Okay, this one’s a bit weird. But as the oldest surviving male descendant of my family (throw no misogyny shade please; this is an old family tradition), I am the “proud” owner of a solid mahogany sea chest from the late 1700s. All of the planks are roughly 1″ thick mahogany, and each plank is made from one piece of wood… not glued-together narrower planks. Given that the chest is the size of a refrigerator tipped over on its side, this is unheard of in our modern world of orchard-grown hardwoods. The joinery is very large 1 inch “fingers,” and there is one surviving hand-forged iron lock for securing the top (of two). It dominates the room it’s in… I had a museum curator/restorer visit once, and he was immediately fascinated by it… said something like “Now that is very old indeed!” His visit had nothing to do with the chest, I might add.
When I was “bequeathed” the chest it was in very bad shape, having sat in a garage where it was exposed to constant moisture and splashing from cars driving in out of the rain, etc. The lower half was white, almost like closed-cell Styrofoam. I consulted some restoration experts over the phone (this was pre-email) and the prevailing advice was to slather the box with clear Watco oil. Of course, I was skeptical.
So, I put the box up on saw horses (with help) and began the operation. Three or four gallons of Watco oil later, the transformation was miraculous. It soaked the oil up like a sponge, and the white, foam-like wood turned a beautiful deep reddish-brown luminous color, just like you’d expect from old mahogany. I was stunned.
It turns out the “sea chest” has some supposed history, and some “open-ended” mysteries about it. The prevailing lore is that this was a chest used to transport family goods from England to America in the late 1700s. Because the box is primitive and purely functional, it is thought that most such crates were broken down into raw lumber to be made into more valuable furniture once their transport function was no longer needed. Hence surviving examples are supposedly extremely rare…. I’ve certainly never seen another. At one point we had the popular traveling PBS “Antiques Roadshow” coming to town, and thought about hauling it down to be shown… but laziness prevailed.
Another weird clue to its origins was a hand-written note from a long-deceased relative, claiming that the chest was a “Mistletoe Bough Box.” Agatha Christie fans… can’t get much better than that, right? From what I can Google it would appear to be a reference to the infamous legend of the Mistletoe Bough Bride, in which the young bride-to-be of Lord Hugh Bethell of Bramshill House decided to play a game of hide-and-seek on the day of her wedding, ending up trapped in a large chest with latching iron locks. Her moldering skeleton, still in wedding gown, was found many years later by the grieving groom. The story became very popular in England in the mid-1800s, so it’s conceivable that this was a term used to describe large, sturdy, locked chests…
Let’s look at the chest in a little more detail, as it certainly bears evidence of the attentions of former owners and their children… although no traces of mummified ancestors, I’m happy to say.
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