A tale of greed and mummynapping
According to the Larkin Thorndike Lee papers in the collection of the Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, after the unwrapping, Lee arranged with a Mr. Bishop to exhibit the mummy and its accompanying collection of artifacts for him and his New York partner Ebenezer Fisk. Shortly thereafter, Lee went to sea again and died in 1825, off the coast of West Africa, of “anxiety.” His heirs and executors tried without much success to locate Bishop and the mummy, so that they could settle Lee’s estate.
Further letters about Mr. Bishop and the mummy reveal that Lee's executors could track Bishop to Newark, New Brunswick, Elizabethtown, and Princeton. An advertisement in the Centinal of Freedom on 15 March, 1825 gives the Newark location as "Mouton's Hotel," and an advertisement in the same paper on 22 February gives the exhibition location as the "Newark Hotel." According to A History of Trenton, 1679-1829; Two Hundred and Fifty Years of a Notable Town with Links to Four Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1829) the mummy was exhibited in Trenton during the second week in March, 1825 at the United States Hotel. Then, according to the Saturday Evening Post dated 7 May 1825 the mummy, which had just arrived in the city, was on exhibition at Jesse Sharples’s Pennsylvania Museum “for a short time.”
Ebenezer Fisk wrote one last time in December to unnamed persons in Beverly concerning the mummy and could get no answers. By all appearances, Bishop absconded, and there is no further extant correspondence which reveals what happened to him.
An advertisement for the Pennsylvania Museum, no. 272 Market Street above the upper Market, Philadelphia, appeared in the Aurora and Franklin Gazette for 3 May 1826, touting:
“Late additions--an Egyptian mummy, with its sarcophagus, and other antiquities, from Thebes, upwards of 3000 years old.”
The insertion date at the bottom of the advertisement shows that the mummy had been in the museum since at least 14 April. It is not clear if this is still a traveling exhibition or if the owner of the museum, Jesse Sharples, had actually purchased the mummy, and, after displaying it in his own museum, was sending it out to tour.
In 1827 the mummy was in the Louisville, Kentucky Museum, as reported by the Focus of 5 June 1827.
"The mummy, &c will continue until the 12th instant, when they will be removed to Cincinnati. Admittance 50 cents—children 25 cents."
An advertisement appeared in Poulson's American Daily Advertiser on 3 July, 1826 offering for sale the contents of Jesse Sharples’s Washington and Philadelphia Museums. Among the items listed was "the Egyptian mummy."
On 22 August 1829 issue of the Saturday Evening Post ran an advertisement for the sale of Sharpless’s Washington and Pennsylvania Museums (obviously there had been not takers!) Listed among the exhibits was the following:
“The Egyptian mummy, and accompaniments, 3000 years old, brought by Capt. Larken [sic], of New York, and attested genuine by Dr. Mitchell, and others. This single article would insure a fortune if carried through the western and southern states.”
This is Capt. Lee’s mummy but how or where or when or from whom Sharpless acquired it is not known, although he had exhibited it at least once earlier at the Pennsylvania Museum, in 1825 and had possession of it again in 1826. Obviously the provenance was a bit fuzzy, as by this point in time as it is referred to only as Capt. Larken’s mummy, but the reference to Dr. Mitchell makes it clear that it was Captain Larkin Thorndike Lee's mummy. It is not known who purchased the mummy or what happened to it subsequently.