Seaweed’s appeal may not be immediately obvious. It comes to beauty by way of strangeness. The texture is uncouth and the shapes irregular; the reference to “weed” does it no favors. Seaweed’s core self proves elusive. Some varieties are delicate, filmy, and slick, and others dense and meaty, prone to intractable knots. I’ve used seaweed as a jumping rope, but I’ve also liquified tendrils with a forefinger’s stroke.
Nowadays, the plant begs respect for its utility. Seaweed prevents oceanic erosion, we are told, and nurtures biodiversity. It’s a nutritious edible that can be cultivated with a light ecological footprint. Most impressively, marine forests are far more efficient than land-based forests at absorbing atmospheric CO2. Seaweed has become commonplace: a children’s snack, a type of massage, an ingredient in face lotion, shampoo, and Bloody Marys. Seaweed deserves our attention, the argument goes, because it is so tremendously useful.
Naturalists of the nineteenth century took a different angle. Although they understood that seaweed “conferred a positive benefit on the atmosphere”, its appeal was precisely its lack of utility. The same word that described seaweed on shore — “rejectamenta” — also described anything more generally considered detritus. Seaweed seemed to be a weird, surplus embellishment that existed for no particular purpose except to express the wonders of the deep ocean. When the preeminent algae scholar William H. Harvey decided at age fifteen to devote his life to algology, it was the same as if he’d pledged allegiance to profitless esotericism. He wrote his former teacher that he intended “to study my favourite and useless class, Cryptogamia. I think I hear thee say, Tut-tut! But no matter. To be useless, various, and abstruse, is a sufficient recommendation of a science to make it pleasing to me.” No other field of study was so delightfully feckless.
Interest in the plant signaled refinement. Flowers were the Victorian middle-class obsession, but those of greater discernment favored seaweed. The exclusive fabric designer William Kilburn led the way by printing muslin chintz with a seaweed pattern in the 1790s, and his client, Queen Charlotte, showed her exquisite taste in wearing the fabric to a ball. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century seaweed enthusiasts were a motley bunch, but their cultural tastes were consistently out of the ordinary. Harvey, for instance, was very fond of his pet ostrich; other seaweed fans obsessed over butterfly genitalia, paper adverts, beetles, and ballooning. Such men took pride in nonconformity. The author of the first American book on seaweed, Charles F. Durant, fit this type exactly: brilliant and cavalier, an intellectually-restless iconoclast. Durant and his ilk embraced seaweed as the niche preference, the obscure art film to the cineplex blockbuster.