by Skye Moody
And they are marvelous: One glance at the pages of Sea-Beans from the Tropics, a book by Perry and Dennis, may hook a beachcomber into collecting these often colorful, sometimes striped or grooved, seedpods. I’ve seen collectors wearing sea-bean necklaces that would absolutely pop from the pages of Vogue magazine, and a revival in sea-bean jewelry hit the summer 2005 fashion runways. Seedpod jewelry is now hawked by street vendors, and my supermarket sells seedpods by the pound to use in flower arranging. Of course, these are harvested at the sourec, not off tide lines.
Atlantic beaches along North and Central America collect thousands of sea beans annually, often found in sargassum weed and floating marine life wrack that the outgoing tides leave behind. Perry and Dennis say nearly two hundred sea-bean species have washed up so far on Florida’s beaches, perhaps the world’s finest sea-bean collection beaches.
A number of factors affect where and when these tropical gems will wash up. In the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream, the world’s strongest current, feeds into the North Atlantic Drift, which carries sea beans from as far south as the Amazon to as far north as Scandinavia. Weather also plays a role; hurricanes in particular can shoot the sea beans off into other surface currents, sending them on a less predictable odyssey than if they remained in the Gulf Stream.
The Drifters of Florida remember fondly the legendary “queen of sea beans,” Cathie Katz. Katz, who grew up in Holland, was in her last years a resident of Melbourne Beach, Florida, was founder and editor of The Drifting Seed, a founder of the International Sea Bean Symposium, and author of several volumes in the Florida Nature series. Katz was known for being the sole beachcomber brave enough and impassioned enough to set out along the beach during a hurricane looking for sea beans and other flotsam. Having combed beaches in Holland, Spain, Portugal, and New Jersey, Katz often said that Florida’s beaches far exceeded any of those beaches in flotsam yield.
A side note on Katz’s flotsaming: She once found a plastic-wrapped package washed up; inside were identification papers belonging to a Cuban man, including his driver’s license and birth certificate. They had washed ashore during the 1994 Cuban exodus. A year later Katz tracked the man down in Miami and returned the papers to him, relieved to learn he had survived his voyage. Katz also found a porcelain Portuguese fishing float the size of a bowling ball—virtually unheard of in today’s era of proliferating plastic fish-net floats.
But can exotic seedpods germinate once on foreign soil? Although seedpods venturing far north into Scandinavia and the British Isles cannot germinate in those cooler climates, Ed Perry in Florida has managed to sprout a brown hamburger bean and has grown it to maturity. The plant has already produced little hamburgers of its own. Because sea beans are still one of botany’s least-studied subjects, Perry believes Florida’s Brevard beaches receive drifting seeds from plants as yet unknown to botanists.
Sea beans also float across the Pacific Ocean from Southeast Asia. They’ve been found on Pacific Northwest Coast beaches. Some are still able to sprout, although the vines they produce will not withstand frost. Hamburger beans, which resemble Big Macs, have turned up on Washington State beaches. The hamburger bean contains L-dopamine, a natural form of the chemical sometimes used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
Velella velella: Flotsam’s Harbinger
The first time I consciously encountered Velella velella, I fell to my knees on the tide line and gave my heart to its translucent blue sail as the curious jelly tacked in the shallows and then beached on the sand. I did not know then how critically Velella velella influences a seasoned flotsamist’s harvesting habits. Since then I’ve learned that when an aggregation of Velella velella washes up, flotsam’s on its way. But upon my first encounter, all I saw was its incandescent beauty and its ingeneous design. This remarkable gelatinous hydrozoa with its own sail and the ability to tack is commonly called a By-the-Wind Sailor. No wonder I fell in love at first sight.
The bright, transparent navy-blue animal is an enchanting combination of cartilagelike skeleton and gas-filled pockets. Oval-shaped, about four inches in diameter and two inches high at the vertical triangular crest set diagonally across the top, By-the-Wind Sailors ride warm water currents.
Adrift on open temperate seas, By-the-Wind-Sailors are social to the extreme, voyaging in aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals. The jelly itself is comprised of a colony of zooids, including gastrozooids and gonozooids. The gastrozooids feed on fish eggs, shrimp eggs, and planktons, while the gonozooids perform the reproductive duties, ejecting tiny medusa.
When driven ashore en masse, sometimes in mile-long flotillas, they form great mounds of blue gelatinous goo, and—there’s always a catch to love at first sight—in death emit a ghastly odor detectable half a mile inland.
Some By-the-Winds tack to the right while others tack leftward. Both types apparently mix together in the central oceans, and I rather doubt that any sort of leftward discrimination exists in their world. But when a strong wind whips up the waters, the jellies tack toward one shore or the other, depending on their bent. Along American Atlantic coastlines, the beached jellies are usually lefties, and strong seasonal winds blow them northwesterly toward shore, while on American Pacific coastlines, By-the-Winds tend to tack to the right as prevailing northerlies keep them offshore, until spring and summer, when strong southerly or westerly winds send them tacking to the beach en masse.
By-the-Winds usually mark the imminent arrival of glass floats and other wonderful things washing in on the tides. That’s because Velella velella is driven ashore by storms—the same storms that rake the central oceans of their floating debris and send it careening toward landfall.
II. ADRIFT AT SEA
My love, alas, I’m lost at sea
And sinking fast.
In my hand your photograph
Accompanies me in Neptune’s bath.
ANONYMOUS
A Brief History of Bottled Romance, Adventure, Research, and Heartbreak
One summer morning on the beach at Green Acres, Maury Island, I was just beginning my scan of the fresh tide line when I heard my brother call my name. I was four years old, and Rob, who was five, ran faster than I, and therefore had already covered most of the washed-up flotsam during our first beachcomb of the day. When he called out, I did a lickety-split and found him crouching down at water’s edge, clutching a glass bottle. “Let me see,” I said. He responded typically by hiding the bottle from me. If he wasn’t going to show it to me, why had he bothered to call me over? Any older brother or younger sister knows why. It wasn’t until he’d gone off like a dog with a bone into the driftwood canyons where he knew I would not dare disturb his privacy that I realized he’d found a message in a bottle. That, or a full bottle of Miller High Life. In those days I ran with the maxim that the sea washes up only one great treasure per tide, and today, at least, Rob had scored.
When he emerged from the driftwood, holding the bottle aloft, I knew he’d hit pay dirt. All flotsamists are braggarts and competitive to within an inch of murder. Rob’s message in a bottle came from somewhere far away, as I recall, traveling several years before washing up on this beach in Puget Sound. I remember the message included a return address, and my brother wrote and mailed a reply and then received a letter back. That’s all I remember about the message in the bottle, except that its author was a grown-up, not very interesting, and therefore forgettable.
It’s been said that the sea can destroy great ships but even a hurricane can’t stop a bottle with a message inside. Actually, I made that up; it just sounds proverbial. Part science, part romance, the saying holds truth. Because of its floatability, a bottle can travel thousands of miles without sinking. Because of its durability, it withstands the ravages of decades traveling in saltwater. The mere mention of a message in a bottle triggers poignant romantic visions of sailors lost at sea, of shipwreck survivors cast adrift, of lonely mariners trapped in the doldrums. Inevitably, a bottle with a message inside plucked from t
he sea or off an ocean beach results in someone’s heartache or rejoicing. Women who believed their sailor husbands were lost at sea have been startled when the bearer of a bottled message suddenly appears at the front door, the message announcing the long-gone salty dog is alive as a newborn snake.
Rulers of great nations have ordered their naval officers to record their locations and battle plans on notepaper, tuck it inside bottles, and trust the sealed bottles to ocean currents. Often as not the strategy failed; the bottle stoppers leaked or the bottles washed up against remote boulders and smashed to smithereens, the vital information set adrift to eventually decompose or sink. Battles were won or lost depending on messages in bottles. Yet the first recorded use of messages in bottles placed into the sea is a tale of scientific strategy aborning. In 310 BC, Greek philosopher Theophrastus, aiming to prove the Mediterranean Sea was formed by inflow from the Atlantic Ocean, tucked messages inside bottles, which he tossed into the Mediterranean. Historians generally agree Theophrastus received no replies, yet history isn’t always accurate, nor thorough. I prefer to think the bottles washed up on distant shores and their finders, unable to read Greek, simply recycled the bottles for olive oil.
Legends abound of lonesome sailors trusting their lovelorn letters to the sea, of stranded mariners on derelict vessels lofting desperate SOS pleas in bottles, and even last-ditch survivors of shipwrecks who jettisoned their own grim epitaphs before their ships went down, reporting the tragic news. In Christopher Columbus’s ship log, the fifteenth-century explorer on his return from discovering the New World recounts that one of his three ships, La Niña, which was carrying him back to Spain, was caught at sea in a great storm over the Atlantic, and was in danger of sinking. In a brief document, Columbus reported his discovery of this new land and sealed the document inside a small cask, along with a note requesting that the cask’s finder deliver the news to Queen Isabella of Spain. He then tossed the cask adrift on the stormy Atlantic. But La Niña didn’t sink and Columbus returned safely to Spain with his ship’s log and tales of the New World. What happened to the message in the little cask is unknown, but the lesson of the tale is that Columbus in the fifteenth century understood the circular pattern of the ocean’s currents and knew chances were good that his message would drift eastward, eventually washing up on a European shore.
Reacting to a report that a Dover boatman had found a message in a bottle and had opened the bottle and read the message inside, an appalled Queen Elizabeth I, in the sixteenth century, appointed an Uncorker of Ocean Bottles and made it a capital offense for anyone but government officials to open such a message. The queen hoped the harsh penalty would protect strategic messages in bottles sent by British fleets at war, a military communication practice that continued for centuries. Ignorance was no excuse for breaking the law, and even the Dover boatman’s cries of “Who knew?” didn’t save him from the gallows.
In 1784, Japanese treasure hunter Chunosuke Matsuyama and his crew of forty-four stranded on a coral reef in the South Pacific. Without fresh water or food, the desperate captain carved an SOS into a piece of wood, sealed the message in a bottle, and lobbed it into the sea. One hundred and fifty years later, in 1935, the bottle was found on a beach of the seaside village where Matsuyama was born. The Japanese treasure hunter and his crew presumably starved to death long before the SOS washed up; still, you can’t beat that bottle’s dead reckoning.
America’s favorite renaissance man, Benjamin Franklin, found a way to speed the mail by experimenting with messages in bottles. Appointed postmaster general for the American colonies in 1737, Franklin noted that the postal department was painfully short on navigation charts. He decided to create an updated and accurate chart for navigating the Atlantic between North America and Europe. At the time, the postal department hired whaler captains to command the colonies’ mail ships sailing to England because whalers understood the ocean currents better than other sailors, and so their ships made it to England much faster than the British mail packets heading to America. Franklin, inveterate collector of useful information, had bottles dropped into the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream, with messages inside asking the bottles’ finders to contact him. Eventually some of the messages were returned. Franklin then combined the whalers’ knowledge of currents with the information he gleaned from movement of the bottles to create a chart on Atlantic currents—charts so accurate that they are today essentially unchanged.
In 1861 a message in a bottle was plucked off a beach on the eastern side of Grand Turk Island. The message inside the bottle read, “H.M. Sloop Ringdove 25th November 1859 Lat 26.21 Long 18.7 by observation. This paper was thrown overboard at noon on the above day having just entered the North East trades. Force wind 3, along Northwesterly swell. Barometer 30.43, Thermometer 75, seawater 73. R. G. Cragie Commander.” An accompanying note asked the finder to forward the information to the British Admiralty, suggesting that the British Navy continued using the Elizabethan method of messages in bottles to convey official information.
In 1875 the captain of the Canadian barque Lennie and his officers were murdered by mutinous sailors. Thinking ahead, the mutineers spared the steward, who was able to navigate. The steward then steered the Lennie toward France, telling his captors that they were headed for Spain. Meanwhile, the steward furtively lobbed several SOS messages in bottles, including a description of the Lennie and its calculated bearings. One of the bottles was picked up and delivered to French authorities, who sent a rescue vessel. The mutinous sailors were arrested and the steward told his story.
On April 20, 1894, Ralph Rogers, a passenger aboard the Marion Lightbody, became homesick for Scotland. As the ship sailed off Cape Verde, Rogers decided to write a letter to his sister, Marion, and send it to her via the Neptune’s post. Rogers wrote, “Ship Marion Lightbody, Lat 25 degrees 2’ N, Long 23 degrees 15’ W, 20th April 1894, All well on board, R C Roger,” with the postscript, “Finder please send this to Miss M Rogers, Lancaster Terrace, Kelvinside Glasgow Scotland.”
On January 16, 1896, in Glasgow, Marion Rogers received her brother’s handwritten letter along with a note: “Grand Turk 29th Dec 1895 Miss M Rogers, As requested by the writer that the person that finds this would please forward it to you. I have undertaken to do so and hope you will receive it quite safe. I found it on the 28th Dec. Yours respectfully, Albert T Wynns, Grand Turk, Turks Island, West Indies.”
One of Glasgow’s newspapers covered Marion Rogers receiving her brother’s message from Wynns, the braggy reporter commenting, “I can see from the map that the bottle fell within the ‘sphere of influence’ of the North Atlantic current, which after flowing southwards along the coast of Africa for hundreds of miles turns sharply to the west at Cape Verde, sweeps across the Atlantic and spends itself amongst the northern West India islands of which Grand Turk may be reckoned as the avant garde. With the chart of oceanic currents before my eyes, I might have predicted the destiny of this bottle, after a course of three thousand miles, with almost absolute exactness. It took 619 days to accomplish the passage, so it would appear that Neptune’s post is somewhat slow. ...”
No message, but seal intact on this washed up bottle of Chateauneuf-du-pape. Vintage uncertain.
Toward the fin de siecle, Matthew Fontaine Maury imitated Ben Franklin’s messages-in-bottles strategy to create U.S. Navy navigational charts, and the pre-casino Prince Albert of Monaco dropped bottled queries into the Atlantic in an effort to study Gulf Stream currents as they approached Europe. The method resulted in the prince’s discovery that the Gulf Stream divides in the northeastern Atlantic, with one current, the North Atlantic drift, branching toward Great Britain and Ireland while the other current, the Azores Current, runs south along Spain and Africa before heading west again. Albert’s discovery aided the Allies during World War I. Using his splitting Gulf Stream theory, military officials were able to predict the travel patterns and landing sites of explosive mines the enemy had set adrift, and thus locate and disarm them bef
ore they exploded.
Marine science still employs the message-in-bottle strategy. Combining the use of drift cards—floating cards that are more practical than bottles—with satellite imaging and computer technology, oceanographers are able to predict with considerable accuracy where and when an object thrust into the ocean will wash up. But nature often intervenes, surprising scientists with sudden changes in wind direction, rogue waves, or other natural trickery that sends drift cards headed for, say, West Africa to end up in Nicaragua, or even to disappear from satellite tracking altogether, perhaps showing up one sunny winter afternoon off the coast of Sicily. Stranger things have occurred. Take, for example, the legendary Flying Dutchman.
Launched in 1929 into the southern Indian Ocean by a German marine science expedition, a bottle that was nicknamed Flying Dutchman contained a message that could be read without breaking the bottle. The finder was asked to report, via ground postal services, where the bottle was found and then toss it back into the sea. Because travel time depends on winds and currents, such a bottle might languish in a becalmed sea or it might catch a swift-moving current like the North Atlantic Gulf Stream, where it could drift up to four knots, possibly covering a hundred miles in a single day.
The Flying Dutchman soon slipped into an eastward current that carried it to the tip of South America, where it was found and reported and then lobbed back into the ocean numerous times. Eventually the Flying Dutchman made it back into the Indian Ocean and passed near the spot where it had originally been jettisoned. Traveling still longer, it finally came ashore on Australia’s west coast in 1935. When it landed for the last time, the Flying Dutchman, according to calculations based on its finders’ reports, had traveled sixteen thousand miles in 2,447 days (slightly more than six and a half years), traveling approximately six nautical miles a day.
