the production of wooden artefacts such as boomerangs, an equivalent men’s business.91 This can be understood as in-keeping with both the Victorian-era association of craftmaking (as opposed to art-making) with women as well as with pre-colonization shell collection and tool production being undertaken by women.92 According to Sarah Colley, the strongly gendered association with particular forms of material culture can be understood as a facet of the ‘deeply dichotomous nature of gender relation in all Aboriginal societies which results in strongly separate men’s and women’s roles and domains’.93 Therefore, shellwork, as women’s business, can be understood as part of a continuous tradition of strongly demarcated gender practices associated with the production of material culture. Similarly, shells are often collected, as they were prior to British settlement, by women working together in groups.94 Shellworkers also often make shellwork in the company of other women. La Perouse resident Beryl Beller describes the collective nature of shellwork: ‘when we were young our mothers would take us to the beach to collect shells … The women would sit around in a circle and sort the shells … They would cut out cardboard shapes … and cover them with the shells we collected’.95 Thus, in working in tandem with other women, shellworkers maintain continuity

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with precolonial modes of production. The communal aspects associated with the production of shellwork represent another core element of cultural continuity. Shellwork also embodies continuous practice in terms of the patterns of sociality and knowledge transmission represented by, and enabling, its creation. Julie Freeman writes that the production of shellwork, condoned by missionaries as ‘non-heathenish’, was utilized by Aboriginal women as a means of imparting pre-contact knowledge to their children. She writes that whilst collecting shells women and children ‘had talks and told stories, they talked about the wind and the magic, and about the character of the ocean and what it does, which wind brings what shells … Traditional knowledge was imparted.’96 Freeman’s statement typifies comments from shellworkers which emphasize that, as an activity associated with utilizing natural resources and moving around the coast, shellwork production enabled the transmission of knowledge – often from mother to daughter – about the Country’s physical and spiritual geography. Discussion about physical geography is often practical – with elders, kin and community members teaching younger women about which shells to collect and how to clean and sort them, and which beaches, tidal movements and weather events will yield particular shells.97 Popular shells collected on Sydney and South Coast beaches include starries (Scutellastra chapmani), black Nerite (Nerita atramentosa), limpets (Cellana tramoserica), limpets from the genus Patelloida and false limpets (Montfortula rugose). Knowledge about spiritual geography is connected to religious stories, cultural values and ideals, many of which are sacred and secret, and cannot be shared with those without particular rights, knowledge or custody over Country. Shellworker Jodi Stewart elucidates this point in the following reflection about learning shellwork from her grandmother: S­ he’d say ‘come over here’ and we’d all tip them out on a sieve, and we’d be there all sorting them out and shaking the sieve and getting all the grit out – getting all the nice shells, the particular ones that she liked … She told us a lot of stories, where not to go and where to go, what to do and what not to do. When she did tell us a story and she’d say to you ‘Now you’re not to tell them people them things because that’s between me and you, and you can pass them on to your children.’ So that’s why I don’t talk about or to a lot of non-Indigenous people in the area, I don’t tell them a lot of things, because what’s been passed on to me I can pass on to my children.98

This handed-down knowledge regarding shellwork processes connects to patterns of knowledge transmission about art making along matrilineal or patrilineal family lines documented in various Aboriginal communities and groups.99 Beyond learning how to gather materials from maternal kin, shellworkers also inherit specific designs and motifs used to pattern shellwork objects. Thus, in reproducing particular ‘shapes, patterns and placings’ a shellworker can be identified as coming from a particular ‘family and community’.100 As shellworker Jessie Ardler recounted in 1987: These designs that I do – the patterns of the shells on the boxes – they were taken from Auntie Ollie and Mum. They did the same sort of thing. You could always

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tell one another’s. Rosaleen and Esma [Esme Timbery] do different from us, Lola [Ryan] and them do different and the Cooley’s do another. Me and Mum and Auntie Ollie and Auntie Louie all did the same type of thing in the pattern of the shells. The pattern and the design have been handed down … Auntie Ollie (Simms) used to make a shellwork basket filled with grit and when she sold it, she got fresh maidenhair fern … and put it all around the basket – it looked lovely. Auntie Ollie would never part with that pattern.101

The Timbery women, perhaps the most well-known contemporary shellworking family, are known for their use of starries pasted in fanned floral patterns. This is evident in Esme Timbery’s Sydney Harbour Bridge (2002).102 Here delicate roundels of starries top the pylons of the bright yellow model of the Harbour Bridge and are also used to illustrate the steel spans connecting the arch of the bridge to its base. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that shellwork, as an art form which has been created continuously for almost 140 years, stands as an important cultural practice and tradition. Reading shellwork as hybrid can have the effect of reducing its significance to the mode – and moment – of its introduction to Aboriginal Women at La Perouse in the 1880s. This can draw focus away from the ongoing, everyday practice of shellwork over time, and obfuscate the maintenance of this art practice across generations. As La Perouse women Gladys Ardler noted while giving her oral history in 1987, shellwork is a ‘sort of traditional thing that was handed down to my mother. My mother did it and her sister did it … I used to do it too’.103 As a craft which has been sustained across this span of time, and handed on from grandmothers, mothers and aunties, shellwork is an icon of La Perouse, and of Sydney more broadly. While shellwork was once read as a sign of cultural erosion and erasure, in the present, shell making stands as a testament to the survival and ingenuity of Aboriginal women in NSW, and as an affirmation that all cultures – by their very nature – change and adapt.104 Further, consideration of the history of shellwork production at La Perouse illustrates the way women at La Perouse have used shells – a core coastal resource – to produce material culture with an ongoing aesthetic and commercial appeal, as evidenced by the historic, and ongoing, interest in, and consumption of, shellwork by both an Indigenous and non-Indigenous public. Ultimately, rereading shellwork as an uncomplicatedly Aboriginal cultural product – in line with the testimony of contemporary shellworkers – serves as a foil to nineteenth-century colonial records which exclude the opinions, experiences and voices of Aboriginal women making shellwork.

Notes   1 Daphne Nash, ‘From Shell Work to Shell Art: Koori Women Creating Knowledge and Value on the South Coast of NSW’, Craft + Design Enquiry 2 (2010): 2. See also, Helen Krauss, Shell Art: A Handbook for Making Shell Flowers, Mosaics, Jewellery and Other Ornaments (New York: Hearthside Press, 1965), 9–11.   2 See for example, Krauss, Shell Art; Joy Langley, Joy’s Wonderful World of Shells (Wheelers Hill, VIC: Marlin Publications, 1989); Patrick Mauries,

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Shellshock: Conchological Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 75; Hannah Robertson, The Young Ladies School of Arts. Containing, a Great Variety of Practical Receipts, in Gum-Flowers, Filigree, Japanning, Shell-Work, etc. (United Kingdom: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 1767), 9; Jane Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts or the Genteel Female – Her Arts and Pursuits (London and Sydney: Ward Lock, 1969), 9.   3 Kelrick Martin (director), ‘She Sells Sea Shells’, Message Stick (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 16 February, 2009).   4 See for example, Val Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past: Investigating the Archaeological and Historical Records (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002); Maria Nugent, La Perouse: The Place, the People and the Sea (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988).   5 Val Attenbrow, Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal People of NSW (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1990), 3.   6 Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, xiii.   7 In Australia ‘Aboriginal people use the term “Country” to describe the physical, spiritual, social and cultural’ connection and custody they have to specific tracts of land, water and sky associated with their ancestors. See Angela Dew, Elizabeth McEntyre and Priya Vaughan, ‘Taking the Research Journey Together: The Insider and Outsider Experiences of Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Researchers’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 20, no. 1 (2019). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-20.1.3156 (accessed 29 February 2021).   8 Heather Goodall, ‘Negotiating Survival: Aborigines, Settlers and Environmental Knowledge on Sydney’s Botany Bay and Georges River’, Australian Zoologist 39, no. 1 (2017): 76.   9 Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu – Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2014), 67–9. ­10 Faye Ginsburg and Fred Myers, ‘A History of Aboriginal Futures’, Critique of Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2006): 30. 11 Ibid.; Attenbrow, Aboriginal Australia, 10. 12 Ginsburg and Myers, ‘A History of Aboriginal Futures’, 30. 13 Melinda Hinkson and Alana Harris, Aboriginal Sydney: A Guide to Important Places of the Past and Present (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2001), 107. 14 Attenbrow, Aboriginal Australia, 10; and Marcia Langton, ‘They Made a Solitude and Called It Peace’, in First Australians: An Illustrated History, edited by Rachel Perkins and Marcia Langton (Carlton, VIC: The Miegunyah Press, 2010), 8. 15 Peter McKenzie and Ann Stephen, ‘La Perouse: An Urban Aboriginal Community’, in Sydney: City of Suburbs, edited by Max Kelly (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1987), 175; Penny Taylor, After 200 Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal & Islander and Australia Today (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), 337. 16 Nugent, La Perouse: The Place, 84. 17 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 176. 18 Ibid.; Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 63. 19 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 176; Maria Nugent, ‘La Perouse’, in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 622.

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20 Nugent, Botany Bay, 63. 21 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 176. 22 Nugent, Botany Bay, 63; and Hinkson and Harris, Aboriginal Sydney, 107. 23 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 177. 24 Nugent, Botany Bay, 63. 25 Ibid., 64. 26 Ilarria Vanni, ‘Bridging the Gap: The Production of Tourist Objects at La Perouse’, in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 400. See also, Ken Watson, ‘Poetic Justice: An Overview of Indigenous Art’, in One Sun One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, edited by Hetti Perkins and Margie West (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), 17. 27 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179; Maria Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”: Aboriginal Women and Shellwork Production, 1870s to 1970s’, Labour History 101 (2011): 76–7. 28 I have been unable to find a record for this object in the MAAS collection catalogue accessible online. However, it is documented briefly in Martin, ‘She Sells Sea Shells’: see around 8 mins, 25 secs. 29 Maria Nugent, ‘Shellwork on Show: Colonial History, Australian Aboriginal Women and the Display of Decorative Objects’, Journal of Material Culture 19, no. 1 (2014): 76. 30 Esme Timbery discusses colloquial shell names in Martin, ‘She Sells Sea Shells’. I have relied on the following sources to identify shells: Barry Wilson, A Handbook to Australian Seashells: On Seashores East to West and North to South (London, Sydney, Auckland: Reed New Holland, 2002) and Des Beechey, ‘The Seashells of New South Wales’, 2019. https://seashellsofnsw.org.au/index.htm (accessed 20 December 2019). ­31 Beryl Cruse, Liddy Stewart and Sue Norman, Mutton Fish: The Surviving Culture of Aboriginal People and Abalone on the South Coast of NSW (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), 8–10. 32 Shellworkers have their own favoured recipes for the creation of glue, with Esme Timbery favouring, for example, a combination of Aquadhere (a commercial adhesive), flour and water. See discussion in Martin, ‘She Sells Sea Shells’; Nash, Transforming Knowledge, 291–992. 33 Maria Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”’, 75. 34 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179. 35 Grace Cochrane, ‘Cross-Over: Two-Way Influences in Contemporary Indigenous Design’, in One Sun One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, edited by Hetti Perkins and Margie West (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), 261. 36 Nugent, ‘Shellwork on Show’, 77–8. 37 Sylvia Kleinert, ‘The Southern States’, in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 241. 38 See Daphne Nash, Transforming Knowledge: Indigenous Knowledge and Culture Workers on the South Coast of New South Wales, PhD Thesis (Australian National University, 2009), 275. 39 Nash, Transforming Knowledge, 275; Kleinert, ‘The Southern States’, 241–2. 40 Maria Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”’, 79. 41 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179.

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Vanni, ‘Bridging the Gap’, 401. Maria Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”’, 77. Kleinert, ‘The Southern States’, 241–2; and Vanni, ‘Bridging the Gap’, 400. Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner, ‘Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter’, in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, edited by Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 9. 46 Nugent, Botany Bay, 63. 47 Ibid., 71–2. 48 Vanni, ‘Bridging the Gap’, 401. 49 Nugent, Botany Bay, 74. 50 Ibid., 72–5. 51 Ibid., 72–5; McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179. 52 Nugent, Botany Bay, 64. 53 Vanni, ‘Bridging the Gap’, 400. See also Jonathan Jones, La Per: An Aboriginal Seaside Story (Art Gallery NSW [online], 2010), 5. http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov. au/education/education-materials/education-kits/collection-notes/). (accessed 2 September 2011). 54 Vanni, ‘Bridging the Gap’, 400. 55 Nugent contends that it was with the creation of the shellwork Sydney Harbour Bridge (after construction of the bridge was completed in 1932) that shellwork transformed from ‘Victorian-era curio to a Sydney souvenir’. Nugent, Botany Bay, 81. 56 Unknown artists, Heart shaped box, c. 1940s, assorted shells, fabric, cardboard, 14 × 14 × 7cm. Accession number: 226.2010, Art Gallery of NSW. 57 Nugent, Botany Bay, 76; McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179. 58 Ibid., 81. 59 Ibid., 81 and 85. ­60 W.E.H. Stanner, ‘The Aborigines (1938)’, in The Dreaming and Other Essays, edited by W.E.H. Stanner (Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Agenda, 2011), 123–45. 61 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179. 62 Hinkson and Harris, Aboriginal Sydney, 108; Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”’, 85. 63 Lola Ryan, ‘Shellwork: From Bridges to Maps’, in Steppin’ Out and Speakin’ Up, edited by Older Women’s Network (Millers Point: Older Women’s Network, 2003), 12. 64 Nash, Transforming Knowledge, 270. 65 Natalie Cromb, ‘Analysis: The ’88 protests’, Special Broadcasting Services. 2018. https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/explainer/analysis-88-protests (accessed 5 July 2018). 66 See, for example, Taylor, After 200 Years; Nugent, La Perouse: The Place. 67 See, for example, the work of James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Sylvia Kleinert, ‘Aboriginal Enterprises: Negotiating an Urban Aboriginality’, Aboriginal History 34 (2010): 171–96; Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast 1700–1900 (Hong Kong: University of Washington Press, 1998). 68 Kleinert, ‘The Southern States’, 246. 69 See, for example, Karen Pakula, ‘Shells Bridge the Gap between Kitsch and Art’, Sydney: The Sydney Morning Herald (2007).

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70 Nugent, ‘Shellwork on Show’, 86. See also, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Parliament of New South Wales Indigenous Art Prize 2005 (Wollongong: Wollongong University, 2005). 71 Martin, ‘She Sells Sea Shells’; Nash, Transforming Knowledge, 302. For further information on shellwork’s reclassification as fine art object see Nugent, ‘Shellwork on show’, 84–9. 72 Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”’, 74; McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179. 73 Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”’, 76. 74 For a clear outline of the use and abuse of the term hybrid see Nick Papastergiadis, ‘Tracing Hybridity in Theory’, in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, edited by Tariq Modood and Pnina Werbner (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997). 75 It is important to acknowledge that prior to British invasion, Aboriginal Australians did not identify as belonging to ‘One Mob’, as some do today (see for example, Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines [London and Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989]) and Marcia Langton, Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things (Woolloomooloo, NSW: Australian Film Commission, 1993). However, given limits of space here, it is necessary to draw the Australian Aboriginal people living in La Perouse during the nineteenth century together under the homogeneous term Aboriginal. 76 Nugent, ‘“You Really Only Made It Because You Needed Money”’, 76. 77 Nash, Transforming Knowledge, 270. 78 Fiona Foley, Biting the Clouds: A Badtjala Perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2020); Jeanine Leane, ‘Gathering: The Politics of Memory and Contemporary Aboriginal Women’s Writing’, Antipodes 31, no. 2 (2017); Judy Watson and Louise Martin-Chew, Judy Watson: Blood Language (Carlton, VIC: Miegunyah Press, 2009); Natalie Harkin, ‘The Poetics of (Re)Mapping Archives: Memory in the Blood’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 14, no. 3 (2014); Julie Gough, Transforming Histories: The Visual Disclosure of Contentious Pasts, PhD thesis (Hobart: University of Tasmania, 2001). 79 Julie Freeman, ‘Gladys Ardler’, in Pallingjang, Saltwater: Aboriginal Artists of the Illawarra and South Coast Regions of New South Wales, edited by Wollongong City Gallery (Wollongong: Wollongong City Gallery, 1997), 8. 80 Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 98. Even scholars who frame shellwork as ‘introduced’ concede, post-contact craft and artefact production for the tourist market, like other activities condoned by missionaries, can be seen to have utilized ‘old skills associated with hunting and gathering’. See McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 179. 81 See Kate Fullagar, ‘Bennelong in Britain’, Aboriginal History 33 (2009): 31–51 for an overview of Bennelong’s engagements with Governor Philip and he, and his friend Yemmerawanne’s journey to London in 1792. 82 Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793). https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/3534/3534-h/3534-h.htm (accessed 30 March 2022). 83 Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 118–19. 84 Ibid., 98–108.

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  85 Ibid., 118.   86 Djon Mundine, Ngadhu, Ngulili, Ngeaninyagu. A Personal History of Aboriginal Art in the Premier State (Campbelltown: Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2008), 21. It is worth noting, as Shall has bemoaned, that ‘… the literature on the Aboriginal use of shell is meagre’ and so there is limited information about shell use in religious and other ritual. See Alexandra Shall, Aboriginal Use of Shell on Cape York Peninsula (Queensland: Archaeology Branch, 1985), 3.   87 Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 109. See also Paul Irish, ‘Bundeena Bling? Possible Aboriginal Shell Adornments from Southern Sydney’, Australian Archaeology 64 (2007): 46–9.   88 Michael Organ, Illawarra and South Coast Aborigines 1770–1850 (Wollongong: Wollongong University Printing, 1990), 141.   89 Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 109.   90 Ibid., 118.   91 Esme Timbery-Russell and Julie Freeman, ‘A Billy and Buckets to Collect Shells’, in Crossing the Strait: Tasmania to the South Coast, edited by K. Wells (Canberra: Continental Shift Association, 2003), 19; Martin, ‘She Sells Sea Shells’.   92 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1982), 5.   93 Sarah Colley, ‘Sisters are Doing It for Themselves? Gender, Feminism and Australian (Aboriginal) Archaeology’, in Gender and Material Culture in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 25.   94 Nash, Transforming Knowledge, 278–9.   95 Beryl Beller, ‘Shellwork’, in La Perouse: The Place, the People, the Sea, edited by Maria Nugent (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), 80.   96 Freeman, ‘Galdys Ardler’, 8. ­  97 Ibid.; Jones, La Per, 7; Nash, Transforming Knowledge, 272; Timbery-Russell and Freeman, ‘A Billy and Buckets to Collect Shells’, 19.   98 Koori Coast, ‘Continuity and Change’. 2008. http://livingknowledge.anu.edu.au/ learningsites/kooricoast/04_continuity.htm (accessed 24 September 2011).   99 See for example, Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), 6–7. 100 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’,180. See also Ryan, ‘Shellwork’, 12; and Martin, ‘She Sells Sea Shells’. 101 McKenzie and Stephen, ‘La Perouse’, 180. 102 Esme Timbery, 2002, Sydney Harbour Bridge, cardboard, shells, fabric and glitter, 11.0 × 21.7 × 5.0 cm, Art Gallery NSW. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/ works/210.2010/ (accessed 31 December 2021). 103 Gladys Ardler, Gladys Ardler Interviewed by Catherine Johnson in the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Collection (New South Wales: NSW Council on the Ageing and Oral History Association of Australia, NSW Branch, 1987), 13. 104 For discussion regarding cultural change see, for example, Margaret Jolly, ‘Spectres of Inauthenticity’, The Contemporary Pacific 4, no. 1 (1992): 49–72; Marshall Sahlins, ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Culture’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, no. 3 (1999): 399–421; Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture: Revised and Expanded Edition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Part Three

Seabed: Materializing Submarine Environments

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Their ‘Colours are Brilliant, but Fugitive’: Coral Concerns from Imperial Expeditions and the British Museum to the Royal Academy and Drury Lane Kathleen Davidson

In his landmark monograph The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (hereafter Coral Reefs), published in 1842, Charles Darwin dedicated much of his final chapter and a long, detailed appendix to explain how colour is used to illustrate the distribution of different kinds of coral reefs with reference to his coral reef theory in Plate 3 of his book. Likewise, in his description of Plate 1 – showing the resemblance in form between barrier coral-reefs surrounding mountainous islands, and atolls or lagoonislands – Darwin signals that the coral structures have been tinted ‘a pale brownishred colour  … in order to catch the eye’.1 In Plate 3, Darwin’s conclusions about reef distribution are conveyed by overprinting sections of colour – bright blue, pale blue and red – on a standard map of the Indian and Pacific Oceans: The bright blue representing atolls, or lagoon-islands; the pale blue indicating barrier reefs; and the red showing fringing reefs. Without the added colours, this outline map would be meaningless for Darwin’s argument. The application of colour on a standard intaglio, Mercator-style map in Plate 3 was a means of conveying the essential information in an economical way.2 Whereas in Plate 1, which combines charts produced during HMS Beagle’s surveys with those from earlier British, French and Russian imperial voyages, colour is applied solely for emphasis – to accentuate the shapes of coral atolls at certain stages of their development.3 The method of applying colour in both examples above corresponds to the printing of colour tints in discrete sections of the principal image that was common practice for artists’ lithographs.4 The function of the printed colour on Darwin’s maps was more than an embellishment: it conveyed the main idea of each image.5 In this procedure of distinguishing the locations of coral reefs and highlighting different stages of reef formation, the applied colours are only notional, not naturalistic, of course. Their purpose is to signify processes of transformation, thus allowing the viewer to perceive coral reefs as dynamic rather than static environments.6

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While Darwin used colour schematically in Coral Reefs to convey changes in reef structures over long periods of time, he also noted in his travel journal and scientific publications noticeable changes in the actual colours of corals and reefs that he visited during the Beagle voyage. The representation of colours observed in nature was a key concern of Darwin’s and most other naturalists in communicating their scientific investigations in images and text. Darwin studied individual coral colonies and his detailed descriptions of corals in situ show his awareness of localized changes. For instance, his initial impression of the remarkable structures and colours of coral species was countered by his surprise two days later at witnessing vast fields of blackened, decaying coral nearby: ‘a forest of branching coral, which though standing upright was all dead and rotten’ due to the low Spring tides having left them exposed ‘in the air to the sun’s rays’.7 Likewise, Darwin described Porites or finger corals that he observed on Keeling or Cocos atoll as being ‘of a yellow colour [when alive] but after having been washed in fresh water and placed to dry, a jet-black slimy substance exuded from the entire surface, so that the specimen now appears as if it had been dipped in ink’.8 This chapter examines representations of coral in British nineteenth-century visual culture – from scientific expeditions and museum collections to the fine arts and theatre productions – and the reception of coral’s varying colours and diverse forms as symbols of physical transformation. Nineteenth-century naturalists recognized that discernible changes in colour were significant, and could be perplexing and concerning. The colours of marine organisms could alter or diminish: due to changes in their local environments; at different stages of their life cycle; or during the transportation of specimens to metropolitan museums and as commercial products as part of the nineteenth-century commodification of the ocean world. Each effort by artists and naturalists to capture the ‘living tints’ of organisms was an explicit acknowledgement of their impermanence. Darwin, for example, took along a copy of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours by Patrick Syme, 1821, during the Beagle expedition (1831–6) to identify and record the colours of freshly caught specimens that would fade over time or be affected by preservatives.9 The degree of detail in naturalists’ documentation of colours could vary according to the intended audience. For example, in Voyage of the Beagle, 1839, the published account of Darwin’s expedition journal – which immediately found a large general audience – Darwin takes great care to convey what he observed and to communicate colours very specifically, sometimes also signalling their effect on the viewer. Furthermore, this attention to sensory experience in Voyage of the Beagle suggests that like many Victorian travel writers, as Marty Gould argues, ‘Darwin saw the world through a theatrical lens, making sense of new sights and sensations by equating them with stage effects, and communicating the whole by using the language of drama and spectacle, a language understood by a metropolitan audience unfamiliar with the world beyond Britain but well-versed in the sights and sounds of the stage.’10 Whereas in his scientific treatise Coral Reefs, Darwin tends to present an abbreviated account of observed colours in his descriptions of coral colonies and living specimens, sometimes focusing instead on the factors causing colours to change in corals – either due to natural events or human intervention. In both these publications, furthermore, an absence of colour can be significant – whether actually observed in nature or just

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utilized in the accompanying images. In Darwin’s map of coral reef distribution, for instance, uncoloured areas  are  indicative of coastlines with negligible or no coral reefs; or else, as he explains, ‘are left uncoloured from the want of information respecting them’.11 The representation of colour – and correspondingly its absence – in Darwin’s visual and written accounts of reef research, and coral specimens and collections exemplifies the complex role of colour in the commodification of the ocean world in the nineteenth century. This is also indicative, to some extent, of the contemporary reception and interpretation of colour in a broader context, which could similarly signify different types of transformation over time. Charlotte Riberyol notes that the use of colour in the arts – and its appreciation by audiences – altered considerably in the second half of the nineteenth century, influenced in part by the development of new colour technologies for the burgeoning textile industry and the widespread use of aniline dyes: The chromatic transformations caused by the emerging colour industry indeed changed the very temporality of colour. Artificial pigments and dyes, which were no longer ground or imported from distant Oriental countries but readymade, were deemed more fugitive than their more ancient, organic or mineral counterparts.12

Symptomatic of the complex reception of colour in this period are public episodes and controversies, such as Owen Jones’s Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court in the Crystal Palace, 1854, following his efforts to visualize and recreate the original colours of faded antiquities in his designs for displays at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham.13 Less prominently, remarks by observers in their diaries and correspondence reveal that a sudden or unanticipated change or depletion of colour could also be concerning, such as in the writings of artist George Frederic Watts – assembled by his wife, Mary  – wherein Watts recounts an episode on an archaeological dig around 1855–6: ‘In excavating they would now and then find an absolutely perfect specimen of colour, but so evanescent that, in a few minutes of sunlight, it would utterly disappear.’14 One instance of this [was] almost unbelievably swift in its disappearance. A great block happened to be turned over while Mr. [Charles] Newton was absent, and the workmen called [Watts] to see it. On it was a border of leaf and flower ornament in strong fine colour – red, yellows, and blues. He had the slab covered up as quickly as possible, but when turned round and uncovered again for Mr. Newton’s inspection, the colour had utterly vanished.15

These accounts were strikingly similar to reports from naturalists who were encountering coral environments. Through the nineteenth century, visual and written representations of coral colonies and separate specimens proliferated, propelled by contemporary theories about the geological and biological processes involved in coral reef formation along with observations of discernible changes in individual corals.16 Additionally, the dissimilarity of travelling naturalists’ descriptions of living corals from coral collections viewed by the general public was conspicuous. From the

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1840s, public museums became more accessible to general visitors and the British Museum contributed to the growing popular fascination with coral though extensive new displays of coral specimens brought back from government expeditions and by independent naturalists and collectors.17 In 1841, the British Museum acquired twenty-nine of Darwin’s coral specimens collected during the HMS Beagle voyage and opened its new coral gallery in 1847 which was publicized to a global audience through the Illustrated London News.18 With a new building hastening towards completion and galleries being opened to the public incrementally, the British Museum had doubled its visitor numbers over the past year.19 The Coral Room was in one of the smaller rooms upstairs in the new building, along with the Egyptian, Etruscan and Ethnographical Rooms.20 More intimate in scale than the Great Zoological Gallery, for example, these upstairs rooms were praised for ‘their systematic arrangement – having an educational effect as well as providing an amusing attraction’.21 While the decisions governing the layout of galleries were often fairly pragmatic due to the museum’s burgeoning collections and the convention for comprehensive displays, correlations between the pallid appearance of the coral specimens and that of the faded ancient artefacts would have been noticeable to museum visitors due to the physical proximity of these different collections. Indeed, on at least one occasion, tropical corals and other marine invertebrates were displayed right alongside the archaeological exhibits, ‘[i]n a portion of the Eastern Assyrian room at the British Museum, on the upper floor of the north-east angle of the building’.22 With the relocation of the British Museum’s natural history collections to the new Alfred Waterhouse-designed museum building in South Kensington in 1881, the Coral Gallery was re-established in a long narrow corridor flanked by the Bird Gallery and a series of galleries on the northern side of the building.23 The museum’s coral collections received a further boost when numerous corals gathered during Britain’s HMS Challenger expedition, 1872–6, were finally all described and sent to South Kensington in the 1880s.24 The Challenger collection was a large and important one – comprising hundreds of coral specimens, representing 293 coral species and referable to sixty-nine genera – a quarter of which was new to science.25 The collection invigorated both scientific and popular interest in the coral regions of the tropical Pacific, which comprised much of Britain’s sprawling oceanic empire in the southern hemisphere. As the expedition report stated about the coral findings: Of the seventy-three new species, seventy-one were obtained in the Pacific, and two in the Atlantic; and this illustrates fairly well the comparative knowledge we have of the two chief coral regions … and [is] extremely suggestive as to want of knowledge of the coral fauna of that immense [Pacific Ocean] region.26

Furthermore, the report pointed out that observations of corals were sorely needed in order to determine the influences of environmental conditions as it had been remarkable to see the extent of variation to which a coral-reef species is liable. They flourished in specific conditions, from which it seemed natural to conclude that the presence of less favourable conditions would be attended by changes in the growth of a coral

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colony.27 However, with the responsibility of merely cataloguing those corals that were collected and taken back to London by the Challenger as mainly dry specimens, and not having witnessed the corals in situ, the report’s author – John Quelch, a zoologist at the British Museum – had not had the occasion to make those observations himself. Instead, Quelch relied on notes from observations of living corals made on the spot by Henry Moseley – a naturalist on the Challenger – when, for example, he described ‘small rounded masses [of West Indian Porites coral], bright yellow or whitish pink in colour, growing in the numerous rock pools which are exposed at low tide’.28 The disparity between naturalists’ descriptions of corals in their expedition journals  –  that is, from seeing them alive and in situ – and the appearance of  the specimens  on view in the coral gallery could not have been more apparent for museum visitors. In natural history museums, displays of tropical corals were principally comprised of bleached specimens; that is, the coral skeletons without the colours provided by the living coral polyps. Accompanying images were produced to supplement the coral collections and gallery exhibits so as to compensate for this deficit of colour in the individual specimens. In 1889, for instance, The Times announced the safe arrival at the British Museum of A.C. Haddon’s collections from his expedition investigating ‘the fauna, structure, and mode of formation of the coral reefs in [the] Torres Straits’, advising that ‘Corals were largely collected and many preserved in spirit with the parts expanded. Of the actiniae [anemones], nudibranchs, planarians [flatworms], and other creatures whose colours are brilliant, but fugitive, many coloured drawings were made [by Haddon] on the spot.’29 In the museum’s Guide to the Coral Gallery, 1907, visitors were likewise advised that ‘[a]s it is impossible to preserve in alcohol the beauty of form and colouring presented by [soft-bodied marine invertebrates], the aid of the artist has been called in, and sketches from life are shown on the walls’.30 These accompanying drawings in the Coral Gallery were watercolours undertaken by the artist Charles Berjeau, who regularly produced natural history illustrations for the British Museum during this period.31 Due to the transience of coral colours for museum visitors and desk-bound naturalists the shapes or growth forms of corals were primary attributes for identification, comparison and appreciation. Roger Fenton’s stereoscopic pair of photographs ‘Group of Corals, British Museum’, published in The Stereoscopic Magazine in October 1859, epitomizes both this interest in and reliance on the forms of corals – rather than their colours – as the basis for study.32 Fenton’s study is exceedingly restrained – focusing on just four symmetrically arranged specimens, excluding all extraneous elements and accentuating the volume and topography of the individual corals when viewed through the stereoscope viewer. In later decades, the Coral Gallery tended towards spectacle by featuring elaborate and enormous specimens as showpieces in the display (Figure 10.1). For example, ‘[t]he most notable additions to the coral gallery’ in 1895 were considered to be the four huge Indian Ocean coral masses belonging to the genus Turbinaria – each weighing up to 1,500 pounds (700 kilograms) – sent from Shark Bay in north-western Australia by William Saville-Kent.33 Again, placed on the walls  around these bleached coral specimens were watercolour studies, including ‘a fine representation of a Madrepore as it appears during life, from the skilful brush of Mr. C. Berjeau’ – complementing a ‘fine series of photographs by Mr. Saville-Kent,

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Figure 10.1  Antony Gepp, ‘Coral Cases’, 20 April 1895, f. 50 in Gallery Photograph Album 1. Natural History Museum, London. Courtesy of Alamy.

[giving] a vivid idea of the character of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia’, that had been installed some months earlier as a ‘new feature in the coral gallery’.34 While the interest in coral reef formation in the nineteenth century was reflected in these sometimes spectacular coral displays at the British Museum, the dissemination and influence of continual reef investigations during the period was wide-ranging and extended across printed media, fine arts and contemporary visual culture. The progress and discoveries of expeditions undertaking coral research featured frequently in the press, as well as popular and scientific journals during the 1840s to 1910s. The Royal Society Coral Reef Committee, for example, regularly released reports about its research, deliberations and progress that were published in the major metropolitan dailies – most prominently The Times – which were then swiftly republished under regional and colonial mastheads.35 The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which had been established in part to promote science to the general public, also highlighted the nation’s explorations and discoveries.36 The subject of corals and coral reefs featured prominently in speeches, exhibitions and practical demonstrations at the BAAS conferences held annually at different provincial centres, which were reported exhaustively in British, colonial and international newspapers. Specific periods of intensive reporting of scientific expeditions generated an escalation in public interest in coral environments and, correspondingly, a more complex and imaginative engagement with the ocean world.

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Figure 10.2  ‘The Coral Finders. Engraved by C.W. Wass from the Picture by W. Etty R.A. in the Possession of the Engraver’, The Art Union, April 1848. State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

The 1840s was one of several periods of considerable investigation into the structure and biology of coral reefs – following the publication of Darwin’s coral reefs theory in 1842. General interest in coral environments, coral collecting and the commodification of coral grew markedly in this period. In April 1848, the Art Union included a full-page engraving by C.W. Wass (Figure 10.2) after the painting The Coral Finder: Venus and her Youthful Satellites Arriving at the Isle of Paphos – painted by William Etty in 1820 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts the same year.37 In this and subsequent works, Etty was celebrated primarily for his masterly use of colour in portraying classical subjects, often with complex compositions.38 In The Coral Finder, a female figure swims beside the boat and holds up a small piece of coral in her hand, in a gesture offering it to Venus. Her discovery is undoubtedly an example of the prized Mediterranean red coral, Corallium rubrum, which accords with the classical subject of Etty’s painting.39 Although the coral branch seems a tiny detail in terms of the overall scale of the canvas, its placement near the centre of the work and vivid colour create a focal point within the composition. The coral’s warm orange-pink colour radiates out from the centre of the scene through its reiteration in the drapery beneath the

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principal figures of Venus and around her companions, visually connecting them to each other and the coral sprig itself, and is ultimately reflected down on to the ocean surface with its valuable coral colonies below. Similarly, the long dark tresses of the coral finder’s hair trailing down into the water, linking with the blue drapery to create an eddy of blues and blacks in the composition, evokes the Mediterranean blue and black corals that were also treasured in this period. Almost three decades later, Etty’s celebrated portrayal of the coral finder had become newly topical. With the original title pluralized and reflecting its broader contemporary relevance, Wass’s engraving, The Coral Finders, and its publication in the Art Union in 1848 corresponded with the surge in coral research expeditions and their public dissemination. Charles Darwin’s 1842 seminal book, Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, was followed by Joseph Beete Jukes’s section on the ‘Beauty of Coral Reefs’ in his Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly: Commanded by Captain F.P. Blackwood, R.N., in Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Other Islands of the Eastern Archipelago (1842–6), published in 1847, and James Dwight Dana’s monographs on zoophytes, published in 1846 and 1849, based on his extensive research of corals during Charles Wilkes’s United States Exploring Expedition (1838–42).40 Jukes’s detailed exposition of his experience of coral reefs – conjuring up Darwin’s characteristically visual language and also evocative of theatre scenography – was widely reviewed in the press.41 General interest in the subject was intense and only increased as the century progressed. Indeed, the various public outings of Etty’s painting are indicative of these peaks of interest and activity in coral research, collecting and commerce. The Coral Finder was again exhibited at the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition in 1889, subsequent to the Challenger voyage with its considerable coral research and coinciding with the gradual publication of the expedition’s scientific findings during 1880–95.42 This final showing of Etty’s Coral Finders in 1889 followed several paintings by Nicholas Chevalier being exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibitions during the 1880s that portrayed coral as both a tropical motif and a commodity. The occasion for these works came during Chevalier’s tour to Tahiti over two weeks in June 1869 as part of the Duke of Edinburgh’s entourage. The artist, who had arrived in Australia in 1854, covered the royal tour in 1867–8 as correspondent for the Australian Illustrated News, accompanying the royal party through the Australian colonies.43 During March 1869 to April 1870, Chevalier was invited to join Prince Alfred’s tour of the Pacific and Indian Oceans aboard the royal yacht, HMS Galatea, before returning to England. As the Art Journal described in 1872, Chevalier exhibited at the South Kensington Museum ‘about a hundred drawings … of hunting-scenes, public ceremonies, costumes, the manners and customs, characteristic scenery, architecture &c., of the various countries visited’ during the voyage.44 Chevalier produced various sketches of Tahitian island life, although these are not specifically mentioned in the Art Journal. It is notable that certain details are repeated across his major works depicting Tahitian subjects, which were produced over a number of years. Some of the same shells and pieces of coral, which is likely Acropora coral, shown in the back of the canoe in Chevalier’s Race to the Market, Tahiti, 1880, for example, resemble those portrayed in in his South Sea Beauty, 1881, and Will You Buy?, c.1883.45 Painted more than a decade after his return, Chevalier’s paintings of

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Tahiti were produced in his London studio, based on his sketches and watercolours drawn on the spot, and are possibly composites of various scenes that he witnessed.46 However, the limited selection of corals and shells depicted and, particularly, the artist’s close attention to each specimen’s individual features and details, indicates that these elements may have been drawn from souvenirs transported to London by Chevalier – or possibly materials purchased locally, rather than being based solely on his sketches produced in Tahiti. Chevalier’s Tahitian subjects explicitly reference the nineteenth-century trade in bleached coral at its source in the tropics, and also allude to its European consumers. The fashion for tropical coral specimens as drawing-room ornaments greatly increased coral collecting from the narrow purview of natural history cabinets and public museums to the domestic domain of middle-class households and the significantly expanded market this popular pursuit represented.47 Formerly, in the Mediterranean coral trade, the kinds of coral regarded as commodities and their respective value was determined predominantly by their colour and its stability, their transparency and the form of their branches. These ranged from Black Coral – that is, coral detached from its original mass that has become embedded in the mud and modified ‘through the action of sulphurous exhalations’ – which was commonly ‘used as an ornament by ladies in mourning, and fetch[ing] a price of 4s. 6d. to 6s. per lb’ to ‘the delicate rosehued varieties, most highly esteemed in Western Europe’, and the elusive White Coral, differing only in colour from the lucrative Red Coral but so rare that it was seldom encountered in nature or the market.48 Contemporary reviewers remarked on the suggestiveness of Chevalier’s Tahiti scenes – comparing the sensuous beauty of the young woman in Will You Buy? with that of the coral and shells that she tenders. She is in the full flush and fructification of her charms … Her eyes are large and lustrous, her figure well marked, her nose being straight and her mouth, with the lips slightly apart and wreathed in seductive smiles, might well excite the envy of a European fashionable beauty … In her shapely hands she holds a large piece of coral, the snowy whiteness of which is brought out in stronger relief by the bright scarlet of the handkerchief upon which it rests. The coral is clasped daintily between her tapering fingers as she presents it to the passer-by with the inquiry, Will You Buy? Beside her is a collection of native shells, whose beautiful convolutions and pearly pink and opalesque tints are executed with wonderful fidelity to nature … Her type of feminine loveliness is in keeping with all her entourage, the warmth, the tropical ripeness and glowing sensuousness of living objects, the curiously shaped and tinted shells, the wild flowers, the coral … 49

The ‘snowy whiteness’ of the bleached coral contributes to its appeal, brought into relief by the young woman’s red scarf and accentuating the dark-olive complexion, as the critic described it, of the Tahitian’s skin, her deep-brown hair and her jetblack eyes. With the Tahitian ‘features not unlike that of Europeans’ and, yet, her  ‘local  colouring  [imparting] an ethnologic interest to the study’, the coral – which the woman holds near to her face and body rather than extending it out to the

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viewer – becomes not only ‘suggestive of tropical luxuriance’ but also a device for the viewer to compare physiognomy and skin colouring in order to very clearly discern those points of physical resemblance and difference between the islander subject and the European viewer.50 Accordingly, the Tahitian woman not only gathers her island’s natural bounties and financially benefits from them but also emerges from and, to some degree, resembles or is physically transformed into nature itself; that is, in the form of the coral she is holding.51 A parallel process of transformation occurred with the reproduction of Chevalier’s Tahiti works and their popular dissemination through the print media, including Race to the Market which was reproduced as a full-page, black and white engraving in the Illustrated London News in 1880 and, again, as a double-page spread in the Illustrated Sydney News in 1888.52 In 1883, Will You Buy? was purchased by  the prominent Melbourne businessman John Munro Bruce and in the same year the  Illustrated Australian News published a colour wood-engraving of the work as a supplement to the November issue of the paper.53 Like other colour supplements produced for the Illustrated Australian News during the 1870s–80s, the reproduction of Chevalier’s painting was undertaken by the artist Samuel Calvert and printed by Charles Troedel and Co.54 Notably, Will You Buy? was selected as the opening work in a presentation album – also produced in 1883 – to showcase the colour printing work of the newspaper’s publisher, David Syme and Co (Plate 19).55 The album represents a handful of the newspaper’s more striking featured images in a series of notated printed sheets demonstrating how these complex illustrations developed incrementally from their constituent colours – each created through the cumulative process of sequentially printing different colours from separate woodblocks and evolving over days or weeks from disconnected islands of colour mapped out by the printer. Reminiscent of Darwin’s map showing the structure and distribution of coral reefs, these distinct sections of primary colour only finally become legible through the superimposition of a detailed, black outline of the composition. In 1884, the Illustrated Australian News published What You Give? (Plate 20) – a companion piece to Will You Buy?.56 Reproducing a sketch by Chevalier, also in Bruce’s collection, this coloured supplement portrayed a young Tahitian woman ‘engaged in vending a collection of natural curios peculiar to those tropical regions’ comprising a variety of intricate, patterned shells and ‘samples of the white and red coral, a fillet of the latter binding her hair, the better, no doubt, to exemplify its utility and beauty’.57 In contrast to the figure in Will You Buy?, this later work presents a classicized image of the islander – depicting her with Europeanized features and hairstyle, and the arrangement of her saffron-yellow vest – a foil to her dark blue pareo – echoing the drape and folds of a Roman tunic. Such idealizing attributes, combined with the placement near the woman’s left elbow of a red coral branch, Corallium species, are more reminiscent of Etty’s Coral Finder and less indicative of an ethnographic study. Unlike Will You Buy? – described at the time as a ‘striking photograph’ of the appearance of Polynesian women in the Society Islands – this latter picture was perceived as more fanciful in its allusions to a South Seas paradise and illusionistic in its effect.58 ‘Such a picture is in itself an idyll’, the Illustrated Australian News advised.59

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If it does not actually tell a tale, it appeals to the imagination and fills the mind with thoughts half formed, perhaps, or with reawakened memories of what we may have read or seen in other days, when the mind was fresh, plastic and impressionable, and keenly susceptible to everything novel and romantic.60

As a set piece, What You Give? employs the theatrical device of screening to simultaneously conceal, reveal and transform physical and pictorial elements within its tropical setting. Resting on the palm of the woman’s left hand, delicately balanced in a vertical position, is a large, bright crimson, diaphanous Sea Fan or Gorgonian coral – that she is in the act of bartering – and which she carefully props upright to show the effect of its fine filigree and hypnotic pellucidity against the length of her extended right arm. Whereas in Will You Buy? the white coral provides a visual device to offset the Tahitian’s skin colour and define her place in nature, the translucent pink Sea Fan in What You Give? not only highlights the islander’s affinity with the ocean world but also, for the viewer, both partially eclipses the background and shades the woman’s arm behind its dense veil – not fully concealing her flesh, but, rather, transforming it to a different hue. The popular art form that most explicitly encapsulated processes of transformation during the nineteenth century was theatre. And, the theatrical genre that most persistently reflected the public reception of Britain’s coral reef expeditions and contemporary fascination with undersea environments was pantomime. While it may be tempting to characterize pantomime’s extravaganza and burlesque as frivolous, the allusions in Victorian pantomimes were always exceedingly topical – routinely parodying domestic events, and presenting themes of empire and Britain’s place in the world.61 ‘Victorian theatre evolved into a powerful institution of imperial representation’, Marty Gould argues, ‘by incorporating the mechanics of panoramic and exhibitionary display into its own performance practices: assimilating other forms of imperial spectacle, blending education with entertainment and bringing the distant imperial frontier to life in the empire’s metropolitan political and cultural center’.62 Indeed, the period of high imperialism directly influenced both the staging and success of pantomime in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, with The Star newspaper in December 1900 declaring the Drury Lane pantomime a national institution and, itself, a symbol of the Empire.63 Typically, classic stories and nursery rhymes were modified and made topical by the inclusion of newsworthy events.64 Physical transformation was also an essential component of nineteenth-century pantomime productions. Characters were transformed into different figures, including other animals and plants, at certain points in the performance. The frequently changing backdrops and sets involved the most extravagant, stunning transformations. The increasingly sophisticated use of stage lighting and the application of changing colour filters allowed discrete elements on the stage to virtually appear, disappear and chromatically transform before the audience’s eyes. The 1853–4 production of Once Upon a Time There Were Two Kings at the Lyceum – comprising mesmerizing undersea designs by the innovative theatrical scene painter W. R. Beverly – was acclaimed as a show worth visiting for the scenic

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effects alone.65 As The Era recounted, ‘all the various species of sponges, corals and the rest with which we are familiar [were presented to the audience], interlacing a tangled forest of sub-marine plants, and the whole rendered sparkling bright and translucent by the play of the blue water and the beams of the soft stars’.66 The Standard described the concluding kaleidoscopic spectacle in Act One of this extravaganza of ‘shading pools of azure water’ and delicate marine life.67 The entire area of the stage has been pressed into the service of this striking scene. Sea-weeds of every variety are grouped and interlaced, and we are well aware what rare diversities of colour [that] nature has lavished upon these fruitful growths of the deep. The contrasts resident in the several tints present a polychromic tableau graceful and elegant beyond measure; while the slender shoots which web every spot and corner upon which the eye rests make up one huge and boundless surface of delicate and impalpable tracery.68

Representations of underwater environments in the theatre became increasingly elaborate; their primary purpose in pantomime being to amplify the theme of transformation. Beverly’s designs for Little Jack Horner, shown at Drury Lane in 1857–8, centred around a ‘Palace of Coral’ in which the pantomime’s transformations took place, and which received utmost favour from critics as well as general audiences. Contemporary interest in scientific theories of evolution and the notion of mutation, as well as the unresolved question of how coral reefs are formed, inflected these transformation scenes and their reception. As one reviewer effervesced: Here we have one of those alluring configurations which alike ravish, dazzle, and amaze the eye. Like the former instances of the same bright and luminous family, the scene is one of mutation, the field of coral which appears in the first instance gradually becoming alive with ascending shafts, upon which groups of Naiads stand in perilous eminence; while others glide imperceptibly from the sides and centres, until a gigantic tableau is formed, the gorgeous and resplendent lustre of which it would be impossible to describe, but the effect of which is overwhelming.69

From the 1870s, performances became longer and the visual elements were increasingly flamboyant, resulting in a greater public profile for scenic artists and their work.70 The Magazine of Art ran regular features entitled ‘Art in the Theatre’ from the 1880s to 1900s; the Scenic Artists’ Association was formed in 1904; and a major exhibition of the work of the great scenic artists was staged at Grafton Galleries in 1905.71 This growing appetite for spectacle coincided with a second wave of coral reef expeditions, initiated by the findings of the Challenger expedition. These were disseminated constantly in the press, along with reports and images from the tropics by colonial naturalists and independent travellers. In this period also, multifaceted, evolving illustrated presentations at scientific conversaziones became a crucial part of publicizing coral reef findings to the public and promoting the work of the Royal Society’s Coral Reef Committee from the 1880s. Henry Moseley and John Murray, of the Challenger expedition, each presented lectures on coral reefs in the 1880s that were illustrated by lantern slides.72 Likewise, William Saville-Kent’s photographic glass plates of the Great Barrier Reef – printed

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as eye-catching full-page autotypes in his much-publicized book The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, 1893 – were shown as ‘natural-colour’ dissolving views in his dynamic magic lantern presentations at the Royal Society and Royal Photographic Society in London on numerous occasions during the 1890s and early 1900s, which were regularly reported in The Times and other newspapers.73 There was substantial cross-fertilization between these separate art forms of theatre scenography, designed to move and change with each scene, and the dissolving views in magic lantern shows.74 Moreover, theatre designs for underwater scenes and coral habitats were discernibly inspired by the animate, dioramic submarine environments created in the large public aquaria that arose in Britain from mid-century.75 Correspondingly, popular illustrated lectures and aquarium attractions employed theatrical spectacle and incorporated theatre design conventions and innovations. Henry Emden’s design for the ‘City of Coral’ scene (Plate 21) in the pantomime Humpty Dumpty – which premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1903 – encapsulated both the layered effect of window-fronted aquarium tanks and the continually changing and dissolving views of magic lantern presentations.76 Applauded as a polychromatic triumph, this was one of many productions to include exhilarating coral scenery, costumes and coral cave ballets that, through the course of the show, commingled with and merged into other creatures and realms.77 The muted but complex colouring and intricate curvilinear-shapes of Emden’s set provided the background for the superimposition and synthesis of flitting spots and layers of changing jewel-like colour lighting, as well as the masking, unveiling and metamorphosing effects of moving painted gauzes.78 The pantomime comprised thirteen diverse scenes, from which, reviewers noted, three spectacles particularly stood out. Most impressive was the undersea ballet, staged on a large scale, which provided a scintillating finale to the second part of the pantomime. As the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported of the London production: Here the beauties are extraordinarily complex, beginning with movements of sirens, leading to the softly floating anemones in their home, and culminating in glowing processions of coral realms. Not only corals, pink, red, and black, but also pearls, jeweled with light, rare-hued shells, anemones, seaweeds with shining stalactites thread their ways into the great picture, which has no repose, yet no disorder. Slowly this wonderful opulence is evolved, light and colour, scenes and dresses, figurants and dancers combining in a triumph of the imagination … To sum up, ‘Humpty Dumpty’ is a long enchantment for the eye.79

While pantomime was one of the more illusionistic art forms portraying corals and coral reefs, representations of these changeable, perplexing marine organisms and environments pervaded much of Britain’s visual culture during the nineteenth century. This chapter has traced some of the visual practices and motifs evoking coral and coral reef transformation by examining the extensive influences and exchanges between science, art and design in this period and their significant role in promoting new knowledge and shaping popular perceptions of the ocean world. Inspired by numerous reports of coral reef encounters by official and independent scientific expeditions, and displays of Britain’s burgeoning natural history collections, the growing public fascination with tropical coral and underwater realms found expression in the fine

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arts, illustrated press and theatre productions. Across these diverse cultural forms, coral’s transient colours and various shapes were both carefully documented and imaginatively presented as symbols of transformation. The general public’s typical encounter with coral specimens in no way approximated the experiences and reports of naturalists witnessing the spectacle of living corals in situ. Corals on display in the British Museum, and as ornaments in domestic parlours, seemed more like the museum’s collections of faded antiquities than contemporary conceptions of tropical nature with its gaudy, brilliant colours. The task of visually revivifying coral and restoring its colour in the national imagination was taken up not only by natural history illustrators but also by artists and designers whose work could be seen at the Royal Academy, in illustrated publications and magic lantern lectures, and at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. For the nineteenth-century viewer, the colours of coral and coral environments became a fugacious pleasure and, hence, a highly valued commodity.

Notes   1 Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (London: Smith Elder and Co, 1842), vii (emphasis in original).   2 Karen Severud Cook, ‘From False Starts to Firm Beginnings: Early Colour Printing of Geological Maps’, Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 159.   3 These comprise maps from the voyages of Cook, Beechey, Moresby and Powell, Duperrey, and Lutké.   4 Cook, ‘From False Starts to Firm Beginnings’, 159.   5 Ibid.   6 Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 147–8.   7 Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 546 and 548.   8 Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 13.   9 Patrick Syme, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: With Additions, Arranged so as to Render it Highly Useful to the Arts and Sciences, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1821); Giulia Simonini, ‘Organizing Colours: Patrick Syme’s Colour Chart and Nomenclature for Scientific Purposes’, XVII–XVIII 75 (2018). https://doi. org/10.4000/1718.1327 (accessed 7 April 2019). 10 Marty Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (New York: Routledge, 2011), 14. 11 Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 123. 12 Charlotte Riberyol, The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), 11. 13 Owen Jones, An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court in the Crystal Palace (London: Crystal Palace Library and Bradbury & Evans, 1854). 14 M.S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol 1 (London: Macmillan and Co, 1912), 165. 15 Ibid., 165–6. 16 Kathleen Davidson, ‘Speculative Viewing: Victorians’ Encounters with Coral Reefs’, in Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture, edited by Grace Moore and Michelle Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 135–60.

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17 Kathleen Davidson, Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-Century Museum: Exchanging Views of Empire (London: Routledge, 2017), 21–65. 18 ‘The New Coral Room, at the British Museum’, Illustrated London News, 3 April 1847, 221. 19 ‘Easter Exhibitions and Amusements’, Illustrated London News, 3 April 1847, 217–18. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. ­22 ‘British Museum – Professor Haddon’s Collection From Torres Strait’, The Times, 23 October 1889, 4. 23 E. Ray Lankester, Guide to the Coral Gallery (Protozoa, Porifera or sponges, Hydrozoa, and Anthozoa) in the Department of Zoology, British Museum (Natural History), 2nd ed. (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1907), preface. 24 J.J. Quelch, ‘Report on the Reef-Corals Collected by H.M.S. Challenger during the Years 1873–76’, 1886 (Zoology. vol 16, Pt. 46) in Great Britain Challenger Office, Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger during the years 1873–76 (Edinburgh: Neill, 1880–95), 1. 25 Ibid., 3. 26 J.J. Quelch, ‘Report on the Reef-Corals Collected by H.M.S. Challenger’, 3. 27 Ibid., 7. 28 Ibid., 13. ‘Challenger Reports’, Science 8, no. 202 (17 December 1886): 572–4. 29 ‘British Museum – Professor Haddon’s Collection From Torres Strait’, The Times, 23 October 1889, 4. 30 E. Ray Lankester, Guide to the Coral Gallery, 69. For the preservation of soft-bodied marine species – see chapters by Philp, Lenk and Brazier in this volume. 31 Berjeaus’s watercolour of a ‘Section of Sea-Anemone’ was reproduced in black and white as Figure 7 in the plate section of the gallery guidebook – Lankester, Guide to the Coral Gallery. 32 Roger Fenton, ‘Group of Corals, British Museum’, The Stereoscopic Magazine (October 1859); Kathleen Davidson, ‘Connecting the Senses: Natural History and the British Museum in the Stereoscopic Magazine’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 19 (2014): 1–12. https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ ntn.700/ 33 ‘The National Collections of Natural History’, The Times, 16 April 1895, 4. 34 Ibid; ‘The Natural History Museum’, The Times, 7 August 1894, 6. 35 See C. Maurice Yonge, ‘The Royal Society and the Study of Coral Reefs’, in Oceanography: The Past, edited by Mary Sears and Daniel Merriman (New York: Springer Verlag, 1980), 438–47. 36 See Jennifer Tucker, ‘Magical Attractions: Lantern Slide Lectures at British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meetings, ca 1850–1920’, in The Magic Lantern at Work: Witnessing, Persuading, Experiencing and Connecting, edited by Martyn Jolly and Elisa DeCourcy (New York: Routledge, 2020), 67–87; Davidson, Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-Century Museum, 197–200. 37 ‘The Coral Finders’, The Art-Union (April 1848): 116–17. After ‘having exhibited two or three pictures, annually, for nine years to no purpose’ during the 1810s, Etty finally received approval from his peers with The Coral Finder – Professor Leslie, ‘Lecture on the Works of the late W. Etty, Esq., R.A.’, The Athenaeum, no. 1170 (30 March 1850): 349–52. William Etty, The Coral Finder: Venus and her Youthful Satellites, c.1820–48, is currently represented by a replica in the Tate collection, London (Tate Ref. N06354). https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/etty-the-coral-finder-venus-andher-youthful-satellites-replica-n06354 (accessed 28 December 2021).

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38 ‘Winter Exhibition at the Royal Academy’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 7 January 1889, 4. 39 On Corallium rubrum, see Pippa Lacey, ‘Imperial Coral: The Transformation of a Natural Material to a Qing Imperial Treasure’ in this volume. 40 Joseph Beete Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. ‘Fly’: Commanded by Captain F.P. Blackwood, R.N., in Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Other Islands of the Eastern Archipelago, during the Years 1842–1846 (London: T. & W. Boone, 1847), 117–24; James Dwight Dana, Structure and Classification of Zoophytes (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1846); James Dwight Dana, Zoophytes Atlas (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849). 41 Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. ‘Fly’: 117–24; ‘Art. VI. –1. Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. “Fly”’, The Quarterly Review 81, no. 162 (August 1847): 468–500. 42 Exhibition of Works by Old Masters and by Deceased Masters of the British School. Winter Exhibition. Royal Academy of Arts, 1889 (London: W. Clowes, 1889), 11. 43 J.G Knight, Narrative of the Visit of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh to the Colony of Victoria, Australia (Melbourne: Mason, Firth and Co, 1868). 44 ‘Cruise of the “Galatea” Round the World’, The Art Journal (February 1872): 60; Marjorie J. Tipping, ‘Chevalier, Nicholas (1828–1902)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chevalier-nicholas-3200/text4807 (accessed 14 October 2019). 45 Nicholas Chevalier, Race to the Market, Tahiti, 1880 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); South Sea Beauty, 1881 (Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney); Will You Buy?, c.1883 (Lot 99: ‘Important Australian Art’, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 27 August 2007). 46 Steven Miller, Dogs in Australian Art (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2012), 140. 47 Despite this expansion of the market, the trade in tropical coral as ornaments remained a relatively small industry and was surpassed by coral mining for the production of agricultural lime, and for mortar in the building industry and as a building material in its own right, each large-scale industries dating back to the 1840s and early 1900s respectively – Ben Daley and Peter Griggs, ‘Mining the Reefs and Cays: Coral, Guano and Rock Phosphate Extraction in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, 1844–1940’, Environment and History 12, no. 4 (2006): 395–433. 48 The Great Fisheries of the World: Described and Illustrated (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1878), 485–6. 49 ‘Our Illustrations. Will You Buy?’, Illustrated Australian News, 10 November 1883, 178. 50 Ibid. 51 This merging with nature is also reminiscent of Lucien Henry’s allegorical Federation Bust, c.1889–91, in which the figure of Australia, swathed in fronds of seaweed, emerges from a giant clam shell that rests on a rough-hewn base seemingly carved from the ocean’s bedrock – Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney (object no. P3207). 52 ‘A Race to the Market, Tahiti, Society Islands’ and ‘Market-Boats of Tahiti’, Illustrated London News, 9 October 1880, 353–4; ‘The Race to Market’, Illustrated Sydney News, 26 July 1888, 4 and 16–17. 53 See provenance notes – Lot 99: ‘Important Australian Art’, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 27 August 2007. 54 See Roger Butler, Printed: Images in Colonial Australia 1801–1901 (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007), 238. 55 Illustrated Australian New Proof Plates, 1880–83: PXE 867, State Library of NSW.

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56 ‘What You Give? From a Picture by N. Chevalier, in the possession of Mr. J.M. Bruce, Melbourne’, Illustrated Australian News, 8 November 1884, 9–10. 57 ‘Our Colored Supplement – “What You Give?”’, Illustrated Australian News, 8 November 1884, 170. ­58 ‘Our Illustrations. Will You Buy?’, Illustrated Australian News, 10 November 1883, 178. 59 ‘Our Colored Supplement – “What You Give?”’, Illustrated Australian News, 8 November 1884, 170. 60 Ibid. 61 Jeffrey Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 24–5. 62 Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter, 14–15. 63 Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime, 19–22; see also Anita Callaway, Visual Ephemera. Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000). 64 Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime, 22–8. 65 Ibid., 139; ‘Theatres and Music’, John Bull 33, no. 1, 725 (2 January 1854): 844. 66 ‘The Christmas Pantomimes and Burlesques’, The Era, 1 January 1854, 12. 67 ‘Christmas Amusements’, The Standard, 27 December 1853, 1. 68 Ibid. An adaptation of this J.R. Planche production premiered in Sydney at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in 1862 – see advertisements in the Sydney Morning Herald during 8–26 July 1862; also Veronica Kelly, Annotated Calendar of Plays Premiered in Australia 1850–1869 – https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:10249 (accessed 7 January 2021). 69 ‘The Christmas Burlesques and Pantomimes’, The Era, 27 December 1857, 11. 70 Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime, 29. 71 Ibid., 126. 72 ‘Royal Institution Lectures: Corals and Their Allies’, Illustrated London News, 28 January 1882, 91; ‘Mr Murray of the Challenger on Coral Reefs’, Edinburgh Evening News, 13 March 1888, 2. 73 Davidson, ‘Speculative Viewing: Victorians’ Encounters with Coral Reefs’, 152–3; Kate Davidson, ‘Saville-Kent, William (1845–1908): English Naturalist and Photographer’, in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, edited by John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1246. 74 Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime, 8–9 75 ‘The Christmas Novelties: Royal Aquarium Theatre’, The Era, 29 December 1878, 4. On the visual affinities of the aquarium, see Judith Hamera, Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 76 Victoria and Albert Museum, London: object no. E.1539&A to C-1925. http:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O144788/set-model-emden-henry/ (accessed 3 January 2021). 77 ‘Humpty Dumpty at Drury Lane’, The Times, 28 December 1903, 10; ‘Christmas in the Playhouses’, Illustrated London News, 2 January 1904, 2. 78 Victoria and Albert Museum item record – http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O144788/set-model-emden-henry/ (accessed 3 January 2021). 79 ‘Humpty Dumpty at Drury Lane’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 28 December 1903, 8.

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Aquariums Under the Rising Sun: A Cultural History of Early Public Aquariums in Japan, 1882–1903 Yuichi Mizoi

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to trace the founding and development of Japanese public aquariums from 1882 to 1903, and their cultural and political contexts. According to Katsumi Suzuki (鈴木克美) and Genjiro Nishi (西源二郎), there were about eleven aquariums built during this period, though only representative examples will be discussed in this study.1 While the historical descriptions in this chapter are based on studies by Suzuki and Shintarou Kamagata (鎌形慎太郎), I will also focus on the less-studied cultural impacts of introducing modern aquariums to the Japanese public. Although the aquarium was introduced to Japan as a facility for studying Western methods of exploiting marine resources, Japanese aquariums became a hybrid of European and Japanese elements of technology, architecture and exhibition styles. In addition to this discussion of the cultural impacts of the introduction of modern aquariums to Japan, I will also consider their symbolic role as spaces where the power of imperial Japan could be displayed. I begin by introducing several accounts of Japanese writers who visited European aquariums for the first time.2 After introducing the first public aquariums in Japan, I outline the architecture, exhibitions, and systems of succeeding aquariums in Kobe, Tokyo and Sakai (in Osaka) between 1897 and 1903, taking account of their cultural and political meanings.

Japanese Writers’ Early Accounts of Public Aquariums in Europe ‘Sea-fish are put into glass tanks, and fresh saltwater is constantly added to keep them alive.’3 This sentence can be found in Seiyo jijo (西洋事情, Things Western, 1866) by Yukichi Fukuzawa (福澤諭吉, 1835–1901), who first introduced Western aquariums to the Japanese public. After joining delegations sent to the United States (1860) and Europe (1862–3), Fukuzawa provided a summary of Western institutions, histories, policies and latest technologies for Japanese readers. In a section titled ‘Museum’, he

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referred to a zoological garden, noting that almost all kinds of animals, including fish, were exhibited there. This description of the zoo and its aquarium was based on Fukuzawa’s visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, famously comprised of a natural history museum and both zoological and botanical gardens.4 The elite Japanese group that undertook the Iwakura Mission, led by Tomomi Iwakura (岩倉具視, 1825–83), also had the opportunity to visit several aquariums in Europe. In addition to its diplomatic purpose, this group aimed to learn as much as possible about Western politics, economics, industries, education, military technologies and so on.5 After the Iwakura Mission’s voyage (1871–3), Kunitake Kume (久米邦武 1839–1931), a member of this group, published the edited Beiou-KairanJikki (米欧回覧実記, The Iwakura Embassy, 1878). In this volume, Kume referred to the Brighton Aquarium, the Crystal Palace Aquarium, the Berlin Aquarium (Berliner Aquarium unter den Linden) and the aquarium at the Hamburg Zoo, describing their water circulation systems, aeration systems and their exhibition styles, noting that it was ‘like cutting out a piece of the sea and positioning it to be viewed from the side’.6 Kume especially praised the Berlin Aquarium. At this aquarium, visitors could watch birds, reptiles and freshwater fish exhibited on the upper floor, and saltwater fish on the lower floor, while walking along a one-way path. The Berlin Aquarium’s famous grotto decorations and well-controlled lighting also increased the viewer’s sense of immersion.7 Japanese visitors felt as if they were walking through an undersea cave filled with the glow of a sunset. Kume commented, ‘With regard to the inside structure, it is not too much to say that it is the best aquarium in the world.’8 Although exotic animals – including camels, peacocks and tigers – had already been displayed in Japan in the Kujaku-chaya (孔雀茶屋, peacock-teahouse, or Kachochaya 花鳥茶屋, flower-bird-teahouse), and Japanese people had kept goldfish in glass bowls during the Edo period (1603–1867), Western zoos and aquariums represented a systematic way of researching, exploiting and controlling nature that had enabled Western countries to achieve scientific and economic superiority over Asian countries.9 Further, zoos filled with exotic animals could represent the power of their possessor. Harriet Ritvo suggests, for instance, that in the nineteenth century, the London Zoo ‘became part of the national rhetoric of imperial dominion … Access to the animals’ native territories symbolized British power and prestige.’10 It is not surprising then, that the first public aquarium in the world (The Fish House, 1853), which embodied Britain’s scientific superiority as well as the British Empire’s domination over the aquatic world, was erected at the London Zoo. As described below, Japanese visitors were not unaware of these symbolic characteristics of zoos and aquariums.

The Earliest Public Aquariums in Japan On 20 September 1882, a small public aquarium called Uo-nozoki (観魚室, the room for fish-watching) was built at the Ueno Zoo, which itself had opened on 20 March 1882 in Tokyo. This zoo was founded by Yoshio Tanaka (田中芳男, 1838–1916) with the help of Hisanari Machida (町田久成, 1838–97). At the end of the Edo period, Tanaka studied natural history under a physician. The Shogunate ordered Tanaka to collect

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specimens of Japanese insects and bring them to the International Exposition in Paris (1867).11 During the exposition, Tanaka probably visited the freshwater aquarium and the saltwater aquarium erected there. Both aquariums were decorated with rockwork, and the latter had an enormous tank that enabled visitors to see animals swimming not only on both sides of them, but also overhead.12 There was also a famous aquarium at the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation at the Bois de Boulogne. Yet, Tanaka seemed to be more impressed by the Jardin des Plantes and conceived the idea to establish a similar institute in Japan. Like the Jardin des Plantes, the Japanese site was to be composed of a museum and botanical and zoological gardens.13 Uo-nozoki was a humble building with ten tanks exhibiting mainly freshwater fish and occasionally saltwater fish (saltwater was drawn from the Sumida River at high tide). The corridor facing the tanks was dark, while the tanks were illuminated by sunlight streaming from above.14 This exhibition style was developed at the aquarium at the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation and subsequently adopted by other aquariums.15 During the 1880s–90s, turtles, newts, frogs and freshwater fish were exhibited at Uo-nozoki, and keepers also tried to rear saltwater animals. However, the variety of animals gradually decreased to a very small sample of freshwater species, including carp, goldfish and salamanders. Suzuki speculates that the small aquarium became less attractive than the terrestrial exhibitions which featured lions, tigers, white bears and other large exotic mammals.16 Uo-nozoki also had rival aquariums. The earliest one of these was the private Asakusa Aquarium (浅草水族館, 1885), where a Watatsumi figure (綿津見神 or 海 神, the Japanese sea-god) welcomed visitors into a cavernous tunnel (3 metres high, 3.6 metres wide, 11 metres long) decorated with stucco rockwork and featuring dozens of tanks on both sides.17 Tanks were connected by a reservoir, placed high above them in order to circulate the saltwater. Visitors could watch sea breams, blowfish, congers, flounders and other species. The aquarium’s second area featured an artificial pond inhabited by saltwater fish and adorned with the figure of a whale spouting water. Over ten freshwater tanks were exhibited in the aquarium’s third area, while the fourth area was again decorated with rockwork and displayed saltwater tanks.18 In spite of, or because of, its ambitious exhibitions, the Asakusa Aquarium did not last even a single year. Fish died one after another during the hot season, and the number of visitors decreased. It is assumed that the Asakusa Aquarium’s water circulation system had not been perfected.19

The Aquariums in Kobe, Tokyo and Sakai, 1897–1903 The Wada-misaki Aquarium 和田岬水族館, the aquarium at the Second Fisheries Exposition (1 September–30 November 1897 in Kobe), is regarded as the first fullyfledged public aquarium in Japan. The construction of the Wada-misaki Aquarium was initiated by Isao Ijima (飯島魁, 1861–1921), who studied under the zoologist Rudolf Leuckart in Leipzig and had possibly visited both the aquarium at the Leipzig Zoo and Berlin Aquarium.20 Dai-Nikai Suisan-hakurankai Fuzoku-suizokukan Hokoku (第二回水産博覧会付属水族館報告, The Report on the Aquarium of the Second

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Fisheries Exposition, 1898), published by the Department of Fisheries at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, offers details about the Wada-misaki Aquarium (Figures 11.1–11.3).21 The aquarium was erected on a 572-square-metre site in Waraku-en (和楽園, Waraku park) near the old fortress, a beautiful location by the seaside. The building was designed in a European architectural style, but according to Enomoto, it also followed the ‘Indian style’; it resembled a Christian church with two spires; however,  the

Figure  11.1  Tsunenobu Fujita 藤田経信 and Sotaro Enomoto 榎本惣太郎, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku 第二回水産博覧会附属水族館報告, ed. Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce 農商務省水産局 (1898), fig.  2. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency.

Figure  11.2 Fujita and Enomoto, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku, fig. 3. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency.

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Figure  11.3 Fujita and Enomoto, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku, fig. 1. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency.

form of the spires, arches and decorations were reminiscent of Indo-Islamic buildings from the early modern period such as the Mughal tomb of I’timād-ud-Daulah built between 1622 and 1628.22 The Wada-misaki Aquarium exhibition was made up of two dioramas, twenty-nine wall tanks, four desk tanks and one container for crabs along with two basins for reptiles and amphibians. The first diorama at the entrance was made of stucco rockwork. The water cascaded down along the rocks and streamed into the pond, and a painting of a distant view of the ocean hung at the back of the diorama. Leaving the entrance area, visitors walked along the one-way path viewing wall tanks on both sides. Most parts of the gangway were darkened to better display the aquatic animals.23 The first twenty tanks represented the coastal sea or the open sea, using rocks, sands, seaweed or cement. The largest tank was about 5.2 metres wide, 1.6 metres high and 1.7 metres deep. At the end of the marine animal exhibition, there was a deep-sea diorama. It consisted of a painting of deep-water fish living among rocks, real sponge specimens collected at Kanagawa, with thin blue cloths covering the front and top of the diorama to immerse the exhibits in blue light.24 Beyond the diorama were freshwater wall tanks, while small desk tanks, basins and incubators showing fertilized trout eggs along with fry from Hokkaido were exhibited in the final room.25 In total, 4,213 saltwater animals and 1,372 freshwater animals were exhibited at the aquarium. Many saltwater animals were brought from the Seto Inland Sea, which the aquarium overlooked, and also from Kanagawa and Okinawa. The animal collection consisted of bony fish (including sea breams, blowfish, sea horses, flounders, goldfish, carp), cartilaginous fish (sharks and rays), cephalopods (octopi and squid), cnidarian (such as jellyfish, sea anemones, sea urchins), crustaceans, amphibians (newts and

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salamanders) and reptiles (sea turtles, freshwater turtles, sea kraits). Remarkably, hawksbill turtles were brought in from Okinawa and colonial Taiwan. Many of the freshwater animals were sent from Gifu, while the coconut crabs, as well as some reptiles, were also from Okinawa.26 Both seawater and fresh water were supplied to the aquarium by a private company and stored in ponds, then filtered using sand before being poured into reservoirs. An oil engine pumped the water to other reservoirs, set at a height of eleven metres, from where the water flowed down to the tanks. The stream also aerated the water (the large tanks were also aerated by other pipes placed on their bottoms). The drained water was returned to the pond and then filtered again.27 Because the Wada-misaki Aquarium was still the first example of the construction of a fully fledged aquarium in Japan, the Report on the Aquarium of the Second Fisheries Exposition describes numerous challenges involved in keeping animals: a lack of systems to adjust water temperature which seriously stressed the animals, and the inconsistent salinity in the supplied water especially on extremely hot or rainy days.28 Some species were vulnerable to instabilities in their environment. For example, eight of fifteen stingrays, all three sandbar sharks, three-banded houndsharks and six guitarfish died during the exposition. The mortality of some invertebrate species, such as octopi, squids, sea slugs, turban shells and jellyfish, was 100 per cent, and two of three sea kraits and all three of the coconut crabs from Okinawa did not survive the cold weather.29 Transportation from remote locations, fights between the tank’s coinhabitants and parasites further harmed the aquarium’s animals.30 However, in spite of these problems, the aquarium succeeded in gaining broad popularity. On the days the aquarium was open, too many visitors entered and were eventually pushed out through the exit without having enough time to view the fish. During the exposition period, the aquarium recorded 198,980 visitors. The facility was relocated to the Minatogawa Shrine (湊川神社) in 1901–2 and maintained by the Hyogo Kyosai Corporation (兵庫共済株式会社, a company which operated the amusement park at Waraku-en) until 1910.31 The idea for establishing a second private aquarium in Tokyo was conceived by Minoru Ota (太田實) and his associates when they saw the success of the aquarium in Kobe. Ota was one of the founders of the Japan Fisheries Association (大日本水 産会), a private organization which aimed to cultivate expertise in developing and managing fisheries. Under Ijima’s instruction, the Asakusa-koen Aquarium (浅草公 園水族館, different from the Asakusa Aquarium mentioned above) was established in 1899 (Plate 22).32 According to Tokyo-meibutsu Asakusa-koen Suizokukan Annai (東京 名物浅草公園水族館案内, Asakusa-koen Aquarium Guidebook: Tokyo’s Special Spot, 1899), the aquarium was a European-style building with sixteen saltwater tanks. The water circulation and aeration systems at the Asakusa-koen Aquarium were basically the same as those at the Wada-misaki Aquarium. Visitors entered a grotto-like tunnel to view tanks representing various areas and depths of the sea. Although the aquarium was constructed on a site of less than sixty square metres, and was not a very large building, it kept tanks with sea turtles, sharks, rays and migratory fish such as mackerel and yellowtail.33 An Asahi Shimbun reporter was impressed by a spider crab, more than two-metres long, but found it regrettable that

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a sawshark broke its snout and subsequently died because of the small capacity of its tank.34 Many animals were brought to the aquarium from Miura, in Kanagawa, and a special vessel was built to keep them alive during transport through the supplying of fresh, filtered seawater.35 The Guidebook also contains tankas (Japanese poems with thirty-one syllables) composed at a poetry contest with an aquarium theme. Some of the poets likened their experiences at the aquarium to those at Ryugu (龍宮, the dragon palace), a mythical underwater topos. As I describe below, this term is important for understanding the cultural features of early Japanese aquariums. Ijima was also appointed to design the Sakai Aquarium. It was a part of the Fifth National Industrial Exposition (1  March–31  July 1903) held in Osaka and Sakai, but was constructed as a permanent building, covering an area of about 721 square metres.36 Ijima applied all his existing skills along with knowledge gained from his travels through the United States and Europe. Tokichi Nishikawa (西川藤吉), who assisted Ijima during the construction of Wada-misaki Aquarium, was appointed as a manager at the Sakai Aquarium, also brought knowledge acquired during his research trips to Australia and New Zealand.37 The Sakai Aquarium building (Figures 11.4 and 11.5), designed in a blend of Japanese and Western styles, contained twenty-nine tanks (twenty-two for saltwater animals and seven for freshwater animals), a seal pool and eight reserve tanks.38 Blue glass was inserted to create an illusion of space on either side or at the back of many of the tanks, and realistic scenes of different aquatic settings and depths were reconstructed

Figure 11.4  The Sakai Aquarium with traditional figures of dolphin-like fish on the roof, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai: Shashin-cho 第5回内国勧業博覧会―写真帖 (c. 1903), n.p. Kansai University Library.

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Figure 11.5  Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai: Shashin-cho, n.p. Kansai University Library.

with the assistance of real and artificial materials. The seventeenth tank (about 6.7 metres wide, 1.6 metres high and 2.1 metres deep) was particularly interesting. Due to the addition of blue glass at the back of the tank, visitors saw large fish swim into a seemingly infinite seascape stretching out between overhanging cliffs.39 The fifteenth tank, which was suspended from the ceiling and had a structure that enabled visitors to observe fish from below, was also notable.40 Freshwater tanks were also well designed. Sand and gravel, gabions, stakes, stone walls and decayed logs were inserted in the tanks to represent Japanese water environments.41 The fourteenth tank demonstrated how grebes catch live fish.42 The seal pool was created to look like a coastal rock reef using natural rocks and cement.43 The inside of the building was darkened like the other aquariums described above, and artificial lighting was set over the water surface for night viewings.44 There was also a goldfish pond and a greenhouse outside the aquarium. The greenhouse displayed aquatic animals in saltwater and freshwater tanks on desks.45 A fountain with a figure of a child holding a shell was built at the aquarium’s entrance, and another with a Ryujo (龍女) figure, a daughter of the dragon king, also called by the more popular name Otohime (乙姫),46 was installed in the adjacent French garden (Figure 11.6). Saltwater was supplied directly from the sea, and fresh water from a spring. Similar to the Wadamisaki Aquarium, the water at the Sakai Aquarium was stored in ponds, sent to display tanks after being filtered, and then streamed to ponds to be reused.47

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Figure 11.6  Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai: Shashin-cho, n.p. Kansai University Library.

The Sakai Aquarium’s main building exhibited 291 species. Most fish, both bony and cartilaginous, cephalopods, cnidarian, crustaceans, amphibians, reptiles, waterfowl and sea mammals (sea lions and fur seals), were collected in Japanese waters. Asian fish species known as San-pan-hi, Re-hi, Zen-hi, Kotai and Tosai were brought from Taiwan. Taiwanese plants were also displayed in the greenhouse.48 During the exposition period, the aquarium recorded 954,516 visitors.49 Audiences enjoyed the ‘extraordinary scene’ of jellyfish (though the jellyfish could not survive more than one day at the aquarium and had to be replaced almost daily), the pleasant movement of seafowl, along with the ‘beautiful sight’ of pipefish glittering during the aquarium’s night time illuminations.50 During night openings, nocturnal fish and diurnal animals moved so actively that some visitors found visiting the aquarium at night was much more fun. On the outside, the building and fountains were beautifully illuminated by white, blue and red lights.51 After the exposition, the Sakai Aquarium was sold to the city of Sakai. It burned down in 1935 but was rebuilt thanks to a donation from a citizen and existed until 1961. In contrast to the Asakusa-koen Aquarium, which closed in the 1930s, the Sakai Aquarium survived for almost sixty years.52

Features of Japanese Aquariums during the Meiji Period Aquariums built until the beginning of the twentieth century had various features in common. Above all, they were a hybrid of European and Japanese cultural elements. As institutions, they mediated Western views of nature. The modern aquarium, which

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separates aquatic animals from humans using glass and displays animals for human viewing, is a product of Western, pre-Enlightenment ideas about nature, recorded in Aristotle’s works and in the Bible; in these texts, animals existed for the sake of humans and could be dominated by them.53 Thus, it is no wonder that the aquarium was introduced to Japan, which aspired to be ‘westernized’, as a facility for learning European ways of classifying, observing and exploiting natural resources. As Kamagata suggests, the merit of the aquarium was emphasized in the introduction to the Report on the Aquarium of the Second Fisheries Exposition. The Report noted that, normally, aquatic animals are hidden under waves, and we lack enough knowledge of them to improve our technologies for exploiting them. However, aquariums enable us to observe animal behaviour in simulations of their natural environments, thus promoting scientific development. For example, English researchers observed whiting in the Brighton Aquarium in order to investigate whether trawl nets disturb whiting’s spawning grounds and concluded that whiting eggs are buoyant and cannot be damaged by nets. Since Japan is surrounded by seas filled with abundant aquatic animals, there was a need to research animals ‘as marine resources’.54 An almost identical case study can be found in the Asakusa-koen Aquarium guidebook55. Similarly, the author of Sakai Suizokukan Zukai (堺水族館図解, The Illustrated Guidebook of the Sakai Aquarium) did not fail to assert the merits of watching living fish for art, fisheries and research.56 The latter also introduces the Western classification of aquatic animals, binomial nomenclature, accurate illustrations of displayed animals and zoological descriptions along with their practical uses (Figure 11.7). For example, the author notes, ‘Sea turtles are tasty and cooked for high-grade dishes in Western countries.’57 It was not only European ideas but also some tangible materials that were imported from European countries to construct aquariums in Japan. For example, the oil engine for the water circulation system at the Wada-misaki Aquarium was assembled in Switzerland, while the pump was produced by the Kawasaki shipyard (川崎造船所).58 At the Sakai Aquarium, the glass for all tanks, varying from 2.4 centimetres to 3.9 centimetres thick, was manufactured in London.59 The oil engine and pumps for the Sakai Aquarium were produced in Japan, but the enamelled iron pipes, which provided filtered water to the tanks, were made in Germany.60 A German air compressor was also employed to aerate the saltwater tanks in the greenhouse.61 Japanese aquariums were practically a mixture of European and Japanese materials from the beginning. Even more interesting is the respective aquariums’ appearance. It was a matter of course to design aquarium buildings in the European style. However, architects were inclined to mix some ‘Asian’ elements into their designs. The above-mentioned Wadamisaki Aquarium, for example, was a European style building mixed with Indian spires, arches and decorations. Its design was possibly inspired by the traditional image of Ryugu, the dragon palace. In Japan, Ryugu has commonly been connected to the legend of Taro Urashima (浦島太郎). Urashima, a fisherman, helped a sea turtle escape from children who were ill-treating it. The turtle thanked him and brought him to Ryugu, located at the bottom of the sea. A beautiful princess named Otohime welcomed him and Urashima stayed for three years. One day, he missed his home and wanted to go back to land. Otohime allowed it and gave Urashima a box, prohibiting him from opening it. Urashima returned to land but realized that hundreds of years

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Figure 11.7  Office of the Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Sakai Aquarium 第五 回内国勧業博覧会堺水族館事務所, ed. Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Sakai Suizokukan Zukai 第五回内国勧業博覧会堺水族館図解 (1903), 32–3. Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency.

had passed there since he left. When he opened the box, despite Otohime’s warning, smoke emerged from it and Urashima instantly became a very old man. The Japanese have been fascinated by this legend for over 1000 years. In the earliest version (recorded in the eighth century), Urashima visits Mount Penglai (蓬莱山) beyond the sea with a turtle who transforms into a beautiful woman.62 Mount Penglai, a heavenly place home to immortals, is a legendary mountain derived from Chinese mythology.63 During the Muromachi period (1336–1573), Mount Penglai was replaced by Ryugu, the dragon palace imported from Indian and Chinese traditions.64 The image of Ryugu was further mixed with the ancient Japanese belief of Watatsumi’s undersea palace.65 In the newer version of story, it is Urashima who visits Ryugu and lives with Otohime, one of the Dragon King’s daughters. The Urashima legend describes the heavenly experience of visiting another world of beautiful inhabitants. This folktale was popular in the Meiji period so it is not surprising that the aquarium was imagined as a place that allowed people to visit the mythical palace summoned on land. Ryugu has also been illustrated by Japanese painters. It was commonly represented using Chinese or Korean architecture, because Japanese painters imagined the world beyond or beneath the sea to be like distant countries.66 Thus, if the Wada-misaki Aquarium was designed not only as a European-style facility, but also as a dragon

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palace, Indian motifs might be appropriate to decorate the church-like building since the idea of Ryugu originates in India. The Wada-misaki Aquarium was both ‘Western’ and ‘exotic,’ a space where visitors could experience Urashima’s underwater travels. The image of Ryugu is also found in the guidebook of the Asakusa-koen Aquarium. At the end of the book, some tankas (Japanese poems) composed by anonymous authors are introduced, and some poets compared the aquarium with Ryugu, such as the following example: Is it the dragon king’s city among wild waves, Here swim stingrays and there swim mackerels. 龍王のみやこもかくや荒潮の そこに赤えいここに青さば67

This image of an aquarium as the dragon palace was without doubt shared by the general public as well as by elites; at the centre of the French garden in front of the Sakai Aquarium, the ‘Otohime’s fountain’ was built to encourage expectations for travelling into the underwater world. The Urashima-legend was the ideal narrative to guide Japanese visitors. However, designers seemed to be unaware of the ironical sequence: the modernized dragon palace recommends visitors to cook sea turtles, not just observe them. It is also significant that aquariums in Kobe and Sakai exhibited animals from colonial Taiwan, suggesting an underlying imperial agenda as one of the principal features of Meiji-era aquariums. Taiwan was ceded to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and, already by 1897, hawksbill turtles had been brought to the Wada-misaki Aquarium from occupied Taiwan (also from Okinawa). Regardless of whether or not the aquarium’s founders were motivated by political intentions, the exhibit’s implication was obvious: Taiwanese animals represented the newly gained domain of imperial Japan. In other words, during that period, zoos or aquariums filled with exotic animals could not be separated from matters of colonialism. The same is true of the Sakai Aquarium, which exhibited freshwater fish from Taiwan (San-pan-hi, Re-hi, Zen-hi, Kotai and Tosai). According to the Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku (第五回内国勧業博覧会事務報告, The Secretary’s Report of the Fifth National Industrial Exposition, 1904), their exhibitor was the Governor-General of Taiwan.68 Another document, Sakai Suizokukan-ki (堺水族館記, Descriptions of the Sakai Aquarium), suggests how these fish seemed to Japanese visitors. San-pan-hi, also called Taiwanese goldfish, have long dorsal and pelvic fins. Re-hi look like a lizardfish with bright eyes and are ‘very ugly’; Zen-hi are similar to lampreys, with very small eyes, which make them ‘ugly’. The remaining two species look similar to forktail bullheads.69 These descriptions suggest that these fish were exotic enough to satisfy visitors wanting to see displays of spectacular fish from remote locations. The Sakai Aquarium’s exhibits were also linked with those at the Fifth National Industrial Exposition. While the name suggests that the exposition was a national fair, it was virtually an international exposition, hosting governments and companies from eighteen countries, including England, Germany, the United States, France, Russia, China

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and Korea, that exhibited 9,211 products within one pavilion, with Canada erecting an independent building for its exhibit.70 A Taiwan Pavilion was constructed at the request of the Governor-General of Taiwan. Mamiko Ito (伊藤真実子) speculates that the Governor-General gained this idea from colonial pavilions at the Paris International Exposition of 1900.71 The Taiwanese pavilion included original buildings relocated from Taiwan, where mannequins in local costumes were exhibited along with a variety of other products. There was a souvenir shop, café and restaurant where visitors were served by Taiwanese staff, and there was even a small zoo.72 One of the Governor-General’s intentions was to promote an understanding of the then-current status of Taiwan, but the pavilion’s representation and inclusion in the Exposition was actually ambiguous, positioning Taiwan as a part of Imperial Japan and as an exotic land at the same time.73 At the Sakai Aquarium, the fish and plants exhibited by the Governor-General of Taiwan must have held the same ambiguous status. The Sakai Aquarium took up a mission to show Japan as one of the most modernized and powerful countries in the world. Like its predecessor in Kobe, the Sakai Aquarium was not free from setbacks.74 Nevertheless, it could be proud of its elaborate exhibits, as Descriptions of the Sakai Aquarium highlighted praise the aquarium received from Western visitors, citing, for example, United States Commissioner of Fisheries, Dr H. M. Smith who compared the Sakai Aquarium ‘to the best aquariums in the world’ in terms of the good health and variety of animals; and the English Consul-General who praised the aquarium’s well-planned construction.75

Conclusion The establishment and development of early Japanese aquariums paralleled the progress of imperial Japan. The modern aquarium was regarded as an indispensable institution to demonstrate Western methods of exploiting aquatic animals to a Japanese public. Despite its humble start at the Ueno Zoo, the Japanese aquarium became grander in the following twenty years. Japanese traditional elements were also incorporated into aquarium design. The Asakusa Aquarium, the first private aquarium in Tokyo, was decorated with the figure of Watatsumi from ancient mythos. The Wada-misaki Aquarium was housed in a European-style building with Indian motifs that were possibly adopted to represent the image of Ryugu, and the Sakai Aquarium housed a figure of Otohime showing how the aquarium experience evoked the underwater travels of mythological figures. In terms of technology, European products supported important parts of aquariums’ operating systems. The early Japanese aquariums could thus be regarded as hybrids of European and Japanese cultures and materials. Like their Western counterparts, some aquariums also represented the power of the empire. When visitors observed animals from Taiwan in Japanese aquariums, they recognized Taiwan as the territory of imperial Japan. It was the Governor-General of Taiwan who built the Taiwan pavilion for the Fifth National Industrial Exposition

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and sent plants and animals to the Aquarium in Sakai. In this regard, early Japanese aquariums were a microcosm of an Asian country where people adopted Western ideas, institutions and technologies, hybridizing them with their own culture, and transforming their motherland into the empire of the sun.

Notes This chapter is translated and revised text from the third chapter of my book Suizoku-kan no bunka-shi: Hito, dobutsu, mono ga orinasu majutsu-teki sekai 水族館の文化史:ひ と.動物.モノがおりなす魔術的世界, published by Bensei-shuppan 勉誠出版 in 2018. This is a product of research which was financially supported by the Kansai University Fund for Supporting Young Scholars 2015 (The Study on the Cultural History of the Public Aquarium, 水族館の文化史に関する研究) and JSPS KAKENHI (16K16756). This research was also supported by the Kansai University’s Overseas Research Program for the year of 2016. I am also sincerely grateful to emeritus professor Takashi Hamamoto and Ms Tomoko Wakasa for checking my English and Japanese words and thank Enago (https://www.enago.jp/) for English language review. Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Dr Kate Davidson and Dr Molly Duggins for valuable advice and helpful revisions.   1 Katsumi Suzuki 鈴木克美 and Genjiro Nishi 西源二郎, Shinpan Suizokukan-gaku: Suizokukan no Hatten ni Kitai wo Komete 新版水族館学―水族館の発展に期待 をこめて (Hadano: Tokai University Press, 2010), 443. This number includes the aquarium in the Minatogawa Shrine (1902), which was originally built in Wadamisaki (1897) before relocating to this shrine.   2 In this essay, some old forms of Japanese characters (hiragana and kanji) are replaced by new forms.   3 Yukichi Fukuzawa 福澤諭吉, Seiyo Jijo 西洋事情 (Tokyo: Shokodo 尚古堂, 1866), 42.   4 Katsumi Suzuki, Suizokukan 水族館 (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 2003), 35–6.   5 Shu Mizusawa 水澤周, ‘Foreword’, in Beiou-kairan-jikki 米欧回覧実記, vol 1, edited by Kunitake Kume 久米邦武, 1878, translated into modern Japanese and annotated by Shu Mizusawa (Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2016), xi–xiii. The official purpose of the Iwakura Mission was to promote friendships between Japan and Western countries.   6 Kume, Beiou-kairan-jikki, vol 2 (2008): 63–4, 114, vol 3 (2008): 350–1, vol 4 (2008): 135. For more on the Crystal Palace aquarium and other British aquariums, see‘ Davidson and Duggins’s chapter in this volume.   7 K.E.O Fritsch, ‘Das Aquarium zu Berlin’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, vol 3, edited by Architekten-Verein zu Berlin (Berlin: Kommissions Verlag, 1869), 230–2, 248–9.   8 Kume, Beiou-kairan-jikki, vol 3 (2008): 351.   9 Kenji Wako 若生謙二, ‘Kindai-Nihon ni Okeru Dobutsuen no Hatten-katei ni Kansuru Kenkyu 近代日本における動物園の発展過程に関する研究’, Zoen Zassi 造園雑誌, 46, no. 1 (1982): 2–3; ‘Nichibei ni Okeru Dobutsuen no Hatten-katei ni Kansuru Kenkyu 日米における動物園の発展過程に関する研究’, diss., Tokyo University, Tokyo (1993), 17–28, Tetsuo Oga 相賀徹夫, ed., Kinsei Fuzoku Zufu, vol.5, Shijo-kawara 近世風俗 図譜　第五巻　四条河原 (Tokyo: Shogakukan 小学館, 1982), 66–7. The peacock-teahouse and the flower-bird-teahouse were amusement facilities where the public could drink tea while watching exotic animals.

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10 Harriet Ritvo, ‘The Order of Nature: Constructing the Collections of Victorian Zoos’, in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, edited by R.J. Hoage and William Deiss (Baltimore: The Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 50. 11 Tokio Sasaki 佐々木時雄, Dobutsuen no Rekishi 動物園の歴史 (Tokyo: Kodansha 講談社, 1987), 45–52. 12 Ursula Harter, Aquaria in Kunst, Literatur & Wissenschaft (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2014), 64–5. 13 Sasaki, Dobutsuen no rekishi, 54–6. ­14 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 45–7. According to an illustration presented on the official website of the Tokyo Sea Life Park, the outside appearance of the Uo-nozoki looked just like the entrance of a natural cave. Its design probably reflected those of European aquariums. Tokyo Sea Life Park, ‘Shashin de Hurikaeru 25 Nen 写真で ふりかえる25年’, Umi, Mirai, Inochi: Kasai Rinkai Suizokuen ha Kaien 25 Shunen うみ.みらい.いのち:葛西臨海水族園は開園25周年. https://www.tokyo-zoo. net/kasai25/history/index.html (accessed 27 August 2019). 15 Harter, Aquaria in Kunst, Literatur & Wissenschaft, 58. 16 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 46–50. 17 There were ‘seven (14 in total) glasses’ on both sides, but another document refers to ‘dozens of tanks’. It seems that the number of glasses did not accord with that of tanks. 18 Ibid., 55–61, ‘Asakusa Suizokukan 浅草水族館’, Yomiuri Shimbun 読売新聞. 14 October 1885 (morning edition), 2. 19 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 60–1. 20 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 76–83. 21 Tsunenobu Fujita 藤田経信 and Sotaro Enomoto 榎本惣太郎, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku 第二回水産博覧会附属水族館報告, edited by Department of Fisheries at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce 農商務省水産局 (Tokyo: Tokyo Insatsu 東京印刷, 1898). The chapter on animal keeping was written by Fujita and the chapter on architecture was by Enomoto. 22 Ibid., 49–50. 23 Ibid., 65. 24 Ibid., 5–12, 65–6. 25 Ibid., 46–7. 26 Ibid., 8–12, 24–5. 27 Ibid.,12–14. 28 Ibid., 12. 29 Ibid., 33–40. 30 Ibid., 30–2. 31 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 84–8, Shintarou Kamagata 鎌形慎太郎, ‘Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai ni Okeru Suizokukan no Jittai 第二回水産博覧会における水族館の 実態’, Hakubutsukan Zasshi 博物館学雑誌 40, no. 1 (2014): 82; Masatake Kawabe 川辺賢武, ‘Kobe no Suizokukan no Utsuri-kawari 神戸の水族館のうつりかわり’, Rekishi to Kobe 歴史と神戸 3, supplement 2 (1964): 33. 32 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 76, 91–103. 33 Tominosuke Fujino 藤野富之助, ed., Tokyo-meibutsu Asakusa-koen Suizokukan Annai 東京名物浅草公園水族館案内 (Tokyo: Kankai-do 瞰海堂, 1899), 7–15, Suzuki, Suizokukan, 93.

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34 ‘Suizokukan no Shingyo to Unpansen 水族館の新魚と運搬船’, Asahi Shimbun 朝日 新聞, 8 December 1899 (morning ed.), 4. 35 ‘Asakusa-koen no Suizokukan 浅草公園の水族館’, Asahi Shimbun, 7 October 1899 (morning ed.), 5; ‘Suizokukan-hatsumei no Seigyo-Unpansen 水族館発明の生魚運 搬船’, Yomiuri Shimbun. 8 December 1899 (morning ed.), 4. 36 Sakai shidan-kai henshu-kyoku 堺史談会編輯局, ed., Sakai Suizokukan-ki 堺水族 館記 (Sakai: Sakai-Shidan-kai Henshu-kyoku, 1903), 9. 37 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 109. 38 Sakai Shidan-kai Henshu-kyoku, Sakai Suizokukan-ki, 9; Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce 農商務省, ed., Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku 第 五回内国勧業博覧会事務報告, vol 2 (Tokyo: Tokyo Kobunsha 東京国文社, 1904), 9–11. ­39 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku, 10–14. 40 Sakai Shidan-kai Henshu-kyoku, Sakai Suizokukan-ki, 24. 41 Ibid., 31–5. 42 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku, 71. 43 Ibid., 11. 44 Ibid., 108. 45 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku, 7. 46 Sakai shidan-kai henshu-kyoku, Sakai suizokukan-ki, 10–11. 47 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku, 17–22. 48 Ibid., 26–47. 49 Ibid., 84. 50 Ibid., 66–71. 51 Sakai Shidan-kai Henshu-kyoku, Sakai Suizokukan-ki, 49–50. 52 Suzuki, Suizokukan, 107, 119–25. 53 Vicki Ellen Szabo, Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea: Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 15–16. 54 Kamagata, Hakubutsukan Zasshi 40, no. 1 (2014): 78–81; Fujita and Enomoto, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku, 1–3. 55 Fujino, Tokyo-meibutsu Asakusa-koen Suizokukan Annai, 1–5. 56 Office of the Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Sakai Aquarium 第五回内 国勧業博覧会堺水族館事務所, ed. Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Sakai Suizokukan Zukai 第五回内国勧業博覧会堺水族館図解 (Tokyo: Kinkodo 金港堂, 1903), 1. 57 Ibid., 60. 58 Fujita and Enomoto, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku, 72. Kamagata also notes: ‘It is remarkable that an oil engine imported from Europe supplied power for the water circulation/filtration system [of the Wada-misaki Aquarium]’: Kamagata, Hakubutsukan Zasshi 40, no. 1 (2014): 86. 59 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku, 13. 60 Ibid., 16–22. 61 Ibid., 56.

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62 Nihon-shoki 日本書紀, vol 1, translated into modern Japanese by Tsutomu Ujitani 宇 治谷孟 (Tokyo: Kodansha 講談社, 2015), 310. 63 Takayuki Mifune 三舟隆之, Urashima Taro no Nihonshi 浦島太郎の日本史 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan 吉川弘文館, 2015), 20–1. 64 Ibid., 91–104. 65 Kazuhiko Komatsu 小松和彦, Ikai to Nihonjin: Emonogatari no Sozo-ryoku 異界と 日本人―絵物語の想像力 (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten 角川書店, 2003), 79–80. 66 Ibid., 80. 67 Fujino, Tokyo-meibutsu Asakusa-koen Suizokukan Annai, 17. 68 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku, 43–4. 69 Sakai shidan-kai henshu-kyoku, Sakai Suizokukan-ki, 33–5. 70 Mamiko Ito 伊藤真実子, Meiji Nihon to Bankoku Hakuran-kai 明治日本と万国博 覧会 (Tokyo: Yosikawa Kobunkan, 2008), 101–3. ­71 Ibid., 108. 72 Katsuhiko Yamaji 山路勝彦, Osaka, Nigiwai no Hibi: Futatsu no Bankoku Hakurankai no Kaibo-gaku 大阪、賑わいの日々―二つの万国博覧会の解剖学 (Nishinomiya: Kwansei Gakuin University Press, 2014), 95–111; Ito, Meiji Nihon to Bankoku Hakuran-kai, 110. 73 Kyoko Matsuda 松田京子, Teikoku no Shisen: Hakurankai to Ibunka-hyosho 帝国の 視線―博覧会と異文化表象 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 2003), 75. 74 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku, 50–64. 75 Sakai Shidan-kai Henshu-kyoku, Sakai Suizokukan-ki, 43–4.

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Merging the University Museum and Volksbildung: The Curatorial Strategies of Berlin’s Museum für Meereskunde in 1900 Stefanie Lenk

The Museum für Meereskunde (MfM) – Museum of Ocean Studies – was the first museum to take a holistic approach to the sea, drawing on cutting-edge research in oceanography.1 Opened in 1906 in the heart of Berlin, the MfM was one of the most innovative science museums of its time. But the glory of the museum was short-lived. After suffering severe damage in the Second World War, the MfM was permanently closed in 1946.2 The unfortunate consequence of the museum’s closure in that year was that it became irrevocably linked to Germany’s recent past. No new beginnings could relativize the impression that would soon come to determine research discourse about the museum. For most scholars, the MfM’s ambitions and values are represented in exhibits like the fully furnished, full-scale copy of the bridge of the German liner Braunschweig (Figure 12.1) that had been added to the collection by 1913.3 Both its upper bridge – for regular navigation – and its lower bridge – used in combat – were accessible, showing, amongst other equipment, modern navigation instruments such as gyrocompasses in use by the German navy since 1908, as well as rapid-fireweapons.4 Exhibits like this one have fuelled the opinion that MfM’s highly innovative curatorial strategy was ultimately propagandistic in nature. It is widely held that the MfM was supposed to politicize and radicalize the German population in times of the Anglo-German naval arms race, and to demonstrate imperial power by highlighting both Germany’s military and civic achievements on the sea.5 The MfM was imperialist in its institutional set-up as well as in its mission. Founded in 1900 as a university museum in conjunction with the Institut für Meereskunde (IfM) of Friedrich Wilhelm University, today Humboldt University, the museum was opened by Kaiser Wilhelm II in Georgenstraße 34–36 near Museum Island. Its founding needs to be understood in the context of the First Naval Law of 1898 – the brainchild of Alfred von Tirpitz, Secretary of State of the Imperial Naval Office from 1897 – which began the armament of the German fleet, and the concomitant mobilization of the German population for the construction of the fleet.6 The Imperial Naval Office and the Kaiser were instrumental in initializing and shaping both the IfM and the MfM,

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Figure  12.1 Copy of the bridge of the liner ‘Braunschweig’, Reichs-Marinesammlung, Museum für Meereskunde. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q II.36.

and the founding director of both institutions, Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, was sympathetic to Tirpitz’s plans.7 While acknowledging the MfM’s political role, this paper sets out to recall the often forgotten academic interests and ideas that went into the creation of the museum as a university institution. I will argue for a more nuanced assessment of the curatorial decisions taken in the early days of the MfM, from 1900 to the eve of the First World War, when the museum’s character became predominantly war related.8 I will discuss this initial phase as an academic enterprise in which the museum was meant to promote the emerging science of Meereskunde (ocean studies) by reaching out to wider audiences. The MfM displayed a level of professionalism in this respect, then unknown in the German university museum landscape.9 Because of the MfM’s role in Tirpitz’s naval propaganda, the museum’s fundamental achievements in the field of public education tend to be discussed for their propagandistic value; this paper concentrates instead on their curatorial and didactic value. With the founding of the German Empire in 1871, Volksbildung – public education delivered by welfare associations and adult education centres – became a pressing issue. Volksbildung was aimed at fostering learning among

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the masses of modestly educated citizens in the emerging nation state.10 The MfM’s efforts in this respect were a significant contribution to a changing museum landscape concerned with clarity and accessibility.11 The pedagogical concept of the museum was stated in writing for the first time in 1900, after a study trip made by MfM staff members through the science museum landscape of Europe. The ‘Memorandum on the Occurrences of a Study Trip to France, England and the Netherlands’, preserved at the university archive of the Humboldt University of Berlin, an invaluable source for retracing the foundational years of the MfM, but also the early history of scientific and technical museum displays in Europe more widely.12 It is, to the best of my knowledge at least, an entirely unique portrait of the state of development of European maritime museums around 1900, with special focus on the nature of the collections and their presentation techniques. The insights gained from the memorandum will inform this chapter’s core themes. My argument encompasses three points. First, I argue that academic interests had a great influence on the MfM’s holistic approach to the marine sphere, unprecedented in the history of maritime museums. While Oceanographie was a branch of physical geography in late nineteenth-century German science that included all the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the sea, Meereskunde, on the other hand, was an umbrella term that comprised all marine science disciplines and could be extended to social sciences and humanities.13 It has been suggested that the museum’s holism was intended to underline German imperialist ambitions in all possible respects.14 I will provide additional evidence to the previously held argument that the MfM’s imperialism was indeed not a simple, one-dimensional war-related ideology.15 I further emphasize that imperialist and academic interests went hand in hand, since the wideranging museum programme served the academic aim of confirming the field of ocean studies as an umbrella science.16 Second, I show that the planning process for the museum display that eventuated was driven by constructive interactions with maritime institutions around the world. This reveals a strong commitment to make the MfM a museum inspired by international display standards and tied to, if not indebted to, international institutions. The memorandum testifies to the curatorial team’s unbiased openness to the best curatorial solutions regardless of national origin. This openness sits uncomfortably with any view that describes the MfM as predominantly ideological in its nationalist ambitions, and instead fits much better with the aim for objectivity inherent in academic work. Lastly, I argue that the MfM’s curatorial choices were aimed at demonstrating scientific knowledge effectively and were profoundly indebted to the didactic ideals associated with the Volksbildung movement circulating in German science museums at the turn of the century. The MfM’s application of modern curatorial methods, while in line with the intentions of the Naval Office, was not reducible to those methods, and must also be understood as an attempt to supersede the state of the art of contemporary curatorship. Making the MfM’s curatorial strategy the focus of the analysis helps us better understand how the sea was conceived of and represented in the early twentieth century. At the same time, this study is a contribution to the history of curation as an investigation of the beginning of a new era of didactic awareness in the display of science.

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At the Crossroads between a Navy Museum and a Museum of Ocean Studies The MfM considered itself to be a museum without prior models.17 This section explores the ways in which the MfM was innovative, the little we know of the internal debates about the museum’s scope, and the reasons behind its all-encompassing concept. The idea to create a maritime museum took shape for the first time after a successful exhibition of naval models in Berlin in the winter of 1897–8. This exhibition can be seen as one of the earliest publicity-oriented measures advocating German fleet building, an endeavour which gained momentum in 1898 when the Deutscher Flottenverein (German Fleet Association) was formed on Tirpitz’s initiative.18 Resuming an earlier discussion about creating a museum in connection with an institute for oceanography, Tirpitz suggested the foundation of a ‘Navy Museum with an attached Institute of Ocean Studies’ in January 1899.19 Henceforth, the Prussian Ministry of Culture, which oversaw cultural initiatives in the Prussian capital Berlin, and the German Imperial Naval Office cooperated to create the institute and museum. On 25  May 1899, Wilhelm II approved their foundation within Friedrich Wilhelm University.20 A year later, Ferdinand von Richthofen, widely recognized for the geographic exploration of China, was named director of the institute and of the Museum of Oceanography. By 1887, Richthofen had already become the founding director of the Geography Institute at Berlin University and fulfilled both positions until his death in 1905, the year before the opening of the MfM. The Kaiser took a personal interest in the internal structure of the MfM. In December 1901, he ordered the creation of a museum section for naval purposes only: the Collection of the Imperial Navy. This order led to an administrative structure which subordinated the museum to both the Imperial Naval Office and the Prussian Ministry of Culture. The Collection of the Imperial Navy was financed by the Navy, and its curator had to be chosen by Tirpitz.21 The historical, economic and natural sciences collections were subject to the Oceanography Institute and belonged to Prussia. Richthofen was paramount director of all these.22 The economist Ernst von Halle and the geophysicist Erich von Drygalski, both lecturers at Friedrich Wilhelm University, were appointed as chief curators. Halle was likewise head of public relations of the Navy Bureau from 1897 onwards, which demonstrates the close ties between the MfM and the German Navy.23 Rudolf Wittmer, curator of the Collection of the Imperial Navy, joined only in 1903, three years after the initial concept for the museum had been developed.24 The years from 1899 to 1901 were crucial to the MfM’s self-invention. A disagreement about the name of the museum reveals that the founding members of the museum formed two factions which had contrasting ideas about the overall direction the museum should take. A camp promoting a predominantly naval character for the museum confronted a more holistic and, as I will argue, more academic viewpoint. The controversy is discernible only from the names given to the projected museum. In January 1899, Tirpitz had suggested the foundation of a ‘Navy Museum with an attached Institute of Ocean Studies’.25 In the following months, when the Ministry

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of Culture and the Navy bureau fleshed out an initial plan together, the term ‘Navy’ was downplayed in the museum’s proposed name: ‘Institute of Ocean Studies with Collections of the Marine sciences (Navy Museum)’.26 In October 1900, the newly appointed director Richthofen dispensed with the term ‘Navy’ in an official document when he published the ‘Memorandum on the Occurrences of a Study Trip to France, England and the Netherlands’. The title featured in the memorandum, ‘Institute and Museum of Ocean Studies’, finally prevailed.27 It seems that Richthofen had planned from early on to assert an ocean studies focus at the expense of a naval one, as his correspondence with Friedrich von Althoff, Prussia’s Minister of Culture, suggests. Althoff was an old confidant of Richthofen who had created the chair in physical geography in Berlin for Richthofen in 1886.28 The shift away from Tirpitz’s original plans of a Navy Museum, diplomatically placed in brackets in mid-1899, was effected in writing in meetings between the Imperial Naval Office and the Ministry of Culture. In his correspondence with Althoff in 1900, Richthofen uses ‘Museum of Ocean Studies’, while in the following year official correspondence addressed to the MfM still tends to refer to the ‘Navy Museum’.29 Reluctance in naval circles to accept the dropping of ‘Navy’ from the name can be seen in the title of a document from August 1901 authored by MfM curator and member of the Navy bureau, Ernst von Halle, who, almost a year after Richthofen had coined the name Meereskundemuseum in the memorandum, writes on the ‘Institute of Ocean Studies and Navy Museum’.30 A division into two factions, however, cannot have been too neat an affair. This situation is illustrated in a secret, undated and unsigned ‘Memorandum for the foundation of a Navy Museum in Berlin’ which was likely authored by Richthofen.31 The document, arguably written in 1899, describes the future structure and content of the museum.32 It divides the museum into technical-economic and scientific-mathematic sections, and fleshes out sub-divisions in great detail. The memorandum is explicit about the propagandistic value of a Navy Museum for the acquisition of overseas territories.33 Its general coherence with later writings of Richthofen – in its substance and in partial or whole paragraphs – makes it plausible that it was authored by the same hand.34 The emphasis placed on the national importance and naval purpose of the museum foundation certainly had, amongst other purposes, the function of demonstrating the relevance of the museum project to all parties concerned. It was, however, Richthofen’s more encompassing vision of the MfM’s function that was to endure under the direction of his successor, the geographer Albrecht Penck, who served as director of the Oceanography Museum from 1906 to 1922. Two years before the outbreak of the First World War, Penck reminded the Geographical Society of Vienna that Richthofen ‘recognised with clear vision that neither a navy museum nor an institute of global economy are called for, but that the new foundation would rather need to devote itself to a higher purpose, namely to demonstrating the importance of the high sea in all its aspects to the German people’.35 The holistic curatorial concept of the MfM was in line with the geographic research promoted by the Institute of Ocean Studies. Beyond that, the curatorial concept was significantly shaped by the experiences from the study trip to European maritime museums, the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and science

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museums that hosted significant maritime collections. Such research trips have not been a frequent object of study in the history of museums so far, and yet they are a common way of engaging with different museological practices and of creating ties with partner institutions. The MfM documented several such trips through Germany, Europe and the United States.36 While the holistic approach of the MfM’s display was possibly fleshed out by 1899, the study tour, undertaken over twenty-seven days in July and August 1900, had a substantial impact on the individual design and interpretation of the respective sections of the permanent display.37 The trip further helped the commission form a shared understanding of the museum’s tasks and infuse the academically trained curators with enthusiasm for their new jobs.38 The commission consisted of Richthofen, Halle, the geographer Wilhelm Meinardus (in place of the unwell Drygalski) and the director’s secretary Paul Dinse.39 The itinerary consisted of seventeen locations in total. The entire committee visited London and Paris together. In London the group saw the Museum of the United Service Institute, the maritime collections of Greenwich Hospital, South Kensington Museum, Trinity House, the Natural History Museum and the Museum of Practical Geology. In Paris they visited the Musée de la Marine in the Louvre, the collections of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, as well as the sections on shipping, oceanography and nautical and oceanographic instruments at the Exposition Universelle. The commission separated for excursions to Edinburgh (Challenger collections, Museum of Science and Art, Scottish Fishery Board), Manchester (Owens College), Plymouth (Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association), The Hague (temporary exhibition on the history of the Dutch Navy) and Amsterdam (Marine collection of the Rijksmuseum).40 The sixty-three-page-long memorandum summarized the findings of the excursion, drew conclusions for the displays of the MfM and described the individual visits in an appendix.41 The reports go into a level of detail that allows us, to some degree, to reconstruct which institutions the curators took their inspiration from for specific exhibits. By and large, the commission considered the British collections and the Exposition Universelle to be the most useful to them, while the French and Dutch displays they found only sporadically instructive. On the whole, in museums of all the countries visited, they observed that collections consistently focused on some or all of the same five themes: (1) Navy; (2) Merchant navy; (3) Shipbuilding; (4) Coasts and harbours; (5) Navigation and instruments.42 Fishing played a marginal role in many collections, and ethnographical subjects were touched on at times, but without following any guiding principles.43 The commission ascertained that the collections’ purposes were usually to remind visitors of national achievements and earlier stages of national development in uplifting ways, as well as to foster the interest of general audiences in the world of the oceans, and, lastly, to develop maritime expertise.44 The scientific dimension of the sea was, however, almost completely excluded from museum displays. Physical, chemical and biological aspects, as well as methods and tools of scientific exploration, were, if not absent or outsourced to other institutions (like zoological museums, for instance), treated only unsystematically in the context of one of the five core themes.45

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Following on from this, Richthofen sketched out the mission of the MfM to incorporate displays on ‘besides seafaring, everything which concerns the knowledge of the sea and its economic exploitation’.46 The suggestions made for thematic threads in the memorandum evolved in 1904 into four museum branches located in Georgenstraße:47 1. The Imperial Naval Collection on the history and organization of the navy, on warships, their equipment and armament as well as on coastal defence. 2. The history and economics collection on the historical development of seafaring, ship building and marine engineering, maritime traffic, global economy, ports and coastal installations, nautical professions, rescue services and water sports. 3. The oceanology collection on the form and structure of oceans and coasts, on the physics and chemistry of the sea, on maritime meteorology and geomagnetism, astronomical geography and nautical matters. 4. The biology collection on marine organisms, their conditions of living, spreading and economic use, as well as ocean fishing.48 This list tells us two things. First, the MfM aimed to become a global showcase for the nascent academic fields of oceanography and marine biology. The attached Institute of Ocean Studies was the first of its kind in Europe.49 The commission came to realize during the study trip that even an expedition as important as the British Challenger Expedition (1872–6), which had laid the material foundation for the discipline of Oceanography and discovered over 4,000 species, was still nowhere represented in a publicly accessible way.50 Part of the Institut für Meereskunde’s strategy was hence to legitimate the emerging sciences publicly through the MfM.51 Second, the MfM wanted to be comprehensive in its collection at all costs.52 MfM’s ambition to surpass all other maritime museums in this respect is a consequence, I contend, of its status as a university institution. The museum concept was shaped by a holistic understanding of the field of ocean studies as it was promoted by the researchers of the IfM. The museum’s director Penck described the MfM in 1907 as follows: ‘a museum which shows the sum of phenomena which relate to a special part of the surface of the earth. Such a museum is in its essence geographical’.53 The geographical scope and surface-approach of the MfM were novelties in the field of maritime museums. In this regard, the geographer Penck was following Richthofen. Richthofen, whose own research explored the interdependence of organic and inorganic material at the earth’s surface, had argued since the 1880s for an understanding of geography as the research of the surface of the earth. In marine terms, Richthofen defined both the surface of the sea as well as the seabed as surfaces.54 The surface-approach was decisive for the consolidation of the academic discipline of geography which had suffered in the previous decades from a lack of direction.55 The MfM was the first institution to apply Richthofen’s methodology publicly to a branch of geography. MfM and ocean studies followed the tradition of geography’s founding fathers Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter who had treated geography as an umbrella discipline encompassing scientific and social sciences disciplines like meteorology, oceanography, geography of plants and animals, ethnology and political

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geography.56 The choice of a universal approach for the MfM, and the insistence on the name Meereskundemuseum, should be understood as a significant step in the larger game of science policy. Establishing the ‘museum of ocean studies’ as a museum type was a way of configuring the discipline of ocean studies at a time when thinking about the future direction of the geographical sciences was in flux and negotiable, as was the allocation of political backing and funds.57 Richthofen’s decision to establish the inclusive character of the MfM as its core feature, as opposed to emphasizing the naval dimension, was driven by academic interests and apparently brought to bear against the opposition of the Navy Bureau.

Volksbildung and Display Culture The second half of this chapter is devoted to the practical implementation of the museum commission’s ideas. The excursion to France, Britain and the Netherlands gave committee members an increased awareness of didactically useful ways to display and interpret exhibits.58 The MfM’s special attention to clarity and accessibility in its displays attests to its strong ambition to set into practice what had been learned abroad, and underlines the importance the university institution gave to the ideals of Volksbildung. Besides propagandistic aims, two other aspects should be discussed as motors for curatorial innovation. There is, first, the predominantly unsystematic display technique of science museums around 1900 as well as the lack of any bestpractice guidelines for the hitherto non-existent type of the museum of ocean studies. Second, the developments at the MfM need to be looked at in the context of the wider movement of science museums redefining their target audiences in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In the memorandum, Richthofen summarizes a number of guidelines regarding the display of museum objects based on insights learned during the study trip: 1. Avoiding exhibiting too much of the same. 2. ­Models of ships or parts of ships should be built on equal scale to simplify comparison. 3. Models of entire ships and complex machinery should be visible in the round. 4. Cross sections or longitudinal sections of ships can be displayed next to each other on a wall to save space, as demonstrated in the Royal Naval Museum. 5. Working models that can be activated by the visitor are highly recommended, as the South Kensington Museum and the Royal Naval Museum have shown. 6. Full-scale objects are preferable to models of reduced size to give the visitor an idea of real proportions. 7. There should be labels and they should be ‘short, but extensive’, following the model of the navy section of the South Kensington Museum, to give lay audiences the possibility to educate themselves about objects that would otherwise have slipped their attention.59

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The rapidly developing market for international and commercial exhibitions, as well as the wave of new museum foundations, at the turn of the century can give a distorted impression of the state of curatorial practices at the time. Richthofen’s guidelines seem commonsensical enough to be accepted by every maritime museum catering for general audiences, provided that sufficient funding was available. And yet, Richthofen’s list documents prospects for such museums around 1900, when the reality tended to look much more haphazard (Figure 12.2). Curatorial thinking about the needs of lay audiences was still in its infancy. At the heart of MfM’s motivation to change this situation lay its mission to reach the general public, at the expense of specialists’ interests: ‘The museum ought not to be just a collection of the institute that is also open to the public; its purpose, rather, is first and foremost to be, like the large navy museums in Paris and London, an open, public collection, which encourages interest in all the fields of the navy and ocean studies in the population.’60 The MfM faced a societal challenge: the rapid technological developments of the time, and the transformations of work and daily life they wrought, confronted a population whose education had traditionally been limited to reading, writing and basic mathematics. In 1891, 91 per cent of all pupils in Prussia were

Figure  12.2  View into the seafaring section and whaling section of the Focke Museum in Bremen. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q IX.23.

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educated in popular schools (Volksschulen), where class sizes of 70–150 pupils were common. Scientific lessons were limited to the remaining nine per cent.61 The need for public science education triggered a wave of new foundations committed to Volksbildung; Berlin alone saw, besides the MfM, the establishment of the Museum für Naturkunde (1889), the Volksbildungsstätte Urania, which created the first public observatory (1889), and the Königliches Bau- und Verkehrsmuseum (1906).62 Urania especially, privately financed mainly by bankers and industrialists like Werner von Siemens, became hugely popular due to its exhibits that allowed visitors to undertake experiments independently with light, sound, heat, electricity and magnetism.63 The institution’s strategy to let visitors participate in scientific experiments was copied by other Uranias across continental Europe. Like Urania, the MfM set out to cater for audiences without any background in science. In contrast to the Deutsches Museum in Munich which was hesitant to get engaged in social politics, the MfM collaborated with Volksbildung associations. The MfM was free of charge and, in cooperation with the Zentralstelle für Volkswohlfahrt (Centre for Public Welfare), it offered guided tours to workers before regular opening hours.64 Public lecture series, organized by the IfM, began in 1900, even before lectures for students had been arranged.65 Illustrated by means of a magic lantern, an early type of image projector, they covered a variety of topics related to the sea. The program built on existing German museum practices designed to reach out to wider audiences; the commission noted that nothing comparable had been attempted in the institutions visited abroad.66 MfM’s efforts paid off: the talks quickly became popular, attracting an average of over 200 listeners as often as four times a week.67 In its first budget year, 1906/07, the MfM counted 115,728 visitors; with 146,537 in the following year.68 By comparison, the ‘Naval, Marine Engineering and Buckland Fish Collection’ of the by then renamed Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) – formerly South Kensington Museum – had 377,077 visitors in 1906, while the V&A’s ‘Collections for Scientific Instruction and Research’, which exhibited predominantly nautical and oceanographic instruments, counted 87,629 visitors.69 Compared to the V&A, however, which closed on some evenings as late as 10.00 pm, the opening hours of the MfM were very limited.70 The MfM opened on Saturdays and Mondays (10.00 am–3.00 pm) and Sundays (12.00 pm–4.00 pm). On Tuesdays it opened for school classes, students and associations.71

Accessibility and Interactivity The commission’s plan to create an accessible and educative experience for everyone was put into practice. The museum display followed the guidelines laid out in the memorandum, systematizing display standards such as consistency of scale for ship models (1:50), accessible, freestanding displays of complex objects and uncluttered exhibition spaces (Figure  12.3).72 At the same time, large-scale objects and full-size models were acquired by the museum. The example of industrial exhibitions and the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1900) were pivotal in this respect. A full-scale copy of the bridge of the Braunschweig (Figure  12.1), recorded in 1913, was very likely

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Figure 12.3  Room I on the history of the German navy, Reichs-Marinesammlung, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q II.9.

inspired by a display curated by the Navy Museum of Saint Petersburg in the Armées de Terre et de Mer hall of the Exposition Universelle.73 The commission found the Russian exhibition space, filled with a command bridge spanning the entire room and completely equipped with all necessary instruments and apparatuses, ‘absolutely worthy of imitation’.74 The MfM produced many more large-scale replicas. When the museum opened, the basement of the museum hosted the interior of the training ship Niobe, which partially reused original components.75 Storerooms, the men’s quarter, the caboose, the sick bay with the ship’s pharmacy, the cabin of the navigating officer and the gun room were furnished in a manner ‘as lifelike as possible’.76 Other rooms included a torpedo boat commander’s cabin, the storeroom of the torpedo boat S17, and the second-class cabin of an ocean liner. The 1907 museum guide apologizes for the replica furniture of the cabin being not as magnificent as the original.77 The new guide of 1913 could list, however, a first-class cabin of an ultra-modern express steamer of the Bremenbased company Norddeutscher Lloyd (Figure 12.4).78 Apparently, it was imperative to show the interior of an ocean liner in an up-to-date version and at its best. The curators were here not so much competing with displays of other museums but, rather, with the high standards set by the industrial exhibits at the international exhibitions.79 Decisive for MfM’s didactic approach was the commission’s finding of the interactive models of steam engines in the Naval Models and Marine Engineering collection, as well as the collection of Fish Culture, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Steam

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Figure  12.4 Replica of a first-class cabin, room 1, history and economics collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q III.13.

engineering, pioneered in Britain, was given centre stage at the V&A. In 1901, one year after the commission’s visit, the total number of models of machines shown in operation was 155. Sixty-nine of them related to marine engineering.80 The working model of the engine of SS A. Lopez, built on a scale of 1:4, drove, through a shaft beneath the floor, all the other marine models, both free-standing and those in display cases.81 In addition to engines, paddle wheels and screw propellers could also be set in motion. Young people especially enjoyed pushing the buttons on the engines, boilers and other machinery to set them in motion. The commission was impressed with the constant inflow of curious visitors, even late in the evening, and acknowledged the relaxed attitude of the wardens towards even the youngest visitors.82 The interactive displays of the trailblazing V&A and Urania created exactly the sort of dynamism and environment for engaging education that the MfM and other German science museums aimed for at the turn of the century.83 Shortly after the study trip, the insurance company Aachener und Münchener Feuerversicherung endowed the MfM with 250,000 Reichsmarks under the condition that Wilhelm II was to decide on how to use the donation. The Kaiser opted for the establishment of a collection of model engines.84 In 1913, thirteen working models of marine engines on a scale of 1:10 were demonstrated in operation in the history and economics collection.85 Unfortunately, there are so few records of the display that it remains uncertain whether visitors were invited to activate the machines themselves.

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Figure  12.5  Working model of a ship model basin in room 6, history and economics collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q III.19a.

The engine models were not the only exhibits that could be set in motion. The 1913 museum guide also records the working model of a ship model basin (Figure 12.5). Eighteen meters long, it filled almost the whole length of gallery 6 of the history and economics section.86 This time, the model demonstrated present German technical developments. Germany started to build these basins at the turn of the century, which were used to experiment with water resistance in order to optimize drive systems and refine the design of ship-hulls; one of the first basins was constructed by the Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau in Berlin in 1903.87

Sensationalism or Effectively Displayed Research? The process of developing the biological section of the museum demonstrates that academic reasoning could be the determining factor when the MfM went for a particularly spectacular display mode. The curators had to invent the display of the biological section almost from scratch, as European museums offered very little orientation in ways to present sea life that were in accordance with the MfM’s understanding of marine biology.88 The testimony of the American zoologist Charles Atwood Kofoid, who in 1910 published a report on about one hundred European marine biological stations, confirms the genuine novelty of MfM’s displays, which he claimed to be ‘unique in their purpose and design’.89

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Around 1900, the predominant presentation technique of natural science museums followed the taxonomic system, which describes, names and classifies natural specimens. Yet, the budding science of ecology, promulgated initially by zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, was reshaping the foundations of the discipline of biology in Germany and beyond. Ecological research properly started with a contribution from the field of marine biology, Karl Möbius’ ‘Die Auster und die Austernwirtschaft’ (‘The Oyster and Oyster Farming’) in 1877.90 In the Memorandum, Richthofen determined that Facies, an outdated term for a community of living creatures (biocoenosis) forming a unity with a special environment (biotope), which, because of a reciprocal dependency regulates itself (the ecosystem), were to form the heart of MfM’s biological section.91 This decision triggered a fundamental shift away from traditional display techniques to biotic exhibits which capitalized on the interplay of sea life and its environment (Figure 12.6). Displaying ecosystems was a spectacular way to introduce marine biology to museum audiences. As Lynn Nyhart has shown, innovative display techniques of the

Figure 12.6  Diorama of the coral reef off the Sinai, room 13, biology collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q VII.20a.

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kind employed by the MfM encountered resistance at times. In her study on group displays in German biological collections at the turn of the century, Nyhart retraces the concerns of museum professionals about the ‘sensationalism’ of displaying animal groups, sometimes placed within simulations of their natural habitats. This display mode had first emerged in the 1890s and, to some museum professionals, seemed somewhat comparable to the waxworks and curiosities of the private commercial collections and trade fairs so popular at the time.92 Yet, the fear of sensationalism has left no trace in the surviving documentation of the MfM.93 The curators must have taken confidence in the fact that their displays, spectacular or not, were in keeping with the research agenda of the MfM. Displays such as the section of coral reef from the Red Sea (Figure 12.6) – transferred from El Tor on the coast of the Sinai Peninsula to the MfM following an excursion of the IfM – were effective illustrations of the interdependence of living nature and geological and geophysical conditions. The museum guide explained in detail the exact location of the extracted tranche of the coral reef in relation to the shoreline, physical conditions which led to the growth of the corals at this location, and how the reef slowly developed through the corals’ secretion of calcium carbonate.94 Meanwhile, the adjacent alcoholaria – aquaria-like glass boxes filled with alcohol and dead specimen of marine plants and animals to create the illusion of living nature – were arranged to give the illusion of a seabed; as the habitat for sea life, they attracted as much attention as the sea dwellers themselves (Figure 12.7).95 The

Figure 12.7  Alcoholarium, ecological display of the seabed nearby Helgoland in 25 metres depth, biology collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q VII.35.

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coral reef display and alcoholaria were at the intersection between marine biology and oceanography, and thus helped demonstrate the need for the interdisciplinary research field of ocean studies.

Negotiating between Academic Visitors and the General Public Given how successfully the MfM implemented its mission to cater for non-specialist audiences, it is all too easy to forget that the museum was a university institution, curated by academics, and attached to an institute which provided the intellectual groundwork for the museum and used it as teaching aid. The museum’s oceanographic section, perhaps fairly described as the academic heart of the collection, presents us most clearly with the challenges the MfM faced in negotiating between the needs of lay audiences and specialists. Even more so than his colleagues, the curator of the oceanography collection, Walter Stahlberg, formerly a secondary school teacher, excelled in combining abstract concepts with real-life scenarios in order to make knowledge accessible to the general public.96 For instance, to demonstrate the overall amount of salt in all the oceans worldwide, he used Berlin’s city palace, the Berliner Schloss, as a reference point (Figure 12.8). A display case demonstrated how deep the salt of global marine space would be if all the oceans’ salt were to settle on the seabed in an even layer. Stahlberg’s

­Figure  12.8 Room 17, oceanography collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q V.5a.

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display showed that the layer of salt would exceed the height of Berlin’s palace by one meter. Next to the image, real salt blocks and drill cores gave viewers a good idea of the composition of salt deposits.97 Stahlberg’s displays are remarkable for their purist aesthetic, in sharp contrast to the predominantly affective display culture of other sections of the MfM. But they were not without precedents. The memorandum mentions a ‘quite remarkable’ statistical presentation at the Chambres de Commerce maritimes at the Exposition Universelle which illustrated by means of cubes of different sizes and colours the economic importance of import and export articles for French maritime trade.98 Several sets of cubes were also used in the initial display of the oceanography collection. The institute also used them for teaching purposes.99 One of these displays illustrates the volume of the oceans worldwide (Figure 12.8). It consists of a white marble cube of one cubic meter representing the earth’s mass upon which several smaller cubes are placed; on the lower board, three marble cubes represent the mass of the ocean (right), the mass of the part of the continental crust between the seabed and the surface of the sea (left), and the mass of the surface of the earth above sea level (middle). On the upper board, yellow cubes represent the weight of the aforementioned masses. The oceans and the continental crust are thus shown to have similar weights.100 Clarity and accessibility, however, could not be achieved through visual media alone, but had to be put into language as well. In respect to the textual interpretation of museum objects, Stahlberg’s ambitions drifted in the opposite direction, away from universal intelligibility, and towards more specialist terminology and hyper-detailed descriptions. A sample of over 100 labels written for the Oceanography collection between 1907 and 1914 has been preserved in the archive of the Deutsches Museum in Munich.101 The only surviving label that explains how to use a working model (Figure  12.9) describes a wave generator after A. du Bois Raymond. The machine could be used to create waves that followed the physical laws of natural waves, which were illustrated using photographs alongside the exhibit. Ostensibly a useful didactic tool, the label’s long-winded written explanation is for a layperson almost incomprehensible.102 As only one example among many, the impenetrable description suggests that the MfM fell short of providing low-threshold access to the natural sciences where label writing was concerned. How the MfM’s labels compare to nonacademic German science museum practices of the time more broadly, however, requires further exploration.

Conclusion I have shown that the Museum für Meereskunde’s mission to promote the emerging science of ocean studies was in terms of conception, objectives and execution an academic enterprise. The museum’s aim was to consolidate publicly the emerging research field of Meereskunde and to present it as an umbrella science. At the same time, the MfM’s research agenda cannot be separated from its wider political agenda, which was targeted at instilling in the German population the importance of national marine developments on all levels, including the naval armament. Both

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Figure 12.9  Wave generator after A. du Bois Raymond, room 17, oceanography collection, Museum für Meereskunde, Berlin. Courtesy Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Historisches Archiv, Q V.15.

its political and academic functions need to be considered in any assessment of the MfM’s display techniques. Interpretations positing a one-sided political ideological basis for the MfM, risk devaluing the museum’s curatorial achievements in creating an unprecedented museum type, based on international research and the commitment to Volksbildung.

Notes   1 My thanks are first due to Stefan Trinks for bringing the MfM to my attention and for his encouragement. The chapter is based on the research for my master thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2012) under the supervision of Martin Caiger-Smith and the late Giles Waterfield. I would like to express my warmest thanks to both of them. It has profited immensely from the feedback of the participants of the panel, ‘Sea Currents: The 19th-Century Ocean World’ (AAH conference, London, 2014) and from advice and support by Eva-Maria Bongardt, Jaś Elsner, Joachim Helfer, Andrea Kölbel, Marco Meyer and Margaret Scarborough. I thank the archivists of the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin and the Deutsches Museum in Munich for the generous assistance with the photographs. Bibliographic references were last updated in 2017.

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  2 For a detailed study on the closure of the Museum für Meereskunde, see HansJürgen Brosin, ‘Vom Institut für Meereskunde Berlin zum Institut für Meereskunde Warnemünde’, in Historisch-Meereskundliches Jahrbuch, edited by Deutsches Museum für Meereskunde und Fischerei Stralsund (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1995).   3 Museum für Meereskunde, Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1913), 7.   4 Jobst Broelmann, Deutsches Museum - Panorama der Seefahrt (Bremen: Hauschild, 2006), 6.   5 Jobst Broelmann, ‘Der Weiß-Blaue Globus: Schifffahrt und Meereskunde’, in Geschichte des Deutschen Museums – Akteure, Artefakte, Ausstellungen, edited by Wilhelm Füßl and Helmuth Trischler (Munich: Prestel, 2003), 193; Regina Stein, ‘Seefahrt, Nation und Krieg – Die Konstruktion eines Deutschen Nationenbildes im Museum für Meereskunde zu Berlin 1906–1945’, in Selbstbilder – Fremdbilder – Nationenbilder, edited by Juliette Wedl, Stefan Dyroff and Silke Flegel (Münster: Lit, 2007), 138; Claudia Schuster, ‘Das Institut und Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin. Forschung, Volksbildung und Flottenpropaganda’, in Kolonialismus hierzulande, edited by Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Erfurt: Sutton, 2007), 152; Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature. The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 286–8; Franziska Torma, ‘Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Vorstellungskraft. Die “Entdeckung” der Meeresökologie im Deutschen Kaiserreich’, in Weltmeere. Wissen und Wahrnehmungen im langen 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Alexander Kraus and Martina Winkler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 42. ­  6 Bettina Probst, ‘Das Institut und Museum für Meereskunde – Eine Bewegte Geschichte?’, in Aufgetaucht: Das Museum für Meereskunde im Museum für Verkehr und Technik, edited by Museum für Verkehr und Technik (Berlin: Nicolai, 1996), 14–15, 20–1; Schuster, Institut und Museum. For the historic context, see Rudolf Kroboth, ‘Flottenbau, Finanzkrise und Reichssteuerreform (1898 bis 1914)’, in Seefahrt und Seemacht im Deutschen Kaiserreich, edited by Volker Plagemann (Munich: Beck, 1988).   7 Schuster, Institut und Museum.   8 Probst, Institut und Museum, 21.   9 For the collections of Friedrich Wilhelm University, now Humboldt University, see Horst Bredekamp, Jochen Brüning and Cornelia Weber, eds., Theater der Natur und Kunst: Dokumentation der Ausstellung Wunderkammern des Wissens (Berlin: Henschel, 2001). 10 The Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung (association for the promotion of public education) was founded in 1871, and was followed by many other conservative associations aimed at making workers valuable citizens by means of education. Andreas Kuntz, Das Museum als Volksbildungsstätte: Museumskonzeptionen in der Deutschen Volksbildungsbewegung 1871–1918 (Münster: Waxmann, 1996), 14–22. For an overview of Volksbildung see Bettina Irina Reimers, ‘VolksbildungsUnd Volkshochschulbewegung’, in Handbuch der Deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880–1933, edited by Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1998). 11 On the need for the professionalization and systematization of the German museum landscape in the early twentieth century, see Alfred Lichtwark, ‘Museen als Bildungsstätten’, in Die Museen als Volksbildungsstätten: Ergebnisse der 12. Konferenz

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der Centralstelle für Arbeiter-Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen, edited by Zentralstelle für Arbeiter-Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen (Berlin: Heymann, 1904), 6–12. 12 Ferdinand Richthofen, ed., Denkschrift über die Ergebnisse einer Studienreise nach Frankreich, England und Holland für die Ausgestaltung des Instituts und Museums für Meereskunde zu Berlin (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1900), in HUB, HUB UA Nr. 37, Bl. 213 ff. 13 Eric L. Mills, ‘From Marine Ecology to Biological Oceanography’, Helgoländer Meeresuntersuchungen 49, no. 1 (1995): 30, 40; Karlheinz Paffen, Gerhard Kortum, Die Geographie des Meeres. Disziplingeschichtliche Entwicklung seit 1650 und heutiger methodischer Stand (Kiel: Geographisches Institut Kiel, 1984), 95–6. See also Walter Lenz, ed., Die treibenden Kräfte in der Ozeanographie seit der Gründung des Deutschen Reiches (Hamburg: Institut für Meereskunde, 2002), 5. For the development of oceanography in Britain, the United States and Scandinavia, see Susan Schlee, The Edge of an Unfamiliar World. A History of Oceanography (New York: Dutton & Co, 1973). 14 Nyhart, Modern Nature, 286–7. 15 Ibid., 283. See also Lynn K. Nyhart, ‘Science, Art and Authenticity in Natural History Displays’, in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, edited by Chadarevian de Soraya and Nick Hopwood (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004); thanks to Kathleen Davidson for bringing this reference to my attention. 16 For ‘Meereskunde’ as an umbrella of the marine sciences, see Mills, Marine Ecology, 40. The rise of the discipline of geography was closely tied to the foundation of the German empire in 1871. See Paffen, Kortum, Geographie des Meeres, 60, 79; Ute Wardenga, ‘Theorie und Praxis der Länderkundlichen Forschung und Darstellung in Deutschland’, in Beiträge zur Regionalen Geographie, edited by Alois Mayr and FrankDieter Grimm (Leipzig: Institut für Länderkunde Leipzig, 2001), 10–11. 17 Walter Stahlberg, keeper of the oceanography collection, expressed MfM’s singularity most clearly: ‘Das Museum für Meereskunde hatte kein Vorbild’, in Das Institut und Museum für Meereskunde an der Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, edited by Walter Stahlberg (Hamburg: Hartung & Co, 1929), 7. 18 Probst, Institut und Museum, 15. For the history of the foundation of the MfM, see also Albert Röhr, Bilder aus dem Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin 1906–1945 (Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum Bremerhaven, 1981), 11–15; Nyhart, Modern Nature, 278–84. 19 Röhr, Bilder, 11–12. 20 Ibid., 12. 21 Institut und Museum für Meereskunde, Statut für das Institut und Museum für Meereskunde an der Königl. Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin: Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 1904), 14–15. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 See Stein, Seefahrt, Nation und Krieg, 129; Jobst Broelmann, ‘U1– Die Unsichtbare Waffe’, in Circa 1903. Artefakte in der Gründungszeit des Deutschen Museums, edited by Ulf Hashagen, Oskar Blumtritt and Helmut Trischler (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2003), 193. For Halle’s position in the Navy Bureau, see Schuster, Institut und Museum, 151; Röhr, Bilder, 11. 24 Albert Röhr, ‘Das Museum für Meereskunde zu Berlin’, Marinerundschau. Zeitschrift für Seewesen 54, no. 1 (1957): 18. On the MfM staff, see also Probst, Institut und Museum, 15. 25 Röhr, Bilder, 12.

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26 ‘Institut für Meereskunde mit meereswissenschaftlichen Sammlungen (Marinemuseum)’. Ibid., 12. 27 Richthofen, Denkschrift. 28 Gerhard Kortum, ‘Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) und die Kunde vom Meer’, Schriften des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins für Schleswig-Holstein, no. 53 (1983): 8–11. 29 See for instance Richthofen to Kultusminister Studt, 22 May 1900, in Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (henceforth GSPK), Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Nr. 158a, Bd. 1. 30 Ernst von Halle, Bericht über die Sammlungen und Ausstellungen in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika welche für die Ausgestaltung des Instituts für Meereskunde und Marinemuseum von Bedeutung sind (Berlin: Wilhelm Greve, 1901), in HUB, HUB UA Nr. 37, Bl. 213 ff. 31 See ‘Denkschrift zur Errichtung eines Marinemuseums in Berlin’ in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158, Bd. 1, ‘Die Begründung eines oceanographischen Instituts nebst Meeresmuseum in Berlin’, fols. 9–12v. 32 The memorandum is filed with MfM correspondence for the year 1899 in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158, Bd. 1. It was printed at the Reichsdruckerei Berlin; the print number 5797. 99. could indicate a printing date in 1899. Richthofen, Halle and Drygalski started to plan an Oceanography institute with the Prussian Ministry of Culture in 1898. See Röhr, Museum, 16. 33 ‘Der Aufschwung aller mit dem Seewesen zusammenhängenden Zweige des Wirthschaftslebens, der Erwerb überseeischer Besitzungen, die wachsende Bedeutung der Seepolitik, die steigende Wichtigkeit erweiterter Seegeltung vergrößern von Tag zu Tag das Feld der deutschen Seeinteressen. (…) Der Grund für die bisher vielfach unvollkommende Erkenntnis liegt heute zum nicht geringen Theil darin, daß es in Deutschland an Einrichtungen fehlt, welche weithin den mit dem Seewesen nicht direkt in Verbindung stehenden Kreisen die wahre Natur dieses wichtigen Zweiges der nationalen Lebensbethätigung einheitlich vor Augen führen.’ ‘Denkschrift zur Errichtung eines Marinemuseums in Berlin’ in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158, Bd. 1, fol. 9. 34 Albert Röhr attests a further ‘Denkschrift über die Begründung und Ausgestaltung des Instituts und Museums für Meereskunde zu Berlin’, authored by Richthofen in 1901, the wording of which is in parts identical with the first paragraph of the ‘Denkschrift zur Errichtung eines Marinemuseums in Berlin’. See Röhr, Museum, 16. For the question of authorship, see also Nyhart, Modern Nature, 282–3. 35 Albrecht Penck, ‘Das Museum und Institut für Meereskunde in Berlin’, Mitteilungen der Kais. Königl. Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien (1912): 414. 36 Richthofen, Denkschrift; Halle, Bericht. Halle’s report was of minor influence on the displays of the MfM. A report on a study trip to maritime collections in Kiel and Hamburg is preserved in a letter from Richthofen to Kultusminister Studt, 24 July 1900, in GSPK, Rep. 76, Va Sekt 2 Tit. X Nr. 158 Bd. 1. 37 The ‘Denkschrift zur Errichtung eines Marinemuseums in Berlin’, possibly dating from 1899, comprises essentially the themes of the future MfM. See no’s. 32 and 33. On the purpose, organization and evaluation of the stury trip, see also the Letter from Richthofen to Kultusminister Studt, 27 September 1900, in GSPK, Rep. 76, Va Sekt 2 Tit. X Nr. 158 Bd. 1 38 ‘Nicht gering ist bei den einzelnen Mitgliedern die Erweiterung des Gesichtskreises und die Schärfung des Blickes für die Aufgaben des Instituts und Museums

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anzuschlagen. Endlich wurde auch hier und da durch persönliche Berührung das Interesse für die zu begründende Anstalt geweckt.’ Letter from Richthofen to Kultusminister Studt, 27 September 1900, in GSPK, Rep. 76, Va Sekt 2 Tit. X Nr. 158 Bd. 1. 39 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 5. 40 Ibid., 1. 41 Ibid., divided into 5–26, and 27–63. 42 Ibid., 6. 43 Ibid., 6–7. 44 Ibid., 7. 45 Ibid., 7. 46 Ibid., 7. 47 The two originally planned sections were divided and the biology collection was given more prominence. See Institut und Museum für Meereskunde, Statut. Cf. Albrecht Penck, ‘Das Museum für Meereskunde zu Berlin’, Meereskunde. Sammlung volkstümlicher Vorträge zum Verständnis der nationalen Bedeutung von Meer und Seewesen 1, no. 1 (1907): 18. 48 The Imperial Naval Collection was located in rooms I–XIII, on the ground floor as well as in the areaway and courtyard. The history and economics collection was in rooms 1–5, situated on the second floor, and in rooms 6–9 on the first floor. The oceanology collection was in rooms 14–19 and 24–28 on the first floor. The biology collection was in rooms 10–13 and 20–23 on the first floor. The sequence of the four sections was accomplished in the order mentioned here after 1911, when an expansion was made in the direction of the former university library building at the rear of the museum. Röhr, Bilder, 16. 49 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 6. 50 Ibid., 16. 51 Ibid., 20. See also Nyhart, Science, Art and Authenticity, 319–20. 52 ‘Es soll aber die Museen in Paris und London an Umfang seiner Aufgaben übertreffen. Wird es auch nach der historisch-nationalen Seite von diesen noch auf lange Zeit hinaus weit überflügelt werden, so erstrebt es doch nach in anderen Richtungen Grösseres, Einheitlicheres, Umfassenderes und Bildenderes, insofern es Alles, was sich auf die physische Geographie des Meeres und seiner Küsten bezieht, in sich begreifen soll.’ Richthofen, Denkschrift, 24. For other all-encompassing museum foundations in Germany around 1900 – a trend that Nyhart calls ‘the Kunde projects’, see Nyhart, Modern Nature, 253–5. 53 ‘(…) ein Museum, das vor Augen führt, welche Summe von Erscheinungen Beziehungen zu einem bestimmten Teile der Erdoberfläche haben. Ein solches Museum ist in seinem inneren Wesen nach geographischer Art.’ Penck, Das Museum für Meereskunde, 3. 54 Kortum, Ferdinand von Richthofen, 11. 55 Wardenga, Theorie und Praxis, 10–11. 56 Kortum, Ferdinand von Richthofen, 12; Paffen, Kortum, Geographie des Meeres, 60, 79. On Ritter’s and Humboldt’s contribution to ocean science, see ibid., 39–54. 57 Wardenga, Theorie und Praxis, 9–13. 58 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 14–15. 59 Ibid., 13–15. 60 Ibid., 24.

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61 Christa Berg, ‘Volksschule im Abseits von “Industrialisierung” und “Fortschritt”’, in Schule und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Ulrich Herrmann (Weinheim, Basel: Beltz, 1977), 250. 62 For an overview of technical collections in Berlin see Hanno Möbius, Vierhundert Jahre technische Sammlungen in Berlin: Von der Raritätenkammer der Kurfürsten zum Museum für Verkehr und Technik (Berlin: Nicolai, 1983). For science museums’ involvement in the Volksbildung movement, see Kuntz, Museum als Volksbildungsstätte, 25–34. 63 Urania counted 220.000 visitors in 1904/1905. Möbius, Vierhundert Jahre, 115. For Urania see Gerhard Ebel and Otto Lührs, ‘Urania - Eine Idee, eine Bewegung, eine Institution wird 100 Jahre alt!’, in 100 Jahre Urania Berlin, edited by Urania Berlin e.V. (Berlin: Urania, 1988), 31–2. 64 Hildegard Vieregg, Vorgeschichte der Museumspädagogik: Dargestellt an der Museumsentwicklung in den Städten Berlin, Dresden, München und Hamburg bis zum Beginn der Weimarer Republik (Münster: Lit, 1991), 82. For the Deutsches Museum, see Walter Hochreiter, Vom Musentempel zum Lernort: Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Museen, 1800–1914 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 162. 65 Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Chronik der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin für das Rechnungsjahr 1900 (Halle (Saale): Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1901), 75. 66 ‘Denkschrift zur Errichtung eines Marinemuseums in Berlin’ in GSPK, Rep. 76 Va Sekt. 2, Tit. X, Nr. 158, Bd. 1, fols. 9–12v; Richthofen, Denkschrift, 6. ­67 Probst, Institut und Museum, 20. 68 Ibid., 21. 69 From 1908 onwards, the Science Museum was cut off from the V&A’s collections and moved into its own building in 1913. For visitor numbers, see Board of Education, Report for the Year 1907 on the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Colleges of Science and of Art, the Geological Survey and Museum, and on the Work of the Solar Physics Committee (London: Wyman and Sons, 1908), 14. 70 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 46. 71 Penck, Museum für Meereskunde, 4. In 1909 the MfM started to open on Wednesdays. Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Chronik der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin für das Rechnungsjahr 1909 (Halle (Saale): Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1910), 106. 72 While the British standard was 1:48, the MfM chose the scale 1:50 that was common in German dockyards. Penck, Museum und Institut für Meereskunde, 415; Richthofen, Denkschrift, 14. 73 Cf. L.E. Des Bertin, Les Marines de Guerre à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Paris: E. Bernard et Cie, 1902). 74 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 28. 75 Museum für Meereskunde, ed., Führer durch das Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1907), 28–30. 76 Ibid., 28. 77 Ibid., 30. 78 Museum für Meereskunde, Führer, 1913, 17. 79 Broelmann, Der Weiß-Blaue Globus, 225–6. 80 Board of Education, Report for the Year 1901 on the Museums, Colleges and Institutions under the Administration of the Board of Education (London: Wyman and Sons, 1902), 24.

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81 Department of Science and Art of the Committee of Council on Education, Catalogue of the Naval and Marine Engineering Collection in the Science Division of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Wyman and Sons, 1899), 216. 82 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 46. 83 Push-button technology became, for instance, the trade mark of the Deutsches Museum, founded in Munich in 1903. See Broelmann, Deutsches Museum, 31; HansLiudger Dienel, Das Deutsche Museum und seine Geschichte (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 1998), 46. For Deutsches Museum founder Oskar von Miller’s fascination with experimental models and the V&A and Urania as influences, see also Oskar Miller, Technische Museen als Stätten der Volksbelehrung (Berlin: VDI, 1929), 4; Wolfhard Weber, ‘The Political History of Museums of Technology in Germany since the Nineteenth Century’, in Industrial Society and Its Museums 1890–1990, edited by Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus (Chur, Switzerland and Langhorne, USA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), 15; Wilhelm Füßl, ‘Gründung und Aufbau 1903–1925’, in Geschichte des Deutschen Museums – Akteure, Artefakte, Ausstellungen, edited by Wilhelm Füßl and Helmuth Trischler (Munich: Prestel, 2003), 68. 84 Röhr, Bilder, 13. 85 Museum für Meereskunde, Führer, 1913, 15. 86 Röhr, Bilder, 23; Museum für Meereskunde, Führer, 1913, 21–2. 87 Broelmann, Deutsches Museum, 126. 88 The commission recorded that only the collection of Owens College, Britain’s premier chemical school, attempted to display corals and sponges in social communities. Richthofen 1900, 56. Richthofen was likely aware of the displays of an oyster bed and a coral reef in Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. Richthofen, Denkschrift, 18. For the display at the Museum für Naturkunde, see Carsten Kretschmann, Räume öffnen sich: Naturhistorische Museen im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 208. 89 Charles Atwood Kofoid, The Biological Stations of Europe, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Education (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), 232. 90 Astrid Schwarz and Kurt Jax, ‘Early Ecology in the German-Speaking World through WWII’, in Ecology Revisited, edited by Astrid Schwarz (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 243; see also Nyhart, Modern Nature, 125–60. 91 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 17. 92 Nyhart, Science, Art and Authenticity, 313. 93 For a detailed discussion of the display of biotic communities in the MfM, see ibid., 319–30. 94 Museum für Meereskunde, Führer, 1907, 98–9 with a cross-section of the coastal reef as an illustrative aid. 95 Alcoholaria disappeared from the 1918 guidebook, supposedly because of the discolouring of the specimens. Regina Kitschmann, ‘Das Museum für Meereskunde zu Berlin in alten Photographien’, in Der Bär Von Berlin, edited by Sybille Einholz and Jürgen Wetzel (Berlin, Bonn: Westkreuz, 1999), 40. The Royal Prussian Biological Station of Helgoland also used alcoholaria at some point between 1892 and 1914. Hubert Caspers, ‘Die Lebensgemeinschaft der Helgoländer Austernbank’, Helgoländer Wissenschaftliche Meeresuntersuchungen 3, no. 1 (1950): 120. 96 ‘Professors Stahlbergs Abschied von Steglitz’, Steglitzer Anzeiger, 3 October 1932. 97 Museum für Meereskunde, Führer, 1907, 90–1. See also Kitschmann, Museum, 36. 98 Richthofen, Denkschrift, 33.

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  99 Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Chronik der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin für das Rechnungsjahr 1902 (Halle (Saale): Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1903), 87. 100 Penck, Museum für Meereskunde, 22. 101 Albert Röhr rescued the labels in 1946 from the ruins of the MfM and sent them in 1976 to the Deutsches Museum. Letter from Röhr to Deutsches Museum Abteilung Schifffahrt, 15 September 1976, DMA, Museum für Meereskunde, DMA BA 483. In 1907, hand-written labels were replaced by printed ones. Königliche FriedrichWilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Chronik der Königlichen Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität zu Berlin für das Rechnungsjahr 1907 (Halle (Saale): Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1908), 93. The majority of the labels archived in the DMA belong to objects in MfM’s oceanography collection and do not mention dates after 1911. Some labels speak of 1911 in the present tense. Few labels seem to stem from the Navy Collection and may date from another time. The dominant typography of the labels is found on photographs of MfM’s collection that are dated before 1914. DMA, Museum für Meereskunde, DMA BA 483. 102 I quote this label in full to give an impression of the immense level of preknowledge and time investment required to engage with the model, which likely exceeded the capabilities of most visitors and makes a translation of the label an almost insurmountable task: ‘Wellenmaschine nach A. du Bois Reymond. Ausgeführt von J. Pfeil-Berlin’ Die weißén Kugeln stellen die Wasserteilchen in 5 verschiedenen Tiefenlagen dar. In Bewegung gesetzt, läßt die Wellenmaschine erkennen, wie durch gleichsinnige Kreisbewegung der einzelnen Wasserteilchen eine Wellenbewegung im Wasser entsteht, und wie dabei das Ausmaß der Kreisbewegungen nach der Tiefe zu abnimmt, während der zeitliche Ablauf der Bewegung für die übereinander liegenden Teilchen derselbe ist. Einige der mit der Maschine herstellbaren Wellenbilder sind in Photographien wiedergegeben und zusammen mit einem Bild, das die Wellenmaschine von der Rückseite her zeigt, in besonderem Rahmen ausgestellt. (Siehe an der Wand!) In der Wellenmaschine ist mit jedem „Wasserteilchen“ der obersten Reihe ein Zahnrad verbunden, das mit ihm auf derselben Achse sitzt. Über diese Zahnräder läuft eine Kette ohne Ende hin, deren rücklaufendes Band man auf der oberen Platte der Maschine verfolgen kann. Zwischen je zwei Zahnrädern läuft die Kette in einer Schlinge nach unten über eine in ihr hängende Rolle. Diese, am Apparat hinten sichtbaren Rollen (vergleiche auch die Photographie 5) hängen mit dem unten verbreiterten Stiel ihrer Schere in eine -förmige (sic!) Eisenschiene hinein. Die Schiene wird von zwei Schraubenspindeln gehalten und läßt sich durch diese mittels der an der Seite oben sichtbaren Kurbel heben und senken. So lange die Schiene in ihrer tiefsten Lage hängt, verhindern die breiten Stielenden der Rollen ein Heben der Rollenscheiben. Dreht man dann die am ersten Teilchen angreifende Kurbel der Maschine (auf der Rückseite aufzustecken), so werden durch die endlose Kette zwangsläufig alle anderen Wasserteilchen sofort mitgenommen; alle beschreiben ihre Kreisbahnen „in gleichen Phasen“, d. h. sie beginnen die Bahn gleichzeitig aus gleicher Anfangsstellung und legen sie gleichzeitig zurück. Wenn man nun die Schiene auf beiden seiten mittels der Kurbel um ein gleiches Stück hebt (beachte den Maßstab dafür neben den Enden der Schiene) und dann wieder die Achse des ersten Teilchens dreht, so folgt das zweite Teilchen erst, nachdem die zwischen den Zahnrädern beider Teilchen hängende Rolle soweit gehoben ist, daß sie mit ihrem verbreiterten Stielende wieder an die Schiene stößt. Wenn es dann seine Kreisbewegung beginnt,

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Part Four

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­1 3

‘An Imitation of Seaweed’: Nature and Design in a Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Cotton Ann Christie

From the second half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, as plant collectors fuelled the desire for exotic plants for gardens and as subjects for design, concurrently the growing interest in the native British coast as a destination for health and amusement included collecting seaweeds, shells and other marine organisms.1 Contemporary descriptions of the pleasures of the seaside suggest a shift towards a Romantic sensibility of the experience of nature as mysterious, autonomous and dangerous. The increasing interest in coastal ecologies epitomized this allure. Seaweeds represented untamed, uncultivated nature in a marginal state, inaccessible except where cast up on the shores of the coast. Queen Charlotte and the Duchess of Portland were notable collectors of seaweed specimens, but the interest extended across society; collecting involved a currency of social exchange and information sharing, validating interactions between men and women and between people of different classes.2 William Kilburn (1745–1818), botanical illustrator and calico printer, worked on botanical illustrations for William Curtis, including Curtis’s Flora Londinensis (1777–98).3 Curtis commissioned leading illustrators including James Sowerby and Sydenham Edwards as well as Kilburn for the hand-coloured engravings for this work, an ambitious subscription publication recording the native plants growing within a ten-mile radius of London.4 Around 1779 Kilburn went into partnership with a calico printer at Wallington Mill in Surrey on the River Wandle and took over the firm completely in 1784, continuing to work in the area until his death in 1818.5 Some of Kilburn’s illustrations for Flora Londinensis were used as copper-plate designs for furnishing chintzes manufactured by the printing firm at Bromley Hall near London. Examples of Kilburn’s accurately observed drawings were translated into textile designs and demonstrate a minimum of stylization or simplification.6 In 1990 the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) acquired a printed cotton dress at a Christie’s auction (Plate 23).7 The dress is well-worn and not in good condition.8 According to the acquisition report, it was purchased by the museum because of its interest as a textile, a block print of very high quality.9 The design includes a number of marine plants and corallines, such as the dominant oak-like fronds of Phycodris

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rubens, accurately represented. Kilburn’s specific use of seaweeds as design elements is mentioned both in the particulars of a sale from his works in 1802 of ‘several thousand Blocks for Calico-printing, amongst which are some of the most curious patterns of sea weed chintzes’,10 and in Charles O’Brien’s contemporary treatise on calico printing, which states that Kilburn’s ‘patterns for 1790 run chiefly on an imitation of sea weed’.11 In his seaweed prints, Kilburn combined the love of naturalistic plant forms with connoisseurship, and also novelty – a term of approval that appears often in contemporary accounts of fashion.12 The cloth chosen by Kilburn is described by Philip Sykas as ‘a high-calibre product of British manufacture, and probably hand-woven’ using ‘fine-spun cotton yarns, probably of the best quality obtainable outside India at that date’.13 Printed with wood blocks on an off-white, undyed background in four closely related purple-red tones, the design even today seems strikingly unusual in the way the organic forms interlink across the surface, neither scattered in ‘sprigs’ nor using trailing stems to link them (Figure  13.1). The technology of block printing is more suited to a pattern using an outline filled with flat areas of colour than this finely cut and intricate mesh of fronds. The repeat of the pattern represents a block of about 21.6 × 19 centimetres (half-dropped; that is, the top of the block in each alternate vertical row is aligned with the mid-point of the block in the row either side). The colours would have been

Figure 13.1  Detail of fabric design by William Kilburn. Printed cotton. England, c.1790. T.84-1991. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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produced in two stages: first by printing with alum and iron mordants, then by dyeing with madder or a similar plant-based dye. The V&A Museum also holds a bound album containing 223 striking watercolour designs attributed to Kilburn, about thirty of which are dated on the back from 1788 to 1792.14 The designs in the album range from flowers, delicate and naturalistic or more stylized, to brightly coloured patterns with geometric structures in neoclassical style. Many of the watercolours include marine organisms and some consist mainly of seaweed forms with one or two other plants. A few pages are annotated with instructions to the block cutters, suggesting that they were used as working documents. Because of the effect of the processes involved in transforming the watercolour design to a woodblock and then a printed textile, it is not immediately apparent that the fabric of the V&A dress closely follows one of the painted patterns.15 Through the simplification of colour and line called for by the wood-block technique it becomes less conventionally pretty, less differentiated, more intriguingly tangled. O’Brien points out that ‘the drawing on paper should be regulated in a degree by the similitude that is attainable on the cloth’, in other words, that the drawing should be suited to its application on the block; but the detail in the paintings and the range of colours seem to show little concession to the translation needed for cutting the designs.16 Some of the finest lines appear as a trail of fine dots formed by inserting copper pins into the block, but otherwise the width of line is limited by what can be cut into the wood. Sykas confirms that ‘the block making was highly skilled, requiring fine carving, and fine pinning’ and that the printed cloth would have been a luxury product.17 The printing represents a display of virtuosity within the frames of reference of the technology and fabric. It does not, for example, seek to imitate costlier fabrics such as embroidered silks except in the choice of the botanical motif. Nor are copper plates used, with their potential for accurate reproduction of much finer lines than could be done with wood blocks. Instead, the design asserts the skill of both the designer and of his workforce in transferring and cutting the pattern and in the evenness of the printing. O’Brien describes the blocks as ‘an instance of what might be done, were Printers not confined to a certain expense; for the cutting in them is such, that no other Printer would or could execute them’.18 The specificity of Kilburn’s drawing indicates that he had accurate reference sources. Since design practice at the time relied heavily on imitation and copying, innovation in design depended on finding new sources for material to translate into patterns. Even if he was not collecting specimens himself, Kilburn’s connections put him in a particularly good position to obtain them.19 Printed images of seaweeds were not then readily available: albums of pressed specimens, produced commercially later in the nineteenth century, were at this date held in individual collections. However, Kilburn had worked on Curtis’s Flora Londinensis for which James Sowerby also provided illustrations; Sowerby with J. E. Smith was responsible for the subscription publication English Botany from 1790 which included his engravings of seaweeds.20 It is also probable that there were sources for specimens through Kilburn’s useful family networks: his sister was married to John Francillon, a jeweller who was an active collector;21 Francillon, in turn, collected the works of the entomological artist John Abbot, who was sponsored by another silversmith Dru Drury, noted as a collector of seaweeds.22

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The interest in natural history by Kilburn’s circle was woven seamlessly into the social community of these manufacturers and merchants, as well as that of their discerning customers. As Emma Spary claims, ‘the possession of knowledge and its objects – books and specimens – formed a continuum with the possession of tasteful luxury goods’.23 As well as borrowing visual images from scientific sources, decorative design played an active role in the expression of cultivated intellect. The taste and education represented by owning a collection of books or specimens might also be denoted by a fabric or ceramic objects decorated with naturalistic plants.24 Commercial and decorative applications of designs based on natural forms might thus communicate not just an appreciation of their beauty, but also associate the wearer with interests in contemporary scientific study and discovery.25 Some of Kilburn’s earlier designs bring to mind the clarity and isolation of a botanical specimen on a blank page, whereas in this fabric the natural forms are linked both by their marine origins and visually through the inseparable elements of the design, accentuated by the limited colour palette. Kilburn drew on a new aesthetic of wildness for its own sake, and on the growing enthusiasm for the coast as a destination for pleasure, for learning and as a resource for innovative material design. His understanding of the overlapping cultural circles of design, science and manufacture ensured that this imagery would be understood and appreciated by those buying and wearing his fabrics.

Notes   1 See for example A. Corbin, trans. J. Phelps, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840 (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994), 53. A longer version of this chapter was published as Ann Christie, ‘A Taste for Seaweed: William Kilburn’s Late Eighteenth-Century Designs for Printed Cottons’, Journal of Design History 24 (2011): 299–314.   2 See for example Mary Delany’s account of an excursion to the coast in 1758: Mary Delany, ed. Rt. Hon. Lady Llanover, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany (London: R. Bentley, 1861), 521.   3 A.K. Longfield, ‘William Kilburn (1745–1818) and His Book of Designs’, Irish Georgian Society Quarterly Bulletin XXIV (1981): 3. See also E.C. Nelson, ‘William Kilburn’s Calico Patterns, Copyright and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine’, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 25, no. 4 (November 2008): 361–73.   4 W. Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration: An Illustrated History (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 189. Flora Londinensis was well received but a commercial failure, which Curtis attributed to his clients’ preference for images of exotic species.   5 Nelson, ‘Kilburn’s Calico Patterns’, 363.   6 See for example Butomus umbellatus, which appears in Flora Londinensis and in the Bromley Hall Pattern Book, V&A, E458.147–8.1955.   7 Acquisition File, T84–1991, V& A Museum Archive.   8 Another dress of the period with a seaweed-related Kilburn print is held in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (RISDM Object Number 1987.028) – Dress | RISD Museum (accessed 8 December 2020).

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  9 Acquisition File, T84–1991, V&A Museum Archive. 10 The Times, 18 May 1802. The sale was held at the end of the term of the lease Kilburn had on the premises. 11 Charles O’Brien, British Manufacturers Companion, and Callico Printers’ Assistant (London: printed for the author and sold by Hamilton & Co, 1792). Unpaginated. The lengthy treatise is very useful for understanding the process of transferring designs onto printing blocks and the printing process itself. 12 The importance of novelty and of a quick response to the consumer’s interests is illustrated by the speed at which designs were copied by other manufacturers and produced at lower prices. The practice led to Kilburn’s involvement in petitioning for design copyright legislation. A.K. Longfield, ‘William Kilburn and the Earliest Copyright Acts for Cotton Printing Designs’, The Burlington Magazine 95, no. 604 (July 1953): 230–3. 13 I am indebted to Philip Sykas for his assessment of the dress and its fabric: P. A. Sykas, ‘Examination of V&A T.84–1991, a Printed Cotton Attributed to William Kilburn in an Open Robe c.1790 Converted to round Gown c.1800–05’. (Unpublished, 2010). 14 V&A Museum, London. E.894:1-149-1978. The cotton textile and painted design are illustrated side by side in E. Ehrman, ed., Fashioned from Nature (London: V&A Publishing, 2018), 60–1. This may be one of three pattern books ‘containing some thousands of his original designs in chintz and fancy patterns’ which were offered for sale shortly before Kilburn’s death. The Times, 18 December 1817. See also A.K. Longfield’s article ‘William Kilburn and His Book of Designs’, Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society XXIV (January–June 1981): 1–28. 15 This fabric pattern is mistaken for ‘delicate sprays of ferns and branches’ in the catalogue of the auction from which it was acquired by the V&A Museum. Christie’s, South Kensington, 23 October 1990, lot 53. 16 O’Brien, British Manufacturer’s Companion. 17 Sykas, ‘Examination of V & A T.84–1991’. 18 O’Brien, British Manufacturer’s Companion. ­19 See Nelson, ‘Kilburn’s Calico Patterns’, for an investigation of the sources of some of Kilburn’s plant motifs. 20 Collection of the Natural History Museum, London, Department of Botany. See Nelson, op.cit., for evidence that Kilburn used Sowerby’s engravings published in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine as sources for designs. 21 P. Gilbert, John Abbot: Birds, Butterflies and Other Wonders (London: Natural History Museum, 1998), 52. Kilburn’s family relationships are detailed in P.K. Kilbourne, The Family Memorial: A History and Genealogy of the Kilbourn Family in the United States and Canada, from the Year 1635 to the Present Time (Hartford CT: Brown & Parsons, 1845), 54. John Francillon’s will, TNA: PROB 11/1583, confirms his relationship to Kilburn. 22 D.E. Allen, ‘Tastes and Crazes’, in Cultures of Natural History, edited by Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 397–8. 23 Emma Spary, ‘Scientific Symmetries’, History of Science 42, no. 1 (March 2004): 34. 24 Lewis Dillwyn, the botanist who took over the Swansea Pottery in 1802, is said to have made his chief designer change his production from freely painted flowers to designs accurately copied from plates in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, and including

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the English names of the plants on the base of the item. E.M. Nance, The Pottery and Porcelain of Swansea and Nantgarw (London: Batsford, 1942), 73. 25 See Ehrman, Fashioned from Nature, for a discussion of the history of the complex relationship between the natural world and fashion from the seventeenth century to the present. The publication, accompanying the 2018/19 V&A exhibition of the same title, explored the environmental costs of commodifying the natural world as well as its importance as a source of materials and design inspiration. Kilburn’s design is featured on the cover of the publication.

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Fashioning Whalebone: Scrimshaw and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition of the Decorative Busk Martha Cattell

Accept, dear Girl this busk from me; Carved by my humble hand. I took it from a Sperm Whale’s jaw, One thousand miles from land! In a gale, has been the Whale, In which this bone did rest, His time is past, his bone at last Must now support thy breast.1

The scrimshaw busk is a long narrow piece of carved whale baleen or panbone, (jawbone) which acted as the central supporting element in corsetry from around the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century.2 The busk was a highly intimate object, inserted in an open slit in the front of the corset as a ‘main stay’, with its purpose being to ‘firm up’ the bodice as revealed in an example from Hull Maritime Museum, England (Plate 24). Busks have a heritage that dates back to the sixteenth century when they were employed as a token of affection, usually given by a man to a woman as part of, what historian Sarah Ann Bendall describes as the ‘complex social performance of courtship and marriage’.3 Women’s bodies during this period were, as Bendall observes, ‘replaced with other bodies – constructed “bodies” of whalebone, horn and busk’.4 According to Bendall, the busk enacted ‘the conjoining of bodies’, both human and animal, through the form of intimate enclosure. Building upon Bendall’s notion of the material intimacy engendered by the busk as an object integral to sixteenth-century social ritual and relationship, this case study considers how both whalebone and women underwent a process of commodification in the nineteenth century through the expansion of the whaling industry and the mass production of whalebone products in women’s fashion, from the corset to the crinoline. Despite such commodification, the busk, as a whale product, remained staunchly animalic in its materiality, connecting, at an intimate bodily level, the wearer to the whale.

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During the nineteenth century at the height of the whaling industry the busk was a popular object for whalers to carve for their loved ones back home. The decorated busk acted as a physical reminder for women of their whaler at sea; while, for the whaler, it offered some comfort that his partner was protected, conforming to contemporary social ideology of gender and domesticity. Perpetuated by the length of voyages, these representations were often idealized, or sentimentalized, as the notions of the real and ideal would become increasingly confused during the voyage, supporting Griselda Pollock’s belief that the nineteenth century was a ‘regime of representation … naturaliz[ing] woman as image, beautiful to look at, defined by her look’.5 With such visions in mind, the crafting of the busk was a highly appealing exercise, allowing the whaler a surface with which they could shape their own partner into the highly constructed vision of beauty that had accompanied their thoughts on the voyage, and out of the very animal that was separating them. During the nineteenth century, scrimshaw busks were typically made from the jawbones of whales, which could be up to eight metres in length on a bowhead whale. After being extracted, these jawbones or baleen plates were shaped down to the correct size, which for a busk, was typically around twenty to thirty-five centimetres long and four centimetres wide.6 Baleen was another popular material used and is found specifically in the suborder of whales Mysticeti, of which the family Balaenidae were particularly targeted by whalers at this time. Baleen hangs as overlapping plates from the upper jaws of these whales’ mouths, which in a bowhead whale can number as many as 325–360 plates.7 After the bones and baleen were treated and shaped, the whalers were at will to carve various motifs of their choosing onto the surface of the whalebone busk, with each etched line physically removing material from the surface and inserting a symbolic meaning or narrative into it. The whalers used tools designed for these processes such as special knives, or, as Herman Melville mentions in Moby-Dick (1851), ‘dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business’.8 Scrimshaw, from the surplus by-products of the whale hunt – baleen, sperm whale teeth, walrus tusks and skeletal bones – was made into decorative or functional objects, in an act known as scrimshandering.9 The origin of this term is not fully known, and it is a craft that produced an array of forms and motifs, ranging from scrimshaw decorated with images of women or whale hunt scenes to functional objects such as pastry trimmers, yarn winders and hairpins, typically intended for women relatives, friends and lovers back home on shore.10 The materiality, sensual experience and bodily context of scrimshaw suggested here is important as through the process of crafting in the hands of the whalemen it was rendered from the bodily matter of once living organisms – whales, and other ocean mammals – into a commodity and potent souvenir of the hunt.11 Scrimshaw busks were ornamented with personal motifs and decorations carved into the surface, aiding in the process of denaturing the original animal subject and engendering a sense of ownership. These carved images were sentimental and made with romantic intentions, but also incorporated violent imagery of the whale hunt. At the top of the busk held in the Hull collection is an elaborate flowerpot with curved handles containing a bouquet of red roses, symbolizing love and ‘natural’ femininity,

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Figure 14.1  Detail of whaling scene, scrimshaw stay busk, 1780–1880, whalebone, 36.6 × 6.1 cm. Courtesy of the Hull Maritime Museum, Hull.

most likely achieved by coloured inks. At the bottom of the busk is the view of a vessel overlaid with an anchor and rope wrapped around it, a symbol of stability and strength, and below this is an unusual tent-like structure, with a crescent moon above. The central and most prominent etched detail on the busk, however, is of a sperm whaling scene where the various aspects of whale hunting and processing are portrayed (Figure 14.1). In the foreground, two whaleboats, each crewed by six men, have caught a sperm whale. The whale’s large head is visible and clear of the water – mouth open in agony and emitting, from its blow hole, a mixture of blood and innards. To the right of the harpooned whale, a small pod of whales appears ready to escape, but their proximity suggests that they will soon suffer a similar fate as the captured whale. In the background of this whaling scene, two ships under partial sail are in different stages of processing dead whales. The right-hand ship is cutting-in to port side, removing the precious blubber from the whale, ready for it to be sliced up and then burnt on the try works, a process which is occurring in the vessel on the left-hand side. The try works, located amidships, billow out a small cloud of smoke, probably pungent and certainly blinding in both its thickness and dark colouration, which, along with the whole scene, has been made more vivid through the addition of ink or a mixture of soot or oil in the surface incisions. Nevertheless, the violent scene of whaling is made diminutive and decorative in nature, commodified for the purpose of taste and emotional sentiment. It is endowed within a new context, where along with other busks, it would be pressed against the bosom of a woman, a closeness to the breasts at one end and the groin at the other. This intimate, but constraining, physicality would both remind wives and girlfriends of the touch of the whaler, and act to keep the women’s bodies tightly constrained – and shielded from the touch of others – whilst the sailors were away. Carved messages, which often appear on scrimshaw busks infer this, such as one from the Hull collection which states: ‘When this you see remember one & keep me in your mind & when that I am far away speak of me as you find.’12 The animality of the busk, and not simply its materiality, is important to remember here, as Erica Fudge argues, ‘Forgetting the living beings behind animal matter reduces animals to the realm of dormant objects.’13 Therefore, despite the attempt to domesticate the busk through crafting, it possesses a distinct bodily context within which the whale, as well

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as the intended recipient and the whaler who crafted it, are all implicated – even more so with an image of a whale directly carved upon it. This period is often referred to as a golden era for the British and American whaling industry, but it was also devastating, both directly for the various species of whales hunted, and ecologically.14 Indeed, the whales’ oceanic habitat and bodies were invaded in the search for utilitarian objects; for oil to lubricate industrial machinery and fuel lamps, and for bone and baleen as supports in clothing such as crinolines and corsets. The numbers involved are large. For example, during the most prosperous period of the industry for the northern port of Hull, between 1815 and 1825, this town alone was sending one-fifth of the British ships that engaged in the Northern whale fishery and producing an average of nearly 5,000 tons of oil a year, with more than 2,000 men employed in the trade.15 Whales, accordingly, became a ubiquitous presence for nineteenth-century consumers, their bodies absorbed into the cultural and economic spheres of craft and commerce, and far removed from the ocean, which they once inhabited. In the example of the scrimshaw busk, bone or baleen is transformed from the internal skeletal support of a whale to a new role in aiding in the encasement of a woman as an exoskeleton armour, a process in which both the whale – through the use of its raw materials – and also the woman – under the notion of fashion – have undergone a process of commodification. Ultimately, however, through its materiality and physicality, the whale, and not the whaler, will remain most intimate to the female wearer, as – despite the opening poem relating how the whaler ‘took [the busk] from a Sperm Whale’s jaw’ – it is ironically the ‘bone’ of the whale and not that of the man who ‘must now support thy breast’.16

Notes   1 Unknown Author, quoted in Walter K. Earle, Scrimshaw Folk Art of the Whales (Cold Spring Harbor: Whaling Museum Society Inc., 1957), 7.   2 For more information on corsets, see Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Dress, Body, Culture) (Oxford: Berg, 2001); and Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (London: B.T. Batsford, 1993).   3 For more information on busks, see, Sarah Anne Bendall, ‘To Write a Distick upon It: Busks and the Language of Courtship and Sexual Desire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, Gender & History 26, no. 2 (2014): 199–222; and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Busks, Bodices, Bodies’, in Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, edited by Bella Mirabella (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 85–102. For information specifically on nineteenth-century scrimshaw busks, see Stuart M. Frank, Ingenious Contrivances, Curiously Carved: Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Boston: David R. Godine, 2012), 38–9, 52; and E. Norman Flayderman, Scrimshaw and Scrimshanders, Whales and Whalemen (New Milford: N. Flayderman & Co, 1972), 154.   4 Bendall, 19. Bendall emphasizes how the term ‘corset’ is a modern word that came into use during the nineteenth century. Stiffened torso-shaping devices during

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the sixteenth and seventeenth century were referred to as ‘bodies,’ ‘stays’ and even ‘bodices’ (if incorporated into the dress itself). Bendall, ‘To Write a Distick upon It: Busks and the Language of Courtship and Sexual Desire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- Century England’.   5 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 2003), 135.   6 Richard C. Malley, Graven by The Fishermen Themselves: Scrimshaw in Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1983), 85.   7 ‘Bowhead Whales,’ American Cetacean Society, 2018. https://www.acsonline.org/ bowhead-whale? (accessed 15 January 2019).   8 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Penguin, [1851] 1992), 258.   9 For more information on scrimshaw, see Flayderman, Scrimshaw and Scrimshanders; Stuart M. Frank, Ingenious Contrivances; and Janet West and Arthur G. Credland, Scrimshaw: The Art of the Whaler (Beverley: Hutton Press, 1995). 10 Frank, Ingenious Contrivances, 3. ­11 Men made up the majority of the industry’s workforce, with little evidence of women’s involvement, beyond the wives of captains and their first mates, who on occasion would join their husbands on board. For more on women’s role in the whaling industry, see Joan Druett, Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820–1920 (Auckland: Collins New Zealand, 1991); and Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 12 Hull Maritime Museum, Hull. stay busk, whalebone, KINCM:2005.3756, c1800–1899. 13 Erica Fudge, ‘Renaissance Animal Things’, New Formations 76 (2012): 86–100. 14 Earle, Scrimshaw Folk Art, 7. 15 ‘Hull, 1700–1835’, in A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 1, the City of Kingston upon Hull, edited by K.J. Allison (London: Victoria County History, 1969), 174–214. 16 Unknown Author, quoted in Earle, Scrimshaw Folk Art, 7.

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The Ornamental Glass Window of the Maison de l’Océan in Paris: A Celebration of Evolution Jacqueline Goy and Robert Calcagno

The ornamental glass window in an annex of the library of the Maison de l’Océan, the Parisian offshoot of the Oceanographic Institute, Prince Albert I of Monaco Foundation, has extraordinary decorations of marine animals derived from the illustrations of German naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s Kunst-Formen der Natur (1899–1904) (Plate 25). While there is no surviving information about who painted the windows or the rationale behind the selection of Haeckel’s illustrations, the representation of marine animals in this painting on glass is no coincidence; they constitute, by the very juxtaposition of different organisms, a celebration of the diversity of nature, just as they mark the stages of evolution.1 Both Prince Albert I (1848–1922) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) were instrumental in the development of the new science of oceanography at the turn of the twentieth century. From 1885 to 1920, Albert I conducted fifty maritime campaigns with the aim of observing and understanding the vast world of marine organisms that comprise more than 70 per cent of the planet’s surface. Notable discoveries included the vibrant colouration of deep-sea marine life, which led to one of the fundamental laws of marine biology: homochromy – or the colouring of species as camouflage – according to the penetration of wavelengths of visible light.2 Albert I’s observations were published in Résultats des Campagnes Scientifiques (RCS), and also were disseminated through  his  public education teaching programme on oceanography, which he inaugurated in 1903.3 Published in the same period, Ernst Haeckel’s Kunst-Formen der Natur brought the beauties of the underwater world to the general public, extolling the principle of symmetry of form in its illustrations of marine invertebrates. Haeckel’s images play on the register of elementary geometrical figures: the circular form of jellyfish and sea urchins, the triangular form of radiolarians and the cubic form of certain cnidarian siphonophores and cubomedusae. Haeckel’s research for Kunst-Formen was fuelled by the opportunities afforded by new marine research laboratories: during a stay at Messina in Sicily in 1859–60 he studied radiolarians and jellyfish; he also participated in the publication of the results of the HMS Challenger expedition which explored the oceans from 1872 to 1876.4 Such research contributed to his studies in evolutionary

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biology and his analysis of embryonic development used to establish the hypothesis that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Artists, architects and designers especially were seduced by the strange shapes, colours, transparency and anatomical constructions depicted in Haeckel’s illustrations that provided new subject matter for the dynamic fin-de-siècle artistic movement of Art Nouveau, which drew heavily from nature and was partially dependent on scientific discoveries.5 The architect René Binet, for instance, was inspired by the skeleton of a radiolarian, Clathrocanium reginae, painted by Haeckel to design the monumental entrance to the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.6 It was possibly by passing through this entrance on the way to the Monaco Pavilion that Albert I was struck by the splendour of Haeckel’s artistic forms. Such a unity of style in the architectural decorations both in Paris and Monaco is proof of his desire to tap into the artistic repertoire of Kunst-Formen der Natur. The Baroque Revival Oceanographic Institute in Monaco, which opened in 1910, is distinguished by a decorative programme of stylized marine flora and fauna, including sculptural casts, mosaics and, in the Salle d’Honneur, an elaborate glass chandelier, by French Art Nouveau designer, Constant Roux (1865–1942), in the form of a jellyfish based on Haeckel’s invertebrate morphology.7 Designed by Henri-Paul Nénot, the Italian Renaissance Maison de l’Océan opened in Paris the following year and likewise features a plethora of ocean-inspired décor (Figure 15.1). Its interiors are richly decorated with painted murals, including an entire room adorned with ethereal underwater scenes by artist and designer Léon Laugier (1879–1962), and extensive frescoes painted by Alexandre Jean-Baptiste Brun (1853–1941) and Louis Tinayre (1861–1942), depicting the work of scientists and ships’ crews on Prince Albert’s oceanographic expeditions. The Haeckel-inspired decorations of the Maison de l’Océan appear in an ornamental window in a room where the window frame occupies a wall that receives flooding light, evoking a vibrant aquarium. Glass, aided by the progress of the chemical pigment industry in the late nineteenth century, became the ideal material to reproduce transparent marine animals and give the illusion of life through the multiple reflections produced by light passing through them.8 The window arrangement is composed of six panes, each decorated with three marine organisms, comprising a total of eighteen designs. The lead cames (supports) of the windows are applied in a geometric pattern that is repeated uniformly across the six windowpanes, suggesting the complex symmetrical structures of single-celled organisms, and are reminiscent of Haeckel’s meticulous line drawings of the microscopic radiolarians that he studied. This lead lighting varies only around the individual sea creatures where the raised profile of the cames subtly transforms the paintings into sculptural reliefs and introduces a sense of tactility into this orderly quasi-aquarium. Within this glass arrangement there are two radiolarians (R), six cnidarians (C), six echinoderms (E), an ascidian (A) and three fish (P). These marine organisms are organized within upper, median and lower horizontal registers that extend across the six windowpanes. Each species is recognizable and can be precisely identified; the following nomenclature is from Haeckel’s descriptions. The upper register consists of Elaeacrinus verneuili (E), Pegasus chiropterus (P), Pteraster stellifer (E), Dicranastrum

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Figure  15.1  ‘Institut Océanographique de Paris’, 1911, photogravure, Librairie Centrale d’Art et d’Architecture: L’Architecture au XXe Siecle. Courtesy of the Institut Océanographique, Monaco.

furcatum (R), Pleurocystis filitexta (E) and Porpema medusa (C). The median register includes Discalia medusina (C), Molgula tubulosa (A), Periphylla mirabilis (C), Disconalia gastroblasta (C), Heliodiscus glyphodon (R) and Disconalia gastroblasta (C). Finally, the lower register features Phoenoschisma acutum (E), Phyllopteryx eques (P), Porpema medusa (C), Asterias rubens (E), Hippocampus antiquorum (P) and Pentremites orbignyanus (E). These diverse marine animals each have distinctive

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anatomies, physiologies and habits, and represent not only different stages of evolution but also various nineteenth-century scientific discoveries and theories. Unicellular pelagic organisms, radiolarians secrete siliceous skeletons bristling with spines that promote flotation. Some species harbour symbiotic algae, but also catch prey. This dual source of nutrition places them at the dichotomy between botany and zoology. Cnidarians, or jellyfish, are a group defined by the cnidocyts (stinging cells) scattered in the ectoderm of the tentacles and are the earliest extant venomous animals on the evolutionary scale.9 Abundant among the window designs, the presence of cnidarians recalls that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Lamarckian scientists suspected that these animals were implicated in the origin of life, a subject addressed by Albert I in his speeches.10 The Discalia, Disconalia and Porpema are all synonymous with Porpita porpita, a colony of pelagic polyps living on the surface of the sea. The polyp’s body is in the form of a disc traversed by a network of channels containing gas. In terms of evolution, its body represents the first attempt at aerial respiration and therefore water outflow.11 This explains the position in the upper register of the window of an image of Porpema medusa showing the upper face of the disc with the eight stigmas serving as air pores. Periphylla periphylla, a deep-sea scyphomedusa (true jellyfish), was fished regularly during the campaigns of Albert I who deduced that its deep red colour, due to a porphyrin-type pigment, was typical of animals living at depth. Located in the centre of the window, this jellyfish is a striking example of Art Nouveau’s architectural fantasy of nature with its four oral arms, its eight gonads, its twelve tentacles and its sixteen muscle bands.12 Echinoderms – also represented on the window – have a radiating arrangement of quills and arms and thus were taxonomically arranged with jellyfish by scientists like Lamarck and Cuvier. However, while the symmetry of jellyfish is typically tetramerous, consisting of four parts, here in the window it is pentamerous. Some echinoderm fossil and larval forms nevertheless show bilateral symmetry.13 Ascidians are viviparous marine animals; their gelatinous outer tunic, or covering, is similar to cellulose. They are classified just before vertebrates and live fixed on the bottom of the ocean; they are benthic and have a symmetry of the sixth order. Finally, Pisces, the first group of vertebrates, is represented on the glass via the flying fish, Pegasus chiropterus, which can fly for more than one hundred metres, evoking the gradual exodus of animals from their primordial exclusively water-based habitats to the land.14 Placed in the upper register of the glass, the flying fish reinforces evolutionary progression as the organizing theme of the composition.15 Haeckel was able to bring order to all these organisms by proposing a phylogenetic classification later overturned by Mendelian genetics and DNA studies. When he took up the question of evolutionary development, he opposed transformism – the transmutation of one species into another – in favour of Lamarckism, and soon embraced Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Haeckel specified that Lamarckism exposed the doctrine of evolution while Darwinism established the process that explained it by selection. This is undoubtedly what interested Albert I, a great defender of Lamarck, especially as Lamarck began his career by botanizing in the gardens of Monaco.

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The ornamental glass window of the Maison de l’Océan represents but one example of the diffusion of marine sciences, propagated by the popular education of Albert I and the imagery of Haeckel through artistic means. A rigorous transcription of scientific discoveries through design, the Maison de l’Océan’s decorative window achieves a synthesis between art and science as espoused by Albert I. The medium of glass presents a luminous evocation of the important stages of evolution of marine organisms, while the window itself materializes the significance of natural history illustration as a stimulus for the decorative arts at the turn of the twentieth century. Ultimately, its crystalline radiance presents a fitting memorial to the role that Albert I and Haeckel played in illuminating the undersea and its rich biodiversity for an enthralled public.

Notes   1 Our sincere thanks to the volume’s editors, Kathleen Davidson and Molly Duggins, for their valuable contributions to this chapter and careful editing of our translated text.   2 Homochromy was observed during the first exploration campaigns of Albert’s schooner Hirondelle I. This put an end to the controversy over the azoic hypothesis – that life could not survive in the murky depths of the deep ocean – a theory supported by the English naturalist Edwards Forbes in 1841.   3 Prince Albert I of Monaco, Résultats des Campagnes Scientifiques Accomplies sur son Yacht par Albert I, Prince Souverain de Monaco, fasc. 84 (Monaco: Impr. de Monaco, 1932), 300.   4 For more on the development of nineteenth-century marine research stations, see Jude Philp’s chapter in this volume.   5 Jan Brazier’s chapter in this volume explores, for instance, how the glass models crafted by designers Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka were inspired by Haeckel’s illustrations of marine invertebrates.   6 Robert Proctor, René Binet: From Nature to Form (New York: Prestel, 2007), 8.   7 Sarah Wade, ‘Ecological Exhibitions at the Musée Océanographique de Monaco’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 9, no. 2 (October 2020): 162–81.   8 Again, the Blaschka’s spun glass models of marine lifeforms are a case in point. Glass as a decorative medium is also visible in the designs of Art Nouveau artist Emile Gallé, especially his Mer Profonde (1903), a deep red glass vase decorated with a luminescent jellyfish and fish, as well Louis Comfort Tiffany’s chandeliers in the shape of a jellyfish umbrella.   9 The toxic liquid that cnidarians inject sometimes provokes anaphylaxis. Charles Richet and Paul Portier, at the behest of the Prince’s initiative on his research ship Princess-Alice in 1901, studied the effects of the toxin of the Portuguese Man of War and Richet was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1913. ­10 Despite the abandonment of this theory at the time of the construction of the Maison de l’Océan and the Institut Océanographique in Monaco between 1898 and 1910, Lamarck’s research into the succession of organisms was still highly respected. 11 This polymorphism is still debated to understand its division of labour – the distinct functions carried out by different groups of cells within the organism.

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12 It is abundant in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean where its density is currently posing serious problems for fishermen. 13 Moreover, the larvae are planktonic whereas the adults are benthic and this change of biotopes (habitats specific to their life stages) makes them meroplanktonic species. 14 Emile Gallé also depicted this evolutionary theme of exodus from the ocean in Main aux Algues et aux Coquillages (1904). 15 The hippocampus male, Phyllopteryx eques, protects its young in a special pocket, like marsupial mammals. The young lick the walls of the pocket from which exudes nourishing mucus.

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Trade Connections: The Acquisition of Blaschka Marine Invertebrate Models in Australia and New Zealand Jan Brazier

Between the late 1860s and early 1880s, several natural history museums in Australia and New Zealand acquired glass models of marine invertebrate animals made by the German father and son glass-workers, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, to enhance their zoological displays. The Blaschkas had developed a niche market for their models. These were advertised in catalogues and sold either directly or through approved dealers. This case study looks at the acquisition of marine models by four museums in New Zealand and Australia. The details behind how and why these models reached Dunedin, Christchurch, Auckland and Sydney reveal the long pathways and intersections of scientific commerce, how connections with commercial dealers developed, and the nature of these business and personal transactions. In Dunedin, the Otago Museum dealt directly with Leopold Blaschka, as did the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. The Auckland Museum worked through dealer Henry Ward (agent for the Blaschkas in North America) as part of an ongoing trade relationship. In Sydney, the Australian Museum dealt with dealer Václav Frič of Prague as part of two transactions: exchanges of specimens during 1868 and 1869, and in 1879, as part of a larger order for an educational collection. Natural history museums wanted the public to understand the kingdoms of nature by seeing displays of animals from all classes and families of animals from the lowest to highest orders. With accompanying guidebooks, ‘the intelligent visitor’ was ‘to acquire a fairly clear and accurate, although naturally superficial, knowledge of the form and general structure of animals, and of their relation to one another’.1 Displays were to be publicly legible, understood by sight, and their meaning comprehensible through layout and labels.2 Yet some animals were not easily observed as museum specimens. Large animals could be displayed and understood as taxidermied specimens, skeletons and casts. Fish could be seen as stuffed skins or preserved in jars. Hardbodied invertebrates could be placed in cases or on stands – shells were attractive with their myriad forms and colours, as were corals and crustaceans. But soft-bodied marine invertebrates, such as sea anemones, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and octopus, could only

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be preserved in alcohol, a process which removed their colour and distorted their shape, making any visual study difficult. For the public, shell-less animals were ‘only visible as “damp, unpleasant bodies,” crammed into jars of spirits, through which it is somewhat difficult to make head or tail of them’.3 Models or good, coloured illustrations were found to be ‘more intelligible than the actual specimens of such creatures’.4 Glass was a perfect medium for models representing marine invertebrates, realistically indicating those ‘gelatinous transparent bodies’.5 The masters of glass model making were Leopold Blaschka (1822–95), assisted from 1876 by his son Rudolph (1857–1939), working in Dresden, Germany. Much has now been uncovered of the work of the Blaschka studio, who from the family’s beginnings as glass-workers carved out a business in the production and provision of glass models of marine invertebrates, supplying museums and educational institutions around the world from the mid1860s until 1890.6 Museums have been working to identify surviving marine models in their collections.7 How business transactions were conducted in the acquisition of these models, within an understanding of the global commerce of natural history, is less well known. The models were initially designed from drawings from zoological texts, including Philip Henry Gosse’s Actinologia Britannica (1860). Later, they were based on observations of real animals, and in liaison with scientists such as Ernst Haeckel and Franz Eilhard Schulze.8 Leopold’s production started with glass sea anemones. The model of the sea anemone Tealia crassicornis reveals his artistic glass mastery (Plate 26). Sometimes known as the painted anemone, the body is encircled by rows of delicate, subtly striped tentacles (one detached) – that almost seem dynamic, as if moving in motion with the undersea environment – while, on top, the anemone’s body terminates in a menacing dark-red disc containing the mouth, all vividly brought to life through coloured glass. Sea anemones were described as ‘flowers of the sea’.9 In the model shown here, Tealia crassicornis is in full bloom, never to wilt or fade on its sea rock-garden base. Our understanding of how the Blaschkas worked with glass, their manufacturing and technical methods over time, is growing with new research.10 By 1871, Leopold was selling models of molluscs, jellyfish, starfish, sea cucumbers and worms. Their accuracy was attested to by their maker in the firm’s promotional material and evidenced by being purchased by many scientific institutions. Sales catalogues were arranged taxonomically, with 700 glass specimens on offer in 1888.11 The British Museum was one of the first to buy the models, acquiring 185 models through orders submitted in 1866, 1876, 1883 and 1889.12 The scientists who filled curatorial positions in Australian and New Zealand museums also sought the glass models when establishing displays of marine invertebrates. Dunedin and Christchurch were to buy directly from Leopold Blaschka, while Auckland and Sydney acquired the glass models through the museums’ trade relationships with natural history dealers. The Otago Museum at Dunedin, New Zealand, established in 1868, opened a new building on 11 August 1877. As part of the new displays, Frederick Wollaston Hutton, curator from 1873, ordered models from Leopold Blaschka: the purchase is recorded in the Blaschka account book on 23 May 1877, for 208 German marks.13 The date may

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be the date of despatch. It is not known if the models were in place for the opening, but the Guidebook, published soon afterwards, refers to the models located in the display cases holding marine invertebrates round the gallery rails.14 The detailed descriptions make no mention of the Blaschka name. Intriguingly, Leopold Blaschka later wrote in a letter to Julius von Haast, curator at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, that ‘Mr Hutton had not bought the same of me directly but obtained them second hand’.15 Perhaps Hutton initially tried to order the models through another seller, as Haast was to do: correspondence has not yet been discovered to document how Hutton made direct contact with Blaschka. In Christchurch, Haast’s dealings got off to a rocky start. Blaschka was in a strong position in producing a product in high demand and could be difficult to deal with. On 28 August 1879 Leopold Blaschka, ‘maker of glass models’ sent a catalogue of his models to Haast as requested by him on 21  June.16 Hutton, who was in regular contact with Haast, had provided him with Blaschka’s address the previous year.17 Blaschka advised that if Haast wished to make a purchase, it would be advantageous to send the amount in advance as the order was then certain to be considered. At the time that Haast wrote, Blaschka’s commitments to existing contracts meant that, even then, it could only be executed by mid-1880. Yet it seems that Haast then contacted A. B. Meyer, director of the Dresden Museum in Germany, with instructions to order the models, and thought Blaschka was to start on them in January 1882.18 But models were not forthcoming. Meyer advised Haast that he should write directly to Blaschka. Haast took this advice, writing to placate the prickly Blaschka and enclosing unspecified photographs. On 26 September 1882 Blaschka replied, thanking him for the photos which ‘pleased me very much’ and acknowledging the firm order received with the letter.19 He wrote that Meyer had mentioned that Haast wanted some models but advised that ‘[t]o deal through Mr Meyer would not be as convenient for me, (I have no connections whatsoever with him)’.20 Blaschka controlled his business by only dealing directly with clients or through his assigned agents. He continued to tell Haast to send 500–600 marks, the amount for a large box of models including packing. Payment in advance brought the advantage of being charged the original catalogue prices ‘without having to pay the substantial mark up of agents’.21 Blaschka advised that the order was despatched on 11 May 1883 via Hamburg to the New Zealand Shipping Company (NZSC) in London. He acknowledged the long delay in execution but wrote that this was ‘to your advantage, because I have included with your models free of charge and for the first time the enlarged details of worms and corals, which are additions planned for the next catalogue’.22 The models arrived in Christchurch aboard the NZSC vessel Waikato in October 1883.23 The models were showcased in the technological room at the museum, which opened in February 1882, with the purpose of displaying objects of interest and as ‘a means of conveying technical instruction to one of the largest and most important classes in the community, the artisans’.24 In a rare acknowledgement of the models’ creator, it was noted in an article in the Press that the glass case was filled with samples of glass-blowing, ‘the work of a famous Dresden glassblower named Leopold

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Blaschka’.25 Furthermore, the article emphasizes the virtuosity of Blaschka’s realistic representation, highlighting the artistic merit of the models: [S]o successfully and accurately has he completed his work that without explanation the models would be taken for the specimens they represent. The whole of the models are extremely delicately tinted, and clearly show that the artist is thoroughly acquainted with his subject. The transparent marine animals, which pass unnoticed by an ordinary person, have been wonderfully represented … The specimens have been placed in the Technological room in order to show them as examples of industrial art as applied to science. In time they will be distributed through the Museum and arranged under their proper classes.26

By 1885 the glass models were in the upstairs gallery in low cases displaying marine invertebrates, along with birds in the wall cases.27 In Auckland and Sydney, dealings involving the Blaschka models were part of transactions with the natural history dealers, Henry Ward in Rochester, New York, assigned agent for Leopold Blaschka in North America, and Václav Frič, of Prague, a regular sales conduit for the models. Both provide an understanding of the relationships between museums and commercial dealers and how they developed, in contrast to Haast’s practice of dealing directly with the model makers. The acquisition of seven Blaschka models by the Auckland Museum was a small part of a rich relationship between curator (from 1874) Thomas Cheeseman and prominent dealer Henry Ward, of Ward’s Natural History Establishment, Rochester, New York. Ward sold natural history specimens to museums and universities around the world. In early 1881 Ward visited Auckland as part of a trip to Australia and Asia. During his stay he made arrangements with Cheeseman for an extensive exchange of natural history objects.28 Such transactions, in which specimens were traded directly between museums and also the commercial sector, were crucial to the development of natural history collections. On 9 September 1882 Cheeseman wrote to Ward: I am anxious to obtain a few of Blaschka’s glass models of invertebrates. I think you told me you had been appointed his agent in America. Could you send me a priced catalogue of his specimens? I would either buy a few, or which suit[s] me better, exchange for them if there is anything I can supply you with.29

On 28  April 1883, Cheeseman wrote again, ‘If you happen to have one or two of Blaschka’s glass models of invertebrate animals by you, please send also. I have thought several times of ordering them, but should like to see an example before actually doing so.’30 Cheeseman also had asked after a taxidermist for the Auckland Museum, and Ward recommended C. F. Adams, who delivered the samples of the glass models on arriving to take up the position in January 1885. Cheeseman wrote on 29 April 1885: Before long, I think that we shall send you a considerable order for them – but in the meantime I should be obliged if you could let me know whether notice is required

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before an order can be fulfilled. I see something in his catalogue to that effect … How about packing? Is there a likelihood of any considerable breakage taking place? A recent catalogue would be welcome to assist in selecting the specimens.31

Ward replied on 26 June: ­ ey are very slow to come. (B. [Blaschka] is a testy, whimsical yet very honest Th German.) It is hardly safe to count on less than six to ten months to fill any order over £10. I pay him in full with the order (he insists that from everyone) and then flatter and cajole him in a craven manner into accommodating me (!) by doing the work as promptly as possible. Blaschka and his son alone – in the world – do this work. He is old and [the] son in poor health. Order now whatever you want. I will advance the money and see them delivered, splendidly packed to your London ag[en]t, or to steamer[?]. Cost as per my catalogue – nothing later.32

Cheeseman advised Ward on 1 March 1886 that he had to defer ordering until ‘next year’ and wished he could visit Ward’s place: ‘I very much wish that I were able to have a look through your establishment, for as you say, there are no doubt many things that could be picked out that would be useful to use.’33 Only the initial samples from Ward, delivered by the taxidermist, were ever acquired. In Sydney, a relationship between the Australian Museum and dealer Václav Frič reveals trade connections with Europe in the exchange and purchase of specimens. In 1868, as part of an exchange of specimens with curator Gerard Krefft, Frič sent ‘a collection of glass models of various genera and species of Actinias [sea anemones], in their natural colours’.34 A collection of wooden crystal models and spiders mounted on slides in spirits of wine were also sent. A further exchange occurred in 1869 that included a set of foraminifera models (100 species).35 There is no mention of the Blaschka name in relation to the sea anemone models, but it is highly likely that they were made by Leopold Blaschka. Frič was a natural history dealer selling around the world from 1862.36 He was the first dealer known to have handled the Blaschka models, selling models of sea anemones to the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society in 1865. Soon afterwards Robert Damon37 was appointed Blaschka’s agent for Great Britain. Blaschka found it more effective for agents to collect orders and send these to him in batches, rather than processing them individually.38 In Frič’s sale to Leeds, as in the Australian Museum transaction, the Blaschka name is not mentioned but simply recorded as a ‘series of 64 accurate Coloured Models of the European Species of Actinea’.39 Frič’s trade catalogue issued around 1878 lists glass models of marine invertebrates that, although not attributed to any studio, were almost certainly made by the Blaschkas.40 No other details – including numbers or species – of the Australian Museum’s 1868 tantalizing acquisition of glass models have been found, and the models are not referred to in any contemporary descriptions of the museum displays. Who initiated the contact between curator Gerard Krefft and Václav Frič is yet to be discovered. Further research and comparative study of similar models from the 1860s may lead to the firmer identification of a number, if not all, of the surviving sea anemone models as possibly some of the earliest surviving Blaschka models.

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A decade later in 1879, the Australian Museum dealt with Václav Frič again. No reference to the earlier dealings was made in the correspondence for this new purchase. Archibald Liversidge, professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Sydney, and member of the Australian Museum Board of Trustees, was in Europe as a New South Wales Commissioner for the Paris Exposition Universelle, reporting for the government on technical education and making scientific purchases. This included a commission from the Australian Museum to spend 500 pounds on the purchase of ‘an educational series of comparative anatomy’.41 In early 1879, while in London, he contacted Václav Frič in Prague. Frič replied that he was glad to furnish a ‘collection of natural objects and preparations serving to the instruction of the elements of comparative anatomy for medicinal [sic] and other students’.42 The Australian Museum submitted a large order in May 1880 comprising specimens and skeletons of all the common European vertebrates and invertebrates, from the lowest to highest orders. The order included Blaschka models. The first chests, which were sent in March 1881 and arrived in midJuly by the SS Cascapedia, contained sixty-six glass models.43 A further twenty-three arrived in a consignment despatched in December 1883. These included a model of a coral branch similar to one of the glass models of marine invertebrates sent by Leopold Blaschka to Julius von Haast at the Canterbury Museum in the same year (Plate 27).44 The Australian Museum acquired 124 glass models in total, registered in 1907–8 in the marine invertebrates specimen collection register (written off in 1941), but yet to be identified and matched to the surviving glass species models. The 1883 Guide to the Contents of the Australian Museum provided detailed descriptions of the new education collection, illustrating zoology and comparative anatomy, located in the upper floor of the new wing, stating that the collection ‘will be found very useful to those making a general study of these subjects. It is made up largely of European specimens having been imported from Germany’.45 But the anatomy teaching collection survived for only a year before most of it was transferred to the University of Sydney, where a new science degree had been instituted in 1882. The trustees observed that as most of the specimens were already represented in the museum, the space could be better used.46 Only the models were retained by the museum. These remained on display until the marine invertebrates gallery was reorganized in 1941; yet knowledge of the Blaschka name drifted away. In Australia, outside Sydney, seven models – including four of sponge larva – are held by the Melbourne Museum, but their origins are yet to be discovered. In Brisbane, in 1885, the Queensland Museum had considered acquiring some, declaring that, for the student of animal life, ‘it would be expedient to procure a few of Blaschka’s wellknown glass models of the lowest animals. These render intelligible to the ordinary observer forms which cannot otherwise be presented bodily even to the naked eye.’47 However, no purchase was made. The Blaschka models were created so that the public could view and make sense of soft-bodied marine animals in zoological displays by apprehending their characteristic forms, colours, surface textures and size. How the public responded to these beguiling models is not known. Yet, while deemed accurate representations, they were of limited scientific value. For marine scientists it was the real specimens stored in alcohol that

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had research value. As museum displays changed in the twentieth century, the models disappeared from view. When acquiring the models, it was their representational value that was sought: the name of the maker was lost in the records until the rediscovery of the Blaschkas’ artistry in recent years.48 The models now sit at the intersection of science and art as part of the visual culture of science and the history of zoological display.

Notes   1 T. Jeffery Parker, ‘On an “Index-collection” for Small Zoological Museums in the Form of a Genealogical Tree of the Animal Kingdom’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 18 (1885): 74. http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/ rsnz_18/rsnz_18_00_000620.html (accessed 15 January 2017).   2 Tony Bennett, ‘Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility and the Social Order’, in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, edited by Sharon Macdonald (London: Routledge, 1998), 25–35.   3 ‘The Australian Museum’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 14 August 1897, 21.   4 Ibid.   5 ‘Glass Models of Invertebrate Animals’, Star, 27 October 1883, 4.   6 The Blaschkas stopped making marine models when they began creating their renowned botanical glass models for Harvard University’s Museum of Natural History. Over 4,000 models representing more than 830 plant species were made. See ‘Glass Flowers: The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants’. https:// hmnh.harvard.edu/glass-flowers (accessed 15 August 2019).   7 See Alexandra Ruggiero and Katherine A. Larson, ‘The Blaschka Legacy in Worldwide Collections’, Journal of Glass Studies 59 (2017): 419–28.   8 See Henri Reiling, ‘The Blaschkas’ Glass Animal Models: Origins of Design’, Journal of Glass Studies 40 (1998): 105–26; Chris Meechan and Henri Reiling, ‘Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and Natural History in the Nineteenth Century’, in Leopold & Rudolf Blaschka, edited by James Peto and Angie Hudson (London: Design Museum, 2002). http://members.ziggo.nl/here/design.html (accessed 15 January 2017); ‘Proceedings of the Dublin Blaschka Congress’, Historical Biology 20, no. 1 (2008); David Whitehouse, ‘Blaschkas’ Glass Models of Invertebrate Animals (1863–1890)’, published 3 November 2011. http://www.cmog.org/article/blaschkas-glass-modelsinvertebrate-animals-1863-1890 (accessed 23 January 2017).   9 ‘Flowers of the Sea’, from the Illustrated London News of 23 December, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 April 1855, 8. For more on the ocean pastoral and its relationship to the domestication of the sea, see Davidson and Duggins’s chapter in this volume. 10 On the analysis of models in the Natural History Museum, London, see Martina Bertini, Efstratia Verveniotou, Miranda Lowe, and C. Giles Miller, ‘Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry Investigation of Late 19th-Century Blaschka Marine Invertebrate Glass Models’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 6 (2016): 506–17. 11 H.A. Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, Catalogue of Glass Models of Invertebrate Animals (Rochester New York: E.R. Andrews, 1878). https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/ manifests/view/drs:47055282$1i (accessed 29 December 2016). For more on the 1878

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and 1888 catalogues, see Ruthanna Dyer, ‘Learning through Glass: The Blaschka Marine Models in North American Post-Secondary Education’, Historical Biology 20, no. 1 (2008): 30. ­12 C. Giles Miller and Miranda Lowe, ‘The Natural History Museum Blaschka Collections’, Historical Biology 20, no. 1 (2008): 59. 13 Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Geschäfts-Anmerkungen [Account book], 1872–87, Rakow Library Corning Museum of Glass. https://www.cmog.org/library/gescha-ftsanmerkungen (accessed 15 January 2017). 14 Otago University Museum Dunedin, Guide to the Collections of Zoology, Geology & Mineralogy (Dunedin: Daily Times, 1878). The Evening Standard mentions receiving a copy on 5 February 1878. 15 L. Blaschka to J. von Haast, 28 August 1879, Haast family papers, ‘Blaschka 1879–84’ MS-Papers-0037 folder 165A (Micro0717-13), National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. 16 Ibid. 17 F.W. Hutton to J. von Haast, 25 September 1878, Haast family papers, MS0037-110 (micro0717-08), National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. 18 On the Meyer and Haast contact, see H.F. von Haast, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast, Wellington (1948), footnote 896: Meyer told Haast that Blaschka hated him and to write direct. 19 L. Blaschka to J. von Haast, 26 September 1882, MS-Papers-0037 folder 165A (Micro0717-13). 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 L. Blaschka to J. von Haast, 11 May 1883, MS-Papers-0037 folder 165A (Micro0717-13). 23 ‘Glass Models of Invertebrate Animals’, Star, 27 October 1883, 4. See Matthew D. Shaw, Joanna Z. Szczepanski, Sarah F. Murray, Simon Hodge, and Cor J. Vink, ‘Ideas Made Glass: Blaschka Glass Models at Canterbury Museum’, Records of the Canterbury Museum 31 (2017): 5–84 for an analysis and detailed catalogue of the models, https://www.canterburymuseum.com/assets/Uploads/Ideas-made-glass.pdf 24 ‘The Museum: The New Technological Room’, Star, 16 February 1882, 4. 25 ‘The Museum’, Press, 27 October 1883, 3. 26 Ibid. 27 M. Mosley, Illustrated Guide to Christchurch and Neighbourhood (Christchurch: J.T. Smith & Co, 1885), 75. http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-MosIllu.html (accessed 22 January 2017). 28 ‘Professor H.A. Ward’, New Zealand Herald, 31 March 1881, 5. 29 Outwards Letter book vol 2 1882–90, MUS96-6-2, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira. 30 MUS96-6-2, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira. 31 Ibid. 32 Ward Correspondence 1868–99 W MUS95-38-11, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira. 33 MUS96-6-2; Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira. 34 Australian Museum, Report of the Trustees for 1868 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1869), Appendix no. 2, 3. Thanks to Dr Jude Philp, Sydney University Museums, for highlighting this reference provided by Dr Jarrod Hore,

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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researcher for the ARC Linkage project, ‘Reconstructing Museum Specimen Data through the Pathways of Global Commerce’. Correspondence, AMS 7, C20.69.18; Exchange Committee Minute Book May 1870 AMS 2, vol 1, 11,Australian Museum Archives. On Friĉ, see Henri Reiling and Tat’jána Spunarová, ‘Václav Friĉ (1839–1916) and his Influence on Collecting Natural History’, Journal of the History of Collections 17, no. 1 (2005): 25–43. Robert Damon (1814–89) was a natural history dealer in Weymouth, England, principally supplying fossils and shells. See Miller and Lowe, The Natural History Museum Blaschka Collections, 57–8; Reiling and Spunarová, Václav Friĉ (1839–1916) and his Influence on Collecting Natural History, 26. Whitehouse, ‘Blaschka’s Glass Models’. Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 46th Report of the Council for 1865–6, 14. https://archive.org/details/annualreport4157leeduoft/page/n225 (accessed 4 November 2019). Reiling and Spunarová, Václav Friĉ (1839–1916) and his Influence on Collecting Natural History, 32. Purchase Schedule from the Australian Museum to the Agent-General for New South Wales, London, 30 September 1879, AMS 7, C.10.79.1, Australian Museum Archives. On the purchase by the Australian Museum, see Correspondence, AMS 7, C.10.79.1 and C.10.81.5, Australian Museum Archives. ‘The Australian Museum’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 July1881, 3. Leopold Blaschka, Model of branch of coral ‘Corallium rubrum’, c. 1883, glass, 20.5 cm × 7.0 cm × 22.0 cm. Australian Museum Archives, AMS582, MA777. Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Glass Model Invertebrate: Corallium rubrum, 1863–82, glass, Canterbury Museum. Accession no. 1884.137.21. https://collection. canterburymuseum.com/objects/192135/glass-model-invertebrate-coralliumrubrum (accessed 20 December 2021). Australian Museum, Guide to the Contents of the Australian Museum (Sydney: Frederick W. White, printer, 1883), 31. Australian Museum, Report of the Trustees for 1884 (Sydney: Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1885), 2; Patricia Egan, ‘Brittle Stars and Sea Anemones: the Blaschka Collection’, Explore 32, no. 1 (2010): 2–4 for date of removal from gallery. ‘Queensland Museum’, Queenslander (Brisbane), 12 September 1885, 434. Ruggiero and Larson, The Blaschka Legacy, 422, calculate that the Blaschkas made possibly 10,000–15,000 models, of which between 35 and 50 per cent survive. For online museum image galleries of marine models, see the Australian Museum’s ‘Blaschka glass models’, https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/collections/ archives/blaschka-glass-models/ and Harvard Museum of Natural History’s ‘Sea Creatures in Glass’, https://hmnh.harvard.edu/sea-creatures-glass. For recent analysis on the artistry of Blaschka marine invertebrate models, see Pandora Syperek, ‘“No Fancy So Wild”: Slippery Gender Models in the Coral Gallery’, in Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space, edited by Tricia Cusak (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 239–57. For a scientific search for living animals that match the models, see Drew Harvell, A Sea of Glass Searching for the Blaschkas’ Fragile Legacy in an Ocean of Risk (California: University of California Press, 2016).

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Index Locators followed by “n.” indicate endnotes Abbot, John 239 Aboriginal 166 n.7, 169 n.75 art and cultural practice 160 Australians 154, 166 n.7, 169 n.75 cultural object 154 cultural product 162, 165 people from La Perouse 153–61, 165, 169 n.75 Problem 155 shellwork 16 n.44, 155, 157, 160, 163, 165 souvenir, transition to (1900s-1940s) 157–60 Sydney 155, 160, 162–3 visual culture 159 Adams, C. F. 258 Adventure ship 68 advertisement 92–3, 145 agent 4, 6, 9, 42, 66, 70, 257–9 agriculture 154 and marine technologies 103 social systems 113 Alaimo, Stacy 13, 102, 113. See also transcorporeality Albert I, Prince of Monaco (1848–1922) 12, 249–50, 252–3 Résultats des Campagnes Scientifiques (RCS) 249 albums 16 n.33, 149 n.17, 182, 238–9 alcoholaria 223–4, 232 n.95 Alfred, Prince 180 algae 8, 12, 15 n.33, 252 Al-Ghazali 140 Ali, Muhammad (r.1749–95) 140 Allas, Tess 161 allegory 139 Alpers, Svetlana 64–5 Alston, Charles 28 Lectures on the Materia Medica 25–6, 30–1

Althoff, Friedrich von 213 amateur (avocational) 5, 62, 82, 129, 134 n.7, 146 ambergris 21, 34 n.10, 35 n.26 DNA studies 34 n.2 historical and literary significance 22 and human-whale relations 34 n.5 and materia medica (see materia medica (ambergris)) odour 21–6, 28–9, 37 n.57 origins of 21–3, 30–1 and perfumery 21–3, 25–30, 33, 34 n.1, 35 n.13 in pharmacopeia 22 ­physical properties of 23 striated formation 21 and system of nature 22, 30–4 uses 22, 24, 29–30 ancestor portrait 54 Anemonia sulcata 127 animal studies 243–5 Anthropocene 5 antler 51, 58 nn.78–9 Appadurai, Arjun, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective 4 Aquadhere 167 n.32 aquarium(s) 1, 7, 9–10, 84, 128, 131, 135 n.13, 185, 192, 196, 199, 202, 250. See also specific aquarium campaigns 131 domestic 123 in Europe 191–2 extensive 126 freshwater 193, 195 in Japan (see Japanese aquariums) public 6, 92, 191 saltwater 193, 195 and tragedy of the commons 144

294

Index

Arcadian laundresses 112 archaeology 70, 101 Ardler, Gladys 165 Ardler, Jessie 164 Aristotelian theory 23 Armée des Princes 62 Armstrong, John, Synopsis of the History and Cure of Venereal Diseases 26 art 8, 10, 49, 62, 65, 67, 74–5, 82, 153, 161, 165, 185, 211, 258 of feminine domesticity 157 history 62, 69, 81, 101–2, 139 manuals 9, 93 of punning (gowhar) 140 and science 74, 253, 261 Art Gallery of New South Wales 158 ‘Art in the Theatre’ (Magazine of Art) 184 Art Nouveau 6, 250, 252, 253 n.8 Asakusa Aquarium 193, 203 Asakusa-koen Aquarium 196, 199–200 guidebook of 196–7, 200, 202 ascidians 250, 252 Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) 53 assemblage 7–9, 11, 13, 86, 90, 102, 104, 114 Astacus fluviatilis 131 Attenbrow, Val 163 Auckland Museum 255, 258 audience 1, 3, 5–6, 10–11, 28, 64, 73–4, 116, 121–2, 124, 174–6, 183–4, 199, 210, 214, 216–18, 222, 224 ­Aurangzeb 149 n.17 Australia 3–4, 123, 148, 158, 160, 162, 180, 258, 260 Aboriginal 153–4, 166 n.7, 169 n.75 coastal aquaculture 154 Great Barrier Reef of 133, 178, 184 natural history museums 255 Australian Museum 128, 132, 136 n.43, 259–60, 262 n.34 Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) 7, 9, 21, 31 scrimshaw whale tooth 31, 32 Aveline, Elizabeth L. 15 n.33, 16 n.46 back cloud (beiyun), coral necklace 42, 55 n.19 Bahamian manufacturers 92 Balaenidae 244 baleen 243–4, 246 Banks, Joseph 31, 63, 134 n.8

baoshi 39, 47, 52 Barbados 8, 81, 95 n.23 Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop 88–93 curios 92 as marine wonderland 93 plantation labour 86 post-emancipation economy 83, 86, 88 shellwork plaques 10, 81–3, 90 tourism, trinkets and decorative labour in 83–7 vendors 93 Barbe, Simon, Le parfumeur royal, ou l’art de parfumer 26 ‘L’Origine des parfums’ (The origin of perfumes) 26, 27 Baroda ornament and crime 142–3 pearls/pearl necklace 142, 150 n.24 Baroque, the Pearl of Allah 139 Barrell, John 120 n.61 Barringer, Tim 83 Bataille, Georges 139 Bauer, Ferdinand 15 n.20 Bécoeur, Jean-Baptist (1718–77), arsenic soap 135 n.11 Belgrave, Benjamin Hinds 82, 88 Belgrave, George Gordon 82, 88 Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop (Bridgetown) 82, 88–93 Beller, Beryl 163 Bendall, Sarah Ann 243, 246 n.4 Benjamin, Walter 139–40 Bennett, Jane 102 Berger, John 102, 115 Berjeau, Charles 177, 187 n.31 Berlin 209 Aquarium 192–3 Berliner Schloss 224–5 exhibition of naval models 212 ­MfM (see Museum für Meereskunde (MfM), Berlin) Navy Museum 212–16 Zoological Museum 132 Beverly, W. R. 183 Little Jack Horner 184 Bewick, Thomas (1753–1828) 71 Biendiné, Camille, Les Quilles en l’Air d’Equihen: Habitations Faites avec la Coque d’un Bateau Retourné 108

Index Bird Gallery 176 Bismarck Archipelago 122 Bjaaland Welch, Patricia 46 Blackburn, Henry, Breton Folk: An Artistic Tour in Brittany 110 Blackburne, Charles W., ‘Cooper’s Photo Studio and Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop, Bridgetown, Barbados’ 91 Blankaart, Steven, The Physical Dictionary 28 Blaschka, Leopold 6, 12, 124, 127, 253 n.5, 255–9 Blaschka, Rudolf 6, 12, 255–6 block printing 237–8, 241 n.11 Bolster, Jeffrey 110 human maritime communities 102 botany 73, 89, 252 Boudin, Eugène 109 Bourbon restoration 62, 73–4 Bourrut-Lacouture, Annette 112 Bowerbank, James 1, 6 Boylston, Dr. 31 Brassey, Lady Annie, In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties 33 Braunschweig 209–10, 218 Brazier, Jan 12, 253 n.5 Brazier, John 129 Breton, Jules 11, 101, 105, 113, 116, 119 n.42, 119 n.45 Calvet 111 peasant bodies on tideline 111–14 The Washerwomen of the Breton Coast 111 working women 112 Breton Barbizon 111 Brighton Aquarium 192, 200 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) 178 British East India Company, Price Current at Canton 1764 44 British Empire Exhibition (1924, Wembley) 93 British fisheries exhibitions 15 n.26 British Museum 8, 12, 58 n.80, 63, 76 n.10, 88, 131, 134 n.4, 176–8, 186, 256 British West Indies 82–4, 86 Brittany 109–11 Brown, George 131 Bruce, John Munro 182

295

Brun, Alexandre Jean-Baptiste (1853–1941) 250 Buc’hoz, Pierre-Joseph, The Toilet of Flora 28 Buddhism 39–40, 43, 47, 50, 53 ­Bullock, William (1773–1849) 61, 63, 68 A Descriptive Catalogue 78 n.39 Exhibit of A Royal Tiger being Suffocated by a Snake 72–3 illustrated catalogue 61–2 Pantherion 70 A Royal Tiger Suffocated by a Boa Constrictor 72 Bullock Museum 62, 70–3 Containers of Birds 72 de Barde’s exhibition 73 exhibitions 71 innovation 72 Lever’s collection 74 Bunnabi 153 busk 12, 243–6 Caiger-Smith, Martin 226 n.1 Calcagno, Robert 12 calico 237–8 Calvert, Samuel 182 Calvet, Jeanne 111–12 Camille Corot, Jean-Baptiste 11, 101, 107, 116 Dieppe, Fisherman’s Wife 105 camp 11, 30, 145–6, 155, 212 canning 109–10 Canterbury Museum (Christchurch) 255, 257, 260 Caribbean/Caribbean identity 81, 92 Archaic Age (c. 3000–500 BCE) 84 Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop and exhibition 88–93 conchology 89 cottage industry 82 curio trade 83 ethnographic photography 87 marine objects 6 as marine wonderland 92 native manufactures 93 natural history network 88 shells 10, 81–2, 89 tourism 85, 88 Cariou, André 114, 119 n.43 Carson, Rachel 114

296

Index

cartes-de-visite 90 Catherine de’ Medici 25 Cattell, Martha 12 cedarwood (Cedrella odorata) 81, 89 Centennial Exhibition (1876, Philadelphia) 92 Centennial Photographic Company 92 Ceylon 140, 144–8 Ceylon Company of Pearl Fisheries Limited 146 Champion, Alexander 31 Charles I 25 ­Charles II 25 Charles Troedel and Co. 182 Charles X (1757–1836) 70 Charlotte, Queen 237 Château de Saint-Cloud 62, 73 Cheeseman, Thomas 258–9 chemist 28, 33, 135 n.11 Chevalier, Nicholas 180 Race to the Market, Tahiti 180–2 South Sea Beauty 180 What You Give? 182–3 Will You Buy? 180–3 Cheyne, George, The English Malady 29 Chimaera (ghost shark) 127 China 3, 47, 212. See also Qing dynasty; Qing imperial court, coral at coral network 39, 53 cults of trees 47 immortality 54 material culture 51 natural hardstones 39 preciousness and treasure 54 n.1 religious beliefs 40 Christie, Ann 12, 237 chromolithograph 8 chunam 146–7 Church Missionary Society 157 Chypre water recipe (Complete Distiller, Cooper) 28 classification 8, 23, 64, 122, 131, 134 n.7, 161, 200 Linnaean 30, 63 phylogenetic 252 taxonomic 121 Clathrocanium reginae 250 climate change 4

coast 11, 30–1, 68, 84, 101, 107, 110, 114, 237, 240 Brittany 109, 111 ecological approaches to 101–3 French Atlantic 11, 101 Normandy 103, 106, 109, 115 NSW 154–6, 160, 163 coastal rim economies 11 Coe, Emma 131 Coe, Jonas 131 Coffin, Joshua 31 Cole, Georgina 10 collage 7–9, 89 collection(s) 1–2, 5–8, 10, 12, 23, 49, 61, 69, 114, 122, 137 n.48, 142, 176, 209, 214, 224, 239–40, 256 animal 195 biology 215, 230 n.48 ­double shellwork plaque 81 French royal 62 history and economics 215, 220, 221, 230 n.48 The Imperial Naval Collection 215, 230 n.48 Lever’s 61–7, 74 in London 62 of minerals 69 of model engines 220–1 natural history 10, 61, 69, 94 n.11, 128, 176, 185, 258 objects 69, 74, 260 oceanography 224–6, 233 n.101 oceanology 215, 230 n.48, 233 n.101 provenance 63 of shells 61, 67, 82, 89, 147, 151 n.43, 163, 181 South Sea 70 themes 214 Collection of the Imperial Navy 212 collectors 64, 68–70, 82, 85, 129, 131, 176, 237. See also specific collectors of seaweed specimens 237, 239 of shells 62, 67 Colley, Sarah 163 colonial/colonialism 4, 10–11, 32, 85, 144, 161, 202 communities 83

Index craft 81 curio trade 88, 93 economies 3 expansion and trade 82 labour 139 missionaries 157 networks 8 colonization 84, 144, 153–5, 161 civilizing project of 157 touristic 110 colours 41, 46–7, 52, 67, 81, 148, 173, 175, 179, 181–2, 184–5, 252 of marine organisms 174 textile industry, technologies 175 Committee of Privy Council 31 commodification 3–4, 10–12, 40, 49, 53, 56 n.36, 93, 174–5, 179, 180, 243–4, 246 fancywork 85 of Pacific shells 10, 62 conchology 66, 82, 89 Confucianism 40–1 Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers 214 consumerism 83, 157 Continental Shelf 151 n.43 Cook, James 3, 10, 67–70, 154, 157–8 expeditions 61, 68 Cooper, Ambrose, The Complete Distiller 28, 31 Cooper’s Photography Studio 91 ­coral 1–2, 66, 176–7, 223, 232 n.88, 255, 257 Acropora 180 black 180–1 bleached 2, 11, 177, 181 Corallium japonica 46 craftsmen 3, 10, 39, 46, 49, 52–3 Gorgonian 183 imperial (see Qing imperial court, coral at) mining 188 n.47 motifs 3, 9, 39–40, 49, 51, 185 as ornaments 3, 49, 188 n.47 physical properties 46, 53 red coral (Corallium rubrum) 3, 10, 39–44, 46–9, 51–4, 56 n.34, 179, 181–2 smart carving of 53 specimens 175–7, 181, 186

297

three-dimensional printed 133 white 46, 181, 183 Coral Gallery 176–7 coral reefs 11, 84, 173, 175–8, 180 colour 173–4 diorama 222, 223 distribution 182 as dynamic 173 expeditions 183–4 formation 178, 184 geological and biological processes 175 structure and biology 179, 182 theory 173, 179 transformation 184–6 Coral Room (British Museum) 176 corset 2, 243, 246, 246 n.4 Coughlin, Maura 11 Courbet, Gustave 102, 116 Courtauld Institute of Art 226 n.1 court dress 41, 54 Cowper, William 29 craft 7–8, 82–3, 89, 153, 159–60, 162, 165, 244, 246 Aboriginal 157 colonial 81 conchology and 82, 89 craftsmen 3, 10, 39, 46, 49, 52–3 indigenous practices 13 as material evidence 161 merchandise 91 production 83 transnational practices 9 cross-cultural 5, 160 cross-fertilization 185 Crystal Palace (Sydenham) 1, 6, 14 n.6, 175, 192, 204 n.6 ­culching 11, 144, 147 cult of celebrity 67–70 cultural containers 161–2 curio 82–3, 85–8, 91–3, 182 curiosity shops 6, 82, 88–93 Curmer, Léon, Les Français Peint par EuxMêmes 103, 107 Curtis, William 237 Botanical Magazine 241 n.24 Flora Londinensis 237, 239, 240 n.4 Curzon, Lord George 143 Cuvier, Georges 252

298 Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai: Shashin-cho 197, 198, 199 Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Jimu-hokoku 202 Dai-gokai Naikoku Kangyo Hakurankai Sakai Suizokukan Zukai 201 Damon, Robert (1814–89) 259, 263 n.37 Dana, James Dwight 180 Dannenfeldt, Karl 22, 37 n.69 Daoism 40, 47, 53 Daribi (New Guinea) 139 Darwin, Charles 101, 124, 126, 252 Beagle 122 On the Origin of Species 102, 123 Porites 174 The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs 173–5, 179–80, 182 Voyage of the Beagle 174 Davidson, Kathleen 11 David Syme and Co 182 dealers 6, 68–9, 255 museums and commercial 258 natural history 82, 89, 256, 258–9, 263 n.37 de Barde, Alexandre-Isidore Leroy (1777–1828) 61–2, 76 n.6, 76 n.10, 78 n.44 aesthetic vision 67, 70 Bloomberg 74 at Bullock Museum 70–3 Crystallized Minerals 69 house as little museum 70 interpretations of 74 in London 61–2 oeuvre 62, 74 Pacific shells, Cook and cult of celebrity 67–70 return to France 62, 73–5 A Royal Tiger 79 n.64 A Selection of Shells Arranged on Shelves 61 Shells 10, 61–7, 73–5, 78 n.55 still life 61–3, 66–7 Still Life of Prunes, Peaches and a Bird 62, 63 de Berry (1798–1870) 70 decoration 8, 86, 192, 195, 200, 244, 249–50 objects 3, 10, 39–40, 51, 244

Index ­deer 51, 58 n.78 de Freycinet, Louis-Claude (1779–1842) 73 de la Marre, Jean-Louis 104 Delamotte, Philip Henry 1 ‘Preparing case for marine objects’ 2 Delouche, Denise 114 Demont-Breton, Virginie 115 denaturing 244 Denham, Henry Mangles 15 n.20 designs 82, 91, 175, 183, 200 n.14, 241 n.12, 242 n.25, 250, 252, 253 n.8 commercial and decorative applications 240 copper-plate 237 for Little Jack Horner 184 textile 237 theatre 185 watercolour 238, 239 Deutscher Flottenverein (German Fleet Association) 212 Deutsches Museum (Munich) 218, 225, 226 n.1, 232 n.83, 233 n.101 Dickinson, Gary 52 Dictyota Dichotoma (in perfume) 34 n.1 Dieppe 104, 106–7 harbour 103, 109 troglodytes 109 Dillwyn, Lewis 241 n.24 Dinse, Paul 214 Dinshah Ardeshir Talagarkhan 142 diving/diver 11–12, 45, 84, 139, 142–5, 150 n.31 Dixon, G.G., ‘Washing Machine’ 146 DNA studies 34 n.2, 252 Dohrn, Anton (1840–1909) 122, 125–9, 131–2 domestic aquariums 123 craft 161 design 82 drawing room 6, 9 home 8 Donovan, Edward (1768–1837) 67 Naturalist’s Repository 67–8 The Doric 146 Douarnenez port 109–10 laundresses 111, 113 sardine fishery 110–11

Index Drury, Dru 239 Drury Lane 183–6 pantomime 183 Theatre Royal 185–6 Drygalski, Erich von 212 du Bois Raymond, A. 225 wave generator after 226 ­Dudley, Paul 31 Dugan, Holly 22 Duggins, Molly 10 Dupuoy, Auguste 110 East India Company 44, 140 Eaton, Natasha 11 echinoderms 252 ecocriticism 101–2 social art history 102 ecology 11–12, 101, 112, 222, 237 approaches to coast 101–3 display 223 ecological awareness 115, 139 and economy 10, 114 shores 114–16 without nature 103 Edinburgh Pharmacopoeias 26 Edo period (1603–1867) 192 education 64, 70, 131, 183, 210, 217–18, 220, 227 n.10, 240, 253, 260 development 12 on oceanography 249 ornamental 7 Pestalozzian principles 2, 13 n.6 public expenditure on 121 Edward Johnson 81 Edwards, Sydenham 237 Ehrman, Edwina, Fashioned from Nature 241 n.14, 242 n.25 Elegant Arts for Ladies 93 Elizabeth Bay House 131 Elizabeth I 25 embryology 123, 135 n.17 Emden, Henry, ‘City of Coral’ scene 185 empire 5–7, 9, 74, 86, 88, 93, 132, 142, 176, 183, 192, 203–4, 210, 228 n.16. See also specific empire empiricism 23, 31–3 Encounters exhibition (2015) 12 Encyclopaedia Britannica 31 Encyclopédie (Diderot & D’Alembert) 29

299

Endersby, Jim 134 n.7 Enlightenment empiricism, ambergris 22–3 pearl 49, 141 Enomoto, Sotaro, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku 193–5, 205 n.21, 206 n.58 ethnography 70, 139 Etty, William, The Coral Finder: Venus and her Youthful Satellites Arriving at the Isle of Paphos 179–80, 182, 187 n.37 Euastacus serratus 131 Euro-Australian society 157 ­evolution 6, 135 n.17, 184, 249, 252–3 exhibition 6–7, 15 n.26, 61, 67, 70–1, 73–4, 114, 140, 184, 212, 214, 217–19, 242 n.25. See also specific exhibition Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop and 88–93 Exhibit of a Royal Tiger Being Suffocated by a Snake 72 international 92, 114, 211, 217, 219 Louvre series 71, 73 marine animal 195 museum 75, 211 Russian 219 sensationalism 221–4 of Shells 74 styles 192–3 Volksbildung and culture 216–18 watercolours 61 exotic animals/exoticism 8, 46, 52, 85, 87, 122, 160, 192–3, 202, 204 n.9 expedition/exploration 5–6, 9, 11–12, 17 n.56, 70, 84, 107, 129, 161, 174, 176, 178, 180, 183, 212, 214, 215, 225, 249, 253 n.2 Beagle 174 Cook 61, 68, 73 fishing 84 HMS Challenger 129, 131, 176, 180, 184, 215, 249 under Louis XVIII 62, 74 oceanographic 250 South Pacific 61 Exposition Universelle in Paris (1900) 213–14, 218–19, 225, 250, 260

300

Index

fancywork 8–9, 82, 87, 93, 97 n.66 advertised 89 Barbadian 88 Caribbean 82, 88 island 85–6, 89, 92 native manufactures 83, 89, 92 natural fancywork 8–9, 89, 94 n.15 fashion 7, 10, 46, 48, 53, 70, 84–6, 112, 129, 141, 149 n.17, 158, 160, 181, 238, 242 n.25, 243, 246 fauna and flora, marine 4, 123–5, 127, 131, 134, 177, 250 Fawkener, William 31 Fenton, Roger, ‘Group of Corals, British Museum’ 177 Feuille d’Affiches de l’Arrondissement de Montreuil 78 n.55 Feyen-Perrin, Auguste 105 Fifth National Industrial Exposition 197, 202–3 fin 128, 202 First Naval Law (1898) 209 fisheries 11, 144, 146–7, 196, 200 exhibitions 15 n.26 in Finistère 110 Gulf of Manaar 144–5, 150 n.31 management science 111 pearl 140, 145 ­Fish-House of the London Zoological Society 123 fishing community 104, 148 fishing industry 109–11 fish scale embroidery 85–6 Flaubert, Gustave 103 Flers, Camille, Normandy Shore 106–7 Flinders, Matthew 15 n.20 ‘Flowers of the Sea’ 8–9, 15 n.31, 16 n.46, 256 Focke Museum (Bremen), seafaring/ whaling section 217 Foley, Fiona 162 Forster, Elizabeth (1735–1816) 69, 78 n.40 Forster, Jacob (1739–1806) 78 n.40 Forster, Johann Reinhold, Introduction to Mineralogy 30 fossils 17 n.47, 135 n.17, 252, 263 n.37 Fourcroy, Antoine Françoise, Comte de 28–9 Fowkes Tobin, Beth 68 Francillon, John 239

Freeman, Julie 156–7, 162, 164 French Atlantic coast 101 human and non-human life 11, 102 maritime communities on North Atlantic 103–9 French exhibition of Louvre series 73 freshwater tanks 193, 195, 198 Frič, Václav (1839–1916) 255, 258–60, 263 n.40 Friedrich Wilhelm University 209, 212, 227 n.9 Fucus Vesiculosus (in perfume) 34 n.1 Fudge, Erica 245 Fujino, Tominosuke, Tokyo-meibutsu Asakusa-koen Suizokukan Annai 196 Fujita, Tsunenobu, Dai-nikai Suisan Hakurankai Fuzoku Suizokukan Hokoku 193–6, 200, 205 n.21, 206 n.58 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, Seiyo jijo 191–2 Fuller, Thomas 25 Gaillarde, Raphael, Director of Louvre Museum, Henri Loyrette Session Portrait in Paris 75 Gallé, Emile 254 n.14 Mer Profonde 253 n.8 Gell, Alfred 46 gemstone 40–1, 43, 52 gender and domesticity 244 studies 244 ‘Gens de Mer: Le Pollet d’Aujourd’hui’ (Men of the Sea: Le Pollet today) 109 geography 73, 164, 211, 213, 215–16, 228 n.16 Georgenstraße, museum 209, 215 George V, King 91 Gepp, Antony, ‘Coral Cases’ 178 Géricault, Théodore, The Raft of the Medusa 74 Gerritson, Anne, The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World 4, 54 n.1 Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung 227 n.10 ­Gibbons, Herbert Adams 110

Index glass 1, 6, 9, 12–13, 89, 122, 124, 200, 250, 253 n.8, 256 arrangement 250 models 6, 12, 127, 253 n.8, 255–6, 258–60, 261 n.6, 263 n.48 specimens 256 window 249, 253 global 3, 61, 66, 74, 109, 112, 213, 215, 256 Godeffroy & Sohn 131 gonorrhoea treatment, ambergris in 26 Gordon, Charles (Chinese Gordon) 40–1, 52 Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–88) 122–4 Actinologia Britannica 123–4, 256 The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea 123 Gough, Julie 162 Gould, Marty 174, 183 Goy, Jacqueline 12 Grafton Galleries 184 Great Barrier Reef (Australia) 133, 178, 184 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (1851) 1–2, 7, 12 Great International Fisheries Exhibition (1883) 6–7 Great Zoological Gallery 176 Greek and Etruscan Vases 76 n.5 Grenville, Charles 63 Groeben, Christiane, ‘Impact of travels’ 137 n.55 grotto 7–8, 192 Guide to the Contents of the Australian Museum 260 Guillou, Alfred 105, 115 Gulf of Manaar 11, 140, 143–4, 147–8, 150 n.31 Gunther, Albert 88 gyrocompasses 209 Haast, Julius von 257–8, 260 Haddon, A.C. 177 Haeckel, Ernst (1834–1919) 6, 12, 122, 124, 222, 249, 252–3, 253 n.5, 256 invertebrate morphology 250 Kunst-Formen der Natur 13, 249–50 Nauphanta challengeri 124, 125 Hafiz 140 Halle, Ernst von 212–14, 229 n.36

301

Hamburg-American Line, Tourist Guide to the West Indies, Venezuela, Isthmus of Panama and Bermuda 85 Hamburg Zoo 192 Hamera, Judith 9 Hamilton, William 63, 76 n.5 handicraft production 83, 85, 88 Han Wudi (141–87 BCE) 41, 48–9, 58 n.61 Han Wudi gushi (Tales of the Emperor Wu of Han) 48 haptic 8 Hargraves, William 129 Harkin, Natalie 162 ­Harper, John 163 Harris, Anne 113 Harrison, Rodney 92 Hartley, Florence 86 fish-scale ornaments 95 n.34 The Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work 85–6 Harvell, Drew 12 Haskin, Frederick J., ‘Crowded Little Isle’ 85 Haswell, William (1854–1925) 122–3, 131 Haswell Museum 137 n.50 Henry, Lucien, Federation Bust 188 n.51 Heptanchus (cow-shark) 127 heterotopia 73, 145 Hibberd, James Shirley, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste 9 Hill, John E, Through the Jade Gate to Rome 56 n.36 Hill, Robert, Cuba and Porto Rico, With the Other islands of the West Indies 87 Hirondelle I 253 n.2 HMS Beagle 122, 173–4, 176 HMS Challenger 5, 124, 129, 131–2, 176–7, 180, 184, 215, 249 HMS Galatea 180 HMS Herald 5 HMS Investigator 15 n.20 HMS Rattlesnake 123 Hoffmann, François 114 Holophusicon 63 Holothuria 127 Holy Sepulchre 148 homemade perfumes 28

302

Index

homochromy 249, 253 n.2 Hope, Thomas 63 Hopkin, David 111 Hornell, James 143–7 Huet, Paul 107 Hughes, Griffith 8, 84 Hughes, Judith 82 Hull Maritime Museum 243–4 Humboldt, Alexander von 215 Humphrey, George (1739–1826) 68, 69, 78 n.39 Hunter, John, Cabinet of Curiosities 63 Hutton, Frederick Wollaston 256–7 Huxley, Thomas (1825–95) 122–4, 127, 131, 134 n.8 hybridity 161–2, 169 n.74 Hyogo Kyosai Corporation 196 Ice House 88, 91 Ijima, Isao 193, 196–7 Illustrated Australian News 182 Illustrated London News 176, 182 illustrated press (periodicals) 6, 186 Illustrated Sydney News 182 ­immersion 192, 195 immortality 39, 42, 47, 54, 58 n.78, 67, 201 immortal stone 39 imperial 3–4, 5, 9, 39, 74, 87, 91, 128, 142, 148, 149 n.17, 183. See also Qing imperial court, coral at Imperial Naval Office 209, 212–13 indigenous 84, 89, 154–8, 160–1, 163 communities 11 cosmologies 3 craft practices 13 practices and traditions 162 Ingold, Tim 102, 107 Institute of Ocean Studies 212–13, 215 Institut für Meereskunde (IfM) 209, 215 Institut Océanographique de Paris 251 Institut Océanographique (Monaco) 253 n.10 international networks of trade 3, 83 Irigaray, Luce 105 Isabey, Eugène 101, 106–7 Surroundings of Dieppe 106 isinglass 1–2 Islamic Spain (ambergris trade) 23 Ito, Mamiko 203

Iwakura, Tomomi 192 Iwakura Mission 192, 204 n.5 Jacques Louis, Comte de Bournon (1751–1825) 74 jade 39–40, 42, 48, 52, 55 n.2, 58–9 n.80 Jahangir 141, 149 n.17 Prince Salim 141 Janin, Jules, La Normandie 103 Janolus cristatus 127 Japanese aquariums 11, 191 earliest 192–3 establishment and development 203 features during Meiji period 199–203 in Kobe, Tokyo and Sakai (1897–1903) 191, 193–9, 202 modern 191 Ryugu 11, 197, 201–2 Japan Fisheries Association 196 Jardin des Plantes 192–3 Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation (Bois de Boulogne) 193 Jaucourt, Louis chevalier de 29 jellyfish 13, 123–4, 196, 199, 249–50, 252, 253 n.8 Jennings, Henry (1731–1819) 68 jequirity seeds (Abrus precatorius) 81 Ji Yun (1724–1805) 46 Johnston, Harry Hamilton 85–6, 88 The Negro in the New World 85 Jones, Andrew, encultured landscapes 102 ­Jones, Owen, Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court in the Crystal Palace 175 Jukes, Joseph Beete, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly: Commanded by Captain F.P. Blackwood, R.N., in Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Other Islands of the Eastern Archipelago 180 Justus Klobius 30 Kamagata, Shintarou 191, 200, 206 n.58 Kamay (Botany Bay) 153, 155, 157–8 Karajarri people, pearl shell ornament 3, 14 n.9 Khan, Ghulam Ali 149 n.17 Khan, Mazhar Ali 149 n.17 Khurram, Prince 141

Index Kilburn, William (1745–1818) 237–40, 240 n.8, 241 n.12, 242 n.25 Kina 139, 149 n.7 Kingsley, Charles 17 n.47 Kirkpatrick, John 129 kitsch 139, 148, 161 Kitson Empire Lighting & Co. 146 Kleinert, Sylvia 157 Kobe, aquariums 191, 193–9, 202 Kofoid, Charles Atwood 221 Kotai 199 Krefft, Gerard 136 n.43, 259 Kujaku-chaya 192 Kume, Kunitake, Beiou-Kairan-Jikki 192, 204 n.5 laboratory 6, 124, 126, 129, 132, 249 labour (work) 1, 83, 86, 104, 112, 115, 120 n.61, 126, 133, 144, 147, 253 n.11 on ambergris 22 in Barbados 83–7 colonial 139 fishermen 7, 103–4, 106–7, 109, 111, 254 n.12 fish-scale 85, 92 industrializing fisheries 11 island 82–3 of pearlescence 140–2 post-emancipation economy 83 theory of society and 148 waged factory worker 113 Lacey, Pippa 10, 14 n.8 Lady Gilbert-Carter 93 Lagrange, Bouillon, Philosophical Magazine 33 Lamarck/Lamarckism 252, 253 n.10 landscape(s) 85, 111, 210–11 coastal 102 dwelling perspective 102–3, 107 as ecological space 112 encultured 106 labour/leisure 83 miniature landscapes 48 shoreline as encultured landscape 106 ­temporality of 102 transatlantic world 83 as worked place 104

303

Lankester, E. Ray, Guide to the Coral Gallery 177 Lansyer, Emmanuel 111 La Perouse 153 Aboriginal people 153–61, 165, 169 n.75 brief history of 154–5 recent histories 160–1 shellwork 11, 153–4, 156–7 changes and continuities 161–2 early years of (1880-1900s) 156–7 history, country, family and knowledge 162–5 transition to Aboriginal souvenir (1900s-1940s) 157–60 United Aborigines Mission 155 larvae 254 n.13 La Sardinière 110 Latour, Bruno, actants 102 Laugier, Lèon (1879–1962) 250 La Villette, Elodie 11, 101 The Beach at Lohic and the Souris Isle, Near Lorient, Slack Tide 115 ecological shores 114–16 Gust of Wind on the Beach at Villerville 115 Larmor-plage 115 lavoir 111, 113–14, 119 n.43 Leane, Jeanine 162 Leder, Otto 90 Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 259 Le Goffic, Charles 107, 109 Sur la Côte, Gens de Mer (On the Coast, People of the Sea) 107 Leipzig Zoo 193 leisure 8, 12, 83, 92, 101 Lendenfeld, Robert von (1858–1913) 128 Lenk, Stefanie 11 Le Pollet 104, 109 Les Gobes 107, 109 Les muscadins 37 n.62 Leuckart, Rudolf 193 Lever, Ashton (1729–88) 61–3, 68, 74 marine objects 66 sale catalogue (1806) 68 sea urchin (Echinus Lamarckii) 67–8 Leverian Museum 61–7 Lewis, William 26, 28–9

304 Leybourne, George, Lounging in the Aq 6, 9 lifeforms and environments, marine 9 human impact on 4 resuscitation 13 seabed 11 ­spun glass models 253 n.8 understanding 123–4 Lillie, Charles 27–9 L’Illustration 107 lime production 84, 95 n.23, 147 Lin, James 42 Linnaeus, Carl 30 Linné, Carl von 122 sexual system of plant classification 134 n.7 Systema Naturae 134 n.7 Linnean Society of New South Wales 129 Liu Hai, snuff bottle 43, 44 Liversidge, Archibald 260 Lo Bianco, Salvatore (1860–1910) 123, 126–7, 132, 137 n.52 London Missionary Society Museum 148 London Museum 61, 70 London Zoo 192 Louis Duhamel du Monceau 104 Louis-Henri-Joseph, the duc de Bourbon (1756–1830) 68 Louis XVIII (1755–1824) 62, 73–4 Lounging in the Aq[uarium] (1880) 6, 9 Louvre series 61–2, 66–7, 69, 71, 73, 75 Cabinet des Dessins 61 French exhibition of 73 illustrated catalogue 71 watercolours 72 Lowe, Miranda 12 Loyrette, Henri 74–5 lyre 7–8 Macauley, Catherine 29 Machida, Hisanari 192 Macleay, William John 128, 136 n.43, 137 n.48 MacLeod, Roy 134 n.5 MacMillan, Allister, The Red Book of the West Indies 91 Madras 145–7 Madrepore 177

Index Ma Duan-lin, Qing Chao Wenxian Tongkao (Great Study of Literary Remains) 45 Magasin Pittoresque 107 magic lantern 185–6, 218 Mahayana Buddhism 39, 48 Main aux Algues et aux Coquillages 254 n.14 Maison de l’Océan (Paris) 12, 249–50, 253, 253 n.10 Ma Jun 49 Maldives, ambergris 30 Malinowski, Branislau 139 Marey, Étienne-Jules, ‘Mouvements de Natation de la Raie’ (Swimming Movements of the Ray) 127–8, 136 n.34 marine 111, 124, 133 animals 249–52, 258, 260 ­biological communities 102 biology 215, 221–2, 224, 249 embroidery 81 embryology 135 n.17 organisms 5–6, 39, 46, 53, 84, 122, 174, 185, 215, 237, 239, 249–50, 253 science, industry and empire 5–7 marine invertebrates 6, 12–13, 176, 249, 253 n.5, 256–8 gelatinous transparent bodies 256 glass models 6, 255–6, 259–60 soft-bodied 6, 255 Marine Museum of the Louvre 70 marine objects 1, 8–9, 74 Caribbean 6 Delamotte preparing case 2 Lever’s collection 66 marine products 1, 4, 7–11, 13, 84 Barbadian 88 Belgraves’ 89, 93 commodification 3 Mariners’ Museum 81 Marine Specimens and Native Manufactures in Fancy Work 82, 88 marine stations 11, 121, 127, 132, 137 n.57 establishment and work of 122, 125 in Southern Hemisphere 128–32 maritime communities at Berck-sur-Mer 107 and ecologies 115

Index human 102 on North Atlantic 103–9 marsupial mammals 254 n.15 Martin, Anne-Denes 110 Marx, Karl 148 mass consumption 13 material culture 3, 10, 12, 93, 121, 139, 162–3, 165 Caribbean 83 Chinese 51 commercial 93 diversity 3 feminine accomplishment 7–8 of First Nation peoples 160 global history and 4 transactions/translations 7–10 visual and 1, 5, 83 materiality 4, 10, 46–7, 102, 139, 243, 245–6 materia medica (ambergris) 23 health tonic 25 for heart and circulation 25 homeopathic remedy for hysteria 26 plague 24 ­sensible qualities 26 sexual health, maintenance of 26 treatment for gonorrhoea 26 warming properties 25 Mayo, Elizabeth 13 n.6 McHugh, James 34 n.1 McLellan, George, Some Phases of Barbados Life: Tropical Scenes and Studies 83–4 McWilliam, Neil 112 The Medical Repository 22, 33 medicine 2, 22, 29, 33, 43, 58 n.78, 142 ambergris as 23, 25, 30 odours 26 perfume and 26 Medusa 74 Meereskunde (ocean studies) 210–11, 213, 215–17, 224–5, 228 n.16 as umbrella science 211, 228 n.16 Meinardus, Wilhelm 214 Melanesian life 139 Melbourne Museum 260 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick 33, 244 Mendelian genetics 252 mere collecting 129, 132, 136 n.43

305

Metropolitan Museum of Art 49, 58 n.70 Meyer, A. B. 257 miasma 143–8 Miel, François (1775–1842) 73 Miklouho-Macleay, Nikolai (1846–88) 122, 125, 128–31 Miller, Emily 12 Millet, Jean-François 102, 115 The Gleaners 112–13 Minatogawa Shrine 196, 204 n.1 Minéraux 73 Minéraux tires du Cabinet particular du roy 73 missionaries 140, 153, 155–7, 160, 163–4, 169 n.80 Mizoi, Yuichi 11 Mizusawa, Shu 204 n.5 Möbius, Karl, ‘Die Auster und die Austernwirtschaft’ 222 models 6, 12, 13 n.6, 124, 127, 212, 216, 218–21, 253 n.8, 255–61, 261 n.6, 261 n.10, 263 n.48 Modest, Wayne 83, 97 n.66 Mohamed, Prophet 143 Monet, Claude 116 caloges 106 Monro, Donald, Treatise on Medical and Pharmaceutical Chymistry 26 Monterey Bay Aquarium Ocean Memory Lab 12 Moore, Grace, ‘Victorian Environments’ 17 n.52 Morocco, ambergris 30 Morton, Timothy 103 Moseley, Henry 177, 184 ­mother-of-pearl 1–3, 8, 146, 148 Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) 142, 149 n.17 Moxley, Joseph, An Account of a West Indian Sanatorium and a Guide to Barbados 86 Müller, August 126–7 Mundine, Djon 161, 163 The Murex 151 n.43 Murray, John 5, 184 Musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer 70 Musée de la Marine (Louvre) 214

306 museum 6, 8, 126, 193, 209, 211, 217, 221, 224, 255. See also specific museum accessibility and interactivity 218–21 antiquities 11, 61, 186 botanical and zoological gardens 193 case studies 12–13 collections 62, 174, 176, 186 and commercial dealers 258 displays 67, 218–19, 259, 261 effect 65–6 German science 220 holism 211 as modern heterotopia 73 objects 10, 12, 34 n.10, 66, 216, 225 ship model basin 221 specimens 23, 255, 258 studies 209, 212, 216 trade relationships 256 Museum für Meereskunde (MfM), Berlin 11, 209–11 Aachener und Münchener Feuerversicherung 220 academic visitors and general public 224–5 biological section 222–3, 230 n.47 curatorial strategy 211, 213 didactic approach 219 display techniques 214, 226 geographical scope 215 memorandum 229 n.32 mission 215, 225 Navy Museum 212–16 self-invention 212 sensationalism 221–4 societal challenge 217 universal approach 216 Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) 218, 232 n.88 Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS), Sydney 34 n.10, 156, 167 n.27, 188 n.51 Museum of Oceanography 212 Museum of Ocean Studies. See Museum für Meereskunde (MfM), Berlin Museum of the United Service Institute 214 musk 22–3, 25, 28–9, 37 n.64 Mysticeti 244

Index Naples 132, 136 n.34 ­Stazione Zoologica 122, 124–9 Nash, Daphne 160 national 4, 9, 128, 132, 186, 192, 202, 211, 213–14, 225 nationalist institutions of oceanography and marine sciences 4 National Museum of Australia 12–13 natural fancywork 8–9, 94 n.15 Natural History Museum (London) 12 The Natural History of Barbados 84 natural history/science 1, 5–6, 8–11, 15 n.20, 32, 34, 64, 68–9, 70, 73–4, 88, 101, 131, 192, 212, 225, 240, 253, 256 Caribbean 88–9 collections 10, 61, 69, 94 n.11, 128, 176, 185, 258 complexities of 124 and craft merchandise 91 dealers 69, 82, 89, 256, 258–9, 263 n.37 in England 61 international trade 131 museums 137 n.48, 177, 181, 192, 222, 255 objects 258, 260 research 122, 126 study 128 natural products 82, 85, 89, 92 natural world 82, 103, 121 binomial system 122 and fashion 242 n.25 navy 209, 213, 215, 216 n.7, 217 Navy Museum 212–16, 219 necklaces 3, 89 Hindu Necklace 142 imperial 40–2, 53–4, 55 n.19 pearl (Baroda) 142, 150 n.22 Nénot, Henri-Paul 250 Neptune (sea god) 49 networks 81, 84, 88, 131, 252 artists 6, 11, 67, 101, 106, 109–10, 112, 114, 118 n.26, 119 n.43, 174, 184, 186 collecting 7, 56 n.36, 69–70, 85, 94 n.11, 129, 132, 136 n.43, 181, 237 colonial 8, 147

Index inter-island 90 international 3, 132 marine 10 professional 5, 29, 124, 131, 223 scientists 7, 12, 121–2, 126–8, 132–3, 250, 252, 256, 260 Neumann, Caspar 32 Royal Society 30–1 new materialism 113 New Materialist 13 New South Wales (NSW) 11, 153–5, 165 ‘New Sweden’ 134 n.10 New Zealand 68, 197, 256 ­of glass models 12, 255 natural history museums 255 New Zealand Shipping Company (NZSC), London 257 nineteenth century 1, 3, 5, 11, 13, 83, 103, 109, 121–2, 132, 135 n.17, 156–7, 178, 181, 211, 237, 239, 243–4, 246 ambergris 23, 26, 28, 33 commodification 4, 12, 93, 174, 243 coral 44 fisheries 146 marine networks 10 marine products 7, 10 pantomime 183 pearl economy 140 recent histories 160–1 tourism 104 visual culture 112, 116, 174, 185 Niobe 219 Nishi, Genjiro 191, 204 n.1 Nishikawa, Tokichi 197 Nizami, Layla and Majnun 140–1 Nochlin, Linda 112–13 ‘Women, Art and Power’ 112 Nodier, Charles 103 Norddeutscher Lloyd 132, 219 Normandy coast 101, 103, 106, 115 shifting baselines in Brittany 109–11 Nugent, Maria 155, 159, 161, 168 n.55 Nutter, William (1754–1802) 64 Nyhart, Lynn 222–3, 230 n.52 O’Brien, Charles 238–9 obsolescence 148

307

ocean/ocean world 1, 3–5, 7–8, 10–13, 21–2, 53, 82, 93, 109–10, 126, 140, 178, 183, 185, 249, 252 Atlantic 3–4, 83, 254 n.12 commodification 93, 174–5 ecologies 5, 12 Indian 3–4, 83, 173, 177, 180 objects 6, 8–10, 12–13 Pacific 3–4, 67–70, 73–4, 83, 130, 173, 176, 180 products 3 studies 210–11, 213, 215–17, 224–5 Oceanographic Museum and Institute (Monaco) 134, 249 Baroque Revival 250 oceanography 4–5, 12, 209, 214–15, 249 collection 224–6, 233 n.101 marine biology and 215, 224 public education teaching programme 249 science of 249 Oceanography Institute 212 ­Ohly, Friedrich 140 Once Upon a Time There Were Two Kings 183 One Tree Island Research Station 133 ontogeny 250 opercula 34 n.1 ornament 3, 6, 11, 14 n.9, 29, 43, 49, 86, 163, 181, 186, 188 n.47 and crime (Baroda) 142–3 drawing-room 6, 181 island 86 tortoiseshell 90 Osaka, Fifth National Industrial Exposition 197 Ota, Minoru 196 Otago Museum (Dunedin) 255–6 Otohime 198, 200–1, 203 Owens College collection 232 n.88 oysters 142–8 painted anemone 256 Palace Museum (Beijing) 47, 52, 57 n.50, 59 n.84 Palliser, Fanny 110 pantomime 183 Humpty Dumpty 185 ‘Palace of Coral’ 184 Papua New Guinea 11, 139–40, 148

308

Index

Parawa 11, 144–5, 147–8 Paris 70 Exposition Universelle (1900) 214, 218–19, 225, 250, 260 International Exposition (1867, 1900) 193, 203 Jardin des Plantes 192 Maison de l’Océan 250 navy museums in 217 Parker, Rozika 86 Parker, Thomas Jeffrey (1850–97) 122, 131 Parkinson, James 64, 68 A Companion to the Museum 64 Parkinson, Richard 131–2 pearl(s) 11, 40, 42–3, 48–9, 139, 143, 148, 149 n.3, 150 n.24 The Beloved 141 and coral worn 54 dialogical relationship 53 economy 140, 146 fisheries 140, 145–7 industry 148 markets 143–4 opaque 52 post-pearl economy 11 shells (Riji/Guwan) 3, 139–40 trade 143–4, 148 yin yang 43, 53 pearlescence 139–40 ­pathos and labour 140–2 Pegasus chiropterus 252 Pemulwuy 155 Penck, Albrecht 213, 215 Penglai 47, 201 perfumers, London 27–8 perfumes/perfumery 10, 34 n.1 ambergris 21–3, 25–30, 33, 34 n.1, 35 n.13 macaroni’s use of 37 n.62 musk 29, 37 n.64 peril 143–8 Periphylla periphylla 252 Persian Gulf 140, 142–3, 147 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, visual education 6, 13–14 n.6 Phillips, Ruth 157 Phillips, Samuel, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park 1 Philp, Jude 11

photogrammetry 133 photography 1, 5–6, 87, 90–1, 96 n.61, 107, 113, 118 n.26, 128, 139, 177, 182, 225, 226 n.1, 233 n.101, 257 Phycodris rubens 237–8 Phyllopteryx eques 254 n.15 Physeter macrocephalus 32–3 physical geography 164, 211, 213 picturesque 84, 86, 94 n.15, 106–7, 133 Barbadian productivity 83 marine picturesque 7–10, 82 misery in ‘Les Gobes’ 107 Pierre, Jean, The Homeopathic Examiner 28 Pinault-Sørensen, Madeleine 66, 77 n.21 Pisces 252 Pliny the Elder (AD 24–79) 45, 56 n.34 Naturalis Historia 56 n.34 Pollock, Griselda 112–13, 244 polymorphism 253 n.10 pomander 24 porcelain 43, 44, 51, 141 Porpema medusa 252 Porpita porpita 252 Portier, Paul 253 n.9 Portuguese Man of War 253 n.9 Poseidon (sea god) 49 postcards 90, 107, 113 Dieppe: Fishermen’s Homes in the Cliff 108 and popular illustration 119 n.36 Power, Susan C. Dunning, The Ugly-Girl Papers; or Hints for the Toilet 28 preservation 7, 11, 26, 109, 122, 124, 127, 187 n.30 Price Current at Canton 1764 (British East India Company) 44 Priebe, Jessica 10 ­Prince Albert I of Monaco Foundation 249 Princess-Alice 253 n.9 professional 5, 29, 124, 210, 227 n.11 museum 131, 223 scientist/researcher 5–6, 12, 67, 121–2, 125–8, 131–3, 215, 250, 252, 256, 260 Prouvost, Laure, Deep See Blue Surrounding You 13 Prussian Ministry of Culture 212

Index Qianlong emperor (1735–96) 3, 40–1, 49, 54, 59 n.84 Huangchao liqi tu shi 41 Qing dynasty 10, 40–4, 54 Qing imperial court, coral at 1–3, 8, 10–11, 39–43, 56 n.24 babao pingshui 49 berries of (penjing bowl) 48 chao dai 43 chao guan (court hat) 41, 43, 52 chao zhu 41, 43 colour perceptions 41, 46–7, 52 dongzhu 42–3 fishing 45 Grand Imperial Ceremonial Dress 41 ingegno process 45 late-Qing robe 49, 50 lingzhi 52 Manchu traditions 40–3 marine origins 43–6, 56 n.34 metamorphosis 49, 53 natural material qualities 46–53 necklaces 40–2, 53–4, 55 n.19 objects 54 Palace Treasure 41, 53 ‘Peaceful Boxes of Treasure’ 49 pellucidity 52 physical properties 46, 53 planting in penjing 49 porcelain famille rose dish 51, 58 n.76 red lacquer boxes 50, 51, 58 n.70 ruyi 52 shanhu 39–40, 43, 47, 51–4 snuff bottle with stopper 3, 14 n.7, 43, 44, 53, 59 n.88 trade 46 transformation, colour 56 n.34 trees 44–5, 47–9, 53 quasi-agency of non-human materials 102 quasi-aquarium 250 Queensland Museum 260 Quelch, John 177 Rabaul Marine Station (New Britain) 122, 128 Radcliffe, John 26 radial symmetry 81 ­radiolarians 249–50, 252 Ralum, research station 131–2

309

Rao, Khande (r.1856–70) 142–3 Rao, Malhar 142–3, 148, 150 n.22 Rao III, Sayajirao (r.1875–1939) 143 rational amusement/entertainment 6, 8, 82, 92, 121, 132 n.4 Rawski, Evelyn, China: The Three Emperors 59 n.84 Rawson, Jessica China: The Three Emperors 59 n.84 Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing 58 n.80 Read, Sophie 22 recapitulation theory 124 reef systems 84, 133–4 Re-hi 199 Reidy, Michael S. 5 Renaissance period ambergris in 22, 25 gift giving 25, 35 n.26 research 5, 121–2, 127, 131, 200, 209, 214–15, 221–6, 249, 253 n.10, 256 coastal ecology 102 coral 178, 180 natural history 122 natural science 126 stations, marine 11, 131, 137 n.57 Resolution 68 Revue Illustrée 107 Riberyol, Charlotte 175 Richet, Charles 253 n.9 Richthofen, Ferdinand Freiherr von 210, 212–17, 222, 232 n.88 ‘Museum of Ocean Studies’ 213, 216 Riello, Giorgio, The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World 4, 54 n.1 Rimmel, Eugene, The Book of Perfumes 22, 35 n.13, 36 n.50 Ritter, Carl 215 Ritvo, Harriet 192 Röhr, Albert 229 n.34, 233 n.101 romantic 8, 82, 106–7, 109, 183, 237, 244 Rotunda’s Grand Saloon 64 Roux, Constant (1865–1942) 250 Royal Academy 62, 71, 186 Royal Academy of Arts 179 Winter Exhibition (1889) 180

310 Royal Aquarium and Winter Garden 6 Royal Naval Museum 216 Royal Photographic Society (London) 185 Royal Society Coral Reef Committee 178, 184 Royal Society (London) 22, 30–1, 33, 185 Rozwadowski, Helen M. 5 Rumi 140 ­rustic 9, 52 Ryley, Charles Reuben 64 Ryugu 197, 200–3 Ryujo 198 Saadi 140 Sabin, Richard 12 sailors’ valentines 81 Sakai Aquarium 197–200, 202–4 Sakai shidan-kai henshu-kyoku, Descriptions of the Sakai Aquarium 202–3 Sakai Suizokukan Zukai 200 Salle d’Honneur 250 Salon de service 73 Salons (1817, 1819, 1822 & 1870) 62, 73–4, 112 Samson, Joan 33 Samuel, Marcus 151 n.43 Sand, George 103, 109 sandcastle 121 San-pan-hi 199 sardine fishery 109–10 Sardine Workers Strike (1924) 110 Saville-Kent, William 177, 184 The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities 185 Turbinaria bifrons 12, 17 n.56, 177 Schafer, Edward 47 Schomburgh, Robert, ‘Steam-Boat Voyage to Barbados’ 86–7 Schulze, Franz Eilhard 256 Schwediawer, Franz Xavier 26, 28, 31–2 science, marine 4, 101, 121, 128, 211, 228 n.16, 253 and aesthetics 13 development of 3, 11 history of 101, 261 industry and empire 5–7 Science Museum 231 n.69

Index scientific illustration 9, 67 scrimshandering 244 scrimshaw busk 12, 243–6 sperm whale 31–2 sea 10, 22, 27, 30, 84, 93, 105, 109–11, 114–16, 132, 140, 153, 158, 192, 195–6, 200, 209, 249, 252 anemones 256, 259 economic exploitation 215 indoors 123 Mediterranean 10, 12, 40, 43 Persian Gulf and Manaar 140 Red Sea 147, 223 seabed 9, 11–13, 45, 143, 147, 215, 223–5 Sea of Grain 140 seascape 8, 82, 93, 198 ­seashore 9, 123 seaweeds 1, 3, 7–9, 12, 34 n.1, 113–16, 184–5, 188 n.51, 237–9 collectors 237, 239 plants of a summer parterre and 16 n.46 Seba, Albertus, Thesaurus 3 Second Fisheries Exposition 193 Sekula, Allan, Fish Story 4 seller 62, 89, 93, 106, 132, 156, 256–7, 259 Sensier, Alfred 112 sexual health, ambergris in 26 shanhu 39–40, 43, 47, 51–4 Shark Bay Reef (Western Australia) 12 Shark Charmer (shark binders) 143–4 Shaw, Peter, A New Practice 28 Sheffield Daily Telegraph 185 Sheller, Mimi 85 Shelley, Samuel (1756–1808) 64 shellfish 84, 104, 115, 154 Shell Oil 151 n.43 shells 8, 15 n.33, 61, 64, 66, 77 n.14, 140, 153, 164, 170 n.86, 237, 255 abalone 154, 156 Banded Kelp (Bankivia fasciata) 158 black nerite (Nerita atramentosa) 164 Bull Mouth Helmet 67 Caribbean 10, 81–2, 89 collection 61, 67, 82, 89, 147, 151 n.43, 163, 181 emerald nerite (Smaragdia viridis) 81

Index Imperial Sun (Astraea helioropium, Martyn) 68–9 limpets (Cellana tramoserica) 164 Mud Oyster (Ostrea angasi) 163 Myochama 129 oyster 142, 144, 148 Pacific 10, 67–71, 74 patterns 156, 158 Pearl Oyster (Pinctada radiata) 163 pearl (Riji/Guwan) 3, 139–40 rice 81, 92–3 starries (Scutellastra chapmani) 156, 164–5 Sydney Cockle (Anadara trapezia) 163 Tapestry (Turbo petholatus) 163 Torres Strait 148 Turban (Turbo torquata) 163 Venus (family Veneridae) 163 shellwork 10–11, 16 n.44, 81–2, 89, 153, 169 n.80 Aboriginal 16 n.44, 155, 157, 160, 163, 165 Bahamas 92 changes and continuities 161–2 commercial production 83 early years of (1880-1900s) 156–7 ­heart-shaped box 158, 159 history, country, family and knowledge 162–5 La Perouse (see La Perouse, shellwork) motifs 90 plaques 81–3, 88–90 South Pacific 156 transition to Aboriginal souvenir (1900s-1940s) 157–60 shellworkers 154, 156–8, 162–5, 167 n.32 Shepherd, Thomas Hosmer, Bullock’s Museum (Egyptian Hall or London Museum), Piccadilly 71 shifting baseline syndrome 111 ships 85, 105, 114, 129, 145, 216, 219, 245 British 32, 246 whaling 84 working model 221 shoreline 101, 109–10, 114–15, 223 ecologies 116 as encultured landscape 106 Gulf of Manaar 144, 148

311

shores 7, 10–11, 84, 101, 103, 105–6, 123, 131–2, 143, 237, 244 ecological 114–16 and economy 114 romantic primitivism 107, 109 Shunzhi (1644–61) 41 Siemens, Werner von 218 Skelton, William 64, 66 Interior View of the Leverian Museum, Southwark, London 65 Sloane, Hans 8 Smith, Bernard 67 Smith, H. M. 203 Smith, J. E. 239 Smith, Michelle, ‘Victorian Environments’ 17 n.52 Smithsonian Institution 127 snuff bottle 3, 14 n.8, 43, 44, 53 Solander, Daniel (1733–82) 134 n.8 Songling, Pu (1640–1715), The Rakshas and the Sea Market 49 South Kensington Museum 180, 216, 218 souvenirs 9–10, 81–2, 85, 89–90, 93, 181, 244 hybrid 89 shellwork’s transition to Aboriginal (1900s-1940s) 157–60 stereograph 92 Sowerby, James 237, 239 English Botany 239 Spary, Emma 240 specimens 1–5, 7–12, 23, 34 n.6, 61, 82, 88, 121, 127, 129, 131, 132, 174, 239, 260 acquisition 85 botanical 240 coral 175–7, 181, 186 and cultural artefacts 70 ­exchanges 255, 259 of Japanese insects 193 museum 23, 255, 258 preparations 127, 132 preservation techniques for 122 selling 88 spectacle 4, 8–9, 84, 86, 88, 93, 103, 106–7, 174, 177, 183–6 spermaceti 1–2, 31 sperm whale 2, 10, 21–3, 30–3, 34 n.2, 245. See also ambergris

312 spirits 25, 28, 36 n.36, 47, 177, 256, 259 spiritual geography 164 sponge larva 260 sponges 1–2, 184, 195, 232 n.88 SS A. Lopez 220 SS Cascapedia 260 staffage 115, 120 n.61 stage set 183 Stahlberg, Walter 224–5 The Standard 184 Stanner, W.E.H. 160 Stark, James, Stark’s History and Guide to Barbados and Caribbee Islands 84, 86, 90, 95 n.23 Steiner, Christopher 157 Stephens, William 129 Stewart, Jodi 164 Stewart, Susan 94 n.4 still life 10, 61–3, 66–7 Stone, Sarah (1760–1844) 64, 68, 144, 150 n.31 sublime 8–9, 82 submarine 49, 142, 185. See also seabed ecosytems 4 imagery 9 Suhrwardi 140 Suzuki, Katsumi 191, 193, 204 n.1 Swadeshi (self-sufficient economy) 143 swastika 59 n.87 Sydney Harbour 129, 133 Bridge 158, 168 n.55 British settlement 155, 158 Watson’s Bay Marine Station 122, 128 Sykas, Philip 238–9, 241 n.13 Syme, Patrick, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours 174 Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) 40 Taiwan 196, 202–3 animals 202–3 pavilion 203 plants 199 as territory of imperial Japan 203 Tanaka, Yoshio 192–3 Tang dynasty 47, 56 n.34 ­Taro Urashima 200 Tasmanian Oyster Bay community 13 Ta-ts’in (Roman Syria) coral beams 49

Index Tattegrain, Francis 105, 107, 115 Taussig, Michael 139, 145 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste (1606–89) ingegno process 45 Sardinian coral 45 taxonomic classification 121 Tealia crassicornis 256 tear 139–41 Technological Museum. See Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS), Sydney tenancy system 86 Tench, Watkin 162 Terra Nullius 154 Tethys leporine 127 textile art and assemblage 8 design 237, 238, 241 n.14 fabric pattern 241 n.15 trade 12 theoretical modelling 121 Thomas, Gilbert 93 Thomson, Charles Wyville 5, 131 Thurston, Edgar 144 Tibetan Buddhism 42–3, 56 n.24 T’ieh shu 47 Tiffany, Louis Comfort 253 n.8 Timbery, Esme 154, 158, 161, 167 n.30 Sydney Harbour Bridge 165 Timbery, Laddie 154 Tinayre, Louis (1861–1942) 250 Tirpitz, Alfred von 209–10, 212–13 Tokyo, full-fledged aquariums 191, 193–9, 202 Tongzhi period (1862–74) 40, 49 tortoiseshell 1–2, 90 Tosai 199 tourism/tourist 6, 8–9, 83, 91, 101, 103–4, 106–7, 109–11, 157, 159–60 Caribbean 88, 92–3 economy 88, 93, 155 initiative 93 summer 101, 104, 107, 109, 111 trade 160 trinkets and decorative labour (Barbados) 83–7 trade/trade circuits 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 23, 39, 45–6, 49, 73, 81–3, 85, 89, 107,

Index 112, 181, 188 n.47, 223, 225, 246, 255, 259 curio 83, 88, 93 international 131 pearl 143–4, 148 ­tourist 160 Traité Général des Pesches 104 trans-corporeality 102, 113, 115 transformation 1, 5, 173–5, 182–6, 217 Mediterranean red coral 10, 40, 53, 56 n.34 metamorphosis/metamorphic 42, 49, 53, 56 n.36, 139 transnational 3, 5–6, 9–10, 13, 62 history 75 issues 62 transparent marine animals 250, 258 Treaty of Paris (1814) 73 Trigoniidae 129 Trollope, Thomas 110 trompe l’oeil 61, 66–7, 70 Tse Bartholomew, Terese, treasure bowls 50 Tullett, William 26, 29 Turbinaria bifrons 12, 17 n.56 turtle 89, 93, 196, 200–2 Ueno Zoo 192, 203 undersea and biodiversity 183, 192, 253, 256 underwater environments 184–5, 202, 249–50 unicellular pelagic organisms 252 United Nations International Law Commission 151 n.43 United States Exploring Expedition 180 university 6, 12, 122, 124, 128, 131, 209–10, 212, 215–16, 224 Uo-nozoki 192–3, 205 n.14 Urania 218, 231 n.63 Uranie 73 Urashima 200–2 van Houtan, Kyle 12 Varda, Agnes, The Gleaners and I 115 Vaughan, Priya 11 16 n.44 vendor 6, 9, 83, 85–7, 93 Venice Biennale 13 Venus fan gorgon 66

313

Vernet, Joseph 109 Loading Barrels of Salted Fish at the Port of Dieppe 104 Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau (Berlin) 221 vibrant matter 139 Victoria, Queen 142 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 218, 220, 231 n.69, 237, 239 Collections for Scientific Instruction and Research 218 Fish Culture 219 V&A exhibition 242 n.25 Victorian 92 association of craft-making 163 fancywork 85, 93 maritime trade 81 pantomimes 183 ­shellwork industry 82, 153 souvenirs 90 viewer 61, 63, 65–6, 70, 73, 75, 87, 112, 159, 173–4, 177, 182–3, 186, 192, 225 visual culture 11, 82–3, 101, 112, 116, 174, 178, 185, 261 Aboriginal 159 ecocritical approaches to 102 Volksbildung 210–11, 226 and display culture 216–18 Volksbildungsstätte Urania 218 Vollmer, John 41 Ruling from the Dragon Throne 55 n.15 Vollon, Antoine 105, 115 Voyages Pittoresques (Taylor & Nodier) 103, 107 Wada-misaki Aquarium 193–8, 201, 203 hawksbill turtles 202 water circulation system 200 Wagner, Roy 139 Waikato 257 Waraku-en 194 Ward, Henry 255, 258–9 Warington, Robert 135 n.13 Warren, David Chapin 81–2 double shellwork plaque 81–2, 89, 93, 94 n.3 ‘Souvenir from Barbados’ 89

314

Index

Wass, C.W., Art Union 179–80 waste 7, 11, 21, 31, 139–40, 143–8 watercolours 61, 65, 67–8, 73–4, 141, 149 n.17, 177, 181, 187 n.31, 239 botanical and zoological 62 design 239 Imperial Sun shell (Astraea helioropium, Martyn) 68–9 Louvre series 72 of minerals 62 shells 64 Waterfield, Giles 226 n.1 Waterhouse, Alfred 176 Watson, Judy 162 Watson’s Bay Marine Station (Sydney Harbour) 122, 128–31 Watts, George Frederic 175 waves 10–11, 22, 34, 114–15, 158, 200, 225 Weisberg, Gabriel 112–13 Wei-Ying-wu (c.737-c.792) 47 West End Villa Museum 88 West Indies Mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni) 89 whalebone 1–2, 31, 244–5 bodies of 243 busk 244 products in women’s fashion 243 whaler 22–3, 31–3, 244–6 whales 12, 30–1, 244, 246 ­commodification 12 fishery 246 hunt 244–5 whaling industry 21, 31, 243–4 in Britain and North America 3 golden era 246 products 2–3 section of Focke Museum (Bremen) 217 whaling ships 84 women’s role in 247 n.11 Whytt, Robert 28 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 11, 209, 212, 220. See also Museum für Meereskunde (MfM), Berlin Wilkes, Charles, United States Exploring Expedition (1838–42) 180

Williams, Charles A.S. 47 Wilson, James Glen 5 Wittmer, Rudolf 212 women 2, 28–9, 86, 110, 149 n.17, 154, 237, 244 Aboriginal (La Perouse) 153, 155–7, 159–61, 165 commodification of whales and 12 estate labour 86–7 exoskeleton armour 246 in fishing communities 105–6, 114 images of working 111–12 Parawa 147 Penn Sardines 119 n.36 sardine factories 119 n.36 shellwork as business 163–5 timeless female labour 112 whaling industry, role in 247 n.11 working-woman-peasant trope 113 Women’s Self-Help Association (Bridgetown) 87, 93 wood-block technique 239 Worm, Ole, wunderkammer 90 Wrigglesworth, Linda 52 wuxing system 47, 55 n.21 Xiwangmu (Queen Mother of the West) 47, 57 n.50 Yale Center for British Art 1 Yongzheng period (1723–35) 47 Young, Diana, ‘The Colour of Things’ 46 Yuanming Yuan (imperial Summer Palace) 41 zaobanchu craftsmen 52 Zen-hi 199 Zentralstelle für Volkswohlfahrt (Centre for Public Welfare) 218 zoo 192, 202–3 Zoological Museum (Berlin) 132 zoological study, British 123 zoology, marine 7, 121–3 and botany 252 and comparative anatomy 260 ­zoophytes 180

315

316

317

318

Plate 1  ‘Specimens of Articles in Common Use’, Great Britain, c. 1830, one tray from a wooden box containing 141 specimens, 16.0 × 25.0 × 9.0 cm overall. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Plate 2 Crystal snuff bottle with a coral twig stopper, Qing Dynasty, nineteenth century, 8.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 50.145.180a,b. Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950.

Plate 3  Alfred Concanen, ‘Lounging in the Aq’, c. 1880, colour lithograph, 36.0 × 25.5 cm. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, S.444–2012.

Plate 4  ‘Flowers of the Sea’, late nineteenth century, shells, seaweeds, corallines, decals, paint, ink, paper, 72.5 × 59.0 × 8.0 cm. Australian National Maritime Museum, 00055180. ANMM Collection Gift from Jean Piggott (née Walker) and John Walker on behalf of the Walker family ancestors.

Plate 5  Ambergris, nineteenth century, 5.5 × 7.3 × 6.0 cm, 50 gm. Australian National Maritime Museum collection, 00006547.

Plate 6  Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, ‘The Whale’, plate XIII in Graphic Illustrations of Animals, Showing their Utility to Man, in their Services during Life, and Uses after Death, London, 1850, coloured lithograph. © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum.

Plate 7 Portrait of Express Xiaoxian, Qianlong Period (1736–1795), 1777 with later repainting, Ignatius Sichelbarth (Ai Qimeng), Yi Lantai, and possibly Wang Ruxue. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 251.8 × 115.5 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, E33619, Gift of Mrs Elizabeth Sturgis Hinds, 1956. Photography by Walter Silver.

Plate 8 Red coral ruyi sceptre, Qing Dynasty, eighteenth century, red coral, 27.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 02.18.623d. Gift of Heber R Bishop, 1902.

Plate 9  Alexandre Isidore Leroy de Barde, A Selection of Shells Arranged on Shelves, 1803, watercolour and gouache on paper glued to canvas, 125.0 × 90.0 cm. D.A.G. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photography by Gérard Blot.

Plate 10  Sarah Stone, Shells, 1781, watercolour painted over underdrawing in black pencil on paper, 43.0 × 58.0 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © NGA.

Plate 11  ‘Souvenir from Barbados’, c. 1884–9, Barbados, seashells, seeds, cedarwood, glass and bronze, 23.2 × 45.0 × 3.5 cm. The Mariners’ Museum and Park, 1987.07.01.

Plate 12  Fish-scale ornament, Barbados, 1881, fish scales, wire, fabric, beads. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, AP.36–1881.

Plate 13  Jules Breton, The Washerwomen of the Breton Coast, 1870, oil on canvas, 135.3 × 201.3 cm. Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Plate 14  Elodie La Villette, The Beach at Lohic and the Souris Isle, near Lorient, Slack Tide, 1876. © Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, Photography by P. Guenat.

Plate 15  Salvatore Lo Bianco (preparator), Holothuria tubulosa. Courtesy of the Stazione Zoological Anton Dohrn Napoli (SZN), ECN010. Photography by Akira Kihara.

Plate 16  Euastacus serratus (now recognized as Euastacus spinifer, Heller, 1865), one of a series of wax teaching models showing the growth of the Australian freshwater crayfish. Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney. SC2001.42.13.

Plate 17  Eye in a crescent shaped setting, early nineteenth century, watercolour on ivory, half pearls, glass cover sealed to ivory by gold beaters skin. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, P.55–1977.

Plate 18  Pair of model slippers, 1951–2, shells and fabric, La Perouse, New South Wales, Australia. Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Gift of Phyllis Steain, 1987. Photography by Michael Myers.

Plate 19  Samuel Calvert, ‘Will You Buy? Engraved from the Picture by N. Chevalier, in the possession of Mr J. M. Bruce, Melbourne. Supplement to “The Illustrated Australian News”, November 1883’, colour wood-engraving by Charles Troedel & Co. in the album Illustrated Australian News Proof Plates, 1880–3, 41.9 × 30.0 × 5.5 cm overall. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, PXE 867.

Plate 20  Samuel Calvert, ‘What You Give? From a Picture by N. Chevalier, in the possession of Mr. J. M. Bruce, Melbourne. Supplement to “The Illustrated Australian News”, November 1884’. State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. Gift of Troedel & Cooper Pty Ltd 1968.

Plate 21  Henry Emden, Set model for the ‘City of Coral’ scene in the pantomime Humpty Dumpty, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1903, 47.0 × 90.0. × 52.0 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Plate 22  Fuzoku Gaho 風俗画報 204, 1900, frontispiece. Kansai University Library.

Plate 23  Dress of block-printed cotton, c. 1800, purple on white fabric designed by William Kilburn, 160 × 70.0 × 70.0 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, T.84–1991.

Plate 24  Scrimshaw stay busk, 1780–1880, whalebone, 36.6 × 6.1 cm. Courtesy of the Hull Maritime Museum, Hull.

Plate 25  Window, Maison de l’Océan, Paris, n.d., glass and lead. Courtesy of the Institut Océanographique, Monaco.

Plate 26  Leopold Blaschka, Model of the sea anemone Tealia crassicornis (now recognized as Urticina crassicornis), c.1880, glass, 10.0 × 11.0 × 8.5 cm. Australian Museum Archives, AMS582/MA863, Photography by C. Bento.

Plate 27 Leopold Blaschka, Model of a branch of coral Corallium rubrum, c. 1883, 20.5 × 7.0 × 2.2 cm. Australian Museum Archives, AMS582/MA777. Photography by Stuart Humfreys.