Of Horses and Chrondrus Crispus

HORSES HARVESTING IRISH MOSS ON PEI

A long time ago I spent a summer in Rockland, Maine living on Lurmonds Cove.  If that sounds familiar, its because the cove had a recent brush with fame when a schooner went aground there a couple of years ago.  Back then I shared the cove with the Rockland waste water plant, the Maine State Ferry Service and Marine Colloids.  The latter occupied the shore opposite me and is notable in my memory for lots of lights at night, for a constant low humming sound and for the stack pushing out clouds of vapor.  On foggy nights the lights and vapor combined to create an industrial tableaux  reminiscent of an impressionist painting.

I soon learned I was living across from a plant that processed Irish moss into the very valuable product additive, carageenan. Irish moss got named for the people of County Carrageenan, Ireland who used to collect it to make pudding. It got valuable when people started to use it as a binder, thickener and stabilizer in things like ice cream, beer, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals, diet soda and a host of other products.

In Rockland the lowly moss (chrondrus crispus) was cooked down and dried out to a  powder and sold as an additive  for pharmaceuticals. It was and is valuable. I knew some people on the supply side of the business who made a  living raking the moss and selling it to  Marine Colloids, which was called Sea Pro back then. It was a small investment for the harvesters, a rake or drag, a $50 permit and a wonky tin skiff and they were in business. It was a low overhead operation. Like clammers, they had a minimal investment in equipment (compared with say a lobster catcher) and an heroic investment in hard labor to make a living. Working along the tide line at low tide they harvested the moss by raking it up.  It was then transported to the plant.  Processing smelled pretty bad  and what remained afterwards left the cove by the truck load headed for the old quarry that served as the dump.

I didn't think much about the Irish moss-carageenan connection until I saw moss being harvested with horses on Prince Edward Island a couple of weeks ago. At the time I was struck by the contrast between the horses and harvesters gathering moss and the wind turbine farm on the bluff above harvesting energy for the island. The juxtaposition of horse power of the past and wind power turbines looking toward the future has stayed with me. Yesterday I went through my trip photos and found some still images and a scrap of video of harvesters working their horses along the surf line.  I was pretty far away, but here it is anyway.  There's more about harvesting moss at the Harvests of Prince Edward Island page.

Prince Edward Island

July 8, 2011--Left Belfast in the late morning headed for Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia for a few days. Stopped in Sussex, NB for the night near a nice little park.

July 9, 2011-- Crossed the bridge to PEI in a driving rain and about lunch time and headed for Charlottetown to find the house where Ted and Jane lived for two years back in the late 60's. We spent the day hanging around town. We couldn't find the bowling alley we visited in January of 1969 when I hitched to the island from North Andover, MA to see my girlfriend.

July 10, 2011--From Charlottetown to the west side of the island today. We poked along the shore and for me the most interesting part of the day way watching some men harvesting seaweed, maybe Irish moss, with horse drawn drags at North Point. The men stayed on shore while horses waded into the surf pulling drags behind them. It was fascinating. Eventually they worked the horses back to shore, emptied the drags into a wire basket which was hoisted up the bank on a little boom and winch operated by a man on the bluff above the cove. I want to know where they got horses willing to walk out into the surf and be buffeted by waves again and again. It was nice to see a sea product harvested with real horsepower. The horses were working just below a bluff shore where a wind farm was thrumming away valiantly making electricity for the island. The contrast in technology was a little unsettling.