by Skye Moody
Time dragged in winter, and Victorian ladies of leisure needed something to do while their servants made up the moss beds. These upper-class damsels took up the art of moss pressing, flattening strands of sea moss between the pages of heavy books. Once dried, the pressed moss, resembling sea-scented lace, was pasted onto the ladies’ personal stationery, providing a fragrant frame for their most intimate correspondence. Idle fingers, after all, are the devil’s digits.
Which reminds me of my Scots great-grandmother. During the nineteenth century, sailors on long voyages whiled away boredom by creating valentines made from seashells, which, upon their return home, they presented to their true loves. One clever sailor figured out that by slicing a seashell it could be glued in flat cross sections into a shallow box, its crosscut design even more compelling than the uncut shell. Soon thereafter, the purple cowrie became the sailor’s valentine shell of choice; slicing reveals its sexy violet interior, a phallic column seeming to penetrate swollen virginal space, or for the more puritanical, a crosscut of male and female organs united in the procreative position. Very suggestive, very Victorian. And my long-in-the-tooth great-grandmother Nell had one of these sailor’s valentines on her bedside table.
The White Bullock of Bombay
The following flotsam tale fascinated me the first time I read it, the more so because had things gone differently, I would not exist. Captain Alfred J. Green, Master Mariner and skipper of numerous British sailing ships—also my greatgrandfather—writes in his ship log of a murder mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes, involving a floating corpse:
“One lazy Sunday morning in 1870, while second mate, I was being rowed ashore from the ship which was lying well offshore in Bombay harbor. I was reading a book, glancing up now and then to steer clear of the harbor traffic for I was the tiller in the stern sheets. One of these intermittent surveys of the harbor revealed something white, a point or two off the bow, and I eased the tiller a bit to bring us closer to it. A white bullock, thought I, one of hundreds of such beasts that each year are dumped into the harbor. But as we drew closer, I saw that it was not a white bullock, but a human body wrapped in a counterpane with feet and neck tied securely with sennit. A weight had been attached but the sennit had given way and the body had floated to the surface trailing the open noose that had been attached to the weight. A long tear in the shroud gave a glimpse of an officer’s sleeve, showing that the murdered man was a second mate. At my command, the apprentice in the bow had taken up the boat hook to fend off this loathsome thing, but being more enthusiastic than cautious, he plunged the boathook directly into the floating mass and with an outpouring of almost overwhelming gases the body slowly sank out of sight. The case was reported to the authorities ashore, who stated that a second officer from one of the ships had been reported missing some two weeks before, and that, undoubtedly, it was his body we had sent back to the bottom of the harbor.
“The entire incident was forgotten during the next seven hectic weeks of docking, unloading, awaiting a cargo, loading and finally rounding up a crew and sailing. We were bound for Hong Kong, and after an eventual passage down the Indian West Coast, we crossed the gusty Gulf of Monar, and rounding Ceylon started our long trek across the Indian Ocean. Dondra Head was barely out of sight when the first intimation of trouble came. I had left the poop at two bells in the midwatch to go forward and find out why the fo’c’sle head lookout had not answered the bells. No cry of ‘all’s well’ had drifted aft, and remembering that the lookout had been a big six foot four brute of the surly, troublemaking type, I was filled, to say the least, with some apprehension and an almost certain knowledge of what I would find. I was dead right. There on the fo’c’sle head, his head resting on a coil of rope and a tarpaulin pulled up to his neck for a blanket, was our lookout snoring stentoriously. I quickly went aft to my cabin, where I procured my revolver, and calling two of the watch who were in the waist and telling them each to draw a bucket of water from the harness cask, we made our way to where our friend lay sleeping. I gave my orders. As I tore off the tarpaulin, two buckets of stinking, salt-pork tainted water were doused full into the face of the giant. With a bellow of rage, the sputtering, gasping sailor jumped to his feet to be met by the glint of a leveled revolver which, while it held back his body, did not put a leash upon the volley of profanity that came spewing out of the man’s very soul: ‘You damned little—you—I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do, and you won’t be the first whippersnapper of a second mate that has felt my hands on his throat.’ Something clicked in my mind. ‘That’s right,’ I said, desperately trying to speak quietly, ‘and the last wasn’t many weeks ago, was it—when you wrapped your victim in a white counterpane and tied his face and neck with sennit! Not cord or spun yarn, but sennit! Sennit that didn’t hold for very long the weight you had tied to the body before you threw him into Bombay Harbor.’
“It was a shot in the dark but the man’s next words proved to the three of us listening that the shaft had driven home: ‘How the hell did you know—who told you—you—.’
“Second Mate Green ordered the sailor below and went aft to lay the story before the ship’s captain. The skipper, a genial, fatherly old man, always saw the best in everyone, and inwardly cringed from violence of any description.
“‘Now, Mr. Green,’ he commenced, ‘we mustn’t be hasty in this—the fellow is probably scared stiff, and we’ll report him to the authorities in Hong Kong. We’re shorthanded and need every man aboard, so let’s forget it for awhile.’
“Three or four weeks passed with the sailor proving quiet and obedient. Then, in the Straits of Malacca, less than a mile from Sumatra’s jungle-clad cliffs, the sailor made his move. Second Mate Green was standing on the poop deck by the wheel, scanning the shoreline through binoculars, when something tore the cap from my head, striking my shoulders at the same instant, and I spun around to see a marlin spike quivering in the oak planking at my feet. Four inches—even two inches—closer and I would have been instantly killed. I looked aloft to see the giant of a man on the yard directly overhead, while at the same instant, the captain, who had witnessed the whole thing, roared out to the mate just appearing on deck to, ‘Clap that man in irons! The scoundrel! Clap him in irons, I say!’
“But the killer sailor had no intention of spending the rest of the cruise in irons. As they neared the Sumatran shore, the sailor managed to jump, feet first, overboard. He surfaced, and struck out for the beach. While the skipper and a mate rushed to the cabins to get their guns, the others watched in horror as a dorsal fin appeared, fast approaching the swimming man. A second later, with a scream heard even by the Captain in his cabin, the shark struck, and the swimmer was jerked beneath the surface. He never reappeared.”
IV. FLOTSAM SCIENCE
According to Norse mythology, a salt mill is grinding away somewhere at the bottom of the sea, ... which explains why the sea is salty. The discovery in the 1970s of hydrothermal vents that emit vast amounts of minerals into the sea suggests we would do well to re-examine our myths and legends.
DR. C.
Oceansonline
Flotsam Density
Only a true flotsamist appreciates the fascinating floating qualities of what washes up on ocean beaches. The laws of density sound simple: What is heavier than the water it displaces will sink, and what is lighter than the water it displaces will float. But as the seahorse that floats somewhere between the water’s surface and the seafloor so aptly demonstrates, variables matter. And density is everything.
Lava lamps taught a generation of Americans about density. Seawater has a density of 1.03 grams per milliliter. What sinks in freshwater with its 1.00 gram per milliliter density may float on seawater. Ice, with a density of 0.92 grams per milliliter, floats on both freshwater and seawater. Wood lighter than the amount of seawater it displaces will float, sometimes for thousands of miles without sinking. Objects placed into seawater will find their own level depending on their densities and volumes. T
he old Ivory Soap maxim, “It floats,” was explained by the product’s “99.44 percent pure” quality. The remaining 0.56 percent is air whipped into the soap ingredients to make the soap bar less dense than freshwater.
Spheres float, up to a point, depending on the volume of material in relation to diameter. An object denser than the water it’s placed into will sink, either suspending in the water or, if dense enough, sinking to the bottom.
Flotsam can float temporarily, as in the case of a human corpse on seawater before its lungs fill with water and its density gradually increases until it finally sinks. But, as the White Bullock of Bombay illustrated, as the decomposing body fills with gases, it rises to float once again on the surface. Or flotsam can float indefinitely, as in the case of any object that is both lighter than seawater and impermeable (such as one made of plastic) or whose density even when suffused with seawater is still less dense than the water it floats in. Driftwood, displacing relatively small volumes of water, will float, as will a ship’s hull until it capsizes and fills with seawater, thus reclaiming nearly all the volume of water it had displaced. Then the ship sinks.
This reminds me of a recent mocking held on my behalf by four men of the sea who shall remain anonymous. I happened to mention that I’d found this deeply rusted wrought-iron terrace table washed up on the beach and they burst into pealing laughter. I recall the most seafaring of the three actually teared up. “What do you know?” he taunted me. “That table was definitely tossed over the bulkhead by some guy living above the beach.” “But it had seaweed on it,” I said. “And the rust ...” He wouldn’t let me finish. The four mariners laughed and said I had a lot to learn about flotsam and jetsam. I said, “What about lagan? Can we talk about lagan?” But they weren’t listening. A more important subject had arisen, baseball, as I recall. We were crammed into a car at the time, and I was crushed between two of these gorgeous hunks in the backseat—can’t complain about that part. I felt my face turn hot, and though I didn’t pursue the lagan angle with them, I later returned to the beach to fetch the evidence, but it was gone—apparently the fellow living on the bulkhead had retrieved it.
A wrought-iron coffee table, because of the density of the iron frame, will sink. So then, why did I find one washed up on the beach? Certainly, it might have been chucked over the bulkhead from land. But the iron was, as I said, deeply rusted and seaweed-coated. Furthermore, I had walked this beach the previous day and the table wasn’t on the tide line. When I discovered the table, it lay exactly along the high tide line.
Powerful undercurrents can shove heavy objects upward, and for a time they become flotsam, then sink again, often tumbling along the ocean floor until they make landfall. Once again: Jetsam can become lagan and then become flotsam, then lagan again, until a forceful current lifts it into a cresting wave headed for shore. I feel better now.
Currents, Whorls, and Gyres
Flotsamists around the world know that ocean currents are at the bottom of what the tide brings in. At the risk of spoiling the magic and romance of beachcombing—though it hasn’t for me or any other devoted flotsamist—knowledge of the oceans and familiarity with ocean currents has helped serious flotsam collectors locate the best stuff that incoming tides toss up onto beaches. Those who prefer clinging to romantic legends or mystical theories about serendipitous appearances of bottles with messages inside, or prophetic messages nature carved just for you into a certain length of driftwood, may prefer to skip this section altogether. But if you can abide statistics and hang onto your romantic beachcomber genes, herewith the basic science behind the flotsam, and if you make it to the very end, you’ll be rewarded with a true flotsamist’s approach to beachcombing.
As we have seen, botanists and biologists have for centuries believed certain plants and animals migrated across entire oceans clinging to drifting tree limbs. This may be true in the case of Fiji’s crested iguana, which apparently washed up on a South American beach eons ago. The potato, according to some accounts, traveled on driftwood from Peru to Polynesia even before the Spanish conquistadors brought it by ship to Europe. These accidental voyages have long fascinated oceanographers, especially those studying ocean currents. For decades, oceanographers have thrown bottles with notes inside into the sea, the notes asking the finder to reply. Drift bottles proved a boon to oceanographers, helping them develop mathematical models of winds, currents, and weather patterns. But drift bottles, though still used today, were eventually improved upon; floating cards—drift cards—proved more practical, as did the concept of tracking ships’ cargo accidentally jettisoned into the oceans during storms. When computer technology entered the world of oceanography, it revolutionized the study of ocean currents, and the man responsible for changing the way we think about the oceans and their flotsam was oceanographer W. James Ingraham Jr., who developed the Ocean Surface Currents Simulation (OSCURS) computer model.
Jim Ingraham borrowed a computer model previously applied only to fishing and created OSCURS. Ingraham had long been fascinated with the science of tracking ocean currents, vital to the fishing industry, to overseas transport, and to sailing—even to aircraft flying over some parts of oceans during climate shifts. Because ocean currents can vary greatly from one year to the next, drift bottles and drift cards and where they are retrieved can explain unusual activity in currents. Like people, ocean currents shift position now and then. A shift in an ocean current can make a critical difference in predicting weather patterns such as El Niño and La Niña and in locating anything that moves partly at the whim of the currents, such as derelict vessels, lost sailors, marine mammals, schools of fish, downed weather balloons.
Ingraham’s OSCURS technology is able to simulate wind-driven currents rippling across the ocean’s surface. Using mathematical equations combining the influence of large-scale, relatively stable currents with the influence of surface currents measured in daily wind variations, and at times using the science of hindsighting, OSCURS can predict movement in the upper layers of the ocean surface, whether it’s moving water or a moving target like a drift bottle or a little pink plastic propeller.
Teaming up with his University of Washington colleague Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer, Ingraham set about tracking flotsam as a way of understanding ocean currents, including the giant circular currents known as gyres. Since no single organization routinely monitored shifting currents, Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer soon established a reputation as experts in the field. The formula may seem simple: winds + flotsam + point of departure + point of retrieval, factored by the direction of average ocean currents = present path of current. They had learned from years of experience that as the distance of the release site from the shore increases, the number of bottles (or whatever was jettisoned into the ocean) recovered onshore decreases. For example, when drift bottles are released within a few miles from shore, about half of them will be recovered. If the release site is hundreds of miles out, the recovery rate can drop to as low as 10 percent. Drift-bottle studies have released as many as 150,000 bottles, although most drift studies involve much smaller numbers. Simple enough to do, but costly, and tedious.
Meanwhile, cargo vessels across the globe caught in violent storms were accidentally jettisoning tons of floating objects into the oceans. One day, according to Ingraham, Curt Ebbesmeyer’s mother, Genevieve, was reading the newspaper and saw an article about flotsam washing ashore. She said to Curt, “You should study this stuff.”
“That’s what I do,” Curt replied.
“I’m not talking about what you put into the ocean,” Genevieve said. “I mean, why don’t you study the flotsam that’s already there?”
From that day, according to Ingraham, the two men began tracking ocean flotsam around the globe, including ships’ cargo lost during violent storms. Both oceanographers are now retired, although Ebbesmeyer publishes the quarterly newsletter Beachcombers’ Alert! out of Seattle and has subscribers around the globe who report on what they’ve found washed up. A disciple of Tadashi Ish
ii, the Japanese flotsam expert who wrote the definitive Encyclopedia of Flotsam. Ebbesmeyer is less eccentric than Ishii and tends to focus on the more scientific aspects of flotsam, contributing valuable data to the field of oceanography. At the same time, his folksy newsletter reaches out to even the most amateur beachcomber.
The Great Garbage Patch
Marine environmental researcher Charles Moore might begin his explanation of ocean gyres by comparing them to toilets in which the water constantly whirls but never flushes. Or, he might use the more tactful “gentle maelstrom.” He should know. He has spent more time than any living human inside the gyres, researching them and all they contain.
Captain Moore was sailing home to Southern California from Hawaii after taking third place in the 1997 Trans-pacific yacht race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. At the helm of Alguita, his cutter-rigged ocean research vessel, Moore usually sought to avoid the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an area of ocean approximately the size of Africa, about 10 million square miles slowly swirling beneath an undulating high-pressure air system. Centered slightly north of the Transpac racecourse, halfway between Hawaii and the mainland’s West Coast, the North Pacific subtropical gyre has about as much wind power over it as a baby’s breath.
