The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

He was brought up in a warm and sheltered environment, surrounded by woods and nature, far from the big city and the world of science, and even farther from the Sargasso Sea.

At the tender age of seven, however, Johannes Schmidt lost his father, and he, his mother, and his two younger brothers were suddenly forced to move to Vesterbrogade in Copenhagen, one of the city’s liveliest streets, and to a very different kind of life, surrounded by different kinds of people. It was an upheaval that affected Johannes Schmidt’s life not only emotionally but also practically. The Carlsberg brewery was located just a few hundred yards from his new home, and even closer was the home of Johannes Schmidt’s uncle, Johan Kjeldahl, who worked as a chemist at Carlsberg’s research laboratory, where Schmidt would eventually begin his own scientific career.

The same year the seven-year-old Johannes Schmidt moved to Copenhagen with his family, the world-famous chemist Louis Pasteur visited the city. Pasteur had developed a method for protecting food from bacteria and microorganisms; pasteurization, as it had been named in his honor, had been hugely significant for beer breweries. When Pasteur came to Copenhagen, he was consequently invited to visit Carlsberg, and a proud J. C. Jacobsen, the brewery’s owner, was so impressed by the great scientist he decided to invest in a sophisticated in-house research laboratory. In addition to brewing beer, Carlsberg would also pursue modern, advanced research. And not just about beer making and food conservation but groundbreaking basic biological and natural scientific research. It was a matter of prestige but also a commercial calculation. Over time, it helped Carlsberg grow from a small family-owned brewery to one of the world’s largest, while the company’s research department would also, in roundabout, indirect ways, contribute to bringing the eel and humankind a little bit closer together.

After moving to Copenhagen, during his first years at school, Johannes Schmidt began to spend more and more time in the Carlsberg research laboratory, shadowing his uncle Johan Kjeldahl, with whom he also lived for a time. It was there, in the laboratory, that he learned the basics of scientific work. It was also where a passion for science—that compelling need to observe, describe, and understand—was awakened in him. When he eventually embarked on his successful academic career, and traveled the world in pursuit of his research, it was with the financial support of Carlsberg.

Johannes Schmidt received a degree in botany and a grant to study the vegetation of what was then known as Siam (now Thailand) in 1898. In 1903, he submitted a doctoral thesis on mangroves, only to immediately switch his focus to marine animals.

On September 17, 1903, he married Ingeborg van der Aa Kühle, whom he’d known since he first came to Copenhagen at the age of seven and who was the daughter of Søren Anton van der Aa Kühle, the successor to J. C. Jacobsen as director of Carlsberg. The wedding took place in Carlsberg’s own church, the Jesuskirken in Copenhagen, and in the spring of 1904, the couple acquired an apartment of their own on Østerbrogade. They had barely moved their furniture in before Johannes Schmidt set sail to find the origin of the eel.

“THE PROBLEM OF THE PROPAGATION AND BREEDING PLACES OF the Common or Fresh-water Eel is one of great antiquity,” Johannes Schmidt would later write in a report to the Royal Society of London. “From the days of Aristotle naturalists have occupied themselves therewith, and in certain regions of Europe it has exercised popular imagination to a remarkable degree.”

He wrote places, in the plural, because how could anyone know for certain there was just one breeding place? And he lingered on that enticing enigma, the one that had for centuries occupied so many scientists and that had now apparently ensnared him as well.

“We know, then, that the old eels vanish from our ken into the sea, and that the sea sends us in return innumerable hosts of elvers. But whither have they wandered, these old eels, and whence have the elvers come? And what are the still younger stages like, which precede the ‘elver’ stage in the development of the eel? It is such problems as these that constitute the ‘Eel Question.’”

More specifically, there was one aspect of the eel question that bothered Johannes Schmidt. His Italian predecessors Grassi and Calandruccio had proposed that the eel, or at least the Italian eel, reproduces in the Mediterranean, since that was the only place they had found leptocephalus larvae. But at the same time, the larvae caught in the Mediterranean were large, three to four inches long, and clearly not newly hatched. How come no one had ever found smaller specimens?

As early as May 1904, mostly through sheer happenstance and before his mission had technically been made official, Johannes Schmidt managed to catch a leptocephalus larva in the sea just west of the Faroe Islands. It, too, was large, three inches long, but it was the first time anyone had seen an eel larva outside the Mediterranean, and it convinced Schmidt that Grassi and Calandruccio were likely mistaken about the eel’s breeding ground. Schmidt also realized that in order to solve the mystery, he would have to trace the eel back to its source, looking for ever-smaller larvae, until somewhere in the vast ocean, he found the first newly hatched willow leaf, and thus the birthplace of the eel. He needed to find a needle in a haystack. And the haystack was an ocean.

“I had little idea, at the time, of the extraordinary difficulties which the task was to present, both in regard to procuring the most necessary observations and in respect of their interpretation,” Schmidt would later write. That was, by all accounts, a polite and conservative understatement.

Between the years 1904 and 1911, Johannes Schmidt patiently sailed up and down the coasts of Europe with a trawl: through the waters off Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the north, across the North Sea off Norway and Denmark, south