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

  People also ate Spondylus meat, although perhaps not simply as food. Images depicting these shells being held and eaten by deities have prompted some ethnographers to suggest that the shellfish were a source of mind-altering drugs. At certain times of year, warm seas can become stained blood red with blooms of toxic algae. For a time after a ‘red tide’ has hit, many shellfish become poisonous to humans; the molluscs absorb neurotoxins from the microscopic algae and pass them on to anyone who eats them. Symptoms of paralytic shellfish poisoning vary; it can make you feel numb and giddy, and sometimes as if you’re flying, but a large dose can be lethal. There is evidence that shamans in early Andean societies used various plants and animals, including toads, for their psychotropic effects. Mary Glowacki from the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research thinks they could have also used poisonous shellfish to help them communicate with the supernatural. Her theory is that shamans may have learned to read the tides and predict when a moderate dose of poisoned shellfish could trigger an out-of-body experience. Given the way that the human kidneys excrete the toxin, it’s even possible that drinking the urine of someone who ate infected Spondylus would get you high.

  Spondylus has been linked with other gruesome practices in Aztec society. Beneath Teotihuacan’s temple of Quetzalcóatl, 60 human sacrifices were buried with their hands tied behind their backs. They were dressed in garlands of Spondylus shells, carved to look like human teeth, and arranged as gaping jaws around their necks.

  The complex and occasionally blood-curdling history of these shells travels into the high peaks of the Andes. In the Inca Empire, children were led by a procession of priests into the highest, most sacred mountains, where they were ritually sacrificed, allowing them entry into the realm of the gods – supposedly a great honour. At such high altitude, the victims’ bodies have occasionally been preserved by the freezing, dry conditions; they look as though they have simply fallen asleep.

  One of these mummified discoveries was a 12-year-old girl, who was found in 1996, some 500 years after she died. She was curled up on a platform facing the rising sun, at the peak of Sara Sara, a volcano in southern Peru. The team of high-altitude archaeologists who found her, led by Johan Reinhard, called her Sarita, ‘little Sara’.

  Several other sacrificial children were found nearby, along with a collection of luxury artefacts: miniature human effigies made from gold and silver, bundles of coca leaves that were chewed to stave off altitude sickness, and statues of llamas carved from Spondylus shells, unmistakable with their long ears standing to attention. Most intricate of all these objects was a male figurine, roughly the size of an Academy Award Oscar statuette, made from silver and adorned with fragments of cloth. You can see his finely shaped toes, and ears pulled into long lobes; his hands are folded across his chest, and he wears an ornate headdress fashioned from red Spondylus shell. All of these shell objects had been on a long journey, 5,000 metres (more than 16,000 feet) up into the clouds, a very long way from the ocean they came from.

  Wind the clock forward a couple of hundred years and we find people still using shells to gather wealth and status, but on a scale never seen before, and in a way that combined ideas both ancient and new. The story of these shells reveals an even darker side to human nature.

  Turning cowries into currency

  Shallow coral lagoons in the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean are home to a small but immensely prolific seashell, the Money Cowrie. The shells, often three centimetres (one inch) long, are creamy white and lumpy, sometimes with a dainty gold line encircling a central hump. In life they are far more stunning than in death; the shell is covered by a frilly black and white mantle, intricately patterned like a miniature zebra.

  Throughout most of their lives, cowries inhabit nooks of coral reefs or the branching fronds of seaweeds, and they don’t travel far. Female cowries lay clutches of eggs and sit on them, before they hatch into minute larvae. Then, for a short window of time, her offspring become travellers; the larvae drift around for a while in the water, riding the currents and tides, before settling down to live out their time as ponderous adults. However, after they died, the shells of many millions of cowries were once taken on long journeys, journeys with a sorrowful end.

  Centuries ago, people in the Maldives began gathering cowries from the warm waters around their islands. They didn’t use tiny fishing lines and baited hooks, as one early traveller dubiously reported, but took advantage of the cowries’ secretive nature. The easiest way to harvest these shells was to throw coconut palm leaves into the shallows, then leave them there for several months. In that time, cowries would come out of hiding and investigate this new source of food and shelter, taking up lodging among the leaves. All the cowrie-fisher needed to do was pull a palm frond out of the water, give it a good shake and the cowries would drop off. It was then a matter of removing the snails from their homes by burying them in hot sand for a few more months. The end result was a stash of gleaming empty cowries, ready to be sorted and packed into triangular bundles wrapped in coconut fibre cloth. At last, when the monsoon winds began blowing from the south, wooden sailboats were cast off and the cowries began a new journey.

  The first port of call was India, where the cowries were exchanged for rice and cloth under the strict control of the Maldivian king. No one else was allowed to take part in the trade. Some of these cowries stayed in India and were used as decorations, amulets and symbols of purity. Indians also used the shells as hard currency, to pay taxes and ferrymen at river crossings. And from possibly as early as the eleventh century, the cowrie trail spread to more distant lands.

  Arab merchants took cowries from India on a shadowy overland route across the Sahara. Little is known about these early traders beyond snippets of evidence here and there; some archaeologists believe cowries were traded in Cairo in the Middle Ages, and in the far west of the Arab world, in Mauritania, remains have been found of an abandoned caravan, complete with its cargo of cowries.

  Maldivian shells were first traded in West Africa in small quantities as amulets and charms, something that native shell species were already used for. By the fourteenth century, cowries had been adopted as currency. The Money Cowrie doesn’t inhabit West Africa, so all the cowries in the region were imported from afar. In the mid-fourteenth century the great Moroccan explorer, Ibn Battuta, wrote the first account of cowries changing hands in the Mali Empire. Back then, shells were used in small transactions in the marketplace, to buy food and other domestic goods, as they have been in many other parts of the world.

  Shells are one of the oldest and most widespread forms of hard currency. In New Guinea, people have pierced flakes of pearl shells and threaded them onto strings, measured across the chest in nipple-to-nipple lengths; Native Americans of southern New England made tubular beads, known as wampum, from whelk and quahog shells, which became legal tender when European settlers arrived; and in the Pacific Northwest, from Canada to California, strings of tusk shells (scaphopods) were used as money. In China, the use of cowries as currency goes back thousands of years. The classical Chinese character for money stems from a pictograph of a cowrie, and when demand outstripped supplies of real shells, people made imitations from bone, ceramics and metal. And it could be that the ancient trades in Spondylus shells, on opposite sides of the world, also included a form of currency which, some say, is the origin of the word ‘spondoolies’.

  Shells work well as a form of money for various reasons: they are difficult to fake convincingly; many of them (cowries in particular) are of a consistent size and weight; they are tough and durable; and they feel nice in your hand and are easy to handle. The deep symbolism of shells, and their association with power and status, may also have encouraged their use for important transactions such as marriage dowries.

  The trade in shells between the Indian Ocean and West Africa continued on a small scale for several centuries. It wasn’t until European traders came on the scene that a radical shift took place and a whole new commo
dity emerged that could be purchased with shells, one that would change the course of human history.

  Portuguese merchants were the first to figure out the connection between seashells from the Maldives and the markets of West Africa. For a while, they had the trade by sea to themselves but the British and the Dutch soon joined them, and eventually took over. Between 1600 and 1850, the East India Companies of these two great trading powers dominated global shell commerce.

  Fleets of ships, known as East Indiamen, sailed first to India, Indonesia and China, where they loaded up with fine goods that were in great demand back in Europe: silks, spices and tea. Before departing again for home, the crews would stop at Indian and Sri Lankan ports to fill their holds with millions of Maldivian cowries. At this point of the trade, the shells were cheap and their main purpose was to act as ballast to keep the ships stable in rough seas throughout their voyages across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the west coast of Africa and back to Europe.

  The shells were unloaded into auction houses in Amsterdam and London, where another circle of traders were waiting. They snapped up the shells, repacked them into a second fleet of ships and sailed them back down south.

  Some two years after they had been plucked from the Indian Ocean, millions of cowries ended their longest ever journey. In the final stage of a 15,000-mile trip, the shells were lowered over the side of European ships and into small canoes that paddled up the shallow, mangrove-fringed creeks of West Africa. The shells were to be exchanged, not for goods to ship back to Europe, but for human slaves.

  European slave traders had discovered that shells were the ideal currency to take to Africa and trade with kings and merchants (ammunition, weapons and other factory-made goods were also exchanged for human lives). Traders turned a handsome profit, importing dirt-cheap shells and exchanging them for slaves.

  Prices per human head rose over the years. In the 1680s, a slave cost around 10,000 shells; by the 1770s the price tag hanging around the neck of an adult male slave was more than 150,000 cowries. Once the shells had changed hands, the slaves were shipped across the Atlantic, many of them to work in Caribbean plantations. And so it was that cups of English tea, made from tea leaves packed among Maldivian cowries, were sweetened with sugar grown by the men and women whose lives had been bought with the very same shells.

  At the peak of the slave trade, British fleets were importing an average of 40 million cowries into West Africa every year. Throughout the eighteenth century, as Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson discuss in detail in their book The Shell Money of the Slave Trade, 10 billion shells were shipped across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

  From the point of view of the molluscs that made all those shells, this is a hugely impressive feat. Enduring such intense exploitation without dwindling is testament to their reproductive prowess and it comes as rather a surprise given that female cowries must spend much of their time brooding eggs, instead of casting their young straight into the big blue, as many of their relatives do. In general, the longer an animal spends tending its offspring, and the fewer young it produces in one go, the more vulnerable the population is to overexploitation by humans.

  When the trade in Maldivian cowries collapsed, it was not because supplies of shells had run out. In 1807, the British government passed an Act of Parliament making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire, and although trafficking persisted for a time among some colonies, the trade in shell money to West Africa drew quickly to a halt. Humans would never again be swapped for shells on the international market, although for a time slaves were still sold within Africa for shells. But this wasn’t the end of the story for the European trade in shell money. A decade later, another new commodity emerged in West Africa, which once again was shipped to Europe in return for shells. Europeans turned their attention from exploiting fellow human beings to exploiting the natural world, and they did so on an even more staggering scale.

  It’s perhaps strange to think that the global trade in palm oil that is currently responsible for the bulldozing of natural habitats across the tropics has its origins in the nineteenth century. Palm oil lubricated the gears and greased the wheels of the industrial revolution that set the modern world in motion. Factories and homes were lit with palm oil lamps, and workers used palm oil soap to wash off the factory grime.

  Back then, most of the world’s palm oil was grown in West African plantations, and British traders continued to use Maldivian cowries to buy it. Rather than fading away, the shell trade ramped up a gear, more than doubling previous levels. By 1850, more than 100 million shells were being traded each year. But there was one more crisis ahead for the European shell trade, one from which it would never recover.

  In 1845 a German trader, Adolph Jacob Hertz, sailed west across the Indian Ocean after unsuccessfully trying to buy cowries directly from the King of the Maldives. The Maldivian monarchs had always been hostile towards any European merchants who showed up at their islands and Hertz was no exception. On his way back home, he called in to Zanzibar, an island off Africa’s east coast, where he discovered an all-too-obvious truth: cowries live all over the place.

  On Zanzibar’s fine white beaches, Hertz found the Gold Ringer Cowrie. This species is similar to the Money Cowrie, although slightly larger and with a more prominent golden circle on its back. Many traders had known of gold ringers and considered using them, but so far this alternative hadn’t made a dent in the Maldivian cowrie trade, largely because African merchants refused to accept them. However, the time was right for Hertz, and his discovery went on to revolutionise the cowrie trade. He set sail from Zanzibar, taking with him a few gold ringers and a good idea of where to find plenty more.

  Before long, a trickle of gold ringers began to enter markets in West Africa. Exactly why merchants finally agreed to take these alternatives remains unclear. It could have been the impact of the booming palm oil industry that was pushing up prices of Money Cowries so that traders welcomed a cheaper option. These new shells went into circulation alongside the traditional Money Cowries, and the trade from East Africa soared.

  This time around it was private dealers who dominated the shell trade, rather than national companies. German and French fleets transported gold ringers directly from East to West Africa and in less than 20 years imported 16 billion cowries, almost as many as the British and Dutch had throughout the previous century.

  Gold ringers flooded into West Africa with a swift and inevitable consequence. Hyperinflation gripped the trade, and the value of shell money plummeted. Soon a handful of cowries was all but worthless. The Maldivian harvest of Money Cowries had already slumped and, 600 years after the shell trade began, it finally came to an end.

  By the opening decade of the twentieth century, imported cowries had changed hands as currency for the final time. In total, more than 30 billion Maldivian cowrie shells ended up half a world away from where they were hatched and lived. The nature of shell money means they could not be withdrawn from circulation or replaced. Some shells were crushed for limestone and many were built into walls and floors, as reminders of former wealth. And some people buried hoards of cowries, hoping their riches would once again be worth something. A day that would never come.

  As well as all the cowries imported into West Africa as tainted symbols of oppression, the region has plenty of shells of its own. Most of them aren’t used for money, though, but for food.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shell Food

  Not far from the westernmost point of the African continent, on a cool cloudy afternoon, I stood gazing up at the bare branches of a baobab tree. Its crown, 10 metres above me, looked out over the mangrove forests and the salty, winding creeks of Senegal’s Sine-Saloum Delta that flow into the Atlantic Ocean. As all baobabs do, this tree had a gargantuan trunk with folded, blubbery skin. The spongy insides hold a water reservoir that sees it through dry times. Shortly before the rains return each year, the baobab draws on this pool of water and bu
rsts into blooms of dangling white flowers that stink of rotting meat, attracting bat pollinators. Over this tree’s long life – at least a few hundred years – it has seen many rains and many bats come and go. And down beneath its roots, this giant, ancient tree has been growing for all these years on a vast pile of seashells. Over centuries, millions of empty shells have been bound together in the soil. I was standing on an island made of shells.

  More than 200 shell middens have been found across the delta. The oldest dates back more than 10,000 years, with the largest standing 11 metres (more than 35 feet) high and spreading across an area of 10 hectares (25 acres). Several are burial tumuli, the final resting place for rulers from the kingdoms of Sine and Saloum, which share a distant, entwined history. Other shell mounds contain no human remains but are just the accumulated debris from millions of molluscs that have been eaten by people.

  Cockles and oysters have long been a staple food for people living in the Sine-Saloum Delta and they have been the basis for an export trade since the sixteenth century. Mandinka merchants harvested seashells and sold the sun-dried meat far and wide. The piles of shells they left behind are testament to the immensely rich waters that have produced so much food over the millennia.

  On one side of the shell island I crunched along a beach made entirely of cream and grey cockleshells. These are West African Bloody Cockles. Their name comes from the bright red haemoglobin pigment they produce (rather than transporting oxygen around the body, as it does in vertebrates, haemoglobin in bloody cockles could have a role in disease resistance). Beyond the beach, a mangrove forest began. The boatman who brought me to the little island steered the narrow wooden pirogue into a green tunnel of these salt-loving trees. I clambered onto the tough mangrove roots to get a crab’s-eye view of the world. When the boat engine cut to silence I could hear snapping and popping all around me. It was the sound of oysters, shutting their shells as the tide fell. Known as Mangrove Oysters, they live permanently stuck to these shadowy roots, and twice a day, while exposed to the air, they stay firmly closed, holding a miniature salty ocean inside their shells. The oysters’ dry spells are far shorter and more frequent than the baobab’s prolonged, yearly droughts. Listening to all the clops and crackles, I realised I was surrounded by a vast and noisy seafood feast.