The Byssus Killer by Charles Tucker (read a book .TXT) 📗

metres below. The air-filled stern remained above water. The four crew swam from under the hull to climb on the stern. To stop themselves from being washed away, they gripped the half dozen metre long Pinna nobilis shells grouped under the counter stern. The shells felt the anger of the storm and went into overdrive, making quantities of sicky ‘saliva’, beards and byssus threads. They grouped tightly together, locking themselves and the four crew into a glued safety block. The crew were covered in the ever tightening glue, initially warm and waterproof, then suffocating as they sank into the cold reef waters to sleep the sleep of the deep.

Some weeks later, the marine scientists re-visited Sennen Cove to set up a Seven Stones reef survey base. Out of courtesy, they called on the old codger to politely tell him there was no bomb lying in the reef. He did not take kindly to the rebuke.

“Those a-cursed jets, squadrons of ’em, come over the Isles of Scilly and up through Cornwall leaving great thick vapour trails blotting out the sun. Turns to thick cloud. Tourists don’t come. Wales has the blue skies now. One day I sees this huge jet diving out of the sky like a gannet on a shoal of fish. He swooped just above the sea. Two long cylinders flew forward out of him. Then he’s gone, climbing way up over Devon. The cylinders hit the sea right on the Seven Stones. If you blinked, you might have thought the bombs hitting the sea was the jet crashing.”

“But the Coastguard have no record of a low flying jet dropping bombs.”

“What do they know! Staring across the Channel at France most of the time, they are. No idea what goes on over the Seven Stones!”

 

 

 Surveying the Seven Stones

The survey team had the list of two hundred Seven Stones wrecks. The first, HMS Primrose, foundered searching for two Spanish frigates in 1656. The last was the infamous Torrey Canyon in 1967. The rumours said, ‘Nobody was on the bridge when it hit the reef’, but the Board of Trade enquiry blamed the inaccurate American Loran navigating system, adding that the British DECCA system had proven accuracy. Shipping avoided the Seven Stones by wide margins thereafter.

Admiralty charts showed positions of wrecks back to the 1800s. An echo-sounding-equipped launch circled the reef to get an accurate plot of the outer lying wrecks. A sonar equipped helicopter was chartered to plot the inner lying wrecks. The diving team would enter the water when all undersea hazards had been located and the weather calm enough to give at least an hour’s dive time.

Two worries concerned the team. The creature covering living bodies with diamond hard glass coatings was down there somewhere. The old codger’s atom bomb, or bombs, if hidden below the surface might be unsafe.

The overhead sonar picked out an image of a wreck lying on its side. Several slabs had spilled from its’ hold. Sonar gives little detail, but sadly this was almost certainly the wreck of the marble carrying trot boat from Sardinia, probably blown on to the Seven Stones in the 1990 storm. Close to the wreck lay several large elongated shell shapes. These shell shapes were unique to the wreck. The sonar failed to locate them elsewhere on the reef.

The Plymouth University marine biologist studied a print-out of the sonar image and was sure the large one metre long shells were Pinna nobilis. He could not understand how a warm water Mediterranean mollusc found in two locations, Alexandria and Sardinia, had started a colony in the cold waters around the Seven Stones reef. Booming with enthusiasm, he wanted to dive and retrieve samples of the giant molluscs immediately.

 

 

 The Alexandria Connection

Ancient Egypt is famous for its pyramids, sphinx, tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Rosetta Stone. Within Egypt, 2500 years BC it was famous for the commercial product of the Pinna nobilis, byssus. Ptolemy V is recorded on the Rosetta Stone as a reducer of taxes, many of which were paid in byssus cloth. This cloth, woven from byssus or sea silk, was more valuable than gold. The metre-long Pinna nobilis secreted a typical mussel beard and filaments to attach itself to a rock, generally in the seas off Alexandria. The beard from a metre-long shell is very much larger than that of today’s edible mussels. Hidden and protected within the beard lay the byssus filaments. Only six centimetres long, the filaments were one tenth the diameter of a human hair. When glued to a rock, the fixing point and the filament were almost indestructible. Skilled fishermen collected the filaments for the spinners and weavers.

Byssus cloth is much finer than silk, requiring skilled and dedicated weavers to produce the cloth. It is also stronger than steel in UTS, ultimate tensile strength.

The pharaoh’s face, on his death, was covered by the finest byssus cloth of his realm. It was steeped in lemon juice and became richly golden, so fine it fitted into every facial feature far better than any gold leaf. The lemon juice also protected against the fruit fly, the only creature known to damage byssus cloth.

The Sardinia Connection

On the southern shores of the Italian island of Sardinia sits the little fishing island of Sant Antioco. Sheltered by mountains it has an almost rain free climate. The land around it retains the warmth of the sun. The sea lapping against the moorings receives the warmth from the land and retains it due to the small one metre tidal range. The clear waters in Sant Antioco’s little bay have been for centuries a breeding ground for the Pinna nobilis. History has no record of how the giant mollusc migrated from Alexandria’s Nile delta to Sardinia, to be found nowhere else. Greek mythology has a strong indication that Sardinia was known to them more as fact