Shells reveal rich gifts from the sea
For me, there’s no more resonant image from a Florida childhood than this: You’re on a bright beach, sun blazing, clouds so big they must surely be the home of the gods. The roar of the waves surrounds you as you scan the sand for seashells. If you’re at a Gulf beach such as Sanibel or Captiva and are lucky enough to find a large conch shell, your parents show you how to press your ear against it. Listen, they say — it’s the sound of the ocean. Pure magic.
Florida author Cynthia Barnett has such memories, of gathering shells with two grandmothers who cheered every one of her finds as if she had brought them Blackbeard’s treasure, she writes in her 2021 book, “The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans.”
It’s a wide-ranging study that goes far beyond reminiscing. Barnett isn’t afraid of daunting topics: Her last book, longlisted for the National Book Award in 2015, was titled “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History.”
“The Sound of the Sea,” too, combines science and history as Barnett takes us on “a global tour of archaeology, anthropology and environmental science, by way of what she describes as ‘perhaps the most loved objects in nature,’ “Mary Elizabeth Williams writes on Salon.com, lauding the book for its light touch in dealing with complicated topics.
Creature creations
Williams and other “Sound of the Sea” reviewers
mention an astonishing statistic, highlighted in the book, that Barnett learned on a visit to the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel.
A survey of the museum’s visitors, including children, revealed that 90
percent didn’t know that a seashell was made by a living animal. They thought the shells were some kind of rock.
“I was just so moved by that. I was disturbed by that,” Barnett said in a 2021 interview. “I couldn’t stop
thinking about it as I was falling asleep. I think by the time I fell asleep, I knew that I was going to write this book.”
The shells that became the subject of her 417-page study are indeed the creations of living creatures and have often been seen as messengers to scientists and others. For Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who wrote her classic 1955 book “Gift from the Sea” on quiet Captiva Island, shells became metaphors “to meditate on marriage, motherhood, and middle age,” as Barnett writes. Through them, Lindbergh inspired a generation of women and also warned of our society’s growing excesses.
While Lindbergh’s 1950s feminism may seem a bit dated today, Barnett notes, “her insights about the natural world imperiled by the amassing culture taking
hold in the 1950s have stood the test of time.”
At first during Lindbergh’s walks on the beaches of Captiva and Sanibel, she succumbed to the collecting impulse, but she before long she realized that “her shell-crammed window ledges and bookcases obscured her enjoyment of any one seashell,” Barnett writes.
“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach,” Lindbergh wrote. “It is only framed in space that beauty blooms.” As Barnett notes, “It’s a line that could apply to a condocrammed beach as easily as a shell-crammed display.”
Shells at Rollins
Longtime Central Floridians may recall the Beal-Maltbie Shell Museum at Rollins College, which drew visitors for decades until it closed as a museum in 1988, when Rollins gave the collection to the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. (The Spanish Mediterranean-style building that housed the museum is now home to Rollins’ Department of Environmental Studies.)
The museum opened in February 1941, with a collection of an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 shells donated by Dr. James Hartley Beal, a retired professor and former president of the American Pharmaceutical Association who wintered on Merritt Island.
Born in 1861, Beal had gotten hooked on collecting shells on a visit to Key West in 1888 and in more than a half-century had built a collection of shells from all over the world. His friend Birdsey L. Maltbie, founder of the Maltbie Chemical Company of Newark, New Jersey, and a longtime winter resident of Altamonte Springs, donated money for the building to house the collection.
Beal’s treasures ranged from giant clamshells that weighed about 700 pounds to shells from animals smaller than a pinhead. The large clamshells were featured on postcards for the museum in which a toddler perched on one of the shells.
Beal’s collection is in good company at the Florida Museum of Natural History. In February 2020, it was reported that retired Jacksonville physician Dr. Harry Lee was donating his collection of almost a million shells to the Gainesville museum, making it one of the nation’s largest repositories of shells.