It is perhaps more fortunate to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Sanibel Island, on the West Coast of Florida, sits perpendicular to the flow of water, and with its sister island Captiva, collects mounds of shells that have washed up from the Gulf of Mexico. These shells do not go unappreciated.

I walk out of my beachfront room at 5:30 a.m., before sunrise, for the newest treasures of the sea, but the shelling masters, some with flashlights, have already taken the bigger shells. Even those who have lived long on the island lose themselves in the intricacy and beauty of the murex, the scallop, the whelk, the lettered olive, the fighting conch, even as they dream of the rare volute, the rare junonica.

Here, where there are no street lights after darkness descends and where there is, by Sanibel law, no collecting of live shells, collectors still find what they are looking for, craftspeople go home with cartons of shells, and even the ordinary visitor cannot part with his finds left in tidal pools and on the empty beaches, or caught in the seaweed and extracted by the endlessly curious. Not only does the beauty compel us, but the rare feeling, in a high-strung world, of being attuned to a harmony of ebb and flow and a timelessness that only beauty and quietude can confer.

And so, as I lose myself in the sounds of the sea and the endless vista of watery horizon and shells, I am determined to steep myself in malacology, or the study of shells, and what better place than Sanibel’s own Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum.

An educational and research center for national and international scientists, for students, and for shell enthusiasts, the museum opened after a decade of planning, building on eight acres of Bailey family property deeded to this wetlands institute, and bringing in malacologist R. Tucker Abbott, Ph.D. as Founding Director. The handsome octagonal structure opened in 1995 and is set a story above, perhaps so that hurricane-tossed waters can flow under it and not harm the museum. The etched cupola windows suggest the constant movement of sea and sky, and a replica of a 13-foot giant squid hangs across the ceiling. Were it real, this squid could grow to 60 feet, and dead, it would make a mighty stink in the museum.

Off to the side in a small auditorium, there are regular showings of a video on shells that organizes the experience of shelling and of the museum. Even the littlest of kids curls up to watch, wide-eyed. I am soon comfortable with such words as operculum, mantle, gastropod, and bivalve, I know that coquinas use siphons to breathe and have a broad foot for burrowing, I have learned about shell locomotion, eating styles, reproduction, and self-protection by camouflage, burrowing, and aggressive behavior. And I have my heart set on finding an angel wing shell before I leave Sanibel.     

Now I am ready for the exhibits in the museum itself. The wall text is outstanding as I walk among the displays of Japanese, S. African, W. African, Lusitanian, Oregonian, Panamic, and Caribbean Province shells.

I learn that the area’s original inhabitants, the Calusa Indians, used the abundant marine resource of shells to sculpt their canoes, make tools, utensils, jewelry, and drinking vessels, and to fashion shelters, burial plots, and temples.  

I stand in front of a huge acrylic tube filled with money cowrie shells and learn that in Africa in 1850, 50 cowries bought a chicken, while 50,000 bought a bride. Cowrie shells were used as money as early as 2,700 B.C. in Egypt, and they financed the ivory trade, the rug trade, and the slave trade as late as the 1700’s in Burma, India, China and, Africa. 

Now I move to a display of shells in architecture, with the scallop as the most used of all shell motifs – for niches, facades, tombs, and pedestals. Maya shells decorated public buildings, Renaissance artists Leonardo da Vinci and Bernini were inspired by the shell, and among the moderns, the museum turns to Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Here in these shells,” said Wright, “we see the housing of the life of the sea. It is a housing with exactly what we lack – inspired form.”  Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City takes its inspired form from the thatcheria mirabilis shell. For the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota, conceived by Wright’s son-in-law, William Wesley Peters, Wright’s widow chose the color purple to match the Cock’s Comb Oyster shell from the Sea of Japan.   

A display of shell inlay enhances utilitarian salt and pepper shakers, Mexican liqueur cups, silverware handles, and intricate Japanese chests of drawers. Cameo carvings of shell made by artisans using steel tools, files, and abrasive powders make the viewer gasp with delight at impossibly detailed horses, chariots, waves, Poseidon figures, birds, and angels, worked on the shell by engravers in Naples between 1850 and 1898. And for those who know they have worn mother-of-pearl buttons but never thought much about it, a section called “Buttons and Bows” explains how freshwater pearly mussel shells with a thick, clear, lustrous iridescence were used from cradle to shroud by 20^th century Americans.  

At a small detour in the museum is the Children’s Learning Lab, with bubbling, live, open tanks, shell games, drawers to open and explore, a giant magnifying glass to reveal the particulars that the naked eye cannot catch, a live mollusk tank, and walls painted to resemble the world “undah da sea.”

An extensive display of Sailor’s Valentines reminds us of New England whalers who stopped for supplies in Barbados and other Caribbean seaports and brought these elaborate shell valentines home to their waiting wives. Curiously, there is now a revival of a craft that had all but disappeared by the 20^th century.

Another extensive display, this one pertaining to adult scallops, reports that there are 400 living species today, varying in the size of their nodes, their flatness or cupped ribbing, and their translucency. While the scallops present no problem for man, the deadly cone shell has a toxin that has defeated many a collector in a mere three hours. So go for the tulip, the striated, or the marble cones, which merely sting, but run, yes run  from the geography cone and the textile cone. The exhibit also explains the current red tides and their effect on shellfish – and the fact that boiling does not destroy deadly toxins, so watch what you eat.  

I exit this easeful yet deeply informative museum imbued with the history and beauty of shells. Before I leave Sanibel, I make two more shelling excursions simply by stepping outside my delightful beachfront hotel and cottages, The Waterside Inn, reasonably priced with large, well-appointed rooms and kitchen facilities, perfectly situated on a wide swath of beach.

Finally, with my carefully sorted plastic shell bags on the seat beside me, I cross the causeway that links Sanibel and Captiva islands to the mainland and head back to Florida’s East Coast, but stop first for gas. Just about every gas station on the strip before I-75 offers the same thing, but this time, I choose Shell. The scallop logo calls to me in a way that it never has before. Perhaps it is because I feel related now to the scallop, and I pat the forty scallops in their plastic bag on the seat next to me. Even if I didn’t get an angel wing this time, I am smiling because I found a sunrise scallop, with three proud, bright yellow stripes from the base to the outermost edges. Wowee!