Many stories have been told about a strange and fabled cloth called sea-silk. Some say that when Jason and his troop of mariners set sail aboard the Argo they may have been hunting for a golden fleece made of sea-silk. There are stories of Roman emperors bearing robes trimmed in shimmering sea-silk, with dancing girls clad in see-through dresses of this same fabric that apparently left little to the imagination. A pair of gloves made of sea-silk has been said to be so dainty, they fit inside half of a walnut shell. Ancient Egyptian kings had boats powered by sea-silk sails, and Egyptian mummies were thought to be wrapped in sea-silk cloaks. Sea-silk was commonly associated with the ‘cloth of gold’ mentioned many times in the Bible. When Henry VIII met the King of France in 1520 at the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’, the story runs that the field was decked out with sea-silk flags and bunting, with Henry’s men dressed to match in fine golden tunics. As for the source of this fine fabric, a peculiar set of stories emanated from Chinese traders in the second and third centuries. Water sheep, they said, lived beneath the waves in the Roman Empire and occasionally clambered onto the shore, where they scratched themselves against rocks and left behind clumps of wool; people gathered these tufts and wove them into fine cloth. Similar stories emerged among Arab traders in the tenth century, who told of a beast called abu qalamun that would emerge from the sea at certain times of the year and shed its golden hair along the shoreline. This hair was made into a cloth so rare and valuable that its export was forbidden. Later, a twelfth-century Moorish writer declared the source of these fibres to be a creature that resembled a small sheep with webbed feet like a duck.
All this may be starting to sound rather far-fetched, and it is likely that the water-sheep stories were really just a joke that got a bit out of hand. From Roman times onwards, other writers based closer to the Mediterranean mention another possible source of sea-silk. They wrote about fine silken threads that came from giant seashells with gleaming beards. It’s here that the stories of sea-silk begin to edge closer to the truth.
Since antiquity, a large species of Mediterranean bivalve has gone by the name of the pinna. Today they are called Noble Pen Shells, Pinna nobilis. They look like huge mussels standing alone on the seabed, at least as wide as a man’s outstretched hand, up to a metre (three feet) tall, and often covered in a fleecy cloak of seaweeds. They can live for 20 years or more, and while there are several other Pinna species, none are as large as the Noble Pen Shell; these are the biggest seashells in the Mediterranean.
A net of silky threads with sticky ends sprouts from the shell of this towering mollusc, to stop it from tumbling over in brisk underwater currents; the threads root the Noble Pen Shell to the seabed. Other bivalve species produce similar strands; if you have ever cooked mussels you may have had to clean them first, pulling off their mossy beards.
These fibrous anchors are formed in a process similar to the production of injection-moulded plastics. An internal gland secretes liquid collagen proteins that trickle along a groove in the mollusc’s foot. The proteins take a few seconds to set hard into a narrow strand while the mollusc presses its foot against the seabed; an adhesive pad at the end of each thread then sticks to seagrass roots, sand grains or other fragments in the seabed. Once the new thread is ready the mollusc lets go, and it will continue making more until it has a beard of 1,000 or so hairs poking out from its shell, and fastened to a central stem lodged deep inside its body. Roughly the width of a fine human hair, the threads can be up to 20 centimetres (eight inches) long. They are known as ‘byssus’, a word often used for sea-silk. Are these delicate filaments the source of the ancient golden fabric? The answer to that is yes. And no.
It was an American biologist and science historian, Daniel McKinley, who in the 1990s decided to try to find out exactly how pen shells came to be pulled up from the depths and thrust into so many myths and fables. He picked up many strands of sea-silk stories and followed them back in time to see where they began. Through hundreds of manuscripts, books and museum specimens, he hunted for evidence to separate the truth from accumulated layers of mythology. What is sea-silk? When people wrote about pinna shells and byssus, what did they mean? Have these fine fabrics really been around for thousands of years? McKinley gathered together his findings and in 1998 published a monograph called Pinna and her silken beard: a foray into historical misappropriations, which already gives you a good idea of what he had to say.
A major snag in the sea-silk stories that McKinley encountered is the changing meaning and spurious translation of words. The modern-day meaning of the word ‘byssus’ is clear-cut. The fibres many bivalves use to fix themselves in place on the seabed are called byssus, and they are made by the mollusc’s byssus (or byssal) gland. It follows that a fabric woven from those filaments should also quite reasonably be called byssus. The problem is that the term hasn’t always referred specifically to fibres made by molluscs. Tracing the word ‘byssus’ back in time, McKinley saw that the solid definition begins to get hazy until all certainty evaporates, and it becomes impossible to know what writers were actually writing about.
Similar words in several ancient languages including Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Phoenician were used as general terms for a range of fine cloths that could have been made from linen or cotton or sometimes silk; the particular material is not always specified. In the Old Testament, for instance, the Hebrew words būş and šeš have been variously translated at different times into the Latin word byssus as well as ‘fine linen’ and ‘silk’ in English and bisso in Italian.
An important waypoint in the story of byssus is Aristotle. He was supposedly the first person to connect the word ‘byssus’ with Noble Pen Shells and their luxuriant beards. However, when we delve into the details of what he actually wrote, and how his words have been translated, a different story emerges.
In his book The History of Animals, written in 350 bc, Aristotle mentions pinna, and numerous translations have been made from the original Greek. In 1910, for example, zoologist and shell-shape ponderer D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson translated some of Aristotle’s text as ‘the pinna grows straight up from its tuft of anchoring fibres in sandy and slimy places’. Much earlier, a thirteenth-century Latin translation described the shells as growing ‘upright out of the depth in sandy places’. This phrase comes from Aristotle’s original Greek word, βυσσου, interpreted in this instance as βυσσός, meaning ‘depth’ (from which the words ‘abyssal’ and ‘bathysphere’ stem). This is probably what Aristotle was originally getting at (where Thompson got his ‘slimy places’ from isn’t clear). The real problems arose in the second half of the fifteenth century, when Theodorus Gaza, a Greek translator living in Italy, undertook a major re-write of Aristotle’s book. One thing he changed was the translation of that key Greek word. Instead of ‘depth’, Gaza read βυσσου as ‘byssus’ or ‘fine linen’. The difference comes down to the subtlest of slip-ups, shifting an accent from the last syllable (βυσσός) onto the first (βύσσος), which transforms its meaning from one word to the other (accents were a later addition to Greek that weren’t used in Aristotle’s time). And so, as easily as that, the pen shells were now growing upwards from their fine byssus, much like a tree growing up from its roots.
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.
The directions to Sant’Antioco read like something from a fairy story: drive down the road lined with prickly pear trees, go past the flock of pink flamingos and carry on over the bridge leading to a little island. There you will find the only people in the world who still pluck tufts of hair from giant seashells and weave them into fine golden cloth.
Bumbling along in the Fiat Cinquecento I hired at the airport, I slow down to catch a glimpse of the orange and yellow houses clustered on the hillside, overlooking an outrageous blue sea that I am told is the hiding place of Noble Pen Shells. I had come to meet the women who hold on to the secrets of sea-silk, and uncover what truths I could about this most mythical of fabrics.
At the top of the hill, above narrow cobbled streets, there is a high wall surrounding an open courtyard and a small, stone building where grapes were once processed and made into wine. Now the space is home to a collection of tools and machinery that have been used in Sant’Antioco over the last few centuries. This is the Museo Etnografico, run by a local cooperative called Archeotur whose members are committed to making sure past lives and traditions are not lost in the melee of modern life and that people don’t forget how things used to be. Preserved in this modest space is an archive of local trades, of bread-making, cheese-making, shoe-making, barrel-making and the dyeing and weaving of local fibres including sea-silk.
Waiting to welcome me in is Archeotur’s director, Ignazio Marrocu, a smiling man with a silver moustache and bright pink shirt. He immediately whisks me over to a cluster of Noble Pen Shells, standing tall and empty in a glass tank of sand. He pulls one out and hands it to me. The shell is at least 50 centimetres (20 inches) long, and surprisingly heavy. At the open end, the part that would have stuck up above the seabed, the pen shell is covered in the twisting white casements of tube worms and dried strands of seaweed; the lower section tapers to a point, and is scaly like reptilian skin.
Next, Ignazio brings out a knotty tangle of threads embedded with tiny seashells and blades of seagrass, like the ginger beard of an old man of the sea, flecked with his dinner. This is the byssus from a pen shell in its raw, untreated state. He then places in my hand a tuft of soft golden fibres that gleam in the sunshine. This is clean and carded byssus, ready to be spun. This is sea-silk.
The museum has a large display board covered in photographs of sea-silk weavers of the past. One black and white picture depicts four young women sitting in a row wearing headscarves, long dresses and aprons; one has a basket on her knee, filled with a tangle of byssus; the other three have wooden spindles and are in the process of twisting the fibres into threads.
Another photograph, this one in colour, shows an old lady wearing big round glasses, a white headscarf and a blue dress. Like the girls in the older picture she is busy spinning sea-silk. This, Ignazio tells me, is Efisia Murroni, who died in 2013 shortly after her hundredth birthday. She had learnt how to weave sea-silk from Italo Diana who ran a studio in Sant’Antioco, weaving traditional Sardinian designs and textiles until his death in 1959.
Surrounding the photograph of Efisia are pictures of Italo’s work. There is a woven hat and jacket for a toddler, a wide knitted scarf with golden tassels and an embroidered tapestry, as tall as the women holding it up. The intricate design has a pair of horses (or possibly unicorns), and a pair of birds that look like fancy turkeys. Around them is a border of other animals, and a row of people holding hands. In the centre is a rather confused patch of stitches, one that tells a story of how the piece was made.
Italo wove and embroidered this piece in the 1930s for the occasion of Benito Mussolini’s visit to the nearby town of Carbonia. It was a new town, built around a coal mine (carbone meaning ‘coal’ in Italian), and the streets were laid out in the shape of the egomaniac Mussolini’s face. The central piece of the tapestry had originally been the words ‘Il Duce’, but this embroidered tribute to fascism was later covered over with new stitches.
Italo’s skills have been passed on via Efisia not to her daughter, who didn’t want to learn, but to two other women from Sant’Antioco. Several years ago, Assuntina and Giuseppina Pes became interested in the town’s traditions of weaving sea-silk, and Efisia agreed to teach them.
The Pes sisters arrive at the museum, after dropping off their children at school, and greet me with smiles and cheek kisses. They are keen to show me their sea-silk skills, so we jump into an aged BMW driven by Giustino, one of Archeotur’s enthusiastic volunteers, who knows English better than I do Italian. We zoom off to the outskirts of Sant’Antioco and pull up to a little house guarded by a friendly, yowling cat.
Assuntina opens the door and ushers us into her home, where bright sunshine pours into a room crammed with two large weaving looms draped in skeins of brightly coloured wool. The walls are decorated with weavings and embroideries of traditional Sardinian motifs. She leads us downstairs into a smaller, darker room and brings out a large plastic Ferrero Rocher chocolate box packed with plastic bags; she then lays a small collection of byssus out on the table. Together, Assuntina and Giuseppina set about showing me the stages involved in making sea-silk.
The first piece is byssus after it’s been soaked for hours in seawater, then freshwater (at this point it hasn’t changed too much), and it is beginning to be transformed, with the sandy, shelly debris picked out. Assuntina opens a red cardboard box with a puff of fibres inside that resemble auburn human hair. She grabs a handful and combs them over and over, teasing them with a fearsomely spiky comb. It reminds me of the painful brushing of my tangly, curly hair each morning before school.
Now, she takes out a wooden spindle, the kind used to spin cotton, wool and linen threads. It looks like a mushroom with a long, narrowing stalk and a small hook on top. She attaches a clump of combed byssus fibres to the hook and sets it spinning. I watch as the spindle spins and twists the byssus into a thread that wraps around the stick. Assuntina deftly feeds the growing thread with more fibres, making it look easy, but I know it isn’t.
In a few minutes she spins a metre or more of thread. It is fairly thick and woolly, but soft to the touch. She tells me that the threads can be soaked in lemon juice to give them a brighter colour. One of their intricate embroideries features a pair of birds gazing at each other, beak to beak. They are sewn onto white linen with byssus of two different shades, one a deep bronze, the other pale gold.
As well as using sea-silk as an embroidery thread, it can be woven into fabric. A tiny tabletop loom comes out and Giuseppina shows me a narrow sea-silk tie in progress. I imagine their grandfathers dressed up in ties like this for church on Sundays. With her fingers nimbly darting this way and that, Giuseppina runs the golden-brown weft thread across the warp and pats them into place, making one more row of fluffy cloth.
No one will wear this tie, and it may never be finished, because new byssus fibres are very hard to come by these days. At the museum, Ignazio had demonstrated for me a metal tool with a long wooden handle that was used to wrench pen shells up from the shallow seabed, a few feet deep, but that is no longer allowed. Since 1992 there has been a blanket ban on harvesting Noble Pen Shells.
Along with seahorses, otters, seals and more than 200 other European species, Noble Pen Shells are protected throughout their ranges under EU law. Scientific advisors declared that pen shells are threatened by pollution and the destruction of seagrass beds where many of them live. Pen shells are easily crushed and torn away by boat anchors and fishing gear; also, divers were collecting them not for their byssus but to make the shells into gaudy home decorations, lampshades and the like. Now it is a criminal offence to deliberately harm or kill a Noble Pen Shell.
With the pen shells protected, Assuntina and Giuseppina see no way to obtain sea-silk, but it’s something they seem calmly resigned to. It’s clear they would both like to preserve the skills passed on to them from Efisia and Italo, but all they have is a dwindling collection of old byssus fibres handed on to them. Occasionally a local fisherman will find a dead pen shell and give it to the women to use. Even so, their byssus stock is small, and sea-silk is becoming rarer and more precious than ever.
The Pes sisters are not alone in continuing the traditions of sea-silk. Patricia, another member of Archeotur, has come with us to watch them at work and in a lull in the conversation she smiles and softly says something in Italian. Giustino translates for me. ‘She says her grandmother weaves sea-silk too.’
We all say goodbye and Giustino drops me off in town, where I pay a visit to another of Sant’Antioco’s sea-silk weavers, one who has something the Pes sisters and Patricia’s grandmother don’t have: a ready supply of new byssus.
I step into the cool, dim interior of the Museo del Bisso – the Byssus Museum – and instantly feel as if I have walked into the fairy tale that my journey to the island had promised. This vaulted stone room was once the town’s grain store and is now a shrine of sorts to sea-silk as well as to the woman who calls herself the last surviving maestro of sea-silk, Chiara Vigo.
The walls are lined with glass cabinets containing a myriad of puzzling objects; a bronze sculpture of a pen shell (far bigger than the real thing) stands on the floor; there are giant portraits of Chiara, and a huge undersea diorama of fish and shells and mermaids. A small congregation sits in hushed silence on chairs lined up in front of Chiara’s table, where she is busy at work.
A great deal of mysticism surrounds spinning and weaving, especially female weavers. Sleeping Beauty fell into a deep sleep after pricking her finger on a spinning wheel. Alfred Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, based on Arthurian legends and depicted in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, was under a curse that meant she couldn’t gaze directly at the real world but could only weave the ‘half shadows’ she saw reflected in a mirror. In Roman and Greek mythology, a trio of goddesses would spin, measure and cut the threads of life. Legends around the world bestow great power, wisdom and magic on women who weave. I find a seat in the Museo del Bisso, next to Rebecca who has come to help translate for me, and I can’t help thinking this place endeavours to channel those same time-worn enchantments.
Illuminated by a bright table lamp, Chiara is carrying out the same meticulous steps of combing and spinning the byssus threads that I saw at the Pes sisters’ house, though Chiara adds her own particular twists to the proceedings. While Chiara works on her strand of sea-silk she tells a stream of stories. She tells her onlookers about the ancient origins of sea-silk in the Middle East, 10,000 years ago; she tells of sea-silk in the Bible, and the source of King Solomon’s shining robes; she tells of her personal oath sworn to the sea.
Chiara plays a game I imagine she repeats many times a day, asking me to hold out my hand and close my eyes. I feel nothing and open my eyes to see a weightless cloud of sea-silk threads sitting on my palm.
Now picking up a wooden spindle, she begins to twist the fibres together, and while she does she sings a song. I don’t ask Rebecca to interpret the words of the Italian sea shanty but I listen to the tune, and Chiara smiles a twinkling smile at her transfixed crowd as the byssus spins round and round. Someone in the audience joins in with a few lines of the song.
When the pile of byssus fibres have all been twisted into one long thread, Chiara unwinds the spindle and brings out a white plastic cup half full of a pale yellow liquid. She explains this is a special mixture – a secret recipe – of lemon juice plus extracts from a dozen different seaweeds and the juice of another large Sardinian fruit. Chiara dunks the byssus thread into the liquid then draws it out, squeezing and dabbing it gently with a tissue. Then for the first time she starts pulling the ends of the thread apart and she gazes into the small crowd, her eyes telling us all ‘and as if by magic …’. The byssus is quite stretchy and elastic.
Now she jumps to her feet and bustles to the window where she holds up the thread to show us all how it gleams a bright golden hue. She breaks the thread in two and presents one piece each to Rebecca and me.
The performance complete and the thread of sea-silk made, Chiara glides around the room showing us some of the things she creates. Individuals and organisations around the world commission her to make weavings and embroideries. A group of Nelson enthusiasts have recently been in touch asking Chiara to weave them a pair of sea-silk gloves like those of their hero. She brings out a small square of knitted sea-silk with a fine open weave and lays it in my hand; it is delicate and dainty but I’m still not quite convinced it would fit into a walnut shell. Many of her works are for churches and cathedrals, and she shows us a splendid embroidery of Mary and baby Jesus. There are no price tags, and nothing is for sale. Such a commercial venture is quite against her ethos of working with her one great collaborator, the sea. This is an entirely voluntary endeavour, made possible only by generous donations dropped in the box by the museum’s door.
In a wooden frame is a golden embroidered lion, with a fancy tail and its front paw raised. It was made several decades ago by Chiara’s grandmother, the woman who taught her how to make sea-silk. Chiara tells us how she believes her family has made sea-silk for 30 generations (by my calculations that is somewhere between 600 and 900 years). Other people in Sant’Antioco tell me that Chiara’s grandmother, just like Efisia Murroni, learnt the skills of sea-silk spinning and weaving from Italo Diana.
A row of containers on a stone windowsill are filled with coloured liquids. Chiara picks up a purple jar and swirls it around. This is the infamous dye that is produced from several species of marine mollusc. Murex shells were dredged up from the Mediterranean in their millions and crushed to produce the rich imperial and Tyrian dyes used to colour the robes of ancient Phoenicians and Roman emperors. Chiara shows me a tuft of byssus with a subtle lilac hue. Dyeing sea-silk like this is a technique that has been passed down, so she says, through generations of sea-silk weavers in her family. If this is true then they were probably the only ones doing it: there are no records of sea-silk being tinted with these molluscan dyes, or any other pigments for that matter, besides the lemon-juice treatment.
The one thing Chiara will never reveal about her sea-silk weavings is how exactly she gets the byssus to make them. Now in her fifties, she tells me she has known for 30 years how to extract fibres without damaging living pen shells. Now the shells are protected, this has become a necessity. The precise details of how she does this remain a carefully guarded secret. She distrusts the biologists who ask to watch and study her at work, convinced they will steal her ideas and open up a new sea-silk industry that will devastate the pen shell population.
All she will say is that there are certain times of year, and certain phases of the moon, when the seabed around Sant’Antioco becomes soft enough to gently pull the pen shells from their resting places. Helped by a local, trusted fisherman she dives down without scuba gear, so she says, and snips off 10 centimetres (four inches) of byssus from each living shell, like giving them a haircut or trimming their nails. Then she pushes each giant shell back into the mud. Is this a genuine technique, or just another part of the mythology she weaves around herself?
As a cool wave of reality ripples into Chiara’s world and mingles with her stories, it’s hard to know for sure what is actually going on. She can’t legally be taking whole pen shells, and her website states that her annual sea-silk harvest is around 600 grams (about 20 ounces). If she only trims their beards she must have to process thousands of shells every year (the full beards from 50 shells will yield only around an ounce of sea-silk). She would then have to leave them alone for long enough to recover, assuming they survived. Maybe there are enough pen shells living in the waters around Sant’Antioco to support a rotational harvest like this without impacting the population; but no one, except perhaps Chiara, really knows if this is the case.
A couple of important questions hover over Chiara’s claims of a sustainable byssus harvest. First, whether the shells do indeed survive through the harvesting process and regrow their trimmed beards. Based on what is known about the biology of pen shells and other byssus-making bivalves, there is a good chance that the shells do survive, so long as their internal byssus gland remains intact. If it does, then the pen shells would need to grow whole new byssus fibres to re-root themselves in the seabed. With their ends cut off the fibres lose their sticky pads, but that shouldn’t be a major problem. Many bivalves grow new byssus filaments throughout their lives, replacing ones that break off. Some even use them as a way of moving over the seabed, throwing out a line, then hauling it in with retractor muscles and shuffling forwards.
Another unanswered question is how long it takes pen shells to grow new byssus beards, and re-root themselves. Until they do, the shells have to stand up on their own, wedged into the mud and sand without the stretchy anchor securing them in place. If a shell gets knocked over it has no means of righting itself and could choke on the seabed and find itself vulnerable to nibbling predators. That said, if the shells are in sheltered, calm water there is much less risk of them falling over.
Judging by other species, the rate of byssus growth could be reasonably speedy. It only takes a few minutes for a Blue Mussel to make a single new fibre, although they are much shorter than pen shell byssus. Mussels can make up to 50 fibres a day, but they will speed up or slow down production depending on various factors. Fast water currents stimulate mussels to make more fibres, although only within reason (if the water flows too fast the mussels find it impossible to get a grip). The whiff of predators like crabs and starfish is enough to trigger byssus production, presumably because this fixes them more firmly to the seabed, making them difficult to eat.
Poking mussels to simulate an exposed, wave-rattled shore is another way of motivating them to get busy making more byssus. In one study mussels were agitated at different rates of between once every 4.5 and 27 seconds for up to two weeks at a time (this was done by an automated mussel-bothering machine, not a sleepless grad student); the more the mussels were disturbed, the more fibres they made.
Being able to control the rate of byssus production is important, because the process is hard work. Making these fibres uses up a lot of energy and protein, which is why mussels will only make as many fibres as are needed according to the prevailing conditions and risk of attack. It is possible that pen shells respond to Chiara’s trimming by ramping up byssus production, diverting energy from other parts of their body to do so. How this affects them isn’t known.
It would be easy enough to find out whether pen shells with trimmed beards do indeed re-root themselves in the seabed and how long it might take, but these aren’t research topics that anyone has yet pursued. An ad hoc experiment did get underway in 2012 when the Costa Concordia cruise ship hit a rock and sank off the coast of Italy. While the ship lay on its side at the surface like the beached carcass of a giant white whale, divers surveyed the water beneath and found a nearby seagrass meadow with a population of around 200 pen shells. They decided to move them out of harm’s way.
News coverage on the internet shows divers gathering up the shells and stacking them temporarily in plastic crates on the seabed. The plan was to put the shells back in their original location, replanting them in the seabed, once the wreck was salvaged. The outcome of this transferral will help demonstrate whether pen shells can cope with being handled. Chiara tells me how annoyed she is about all this, because she thinks it gives people the idea of pulling up pen shells and making sea-silk. She worries that if the masses blunder in and copy her, it will end in disaster for her beloved pen shells.
The only way I see these giant seashells becoming endangered because of their byssus would be if new markets or appetites arose, if sea-silk became the darling of fashionistas or the substance of some other fetish. If that ever happened then a truly sustainable byssus harvest, one that doesn’t lay waste to wild pen shells, would be an unlikely dream. The real world shows us that this sort of thing almost never happens.
Look at the vicuña, a wild relative of alpacas and llamas, which lives on high grassy plains in the Andean mountains. To stay warm, these dainty camelids grow ultra-fine wool that can be spun into a fine and expensive fabric. The Peruvian government set up a labelling system for wool taken from animals that are caught at most every two years, shorn and released unharmed. Of course it is much simpler to simply shoot a vicuña and skin it. Vicuña numbers are recovering but poaching continues, as does the black market in cheaper, uncertified wool. A similar situation would probably unfold if there was ever a market for sea-silk. Luckily so far, though, demand for sea-silk remains negligible.
Chiara is kindling a desire for sea-silk but she is also fiercely protective of its source along the shores of Sant’Antioco. In many ways, she is doing the opposite of philanthropists who came before her, who tried to stimulate the sea-silk industry and help other weavers make a living.
The rarity of sea-silk fibres and the difficulty of obtaining them is a challenge Chiara faces, but at the same time it is the key to her fame and success. She clearly needs to protect the source of these delicate fibres together with the museum and livelihood that rely on them. By retelling folktales and weaving new traditions to fit with the modern world, Chiara is getting caught in the threads of her tapestries and becoming part of the story herself, and in doing so she guarantees the spotlight stays focused on her as the self-styled saviour of a fading custom and craft.
Stepping outside into the bright sunshine I clutch my piece of sea-silk, and ancient stories waft through the museum door behind me. Suddenly it strikes me how bizarre it is to be holding a piece of thread made from fibres that oozed from a mussel. Then again, why is it any stranger than wool that grew on a sheep’s back, or silk that was spat out by a caterpillar? It reminds me of the extraordinary brocaded cape woven from the silk of a million golden orb-weaver spiders in Madagascar, and displayed in London at the Victorian and Albert Museum in 2012.
I had seen sea-silk being made and was quite convinced that this stuff really does exist, but there remained one part of the story of sea-silk I wanted to see.
I walk down the hill to a small wharf where fishermen are unloading octopuses, amorphous handfuls of soft white glop, while others tout for business; these days there is more money to be made taking tourists on fishing trips than selling the fish they used to catch themselves. Passing the large boats, kitted out for a day of fishing and feasting, I come to a smaller wooden boat painted blue and filled with ropes, polystyrene buoys and a pair of worn oars. A small fish, perhaps a goby, stares at me from the transom, dead but only recently. The skipper helps me clamber on board and I wonder if we will both be rowing. Then a little engine hidden in the stern kicks into life and we chug across the flat lagoon to a spot just offshore. For an anchor, he pushes a wooden pole through a hole in the hull, pinning us to the shallow seabed below while I scramble over the high gunwale and into the cool water.
Paddling around, snorkel in my mouth and eyes down, I catch my first glimpse of the Noble Pen Shells, nestled in a lush garden of seagrass and seaweeds. The shells look frilly and soft on the outside, but I discover they are firm to the touch as I reach down through the shallow water and gently tap one with my fingernail. When I do, the shell twitches, pulls in its white and black-flecked mantle and slowly shuts. It closes its mouth into a puckered semi-circle facing the surface above.
Living among the pen shells are plenty of other creatures. Tiny green fish dart constantly around me. A bright red starfish is splayed out on one shell, and Peacock Worms stick their heads from thin tubes, each one unfurling a crown of feathery tentacles. I spy a bubble snail, a type of sacoglossan sea slug, sliding across a pen shell; it carries its own fragile shell on its back, like a precious marble clenched between two folds of lime-green mantle, a precise colour match for the Caulerpa seaweed it lives in.
I sneak up as slowly and quietly as I can on a few pen shells and peer inside to check for hiding crustaceans. For a long time, people have known about (and often become slightly obsessed with) the tiny creatures that live inside pen shells.
Known generally as pea crabs, they are commonly depicted as sentinels, watching over the blind molluscs and alerting them when trouble or food is near. Pliny the Elder described the pea crabs as signalling to the pen shells with a gentle nip whenever a little fish wandered in; the shell slams shut and then both mollusc and crab tuck into a shared dinner. More recent studies reveal there are two crustacean species associated with pen shells – a crab called Nepinnotheres pinnothere and a shrimp, Pontonia pinnophylax – but they aren’t security guards or hunting partners; the shell interior simply provides them with a safe refuge. The crabs eat the same planktonic food as the filter-feeding shells and the shrimp scrape food particles from the surface of the molluscs’ gills and snack on their pseudofaeces.
People have done strange things with pinna pea crabs. There are ancient recipes listing pea crabs as an ingredient for soup. They have also been a source of moral guidance, with the belief that we could all be a bit more selfless and cooperative like them. An ancient Greek book from the second century called The Interpretation of Dreams informs couples that they will have a long and happy marriage if they dream about the pinna shells and pea crabs that live so harmoniously together. Strange dreams indeed.
I scoot from pinna to pinna, but none of them seem to be occupied by little crabs or shrimp. Inside a dead shell, gaping and still, there is a dark shadow of a fish lurking. The basilisk blenny slowly retreats like a shadowy face pulling back from the window of an abandoned house, not wanting you to know that you are being watched.
Most of the Noble Pen Shells I see are on the small side, about as wide as my outstretched hand. They are all young ones, not yet fully grown. It means this particular spot is an important nursery for the population, and a good indication that all is well for the pen shells of Sant’Antioco. I can’t tell for sure without spending days and weeks swimming around the entire island counting shells as I go and then ideally coming back some time later to see if things have changed. But the presence of juveniles is a sure sign that adults are nearby and they’ve been successfully breeding. These are probably not shells that Chiara will harvest, because they are too close to town, and to the gaze of prying eyes. Popping my head up above the surface, I see a coach-load of tourists drive past along the seafront, a few hundred metres away.
Not much is known about pen shells and their current status in the Mediterranean, following protection more than 20 years ago. A few scientific studies have mapped out their distribution and sizes, and there are signs of recovery and healthy populations. Their seagrass habitats are certainly under pressure still, in particular from rising sea temperatures, but pen shells do live elsewhere, too, in sandy, muddy environments that are far less threatened. To some extent the pen shells’ protection is a precautionary measure, a proactive step to make sure they don’t dwindle as they so easily could, rather than waiting for catastrophe to strike, by which time it might already be too late.
Back down below me, the Noble Pen Shells seem to shift and glide across the seabed but in fact it is the grasses and weeds that flutter in the breezy current around them, while the shells stay put. They are wedged firmly in place up to their middles in the soft sediment, anchored by their unseen byssal threads.
There is no doubt that sea-silk continues to enchant people, especially when they are regaled with worn-out fables told as if they were still true today. Surely, though, there are wonders enough to be had in the reality of these giant shells with golden beards. We can marvel at the tiny crabs that cohabit with the living shells, and the octopuses and fishes that move in when they die; we can ponder the strange mystery of who it was who first thought to tease out a pen shell’s fibres and spin them into silk; we can contemplate the spelling mistake made centuries ago that led to a deep-rooted case of mistaken identity; and we can admire the intricate embroideries made by the artisans of the more recent past and present.
Giuseppina and Assuntina Pes will keep working on their weavings but for the most part they will use alternative fibres, not sea-silk. Chiara Vigo will continue to run her museum, tell her stories and venture to the shore to gather more byssus when no one is watching.
The Noble Pen Shell is a rare thing indeed. It is a sea creature with something to offer but isn’t, for once, being plundered to meet human needs and desires. So it can only be a good thing that newly woven sea-silk remains an obscure, curious thread that gleams now and then on just one tiny island.