Mystic — Before it goes on display as part of a new Mystic Seaport Museum exhibit this coming November, a small sailor’s ditty box had to make the same historic trip it did 200 years ago.

Last month, museum President Steve White and 13 other people with ties to the museum were among a large group who traveled to Antarctica to visit various sites, including Deception Island, where Stonington native Nathaniel Palmer was among the first people, and the first American, to spot the continent while on a sealing trip. They also visited tiny Stonington Island, which was abandoned in 1975, and Palmer Station, where scientists conduct research and a sign post reads “Stonington CT 7,139 miles.”

They brought along the small wooden box, called a ditty box, holding a sewing needle that 16-year-old Stanton L. Burrick was carrying with him on Nov. 17, 1820, when he was among a group of five Stonington men aboard Palmer’s 47-foot sloop Hero. That was the day Palmer sighted the continent. 

“It was incredible to bring this back to where this amazing Stonington story was told,” White said Tuesday.

The idea for the trip began five years ago, when museum officials were discussing ideas for future exhibits with the board of trustees.

White said trustee Alex Bulazel of Greenwich, who has made five trips to Antarctica, asked if the museum was planning to recognize the 200th anniversary of Palmer’s sighting of the continent.

“This is a remarkable local story and we were not aware of anyone else doing a bicentennial exhibit on Antarctica,” said White. “We said, 'We ought to do that story.' Palmer is a local hero. So, it made a lot of sense.”

White said the museum then contacted luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent, which travels to Antarctica, about co-branding the trip. The museum also involved the Stonington Historical Society, which is headquartered in Palmer’s home.

During the 15-day trip aboard the 466-foot A&K ship, both White and Glenn Gordinier, the co-director of the museum’s Munson Institute, gave talks to the 186 passengers about Palmer and the Stonington connection. Also speaking were experts on marine mammals, birds, geology and British and Russian history, as explorers from those two nations sighted Antarctica earlier in 1820.

“All three have fascinating stories,” White said about Palmer and explorers Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Edward Bransfield.

White pointed out, though, that another Connecticut resident — John Davis of New Haven, the captain of a sealing vessel — was the first person to set foot on Antarctica in 1821. White said the museum is trying to locate descendants of Davis.

White said that it was on the shore at Whaler’s Bay on Deception Island, off of which Palmer’s sloop Hero had anchored, that Bulazel, White and Gordinier unveiled the ditty box for the passengers and told its story. The box is engraved with the inscription “Sloop Hero, 1820, and L.B.”

White said a Milford man donated the box to the museum in 1950. It had been in his family but he did not know how they had come to own it.

White said he and other passengers walked up to the same hill on Deception Island that Palmer did to spot the land of Antarctica.

The museum’s upcoming Antarctic exhibit, which is slated to open Nov. 14 in the Thompson Exhibition Building and run for 11 months, will go far beyond the Palmer story. It is being billed as the “first-ever exhibition to explore the full history of human contact and our engagement with the Earth’s most extreme environment.”

White said it will tell both a local and international story and will feature more than 200 artifacts from not just the Seaport’s collection but other institutions. The exhibit will include manuscripts, clothing, images, historical and contemporary equipment, vehicles, specimens, instruments, paintings, film clips and other artifacts. The various themes it will illustrate will include Antarctica's geological and human history, physical geography and biological diversity, as well as its discovery and exploration, commerce, such as seal hunting, and the effect of more recent factors, such as climate change.

j.wojtas@theday.com