The Journey of a Sea Bean: In Praise of the Ocean’s Smallest Gifts

A sea bean can travel far and remain unscathed because the seed coat, the testa, is hard and impermeable yet light and buoyant. The dormant embryo that it contains is so well protected by this testa that viable sea beans can arrive on northern shores after floating on the surface of the ocean for thousands of miles. A sea bean that rattles is unlikely to grow, but as E. Charles Nelson warns in his book, Sea Beans and Nickar Nuts,

The only way to test whether a drift-seed is viable—capable of germinating—is to sacrifice the specimen and attempt to germinate it. It is a decision that you must make yourself, remembering that once the seed is prepared and planted it will produce either a rather a vigorous plant, probably requiring a massive, continually heated greenhouse in which to live, or nothing and then it will be so rotten that you will want to dispose of its putrid remains. Whatever the outcome, your lucky drift-seed will be lost for ever.

I would not risk mine.

Perhaps the sea bean that I will one day find is still growing. Maybe it sits cradled, with others, within a seed pod that stretches a little over a meter in length and which dangles from a forest canopy. I have begun to imagine its journey, to think of the rainforest in which its vine grows. At some point the seed will slip from the pod. I do not know how the seeds are scattered—if the pod first falls and then breaks, or if it splits while still aloft. It does not matter; the seed is light and easily lifted from the forest floor by the rivulets of rain that snake through the leaf litter after a torrential downpour. Or maybe the pod hangs over a stream and the seed will not need to wait for the rainy season to begin its journey.

Afloat, it becomes a drift-seed, and soon enough the stream will empty into a river and the river will empty into the sea and then the sea bean, my sea bean, will begin its ocean voyage. I wonder where it is growing—in the American tropics or in the forest of an island in the Caribbean Sea. I prefer the thought of an island forest. Islands are easier to imagine now that I am, in some ways, becoming an islander. I know from Sea-Beans from the Tropics, by Ed Perry IV and John V. Dennis, that, if it enters the Caribbean Sea, it will drift north, on the Yucatán Current, and into the Gulf of Mexico. It will circulate in a clockwise direction past the shores of Mexico, Texas and Louisiana, passing by some of the many oil and gas platforms that occupy this body of water. It might even pass the place where the Deepwater Horizon once towered above the surface of the sea.

If it passes through the Gulf at a time of bird migration, the sky could be filled with birds of many kinds—or maybe this is too nostalgic and the days of endless flocks have gone, but still there will be birds in the sky. The weaker of the birds seek refuge on the oil and gas platforms, where peregrine falcons have learnt to wait for prey. In poor weather, at night, the lights of the platforms disorientate the birds. They fly in circles; some collide with steel and others fall exhausted into the sea. Migrating birds also succumb to the sea in storms and this is how songbirds, like house wrens, have come to be found in the stomachs of tiger sharks.

My sea bean will need to find its way through the Florida Straits, a gap of ninety miles between the tip of the Florida Keys and Cuba, and then it will join the Gulf Stream. This will carry it north, along the coast of Georgia, South Carolina and then North Carolina. Just beyond the sandy barrier island of Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream leaves the continental shelf and begins to cross the Atlantic. Here my sea bean will be joined by drifting debris that has been carried south, from the north, on the Labrador Current—birch bark from the forests of Canada and cigarette lighters from Greenland.

The Gulf Stream does not reach Shetland; instead, it turns south part way across the Atlantic Ocean to eventually encircle the Sargasso Sea. Some drift-seeds will be carried southwards too, to circulate for years on end within this subtropical gyre. This is the place where young sea turtles drift, in water thick with plastic and sargassum seaweed, until they mature and break away to swim to their breeding grounds. The son of my neighbor captained a container ship of bananas through the Sargasso Sea. He said that it was eerie, that the sea smelt oddly like land and that, yes, it was visibly choked with plastic.

Before the Gulf Stream turns south, surface layers of warmer water—a current called the North Atlantic Drift—peel away to continue north, and this is why Shetland is not encased in ice each winter, even though these islands lie at a latitude of 60 degrees north. My sea bean will be carried towards Shetland by the North Atlantic Drift and will be blown by a westerly wind to a local and inshore current. Other drift-seeds will continue further north on diverging currents, and so some will travel west to be found in the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, while others will head east to wash ashore in Arctic Norway and Russia.

It is still a cause of speculation—the length of time that it takes for a drift-seed to arrive on a northern shore. Drift bottles released from the north-eastern islands of the West Indies reached the beaches of Europe, on average, fourteen months later. This finding has been used as a proxy to estimate the time it takes for a drift-seed to reach beaches in the north. But drift-seeds grow south of this release point, and it is not clear that the bottles arrived as far north as Shetland. The fastest crossing of a bottle, traveling over 4,000 miles from Hispaniola, in the Greater Antilles, to south-western Ireland, took 337 days, but bottles can catch the wind in a way that drift-seeds do not. It has been found that a sea bean can float in a tank of still water for at least nineteen years.

When I find my sea bean, I will not know how long its journey took. I try to picture in my mind the moment of discovery—will it be lying among pebbles, resting on a strandline of tangled seaweed or maybe lying in plain sight, a deep brown on the pale white of shell sand? Sometimes now, when I am unable to sleep, I am comforted by the thought of a sea bean floating northwards, towards Shetland, on the dark surface of the ocean.

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There is no sand at Woodwick; it is a beach of large unstable pebbles that shift with a sharp crack of sound as you cross them. Boulders have been tossed high up onto the grass at the back of the beach by the waves of a storm. Patches of bare earth suggest that they were rearranged by the sea this winter.

The two drift-seeds found at Woodwick—a sea bean and a kind called a sea purse—belonged to Joy Sandison. They now lie in a National Trust for Scotland warehouse somewhere in Edinburgh. In the typed note that accompanies a photograph of the drift-seeds, Joy recalls that they had “lain amongst Mother’s sewing things as far back as I can remember.” Joy was born in 1929, and it is possible that both drift-seeds were found more than one hundred years ago. Her note explains that sea beans found on Shetland beaches are thought to be lucky, but she does not elaborate any further.

Joy Sandison’s sea bean was found by Tommy Bruce, a shepherd. There is no date for when Tommy found it, but I think of him, strolling along the beach at Woodwick and bending down to pluck it from a strandline. Did he know of their use as charms and, if so, why did he give his luck away? Perhaps Joy’s mother, Ida, was a keen collector of natural curios and he was fond of her, or loyal.

I am left contemplating this luck. The absence of drift-seed folklore in Shetland frustrates me. It is so well documented elsewhere along the shores of the north-eastern Atlantic that I don’t understand why nobody has ever noted down their use as charms here. There are several records of drift-seeds washing up in Shetland, including for the parish in which I live, but these are perfunctory descriptions at best.

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From Sea Bean: A Beachcomber’s Search for a Magical Charm—A Memoir by Sally Huband. Copyright © 2024 by Sally Huband. To be published on Nov. 5, 2024, by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.