TREASURE HOUSE OF THE SEA

Evening Star, Issue 21742, 9 June 1934, Page 19

TREASURE HOUSE OF THE SEA

THE MUSEUM IH MOHACO The great white castle rises sheer from tho sea at tho eastern tip of the Hock of Monaco. The breakers beat against the reef on which it stands (writes “ 8.D.,” in the ‘ Manchester Guardian '). Up and up rise its walls to tho top of the precipice behind, and then up and up again, so that it is a huge building which you approach from the landward side, on top of the rock the Musco cV Oceanographic. Strange that only one of the world’s very rich men, Prince Albert 1., should have built and filled a treasure house of the sea. ...

The Prince was a curiosity in himself —a happy millionaire. He wanted to know everything about the sea and its mysterious ways, and about life in tho deep holes of the oceans. He fitted out magnificent steam yachts equipped to discover these secrets, and cruised forth on quest after quest that added prodigiously td\ humanity’s knowledge of marine biology and oceanography. The public are appreciative of his treasure house; now and then it is visited in a day by nearly as many tourists as flock to one of the thirty or forty trashy little cinemas and cabarets of the byways of Nice. MODELS. The Prince and his staff even took the trouble to show the visitors how much silver is floating about in the sea. A tantalising spectacle, this model of a silver pyramid which would stand nearly as high as Snowden. Alongside you notice a tiny model of a pyramid which would stand on a pennypiece—the other one is breast high; the midget pyramid represents all the silver mined from Columbus’s time until 1905. Again, models graphically bring home to you the variations in marine depths. Stand before these three blue glass pedestals on each of which rides a model of the Mauretania, a couple of inches long. First you see her in the southern' waters of the North Sea on a depth of 90ft. It looks so shallow in proportion to her length that you would fear she would bump bottom in a bit of a blow—a mere shelf of plate glass. Then you see her in tho Atlantic, with quite a lot of water under her, 13,500 ft to scale. And then a tiny mite of a toy perched atop a dark blue column of glass nearly twice the height of a man; that is how she would look if you were halfway down that terrifying abyss of black waters, 29,000 ft deep, to the south-east of the Pacific isle of Guam.

Groat nets and bags by tho dozen, one of them big enougli to hold a couple of houses; hang from the lofty ceilings. Traps as large as tents, containing a little searchlight, for the luring of strange fishes down in the twilit depths. Ingenious gear of shining brass and steel, of 'zinc and lead, copper and galvanised iron for discovering depths and deep-sea currents, bringing up samples of ooze and sand and water; gear for investigating, far below, the transparency, colour, and penetration of light in the waters. Unsuspected breeds of thermometers. KEGS .CAST ON THE WATERS. Ranged along a wall are small craft which have done notable detective work among the ocean currents—sombre beer kegs and gaily striped casks, bottles topped with a small metal flag, hollow copper balls like those which float in cisterns. The Prince had hundreds of these dropped overboard from his yachts. They were so weighted as to float just below the surface, lest wind influence tho direction of their travels. With them you see one of several albums, like big cheque books, in which are pasted numbered appeals in nine languages for the return of this scroll of paper to the French Government. Each scroll was contained in a strong glass tube packed into ball or tub or bottle. More scrolls will be trickling back to Monaco, by way of tho French Admiralty, for a century—or many a century.* Numbers of them, snug in bottle or copper ball, must be awaiting discovery on Arctic beaches and palmfringed tropic strands. Yonder is the complete laboratory cabin of Hirondello 11. just as it was when the Prince and his fellow-biolo-gists gloated over their catches at its tanks and benches. A model of his graceful three-masted steam yacht Princess Alice I.; built on tho'Thames, she was, in tho Blackwall yards, and her model sits in a glass case made in Gray’s Inn road. The Prince’s treasure house offers for inspection' not merely such things as these, with a multitude of photographs and paintings and the greatest collection in the world of tho strange creatures of the vast deeps, but a fascinating assemblage of man’s ways of using what he chances to find in the sea and of man’s picturing in porcelain, metal, wood, and leather of such finds.

Have you heard of fish wine? Here >s a bottle of it, veritable Nuoe Mam as produced in Indo-China (with a label printed in Paris), the colour of cold tea, the fruits of mysterious toil over fermented fishes. Of “blonde” herring oil from Norway, which somebody somewhere prizes? Of packets of powdered liver of cod? Of Japanese jars of pickled sea urchins, and tins of sea slugs for the feast? You linger beside a doll’s-house model of a sardine tinning plant, perfect in all its detailry; beside a huge case containing a colony of penguins; beside a Danish lobster maze, or a horrible Eskimo seal trap with shark-toothed jars of iron. There are prints which show the ways of fishermen in olden times and exotic climes; and sea birds and beasts, and the shells and corals and sponges of all the world’s reefs and beaches. In the halls below you find tanks of living turtles and conger eels, crabs and squids and octopuses, flowerlike anemones and the bright-hued little fishes of tropical pools. Their water is driven up automatically by the surge breaking on the rocks far below, by an ingenious wave-power pump. These are only a few of the things you find in the treasure house of the sea.