The last surviving sea-silk seamstress. By Eliot Stein
NB: These accounts of artisanship highlight the discrepancy between craft pride and wage-labour DS
Byssus, or sea silk, is one of the most coveted materials in the world – but after more than 1,000 years in the same matrilineal family tree, this ancient thread may soon unravel.
Each spring, under the cover of darkness and guarded by members of the Italian Coast Guard, 62-year-old Chiara Vigo slips on a white tunic, recites a prayer and plunges headfirst into the crystalline sea off the tiny Sardinian island of Sant’Antioco. Using the moonlight to guide her, Vigo descends up to 15m below the surface to reach a series of secluded underwater coves and grassy lagoons that the women in her family have kept secret for the past 24 generations. She then uses a tiny scalpel to carefully trim the razor-thin fibres growing from the tips of a highly endangered Mediterranean clam known as the noble pen shell, or pinna nobilis. It takes about 100 dives to harvest 30g of usable strands, which form when the mollusc’s secreted saliva comes in contact with salt water and solidifies into keratin. Only then is Vigo ready to begin cleaning, spinning and weaving the delicate threads. Known as byssus, or sea silk, it’s one of the rarest and most coveted materials in the world.
Byssus, or sea silk, is one of the most coveted materials in the world – but after more than 1,000 years in the same matrilineal family tree, this ancient thread may soon unravel.
Each spring, under the cover of darkness and guarded by members of the Italian Coast Guard, 62-year-old Chiara Vigo slips on a white tunic, recites a prayer and plunges headfirst into the crystalline sea off the tiny Sardinian island of Sant’Antioco. Using the moonlight to guide her, Vigo descends up to 15m below the surface to reach a series of secluded underwater coves and grassy lagoons that the women in her family have kept secret for the past 24 generations. She then uses a tiny scalpel to carefully trim the razor-thin fibres growing from the tips of a highly endangered Mediterranean clam known as the noble pen shell, or pinna nobilis. It takes about 100 dives to harvest 30g of usable strands, which form when the mollusc’s secreted saliva comes in contact with salt water and solidifies into keratin. Only then is Vigo ready to begin cleaning, spinning and weaving the delicate threads. Known as byssus, or sea silk, it’s one of the rarest and most coveted materials in the world.
Today, Vigo is believed to be the last person on Earth who still knows
how to harvest, dye and embroider sea silk into elaborate patterns that glisten
like gold in the sunlight. Women in Mesopotamia used the exceptionally light fabric to embroider
clothes for their kings some 5,000 years ago. It was harvested to make robes
for King Solomon, bracelets for Nefertiti, and holy vestments for priests,
popes and pharaohs. It’s referenced on the Rosetta Stone, mentioned 45 times in
the Old Testament and thought to be the material that God commanded Moses to
drape on the altar in the Tabernacle.
No-one is precisely sure how or why the women in Vigo’s family started
weaving byssus, but for more than 1,000 years, the intricate techniques,
patterns and dying formulas of sea silk have been passed down through this
astonishing thread of women – each of whom has guarded the secrets tightly
before teaching them to their daughters, nieces or granddaughters. After an invitation to
visit Vigo’s one-room studio, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with the
last surviving sea silk seamstress, watching her magically spin solidified clam
spit into gold.
I slowly approached
the small wooden table where Vigo worked, walking past a 200-year-old loom,
glass jars filled with murky indigo and amber potions and a certificate
confirming her highest order of knighthood from the Italian Republic cast aside
on the floor. “If you want to enter
my world, I’ll show it to you,” she smiled. “But you’d have to stay here for a
lifetime to understand it.” Vigo learned the
ancient craft from her maternal grandmother, who taught traditional wool
weaving techniques on manual looms to the women of Sant’Antioco for 60 years.
She remembers her grand-mother paddling her into the ocean in a rowboat to teach
her to dive when she was three years old.
By age 12, she sat atop a pillow,
weaving at the loom. “My grandmother wove
in me a tapestry that was impossible to unwind,” Vigo said. “Since then, I’ve
dedicated my life to the sea, just as those who have come before me.” Vigo is known as su
maistu (‘the master’, in Sardo). There can only be one maistu at a
time, and in order to become one, you must devote your life to learning the
techniques from the existing master. Like the 23 women before her, Vigo has
never made a penny from her work. She is bound by a sacred ‘Sea Oath’ that
maintains that byssus should never be bought or sold…
see also:
IN THE spring of 1976 Mau Piailug offered to sail a boat from Hawaii to Tahiti. The expedition, covering 2,500 miles, was organised by the Polynesian Voyaging Society to see if ancient seafarers could have gone that way, through open ocean. The boat was beautiful, a double-hulled canoe named Hokule’a, or “Star of Gladness” (Arcturus to Western science). But there was no one to captain her. At that time, Mau was the only man who knew the ancient Polynesian art of sailing by the stars, the feel of the wind and the look of the sea. So he stepped forward. As a Micronesian he did not know the waters or the winds round Tahiti, far south-east. But he had an image of Tahiti in his head. He knew that if he aimed for that image, he would not get lost. And he never did.
More than 2,000 miles out, a flock of small white terns skimmed past the Hokule’a heading for the still invisible Mataiva Atoll, next to Tahiti. Mau knew then that the voyage was almost over. On that month-long trip he carried no compass, sextant or charts. He was not against modern instruments on principle. A compass could occasionally be useful in daylight; and, at least in old age, he wore a chunky watch. But Mau did not operate on latitude, longitude, angles, or mathematical calculations of any kind. He walked, and sailed, under an arching web of stars moving slowly east to west from their rising to their setting points, and knew them so well—more than 100 of them by name, and their associated stars by colour, light and habit—that he seemed to hold a whole cosmos in his head, with himself, determined, stocky and unassuming, at the nub of the celestial action.... read more
