Waterland

by Graham Swift

  OF WHICH the specimen placed by Freddie Parr in Mary’s knickers in July, 1940, was a healthy representative of the only, if abundant, freshwater species of Europe – namely Anguilla anguilla, the European Eel.

  Now there is much that the eel can tell us about curiosity – rather more indeed than curiosity can inform us of the eel. Does it surprise you to know that only as recently as the nineteen-twenties was it discovered how baby eels are born and that throughout history controversy has raged about the still obscure life cycle of this snake-like, fish-like, highly edible, not to say phallically suggestive creature.

  The Egyptians knew it, the Greeks knew it, the Romans knew it and prized its flesh; but none of these ingenious peoples could discover where the eel kept its reproductive organs, if indeed it had any, and no one could find (and no one ever will) in all the waters where the European Eel dwells, from the North Cape to the Nile, an eel bearing ripe milt.

  Curiosity could not neglect this enigma. Aristotle maintained that the eel was indeed a sexless creature and that its offspring were brought forth by spontaneous generation out of mud. Pliny affirmed that when constrained by the urge to procreate, the eel rubbed itself against rocks and the young were formed from the shreds of skin thus detached. And amongst other explanations of the birth of this apparently ill-equipped species were that it sprang from putrefying matter; that it emerged from the gills of other fishes; that it was hatched from horses’ hairs dropped in water; that it issued from the cool, sweet dews of May mornings; not to mention that peculiar tradition of our own Fenland, that eels are none other than the multiplied mutations of one-time sinful monks and priests, whom St Dunstan, in a holy and miraculous rage, consigned to eternal, slithery penance, thus giving to the cathedral city of the Fens its name: Ely – the eely place.

  In the eighteenth century the great Linnaeus, who was no amateur, declared that the eel was viviparous, that is to say, its eggs were fertilized internally and its young were brought forth alive – a theory exploded (though never abandoned by Linnaeus) when Francesco Redi of Pisa clearly showed that what had been taken for young eelings in the adult’s womb were no more than parasitic worms.

  Womb? What womb? It was not until 1777 that one Carlo Mondini claimed to have located the minuscule organs that were, indeed, the eel’s ovaries. A discovery which raised doubts in the mind of his countryman Spallanzani (a supporter of Redi contra Linnaeus) who asked the simple yet awkward question: if these were the ovaries then where were the eggs? And thus – after much refutation and counter-refutation and much hurling to and fro of scientific papers – it was not until 1850 that Mondini’s discovery was confirmed (long after the poor man’s death) by a Pole, Martin Rathke, who published in that year a definitive account of the female genitalia of Anguilla anguilla.

  Witness the strife, the entanglements, the consuming of energy, the tireless searching that curiosity engenders. Witness that while the Ancien Regime tottered, while Europe entered its Revolutionary phase and every generation or so came up with a new blueprint for the destiny of mankind, there were those whose own destinies were inseparably yoked to the origins of the eel.

  And yet in 1850, though the ovaries had been accounted for, the testes still remained a mystery – open to all claimants – and the obscure sex life of the eel still unilluminated. Obscure or otherwise, it must have been healthy, for, notwithstanding the universal ignorance as to their reproductive processes, large numbers of young eels continued every spring to mass at the mouths of their favoured rivers – the Nile, the Danube, the Po, the Elbe, the Rhine – and to ascend upstream, just as they had done in the days of perplexed old Aristotle and before. And it is worth mentioning that in that same year, 1850, though it can only be connected by the most occult reasoning with the researches of a Polish zoologist, the eel-fare, that is, the running of elvers or young eels upriver, on the English Great Ouse was on a notably large scale. Two and a half tons of elvers were caught in one day, the numerical equivalent of which can be estimated when it is considered that upwards of twelve thousand elvers go to make a pound in weight.

  In 1874, when you will recall there was much flooding of that same River Ouse and my great-grandfather became not only a father but Conservative Member for Gildsey, another Pole, Szymon Syrski, Professor at the University of Lemberg, made the long-delayed discovery of the eel’s testes – a breakthrough for which he received more recognition than Mondini. For these same tiny eel’s testes are sometimes known – no doubt at the cost of a certain jocularity – as Syrski’s organs. This, however, did not prevent, in the same year, Julius Münter, Director of the Zoological Museum of Greifswald, examining some three thousand eels, declaring that none of them were male and concluding that the species reproduced itself parthenogenetically – that is by immaculate conception.

  Yet, given those two vital and most complementary organs – the ovaries and the testes – when, where and by what method do they combine to do their work?

  We have not yet come to the most remarkable episode in this quasi-mythological quest for the genesis of the eel. It must be understood that in its natural habitat, the freshwaters and estuaries of Europe and North Africa, the eel assumes two distinct forms. For most of its adult life it is olive green to yellowish-brown and has a snub nose. But when it has lived for some years, its snout grows sharper, its eyes larger, its sides acquire a silvery sheen, its back becomes black and all these changes signal a journey back to the sea. Since this journey occurs in autumn and young elvers come upstream in spring, it is not unreasonable to infer that the latter are the offspring of the former and that spawning occurs in winter in coastal regions. Yet (to repeat) who has ever found a ripe female, let alone an eel’s egg or a newly hatched larval eel, in the inshore waters of Europe?

  In 1856 – after Rathke and before Syrski – in the warm currents of the Straits of Messina, there was caught one day a tiny fish, quite unlike an eel, which was claimed as a new genus. Forty years later a similar specimen, caught from the same Straits of Messina, was reared in captivity and demonstrated to be, despite its uneel-like form, none other than the larva of the European Eel. Yet if adult eels abounded in such vast numbers, why were their larvae such elusive rarities?

  It is time to introduce into the story the figure of Johannes Schmidt, Danish oceanographer and ichthyologist. Who has heard of Johannes Schmidt? It is said that modern times do not have their Sinbads and Jasons, let alone their Drakes and Magellans, that the days of great sea-quests went out with Cook. Johannes Schmidt is an exception. There are those who fashion history and those who contemplate it; there are those who make things happen and those who ask why. And amongst the latter there are those who regard the activities of the former as a mere impediment to their aims; who, indeed, consigning history to the background, turning their backs on its ephemeral compulsions, embark on the most fairy-tale searches after the timeless unknown. Such a man – such a votary of curiosity – was Johannes Schmidt.

  In 1904, when the European powers were scrambling for colonial loot, Johannes Schmidt set out to discover the breeding ground of the European Eel. He voyaged from Iceland to the Canary Islands, from North Africa to North America, in ships which, because of his inadequate funds, were ill-suited and ill-equipped. Catching his first specimen of larva west of the Faroes – the first recorded outside the Mediterranean – he proceeded to catch younger and younger specimens at various stations in the Atlantic. At the same time he examined and statistically classified large numbers of mature eels and was able to confirm – which had never been demonstrated before – that the European Eel was indeed one single homogeneous species, Anguilla anguilla as distinct from its close relative, the American Eel, Anguilla rostrata.

  From 1908 to 1910, while a crisis flared in Bosnia, Italy turned covetous eyes on Tripoli, and the British people, impatient with only four Dreadnoughts a year, began to chant ‘We want eight and we can’t wait’, Schmidt cruised the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, collecting eel larvae ev
en from such contentious waters as those off Morocco and around the excitable Balkans. He found that the larvae increased in size from west to east of the Mediterranean and concluded that the eels of the countries bordering the Mediterranean did not spawn in that sea but somewhere in the Atlantic. The larvae taken from the Atlantic, in almost all cases smaller than those from the Mediterranean, confirmed the hypothesis of an eastward migration of larvae and pointed to a breeding-ground in the western part of the ocean. Schmidt realized that to locate this elusive region it was necessary to hunt for still smaller larvae, plotting their position, until at length he would have inevitably closed in on the long-sought Birthplace of Eels.

  In 1911, when a German gunboat steamed into the port of Agadir and my grandfather, whose brewery had just burnt down, in extraordinary circumstances, was winding up his affairs to live in rumour-nurturing seclusion in Kessling Hall, Johannes Schmidt persuaded various shipowners with vessels on the transatlantic route to cooperate in the collection and classifying of larvae samples. No less than twenty-three ships were thus enlisted. Not content with this, Schmidt voyaged ceaselessly himself, in his schooner, the Margrethe, from the Azores to the Bermudas, from the Bermudas to the Caribbean.

  Alas, that curiosity must allow history its way. Alas, that Schmidt has no choice but to hold up his search, furl the sails of the Margrethe, and fret impatiently while the world embarks on a four-year bout of carnage. Alas, that from 1914 to 1918 it is not the origins of its own homogeneous species of eel that concerns Europe but the heterogeneous disposition of its national interests and armed forces. Alas, that it is not the presence in the Atlantic of minute eel larvae migrating dauntlessly eastwards which is uppermost in the minds of European seafarers, but rather the presence of German U-boats migrating westwards, out of Wilhelmshaven and the Kiel Canal.

  And yet it must be said that this catastrophic interval, to which such dread words as apocalypse, cataclysm, Armageddon have not unjustly been applied, does not interrupt the life cycle of the eel. In the spring the elvers still congregate in their millions at the mouth of the Po, the Danube, the Rhine and the Elbe, just as they did in Alexander’s day and Charlemagne’s. And even at the very epicentre of the slaughter, on the infamous Western Front itself, as one Henry Crick was able to vouch, they are not to be dissuaded. If eels, indeed, were born out of mud, here they should have teemed; if eels sprang from putrefying flesh, here should have been a bumper crop.

  Nor does this four-year intermission inhibit the determination, if it tries the patience, of Johannes Schmidt. For soon after its cessation, glad that history has got its business over, he once more takes to the seas. Once more he is scooping up eel larvae – this time in the Western Atlantic. And by the early twenties – so tirelessly has he worked – he is able to declare his findings; to affirm that, taking the area where the largest number of smallest larvae have been collected to correspond to the breeding territory of the eel, then this same, long unimagined, let alone undiscovered spawning ground is to be found between latitudes 20° and 30° North and longitudes 50° and 65° West – that is to say, in that mysterious region of floating weed known as the Sargasso Sea.

  So it was that when my father became keeper of the Atkinson Lock and began, as his forefather Cricks had done, to trap eels in the River Leem and its adjacent drains, human knowledge, after two thousand years and more of speculation, had only just assembled the facts which could have shown him where those eels came from. Not that he ever learnt, then or later, the truth of the matter. For what did he know, in his English Fens, about a Danish biologist? Yet assuredly, had he been informed on the subject, had he been told that those same eels he lifted from his traps had got there by way of a three- to four-thousand-mile journey from a strange marine region on the other side of the Atlantic, his eyes would have widened and his lips would have formed a distinct O.

  But that is not the end of the story of the eel. Curiosity begets counter-curiosity, knowledge begets scepticism. Even granted, say the doubters of Schmidt, that the larval eel makes its way three, four, or even five thousand miles to the haunts of its sires; even granted that the young elvers, undeterred by weirs, waterfalls and lock-gates, travel up rivers and even wriggle over land to reach ancestral ponds and streams, are we to believe that the adult eel, after years of life in freshwater or brackish shallows, is suddenly both compelled and enabled to undertake this journey once more in reverse, with the sole purpose of spawning before it dies? What evidence can Schmidt produce of adult eels travelling in a westerly direction in the mid-Atlantic? (Alas, Schmidt can produce virtually nothing.)

  Put the case that Schmidt is wrong in his conclusion that the European Eel is a peculiarly European species distinct from its American relative. Put the case that the differences between the so-called European Eel and the so-called American Eel are not genetic but physiological and determined by different environmental factors. Might it not then be possible that the European Eel, having separated itself by so many miles from its breeding ground, does indeed perish without progeny in continental waters, but its stocks are maintained by the American Eel (so-called) which is not faced with nearly such arduous distances? And that what determines that some eels will become denizens of the new world and some of the old is merely the exact point of spawning within the breeding-ground and the prevailing currents thus brought to bear?

  But why should nature have permitted such a wasteful mistake? Can Europe be the graveyard of orphaned and childless eels? Are the natural environments of America and Europe so different as to create a physiological contrast sufficiently pronounced to lead to speciological error? Can it be denied – for here centuries-old observation bears witness – that adult eels, adopting their silver costume, do indeed in the autumn take to the sea? And supposing, to offer a compromise, that these adult eels fail to reach Schmidt’s critical lines of longitude and latitude, might they not spawn and die somewhere, let us say, in the eastern or mid-Atlantic; and might not their eggs, given seasonal and climatic conditions, still drift, just as the seaweed drifts, towards the vortical Sargasso; so that that marine nursery, if not a breeding-ground, is still a hatching-ground?

  Curiosity will never be content. Even today, when we know so much, curiosity has not unravelled the riddle of the birth and sex life of the eel. Perhaps these are things, like many others, destined never to be learnt before the world comes to its end. Or perhaps – but here I speculate, here my own curiosity leads me by the nose – the world is so arranged that when all things are learnt, when curiosity is exhausted (so, long live curiosity), that is when the world shall have come to its end.

  But even if we learnt how, and what and where and when, will we ever know why? Why why?

  A question which never baulked an eel. Any more than the distance between Europe and longitude 50°. Any more than the appearance upon the scene of man with his unique possession of precisely that unremitting question Why, and with his capacity to find in the domain of the eel, in water, not only a means of transport and power and a source of food (including eels), but a looking-glass for his curious and reflective nature.

  For whether or not the silver-coated Anguilla anguilla ever reaches the Sargasso, whether it performs its nuptial rites there or before, none the less it is true that, just as the young eel is driven not only by marine currents but by an instinctual mechanism more mysterious, more impenetrable perhaps than the composition of the atom, to make for some particular watery dwelling thousands of miles from its place of birth, so the adult eel, moved by a force which outweighs vast distances and the crushing pressure of the ocean, is compelled to take again to the sea and, before it dies and leaves the world to its spawn, to return whence it came.

  How long have eels been doing this? They were doing it, repeating this old, epic story, long before Aristotle put it all down to mud. They were doing it when Pliny posited his rock-rubbing theory. And Linnaeus his viviparity theory. They were doing it when they stormed the Bastille and when Napoleon and Hitler conte
mplated the invasion of England. And they were still doing it, still accomplishing these vast atavistic circles when on a July day in 1940 Freddie Parr picked up out of a trap one of their number (which later escaped and lived perhaps to obey the call of the far Sargasso) and dropped it down Mary Metcalf’s navy blue knickers.

  27

  About Natural History

  WHAT is this – a biology lesson?

  No I prefer, in order to point a contrast, to call it Natural History.

  Which doesn’t go anywhere. Which cleaves to itself. Which perpetually travels back to where it came from.

  Children, there’s something which revolutionaries and prophets of new worlds and even humble champions of Progress (think of those Atkinsons and their poor living fossil of a Sarah) can’t abide. Natural history, human nature. Those weird and wonderful commodities, those unsolved mysteries of mysteries. Because just supposing – but don’t let the cat out of the bag – this natural stuff is always getting the better of the artificial stuff. Just supposing – but don’t whisper it too much abroad – this unfathomable stuff we’re made from, this stuff that we’re always coming back to – our love of life, children, our love of life – is more anarchic, more seditious than any Tennis-Court Oath ever was. That’s why these revolutions always have a whiff of the death-wish about them. That’s why there’s always a Terror waiting round the corner.

  What every world-builder, what every revolutionary wants a monopoly in: Reality. Reality made plain. Reality with no nonsense. Reality cut down to size. Reality minus a few heads.

  So shall we get back to the syllabus? Shall we get back to the 1790s and Monsieur unswerving-of-purpose Robespierre?

  Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It’s part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know. How can there be any true revolution till we know what we’re made of?