OBJECT history Finally, I went to Philadelphia, where Gabb had submitted 118 his research to prestigious scientific societies of his day, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, the latter founded by Benjamin Franklin. The Academy Library has an index with most of its documents and publications since the 1850s. I reviewed a number of references, as well as the meeting notes of the society for the ten years that Gabb was in the Caribbean. There was little of interest. But then I found Gabb’s final report to the academy, published posthumously in 1878 and titled “Description of a Collection of Fossils, Made by Doctor Antonio Raimondi in Peru.”7 Like most naturalists, Gabb was a wonderful draftsman. His drawings of Raimondi’s fossils are accurate even by today’s standards. However, more important is his connection with the name Raimondi, who was the most famous naturalist in Peru during the late nineteenth century. This was a watershed moment in my project since it connected Gabb to a collector-scientist in Peru, the locus of the Moche culture and the origin of the Iguana staff. What emerged from all this follows. William More Gabb was born in Philadelphia in 1839 and was raised by his widowed mother. He developed a precocious interest in the sciences, particularly in natural history, conchology, and geology, and he later studied paleontology, chemistry, and arachnology. After graduation from high school, he became the assistant to the foremost geologist of the period, James Hall, at the New York State Museum in Albany. He subsequently joined a group of young scientists studying at the Smithsonian, perhaps at the suggestion of Secretary Baird. In 1861, at the age of twenty-two, Gabb had sufficient status and publications that he was hired as a paleontologist to assist the California Geological Survey. He traveled to the West, where he remained until 1868, mapping California and Oregon. Clearly Gabb was an adventure seeker who saw himself in the role of pioneer. Although described as mildmannered and even-tempered, there he was in 1861 in the far West on horseback amid hostile Indians, exploring uncharted mountains and valleys in relatively new states.8 It is not apparent just how Gabb parlayed himself into his profession, as naturalists of the period tended to come from wealthy families with independent means. Gabb grew up relatively poor—his mother was a milliner in a small shop—and for most of his adult life, his publisher was a Mr. B. Westermann in New York City, who also kept FIG. 9 (above): Portrait of William More Gabb, 1868. Inscribed on back: “á Sr. Dr. Antonio Raimondi con compliments sic de W. M. Gabb.” Photo by Henry Ulke, 278 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. FIG. 10 (right): Some of Gabb’s renderings of Raimondi’s fossils. From William M. Gabb, “Description of a Collection of Fossils Made by Doctor Antonio Raimondi in Peru.” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1878, 2nd Series, 8: 263–336: pls. 40 and 42. FIG. 11: Idol, zemi. Taíno, Caribbean Islands. Wood. H: 101.6 cm. Ex. Mr. Firth, Turks Island; William M. Gabb, Philadelphia. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, inv. #005890/A42663-0. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. track of his modest accounts. In other respects, he fit the profile of a naturalist of that era to a tee. The late nineteenth century was an intense period of scientific discovery, in which naturalists traded found treasures with each other, maintained copious correspondence, and were masters at freehand drawing. They published extensively and, most importantly, shared an insatiable appetite for the world around them. Gabb resigned his position with the California Geologic Survey in 1869 to travel to Santo Domingo, where the government wanted to assess its geological resources, hoping to find mineral deposits to pay off public debts. Gabb’s three-year stay in Santo Domingo (1869–1872) resulted in an important monograph on the topography and geology of the Dominican Republic and a reconnaissance map that, combined with Haitian surveys, represented the first accurate map of the island of Hispaniola. This was no small feat. Another traveler of the era, Albert Warren Kelsey, visited the Dominican Republic in 1867 and reported that the country had no roads worthy of mention—people rode bulls and camels or took boats around the island from one place to another.9 In the wake of his Caribbean success, Gabb was hired in 1873 by the Costa Rican government to conduct a topographical and ethnographical survey of the country, particularly in the little-known southern province of Talamanca. He returned to the United States in the spring of 1876 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Not long afterward, he returned to the Dominican Republic to develop a promising gold mining claim. In his spare time, his correspondence reveals that Gabb was occupied by classifying tropical spiders in his back yard and equally engaged in collecting Taíno artifacts in caves and occasionally by purchase from other individuals. These formed the two groups he sent to the Smithsonian in 1877. It was also in 1877 that Gabb cataloged the complete collection of fossils for Antonio Raimondi. Not only was Raimondi the father of paleontology in Peru, but as a true naturalist of the period he had broad-ranging interests that extended beyond his professional field. The Raimondi Stela at the site of Chavín de Huantar in northern Peru is named after him, and he explored Moche ruins in the northern province of La Libertad. In less than twenty years, Raimondi made seventeen trips on horseback around Peru and into the Amazon Basin, collecting ancient artifacts, native costumes, fossils, and minerals. Before his death in 1880, he established the Asociación Educacional Antonio Raimondi (now the
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