Day 5 in England: The Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum

Overall, my teenager was fairly patient with being hauled along on Mom's England Trip of a Lifetime, but this kid who used to be my best traveler now insists that she hates all travel with the fire of a thousand suns... and she hates visiting museums with the fire of almost a thousand suns.

Funnily enough, the kid who used to be the worst traveler... just, OMG the WORST TRAVELER!... is now the best traveler ever, and by that I mean that she loves all the same travel things that I do: museums, tours of old shit, a few more museums, grubbing in the mud to find literal trash, eating local junk food, and for a nightcap, we'll hit up one more museum then go to bed early so that on the next day we can be at our first museum right when it opens.

So although I was sad to leave my teenager home on this day of museums, she was ecstatic to have the choice to opt out and spend the whole day just rattling around the AirBnb by herself.

And my college student and I, Matt in tow, were ecstatic to catch the bus around the corner and take it all the way to the front door of the Natural History Museum.

We were there right when it opened!

I was the most excited to see the Fossil Marine Reptiles Hall, which is where Mary Anning lives, but in the interest of crowd control, we first hit up the gallery I was second most excited to see:

DINOSAURS!!!

This was not my favorite dinosaur exhibit--for some reason, many of the fossils were mounted overhead, in dim light--

--and I had a lot of trouble simply making them out, much less peering closely and nearsightedly at all their tiny details, as I prefer. 

Still, there were some wonderful treasures! Here is part of the first (known) T-Rex fossil ever discovered:

We also saw the first known Iguanodon fossils ever discovered, two teeth found by Mary Ann Mantell. Later, a quarry owner discovered part of an Iguanodon skeleton inside a limestone slab that had been blasted apart. These Iguanodon teeth are another example of men intercepting women's finds and claiming them as their own, as it's Mary Ann's husband, Gideon, who gets most of the credit for the Iguanodon. To be fair, he was the one who researched it and described it, but he's also the one who had the education and the freedom of movement to do so.

I'm interested in the history of paleontology, and I like to look at exhibits that are still set up to look like they might have in the 1800s and early 1900s. It was really fun, then, that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum had exhibits like this!

I like to look at the labels on older fossils to see if anyone interesting collected them. A couple of these fossils are labeled as coming from the Mantell collection, as in Gideon Mantell, and a couple more are labeled as having been collected by W.E. Cutler. There's not a ton of information about him, but a couple of cool points: he died of malaria in 1925 while on a dinosaur dig in Africa, and he has a mystery! In 1920, Cutler uncovered a partial Chasmosaurus skeleton and put it in storage to await a buyer. In 1921, he was hired to dig in Africa, where he died. He left no records saying what he did with his Chasmosaurus or where it is. There *is* a Chasmosaurus fossil in the Natural History Museum that resembles the field photographs of Cutler's fossil, but it doesn't have any associated records. 

I would happily spend the rest of my life in some museum's endless archives, puttering away and solving little mysteries like this one.

There were several good specimens from the collection of Georges Cuvier, who I used to be into until I learned about his WHOLE THING with "scientific" racism. He "dissected" the enslaved human trafficking victim Sarah Baartman after her death, not to figure out why she died but to get some primary source support for his racist beliefs, part of which included the idea that Adam and Eve were white. He was super gross, and I'm not happy to have to add him to my list of Misogynistic Men of Science. 

After the dinosaurs, since we were in the area and all, we looked at every mammal, every invertebrate, and every fish, reptile, and amphibian:

Then... Mary Anning!!!

Mary Anning's first articulated plesiosaur fossil!!!

I do not understand the Natural History Museum's obsession with displaying artifacts up high, but a large number of my precious plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were mounted easily 15 feet up. I can't read the labels from that high! I can't closely inspect every bone!

Seriously, look at this nonsense!

Still, even though you have to crane your neck, there were so many beautiful fossils. Look at Mary Anning's marvelous ichthyosaurs!

I love how they're still in their original mounts, in their cases that call them Sea-Dragons!

Only the bottom fossil has a known provenance from Mary Anning, but she probably found the other two, as well. 

Two interesting things about the below inscription: 1) he uses the phrased "purchased from Mary Anning," which is a great way to not admit that she also discovered and prepared the fossil, and 2) he says that she found another part of this fossil later and sent it to him, which shows how well she remembered all of her discoveries, enough to connect one piece to another years apart, and that she was too generous for her own good. She ought to have charged him through the fucking nose for that piece.

This is Mary Anning's biggest ichthyosaur. Matt couldn't even get the whole thing in the same frame as me!

It's so big that it has other fossils ON it!

We could have easily stayed at the Natural History Museum until it closed, and we did swing by most of the other galleries, but on this day I also really wanted to check out the Victoria and Albert Museum, conveniently located just across the street. There was nothing in particular that I'd been excited about seeing there, but of course I DID find marvelous things!

See the pipe found on the Thames foreshore?!? SQUEE!!!

Thanks to all the Medieval art I studied in my misguided twenties, I got very distracted by all the lovely rood screens--

Awww, look at that beautiful sculpture of a bunch of men torturing a lone woman!

--and effigies--

--and dragons!

I really loved the large-scale architectural elements in the Victoria and Albert. The museum has saved pieces like staircases, entire balconies, and decorated columns-and you can look at them!

There was also a wonderful display of jewelry, so the college student and I spent a LOT of time inching our way around the jewelry exhibit, peering at every tiny ring and reading its label twice, then peering at it again with renewed interest based on what we'd learned from the label. I'm low-key obsessed with iron jewelry now--it was great to wear during mourning and during wartimes after you'd donated your precious metal jewelry, but it's also super bad-ass and I would wear it all the freaking time if I had it.

Also bad-ass? Queen Victoria's sapphire and diamond coronet!

It was designed by Prince Albert, who apparently had excellent taste and was in charge of making sure all of Victoria's jewelry was beautiful and classy.

I don't wear jewelry, but I could use someone with excellent taste to make sure that all of my cargo pants and T-shirts and sneakers are beautiful and classy!

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

At the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum (Again!)

I once read an essay in a travel magazine written by a woman who claimed that she and her partner had a policy to never visit the same vacation spot more than once. Now, I don't know to what level they took this--"We've been to the Mona Lisa gallery in the Louvre once, so we'll never go into that gallery again," or "We've been to the Louvre once, so we'll never go again," or "We've been to Paris once, so we'll never go again"--but the practice immediately struck me as something that I'd NEVER want to do.

Mind you, I'm also not going to be going to Disney World five times in two years like one particularly obsessed mom friend of mine (Kimberly, I'm waving at you!), but I do appreciate visiting a well-loved place again. It makes a lot of sense from a parenting perspective, since the child who loved Chicago's Field Museum at the age of four is in for a whole new world of experience when she comes again at the age of eight, and the children who just rode Big Thunder Mountain Railroad five minutes ago are going to enjoy the feeling of mastery that comes with knowing what to expect when they ride it a second time, and they're going to love it even more the third time, the fourth time, the fifth time, and the sixth time, after which they might be willing to take a break, but only if it involves ice cream bars shaped like Mickey Mouse's head.

The same scenario applies to adults, too, however--or at least to me! I loved visiting Hawaii for the first time as a kid, and I loved visiting Hawaii for the second time on my honeymoon with Matt; it was a whole new Hawaii, experienced as an adult, following my own agenda, with my partner. We didn't stay at the nice resort of my childhood, but we did stay in a hostel where we both thought that the owner was going to kill us in our beds (seriously, if I had a buck for every time that has happened to me...); we had our own rental car, we drank a ton of guava juice, and we came so close to active lava flows that if I'd tripped and fallen I would have burned my face off.

I can't wait to visit Hawaii again and show it to our girls.

So it bothered me not at all that the girls and I were just at the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum last year; we still like shells--

--the girls are older and know more science and geography with which to appreciate the museum's collections--

Shells from Africa--how apropos!

 Once again, I studied with fascination the collection of Sailor's Valentines--

--but this time, now that each girl is a year older, the project struck me as actually pretty doable for me and the girls and our huge shell collection. Stay tuned!

Inspired by our museum visit, Willow asked if we could study mollusks. I'm starting us off by learning the order of taxonomy, then zipping down to Phylum Mollusca, where I'll need to do a lot of preparatory studying, myself, frankly, invertebrate biology not being a huge part of my own childhood curriculum.

Let the adventure begin!

A Book about Salt, and a Field Trip to Friendship

 

I read a very interesting book about salt the other day:

Salt: A World History covers the history of human production, transportation, and consumption of salt, from the first evidence of its processing and usage to today. Because salt is ubiquitous today, in most places easily accessed and cheap (you can get free packets of iodized salt in fast food restaurants--the Ancient Chinese would have flipped!!!), it completely blew my mind to learn that once upon a time the ability to access and process salt defined where you could live, and that the production and transportation of salt once upon a time made and broke the fortunes of nations. It's an unnoticed component of a lot of world history and human geography, and makes a lot about the world make more sense.

Like words! Ancient Roman soldiers at one point were paid in salt (which had an AWESOME resale value!), so that's where the world "salary" comes from, and also the phrase, "worth his salt." They salted their raw veggies before they ate them, so that's where the word "salad" comes from. 

That chapter right there is where the book hooked me. Y'all know how I feel about etymology!

And then I got completely invested in how ancient sources of salt were discovered and processed, and then improved with technology, and then, like as not, taken over by the government. 

Like the Salt March. Here's me showing off my ignorance, but how did I watch that entire Ben Kingsley movie as a little kid and yet still I knew nothing about the Salt March? Helped Will with her entire AP European History class (and she got a terrific score on the exam!), and still I knew nothing about the Salt March! In Colonial India, the government tried to monopolize salt production (thereby raising the prices, taxing it, shutting the former owners and laborers of saltworks out of their businesses, etc.) and forbade citizens from collecting their own salt, even though it was readily available, historically an activity that everyone did, formed these big crusts on the beaches and was LITERALLY RIGHT THERE. Gandhi's peaceful protest started by simply walking to the beach and... picking up salt.

In contrast with how they messed up India by putting artificial restrictions on salt production and trade, England messed itself up by having basically no restrictions on its own salt production for centuries, during which salt was a super lucrative commodity. In England, "wich" was a suffix given to places where there was production activity or trade, so many of the places in England with names like Norwich and Greenwich had saltworks. Whole families would be out there constantly pulling up brine from springs and boiling it in pans, never taking a break or letting the kids go to school because that would eat up their profits. They burned coal to evaporate the water, so the atmosphere was toxic, and much of the salt that was produced was put on ships to West Africa... where it was traded for captured Africans, who were then taken in those ships to North America and sold into slavery.

England just really, really sucked for a while, didn't it?

In the late 1800s, mysterious sinkholes begin to develop all over Cheshire County, where you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone who'd dug a well and was pumping up brine and evaporating it. The sinkholes could emerge anywhere, and destroyed streets and houses and fields. There was no way of predicting where they'd show up next. But they did eventually figure out what was causing them. Apparently the entire county was underlaid with rock salt, and the brine that everyone was pumping up was groundwater that had dissolved some of this salt. When they pumped up the brine, more groundwater replaced it, and then that groundwater dissolved more salt until it, too, reached maximum solubility. Then it, too, got pumped out, until there were just vast open spaces underground that couldn't support the earth above it and collapsed.

And that's just one example of people messing up the land. Not specifically salt focused, but salt adjacent, is how Israel built a canal to siphon water from the Sea of Galilee, which flows into the Jordan, which Jordan also siphons water from, so that so little water finally makes it to the Dead Sea that it's growing ever saltier and ever smaller and if you ever want to see it while it still exists you should probably go ASAP.

Other interesting facts: iodized salt is politicized in many places (side note: I wonder if I should consume more iodine?), the bodies of LITERAL CELTS were found in Austria in a prehistoric salt mine, adding to my list of places that I really must visit, and former salt mines make excellent bunkers for precious artifacts and nuclear waste, because the openings that you make into the vault will recrystalize and seal the vault up as if it had originally grown that way.

After I finished this book, I OBVIOUSLY Googled "saltworks near me." You never know--maybe there's a cool old salt mine somewhere near! Maybe it has a slide!!!

I didn't find any salt mines with slides within driving distance, alas, but I DID find that a nearby creek is aptly named, and that in the 1800s after the state was snookered away from the Miami, settlers pumped brine out of springs and evaporated it to create salt. Some more digging informed me that sometimes they'd go door to door and sell the salt by the cupful to individual households. 

So, I really REALLY wanted to see if I could find any evidence of these historic saltworks, but the problem is that the entire Salt Creek Valley was actually dammed in the 1960s to make the lake that we now use for drinking water. Salt Creek feeds into it from the north and flows out of it from the south, but there's no way that I can figure to find out if any of these old brine wells are still above water. 

Nevertheless, there's definitely some old stuff over there on the north side of the lake, stuff that I've never wandered around to look at before, so on an overcast late afternoon recently, Matt and Will agreed to come check it out with me.

This is supposed to be a marsh, but I guess only seasonally? The Corps of Engineers manages it, but I couldn't figure out if it was always a marsh, or only since the valley was flooded:

This is the cemetery of Friendship, Indiana, which was created by a guy who figured that his saltworks were so successful that there should be a whole town around it. I don't think anyone ever actually lived in Friendship, but the stones of this cemetery are all from the 1800s, when the town was trying to be established:

It's interesting to contrast it with the Mt. Ebal Cemetery, which seems to have been most active a little later and is still well-kept and visible. This cemetery is just a little clearing in the woods, accessed by dirt road, overgrown and old and fascinating:

It's limestone country, of course, so many of the stones are limestone, easy to identify by how they've weathered:

The spiky plant growing around almost all of the stones is yucca, which is not native to Indiana but was super popular to plant around homesteads and in cemeteries. I absolutely covet a yucca of my own:

Because this cemetery is mostly undisturbed, I guess, I also thought it was interesting to be able to see clear differences in the ground over where I assume the burials are. The ground is slightly indented, and there's a different groundcover just in those spots. It reminded me of that Irish henge that was discovered because of very slight differences in the composition of the soil from the ancient rotted posts:

And as always, there are examples of beautiful stone carving:

There's pretty much always someone who's grubbing around looking for frogs and cicada shells instead of gazing at historic stone carvings, as well. Tell me you spent the day working in a stable without your heavy gloves on without telling me that you spent your day working in a stable without your heavy gloves on, sigh:

This one has a creepy poem!

And this one I didn't see until I tripped on it:

Afterwards, we drove around tiny backroads for a while (I think I found the iron bridge referenced in that article on the history of the local saltworks!), stopping to look at the pretty things--

Matt and Will report that the zoo they visited in Lima, Peru, had an exhibit of white-tailed deer.

--then we hiked down a gated road to see where Google Maps had geotagged the Friendship Church.

Found it! Or, rather, we found what's left of it...

So, no brine springs or saltworks, but a great old cemetery, hundreds of thousands of black-eyed susans, some zoo-worthy white-tailed deer, and a very interesting and decrepit staircase. 

And a VERY interesting book about salt!