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the FABULOUS cropOF THE SEA FARMERS

THE day after hurricane Esther hit the New Eng-land coast last fall a shabby little truck came

bumping down onto a lonely Maine beach at lowtide. A man and a boy jumped out with pitchforks,attacked a long roll of sea moss the storm waves hadthrown up and heaved it into the truck. As soon asthey had a load they hurried off, then quickly re-turned for more. Some hours later, with their thirdload hoisted in, they stopped to rest. They couldafford to, now, for they had beaten the coming tideand won a rich prize. When they had rested theyspread and dried the moss in a nearby field. Theton or so they had gathered would bring them morethan $200 in cash.

Along 1100 miles of shoreline from Cape Cod toNewfoundland hundreds of people do the same thingafter every storm. Many communities make theirlivelihood by farming the sea in this way. For, hid-den in the delicate purple fronds of this derelictweed, known as Irish moss, is a constituent called

carrageenan. This chemical and its companions, al-gin and agar, derived from rockweed and kelp, havebecome so valuable in the food and other industries,and show such promise in many more, that harvesterscan't meet the demand.

All over the world, but especially in cold water likethat of the North Atlantic, Irish moss grows inabundance. Only a small part of the seaweed neededas raw material can be found beached after a storm.Most must be harvested by hand direct from itsbeds on submerged ledges a few feet below low tide.The moss clings to rock surfaces by stems knownas "holdfasts." Harvesters take great care not towrench these loose; if they pull them off, the plantwill not grow back again. If the slender fronds aloneare taken the plant thrives, and will luxuriate againin a few months. From May to November manyhundreds of fishermen, vacationing students andpart-time workers gather Irish moss and other sea-weed from small boats, using long-handled rakes.

Delivered wet to commercial drying stations alongthe coast, Irish moss brings up to $1.75 a hundredpounds. If the mossers do their own cleaning anddrying they can make as much as $10 a hundred.

Once dried, the moss is trucked to Marine Colloids,Inc., at Rockland, Maine. Every year this factoryputs more than ten million pounds of seaweedthrough its extraction machines to obtain the twochemicals. Both algin and carrageenan are poly-saccharides — natural sugars. In food they aretasteless and colorless "stabilizers." You eat them inpie fillings and cheese spreads, jams and jellies, maltsand frappes. Carrageenan makes ice cream smooth,keeps mayonnaise and salad dressing from separatingand toothpaste from drying out. It also makes inkflow to print newspapers, and helps printed designson curtain and dress goods to hold form and color.

Chemical derivatives of algin products have re-cently turned up in water-basepaints, and have givenbetter finish to shoes and leather bags. One deriva-

tive is an ingredient in penicillin shots, another is inthecompound the dentist uses to make impressions ofyour teeth. And the Rockland firm, Marine Colloids,Inc., says the potentialities have hardly been touched.

SEAWEED harvesting has been known for 5,000years. Shen Nung, the "father of medicine," pre-

scribed seaweed in 3000 B.C. Confucius praised itscurative value. For centuries the Japanese used itfor food, as did many other maritime nations. Gen-erations of French peasants in Brittany burnedkelp to make potash and iodine. The AmericanIndians fertilized their corn with it. The wife ofthe German bacteriologist, Robert Koch, discoveredagar gel as a nutrient carrier for the microbesher husband was studying. It is the standard cul-ture medium today in all medical laboratories.

Many kinds of seaweed are gathered today, butthe "sea farming" of Irish moss has a romance allothers lack. The Irish themselves discovered it

600 years ago, first harvesting it in County Carrag- the sugar-designating suffix "an." Stanford's dis-heen on the south Irish coast. For centuries they covery went unnoticed for thirty years,used it for medicine and food and fertilizer and In the deep depression of the 1930s a youngeventually found that small quantities of moss, French chemist, Victor LeGloahec, arrived in Newboiled with milk, would produce a "set," or jelly. York with a method he had patented for extractingThis is the origin of the dessert the French call algin under precise control, to yield an entirely newblanc mange. Scotch-Irish settlers in the American standard of purity.colonies brought the taste for moss with them and Although the financial community in New Yorkgladly imported it from home at two dollars a was in the doldrums he found an imaginative busi-pound. Finally, Dr. J. V. C. Smith, an early mayor nessman, Robert S. Holt, who listened. Here wasof Boston, spread the word that he had found Irish a way to put hundreds of people to work along themoss on Massachusetts beaches. The citizens eager- Atlantic seaboard who were starving in the fishingly exploited the discovery and the colony became industry. The two set off up the coast to find goodthe first community to harvest the moss in the New sources of seaweed. They located rich beds of itWorld. in southern Nova Scotia and almost as much in

For centuries Irish moss, with its hidden car- Maine. They determined upon Rockland, Maine, asrageenan, had been used to soothe rough skin, while the central point for their extraction factory.the milk gel did duty as a complexion cream. Moth- It was not until 1937 that Holt and LeGloahecers relied on it for sore throats and to combat the got their venture off to a modest start in a convertedmurderous croup. But not till 1888 did British lime-burning plant in Rockland. But their imposingchemist E. C. C. Stanford extract and analyze the name, the Algin Corporation of America, helpedseveral constituents and give them names. Because them believe in the future. What helped more was aof its Irish ancestry he called the extract from moss team of two young brothers, Nick and Bart Pelli-Carrageen, to which modern chemists have added cani, sons of an Italian-born stone mason. Nick got

the job of scouting the coast for people willing todo seaweed harvesting. Bart determinedly went towork learning the details of LeGloahec's patent, ac-tually began designing the equipment.

FOR the first ten years the Algin group barelyscraped along. The thing that kept them in

business at all was the top grade quality of the ex-tracts from the new process. Algin of controllablegrade and wide variety of chemical compoundingturned out to be ideal in the field of stabilizers forjams and jellies, even printing inks. More impor-tant, its excellence immediately earned it a placein the new application of seaweed products in sur-gical jellies, salves and ointments. Here only thebest could be employed.

Just as they were reaching success with this in-novation a sudden fire in the plant's alcohol tanksvirtually wiped out everything in fifteen minutes.The day after the disaster it seemed as if the ven-ture and the hundreds of kelp gatherers who nowdepended on it were finished. But the Pellicanisinsisted on salvaging what they could. In their shirtsleeves they straightened out the twisted pipes, andwith secondhand equipment borrowed and scrapedtogether over the countryside, they struggled intooperation again. Then they sat down to wait forword from New York as to the fate of the company.It soon came. The investors had decided to tryagain.

Immediately their worst problem was competi-tion. Some years before, a Chicago seaweed firmcalled Krim-Ko had established an Irish moss plantin Scituate, Massachusetts, where mossing had beendone for 150 years. Under chemist Earl C. Jertson,this outfit was eagerly exploiting the uses of carra-geenan, previously untouched. Jertson's first trywith the new chemical was to rescue chocolate-flavored milk. The beverage had never been suc-cessful because the cocoa always settled out, leav-ing unsightly streaks on the glass that were very

hard to wash off. Carrageenan remedied that atonce — kept the drink smooth and palatable andended the cleansing problem. Success of the ideawas so immediate that Jertson bought the businessand set up the Seaplant Corporation, with a factoryat New Bedford, using many of the same harvestersas the Rockland firm.

An Algin Company salesman on the West Coast,encountering the formidable challenge of carragee-nan, persuaded the Rockland people to get into thegame. Seeing an answer to their troubles, LeGloa-hec and Bart Pellicani quickly adapted their algin-making machinery to carrageenan and plunged in.Soon they began to have an advantage, for theFrench chemist's alcohol process had a clean leadin the matter of quality.

Presently carrageenan found a host of other jobs.It began to find a place as a stabilizer in ice cream.It lent richness and permanence to whipped creamand maintained the flavor of fruit syrups andpickles. It was useful in biscuit mixes, cakes andsoups. Its high quality and uniformity gave it astart in pharmaceuticals. Nowhere was it more magi-cal than in toothpaste, where today it figures inevery well known brand but one.

A few years ago the Algin and Seaplant companiesmerged to form Marine Colloids, Inc., and largelybecause of carragneenan this has become the domi-nant producer of seaweed extracts in America andprobably in the world. On the Atlantic seaboard ithas only one competitor, the Kraft Foods plant atPortland, Maine. In Europe it owns one of theonly four plants there are, the factory in Normandy.There is a competitor in England, one in Denmarkand a third in Morocco.

Marine Colloids gets its seaweed from every cor-ner of the world and blends the product to obtaindependable uniformity of chemical properties —vital in the food and drug industries. Gathererson the east African coast, in India, Malaya, Aus-

(Continued on page 62)

Marine ColloidsRockland plant,right, fronts onRockland Harbor.For every poundof dry sea mossprocessed here,five pounds ofwet moss must behand-harvested.

tralia, along the borders of the North Sea and theeastern Atlantic, all contribute to the extracting vatsin Rockland, Maine. Gathering methods in the restof the world are still extremely primitive, even inIreland and France where modem weed farmingwas born. Either the harvesters rip the weed offthe rocks by hand at dead low tide or wait forstorms to bring the catch in to the beaches. It isthe despair of the American engineers that theycan't seem to induce the gatherers in foreign com-munities to use up-to-date methods.

In the past all mossers had to do their own drying,but the procedure was arduous; wet moss must bespread very thin over an open field or on woodenracks and turned after the sun has dried out oneside. The crop can survive only one wetting byrain, without bleaching and rotting.

The Rockland company has recently set up me-chanical drying stations along the coast of Maineand Canada, and now the mossers have only to runtheir loaded boats in to the company dock, forktheir moss into trays lowered to them, watch it getweighed and then receive cash for it on the spot.

Chemically the extraction process is simple,though it must be carried on under rigid control.The seaweed plants are cleaned, ground and boiledin great vats of pure water, which dissolves thecarrageenan as salt water cannot do. The residueis thrown away, while the chemical is dried out byalcohol extraction. A white powder is all that is left.

MY friend Joe of Maine's Casco Bay is a cham-pion mosser, and typical of the many men

who stoutly make a go of it. Joe's life is moss andnothing else from May to October. Besides theboat, a 16-footer, he has a special steel rake hewelded up himself by attaching a row of blunt gal-vanized spikes to a steel bar and fitting it with a12-foot handle. A mesh basket, fixed to the handle,catches the loosened moss and permits him to bringup about fifty pounds at a time. The sea is neverstill and he must time his raking strokes so thatthe waves will help him.

Joe is a thin, wiry man with the weatherbeatenface of a Maine coaster. He has tremendousstrength but doesn't weigh much — a very goodcombination for mossing. Joe gets nearly a ton ofmoss into each boat load. Under favorable weatherand tideconditions, he has made up to $200 in a week.Mossing is one of the few remaining industrieswhere the rewards are strictly proportional to howhard you work.

Like most good sea farmers Joe has a mind like amap and has committed to memory every importantmoss bed in the entire bay region. There are prob-ably a hundred miles of shoreline in the area, count-ing inlets and islands; he divides his time betweenharvesting and looking for new beds; he is quickto abandon a worked-out ledge and move to a newone. For this prospecting he has developed greatskill in detecting the purplish shadow that meansmoss below. Sometimes in bright sunlight he usesa glass-bottomed box. But generally he can tellfrom the surface what the situation is. "Once you'velearned how," he says, "you don't need trickgadgets."

Just the same, Joe's adventurous spirit drives himincessantly toward improvement. He once con-sidered skin diving to gather moss, a crude form ofwhich is generally practiced in Europe. He foundit nowhere near as fast as raking. Lately, he hasbeen working on a small machine, something like ahedge clipper, to harvest moss by a power cablefrom the boat. The company is financing his at-tempt. Ordinarily, Joe and his colleagues wouldhave misgivings about mechanization, for fear ofoverproduction. But the company has assured himthere is no danger. Their principle concern is toget enough moss to satisfy their hungry extractingmachines. They point out that the really fertilebeds of moss lie in deep water on flat ledges, too fardown for human hands to rake. These great bedspromise a huge gain in harvesting if a machine canbe made that will reach them. But there is littledanger that any machine can compete successfullywith hand-manipulated tools in shallow wateramong the clutter of boulders and wave-worn ledges.

FARMING the sea can yield untold new wealth.Some of the seaweeds have very high Vitamin

C content. There are proteins and enzymes, andthe algae which seem to be slated for diets in spaceare among the seaweeds, too. Only the skill andimagination of the organic chemist are needed toexpand the value of carrageenan and its sister ex-tracts. Animal foodstuffs, electrical insulation, ex-plosives, resins, industrial chemicals, coloring pig-ments, drugs, blood plasma substitutes, coagulants— all have been, or are soon to be, investigated asproducts of the inexhaustible farmland of the sea.

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Reprint from June Issue, 1962

OOWI+GfIJr MagazineCamden, Maine