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Exchanges with Florence Natural History MuseumThe Auckland Museum Library holds both the in-coming Giglioli letters and contemporary copies of the out-going Cheeseman letters. From these documents, and from birds in the collections of both museums, Brian Gill, Auckland Museum’s Curator of Land Vertebrates, has written an account of the transactions as a detailed case-study of a 19th century museum exchange between institutions half a world apart.
For 27 years between 1877 and 1904, Thomas Cheeseman of Auckland Museum and Enrico Giglioli of the Florence Natural History Museum in Italy, corresponded to arrange repeated exchanges of natural history and ethnographic items. Some 150 New Zealand birds were sent to Florence, and more than 600 Italian and foreign birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians were sent to Auckland. Giglioli especially sought Maori and Pacific ethnographic items. He could offer royal acknowledgement of Cheeseman’s efforts, and the latter received a Galileian silver medal of merit from the Florence Faculty of Sciences in 1887. The exchanges show what could be achieved over time by relatively few letters, despite the slow postal service, the need for agents, and the vagaries of freighting by sailing ship and steamer that included port strikes, unscheduled transhipment and the loss of ethnographic items by pillage en route. Brian Gill’s article has appeared in the British journal “Archives of Natural History” published by Edinburgh University Press.
 Click here for a copy of the article.
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