The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield

in the Pitt Rivers Museum for over a hundred years was repatriated and reburied in August 2010, a process initiated over ten years earlier by the Haida. ‘It was truly a momentous, historic day of healing for both the Haida and the British.’ This was not the first time ancestors had been given back to their people. Between 1992 and 2004, the remains of 460 of their ancestors were brought back to Haida Gwaii. An ‘End of Mourning’ ceremony was held on the islands in 2006, in which their souls were released to Gaahlandaay Tllgaay (Spirit Land). The Haida are hopeful that many of their belongings – and not just their ancestors’ bones will be returned to them. Nika Collinson of the Ts’aahl Eagle Clan explained how important is it that Haida treasures are restored to them. ‘As Haida treasures return home, elders come to see them … as [the elders] remember, they begin to talk, bringing the history, use and stories of these treasures out of concealment and passing this knowledge on to the next generations to learn from. Without the return of these cultural materials, so much of this knowledge would not come to the surface and subsequently would not be passed on.’

      There were once tens of thousands of Haida people. When Europeans arrived on the islands, this number quickly fell to fewer than 1,000, because of introduced diseases, including measles, typhoid and smallpox. Today, there are around 5,000 Haida, around 2,000 of whom live in Haida Gwaii, with others in Prince Rupert, the lower mainland of British Columbia, Seattle and Alaska.

      The Haida are known for their tall totem poles, which they call ‘monumental poles’ – or ‘gyaagang.Ngaay’ in Haida. They say the first pole carvers were inspired by and learned from a pole they saw standing out in the ocean. The monumental poles are carved from red cedarwood, and it takes a year to create each one. The totem poles were used to tell stories, to mark important events, to show status and to mock people. This still goes on. In 2007, a shaming totem pole was put up in Alaska featuring the upside-down head of the ex-CEO of the oil company Exxon. The totem pole was made to express anger over the unpaid debt the company owes for the Exxon Valdez oil spillage of 1989. In England, in Windsor Great Park, near Windsor Castle, there is a 30-metre-high totem pole made in 1958 from a 600-year-old tree felled on Haida Gwaii. It was given to the Queen to commemorate the centenary of the founding of British Columbia.

      The ancient Haida lived in houses made of cedar which slept 30 or more people. They ate mussels, oysters, oolichans (a fish) and oolichan grease (fish oil). High-ranking men and women tattooed their clan crests (depicting animals, the supernatural or clan histories) on to their skin. All the Haida had a deep respect for the environment. They travelled in cedarwood canoes. If you look on the back of a Canadian $20 note, you will see an artwork called Spirit of Haida Gwaii, by Haida artist Bill Reid, which depicts a Haida chief in a canoe with many other creatures of Haida Gwaii, including the raven, the frog, the eagle and the bear.

      The Haida language has no relationship to other languages – rather like Basque and the Ainu language once spoken on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan. There are fewer than 40 remaining speakers of the language, most of them over 70 years old.

      I’d like to imagine the Haida rattle finding its way back to Haida Gwaii so its people can remember the days of the sGaagas. When it is returned, I am sure the Haida will say ‘Háw’aa’ –‘thank you’.

      [Louis Pasteur (1822–95)] Pasteur was a French chemist and biologist who invented pasteurization. Some of the things he used in his research are in storage in Blythe House.

      [A Haida shaman’s rattle] Of all the countless medical curiosities I saw in the Wellcome storage in Blythe House, I liked this rattle made out of cane and puffin beaks the most.

      [Haida Gwaii] The Haida are the indigenous people of Haida Gwaii (Islands of the People), an archipelago off the coast of Canada.

      [Totem poles] The Haida are known for their totem poles, which they call monumental poles. They carve them from red cedarwood trees, and each one takes a year to make.

      I saw the pencil sketch of DNA in the Wellcome Library, on Euston Road, London. The drawing belongs to the Francis Crick archive, which is made up of 2,000 paper files (or 200,000 sides of text/images) amassed by Crick during his career.

      There I met Ross MacFarlane, research officer at the Wellcome Library, and he showed me a selection of its treasures.

      We began with the oldest thing there, the Johnson Papyrus, a piece of a book, or scroll, from the fifth century AD. It was found in Egypt. It is the oldest surviving illustration of a herbal. What’s a herbal? It is a book with names or drawings of plants, usually with information about the plant as well – including its culinary, aromatic, medicinal or hallucinatory powers, and sometimes legends associated with it. In this case, the ancient, precious drawing is of a bluey-green comfrey plant. Below it, in Greek, is an explanation of how the plant can be used for healing. This is how herbalism developed: by trying out plants and seeing how they made you feel. By trial and error the properties and medicinal uses of different plants were discovered and passed on to others.

      We also looked through a diary belonging to Robert McCormick, ship’s surgeon and natural history expert on HMS Beagle. There is no mention of Darwin in the entire diary. Ross suggested McCormick was probably rather cross that Darwin had turned out to be such a natural history know-it-all, as that wasn’t the reason for him being brought on board the Beagle. Darwin joined the expedition late in the day when Fitzroy, the captain, decided he needed someone who knew about geology to come and keep him company, someone, most importantly, who would pay his own way. Darwin fitted the bill. Although I know he wasn’t a real geology pro because I visited the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge – who own Darwin’s rock collection from the Beagle – and they showed me a diary of Sedgwick’s, in which he mentions taking Darwin on a quick expedition to give him a crash course in geology just before he set sail.

      I also looked through an early guide to swimming written by a Cambridge don in Elizabethan England, and a letter written by the antiquarian Sir Hans Sloane, who collected the countless treasures that became the basis for the British Museum collection. In the letter, he talks about a door that leads from his garden into a coffee shop designed as a cabinet of rarities, where he went to chat over coffee with other local pals who were interested in new ideas and discoveries. I wondered whether he would mention chocolate, for he introduced drinking chocolate to Britain in 1687. He didn’t. But you’ve probably tasted something similar to his blend; ‘Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’ recipe eventually passed into the hands of Cadbury’s.

      Then I came to a white file filled with photographs, scientific papers, personal letters and musings. Ross pulled out the sketch. I instantly recognized the spiralling ladder that carries the Earth’s variety of life forms. The image was sketched in 1953, 84 years after Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in 1869.

      Miescher found out about DNA – which he called nuclein – when, doing a grim-sounding experiment on cell-digesting, he extracted some enzymes from a pig he had bought at a butcher’s and some cells from bandages used by a soldier during the Prussian War, which was going on at the time. He suggested that nuclein might be involved in heredity, but then discounted his own idea, saying it wasn’t possible that one single molecule could account for all the variation seen within species. He thought that would be far too simple.

      So Francis Crick and James Watson, helped by the work of Rosalind Franklin, didn’t discover DNA, but they did work out what it looked like. They struggled to