More Adventures in the Sun—3
He Sells Sea-Shells… (Sunday Times, April 14, 1957)
By Ian Fleming
Last Sunday Ian Fleming described his arrival in Grand Cayman in search of rare sea-shells. The search along Bodden Beach was fruitless, but Conrad Hilton, the taxi driver, still had the mysterious Mr. Willywaw, a famed collector of sea-shells, up his sleeve.
Philosophically we had our lunch and curled up to sleep in the shade to wait for 3 o’clock. When Conrad Hilton arrived I was sharp with him. What did he mean by saying that this was just the place for us? There weren’t any shells. Wasn’t there somewhere else he knew of? Anyway, let’s go and see Mr. Willywaw.
Mr. and Mrs. Willy Wood (for that was their name) lived in a neat concrete bungalow. They were quite charming. Willy Wood was a handsome, middle-aged Caymanian with the sort of face you would find on the quay at Brixham. His living-room contained much inappropriate and overstuffed furniture. There was a battered wireless set, and faded photographs round the walls. Chickens and dogs scratched about in the bushes between the house and beach. There was no sign of sea-shells.
I summoned my scant expertise and questioned him. “Tiger cowries?” No, he did not know them. “Cone shells? Did he find many like this?” I produced a broken Marbled Cone I had found that morning. No, he could not say he did. They found small ones which they used as spinning tops for the children. “Well, do you find any giant Queen Helmets?”
“No, just small ones.”
“Olives ?”
“Sometimes, not often.” (These pretty, highly polished shells are common on my Jamaican beach.)
Well, what were his most valuable shells? Willy Wood smiled secretively. He reached under the sofa and pulled out a large grocery box untidily heaped with brown paper bags. He peered into several of these and threw them carelessly back. I thought that he was even more careless of his collection than I was. Finally he found the right one.
“These are my best ones,” he said. “Ever seen these?” He tipped the bag on to the floor. A pile of small slivers of brown cuticle fell out. They looked rather like morsels of tortoise-shell. The small bag must have contained thousands of them. They were ugly, dirty little scraps and extremely dull. We gazed in astonishment.
Willy Wood said “You know the Bleeding Tooth shell?” (Despite its interesting name, this nerite is one of the commonest shells in the whole of the Caribbean. Members of the same family, but without the bloody looking teeth, can be found in their billions round the coasts of England.) “Those are the ‘doors’ of the shell.”
Willy Wood was referring to the opercula—the tough membrane with which the animal shuts itself inside its shell.
Astonished, I said, “But why are they so valuable?”
“Don’t know”" said Willy Wood. “But I get 18 dollars for these.”
“Eighteen dollars! Each?”
Willy Wood smiled pityingly “No, 18 dollars a gallon.” A gallon of these scraps of stuff would number, I suppose, about 10,000.
“Who do you sell them to? What do they use thein for?”
“Dealers in the States—St. Petersburg, Miami, New York. They use them in artificial jewellery. Make necklaces and so forth.”
Willy Wood picked up another brown bag and poured a pile of tiny white volutes on to the floor.
“We call these Rice Shells. They fetch 12 dollars. When I need some of these I just bring up a sack of sand and pour it out on the porch and put on my spectacles and spend an afternoon picking out the shells.”
More bags were opened. More piles of incredibly dull little shells were poured out. “Ten dollars, nine dollars a gallon. They say they use these for sewing on materials.” Willy Wood laughed indulgently at the notion. He said that he was not doing so well now. There were too many people round the world in the business. He used to ship gallons and gallons of shells every week. Now the prices were going down and he only made a shipment once every two or three months.
Now it was all clear to us. The “paradise of sea-shells” myth had grown out of this strange, but rewarding, activity of Willy Wood paying pennies to the children of Bodden to pick up thousands upon thousands of the commonest sea-shells in the world to go off to the sham jewellery factories in the States. Of course, to a Caymanian, the place was a “paradise,” where you could just pick up the ground you were standing on and sell it at 18 dollars a gallon. But as for rare or beautiful sea-shells, maybe there would be some specimens in the Cayman seas but no one was in the least interested. They were not what Mr. Bloomfeld in Miami wanted.
It is true that I also was not very clear what I wanted, except that it should be something handsome and something new to me. I do not collect shells seriously. I was not looking, for instance, for a Left-Handed Cone shell, or a Double-Spined Fighting Conch, or for some of the Treasures of the Sea that can be found in the Caribbean and that might be worth £20 or £30 each.
My illustration [omitted] shows three shell treasures. It is taken from Hyatt Verrill’s excellent Shell Collector’s Handbook, published by Putnams, New York. As Mr. Verrill points out, no shell is really rare. There are species that live in remote places or very deep or those that are fragile. One such is the Slot Shell or Pleurotomeria, found off Japan—dull shells with rusty brown markings, but still selling for £20- £40 a specimen because they usually live at 100 fathoms or more and are fragile. An example of this is the Glory-of-the-Seas Cone, which, for 200 years, was considered the rarest of shells. By 1944, 25 specimens were known and the value of a fine specimen was around £500. Since then many more examples have been found and, in 1945, the price had dived to about £20.
Today Mr. Verrill says that two of the rarest shells are the Prince of Wales Cowrie, of which only four specimens are known, and the White-Toothed Cowrie, the only specimen of which is in the British Museum.
Before the war one of the prizes was the Precious Wentle Trap found off China and Japan. The ingenious Chinese counterfeited them in rice paste and sold them for hundreds of pounds to collectors. Then came the war and the G.I.s started looking for shells and buying them in the Pacific islands, and the bottom fell out of the market in Wentle Traps and in such rarities as the Great Golden Cowrie. This shell was a symbol of aboriginal royalty and all specimens found had to be delivered to the island chieftains. “Civilisation” came with the war and now Great Golden Cowries are a drug on the market.
But there are still prizes to be found in Caribbean waters—such as the Murex Argo of which one of the few specimens is in the Liverpool Museum of Natural History—and our minds had been inflamed with the hope of legendary treasures such as these when we came to the Caymans. Faced with Willy Wood’s famous “shell collection,” we realised that our quest had been fruitless. We edged the conversation away from shells to pirate gold.
Willy Wood said Yes, indeed. People were always hunting for it. After the war he had bought a mine-detector in Florida and spent months searching round the beaches and caves. “And I dug, I dug for days and weeks and I kept on finding it again and again. And do you know what it always was?” Willy Wood roared with laughter, “Bottle tops and suchlike. And do you know some folks from here even went over the cemetery with a mine-detector? They heard that the Spaniards were buried with their swords. They dug up plenty of graves before the Minister and the police got after them.”
Conrad Hilton, who had been observing the whole scene from the doorway, felt that this was a slur on the island. He broke in “But, Willywaw, don’ you ’member that man who came an’ when he gone ’way, his suitcase was heavy as lead? He wouldn’t allow no one carry it out to the plane. Took him quarter of an hour to get out to the plane movin’ his suitcase a few feet at a time. And he got into the plane and no one never saw him again.”
Willy Wood shrugged indifferently. “If that had been gold,” he said practically, “it would have bust through the floor of the plane. Maybe the man was sick or something.”
We parted, the two shell-collectors, despite their common bond, disunited, and crashed and banged our way back to Georgetown, the day saved by the charm of Willy Wood and the strangeness of his trade.
On the way I questioned Conrad Hilton about the turtles for which Grand Cayman has always been famous. Apparently these were also a myth. There are no turtles in the Cayman Islands. The Caymanians catch them off the coasts of Nicaragua, 500 miles away. We have a treaty with Nicaragua which allows them to do so but even in this tiny remote trade we have just been slapped in the face. A month, ago the Nicaraguans arrested two Caymanian ships and threw their crews into gaol. Nicaragua had done a “Suez” and torn up the turtle treaty without warning.
But what about this business of the turtle soup for the Lord Mayor of London? Was that a fable too?
Conrad Hilton said no, that was about all that was left of the turtle trade. The Caymanians caught enough turtles to feed them and their families. They kept them in a lagoon with each fisherman’s initials carved in the tortoiseshell. Two or three times a year they shipped a few to Kingston to be flown to London.
There is no Industry in the Cayman Islands, except banking the money, which the Caymanian seamen send back to the island from all round the world. It is time the encyclopaedias and guide books got these things right.
We left Grand Cayman with only mild regret and were glad to get back to the lush green beauty of Jamaica. Grand Cayman, like the other small Caribbean and Bahamian Islands I have visited, is, when you have taken away the sun and the colours of the sea, an ugly, lonely little island once brushed excitingly by history but now a refuge for the two-week American tourist who cannot afford, or who is disgusted by, Florida. Tourism will certainly be developed for these people, the roads will be metalled again and there will be attempts to spray the mosquitoes and sand flies. The staunch, cheerful Caymanians, the nicest feature of the island, will not be more than superficially spoilt by this traffic until the modern pirates discover the place.
Then the island will be given over to the pirates again—to the modern pirates who discover that the only direct tax in the Cayman Islands is a head tax on adult males, between 16 and 60, amounting to eight shillings a year.