Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (21 page)

Gaza’s translation of
The History of Animals
was published in 1476 in Venice, and it was immensely popular, far outselling all the previous versions. By making this misleading connection between pen shells and byssus, though, he sparked a game of Chinese whispers that has gone on ever since. Stories were reshaped and new ideas became fixed until most writers and historians uncritically came to assume that any mention of byssus, no matter how far back in the past, could have referred to sea-silk woven from the Noble Pen Shell’s fibres.

The true story, now well hidden and seldom told, is that up until the fifteenth century there was no reason to link byssus and pen shells. All the various ancient mentions of byssus – in the Bible, on the Rosetta Stone, on ancient papyrus scrolls and elsewhere – most probably referred to linens, or mulberry silk made by moths.

Given all this, Daniel McKinley remained sceptical about many of the ancient stories of sea-silk. He was sure that the idea of Jason and the Argonauts chasing after a fleece made
of sea-silk, however tempting, was just one of many embellishments added to the myth throughout centuries of storytelling. Analyses have shown that Egyptian mummies are wrapped not in sea-silk but in linen. And in McKinley’s view, the links of sea-silk to the biblical cloth of gold were equally shaky; Henry VIII and his men almost certainly never dressed head-to-toe in sea-silk.

Nevertheless, sea-silk
has
been around for a long time, although not as widely or with as much significance as many still claim. In reality, sea-silk has always been incredibly rare.

From myths to reality

The earliest authentic written mention of sea-silk, one not based on hearsay or mistranslation, comes from the turn of the third century
AD
. ‘Nor was it enough to comb and sew the materials for a tunic. It was necessary also to fish for one’s dress.’ This quote is attributed to a man known as Tertullian, from Carthage in the African provinces of the Roman Empire. He goes on to describe how fleeces are obtained from ‘shells of extraordinary size’ that have tufts of mossy hair. He was clearly talking about pen shells and their byssus beards.

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 firmly 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.