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

some seemingly abandoned winter stores of corn and beans, but after sacking the stores, they found themselves hunted by the natives whose food they’d stolen. One night, they were attacked by warriors with bows and arrows and narrowly escaped.

Tuberculosis, pneumonia, and scurvy soon broke out aboard the ship. Food was scarce and the water dirty. When spring finally arrived, only 53 of the 102 passengers were still alive. Half the crew had perished as well.

It was March before the surviving colonizers were able to leave the ship at last, still determined to follow through on their plan and fulfill the will of God. They were famished and frozen and had in the way of possessions not much, other than their conviction that God was on their side. They didn’t know where they should start building their colony or how they could make peace with the natives. Nor did they know where to hunt, which plants were edible, or how to find potable water. The promised land could perhaps be welcoming, but clearly only to those who understood it.

That’s when they came across Tisquantum. A member of the Patuxet tribe, he had been captured by the English years earlier, taken to Spain, and sold as a slave, before managing to escape to England, where he learned the language. Eventually, he boarded a ship back to North America, only to find that his entire tribe had been wiped out by an epidemic probably brought by the English.

There was no apparent logic to his actions, and a person’s motives cannot always be explained by his backstory, but by all appearances, Tisquantum saved the imperiled English colonizers. One of the first things he did was gift them an armful of eels. After their very first meeting, Tisquantum went down to the river, and “at night, he came home with as many eels as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of,” noted one of the pilgrims in a diary later sent back to England. “They were fat & sweet, he trod them out with his feete, and so caught them with his hands without any other Instrument.” It was a gift from God in their hour of need, the salvation they had never stopped praying for.

Before long, Tisquantum had taught the pilgrims how to catch eels and where to find them. He also gave them corn and taught them how to cultivate it; he showed them where they could find wild vegetables and fruits and advised them on how and where to hunt. Not least, he helped them communicate with the local natives and was key to negotiating the peace agreement that was pivotal to the lost Englishmen’s future in America.

And thus, the pilgrims survived, becoming, in time, legends in the American creation myth. The Mayflower’s arrival has been a symbolic and epoch-making event in American history ever since, mythologized and romanticized in countless patriotic contexts.

In November 1621, a year after their arrival and around the date that has ever since, and because of the pilgrims’ survival, been called Thanksgiving, they wrote in their diaries about the amazing land they had found. They wrote about the grace that had, after all their tribulations, been extended to them and thanked the Lord for all the trees and plants and fruits surrounding them, for the animals and fish and fertile soil and, of course, for the eels they “effortlessly” fished out of the river in great quantities every night.

It would have made complete sense for the eel to have become an important figure in American mythology, a fat, shiny symbol of the promised land, the gift that sealed what was preordained. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps because the eel’s nature doesn’t lend itself well to solemn symbolism. Perhaps because it soon became associated with the simple eating habits of the poor rather than with feast days. Perhaps also because the gift had come from a native man.

For some reason, this gift from God to the early pilgrims has been all but erased from the grand narrative. The story of the colonization of North America is full of myths and legends, but the story of the eel isn’t one of them. On Thanksgiving, Americans eat turkey, not eel, and other animals—buffalo, eagles, horses—have been the ones to shoulder the symbolic weight of the patriotic narrative of the United States of America. True, the colonizers continued to catch and eat eels, and by the end of the nineteenth century the eel was still an important ingredient in the American kitchen. But it gradually disappeared from dinner tables. After the Second World War, the eel’s reputation lay in tatters, and by the end of the 1990s, eel fishing had more or less completely ceased along the East Coast. Today, many Americans think of the eel as a troublesome, fairly unappetizing fish they want as little to do with as possible. Sometimes, even the gifts of God are only begrudgingly accepted.

THIS UNCERTAIN, CONTRADICTORY ATTITUDE TOWARD THE EEL WAS, of course, not unique to the arrival of the Mayflower in North America. Throughout history, the eel has aroused ambiguous feelings in the people who have encountered it. At times reverence, but also an inevitable unease. Curiosity, but also rejection.

In ancient Egypt, the eel was considered a mighty demon, an equal of the gods and a forbidden food. A creature moving effortlessly beneath the glittering surface of the holy Nile, slithering through the sediments of existence itself. Archaeologists have found mummified eels in tiny sarcophagi, laid to their eternal rest next to bronze statuettes of the gods.

Granted, many animals symbolized divinity in ancient Egypt. The sun god Ra was often depicted with the head of a falcon. The god of the Underworld, Anubis, had the head of a jackal. Thoth, the god of wisdom, was given the head of an ibis. The goddess of love, Bastet, had a woman’s body and a cat’s head. Every animal represented different characteristics, of course, but the blurring of the line