Shells from Captain Cook’s last voyage discovered while cleaning house

Relics returned to the museum

Samples of shells from famous explorer Captain James Cook’s final voyage have been rediscovered 40 years after it was thought to have been discarded in a trash bin. It will be presented at an exhibition in England.

More than 200 shells have been returned to the English museum and will now be put on display in Northumberland. The sinks belonged to Bridget Atkinson.

“It’s really nice to be able to tell the story of a remarkable woman,” collections curator Frances Mackintosh told The Guardian. “She’s not a duchess or part of London’s high society, and she’s not in the history books, but she’s phenomenal.”

Atkinson came from a wealthy family but rarely left her farm in Cumbria. Her lifelong passion was shells, and she used her extensive connections to collect approximately 1,200 specimens from around the world. While many collected them for decoration, Atkinson was interested in them from a scientific and geographical point of view. The shells were passed down through the family, including her grandson John Clayton, whose collections form the basis of the museum.

In the 1930s, Atkinson’s objects came to the site of what is now Newcastle University. However, they were thrown out during an office move in the 1980s. They were thought to be lost forever, but it turned out that passing marine zoologist John Buchanan had retrieved the shells from a trash can. His family, while cleaning out the house after their mother’s death, found and donated the amazing shells to English Heritage.

“I couldn’t believe it. I just thought, ‘This is amazing,’” recalls the exhibition curator.

Seashell experts helped identify and attribute the collection, which includes specimens sent to Atkinson by a gunsmith on Cook’s third voyage around the world, during which he was killed by George Dixon.

As evidence of authenticity, there are also letters from Atkinson to her sons, some of whom inherited sugar plantations in Jamaica, while others worked for the East India Company. In her correspondence, Atkinson asked the children to try to find specific shells for her collection. Some of them contained living creatures, with one instruction from Atkinson to “boil them until they turn red.”

Curator of Non-Insect Invertebrates Tom White noted that the collection contains many rare species and described Atkinson as “one of the first known women to assemble a scientifically significant collection of shells from around the world.”

“They would have been extremely sought after in 18th-century Britain, the golden age of shell collecting, when individual specimens could sell for thousands of pounds,” the expert comments.