There is a gruesome and literal connection between the beauty of the ocean’s depths and the violence of the Middle Passage; the ocean is both an ecosystem and a mass grave. When Christina Sharpe in In the Wake writes about residence time—the “amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean” —she recounts a conversation with Anne Gardulski:
[Because] nutrients cycle through the ocean . . . the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today. They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. Around 90 to 95 percent of the tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled.
What do we make, then, of the popularity of marine specimens (which were once part of this cycle) resurfacing in the nineteenth century at anti-slavery fairs? What can we learn about abolition, natural science, and racial ecologies by studying the anti-slavery interests in harvesting, curating, and exchanging the ocean’s plants and organisms?
Advertisements and articles in periodicals show us that marine specimens were highly sought after at American anti-slavery fairs. Issues of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator tell us that the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar in Faneuil Hall had a “Botanical series of British Alga, Mosses and lichens in books and mahogany eases” in 1847, “Sets of Mosses, Lichens, Flowering Plants, Depatica, Zoophytes, Algae, Fungi, Ferns and Grapes . . . Sea Mosses exquisitely arranged in baskets and shells” in 1848, and a “collection of British Sea-Weed and shells” in 1850. Seaweed in particular, was a common sight. Reports on the sixth Rochester Anti-Slavery Bazaar in The North Star boasted: “Of the contributions of the Manchester box, none attracted more general attention than the beautiful portfolios of dried plants and seaweeds.” Note how curation is particularly prized in these descriptions. These plants are not scattered or loose, but set in books, eases, baskets, shells, and portfolios.
The interest in ocean specimens continued to grow over the course of the nineteenth century. In another instance, a report of the twenty-third National Anti-Slavery Bazaar in an 1857 issue of The Liberator explains:
Natural and scientific curiosities and collections were as abundant as literary ones. There were algae from every coast sent by the ladies of Britain and the prisoners at Belile. Here were ferns from every field, and shells from every sea, scientifically arranged, or poetically described.
From these accounts, it seems that seaweed and algae held the most appeal for amateur oceanographers. Seaweeding, or algology, was a popular practice throughout the nineteenth century. As the phrase “scientifically arranged, or poetically described” shows us, there was an implied connection between seaweeding and literary practice. The two met most vividly in the seaweed album. The process of making an album was fairly simple, and laid out in many popular instructional guides. One would begin by walking down the coast to find these specimens, and then, once at home, place them in a large basin filled with water, lay the seaweed flat, insert a stiff piece of paper underneath it, and carefully spread the damp seaweed with a large pin. Very soon, one’s blank book would be filled with colorful seaweeds of all kinds, possibly accompanied by scientific labels, transcribed poems, or other details like the date and location of collection. Beginning in Britain, this trend offered mobility, solitude, and scientific curiosity to hobbyists and professionals alike and was particularly enjoyed by women. Seaweed collectors saw the coast and the ocean as an ecosystem that could be appreciated, studied, and even preserved.