Make Mine Tea 7/11

 We spent the morning at the Royal Geographical Society, getting a run down of the collection from Rie, the Principal Librarian. The RGS was founded in 1830 to promote scientific geography, which at the time basically meant exploration. They sought the source of the Nile, the NW passage, etc. For a long time, it was a bit of a boy’s club, though in the 1890’s they admitted women for the first time. Apparently, the older members then put up a ruckus, and no more women were admitted until 1913.

The collection contains about 2 million items, including a million maps, making up the largest map collection in the world. There are something around 2,000 atlases, the oldest of which is from 1490, and based on the writings of Ptolemy. The collection also contains half million photographs and a huge glass lantern slide collection, which reminds me of that scene in The Golden Compass, where Lyra spies on her uncle presenting his explorations with glass lantern slides. The collection also contains 250,000 books and 15,000 objects, which were really interesting.

All of the objects in the collection are from donation, usually from the families of deceased explorers. There is currently no classification system in place, and conservation is handled offsite or by the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Society, who clean the artifacts once a week.

We got to see a lot of interesting items from the collection, including the hats that Drs. Stanly and Livingstone were wearing when the former came upon the later and (according to legend) uttered, “Mr. Livingstone, I presume?” There was also a map drawn up by Lawrence of Arabia, an Inuit sun-visor to prevent sun-blindness, and a silver platter presented to the Captain of the Beagle for accurate mapping on the voyage with Charles Darwin.

We also heard the story of a quest to find a Northwest passage that ended in disaster, when the ship got trapped in the Victoria Straight, and the entire expedition perished trying to march to safety. Only one document describing the disaster has been found, and the log books that might tell more of the story are still missing, as are the ships. Apparently, Canada is funding an exhibition to try to find them.

One of the rescue attempts to try to find them involved putting colors with the rescue ships coordinates on arctic foxes, in the hopes that one would raid the camp of the missing sailors and get caught. This led Allison to the logical conclusion that there are now lots of arctic fox corpses out there with tiny collars still attached.

 

We also got to see items that were found on George Mallory’s body when it was recovered from Everest in 1999, perfectly preserved. We heard all about how his partner’s body and the camera were never found, though they did his find his “Eye sacs.” “Eye sacs?!” We inquired, horrified. Yeah, “Ice Axe,” He reiterated, with a slightly less pronounced accent. Two countries divided by a common language!

We grabbed lunch from a pub in Covent Garden, and then found our way to Twinings. Twinings had a little “museum” in the back of the shop, illustrating its role in the history of tea. More exciting, though was the free tea tastings that were going on. We had a lot of fun sampling the different teas, and then rummaging our way around the available collection. For some reason, the place was being filmed for broadcast on Chinese television? So if you catch site of me on a Chinese network, now you know why. I ended up getting some Darjeeling, and a tea bag holder that says “Twinings,” even though I don’t use tea bags anymore. It was cool being in a tea shop with a real sense of history. No Teavanas here, yet.

Allison, Christine, and I decided to go on the London Eye in the evening, and despite the deceptively long-looking line, we barely had to wait before getting on the Eye around 8:45. The views from the Eye were impressive, and I was surprised again at how close everything in London is. I had no idea we lived so close to Covent Garden, until we walked back from lunch earlier that day, and until I went up in the eye, I didn’t realize how close Buckingham Palace was. It was really fun, touristy thing to do.

Christine wanted to walk along the river to see the fairy lights on the wharf, and we ended up grabbing dinner at The Wharf, which we regretted when the temperature started dropping. Still, we had a good time, and were taking fun pictures as we walked back to the dorm. Which is when this guy who offered to take a photo of all three of us. He positioned us with St. Paul’s in the back, and went for a really artsy angle. When he was done taking the picture, he started walking back down the river with us. This guy was not the brightest bulb. When we explained what we did, he seemed to think that we worked a lot with Wikipedia, and then tried explaining how links work on Wikipedia… Yea. He also made a comment that he couldn’t be a camera thief, because he doesn’t have a “forgettable” face. Which seemed super arrogant to me. When we finally split ways, we laughed the whole way home about that encounter.