Qualla: Whitby Museum

Whitby Museum: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John W. Schulze from Tejas, CC BY 2.0. The Hand of Glory is real. Whitby Museum has it - a withered, blackened human hand, taken from the body of a hanged man and prepared, according to the old grimoires, to render thieves invisible and put householders into magical sleep. It was discovered behind the wall of a thatched cottage in Castleton in 1935 and given to the museum in the same condition: dried, mounted on a wooden plinth, and entirely uncanny. It is by no means the strangest thing in the building. In 1823, a Whitby vicar and a handful of citizens started the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, which began collecting almost anything interesting that came its way. Two centuries on, the museum they founded is still owned by the same Society, run partly by volunteers, and proud of its refusal to update.

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Image: John W. Schulze from Tejas | CC BY 2.0

Whitby Museum: Marine Monsters in Jet

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pam fray, CC BY-SA 2.0. Whitby's cliffs are Jurassic. For two hundred years, fossil hunters have pulled extraordinary creatures out of those rocks: ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, ammonites the size of dinner plates, the long jaws of marine reptiles that swam in warm shallow seas 180 million years ago. The m...

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Image: pam fray | CC BY-SA 2.0

Whitby Museum: Cook and the Endeavour

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anonymous, Public domain. The museum's Captain Cook collection traces the great Yorkshire navigator's career from his apprenticeship in Whitby through his three Pacific voyages. The original Endeavour was a Whitby collier, built locally and bought by the Admiralty for Cook's first expedition in 1768. The ...

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Image: anonymous | Public domain

Whitby Museum: Sutcliffe's Whitby

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew Hartley, CC BY-SA 2.0. Frank Meadow Sutcliffe was the museum's curator and one of the finest pictorialist photographers of late Victorian England. His glass-plate negatives of Whitby - the harbour at low tide, the fishwives in their headscarves, naked boys playing on the slipway, the steep stone stairs...

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Image: Matthew Hartley | CC BY-SA 2.0

Whitby Museum: An Egyptian, Briefly

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mick Garratt, CC BY-SA 2.0. Between the 1890s and 1930, the museum displayed the mummy of an Egyptian man who had died around 300 BC. The mummy had belonged to Sir George Elliot, an industrialist who had donated it on his death. In 1930, when Whitby found itself short of funds, the curator of the Hull Munic...

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Image: Mick Garratt | CC BY-SA 2.0