Returning (again) to seaweed, never having left it.
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| Millet's stooping figure becomes a seaweed gleaner at the ecomuseum. |
A talk I gave several years ago about thrift and recuperation in coastal culture has grown into a fascination with coastal ecology and the origins of marine biology in France. In July (2015), before heading to Liverpool to a conference on "Transatlantic Dialogues", I was on a short trip to France, and made a point of visiting the Ecomuseum of Kelp Harvesters and of Seaweed (Musée des goémoniers et de l'algue) in Plouguerneau (on the north coast of Finistère, not far from Brest). The community-run ecomuseum is
positioned in the heart of an area that has the greatest concentration
of seaweeds and the strongest living tradition of harvesting.
The museum presents the historical importance of seaweed in the local culture and economy.
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| dried seaweeds |
I had contacted the museum to ask a few questions and was encouraged to visit, but I no idea what to expect. First, I watched a short documentary that interviewed many older people who spoke in Breton and in French about their memories of gathering seaweed before school, about being on harvesting trips that encircled and denuded the underwater kelp forests surrounding islands (like Ouessant), about drying and burning seaweed for the "soda" in its ash (high in iodine) and the later industrialization of the process (more machinery, fewer harvesters, lower prices,etc.).
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| Iodine factory at Lampaul, opened in 1895 |
Harvesters traditionally dried and burnt the kelp they collected on the beach and then sold the ash which was then processed by iodine factories (many were built on the coast in the late 19th century)
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| Piles of dried kelp, Lampaul |
and by 1977, seaweed was purchased green from the large-scale harvesters.
The museum tells a local story about the culture of this harvest which is bound up in stories, song and the Breton language. In its historical trajectory, it is also global story about the part of the industrialization of fishing, and exploitation of ocean resources, of the push to mechanize the
harvest, squeeze out the small producer (with more material investment in boats and trucks), and the coincidence of falling prices and the drive to more efficiently use up local resources.
Before its industrial collection and processing, seaweed collecting, like
gleaning a harvested field, was a right protected and policed by each commune. There were collection days set
aside for the needy—(e.g. women with husbands in the military and widows were allowed special collection rights and could employ a man from outside the commune to help them). Whereas dead seaweed washed up in abundance on the coast for the gathering, foragers and harvesters sometimes went to the limits of the earth: the
intertidal zone exposed by the duirnal tides that recede the most at new and
full moon and are exceptionally low at the equinoxes.
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| Pierre Toulgouat, The oldest seaweed harvesters: husband and wife (64 and 58 years old) who spend entire days in the water up to their stomachs. Ouessant, 1938, MuCEM. |
Any nearby lighthouse was arbiter of day and
night: collecting could not begin in the morning until the light was
extinguished. There was a general ban on
night gathering except driftweed. Live, attached seaweed was considered royal
property in the 17th century and up until the 19th century its cutting was strictly regulated. Local rules
controlled where on the beach collected material could be dried or loaded into carts. Harvested seaweed left on the beach after dark became
unmarked (no one’s property) free to become driftweed again.
From the 1860s until well
after the first world war, painters and photographers repeatedly represented Bretons
gathering and burning seaweed. Many of the realist tropes developed for the description of agriculture (such as Millet's Gleaners) were put into use in describing workers of the shore. Fishing practices, much harder to observe from shore, never received as much visual attention. Charles Cottet, in a painting that is in the collection of the Morlaix Museum, paints lumpy, brown piles of drying kelp spread out across the island landscape of Ouessant. As part of his series, In the Country of the Sea, he shows us the dependence of the people of the island on the sea-- and the ecological entwining of sea and land harvests.
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| Charles Cottet, Piles of Drying Kelp, Ouessant. c. 1903, Morlaix |
For the islanders, seaweed was burned and sold to the outside world, but it also had many uses. In a very wet place with no trees is substituted for wood as fuel. Thrift and ingenuity prevailed on the islands. Seaweed combined with cow
manure was shaped into large pancakes (called “glaouad”) and dried out for later burning. (Clumps of turf or "gleds" were also cut for burning on the islands).
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| "Gleds" or turf cut on Ouessant, 1938 |
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| Maturin Meheut, Île de Batz, Bringing in the kelp for winter heating, 1912. On view at the Meheut Museum, Lamballe, July 2015. |
The offshore islands such as Batz and Ouessant were places of material scarcity: the only cash commerce with the mainland
was in fish, wool from their sheep and ash from the burning of seaweed. Cash gained from the sale of kelp ash was often used to purchase firewood. Seaweed was a substitute for firewood on the islands, and in glass manufacturing (until 1789), the soda ash (sodium bicarbonate ) from kelp was in demand because of the deforestation of Europe. I find these ecological relationships fascinating.
Iodine's use as a disinfectant was discovered in 1812 and the thickening agent, alginate was found in seaweed in in 1880: both were reasons for the continued harvesting of seaweed as a raw material.
So many images and travel tales from the Breton islands focus upon the material aspects of everyday life on the Breton coast, and dwell upon the hard-scrabble life of the peasant population in their toils to recuperate value from base materials like seaweed. Over several years of looking at these images of seaweed harvesting from art museums, historical image banks and in the ecomuseum, I wondered how much artists like Cottet, Meheut or Elodie La Villette (mentioned in a previous post) knew about marine natural history.
The British enthusiasm for the seaside and for amateur botanical and tide pool collecting has received much attention, but it was harder to figure out if there were many popular French parallels.
French naturalists Jean-Victoire Audouin and Henri Milne Edwards were first French natural history
scientists to look closely at the littoral. They had first investigated and
published their findings on the proliferation of life—both human and nonhuman
at the tideline, especially in their careful field work conducted on the archipelago of the Chausey islands, off the coast
of Granville (Normandy) in the 1820s where they observed both Norman and Breton seasonal workers (many of whom set up temporary camps under upturned boats) harvesting and
burning seaweed, fishing and quarrying granite from the island. In 1832 they published their first volume of Recherches pour servir à l’histoire naturelle du littoral de la France in which they describe the vibrant, horizontal bands of
plant and animal life on tidelines. Their early observations of marine invertebrates and on
the zonation of the intertidal zone was important foundation of ecological
literature.
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| Concarneau Biological Station (Marinarum) |
In 1859, the first marine biological station was established in Concarneau. In the Third
Republic, many newly opened biological stations all along French coastlines fostered fish breeding, international
biological Research, and comparative anatomy of marine invertebrates.
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| Le Monde De La Mer. Paris, 1865. |
a video of the Crouan Brothers' Alguier:
Algues marines du Finistère (1852) was printed in a limited edition of 50 (with real pressed specimens for each entry). One exemplary copy of this was on view in Concarneau Feb- April 2015, and is currently in Saint-Charles. They learned their techniqes of pressing the seaweed they had collected from the writings of an earlier collector from Quimper, Theophile Bonnemaison (1774-1829) (also a pharmacist and amateur algologist). (To be continued...) 
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