December 16, 2014

I was on my morning walk the other day and happened by the small protected beach at Playa Escambron. I was surprised at the amount of vegetation in the water and on the beach. As I stood there, getting my camera ready, a Puerto Rican gentleman walked by and said something to me in Spanish. I shrugged and said “No Espanol” to which he replied “Too much seaweed.”

Now, seaweed is a rather generic term, used to describe pretty much any rooted or floating vegetation. It has been used to describe various members of the red, green, and brown algae, some of which, for example, wakame, nori, kombu, and arame, are alleged to be highly nutritious. Check out Amazon for a wide variety of edible seaweed products, including seaweed Pringles, product of Thailand. I bet a few of those would look good on your Christmas platter.

I suspect the seaweed I saw was a brown alga, of the genus Sargassum, known commonly as gulfweed. Portuguese sailors first encountered gulfweed on their 15^th century voyages into the Atlantic and named the brown floating seaweed after a plant that grew in their cisterns on the Iberian Peninsula, with the Portuguese name sargaco. Columbus also encountered gulfweed on his voyages to the New World.

Early mariners convinced themselves that the Sargasso Sea, named after the alga, was so filled with gulfweed as to be impassable. While that is not true, it is true that the floating mats of Sargassum create a unique ecosystem. The catadromous American (Anguilla rostrata) and European (Anguilla anguilla) eels begin their complex life cycles there, as larvae, before starting their journeys to North American and European rivers and eventual sexual maturation. Sigmund Freud began his scientific career dissecting hundreds of eel specimens in a fruitless search for the male eels’ reproductive organs, not realizing that the eels that returned and migrated upstream (elvers) were far from sexual maturity. I wonder what would have been the history of psychiatry had Freud found their sexual organs.

The life history of the European eel figures in Graham Swift’s 1983 novel Waterland, long one of my favorites. In one scene, an elver was somehow placed in young Mary Metcalf’s knickers, while she was swimming with the local boys in the Great Ouse in the English fens. This occurred during (and maybe caused?) the beginnings of her sexual explorations of ‘holes and things’ with Tom Crick and, unknown to Tom, his daft half-brother. The movie version (1992), although inexplicably moved to Pittsburg, is worth seeing. Jeremy Irons is excellent, as is Lena Headey who played the young Mary.

Perhaps some of the gulfweed I saw had drifted here from the Sargasso Sea. It is known to drift, driven by the wind, for hundreds of miles, creating brownish mats of plant life. The brown color derives from the pigment fucoxanthin, which absorbs light in the blue-green to yellow green portion of the visible spectrum. Fucoxanthan, it is claimed, has medicinal benefits and is sold as a dietary supplement. Perhaps, the next time I see large amounts of gulfweed, I’ll collect some and figure out a way to extract the pigment and start a business selling it, from a table on the waterfront, to cruise ship passengers. They are not likely to return and complain and ask for their money back.

I wonder if the Portuguese, or for that matter, the Spanish, Dutch, French or English, sailors thought of the sea as wine dark. Homer apparently did, as this phrase shows up in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. I don’t have my translations (Lattimore and Fagles) here with me so I can’t quote exact lines. I do know that Homer’s wine-dark sea has caused some speculation among scholars.

One suggestion concerns the fact that the Greeks diluted their wine, often twenty-fold, with water. One research chemist, in collaboration with a classics scholar, suggested the hard water from the Grecian peninsula and islands caused a color change, to a bluish hue. I’ve had a bit of Greek wine, mostly retsinas, and I can fully understand they would have been better diluted with water, or, for that matter, dry cleaning fluid, or most any other liquid. Still, I would like to experiment with other Greek wines, the older ones, like Chian, Coan, Corcyraean, Cretan, Euboean, Lesbian, Leucadian, Mendean, Peparethan, Rhodian and Thasian. I will dutifully mix a little of these wines with the hard waters here and record the results. I’ll send pictures.

Most scholars dismissed the blue-wine theory pretty much out of hand, which led to other speculations. I like the theory that Homer was color-blind. Since he was reputedly all blind, not just color-blind, this seems, on the surface, unlikely. The theorists had an answer: all the Greeks of that era were color-blind.

I rather like this theory. I like the idea that certain populations can have distinct genetic patterns. You undoubtedly recall the excitement when the Mediterranean diet was in vogue – a diet rich in olive oil, fish, and red wine, if I recall. The diet was touted as the reason Greeks and other southern European peoples had low rates of coronary heart disease, and lived long, healthy lives dancing the syrtos,  kalamatianos, hasapiko, siritaki and other Zorba-like dances. Matt Ridley, in his excellent book Genome, debunked this, and instead attributed the patterns of coronary heart disease to patterns of genetic variations of the APOE genes found on chromosome 19.

I was disappointed to learn this – I rather liked the Mediterranean diet. We still use olive oil, and the occasional glass of red wine.

This does lead to an idea. I’ll extract fucoxanthin from the gulfweed, and dissolve it in cheap Spanish olive oil. I’ll call it Mediterranean Elixir (from the Wine-Dark Sea), and sell it to cruise ship visitors at an inflated price. I’ll claim it is useful for preventing seasickness, curing erectile dysfunctions, awakening a tired libido, and being an excellent remedy for hangovers.

If you want in on this, send a check for $10,000 or whatever you can afford. I think I’m onto something here.

 

References:

The Iliad of Homer (Lattimore translation). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

The Odyssey of Homer (Lattimore translation). New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

The Iliad of Homer (Fagles translation). New York, Viking/Penguin. 1990.

The Odyssey of Homer (Fagles translation). New York, Viking/Penguin. 1996.

Graham Swift, Waterland, Heinemann, 1983.

Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, 1999.

For an interesting discussion of the phrase wine dark sea, see www.nytimes.com/1983/12/20/science/homer-s-sea-wine-dark.html

See Wikipedia entries for brown algae, Phaeophyton, fucoxanthin, and eels for more information.