A museum of 500,000 oddities
Reachable only through an arched doorway hidden in Oxford’s Natural History Museum, this treasure trove has everything from nose flutes to totem poles to shrunken heads.
The 30cm-long, rolled-up scrap of shark skin in front of me has a story to tell. More than 240 years ago, it was being used - regularly, by the rather grizzled look of the thing - by persons unknown in the Polynesian archipelago of Tonga to smooth down clubs, bowls and other wooden objects. Call it part predator, part sandpaper.
It has also travelled far. Today it resides in England, in Oxford’s magically engaging Pitt Rivers Museum, sharing a case with dozens of other items gathered on Captain Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific in the late 1700s. Surrounding it are strange ornaments and food pounders, fish hooks and bird-bone necklaces. Away to its right is a delicately engraved bamboo nose flute from Vanuatu.
The large display case, newly opened in 2016 to show off the so-called CookVoyage Collection, is the latest addition to a museum that draws just a fraction of the attention of Oxford icons like the neoclassical Radcliffe Camera library building and 16th-century place of learning Christ Church College, but carries no less wonder.
The museum is itself an oddity. Reachable only through an arched doorway hidden at the rear of the main hall of Oxford’s Natural History Museum, the low-lit room is filled with close-set cases of global curiosities. The collection stretches to some 500,000 items, around 400,000 of which are on show, with the rest archived out of sight. To enter feels rather like arriving into an eccentric Victorian storage depot.
Which, in a way, is precisely what it is. The museum was founded in 1884 by the
elaborately named Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, an aristocratic English army officer with a keen interest in ethnology. As such, he was an avid collector of both exotic and everyday objects from around the world, and the museum began as somewhere to showcase his personal collection of 22,000 anthropological items. It has since grown into an unconventional three-floor gallery: a warehouse of the weird and wonderful.
What makes it so unusual, other than its overfilled display cases and dim lighting (torches and magnifying glasses are both available on entry), is the way in which its collection is presented. Rather than being arranged by age or geography, items are clustered by purpose or use. The idea is that visitors can compare in one place a group of objects - puppets, snowshoes, head dresses, hunting spears - from different eras and disparate parts of the world.
The packed Human Form In Art case, for example, contains everything from a rather haughty-looking wooden effigy of Queen Victoria, created in Nigeria, to a ghostly cuttlebone-carved figure from the Solomon Islands. A section titled Lutes includes a ukulele from Hawaii, a three-string fiddle from Ecuador and a mandolin used by a British soldier in the WWI trenches, among dozens of other such instruments.
It’s often difficult to absorb fully what you’re looking at. In the gruesome Treatment of Dead Enemies cabinet, next to a group of preserved skulls, six shrunken human heads from South America are on show, their hair and eyelashes still in place. Elsewhere, I discovered a tobacco pouch made from the skin of an albatross foot, a block of century-old Norwegian reindeer cheese and an Alaskan kagoule created entirely from seal intestines.
There is no start or finish, and the collection is not intended to be covered in one visit. Indeed, you could come calling every day for months and still find some previously unseen corner brimming with trinkets and rarities. There are concealed drawers under the cases, paddle exhibits in the ceiling rafters and entire displays tucked away at ankle level. Many of the labels are tiny and handwritten. It is a museum that requires crouching, squinting and detailed exploring.
The largest item in the collection is a spectacular 11m-high totem pole carved from a single red cedar on Canada’s Haida Gwaii islands in 1882. At its summit, a frogeating bear looks out across the half-light of the museum, still savage-toothed and wildeyed nearly 135 years after being carved.
Not all exhibits date back so far. Directly above the totem pole are four shields from Papua New Guinea, purchased in 2002 and decorated with paintings of the contemporary comic strip character The Phantom. Likewise, alongside Burmese neck rings and Central African lip plugs in the Reshaping cabinet, hangs a single silicon breast implant. The ethos of the museum, which makes a point of stating that its collection has been bought rather than stolen or pillaged, is that if an item has merit of its own - if it has a story to tell - then it warrants inclusion.
Pitt Rivers himself, being a military man, began his collection by amassing different weapons. Almost the entire top floor is given over to rifles, knuckle-dusters, blowpipes, spiked maces and suchlike. Seeing so many instruments of harm in one place is disconcerting, but as elsewhere in the museum, the motley montages are not here to make any sort of statement. Above all, they highlight the commonality of people around the planet.
Oxford, the city of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Lewis Carroll, has always been a special place. Away from the college quads and the Harry Potter halls, however, the murky, maze-like floors of the Pitt Rivers Museum might just be the attraction that best conjures up the city’s old-world enchantment.