Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  During Chapman's tenure the Museum's bird collection was built up from about 10,000 specimens to over 750,000, to make it the greatest such collection in the world. Chapman once said that the Museum's bird collection was better than all the rest of the world's put together. It was greatly enhanced by a single acquisition, one of the largest in the Museum's history—the birds of an eccentric English baron.

  LORD ROTHSCHILD'S BIRDS

  In 1931 the Museum's already fine and still-growing collection was augmented by the extraordinary bird collection of Lord Walter Rothschild. Ever since he was a little boy, Rothschild had had a grand passion for natural history, and in 1889 he started a museum at the family estate in Tring, England. In the years that followed, it was to become the largest and most famous natural history collection ever assembled by one man. Eschewing his family's banking business, Rothschild devoted himself full-time to collecting, and over the years sent more than four hundred men into the field for his museum. Rothschild was particularly interested in birds and butterflies. By the late twenties, the Tring collection of birds—which numbered well over a quarter-million—had become the most studied bird collection in the world.

  Then, on March 10, 1932, in a move that stunned the British public and scientific circles, he announced that he had sold his bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History for an undisclosed sum of money. Indeed, at the time of the announcement, the sale and transfer of the collection was already close to completion, and had been accomplished with such secrecy that even Rothschild's family had no idea that it was under way.

  The secret sale was initiated in October 1931, when a trustee of the American Museum and patron of the Ornithology Department, Dr. Leonard Sanford, received a letter from Rothschild offering him the collection for $225,000, or about a dollar a bird. "It requires thought and courage," Rothschild wrote to Sanford, "to tear one's being out by the roots.... This debacle would not have happened had my brother been alive for as you know I was disinherited & he inherited my father's fortune & always helped me when he was alive...."*45 Rothschild hinted that he was forced to sell the collection because he owed three years' back taxes to the Crown, and was being pressed by the government.

  Sanford immediately wrote to Henry Fairfield Osborn that the collection was "now worth between $1,500,000 and $2,000,000 and is offered to us for $225,000. This offer is largely due to the fact that I have promised Lord Rothschild we will keep the collection intact and develop it according to his ideas."

  Following that correspondence, negotiations and arrangements were made, all with the secrecy that Rothschild requested. The family of Harry Payne Whitney agreed to donate to the Museum the funds necessary to acquire the collection, and Robert Cushman Murphy, a curator in the bird department, was put in charge of the monumental task of cataloging the collection at Tring, packing it, and shipping it to the States.

  Sanford, who knew Rothschild, undertook the delicate negotiations, made all the more so by Rothschild's strong emotional attachment to the collection. Rothschild wanted to keep some of the birds for sentimental reasons, including a peerless collection of birds of paradise. The Museum especially wanted the birds of paradise, however, and Sanford was charged with the task of getting them. When Sanford finally persuaded the baron to give them up for the sake of science, Rothschild broke down and wept. (According to Robert Cushman Murphy, "Old Doc Sanford was close to weeping as well.") Later, Murphy wrote to the Museum's assistant director:

  Getting everything we wished, and more than we dared hope for, was a great feat, but still more remarkable is the good will, not to say enthusiasm, that [Sanford] has aroused in Lord Rothschild. A week ago the old gentleman looked as though hanging would be a relief to him. Now he acts and talks rather as though the transfer of his life-long love to the American Museum was its most desirable apotheosis ... and he is fully "sold" regarding the care, protection, and scientific use that his treasures will inherit in the Whitney Building.

  Murphy and his wife spent four months at Tring cataloging and packing the collection. Rothschild had managed to fill four rooms and a capacious basement with birds. They were arranged in systematic order, but Rothschild's prodigious memory had obviated the need for a written catalog. Many specimens weren't labeled, and the information was stored only in the baron's head. Thus, before the collection could be moved, Murphy had to count every bird (all 280,000 of them) and prepare a catalog containing information on each specimen. He wrote that

  any hitch, any unrecorded gap, would lead to hopeless confusion, especially since only one or two specimens in many series of one kind had had the scientific name written upon the field label. A thousand packs of cards, turning in a lottery barrel, would be a simple task of reassortment compared with a possible jumble of partly unnamed Old World warblers and thrushes, represented by subspecies extending across Eurasia from Ireland to Japan.

  The larger specimens were wrapped in newspapers, "mostly of wartime vintage," and later, when those ran out, Dutch newspapers. (When they switched from English to Dutch papers, Murphy noted that the work of the packers speeded up considerably.) The catalog, when finished, took up 740 foolscap pages.

  When most of the collection had been shipped to America, Rothschild finally announced that it had been sold. He merely indicated, in a terse statement, that he had found it necessary to dispose of part of his collections, and that the birds were the only easily sold asset.

  The American Museum worried about how the British Museum would react to the sale, as there had always been (and continues to be) an excellent relationship between the two institutions. Although there was some grumbling, the British Museum took the sale with grace. One scientist even declared that the collection belonged to the world, not to any country, and that it would be more accessible and better cared for in America. Rothschild, who was actually a trustee of the British Museum, had quietly approached several of his co-trustees, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, to explore the possibility of a British Museum purchase. He apparently was told that there was no hope that it would be purchased by the British Museum. Rothschild wisely decided that if he sold it abroad, he had better keep the deal secret until it was consummated. The collection was so large that, back at the American Museum, it took many years to unpack and install in the new Whitney Wing.

  It wasn't until after Rothschild's death, in 1937, that the real reason for the sale of the Tring bird collection came to light. Rothschild's niece, Miriam Rothschild, reported the discovery in her memoir about her uncle, entitled Dear Lord Rothschild:

  Walter, who was then thirty-six years of age, had decided he could no longer bear to read his personal correspondence ... He obtained two large wicker baskets (five feet by three feet) from the Tring Park estate laundry, and when the mail was brought to him with his early morning tea he sorted the letters into two piles, one large and one very small, the latter with a well-known dreaded handwriting on the envelope, and dropped them unopened in their respective baskets. When the baskets were full, he shot the iron bar through the two pendulous metal loops, secured the padlock and turned the key. Over the months which followed a large number of similar baskets accumulated in his room, one piled on top of the other....

  It was not until thirty years later, after Walter's own death, that the last of the linen baskets divulged its ugly secrets. His greatest act of folly was the decision to set aside, securely locked, this one basket into which he had dropped the smaller packets of letters. It fell to the lot of his horrified sister-in-law to discover the existence of a charming, witty, aristocratic, ruthless blackmailer who at one time had been Walter's mistress, and, aided and abetted by her husband, had ruined him financially, destroyed his mind for forty years and eventually forced him to sell his bird collection.

  Miriam Rothschild never identified the blackmailer. She wrote that the baron

  seemed to shrink visibly in the period following the sale.... He felt tired and distrait, and spent only about two hours before lunch in
the [Tring] Museum. It was winter—his birds had flown.

  Before Murphy left, Rothschild gave him a large photograph of himself. Murphy wrote in a letter:

  After getting him to sign it and add the date of the contract [with the Museum], I promised him that it would be framed and hung forever in the department. He is as jubilant over it as a school boy on the "honor roll"! In many ways he is as naive and shy as a child, anyway, and, although he always carries the front of a lord, he is also an extraordinarily simple man....

  True to the promise, that photograph still hangs in the department, showing a plump, bearded, and avuncular old man with a kindly face: this nobleman who built up—and then lost—the greatest private bird collection ever assembled.

  THE WORLD'S BIGGEST NEST

  In addition to birds themselves, the ornithology collection also includes birds' eggs and nests, which are cataloged together for convenience. But we will find what is by far the strangest bird nest in the Museum on display at the back of the Sanford Hall of Biology of Birds. Taking up an entire case, this social weaver bird's compound nest was collected in South Africa in 1925. At 300 to 400 cubic feet, it may be the largest bird nest in any museum.

  The history of this nest begins in the 1920S, with James Chapin, a curator in Chapman's bird department, who was particularly interested in African bird nests. When a colleague of his at the Smithsonian Institution, Herbert Friedmann, was arranging a trip to South Africa, Chapin pressed him to collect a nest of the social weaver, which he felt would make an excellent addition to the collection. Friedmann accepted the challenge and set out for Africa in 1924.

  The social weaver is a bird architect nonpareil. Flocks of these birds build huge "apartment house" nests in the flat-topped acacia trees of the South African veldt. Crafted out of coarse grass and twigs, the nests are not Woven but rather thatched, much like a haycock. The result is a large, hanging mass of straw whose underside is perforated by the entrances to individual nests. Every year the flock adds to the nest, contributing to massive domiciles that occasionally grow so heavy they collapse parts of trees. The very largest can reach 2,000 cubic feet. Often they can rival human dwellings in longevity; some nests have been observed to be in use for over one hundred years.

  Friedmann's search for the perfect nest began in January 1925, near what was then Maquassi, in the Transvaal. A railroad had recently opened the area, and Friedmann journeyed by train, searching a swath of land about five miles deep on each side of the tracks for a distance of some one hundred miles. The veldt was so flat and open and the nests so large that they could be spotted miles away. Friedmann claimed to have examined every nest in the 1,000-square-mile area—all twenty-six of them—before selecting a large, shapely, compact nest that looked as if it might travel well. The nest, which was nine feet high, seven feet wide, and eight feet deep, hung in a twenty-five-foot acacia, and covered about 25 percent of the tree.

  Friedmann and his assistants realized that collecting the nest meant collecting the tree as well, so they trimmed off the excess branches, tied several guy lines to the crown, chopped through the trunk, and gently lowered the tree onto a horse-drawn cart. (Friedmann makes no mention of how the resident birds might have viewed this procedure.)

  Borrowing a technique used in collecting dinosaur bones, Friedmann first covered the nest with burlap, then wrapped it with plaster-soaked burlap. This was followed by a layer of chicken wire and more layers of plaster. Following Chapman's example, Friedmann collected all the fixings of a habitat group, including some of the birds, made plaster casts of the acacia leaves, and even dug up a tubful of red earth near the base of the tree—all so that preparators back at the Museum could recreate the setting.*46

  Chapman had authorized $100 in expenses for Friedmann to get his prize to the port at Capetown. But when he found out that shipping the nest from Capetown to New York was going to cost hundreds of dollars more, he was so horrified he wanted to instruct his shipping agents to dump the nest then and there. But he changed his mind—probably under Chapin's influence—and the nest duly arrived at the Museum.

  The nest was first displayed in the 1940s, when the Hall of Biology of Birds opened. Chapin was in charge of erecting the exhibit, and after it opened he used to pose as a visitor and mingle with the crowds admiring the nest. A story is told that one day Chapin, finding a large and excited crowd in front of his exhibit, sidled up to drink in their praise. To his dismay, he found that the people were watching the activities of a mouse that had made the nest its home.

  In 1982 the hall was renovated, and along with it the nest was given a thorough cleaning and refurbishment. The nest was washed with detergent, which was flushed out with water and then blow-dried with fans. Finally the whole thing was cemented together with a spray consisting of a solution of Elmer's Glue-All and glycerine. Altogether, it took several hundred manhours to refurbish the nest, which is now safely back on view in its familiar setting on the Museum's first floor.

  FIFTEEN

  Anthropology

  No one really knows exactly how many anthropological artifacts are in the American Museum of Natural History. The official number given to the press is about 8 million, but many curators will privately admit that this is mostly a guess. Whatever the number, they fill well over fifty storage rooms, and the Museum has been spending millions of dollars to renovate, conserve, and computerize this extraordinary collection. Yet these are merely the physical collections. There is another collection that is, in a sense, invisible. It has no catalog numbers and is not cross-referenced or indexed in a computer system. It cannot be displayed, photographed, or insured.

  This collection is the vast body of myths, songs, dreams, sacred texts, and visions gathered by Museum curators from hundreds of living and extinct cultures, from New Guinea to Manhattan Island. Both in published works and in reams of unpublished notes stored in a fifth-floor vault, one can find hundreds of creation stories, descriptions of afterworlds both heavenly and hellish, epic tales of gods and demons, magical formulae, chants and songs, dreams of the past and future, visions of prophets and shamans, recipes for potions to heal the body and mind, and much more.

  The collection contains such things as the creation myth of the Hackensack Indians (who once lived on Staten Island), accounts of the dream cults of the Oglala Sioux, and shaman chants of the Tsimshian Indians of the Northwest Coast. Here too one can read the epic tales of the San Carlos Apaches, the love poetry and death songs of the Ojibwa Indians, songs recorded on old wax cylinders of the Yukaghir people of Siberia, and dozens of myths of a Great Flood and an arcadian age when animals spoke like people.

  No one really has any idea of just how much—or exactly what—mythological material might be stored in the Museum. Most of the myths were gathered before 1930. Today, with several notable exceptions, the Museum's anthropologists are less interested in mythology, partially because many of them are working in literate societies where myths have already been written down. One of the exceptions is Robert Carneiro, a curator specializing in the cultures of Amazonia. In a visit to South America in 1975, he collected a dozen myths from the Kuikuru, a Carib-speaking people who live in a single village in the upper Xingu basin of central Brazil.

  By far the most complete body of myths in the Museum comes from the Indian cultures of North America. Between 1880 and 1930, myth collectors from New York traveled west with pen and paper to capture the Indian myth cycles before they became hopelessly garbled by Christian influences or were lost entirely. While Franz Boas was busy recording the entire myth cycle of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Coast (a staggering body of myths, as voluminous as the Bible), his contemporary, Robert H. Lowie, was tramping across the West from Alberta to Arizona, collecting hundreds of myths (as well as artifacts) from the Hopi, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cree, Shoshone, and Ojibwa cultures. Pliny Earl Goddard, another Museum curator, spent twenty years studying the dancing societies of the Sarsi and the many dialects of the Athabascan family of tribe
s, of which the Apache are most prominent. Clark Wissler, also a myth collector and chairman of the Department of Anthropology, built the Museum's collection of Plains Indian material into one of the greatest in the world, and in addition edited several numbers' of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, in which many of the myths were published.