The Art of Collecting Seaweed

For centuries, the gathering of seaweed was an important activity along the coasts and islands of western Brittany. The back-breaking work involved in harvesting, drying and burning the seaweed changed little between the ends of the 17^th and 20^th centuries. Sometimes, whole families laboured together, for others it was a means of supplementing the meagre household income and an activity pursued by the women and children of the community while the menfolk were at sea.

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Traditionally, seaweed was harvested on a fairly modest scale as a foodstuff for both human and animal consumption as well being utilised as a fertiliser and even as a source of domestic fuel. However, the 17^th century saw the emergence of more intense harvesting thanks to the demands of the emerging glass-making and soap-making industries. Both of whom required ready access to good quality sodium carbonate or soda; a product extracted from the ashes of burnt seaweed.

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By the end of the 18^th century, advances in manufacturing technology saw a marked decline in the demand for industrial scale quantities of soda. However, the slump in demand was completely reversed within a generation thanks to the accidental discovery of iodine; created as a by-product from destroying the soda residue.

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Typically, men would gather the seaweed directly from the sea using large wooden rakes while the women and children would focus their efforts along the seashore and amongst the coastal rocks. The collected seaweed was then carried by hand or in wheelbarrows or even horse-drawn carts and piled together in large stacks, several metres square. Sometimes, these massive seaweed stacks were constructed in shallow water and tied together like an enormous bale; the incoming tide would be left to do the hard work of bringing the stack further up the seashore.

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As with most commercial endeavours, seaweed gathering here was long plagued by arguments of unfair competition. Those fortunate to have access to a horse and cart were able to take tonnes more seaweed directly to their ovens, much to the chagrin of those poor souls who had to move everything, in stages, by hand or wheelbarrow.

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Once collected, the seaweed was spread across the ground to dry and while Mother Nature was doing its share of the work, the harvesters were busy preparing their ovens. These ovens were usually long, fairly shallow, stone-lined pits dug out close to the shoreline. Depending on conditions, the seaweed was burned for between 10 to 24 hours; the fires kept burning until the many tonnes of collected seaweed had burned to cinder. These ashes were then formed into bricks of soda, popularly known in Breton as Bara Mor or Sea Bread, which were then sold to brokers and other middle-men who dealt directly with the iodine factories.

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The first factory entirely dedicated to the treatment of seaweed for the production of iodine was established in Le Conquet, the westernmost town in Brittany, in 1829; the first of many such facilities that were ultimately created across western Brittany. Underpinned by its long traditions of harvesting seaweed and in the production of soda, Brittany soon found itself dominating the nation’s iodine industry. By 1860, more than a dozen Breton factories produced about 70 tonnes of iodine annually, representing over 80 percent of national output.

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Thanks to improvements in the extractive process that produced iodine from soda, the industry continued to prosper here until the early 1900s when the effects of competition from Chile, and later Japan and the USA, began to be felt. By the 1930s, Brittany’s cottage-industry style seaweed harvesters were in terminal decline; unable to compete with the mechanised industrial techniques used by its overseas competitors who instead extracted nitrates from mineral deposits.

The industry effectively ended, as an economic concern, here in the early 1950s although some producers managed to keep going, having moved into alginates; a derivative of seaweed used as thickening and stabilising agents in the pharmaceutical and food industries.

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Today, arguments about efficiency and economies of scale are countered with increased calls for ecological sustainability and reduced carbon footprints and while the number of professional seaweed harvesters are nowhere near the numbers seen as late as the 1960s, scores of such specialists continue to ply the trade. Indeed, some reports suggest that the industry is now growing again, thanks to the traditional demand for seaweed as a foodstuff, animal fodder and natural fertiliser now being supported by increased calls from the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries.

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