Book: The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans
Author: Cynthia Barnett
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Price: $27.95
Not many of us have cared to find out about the identity of the mysterious woman referred to in the tongue-twister, ‘She sells seashells by the seashore.’ But Cynthia Barnett — she had gifted readers a lyrical sociology of rain earlier — is not one of us. She informs us here that the ‘She’ could well be Mary Anning, a British fossil expert. Anning isn’t anachronistic to Barnett’s wondrous, and equally illuminating, examination of seashells. For seashells, she writes, tell us the story of “a fossil diary for half a billion years…” As chronicler, Barnett enriches her retelling by linking seashells — Lightning Whelk, Money Cowrie, Junonia, Queen Conch — to lives, living, cultures, economies, ecosystems, all of which come together to constitute an increasingly fragile circle of life.
Barnett’s knowledgeable exposition of the intricacies of marine life may attract a niche readership. Yet, it is difficult to turn away from such delightful nuggets as Leonardo da Vinci’s aesthetic enchantment with a shell that led to the creation of a spiral staircase in France’s Château de Blois. Or that a collective, cross-cultural fixation — ‘shell mania’— led to a great derangement, afflicting early Andean people, who had perfected the deep, sombre notes of conch trumpets, Indians — the worshippers of the shankh — and, later, Europeans — merchants, seamen, traders, collectors, royals and artists. Barnett writes that ‘Conchylomania’ claimed, among other admirers, Rembrandt, the Holy Roman Emperor, Franz I, Marie Antoinette, not to mention the Portuguese and the Maldivians, who built and profited from their Cowrie Empires.
Commerce — greed — was, unsurprisingly, accompanied by crisis. “When Henry Hudson sailed his ship… into New York Harbor in 1609, he had to navigate 350 square miles of oyster reefs. Within three centuries, oysters no longer colonized the harbor.” Today, climate change is causing mass extinctions elsewhere, even as global restoration projects aim to resuscitate the species.
That mystical chime trapped inside seashells, a sound that has drawn both the scientist and the poet to them — could it then be the death knell of the planet?
