Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells Read online

  Sea-silk is one of the commodities listed by the Roman Emperor Diocletian in a price-fixing scheme that he rolled out across the empire in 301 ad, to try to stop merchants from fleecing their customers. Sea-silk crops up again in Constantinople in the middle of the sixth century when Emperor Justinian handed out gifts to visiting dignitaries including a ‘cloak made of wool, not such as produced by sheep, but gathered from the sea’.

  As for actual remains of ancient sea-silk, these are even more fragmentary and hard to find than written words. While we could blame clothes moths for eating the evidence, other natural fibres are just as vulnerable to getting munched and yet they show up much more frequently in the archaeological record. The oldest known piece of sea-silk dates from more than 1,700 years ago in the fourth century. It was found in Budapest, in the remains of what was formerly a Roman legionary town called Aquincum on the northern fringes of the empire. In 1912, a grave was found there containing a female mummy wrapped in linen. Between her legs was a fragment of fabric identified at the time as sea-silk. It was described as being coarse and brittle and as if it was made from human hair. Under a microscope, the cut ends of the fibres were seen to be egg-shaped, a unique feature of sea-silk. It remains unknown where this scrap of fabric was made; the piece was lost amid the chaos of the Second World War.

  To find the next oldest piece of sea-silk, and the oldest surviving and scientifically verified example, we have to jump forwards in time 1,000 years to the fourteenth century. A knitted hat was excavated in 1978 from a damp basement just outside Paris. It has a few holes in it now, but you can clearly make out that it was a close-fitting beanie hat. The idea that sea-silk was flimsy and delicate doesn’t quite ring true with this piece of clothing; warm and woolly are the words that spring to mind.

  In his book, Daniel McKinley hunted for proof that sea-silk fibres had ever been woven or knitted into chiffony fabrics, and he drew a blank. Stories of sea-silk gloves kept in a nutshell may be yet another mix-up, this time with an early nineteenth-century trend for so-called Limerick gloves. Made in Ireland and Scotland from fine leathers, they were indeed sold stuffed into walnut shells.

  The idea that sea-silk can be quite cosy fits with a rare literary appearance of this elusive fibre. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne dressed the renegade explorer Captain Nemo and the crew of his submarine the Nautilus in uniforms made of byssus. At the start of the book Nemo kidnaps the scientist, Professor Aronnax, whose expedition attacked the Nautilus thinking it was a dangerous sea monster. Nemo and his captive crew then venture around the globe exploring the underwater realm and, at one point, they cruise close to a submerged volcano; conditions on board become so hot that Aronnax feels obliged to take off his byssus coat. In the original French version of the book, Verne goes to some lengths to describe what he means by byssus, explaining that his submariners harvested fibres from pen shells to make their clothes. These details are skipped over by translators in many English editions, leaving readers to ponder the contents of Nemo’s wardrobe.

  I began to suspect that seductive dancers of the Roman emperors would have been thoroughly disappointed by what sea-silk had to offer when I saw a piece of it for the first time. I was visiting the mollusc section at London’s Natural History Museum; curator Jon Ablett met me in the museum’s great entrance hall, beneath the iconic Diplodocus skeleton, and led me through a door and down a set of narrow stairs to the back rooms that house the bulk of their enormous collections. Molluscs alone take up several huge rooms and long corridors lined with wooden cabinets; Jon opened a drawer in one. Pulling out a small box, he showed me a golden-brown glove. It’s one of four sea-silk gloves that belonged to Hans Sloane, the man whose seventeenth-century collection formed the foundation of the British Museum, and in time its natural history division. I wasn’t allowed to try it on but the glove looked to me to be rather thick and itchy, not gauzy and delicate; you would definitely be hard pressed to find a walnut big enough to keep it in.

  The glove is one of around 60 items listed in a catalogue of all known sea-silk objects. Project Sea-silk is based at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland, where its founder and sea-silk scholar, Felicitas Maeder, is gathering records and information about sea-silk, all of them available to see on her website. She has scoured museum collections around the world for items made of sea-silk from before the 1950s. Knitted gloves and gauntlets are the most common items Felicitas has archived, along with a few hats, scarves and ties. Tufts of golden sea-silk have also been made into unspun fur. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has an Italian muff in its collection and the Musée Océanographique in Monaco has several furry sea-silk objects including a lady’s purse that looks rather like a Scotsman’s sporran.

  Most of the objects in the Project Sea-silk archive date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the fourteenth-century Parisian hat is one of a kind), and many of them were made in Italy. It was around this time in the southern Mediterranean that the stories of Noble Pen Shells and sea-silk began to untangle, and a clearer picture of this legendary fabric emerged.

  ‘They tell me they are very scarce, and for that reason I wish you to have them.’ These were the words of Horatio Nelson in 1804, a year before he died at the battle of Trafalgar, written to his lover Emma Hamilton. He was referring to a pair of gloves made ‘only in Sardinia from the beards of mussels’. By that time, fine items of sea-silk like Emma’s gloves were becoming more familiar.

  The origins of sea-silk remain stubbornly mysterious, and no one knows for sure who first thought to pluck hairs from giant seashells and turn them into threads and fabric. Certainly by the Renaissance, Noble Pen Shells and samples of sea-silk began appearing in cabinets of curiosities.

  Scholars and noblemen across Europe developed the habit of curating private collections of assorted objects and oddities. Both natural and man-made curiosities were displayed side by side in specially made pieces of furniture, or spilled over into entire rooms: stuffed animals and skeletons, feathers, butterflies, seashells, corals, bits of old pottery, shrunken human heads, coins, even unicorn horns and mermaids, which were often covertly cobbled together from an assortment of real animals.

  The idea behind these collections was to assemble a physical encyclopaedia that helped make sense of how the world worked by drawing connections between apparently quite different objects. They arose before science and art were pulled firmly apart and assigned their own distinct disciplines. Onlookers would have no doubt marvelled at sea-silk, and puzzled over where it came from.

  By the nineteenth century, sea-silk was being put on display at international exhibitions as an example of fine craftsmanship. Sea-silk appeared at the Louvre in Paris in 1801, and in 1876 was brought to America and displayed for the first time, at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that celebrated 100 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  Accounts of how these sea-silk items were made, and where, come from a coterie of early travel writers, mostly young gentlemen who went on Grand Tours of Italy. According to these sightseers, fishermen along Italy’s Mediterranean coast used long metal tongs to probe the depths for pen shells; divers also swam down, tied ropes around them and yanked the shells back up to the surface. It was mostly women, especially in nunneries and orphanages, who took on the task of washing, combing, spinning and finally knitting or weaving the fibres together. As one writer in 1771 noted, ‘The preparation is both laborious and ingenious.’

  The centre of the sea-silk industry is pinpointed in many reports in Taranto, a city on the southern tip of Italy, inside the heel of its boot. Some confusion remains over a fine fabric called tarantine also made in the city, which some say could have been sea-silk, but was probably in fact made from fine sheep’s wool (regular, terrestrial sheep that is, not water-sheep). Other mentions of sea-silk come from Naples, Sicily and Corsica, as well as Spain and mainland France, but the only other place where its production has been firml
y identified is Sardinia.

  By all accounts the sea-silk industries in Taranto and Sardinia could never have been very big. Nelson hit the nail on the head when he described Emma’s gloves as being incredibly rare. For one thing, the supply of byssus threads was, all things considered, quite tiny. To knit a single pair of gloves probably required 150 shells, and unlike a field of cotton or a herd of sheep that can be harvested and shorn many times, pen shells would have produced only a one-off haul of material; they were brought up from the depths and killed for their beards. People sometimes ate the meat, too. Greek and Roman writers had mixed feelings about how good pinna was to eat, saying it was difficult to digest and diuretic, although the meat from smaller shells was apparently tasty when marinated in wine and vinegar. In southern Italy, pinna was cheap food until fairly recently, with various recipes including frying them in breadcrumbs, boiling them into broth, cooking them in lemon juice and serving them with baked prunes.

  Another hint that sea-silk production never exactly flourished comes from reports of people who endeavoured in vain to stimulate the industry. In the 1780s, archbishop Giuseppe Capecelatro hoped to create jobs for impoverished sea-silk weavers in Taranto. He tried to kindle demand for the fabric by handing out sea-silk gifts to visiting dignitaries. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sardinian doctor Giuseppe Basso-Arnoux remembered his childhood Sundays, when his family dressed in fine sea-silk accessories, scarves and gloves. Later in life he decided to try to bring back these traditions. Visiting London, he attempted to establish a trading interest in sea-silk, but as with Capecelatro and anyone else who tried, his efforts never amounted to much.

  More recent attempts have been made to rejuvenate sea-silk manufacture. In Taranto in the 1920s, Rita del Bene tried and failed to establish a government department of sea-silk, so instead set up her own private school to teach the craft, which continued with some success until the outbreak of the Second World War. An interest in sea-silk in Taranto never revived after peace returned to the region. However, the processing of sea-silk has not disappeared altogether.

  To the west of Taranto, 120 miles across the Tyrrhenian Sea on a tiny island off the coast of Sardinia, the craft clings on. It was there that I tracked down the trail of the sea-silk, finding a place where a few strands of this mythical thread are still made, and plenty of stories are still told.

  The directions to Sant’Antioco read like something from a fairy story: drive down the road lined with prickly pear trees, go past the flock of pink flamingos and carry on over the bridge leading to a little island. There you will find the only people in the world who still pluck tufts of hair from giant seashells and weave them into fine golden cloth.

  Bumbling along in the Fiat Cinquecento I hired at the airport, I slow down to catch a glimpse of the orange and yellow houses clustered on the hillside, overlooking an outrageous blue sea that I am told is the hiding place of Noble Pen Shells. I had come to meet the women who hold on to the secrets of sea-silk, and uncover what truths I could about this most mythical of fabrics.

  At the top of the hill, above narrow cobbled streets, there is a high wall surrounding an open courtyard and a small, stone building where grapes were once processed and made into wine. Now the space is home to a collection of tools and machinery that have been used in Sant’Antioco over the last few centuries. This is the Museo Etnografico, run by a local cooperative called Archeotur whose members are committed to making sure past lives and traditions are not lost in the melee of modern life and that people don’t forget how things used to be. Preserved in this modest space is an archive of local trades, of bread-making, cheese-making, shoe-making, barrel-making and the dyeing and weaving of local fibres including sea-silk.

  Waiting to welcome me in is Archeotur’s director, Ignazio Marrocu, a smiling man with a silver moustache and bright pink shirt. He immediately whisks me over to a cluster of Noble Pen Shells, standing tall and empty in a glass tank of sand. He pulls one out and hands it to me. The shell is at least 50 centimetres (20 inches) long, and surprisingly heavy. At the open end, the part that would have stuck up above the seabed, the pen shell is covered in the twisting white casements of tube worms and dried strands of seaweed; the lower section tapers to a point, and is scaly like reptilian skin.

  Next, Ignazio brings out a knotty tangle of threads embedded with tiny seashells and blades of seagrass, like the ginger beard of an old man of the sea, flecked with his dinner. This is the byssus from a pen shell in its raw, untreated state. He then places in my hand a tuft of soft golden fibres that gleam in the sunshine. This is clean and carded byssus, ready to be spun. This is sea-silk.

  The museum has a large display board covered in photographs of sea-silk weavers of the past. One black and white picture depicts four young women sitting in a row wearing headscarves, long dresses and aprons; one has a basket on her knee, filled with a tangle of byssus; the other three have wooden spindles and are in the process of twisting the fibres into threads.

  Another photograph, this one in colour, shows an old lady wearing big round glasses, a white headscarf and a blue dress. Like the girls in the older picture she is busy spinning sea-silk. This, Ignazio tells me, is Efisia Murroni, who died in 2013 shortly after her hundredth birthday. She had learnt how to weave sea-silk from Italo Diana who ran a studio in Sant’Antioco, weaving traditional Sardinian designs and textiles until his death in 1959.

  Surrounding the photograph of Efisia are pictures of Italo’s work. There is a woven hat and jacket for a toddler, a wide knitted scarf with golden tassels and an embroidered tapestry, as tall as the women holding it up. The intricate design has a pair of horses (or possibly unicorns), and a pair of birds that look like fancy turkeys. Around them is a border of other animals, and a row of people holding hands. In the centre is a rather confused patch of stitches, one that tells a story of how the piece was made.

  Italo wove and embroidered this piece in the 1930s for the occasion of Benito Mussolini’s visit to the nearby town of Carbonia. It was a new town, built around a coal mine (carbone meaning ‘coal’ in Italian), and the streets were laid out in the shape of the egomaniac Mussolini’s face. The central piece of the tapestry had originally been the words ‘Il Duce’, but this embroidered tribute to fascism was later covered over with new stitches.

  Italo’s skills have been passed on via Efisia not to her daughter, who didn’t want to learn, but to two other women from Sant’Antioco. Several years ago, Assuntina and Giuseppina Pes became interested in the town’s traditions of weaving sea-silk, and Efisia agreed to teach them.

  The Pes sisters arrive at the museum, after dropping off their children at school, and greet me with smiles and cheek kisses. They are keen to show me their sea-silk skills, so we jump into an aged BMW driven by Giustino, one of Archeotur’s enthusiastic volunteers, who knows English better than I do Italian. We zoom off to the outskirts of Sant’Antioco and pull up to a little house guarded by a friendly, yowling cat.

  Assuntina opens the door and ushers us into her home, where bright sunshine pours into a room crammed with two large weaving looms draped in skeins of brightly coloured wool. The walls are decorated with weavings and embroideries of traditional Sardinian motifs. She leads us downstairs into a smaller, darker room and brings out a large plastic Ferrero Rocher chocolate box packed with plastic bags; she then lays a small collection of byssus out on the table. Together, Assuntina and Giuseppina set about showing me the stages involved in making sea-silk.

  The first piece is byssus after it’s been soaked for hours in seawater, then freshwater (at this point it hasn’t changed too much), and it is beginning to be transformed, with the sandy, shelly debris picked out. Assuntina opens a red cardboard box with a puff of fibres inside that resemble auburn human hair. She grabs a handful and combs them over and over, teasing them with a fearsomely spiky comb. It reminds me of the painful brushing of my tangly, curly hair each morning before school.

  Now, she takes out a wooden spindle, the kind used
to spin cotton, wool and linen threads. It looks like a mushroom with a long, narrowing stalk and a small hook on top. She attaches a clump of combed byssus fibres to the hook and sets it spinning. I watch as the spindle spins and twists the byssus into a thread that wraps around the stick. Assuntina deftly feeds the growing thread with more fibres, making it look easy, but I know it isn’t.

  In a few minutes she spins a metre or more of thread. It is fairly thick and woolly, but soft to the touch. She tells me that the threads can be soaked in lemon juice to give them a brighter colour. One of their intricate embroideries features a pair of birds gazing at each other, beak to beak. They are sewn onto white linen with byssus of two different shades, one a deep bronze, the other pale gold.

  As well as using sea-silk as an embroidery thread, it can be woven into fabric. A tiny tabletop loom comes out and Giuseppina shows me a narrow sea-silk tie in progress. I imagine their grandfathers dressed up in ties like this for church on Sundays. With her fingers nimbly darting this way and that, Giuseppina runs the golden-brown weft thread across the warp and pats them into place, making one more row of fluffy cloth.

  No one will wear this tie, and it may never be finished, because new byssus fibres are very hard to come by these days. At the museum, Ignazio had demonstrated for me a metal tool with a long wooden handle that was used to wrench pen shells up from the shallow seabed, a few feet deep, but that is no longer allowed. Since 1992 there has been a blanket ban on harvesting Noble Pen Shells.

  Along with seahorses, otters, seals and more than 200 other European species, Noble Pen Shells are protected throughout their ranges under EU law. Scientific advisors declared that pen shells are threatened by pollution and the destruction of seagrass beds where many of them live. Pen shells are easily crushed and torn away by boat anchors and fishing gear; also, divers were collecting them not for their byssus but to make the shells into gaudy home decorations, lampshades and the like. Now it is a criminal offence to deliberately harm or kill a Noble Pen Shell.