It was already known that the eels that swim up rivers and other waterways on the American continent belong to a different species from their European counterparts. The two types of eel are virtually identical, and they go through the same metamorphoses, but they nevertheless belong to different species of the Anguilla family. The only thing that differentiates them is that the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, has a few more vertebrae then the American eel, Anguilla rostrata.
Johannes Schmidt’s mission was, of course, to find the birthplace of the European eel, but what he discovered as he pushed farther and farther west was that more and more of the larvae caught belonged to the American species. That posed certain problems. Aside from measuring and counting the larvae, he now also had to classify each specimen. Out on the ocean, aboard a rolling and pitching ship, he had to place every last tiny willow leaf under the microscope and try to count the muscle fibers along its back; the fibers correspond to the number of vertebrae that appear in the fully grown eel. By so doing, he could determine which species the larva belonged to, and then construct tables showing where each species was more common. What he discovered was that in the western part of the Atlantic, the population was mixed. European and American larvae comingled, seemingly powerless to resist the currents, and they were caught in the same nets. That should, logically speaking, have meant that European and American eels were not only virtually identical but that they also bred in the same spot.
If that were the case—and in turn meant that Schmidt, if he could find the birthplace of the European eel, would by default also find the birthplace of the American eel—only one mystery would still remain: How do they know which species they are? How do the tiny willow leaves drifting through the Atlantic know where to go? Clearly, Schmidt wrote, larvae of both eel species travel together on the Gulf Stream, but at some point, their journeys diverge; the American larvae suddenly veer west, turn into glass eels, and wander up American waterways, while the European ones press on eastward. “How,” Johannes Schmidt wrote, “do the masses of larvae in the western Atlantic sort themselves out, so that those individuals which belong to Anguilla anguilla ultimately find themselves in Europe, while those of Anguilla rostrate ‘land’ on the shores of America and the West Indies?”
His conclusion was that the different types of larvae, similar as they may appear, are programmed from birth to seek out different destinations. Simply put, the American ones grow faster than their European cousins, meaning they have the strength to break out of the mighty ocean current as it passes the American coast, instead of drifting on toward Europe. American eel larvae undergo their first metamorphosis, turning into glass eels, after just one year, while the European ones spend two long years drifting with the currents, and become glass eels only after three.
This is what makes the eel unique, Johannes Schmidt argued. Not its metamorphoses, not that the mature silver eels wander back to the sea and cross an entire ocean to breed. “The point which makes our eel an exception among fishes, and among all other animals, is the enormous extent of its journeyings in the larval stage.”
THE SPRING OF 1914 FOUND JOHANNES SCHMIDT WITHIN TOUCHING distance of his goal. He was slowly homing in on the birthplace of the eel; all his observations were pointing in the same direction; all that was needed now were more expeditions. The scientific approach—empirical, systematic observation—had, after ten years of at times seemingly hopeless searching, come through after all. The truth would soon reveal itself in Johannes Schmidt’s microscope. In May 1914, he found two eel larvae that were just a third of an inch long.
That was when more worldly affairs suddenly got in the way. First, the schooner Margrethe sank after running aground off the island of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean. Fortunately, the collected specimens could be salvaged, but, Schmidt wrote, “here we were, on Saint Thomas with no ship. The only thing to be done for the moment was to endeavor to press forward the work being done from the trading vessels.”
Soon after that, in July 1914, the First World War broke out. Suddenly, the Atlantic was no longer just the enigmatic location of the eel’s propagation but also a war zone. Submarines patrolled the sea, threatening any and all who dared to venture out; several of the trading ships participating in Schmidt’s search were sunk; sailing around the ocean in search of transparent little willow leaves was no longer just a fairly unpromising endeavor, it was also deeply dangerous.
For five long years, Johannes Schmidt sat in his chamber, waiting for the world powers’ irrelevant skirmish to end so he could once more resume his much more urgent task. While he waited, he worked on the data he had already collected, photographed his specimens, cataloged them, drew up tables and diagrams. He was impatient, knowing exactly what he had to do “as soon as the war ceased.”
In 1920, when large parts of Europe still lay in ruin, Johannes Schmidt set sail again. During the imposed hiatus, he’d made sure he would be even better equipped than before. Through the East Asiatic Company in Copenhagen, he had gained access to the four-masted schooner Dana and outfitted her with all the necessary scientific equipment. Most important, however, he now knew where to look.
During 1920 and 1921, the Dana caught more than six thousand leptocephalus larvae in the western part of the Atlantic. Schmidt was able to make a detailed map of where the smallest specimens had been found. Specimens so minute, Johannes Schmidt wrote, “that there can be no question . . . where the eggs were spawned.”
A PERSON SEEKING THE ORIGIN OF SOMETHING IS ALSO SEEKING HIS own origin. Is that a reasonable statement? Was that true of Johannes Schmidt? The man who since the tender age of seven had lived with only fading memories of his father? Had he fished for eels as a child? Had he held an eel and tried to look into its eyes? In 1901, just a few years before he set off on his first journey, his uncle Johan Kjeldahl, who had at times been a kind of surrogate father, drowned. In 1906, while he was still sailing up and down the coasts of Europe, his mother passed away. The Johannes Schmidt who sailed west, out into the open ocean toward the unknown, was a young man whose every connection with his own origin had been severed.
What that really meant to him, we can’t say for certain. There is in his background, or at least what we know of it, very little to explain why he spent his life seeking the eel’s birthplace. Granted, he was a consummate scientist. He was often described as exceedingly efficient: he observed, described, and tried to understand; only rarely did he seem to trouble himself with the question of why. He took a matter-of-fact view of the world and his own place in it. In letters and reports, he was plainspoken and formal. In pictures, he looks warm and friendly and usually wears a three-piece suit and bow tie. He was said to love animals, with a particular love of dogs. But his motivation remains a well-buried secret. He grew up in a safe middle-class environment and felt at home in the world of science from an early age. By marrying Ingeborg, he also became a member of the upper echelons of Copenhagen’s bourgeoisie. He could have chosen an easier, more comfortable life. In terms of common measures of success—wealth, prosperity, status—he clearly had more to lose than gain from his journeys. And yet it never seems to have occurred to him to question the usefulness of spending almost two decades drifting around the vast Atlantic Ocean, finding tiny transparent willow leaves.
Put plainly, Johannes Schmidt was entranced by the eel question, by the enduring mystery of where the European eel breeds, how it is born and how it dies. “I think,” he wrote, “the eel’s life-history is, in point of interest, hardly surpassed by that of any other species in the Animal Kingdom.”
Perhaps there are people who simply don’t give up once they’ve set their minds to answering a question that arouses their curiosity, who forge ahead until they find what they seek, no matter how long it takes, how alone they are, or how hopeless things seem. Like a Jason aboard the Argo, seeking the Golden Fleece.
Or perhaps the eel question provokes a different kind of doggedness among those who tackle it. The more I myself lear
n about the eel, and the more aware I become of what the acquisition of that knowledge has cost throughout history, the more I’m inclined to believe that is the case. Above all, I want to believe that the mystery draws us in because some aspect of it is familiar. The origin of the eel and its long journey are, despite their strangeness, things we might relate to, even recognize: its protracted drifting on the ocean currents in an effort to leave home, and its even longer and more difficult way back—the things we are prepared to go through to return home.
The Sargasso Sea is the end of the world, but it’s also the beginning of everything. That’s the big reveal. Even the pale yellow eels my dad and I used to pull out of the stream on late August nights had once been willow leaves, drifting four thousand miles from a strange and fairy-tale-like place far beyond what I could imagine. When I held them in my hands and tried to look into their eyes, I was close to something that transcended the limits of the known universe. That is how the eel question draws you in. The eels’ mystique becomes an echo of the questions all people carry within them: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?
Was it like that for Johannes Schmidt?
Perhaps, but it is of course perfectly possible that all those things were completely inconsequential to him. He had accepted a challenge and decided to see it through. He had formulated his own explicit question—Where are eels born?—and a method that generated its own momentum, so to speak. He caught tiny transparent willow leaves, and with each specimen caught, the task became catching one that was smaller still. His goalposts kept moving. It was as simple as that.
And the eels, for their part, were there beneath his feet while he crossed the Atlantic, as they had always been. The tiny willow leaves drifting on the ocean currents in one direction and the fat, fully matured silver eels, their course stubbornly set for the Sargasso Sea, swimming in the other. Year after year, they continued their mysterious journey away from home and back again, unperturbed by world wars and human curiosity. Just as they had long before Johannes Schmidt ever set sail, long before Aristotle saw his first-ever eel and tried to understand it, long before the first human ever set foot on this planet. The eels didn’t care about the eel question, and why would they? To them, it was never a question in the first place.
IN HIS EXHAUSTIVE REPORT, WHICH APPEARED IN PHILOSOPHICAL Transactions of the Royal Society of London, eventually published in 1923, Johannes Schmidt accounted for close to two decades of work. On a map, he demarcated the area he could with a considerable degree of certainty claim was the spawning site of the eel. The elliptical area almost exactly delineates what we today call the Sargasso Sea.
“During the autumn months,” he wrote as a kind of summary, “the silver eels leave the lakes and rivers and move out into the sea. Once beyond freshwater limits, the eels are, in most parts of Europe, outside our range of observation. No longer subject to pursuit by man, hosts of eels from the most distant corners of our continent can now shape their course south-west across the ocean, as their ancestors for unnumbered generations have done before them. How long the journey lasts we cannot say, but we know now the destination sought: a certain area situated in the western Atlantic, N.E. and N. of the West Indies. Here lie the breeding grounds of the eel.”
This is why we now know—at least with some degree of certainty—where the eel reproduces. All our knowledge on this matter rests on Johannes Schmidt’s work. What we don’t know is why. Why there? What’s the point of the long, hopeless journey and all the trials and metamorphoses? What is there for the eel in the Sargasso Sea?
Johannes Schmidt might have replied that it’s irrelevant. Existence comes first. The world is an absurd place full of contradictions and existential confusion; only those who have a goal are ultimately able to find meaning. One must imagine the eels happy.
And Johannes Schmidt as well. In 1930, he was awarded the prestigious Darwin Medal by the Royal Society of London. And, with that, he was done, his story complete. Three years later, he died from the flu.
8
Swimming against the Current
July and August was prime eel fishing season. Never before midsummer. “There’s no point fishing before midsummer,” Dad would say. “It’s too bright, the eels won’t bite, it has to be darker.”
He talked a lot about eel darkness, when the nights are at their murkiest and the eels at their boldest, when out of a thirst for adventure or recklessness they expose themselves to humans.
But of course, he had it wrong. Or maybe he chose to believe his own truth because it made life a little easier.
There really is such a thing as eel darkness; it happens at the end of summer and lasts for a few months. This is when the silver eels begin their journey toward the Sargasso Sea and can therefore be lured into fishermen’s traps along the coasts. Our eel darkness was something else. It happened when Dad was on summer leave and therefore able to spend his nights down by the stream instead of in bed.
He’d worked all his life. For as long as I’d been alive, and before that, too, he’d been a road paver. He got up every morning before six, drank coffee and ate sandwiches, and was at work before seven. He was part of a work team who—in relative freedom, a chain gang without chains—traveled around paving, making new roads or fixing old ones. It was heavy work, hot and foul smelling; someone got to drive the big machine that spread the asphalt out over the prepped road surface, but someone had to walk behind it, too, with a shovel or a rake, in a cloud of tar and soot. They worked on commission, so each step taken and each shovel lifted was a krona earned. They worked from seven to lunch, coffee and sandwiches in the work shed, then from lunch until four, unless there was an unusual amount of work to be done and they had to stay late.
He usually came home around half past four, took off his dirty work clothes and went straight to bed. His body was hot and sweaty, his whole being exhausted. You were allowed in his room, but he didn’t say much. “Just need a bit of a rest.” Sometimes he dozed off, but thirty minutes later, he’d get back up for supper and what was left of the day.
Work was more than an occupation, it was an integral part of him; it broke him down, but it also made him hardy, it shaped and colored him. He was a fairly large man, not too tall, but muscular and top heavy. He was tenacious and strong. His upper arms were powerful and firm; both my hands together weren’t enough to encircle them. In the summers, he worked bare chested and got so tanned his skin looked like dark rust and the faded tattoo on his forearm, a simple anchor, grew almost invisible. (He’d gotten the tattoo before he was of age, drunk and lost in Nyhavn in Copenhagen, and why he’d picked an anchor was probably a mystery even to him, since he’d never been to sea.) His hands were big and ponderous with thick, leathery skin. One of his pinkies was missing; it had been broken so many times it had stiffened into a crooked grimace, like an oversized claw. He’d asked a doctor to remove it, and the doctor had obliged.
He’d worked for decades, and it showed. The warm, newly made asphalt he carried, shoveled, and flattened every day seemed to have seeped into his skin. He smelled profoundly of tar, even after washing up and changing his clothes. It was a mark of the working class.
When we were out driving, he would point to a paved street and say “I made that.” He liked his work and could almost, if pressed, admit he was good at it. His professional pride was of the natural, universal kind—the kind that comes from knowing you’re pretty good at something not a lot of people know how to do, and from knowing there’s a certain permanence to what you make and that other people value it.
But his identity didn’t revolve around being a paver. His profession was just a word. When he talked about himself, he called himself a worker, and contained in that concept were most of the things he considered central to his being. Nor did it seem to have been a matter of choice. He was a worker from birth and his identity was inherited. He was a worker because something bigger and stronger than him had chosen that life for him. The course of his life was pre
determined.
But if that was his heritage, what was mine? Maybe—and herein lies the minute, barely perceptible shift that takes place between generations—a never-spoken but ever-present encouragement: No, all doors are not open to you, and time is shorter than you think, but, of course, you’re always free to try.
DURING THE SUMMER VACATION, WE SOMETIMES WENT DOWN TO the stream earlier in the day, while there was still light. Instead of bats, swallows swooped and dived above the water; from a distance they looked almost identical but they moved differently. The sun glittered in the stream and the tall grass waved drily in the breeze.
One early evening, we were standing by the willow tree a distance below the rapids.
“Think you can swim across here?” Dad asked.
“Of course I can.”
“I’ll give you ten kronor if you cut straight across.”
“Sure.”
“But it has to be straight across. Straight across the current. You can’t drift. If you swim straight across without drifting, I’ll give you a tenner.”
I undressed and stepped into the water. It was cold and dirty; I hesitated for a second or two.
“There,” Dad said, pointing. “Straight across right here, from the tree to the rock on the other side.”
I slipped down and out into the stream and started swimming; for about five feet, I did okay. I held my head up high and kept an eye on my target. Straight across to the rock. It didn’t feel particularly insurmountable. But then I reached the middle of the stream where the current was at its strongest; it grabbed me like a hand brushing crumbs off a table. I was swept along a few feet, pulled under, I swallowed water and coughed before I managed to turn against the flow and stay motionless in the middle of the stream for a few seconds, like a boat at anchor, paddling frantically against the current. Suddenly, I felt it lift me up and shove me forward; I virtually hurled myself toward the shore. I climbed out on trembling legs, about fifteen feet downstream from the rock.
The Book of Eels Page 6