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

This is what makes the eel unique, Johannes Schmidt argued. Not its metamorphoses, not that the mature silver eels wander back to the sea and cross an entire ocean to breed. “The point which makes our eel an exception among fishes, and among all other animals, is the enormous extent of its journeyings in the larval stage.”

THE SPRING OF 1914 FOUND JOHANNES SCHMIDT WITHIN TOUCHING distance of his goal. He was slowly homing in on the birthplace of the eel; all his observations were pointing in the same direction; all that was needed now were more expeditions. The scientific approach—empirical, systematic observation—had, after ten years of at times seemingly hopeless searching, come through after all. The truth would soon reveal itself in Johannes Schmidt’s microscope. In May 1914, he found two eel larvae that were just a third of an inch long.

That was when more worldly affairs suddenly got in the way. First, the schooner Margrethe sank after running aground off the island of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean. Fortunately, the collected specimens could be salvaged, but, Schmidt wrote, “here we were, on Saint Thomas with no ship. The only thing to be done for the moment was to endeavor to press forward the work being done from the trading vessels.”

Soon after that, in July 1914, the First World War broke out. Suddenly, the Atlantic was no longer just the enigmatic location of the eel’s propagation but also a war zone. Submarines patrolled the sea, threatening any and all who dared to venture out; several of the trading ships participating in Schmidt’s search were sunk; sailing around the ocean in search of transparent little willow leaves was no longer just a fairly unpromising endeavor, it was also deeply dangerous.

For five long years, Johannes Schmidt sat in his chamber, waiting for the world powers’ irrelevant skirmish to end so he could once more resume his much more urgent task. While he waited, he worked on the data he had already collected, photographed his specimens, cataloged them, drew up tables and diagrams. He was impatient, knowing exactly what he had to do “as soon as the war ceased.”

In 1920, when large parts of Europe still lay in ruin, Johannes Schmidt set sail again. During the imposed hiatus, he’d made sure he would be even better equipped than before. Through the East Asiatic Company in Copenhagen, he had gained access to the four-masted schooner Dana and outfitted her with all the necessary scientific equipment. Most important, however, he now knew where to look.

During 1920 and 1921, the Dana caught more than six thousand leptocephalus larvae in the western part of the Atlantic. Schmidt was able to make a detailed map of where the smallest specimens had been found. Specimens so minute, Johannes Schmidt wrote, “that there can be no question . . . where the eggs were spawned.”

A PERSON SEEKING THE ORIGIN OF SOMETHING IS ALSO SEEKING HIS own origin. Is that a reasonable statement? Was that true of Johannes Schmidt? The man who since the tender age of seven had lived with only fading memories of his father? Had he fished for eels as a child? Had he held an eel and tried to look into its eyes? In 1901, just a few years before he set off on his first journey, his uncle Johan Kjeldahl, who had at times been a kind of surrogate father, drowned. In 1906, while he was still sailing up and down the coasts of Europe, his mother passed away. The Johannes Schmidt who sailed west, out into the open ocean toward the unknown, was a young man whose every connection with his own origin had been severed.

What that really meant to him, we can’t say for certain. There is in his background, or at least what we know of it, very little to explain why he spent his life seeking the eel’s birthplace. Granted, he was a consummate scientist. He was often described as exceedingly efficient: he observed, described, and tried to understand; only rarely did he seem to trouble himself with the question of why. He took a matter-of-fact view of the world and his own place in it. In letters and reports, he was plainspoken and formal. In pictures, he looks warm and friendly and usually wears a three-piece suit and bow tie. He was said to love animals, with a particular love of dogs. But his motivation remains a well-buried secret. He grew up in a safe middle-class environment and felt at home in the world of science from an early age. By marrying Ingeborg, he also became a member of the upper echelons of Copenhagen’s bourgeoisie. He could have chosen an easier, more comfortable life. In terms of common measures of success—wealth, prosperity, status—he clearly had more to lose than gain from his journeys. And yet it never seems to have occurred to him to question the usefulness of spending almost two decades drifting around the vast Atlantic Ocean, finding tiny transparent willow leaves.

Put plainly, Johannes Schmidt was entranced by the eel question, by the enduring mystery of where the European eel breeds, how it is born and how it dies. “I think,” he wrote, “the eel’s life-history is, in point of interest, hardly surpassed by that of any other species in the Animal Kingdom.”

Perhaps there are people who simply don’t give up once they’ve set their minds to answering a question that arouses their curiosity, who forge ahead until they find what they seek, no matter how long it takes, how alone they are, or how hopeless things seem. Like a Jason aboard the Argo, seeking the Golden Fleece.

Or perhaps the eel question provokes a different kind of doggedness among those who tackle it. The more I myself learn about the eel, and the more aware I become of what the acquisition of that knowledge has cost throughout history, the more I’m inclined to believe that is the case. Above all, I want to believe that the mystery draws us