by Skye Moody
Ancient Flotsam Cures and Cosmeceuticals
Ancient peoples believed that gods sent healing remedies from the sea to those who respected it. A peek into an ancient pharmacopoeia offers examples of medical treatments involving flotsam.
Seahorses, which travel just beneath the water’s surface, have always been collected, both for ornamental and medicinal use and by children for purposes of torture. Ancient Greeks employed seahorses in an attempt to cure cancer, and Europeans believed seahorses cured urinary incontinence and improved the flow of breast milk. Children still collect seahorses to add to their “sea rodeo” collections, and this is where the torture enters. I once witnessed a five-year-old boy playing sea rodeo with freshly harvested seahorses from the Indo-Pacific. The boy had fashioned a miniature lasso from dental floss. I needn’t elaborate. Pity he didn’t realize that an intact seahorse washed up on the beach is thought to bring great fortune to its finder.
Limpet shell and gold snuff case from Dover, England.
Pearls are also believed to lure good fortune. Tahitian black pearls are particularly effective in curing female depression, and just now I’m really, really depressed. Pearls also were used to reduce fevers and to treat various organ maladies. Crushed pearl mixed with crushed coral was thought to cure tuberculosis. Today, crushed pearls are used in Chinese and Japanese cosmetics made for improving skin texture and clarity, or at least the manufacturers’ bottom line. Asian women swear by crushed pearls, though, like this writer, they’re fonder of the uncrushed variety. Persians believed pearls cured insanity, and I’ll second that.
On a recent layover in Hong Kong, I devoted an afternoon to pearl creams. My old pal Simon Chu, who manages a pearl export establishment, pointed me to the best apothecaries, and when all was said and done, I came home with a product called Make Best Face for Husband, a rich, thick, pearl-infused emollient produced by a factory in Macau. The instructions advised using only on face and hands, as “ingradients may allergic other body parts.” In the end, Make Best Face for Husband gave me a rash around the hairline and nostrils, but I swear I saw crushed pearls in the formula.
Abalone shell, the English believed, made short shrift of corns. Here’s the recipe: “Squeeze lemon juice over mother-of-pearl buttons 2x a day for one week, until the buttons turn to paste. Spread on corn, cover with bandaging. Repeat once a day until the corn detaches from the foot.” Next time you lose a button try checking your neighbor’s foot.
Seaweed, marine algae, stranded fish, and invertebrates are listed in ancient pharmacopoeias. Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman physicians combined ministration of organic matter washed up on their beaches with prayer to heal the sick. Brilliant. They actually slopped on the raw, slimy stuff straight off the wrack, and here we discover the origins of La Costa and other spendy spas. Today, native healers and shamans compete elbow-to-elbow with spa owners along the wrack line, collecting medicinal and cosmetic miracles piled up on beaches—jumbles of green and brown seaweed, and kelp so tangled it snags seahorses, mussels, crabs, and other marine life, whose leaves or roots or skins found their way into the apothecaries of every ancient seashore community in the days when every part of a plant or animal was sacred. But I’ll bet if they had Aleve and Botox back then, the wrack would have languished where the tide left it.
In Europe during Victorian times, seawater treatments became all the rage as thalassotherapy, and spa aestheticians applied seaweed poultices directly to their clients’ skin, then bathed the skin in seawater to help detoxify and nourish the body. Because of its amazing softening properties, seaweed has for centuries been used in traditional Asian pharmacology, applied to tumors and nodules. As an anti-inflammatory, seaweed has been applied to swollen lymph and thyroid glands, and when taken orally seaweed is believed to reduce swelling of lymph nodes and, more recently, to generally help combat symptoms associated with HIV and other autoimmune disorders and certain chronic allergies.
Chondrus chrispus, Irish moss seaweed, traditionally was used to remedy digestive problems like diarrhea, and to treat dysentery, gastric ulcers, and the common cold. Both green and brown seaweed—ubiquitous flotsam debris—contain minerals and other nutritive properties and have for centuries been a dietary staple, as common as lettuce and other land-grown vegetables, and, if possible, less palatable. “Eat your seaweed, young man, or you’ll never make samurai.”
Irish moss is a gloriously versatile flotsam that is also used as bedding. I’ve lain on a moss bed in a hotel in Rome, which shall go unidentified only because it is one of those preciously held secrets one can’t afford to advertise for fear of creating a tourist wave that would spoil its cachet. I can state without hesitation that this hotel’s Irish moss bed is even more comfortable than Leonard Bernstein’s bed.
They say never kiss and tell. I didn’t kiss, but I’ll skip the details other than to report that I spent a night in Mr. Bernstein’s bed, and in that downy nest enjoyed the second-best night’s sleep of my life. In fairness I must divulge that the maestro and I did not share his bed—I had it all to myself. On a scale of 1 to 10½, the maestro’s bed ranks 10, while the Irish moss bed in Rome ranks 10½. But getting back to flotsam, picture this:
A sunny springtime in Connecticut. Midafternoon. The swimming pool at Leonard Bernstein’s country residence. I am lounging poolside, savoring robin song, when I notice a stick adrift in the swimming pool. A whisper of breeze had stirred up a current on the water’s surface, causing the stick to flow in and out of lacy shadows cast by a shade tree. Is that a stick, I asked myself, or ... good heavens, could that be a baton? Was it possible that somehow the maestro’s baton had fallen into the swimming pool, to travel like so much flotsam from the diving board to the stepladder, trapped in heartless currents, its delicate balance thrown off by the aquatic insult? I removed my sunglasses and stood up. Straightening my bikini bottoms, I marched barefoot toward the pool. The melody to “The Rumble” entered my head and I must have been humming out loud because the startled robin stopped singing and flickered off. I dove into the pool and swam for the sacred flotsam. As my fingers grasped the slender stick I at once perceived the flotsam was more suited to the robin than to the maestro. At that moment my host ventured out from the house. “I didn’t know you were quite so compulsively a neat-freak,” he said. “How about another martini?”
Bladderwrack, fucus vesiculosus, a floating seaweed, grew popular in nineteenth-century North Atlantic coastal regions as a treatment for goiter and obesity. Now my interest piques: Did they really distinguish between goiters and obesity, or did they think dad’s pork belly was a goiter? Anyway, the claim itself is suspect—who knew from goiters back then? I think the bladderwrack claim is a bogus attempt to promote sales of fucus vesiculosus by Shopping Channel shamans who adopt transparent Scottish brogues and claim the cure was passed down in family lore. Besides, no wrack I’ve ever seen has a bladder, and I’ve even looked up a kelp’s hose.
Japanese have traditionally embraced—or rather, imbibed—sea vegetable diets for their laxative qualities. Arame, hijiki, kombu (a kelp), and wakame have all been shown to eliminate toxins from the intestines because they contain an alginic acid, which binds to heavy metals in the intestines, making them indigestible; the toxins then glide from the body along with the alginic acid. And today, even Morpheus wears a seaweed cure: a new brand of seaweed fiber pajamas that detoxify while you sleep.
Poseidon’s Drifting Limbs
Twelve thousand years ago, Iceland’s first settlers chopped down the island’s trees for building material and fuel. So thoroughly did they denude the land of trees that they came to depend on Siberian driftwood for home construction and fuel. I’ve visited Siberia, have personally eyeballed Siberian tree trunks, in fact, stumbled into one, after too much Inupiat white lightning. Siberian trees are not, well, girthy. They are thin as a Finnish rock star, and I venture to say, were probably no thicker twelve thousand years ago. Siberian driftwood can’t be all that desirable as log cab
in material.
Eventually someone in Iceland’s denuded taiga got the eureka of growing, hopefully, fatter trees from seedlings arriving via Siberian driftwood, but in the meantime, sheep-herding was introduced, and the dimwitted ruminants munched out the tree saplings before they could mature. Decades later, still dependent on Siberian flotsam, someone fenced the sheep in, and the tree saplings eventually matured into girthy construction-grade timber. Iceland’s strandliners still covet wood flotsam, though, just in case the sheep get loose.
An amazing quality of driftwood is how far it can travel without deteriorating. Branches of Pacific Northwest Douglas firs have been found on Polynesian beaches. Rare Chinese woods have been collected along the Oregon coast—not only remnants of shipwrecks, but also parts of uprooted trees gone adrift. Hardwoods from the tropics have washed up along Maine’s coast, but to the amateur beachcomber’s eye, the wood is indistinguishable from other driftwood lining the beach. Experts know the difference, and they have made startling discoveries that have led to an understanding of the ocean’s currents and weather patterns.
I met Lonnie Rose in Garibaldi, Oregon. Lonnie is a woodworker. I am not sure if that means a carpenter or a sculptor, and I never had an opportunity to find out because when Lonnie starts talking about driftwood flotsam, he’s a runaway train. He’s a whole-body talker, moving in rhythm to his story, his hands waving, his hips swaying—you’d think he was dancing—his mesmerizing tales of driftwood flotsam painting a picture of every piece of wood he’s ever claimed off Oregon’s wild beaches. Lonnie Rose has literally fenced himself in with flotsam. A fence he built of driftwood flotsam surrounds his blink-and-miss home on the precipice of U.S. Highway 101 running through Rockaway Beach. But Lonnie’s favorite flotsam is kept indoors because it is too incredible to appreciate in peripheral vision.
It’s a horse’s head formed in the grain of a cedar log. Lonnie rescued it from the tide off Garibaldi. It doesn’t take the haunted eyes of a war veteran like Lonnie to trace the outline of a horse’s head in the cedar grain, and I felt its power in Lonnie’s dance. One of America’s unsung heroes, Lonnie is hippied-out, as honest as an Oregon blueberry. Who knows what Lonnie has seen riding an incoming tide?
While it travels the ocean currents, driftwood provides homes for seabirds as its flora feeds fish and other aquatic species. Meanwhile, gribbles, shipworms, and ocean-friendly bacteria work to decompose the wood, adding unique character to each branch, or limb, or trunk. Washing up onto beaches, driftwood can pile up to form a skeletal structure on which sand dunes may form. Weathered, sun-bleached, gnarled, and riddled with wormholes, driftwood is one of nature’s most eclectic and ubiquitous art forms, most beautiful when left unaltered by human hands. God bless the driftwood crafters, can you please take a hint from Lonnie Rose and let driftwood speak for itself?
Driftwood today is celebrated at fairs in a few beach communities along North America’s coastlines. But its beauty is even more revered as natural sculpture in Japan, in Barcelona, Spain, and in other European cities, where major driftwood exhibitions bring together flotsamists from around the globe. I’ve never personally attended one of these gatherings, but I can just imagine Lonnie showing up in Barcelona and wowing the crowd with his cedar-grain horse.
Perhaps the most important driftwood log to complete a transoceanic voyage was the tree trunk that reputedly crossed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia, carrying on its back the exotic sweet potato. As far back as 10,000 BC, potato tubers were harvested in Peru. By 2500 BC, South American natives were cultivating potatoes and creating new varieties. The sweet potato varieties were particularly well suited to hot, moist climates. Centuries before Spanish and Portuguese explorers discovered potatoes in the Americas, the tubers were already being cultivated in New Zealand and in the South Pacific Islands. Paleontological evidence suggests that by AD 400, potato tubers had reached eastern Polynesia, and by AD 1300, sweet potatoes were being cultivated in New Zealand. From Polynesia, the tubers traveled northward into Asia, reaching China and Japan, where they became dietary staples. Although no clear evidence has yet definitively proved how the tubers first arrived in Polynesia, many paleontologists believe the sweet potato most likely traveled across the South Pacific as tubers attached to a driftwood log, or as seed capsules that floated. Remember that at Thanksgiving dinner.
Driftwood connoisseur Lonnie Rose.
The Chilean Blob
Organic flotsam, as we have come to learn close-up, comes in all species. Los Muermos, Chile, in 2003, received a frightening visitor to its shores. The washed-up thirteen-ton blob of amorphous tissue contained no bones or scales or armor of any sort, and while marine biologists scratched their heads in wonder, some locals speculated the thing from the sea was a giant octopus.
When scientists studied the tissue and found sperm whale DNA and dermal glands, the giant-octopus-monster buzz suffered a blow, though it didn’t die out. Then biologists checked some preserved samples of other sea monsters that had washed up in other locales, including the Giant Octopus of St. Augustine, Florida, circa 1896; the Tasmanian West Coast Monster, circa 1960; the Bermudan Blob, circa 1992; the Nantucket Blob, 1996; and finally, Bermuda Blob 2, in 1997.
Test results confirmed all these monstrous sci-fi gooey gobs of flotsam were, in reality, ballena restos, or, in French, vestige baleine, or, in Swahili, nyangumi vipinda; in any case, more than whale yack but less than Moby Dick. Translation: whale remains.
The Drifters
We already know that Cro-Magnon man wore shell jewelry. Now it comes to light that at least for the past thousand years, Native Americans have made necklaces from seedpod flotsam. Especially along tropical coastlines and subtropical beaches, exotic seedpods wash in off the tides. In 1894, Garden and Forest magazine published an article by C. H. Coe, a collector of sea beans on Florida’s beaches. Although sea beans had for centuries, possibly millennia, been put to sundry uses by humankind, Coe’s article, which focused on how to polish sea beans, is the first recorded literature in the United States.
Sea beans are seedpods of tropical plants, woody vines, and trees. The sea bean’s exterior pod or outer seed coat is virtually waterproof. Inside, an air pocket, often supporting a fertile kernel, gives the pod buoyancy, making it a great candidate for bobbing along on ocean swells and currents. A legend from the Azores says Columbus, while searching for the West Indies, learned of seedpods washing ashore on the Azores. Specifically, Columbus learned of a heart-shaped, mahogany-colored pod now named Fava de Colom and commonly called the sea heart because of its vaguely heartlike shape and its deep mahogany-red shade. Columbus, according to this legend, had seen sea hearts in Europe, where the pods were fashioned into snuff boxes. The pods had washed up onto European beaches off the North Atlantic Current. Some collectors refer to this sea bean as a kidney bean, which begs the anatomical question, “Which is the more accurate description of its shape?” I vote for heart, but then I’ve never autopsied anything owning a heart and a kidney. The sea heart comes from Entada gigas, a woody vine that grows in America’s tropical climes. This humble bean had navigated the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream before entering the North American Current. Columbus also identified at least one species of bamboo in the West Indies, which he erroneously thought must have come from the East Indies. Although he got the land mass wrong, Columbus nevertheless understood ocean currents, thanks to such arcane clues as the floating adventures of tropical seedpods. If flotsam can help an explorer navigate alien waters, it must be worth something.
In fact, sea beans of many varieties had been traveling ocean currents for thousands of years, journeying both north and south from their native soil. The northward drifters often float as far as Western Europe before beaching on the shores of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; some few travel even farther north to the Netherlands and Norway. Originating in the Amazon rain forests and on the beaches of the American tropics, the seedpods are washed by rains and tides into the Gulf Stream current.
Their tough outer coats survive thousand of miles of saltwater drifting, though some with weaker exterior shells sink along the way. Once beached in a northern temperate climate, the beans might sprout, but will soon die from the cold temperatures. Scottish folklore tells the story of the Mary bean, actually a washed up morning glory seed, which was used in Scotland to ensure safe childbirth. The woman delivering held the bean while her midwife chanted a Gaelic verse. In Norway, women fought labor pains by sipping a brew of tea or ale, from a cup made of sea heart skin.
Ed Perry IV, a Florida park ranger, and the late John V. Dennis, a botanist, biologist, ornithologist, and writer, studied sea beans for decades. Perry’s initial interest in sea beans and drift seeds came from his grandmother, Helen Wright Risler, who operated the Sea Bean Boutique in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Dennis, who passed away in 2002, and Perry were among the charter members of The Drifters, a seedpod squad that publishes an international sea-bean and drift-seed newsletter appropriately named The Drifting Seed. The Drifters soon initiated a dialogue among botanists, oceanographers, serious sea-bean collectors, and interested beachcombers that has developed into the International Sea Bean Symposium, an annual conference held in Florida aimed at discovering everything there is to know about these marvelous bits of flotsam.
