Cleveland Museum of Natural History revisits its early days with ‘Sailing for Science: The Voyage of the Blossom’

“This is it! Look — 60 cents, April 16, 1923!”

A certain enthusiasm is unmistakable from Wendy Wasman, librarian and archivist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who has just been asked if the map she is showing is the original map of an area of the South Pacific used by the crew of the Blossom sailing vessel.

Wasman is the woman behind “Sailing for Science: The Voyage of the Blossom,” which, she says, is the museum’s biggest in-house-created exhibition in a decade.

“This is an exhibit about the museum’s first scientific collecting expedition — 1923 to 1926,” she says. “The (then-new) museum needed to fill its shelves for research, for exhibition, for education. Museums did that in lots of ways — they either bought collections, they have stuff donated or they went on an expedition.”

The journey would prove to be fraught with problems — including a mutiny of sorts — and take significantly longer than planned.

The expedition’s ship was named for the woman who funded the effort — which included buying the schooner and paying the salaries of the 16-man crew that would take to the seas on it — for $125,000: Elizabeth Bingham Blossom, wife of Dudley S. Blossom of Blossom Music Center fame. (By the way, the museum folks figure that price tag equates to $1.8 million today.)

About 10 years ago, Wasman unearthed some items from the museum’s archives related to the Blossom that piqued her interest.

“I thought, ‘I’ve heard of the Blossom expedition. What is this?’” she recalls. “I started researching everything I could about it.”

That research led to a 2013 article she wrote for the magazine the museum publishes for members, which was followed by a lecture two or three years later, she says, complete with digitized glass lantern slides chronicling the exhibition. When she pitched and got the go-ahead for an exhibition, she and museum staffers spent a year planning and executing what became “Sailing for Science.”

“They laid this out so beautifully,” she says of the design folks. “It’s a real team effort.”

Among the many items museum guests will encounter in the Fawick Gallery are photos of Blossom and key crew members, starting with George Finlay Simmons, both expedition leader and captain of the ship. You’ll also meet biologist Kenneth Cuyler, whom Wasman refers to as Simmons’ “right-hand man” and is described in the placard by his photo as being “worth three men in a pinch.”

Cuyler is shown at the wheel of the Blossom. According to Wasman, a massive storm hit the ship in the voyage’s early days, leading to terrible smells plaguing the vessel and a bout of illness for Simmons. Fortunately for the crew, as a child Cuyler had suffered an incident that damaged his olfactory nerve and, to hear Wasman tell it, couldn’t smell a thing.

“Isn’t it great?” she says. “There are so many stories within the story.”

Only four of the 16 men who started the journey finished it. Many of the college men Simmons initially hired learned early on their captain’s romantic notion of how the journey was to go was not to be.

“He wanted to train them to be able to do preparation of scientific specimens (on the ship),” she says. “But after they crossed the Atlantic — which was supposed to take 20 days but took 40 (because) huge storms ruined everything — they decided this is no pleasure cruise. They were done. They left, so (Simmons) had to hire new crew in Cape Verde Island.”

Also departing then was Carl Robertson, an associate editor of The Plain Dealer.

“He begged to go on (the voyage),” Wasman says. “He wanted to send minute-by-minute live reports back.

“And then he vowed he’d never go on a sailing ship again after that.”

It was no oceanic vacation for Simmons, either. When he and others took a whaleboat to what is now Trindade, an island off the coast of Brazil, the boat capsized and they lost equipment — and shoes.

“They had, for some reason, six left shoes and no right shoes,” she says, adding that they needed to hike to the other side of the island, where the Blossom was anchored. “Simmons writes in a letter to his wife that he had his left boot and someone else’s left sandal on his (right) foot — and somebody’s long underwear tied around his head, like a piratical-looking turban, for the sun.”

Items from the voyage on display include the ship’s brass bell — on loan from Simmons’ granddaughter Nancy Simmons — and a sextant used for navigations, which Wasman calls “early GPS.”

You’ll also see a detailed field catalogue.

“This is nearly every single specimen that they found — nearly 13,000 specimens, and every single one is listed here,” she says. “Its’ given a number, the date when it was collected, what it is, male/female, how it was prepared … and where they found it, who found it and notes.”

While the journey lasted longer than planned — three years, instead of two — it was cut short geographically.

After it was docked in Charleston, South Carolina, the museum sold the ship to John da Lomba, one of the original crew members — and the oldest, at 50, and most experienced, having started working on whaling ships at 14. He used the Blossom for business ventures until it was wrecked off the coast of Africa in 1930. No one was hurt in the wreck, Wasman says.

Simmons became the CMNH curator of ornithology but left after penning a well-received 72-page article for National Geographic about his work.

“He was like a rock star,” Wasman says. “People were so enthralled with his story of adventure.”

She clearly is still enthralled with the expedition.

“This is our story — that’s what’s so great about it. This is where we began. This is how we began.”

‘Sailing for Science: The Voyage of the Blossom’

When: Through Aug. 5.

Where: Cleveland Museum of Natural History, One Wade Oval Drive.

Admission: Included with admission to museum — $15 for adults, $12 for youth 3 to 18, those 60 and older and college students with ID, and free for those 2 and under.

Info: 216-231-4600 or cmnh.org.

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