Glory of the Sea: Conus gloriamaris, Chemnitz 1777
"It is impossible! Empty! Why, Gloria maris is gone! Oh, what shall I do? Gone! and there are only eleven others in the world."
Darley Dale, The Glory of the Sea (1887, p. 53)
For two hundred years, Conus gloriamaris, the "Glory of the Sea," was the rarest shell in the world, with only a dozen or so examples known to exist. When the pseudonymous Dale wrote her eponymous novel, none had been found for the previous half century, and it even was thought that the shell might have become extinct—indeed, as Melvill lamented, "almost as extinct as the Great Auk [1844], or Dodo [1681]."
The earliest specimen, of unknown provenance and location, was from a Dutch cabinet and first mentioned in a 1757 sales catalog, where it was listed simply as Gloria maris. Purchased by Count Adam Gottlob von Moltke for 49 guilders, the shell eventually came into the collection of the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen, where this rather modest (three-and-a-half-inch long) and damaged shell (a healed scar runs almost its entire length) is recognized as the holotype (the definitive type specimen) for the scientific description of the species.
It was Moltke, too, who introduced the German émigré Franz Michael Regenfuss to the Danish court, where he was appointed engraver to the king and encouraged to continue work on a proposed book on conchology. Published in German and French in 1758, Auserlesne Schnecken Muscheln und andere Schaalthiere ("Selected Snails, Mussels, and other Shellfish," its title in German) was illustrated by Regenfuss, who contributed twelve magnificent engraved plates, most of them hand colored by his wife. Unprecedented in size, each sheet measures more than twenty by fifteen inches, a larger surface area per page than any other conchological work before or since. So beautiful are they that the artist is better known than the author of the book, which often is attributed to Regenfuss himself. Gloria maris is not illustrated even though, in a discussion of the natural history cabinets and shell collections in Denmark (including Moltke's), it was said to have been "so named because of its beauty and rarity" (p. IX).
However evocative, Gloria maris is not descriptive of its taxon (the hierarchical division of a species) and so, in terms of zoological nomenclature, considered invalid. Rather, it was a nomen nudum ("nude name") and still figuratively naked—which is hardly surprising, given that the shell had been mentioned only the year before.
In fact, an acceptable binominal name (genus and species) would not be given for twenty more years when, in 1777, the Danish clergyman Johann Hieronymus Chemnitz, to whom Moltke had lent his shell, described it in a publication that did meet the proper criteria and so has his name attached; indeed, this is the only shell to carry his name. Regenfuss provided the accompanying drawing but, so disfiguring was the scar, that he tactfully chose to ignore the injury. The shell also is illustrated (above) in Chemnitz's monumental Neues systematisches Conchylien-Cabinet (Vol. X, 1788, pp. 73–75; Tab. 143, Fig. 1324–1325). But it did not use binominal nomenclature and so deprived him of any additional authorship.
When Jean Guillaume Bruguière published the first volume of his Encyclopédie méthodique, histoire naturelle des vers in 1792, he relates on the last page that only four examples of Cone gloire de la mer then were known to exist in Europe. This superbe coquille was in "les cabinets de M. Lyonet, Moltke, Calonne et Hwass" (p. 757). The shell belonging to Pierre Lyonet also was mentioned by d'Argenville in La conchyliologie, where it is described as très-rare (p. 343). The one belonging to Moltke was the shell he had acquired at auction and lent to Chemnitz. D'Argenville also mentions this Gloria maris, remarking on its de sa beauté & de sa rareté (pp. 811-812). There is some confusion regarding the shell owned by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Controller General of Finance to Louis XVI, which possibly may have come from the estate of the Duchess of Portland. The last specimen belonged to Christian Hwass, whose description of Conus was edited by Bruguière in the Encyclopédie méthodique (p. 601).
In 1801, the Earl of Tankerville purchased Calonne's shell for £90 (Reeve) or £30 (Dance), which became the most celebrated shell in his collection when it was auctioned after his death in 1825. G. B. Sowerby, who was commissioned to manage the sale, states in the Catalogue that he had seen only one other example and that the one now for sale (No. 2463) "is by far the finer, both in respect of size and colour," as proven by "the faithful representation we have given of it" (pp. iv-v). And indeed, the Gloria, one of nine hand-colored engraved plates, was beautifully illustrated (above), each fine reticulate line exquisitely copied, although, according to Melvill, "very highly colored."
It was purchased by William Broderip, whose own collection was acquired by the British Museum a dozen years later. Baird relates that it was sold for one hundred guineas (£105) and opined that this was perhaps the largest sum ever paid for an individual shell. Broderip, having vowed that he would never pay more than £100 for any shell, had offered six pence less than his limit, only to lose the bid. Happily for him, the winning bidder later went bankrupt and Broderip was able to recover his lost shell for £50.
This hand-colored lithograph, also by Sowerby, served as the frontispiece to the first volume of Conchologica Iconica: or Illustrations of the Shells of Molluscous Animals by Lovell Augustus Reeve. Published in 1843, it was the first in a series of monographs on a single genus, beginning with Conus, that would extend to twenty volumes over the next thirty-five years and occupy the rest of his life. Reeve died in 1865 (the last five volumes being completed by Sowerby II), having purchased "at a high figure" (£42) only seven months before the very shell ("the most perfect Conus gloria maris known," according to Melvill) that had illustrated the title page to his book almost twenty years earlier.
"The shells selected for figuring were the finest examples then procurable," and most were drawn life size, which accounts for the large number of volumes in the series. Indeed, the illustrations are recognized as the most accurate, as well as among the most beautiful, of all those before the widespread advent of photography. Twenty-seven thousand shells, a catalog of almost every known species, are depicted, very many of which were taken from the collection of Hugh Cuming, which comprised three times that number of specimens. (On his own death that year, it was purchased by the British Natural History Museum for £6,000.)
In 1792, only four examples of C. gloriamaris were thought to exist. None had been collected as living specimens and nothing was known about their habitat. Cuming was an intrepid collector and sailed on expeditions throughout the Pacific gathering specimens. In 1837 (a half century after Chemnitz first had described the shell), he discovered two immature snails, one three inches long (illustrated in the Conchologica Iconica, Pl. VI, fig. a–b), the other just half that size, on a shallow reef in the Philippines and "nearly fainted with delight." Later, the habitat was rumored to have been destroyed by an earthquake (or a volcano), and it was feared that C. gloriamaris had become extinct.
In 1865, when Reeve sought to sell his gloriamaris for £70, he thought there to be only ten examples in the world—all, except for the two found by Cuming, originally from Dutch cabinets. But then a live specimen was found in Indonesia in 1892 and another in 1896. Other than poorly documented finds, a live shell would not be collected for the next sixty years—until 1957, when a live gloriamaris was discovered in the Philippines (as excitedly but belatedly reported by The Times of London). By then, two dozen examples were known, one of which purportedly sold that year (Saul) for $2,000 or in 1964 (Dance). In terms of contemporary purchasing power, this is about $19,000, which then was the median price of a house in the United States.
When Dance's book on shell collecting was published in 1966, forty-one had been found. Three years later, a colony of about seventy was discovered in the Solomon Islands (and any more collected the following summer) and what for two centuries had been the rarest and most costly of shells became slightly more ordinary. And, having been found, much of its mystery has been lost.
Too, although an attractive shell, gloriamaris is not exceptionally so, the intricate and delicate tented pattern subdued and sometimes marred by distinctive growth marks. Other cone shells, too, have shared its "glory," especially those with similarly high spires.
The Glory of the Sea by Darley Dale (the pseudonym of Fanny Maria Steele) was published by the Religious Tract Society in 1887, the year she became a devout convert to Roman Catholicism. It tells the story of Polly, a young bedridden girl who, having inherited a large and valuable cabinet of shells ("one of the finest private collections in England") from her eccentric godmother, is nevertheless disappointed that she was not bequeathed any money (a concern "not for myself, but for other people"). Unknown to Polly, however, the will also stipulated that, if she kept the collection intact and added an additional twenty specimens by her twenty-first birthday, she would inherit all of the old lady's fortune. On the other hand, if she lost or sold any of the shells or took no interest in them, she would forfeit the collection altogether and receive a lesser legacy of £500 (plus, rather fastidiously, four years' interest on the amount until Polly reached her majority).
The rest of the book tells of Polly's increasing appreciation for the shells in her care. There also is the mysterious disappearance of the Gloria maris, "the rarest of all my shells," from a secret drawer in its display cabinet. As she learns more about conchology, so does the reader—in paragraphs such as this.
"'There is the Money Cowry, Cypræa moneta.' 'Why is it call the Money Cowry?' asked Robert.' 'Because it is used by the natives of West Africa as money; it is the current coin, too, of Siam and Bengal....' 'What is this white shell with bright orange teeth called?' asked Poppy.' 'The Orange Cowry. It is a rare one. The chiefs of the Friendly Isles wear it as an ornament; it is a badge of rank. But rarer still is Cypræa aurora. Yes, you have one. Look! I know it by this hole, which pierced by some New Zealander; it is not a natural perforation; they suspend it to their dress as an ornament. [The two shells actually are the same.] That one there, Annulus, is used for money, for ornament, and to weight their fishing-nets with, by the West Indians'" (p. 28).
Two hundred and more pages later, Polly has demonstrated her "pure love of conchology," added thirty more shells to the thousand she already has, and so inherits a fortune of £20,000 (a present value, depending upon how it is calculated, of about $2,250,000—or a million dollars more). She has been cured of her affliction (a curvature of the spine that required her to be chained to a sofa, encased in plaster) and become engaged to her teacher, an adoring but impecunious curate "who taught me to love my shells." The missing Glory of the Sea, "worth ten times its weight in gold," has been found as well, just a day before Polly's twenty-first birthday. The shell seems to have been unwittingly hidden away by Polly's father (himself a poor rector) who, burdened by the secret stipulation of the will, had put it in what he imagined to be a safer place while sleep walking one night. Now, no longer anxious for his daughter's sake, even he is cured of his somnambulism.
"And with the matter ends this story, the primary object of which had been to describe the architecture of those beautiful homes of the Mollusca...and last, but not least, the wonderful and often beautiful architects themselves, who, like all other creatures on earth and in the sea, were made for the glory of God" (p. 206).
As Dance acidly comments: the book is "probably scarcer than the shell nowadays—and deservedly so."
Poppy's exclamation of despair over the loss of her Gloria maris quoted above, when she declares that there are only twelve examples in all the world, derives from an article in the Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society that was published the same year as Dale's book (but reprinting a paper read two years earlier, in 1885). There, J. Cosmo Melvill, having acquired an example of gloriamaris himself in 1884 for almost £50, sought "to enumerate the whereabouts of the 11 or 12 specimens known to exist."
His was the first attempt to make such a list, and he counted twelve examples altogether, including the two specimens found by Cuming; the Tankerville cone (all three in the British Museum); a shell then owned by a Mrs. de Burgh ("perhaps the finest specimen known" and originally sold to its previous owner by Reeve for £70); and a fifth owned by Melvill himself ("finely marked, and of mature growth"). Outside of Britain, there were three poor specimens in France, Italy, and Holland respectively (as well as one in the Natural History Museum, Rotterdam); one in the collection of the King of Portugal; another supposedly in the American Museum of Natural History (which, in fact, did not acquire its first gloriamaris until 1922); and finally, Reeve's own shell. (Such was the significance of Melvill's acquisition that Dance illustrates it in his book Rare Shells.)
In 1922, when there were only two other specimens in the United States and still only about a dozen in the world, the American Museum of Natural History purchased (for $250) a C. gloriamaris, "now the most highly prized of all the cones in the Museum" as was excitedly announced at the time. Indeed, so rare was the shell thought to be that "the species is doubtless practically extinct....the surviving remnant of a vanished life." There was an accompanying photograph of a slightly smaller Gloriamaris owned by Mrs. F. A. Constable, which she herself bequeathed to the Museum in 1929, as part of her husband's collection "of species noted for rarity and beauty" and which "have been permanently placed in the Hall of Ocean Life, where they may be seen by the public when that hall is completed." Even by 1937, when Miner captioned a picture of the 1922 purchase, he characterized it as "the rarest and most sought after of shells" and one of two perfect specimens in the collection, none having been recorded since Cuming's discovery exactly a century before.
Almost thirty years later, in October 1950 (and not 1951, as invariably reported), the first shell (about five inches long, slightly larger than the one in the photograph above) was stolen from its display case just outside the Hall. A photograph and description were sent to well-known dealers in the country, but it has never been recovered.
Surprisingly, there seems to be no primary account of the robbery—at least not in the press clippings on file at the Museum or in The New York Times, which nevertheless did relate the theft of blowgun darts in 1954 (which were returned when the young thieves learned that they may have had poisoned tips) and, ten years later, the Star of India, the world's largest star sapphire, which also was recovered.
This is the title page of the article that gave Conus gloriamaris, Chemnitz 1777 its scientific name. The German translates as "From an extraordinarily rare species of cylindrical snails, which bears the name Gloria maris." Notice that the text is printed in Fraktur, a type of blackletter typeface that, with its many ligatures and abbreviations seems almost defiantly Teutonic, whereas Latin terms (such as Gloria maris) are printed in Antiqua, a Roman script.
References: Shell Collecting: An Illustrated History (1966) by S. Peter Dance (the standard reference for the history of shell collecting); A History of Shell Collecting (1986) by Peter S. Dance (a revised edition of Shell Collecting: An Illustrated History); Rare Shells (1969) by S. Peter Dance; Classic Natural History Prints: Shells (1991) by S. Peter Dance and David Heppel; Shells: An Illustrated Guide to a Timeless and Fascinating World (1974) by Mary Saul; "The Case History of a Rare Shell: Conus Gloriamaris Chemnktz 1777" (1970, September ) by E. R. Cross and Rutn Fair, Hawaiian Shell News, 18(9), 1, 3-8; "Conus Gloriamaris Find at Guadalcanal (1970, September ) by Wally Gibbins, Hawaiian Shell News, 18(9), 7; "Glory of the Sea: The Rarest and Most Coveted Prize in a Shell-Collector's Cabinet" (May 23, 1959) The Times (London); "Shell Collection, Now Valued at $30,000, Given to Museum by Widow of Merchant" (July 16, 1930), New York Times, Section L, p. 33; "Cylinder gloriamaris (Chemnitz, 1777), the Quintessential Rarity" (2012, October) by Diana Carvalho and António Monteiro, The Cone Collector, Issue 21, 14-19; "Type Specimens of Conus (Mollusca: Gastgropoda) in the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen: A Historical Account" (2009) by Alan J. Kohn, Steenstrupia, 30(2), 97-113; "Type Specimens and Identity of the Described Species of Conus II. The Species Described by Solander, Chemnitz, Born, and Lightfoot Between 1766 and 1786" (1964) by Alan J. Kohn, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 45(304), 151-167; "The Rarest and Most Coveted Prize in a Shell-Collector's Cabinet" (May 23, 1959), The Times (London), p. 8; "Revised List of the Specimens of Conus Gloria-Maris Chemnitz in the Collections of the World" (1949) by W. S. S. van der Feen-Van Benthem Jutting, Bijdragen tot de Dierkunde, 28, 153-163; "On the Conchological Work of F. M. Regenfuss" (1964) by W. S. S. van Benthem Jutting, Zoologische Mededelingen, 39(18), 168-179; "On the Type Specimen of Conus gloria maris" (1945) by Anton Fr. Bruun, Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra Dansk Natur-historisk Forening, 108, 95-101; American Museum of Natural History, Research Library (April 11, 2019), personal communication; "In the Field of Natural History: Marine Life" (1929) by A. Katherine Berger, Natural History: The Journal of the American Museum of Natural History, 29(3), 334-335; "The 'Glory of the Sea'" (1923) by Roy Waldo Miner, Natural History: The Journal of the American Museum of Natural History, 23(4), 325-328; "What is a Mollusk Shell" (1937) by Roy Waldo Miner, Natural History: The Journal of the American Museum of Natural History, 40(1), 399-409.
The Naturalist's Repository (1823) by E. Donovan; M. Bruguiere, Encyclopédie méthodique, histoire naturelle des vers (1792), "Cone gloire de la mer," Vol. I, pp. 756-757; A Catalogue of the Shells Contained in the Collection of the Late Earl of Tankerville (1825) by G. B. Sowerby; The Museum of Natural History: The Animal Kingdom, Mollusca, Vol. II (1877) by John Richardson and William S. Dallas, assisted by William Baird; "An Epitome of the Life of the Late Hugh Cuming" (1895) by J. C. Melvill, The Journal of Conchology, 8, 59-70; "Some Personal Reminiscences of the Late Hugh Cuming" (1895) by E. L. Lavard, The Journal of Conchology, 8, 71-75; "Lovell Reeve: A Brief Sketch of His Life and Career" (1900) by James Cosmo Melvill, The Journal of Conchology, 9, 344-356; "V. Notes on the Subgenus Cylinder (Montfort) of Conus" (1887), Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (Third Series), 10, 76-90; "XX. Von einer ausserordentlich seltenen Art walzenförmiger Tuten oder Kegelschnekken, welche den Namen Gloria maris führt" (1777) by J. H. Chemnitz, Beschäftigungen der Berlinischen Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde, 3, 321-331 (illustrated Tab. VIII, Fig. A). Many of these older titles are available online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
See also Golden Cowrie and Money Cowrie.
