Hundreds of thousands of artifacts packed up as N.B. Museum faces uncertain future

In life, Delilah roamed the cold, blue waters of the North Atlantic, queen of all she surveyed. In death, she has been no less majestic. 

For 30 years, Delilah the right whale has held pride of place at the New Brunswick Museum's exhibit centre in Saint John, suspended above the heads of marvelling spectators in Market Square.

Today, the whale is reduced to a pile of earthbound bones, each vertebra and lengthy rib bubble-wrapped as carefully as fine china. Her strikingly hand-like flippers remain intact but still unpacked, as is her golf-cart-size skull. 

More than 100 precious pieces of Delilah are resting on wooden pallets, each package marked with a series of numbers meant to make it easier when reassembling this star attraction of the New Brunswick Museum.

The whale is heading into storage and an uncertain future, along with the other members of the museum's marine mammal display. 

Her bones are one small part of a collection of more than 400,000 artifacts held by Canada's oldest continuing museum, all ordered packed up and made ready for a move.

But even as curators carefully disassemble and pack up the museum, no permanent home, or satisfactory storage space, has yet been identified for this jewel of New Brunswick history. 

The museum is spread over two problematic buildings — an exhibit space and shop at Market Square in uptown Saint John and a collections and research centre in a much older building on Douglas Avenue in the north end.

For years, staff at the museum, which got its start in 1842, have had to cope with a lack of storage and a shortage of suitable exhibit space. An abundance of roof leaks and mould have dogged both locations.  

"We had a major leak about a month ago, like a-thousand-litres-of-water major leak," said acting board chair Kathy Hamer.

"That's when you get your collections potentially threatened, when you have to close rooms. Then there's an exhibition space that isn't fully available to the public."

The packing up is a massive undertaking, but one that curator Donald McAlpine says staff have long anticipated. 

"There have been issues with Douglas Avenue that have meant staff have constantly been moving things from one part of the building to the other," said McAlpine, head of the department of natural history.

Now, tonnes of fossils, shelf loads of jarred, pickled remains, drawers filled with painstakingly preserved bats, butterflies and iridescent beetles are being carefully wrapped for removal.