Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: One of the most evocative museums in the country is the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Speaker: And I say evocative because this isn't your standard encyclopedic collection.
Speaker: At heart, and in its roots, it's a museum of exploration.
Speaker: That's because it began as a maritime museum all the way back in 1799, when it was called the East India Marine Society.
Speaker: Merchant captains could join the society only if they had sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope, or Cape Horn,
Speaker: And so the society collected objects that these captains brought back from their distant voyages, like ostrich eggs and ivory carvings and even taxidermied penguins.
Speaker: It quickly became a repository for some of the most fascinating objects in America, brought to Salem from around the world.
Speaker: And that tradition continues today with the Peabody Essex Museum playing to its strengths, wonders and rarities from around the world which speak to global trade and cultural exchange across hemispheres.
Speaker: And curious objects got special access to a part of the museum that most visitors never see.
Speaker: In fact, I had the chance to feel just a little like a world traveler myself.
Speaker: Because like so many museums, PEMS collections long ago outstripped their physical display space.
Speaker: Thousands upon thousands of objects need to be kept elsewhere and to be kept safe and ideally to be kept accessible to curators and researchers who rely on the collection to make new discoveries.
Speaker: Enter the Collection Center, PEM's brand new state-of-the-art off-site storage facility with 120,000 square feet full of, well, curious objects.
Speaker: The museum invited me to tour the facility.
Speaker: So I spent a full day poking my head around, looking at everything from a whaling ship's logbook to a giant bell made by Paul Revere to a pair of Christian Louboutins traversing the globe and the centuries in just a few hours.
Speaker: To be honest, it was overwhelming.
Speaker: But fortunately, I had help from three of PEM's curators, plus their director of the collection center, to guide me through the building and through the incredible array of objects stored there.
Speaker: It was a day of discovery after discovery with whole categories of objects I had never seen before, and I've seen a lot.
Speaker: This is a place where someone like me, or you, could wander for eons, constantly encountering fantastic new experiences in the form of objects.
Speaker: I heard fascinating stories about everything from original documents about the Salem witch trials, to Chinese porcelain made for Swedish royalty, to a shoe designed for southern slave plantations.
Speaker: In fact, I heard so many great stories that we couldn't fit them all into one episode.
Speaker: So this week and next, we'll be heading to Salem, Massachusetts to experience a side of the museum you've never seen before, the Collection Center, where the behind-the-scenes magic happens.
Speaker: Now, first off, a little housekeeping.
Speaker: I want to thank the Peabody Essex Museum for supporting this episode and their staff for sharing their time and experience with me, especially Dinah Carden, who made it all possible.
Speaker: You can see photos of all the objects discussed today at vmagazineantiques.com slash podcast, which I highly recommend checking out.
Speaker: And if you're listening to this episode and you're not already subscribed to Curious Objects, you should do that right now to make sure you don't miss future episodes, including the second part of my visit to the Peabody Essex Museum.
Speaker: On Apple Podcasts, that's the follow button in the top right.
Speaker: On Spotify, you just tap the three little dots on the top right and then hit follow.
Speaker: And if you're enjoying Curious Objects, please do take a moment to leave us a five-star review and better yet, tell a friend about the show.
Speaker: If you want to get in touch, you can email me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com or find me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: You've been sending me some great ideas for future episodes, which I really appreciate.
Speaker: So please keep those coming.
Speaker: And as always, thanks for listening.
Speaker: It's a valuable space, it's an important space, and it feeds into every function of the museum.
Speaker: That's Angela Segala, director of the collection center and my guide through the cavernous storerooms and endless passageways that make up this remarkable building.
Speaker: And before we dive into the actual objects and their stories, I want to give you a mental picture of what a top-of-the-line museum storage facility looks like.
Speaker: Because for all the time that you might have spent exploring the galleries of great museums, it's these storage facilities where 90 or 95 or 99% or more of their collections actually live.
Speaker: So this is a 420 foot long hallway.
Speaker: And on the right side of the hallway is storage only.
Speaker: On the left side, these are function slash program rooms.
Speaker: So at this moment, things are...
Speaker: for the most part, packed away with the exception of the library.
Speaker: So we have to assist curators in pulling things out.
Speaker: One day, hopefully maybe about a year from now, we're going to have some really exciting furniture in place and curators will once again be able to come in, access the objects on their own time.
Speaker: But right now we pull them out for them and we put it into the art
Speaker: work review room.
Speaker: So it's a space dedicated to viewing.
Speaker: And we use it for outside researchers.
Speaker: So if you wanted to see our silver, for example, we would pull it out for you.
Speaker: We would pull it out for you, put it in this room.
Speaker: I did want to ask, you mentioned that these cabinets are inevitably expensive.
Speaker: Why is that?
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: Let's imagine you have a cabinet at home.
Speaker: Let's say you have a dresser and you put your clothing in your dresser and you have a leak.
Speaker: What do you think is going to happen to the pieces in your dresser?
Speaker: Not great things.
Speaker: Yeah, they're going to get wet, right?
Speaker: They're going to get wet.
Speaker: If you leave them in your dresser for a long period of time and temperature and humidity fluctuate, there could be some environmental concerns that end up impacting that clothing.
Speaker: Things turn yellow, right?
Speaker: Things get spots on them.
Speaker: So you want the environment for the pieces in your dresser to be somewhat stable and free of pollutants.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And wood is a pollutant, basically.
Speaker: So you want something that's inert.
Speaker: You want something that is, in our world, powder-coated metal is great because it's not going to off-gas the way that wood does.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: You have cabinetry that is watertight, that if you have a fire, a flood, any kind of event, the things inside are safe.
Speaker: So you have advanced kind of gasketing and so forth.
Speaker: And that's what makes it expensive, you know, and I can't wait to show you our cabinets.
Speaker: In fact, people have often said to me in the museum, I can't believe you get so excited about cabinets.
Speaker: But really what we're doing is
Speaker: It's providing a home.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's providing a home for these objects that, you know, they've been folded and they've been in drawers.
Speaker: And we are, the museum is taking steps to give these pieces a home where they can be safe, where they are not deteriorating at an advanced rate and people can see them.
Speaker: One of the challenges inherent to managing a collection of thousands and thousands of objects is simply keeping track of them.
Speaker: What object is what?
Speaker: Which thing belongs where?
Speaker: And even outside of museums, private collectors have sometimes struggled as they acquire more and more objects.
Speaker: Yeah, so collectors often wrote on these where they bought them, or if somebody brought it back and gave it to a friend, they might do that.
Speaker: And even when they came into our predecessor institutions, curators or caretakers would write, yeah, crazy places, actually writing on the objects in a place where you see it.
Speaker: So sometimes when you go through the collection on view in a museum,
Speaker: you see labels and things and you're like, why would somebody do that?
Speaker: But it wasn't unusual.
Speaker: You find that in silver, of course, generation after generation engraving onto the bottom of objects, you know, their initials are given from X to Y or even just a number, a private collection number.
Speaker: And sometimes that can be very informative, tell you things about the object that you wouldn't have known otherwise.
Speaker: Well, whenever you see a maker's mark on the body of a piece of hollow wear, kind of right at eye level when you're looking at the piece, how do you feel about that, Ben?
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: You do?
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And it's interesting, and I mean, not to get onto silver, but it's interesting to think about the ways that the locations of the sort of typical locations where marks are struck, how that evolves over time.
Speaker: So, you know, in the 17th century, in English silver, hallmarks are put sort of haphazardly.
Speaker: You know, they were fairly consistent from object to object.
Speaker: If you have a tankard, the hallmarks are struck near the rim on the outside next to the handle, right?
Speaker: And that's pretty much true for all tankards from that period.
Speaker: But then by the mid to late 18th century, those hallmarks are now being struck on the bottom where you can't see them anymore.
Speaker: And that's, you know...
Speaker: Nobody really wrote about that transition.
Speaker: We don't have special insight into the psychology behind it, but we can imagine, well, you know, silver is sort of professionalizing and they're starting to look at the object as more of a kind of work of art and they don't necessarily want to mar it with these marks that are an indication of the commerce that went into their production.
Speaker: So they're starting to hide them or place them more...
Speaker: symmetrically or more evenly, but now we're getting off onto a completely different subject.
Speaker: Well, no, actually, this is totally appropriate because in the history of this collection, you can see writing on the outside of it and you can see numbers.
Speaker: on the objects and the numbers in a museum, they're an identifier, of course.
Speaker: So very much like people have a social security number, that's your number, your identifier from the government, et cetera.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So anyway, the numbers that are applied to an object, it's based today on when they come in.
Speaker: And as the museum profession professionalized over the years,
Speaker: We started to get better about where to put those numbers.
Speaker: So same thing.
Speaker: You know, the identifier these days is you would put it underneath and you put it on the corner and you would put it, you would apply it with a material that would be easily removable if you wanted to.
Speaker: It's not marking it forever like we see over there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not engraving the bottom of a piece of silver.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Okay, so you just know I had to get in some silver talk.
Speaker: But now, I don't think you'll be surprised to hear me say that talking about the enormous number of objects in the collection center set me to thinking about access.
Speaker: Because the museum itself has limited space to display these pieces,
Speaker: And yet each one has its own history, its own beauty, and its own stories.
Speaker: And the idea of all of that being stuffed away in a dark storeroom never to see the light of day is honestly distressing to many of us who think and care about these objects.
Speaker: But one of the core ideas behind PEM's new collection center is making these pieces more accessible, not less.
Speaker: Now, I'm so glad you asked about storage and access in general and how often we rotate because, you know, it's my belief that in general, the way folks view storage is based on a really effective image at the end of a very popular movie.
Speaker: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Speaker: That darn Indiana Jones impacts my daily life so much because, you know, they have the crate for the Ark and they show someone pounding in the nail and wheeling it off into a dark abyss of other like objects just kind of sitting there in the dark.
Speaker: you know, with no one to ever look at them again.
Speaker: That's the implication, right?
Speaker: But actually, I've been working in storage for over 20 years of my professional career, and it's actually a very active place.
Speaker: So yes, things are being pulled out and rotated quite often.
Speaker: I think in 2022, even with the pandemic, we did eight or 10 different rotations.
Speaker: throughout the year.
Speaker: We rotate for conservation purposes.
Speaker: We rotate in order to get additional objects on view.
Speaker: However, another way to do that is through digitization.
Speaker: through photography, taking these images and getting them online or sharing them with researchers, that happens here as well.
Speaker: So does research.
Speaker: So does access or programs with small groups.
Speaker: And so the activation of storage, you know, that's not...
Speaker: singular to PEM, that's across the world.
Speaker: More people are looking at how do we activate storage to make it come alive for more people so that it's not that dark abyss that Indiana Jones shows us at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arctic.
Speaker: It is, in fact, a very vibrant place.
Speaker: And because we have this building now and we have this space that you are experiencing,
Speaker: the public is going to no longer be limited by the gallery wall.
Speaker: The experience can extend
Speaker: And I don't mean that through traditional exhibition.
Speaker: I mean through programs.
Speaker: You know, we can bring groups of 15 people at a time into the space to experience a program surrounded by objects and storage.
Speaker: So it's no longer a select person that gets to see these objects or someone who is at the height of their, you know, scholarly career and wants to come in and see something.
Speaker: That's not the case.
Speaker: It doesn't have to be that way.
Speaker: Okay, now that we've thoroughly covered Indiana Jones, I think it's time to start looking at some of these extraordinarily curious objects in this collection center.
Speaker: At the beginning of the show, I mentioned that the origins of the Peabody Essex Museum are rooted in exploration and global trade, and that's true.
Speaker: But it's also a museum in Salem, Massachusetts, a town whose claim to fame I probably don't have to remind you about.
Speaker: And the witch trials are a double-edged sword for Pemm.
Speaker: On the one hand, it's a touchstone of American history, not to mention an evergreen metaphor in our politics that never seems to lose relevance.
Speaker: And it brings countless tourists to Salem, chasing after ghost stories and the occult.
Speaker: On the other hand, it's an incredibly sensitive subject, despite more than three centuries elapsing since those terrible events.
Speaker: And the excitement around witchcraft can sometimes obscure the horrors that really took place in Salem.
Speaker: The false accusations, mass hysteria, the forced confessions, and brutal executions.
Speaker: So for curators at PEM, there's a tough balance to strike.
Speaker: How do you feed and encourage people's excitement about history without letting misconceptions and stereotypes overwhelm the truth?
Speaker: And I think the key is really to go back to the source, go back to the objects and the records, and to quote Mark Twain, show, don't tell.
Speaker: Show people with their own eyes what happened.
Speaker: And one of the treasures of the Peabody Essex Museum is a collection of hundreds of documents relating to the witch trials.
Speaker: They range from letters and petitions to depositions of people like Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Good to a bill for 40 pounds sterling that the jail keepers sent to Essex County for keeping, quote, the witches.
Speaker: These documents all date to the time of the trials, starting in 1692.
Speaker: One of them is a manuscript handwritten by the accused witch Mary Esty, sent to the governor and the court, begging for them to see reason.
Speaker: She wrote, I petition to your honors not for my own life, for I know I must die and my appointed time is set.
Speaker: But the Lord, he knows it is, that if it be possible, no more blood, innocent blood may be shed.
Speaker: Mary Esty was hanged on September 22nd, 1692, one of 14 women and six men executed by the state for witchcraft.
Speaker: This heart-rending document is kept in the Phillips Library, which is housed in the collection center.
Speaker: And at 331 years old, along with hundreds of other witch-child documents, it's the oldest of the curious objects on our path of exploration through the collection center,
Speaker: They're among the foundational, if shameful, records of the history of American law and justice.
Speaker: So I wanted to start by speaking about these documents with the director of the library, Dan Lipkin.
Speaker: When we spoke, he told me that the library was right in the midst of a collaboration with the Boston Public Library and the Massachusetts Supreme Court to return numerous documents that the state had loaned to PEM decades ago.
Speaker: We made this pickup this morning.
Speaker: Our friends in collections management and our manuscript librarian picked up this stuff from BPL that was returning to us.
Speaker: We dropped off another batch of material to digitize, and we also returned maybe 32 boxes of Essex County and Salem court records to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court archives, which was kind of part two of the arrangement we made
Speaker: in the fall to return the witch trials documents to them.
Speaker: So we returned almost 530 original documents.
Speaker: They had put that material on deposit with the Essex Institute with us in 1980 and said, we'll be done with our storage facility in a few years.
Speaker: And 43 years later, they're ready.
Speaker: So tell me about these witch trial documents.
Speaker: What are they?
Speaker: What do they consist of?
Speaker: So they consist of the official court records of the WICH trial.
Speaker: So there are warrants for arrest.
Speaker: There are transcriptions of examinations.
Speaker: There are depositions, records of depositions and testimonies given for and against the accused.
Speaker: There are documents issued by the state about making restitution payments and exonerations after the trials.
Speaker: So it's a whole wide mix of
Speaker: documents, you know, documenting the whole process of what happened.
Speaker: Some of the restitution documents go all the way up to 1712, 1713, 1718.
Speaker: It's basically the closest thing we have to the truth of the trials, right?
Speaker: That's the record of what happened in the courtroom.
Speaker: So what do these documents tell us that we might not have understood in popular culture about the trials themselves?
Speaker: Well, I think in the exhibitions that I've worked on here, and we're going to be opening another one in September about the witch trials, what we've really tried to do is focus on
Speaker: the real human impact or the impact on real humans.
Speaker: You know, these aren't movie characters.
Speaker: They're not made up cartoons.
Speaker: You know, they are, these are real people dealing with this crisis in these conditions.
Speaker: And so what we've tried to do in the exhibitions and what I hope people get from both the exhibitions and from the documents is some sense of how people thought about the crisis, what people were dealing with.
Speaker: You can read their words through these, the transcriptions of the examinations when
Speaker: people are protesting their innocence or when people are submitting petitions on behalf of their neighbors saying this person can't be a witch.
Speaker: I've known them for 30 years and they're a good Christian.
Speaker: So I think that that human dimension of the story is what I hope gets across.
Speaker: The objects that we have that are associated with the people involved in the trials were not part of the deal with the state.
Speaker: Those don't belong to the state.
Speaker: And so we will continue to build exhibitions and
Speaker: galleries around the objects that we have.
Speaker: A window that belonged to the town family, a sundial that belonged to John and Elizabeth Proctor.
Speaker: So we can continue to tell those stories about what happened and hope that people take the lessons of what happened and apply them to how they act and behave and advocate for people suffering injustice today.
Speaker: We'll hear more later on from Dan Lipkin, but for now, we've had a look at some of the deep and difficult local history of Salem and the Peabody Essex Museum.
Speaker: So let's turn now to the global history.
Speaker: And we'll just move right along chronologically from the witch trials of the late 17th century
Speaker: to the 18th century in the age of global trade, when merchant vessels are careening around the world carrying ideas alongside objects and goods alongside, of course, money.
Speaker: And some of the objects that Europeans most coveted were fine porcelain pieces from the kilns of Jingdezhen, a Chinese city some 200 miles inland from Shanghai,
Speaker: the porcelain capital of the world for the last 600 years and even up to today.
Speaker: One piece in the PEM collection has a really incredible story behind it, connecting two parts of the world that really couldn't be more physically remote from each other.
Speaker: And the story behind this piece took some serious sleuthing to uncover.
Speaker: I spoke about it with Karina Corrigan, PEM's Associate Director of Collections and Curator of Asian Export Art.
Speaker: So this is an amazing piece that was made in the ceramics capital of the world in Jingdezhen that was for punch for that, you know, alcoholic 18th century beverage of choice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's an enormous punch bowl.
Speaker: It is an enormous punch bowl and very wonderfully surviving with its under dish.
Speaker: Not all punch bowls had under dishes.
Speaker: A lot of them don't survive with them, but this one does.
Speaker: And then even more surprisingly, it has this lid.
Speaker: So really, even before you know what this is, you might say a punch bowl fit for a king.
Speaker: And we acquired this... And just for listeners who aren't looking at it right now, so this is a... it's colossal.
Speaker: It's a large dish.
Speaker: What is this, 18 inches across?
Speaker: Yeah, probably.
Speaker: Give or take, with an enormous bowl on top and the bowl with a cover.
Speaker: and all of it elaborately decorated.
Speaker: We have scenes, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Speaker: We have geometric designs.
Speaker: I mean, it's a visually impressive object, but just the scale of it is really- It's a lot of punch.
Speaker: It's a ton of punch.
Speaker: Yeah, geez.
Speaker: Okay, sorry to interrupt.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: So we knew, you know, obviously from a scale perspective, exciting.
Speaker: The enameling is beautiful, very unusual borders on here.
Speaker: And then this kind of odd scene on both the lid of the punch bowl and on the under tray.
Speaker: And we didn't know what it was, but we often buy things that we don't know entirely what they are, and then we try to figure out what they are later.
Speaker: I'm familiar with that situation.
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker: I'm sure you are, actually.
Speaker: And PEM has a very large and important collection of this kind of ceramics.
Speaker: Ceramics made in Jingdezhen, really from...
Speaker: Some pieces are as early as the 14th century, right up until the 19th and early 20th century.
Speaker: And in fact, if you go to Ikea, a very significant number of ceramics at Ikea are still being made.
Speaker: And when the tradition continues.
Speaker: It is still the ceramics capital of the world.
Speaker: So PEM has a huge collection, over probably 7,000 pieces of ceramics.
Speaker: Chinese ceramics made for export.
Speaker: A lot of it for Europe, a lot of it for the Americas.
Speaker: Obviously the things that have been in the collection the longest were made for Salem or Massachusetts.
Speaker: But we've also been collecting pretty aggressively in the last 30-40 years.
Speaker: So a lot of things for the Middle East, for the Southeast Asian markets, for the South American markets.
Speaker: And so Bill Sargent, my predecessor, had a suspicion, particularly with this wonderful Swedish flag, that this was for the Swedish market and potentially... So it's a little boat with a number of oarsmen.
Speaker: And then at one end, this, yeah, this, this rippling in the wind, sort of Swedish flag.
Speaker: So, and we see this little boy who's running down the path and some, some fancily dressed people here waiting on the dock or having, perhaps having just arrived from this boat onto the dock.
Speaker: And to cut to the chase, this is not only a view of the Chinese pavilion at Drottningholm,
Speaker: Brotningholm is the current home for the king of Sweden.
Speaker: And in the 18th century, mid-18th century, the king at the kind of height of Shinmozuri
Speaker: wanted to surprise his queen with a lovely birthday present.
Speaker: And he builds a temporary Chinese pavilion for her.
Speaker: And this is indeed a depiction of her birthday, her birthday surprise.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: She was put on a barge, brought over from the house to where this pavilion is for the unveiling of this surprise.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: A totally chinoiserie, a chinoiserie wonder.
Speaker: Have you ever been?
Speaker: Sweden?
Speaker: I haven't, no.
Speaker: It's an amazing place.
Speaker: And the thing, so that's exciting in and of itself, this major moment in Sweden and fascination with China and the Queen Ulrika, Louisa Ulrika's birthday present.
Speaker: But what made this even more exciting is the Queen loved her birthday present so much that this was a temporary structure.
Speaker: This was not intended to survive long term.
Speaker: the king decided he was going to build it permanently.
Speaker: So it stayed up for a little while, was torn down, and now when you go to Drotteningholm, you will see the permanent structure.
Speaker: This is one of only two depictions that survive of the original building.
Speaker: There's one watercolor and this.
Speaker: So the architect to the king was on an Addingham course.
Speaker: And so I mentioned this to him and he said, well, send me pictures.
Speaker: And he was the one who said, oh my God, not only is this Drottningholm, this is a very rare depiction of this building.
Speaker: And he came to see it at some point and then significant enough that he mentioned it to the king.
Speaker: And so, in fact, my first day in my full curatorship, we welcomed the King of Sweden.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: And he was coming specifically to see this and I think was very delighted and impressed.
Speaker: I think he was a little bit curious as to how it had left the royal collections, which we're still not entirely sure about.
Speaker: But we do hope someday to actually be able to send it back on
Speaker: on long-term loan to Drottningholm.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: And so is the idea that the king would have commissioned this contemporaneously with the construction of the pavilion as a kind of memoriam or as a celebratory object or maybe to be housed inside it?
Speaker: Or what context do you imagine for his order of this piece?
Speaker: It is an unusual thing.
Speaker: There is a very similar covered punch bowl with underdish in the Met's collection.
Speaker: And there are a small number of these with Scandinavian scenes on them.
Speaker: So it's plausible that it was a commission by the king.
Speaker: It's plausible it was for some exciting event after.
Speaker: I don't... Well...
Speaker: The short answer is we don't know.
Speaker: We don't know.
Speaker: Interestingly, the bowl at the Met has an early American provenance, which is a little bit confusing.
Speaker: This turned up in a small auction here in Massachusetts.
Speaker: So we don't entirely know what that is.
Speaker: early 19th century history for, and I would suspect both of those pieces is.
Speaker: Bill Sargent certainly featured this prominently in his magnum opus on the Chinese ceramics at PEM.
Speaker: But I think we still have many, many discoveries to make about this.
Speaker: Gosh, have you drunk punch out of it?
Speaker: We have not.
Speaker: We have not.
Speaker: Although we should have.
Speaker: We should have had them at the auction house have punch out of it before.
Speaker: Typically, we're no longer using works in the collection for their intended purposes.
Speaker: Not even the king of Sweden would have allowed to.
Speaker: Not even the king of Sweden.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I'm personally a little bit obsessed with these sorts of objects that tie the world together, and the 18th century is chock full of them.
Speaker: And so I have one more object I want to share with you today, another really striking cross-cultural exchange, this time with Persia.
Speaker: But it's a type of object you might not expect to come across in a refined museum collection.
Speaker: Shoemaking was a huge industry here on the North Shore of Massachusetts and throughout Massachusetts.
Speaker: Like the textile industry in the 19th century, in the early, before the Civil War, well before the Civil War, decades, there were early manufacturers who were on the kind of the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution in this area.
Speaker: I think people know more about the textile industry that was here, but the shoe industry was also here.
Speaker: And it does continue on in New England to today.
Speaker: That's Paula Richter, a curator who specializes in textiles and fashion.
Speaker: And the very first object she showed me was this incredible eccentric shoe.
Speaker: Actually, the best way I can think to describe it is as a sort of jester's shoe.
Speaker: Well, it was collected by one of the members of the East Indian Marine Society in 1799, and he recorded that it was from Persia.
Speaker: And his name was Ichabod Nichols.
Speaker: He was born in Salem.
Speaker: He later lived briefly in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Speaker: He intermarried with the Peirce family of Salem.
Speaker: So he was connected through to some of the leading merchants in Salem who some of them were sending ships to China or to India.
Speaker: or to many points in between.
Speaker: And somewhere in his travels, we don't know exactly where, he came across the shoe and he brought it back because I think he could not have imagined coming across this shoe.
Speaker: It's really, it's quite a visual feast.
Speaker: Well, it is.
Speaker: It's colorful.
Speaker: So it's made out of leather, several types of leather.
Speaker: It also has red wool fabric.
Speaker: which is shown, you can see a lot of it, which has then been re-embroidered and ornamented with metal thread embroidery and beadwork.
Speaker: And it's a type of shoe that was, it could be from Persia or what is now Iran.
Speaker: And it's a type of shoe that was,
Speaker: It has geometric patterns.
Speaker: It has flowers all done in beads.
Speaker: It's gold.
Speaker: It's green.
Speaker: It's red.
Speaker: It has a, the toe of the shoe is curved back.
Speaker: This is why I say jester shoe.
Speaker: It looks, it looks very fanciful and jocular.
Speaker: And then this is actually how these shoes were worn.
Speaker: This folded down.
Speaker: So it does become, you mentioned clogs actually.
Speaker: It becomes like a slipper that you slide your foot into.
Speaker: You could choose to wear it the other way, but the style was often worn like that.
Speaker: With the heel sort of flattened down so your heel falls on top of the material of the shoe rather than putting inside it.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: we don't, we're not, we haven't actually pinned down where this came from.
Speaker: And the shoe with this curved toe and the way the tongue comes up and is shaped, and then the way the heel falls down, there are a number of shoes, some from India, like the Mughal Empire, some from Persia, the Persian Empire at the time,
Speaker: or the Ottoman Empire, so more on closer to Turkey, what is now today Turkey.
Speaker: And the Persian Empire, of course, would be the region that's now Iran.
Speaker: And so we're not exactly sure where this came from.
Speaker: Probably more research to do.
Speaker: I do want to see if I can turn it over here.
Speaker: When the East Union Marine Society, when they set up their cabinet of curiosities, they numbered things.
Speaker: And that's their number, 349, and then later numbers were added to it.
Speaker: So 349, does that mean it was the 349th object?
Speaker: That 349th object that came into the collection.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Donation.
Speaker: The museum did publish a catalog.
Speaker: The East Union Marine Society published a catalog early on, I think beginning in the 1820s.
Speaker: And then they republished it as the collection kept expanding.
Speaker: They did it again in the 1830s.
Speaker: And so there is a record, there's a printed record that were, it was like our gallery guides today.
Speaker: People would be able to pick it up if they were a visitor back in,
Speaker: you know, 1820.
Speaker: Look through the pages until they find the number.
Speaker: And interestingly enough, there was enough trade going on by the British and some of the other Europeans across that same region, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Sephavid Empire of that time,
Speaker: and then over to India, that they were aware of these styles of shoes that were so different from what Europeans, and some of it actually influenced shoes in Europe.
Speaker: We've talked about shoes and Sweden and witches and Indiana Jones.
Speaker: And believe it or not, we've barely touched the surface of what I saw at the collection center of the BBD Essex Museum.
Speaker: So next week, we'll journey back to PEM and see what else we can turn up.
Speaker: It will surely involve whaling ships and Louboutins.
Speaker: And what exactly does it take to physically move an entire museum collection anyway?
Speaker: Meanwhile, this has been Curious Objects.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
