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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD

@greenleejw

26 Nov 20

It's Thanksgiving. Are you getting your eels ready? It's traditional!

The 1st Thanksgiving included a big table full of eels. And it's fitting. Tisquantum brought eels to the starving pilgrims that spring to celebrate their new peace treaty w/ the local Wampanoag tribe. 1/6

You may read elsewhere that the indigenous peoples taught the Pilgrims how to fish eels. This is unlikely. The Pilgrims came from England, w/ it's long-established tradition of eel fishing, & they came by way of Europe's other great eel fishing culture in the Netherlands. 2/6

In fact, the English were well acquainted w/ the method by which the local people fished for eel. William Bradord wrote that Tisquantum "trod them out with his feet"...a means of fishing that Chaucer had written about as common in England several centuries earlier. 3/6

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD

@greenleejw

17 Sep 20

Eels weren't just for paying rent in medieval England; they were also part of the trade economy!

A 10th C. schoolbook includes an imaginary discussion w/ a fisherman who says he catches eels & takes them to town for sale, but that he can't catch enough to meet market demand. /1

https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1204839635802841095

So how do you get your eels to town? You can transport them live in barrels or baskets; eels can live for a time out of water, esp. if packed in damp moss or hay.

Or you might smoke them & take them to market in units of 25, called sticks. /2

https://twitter.com/greenleejw/status/1204839635802841095

Getting the fish to town wasn't always easy, though. There were pirates, bandits, & unscrupulous folk like Geoffrey Cardun. In 1203 he was found guilty of collecting illegal tolls on people passing through his land, including taking one stick from each eel cart.

Villany! /3

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD

@greenleejw

11 Sep 20

Did you know that eels migrate thousands of miles, or that their bodies change dramatically during their lives? Do you want to know?

That's right, friends...it's eel life cycle time!

Before we start, let's remember that I'm a historian, not a scientist. But I'll do my best. /1

All the eels in Europe and N. America are born (we think) in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic. We've never actually seen eels mate, but this is where the smallest larvae have been found.

Eel larvae are transparent, leaf-shaped things. They look like this! /2

They can't really swim...they mostly float on the currents. They catch eventually a ride on the Gulf Stream and make their way towards land. For European eels, this means a 3,000+ mile journey.

This can take up to three years. /3

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD

@greenleejw

16 Dec 19

It's 1200, and you're the Abbot of Ramsey (congrats!). At Lent your tenants come calling with their annual rents of preserved eels.

- 60,000 from Welles
- 4,000 from Chatteris
- 125 from Little Bedford
- 5260 from Wisbeck
etc.

So what do you do with all of these eels? /1

Well, you eat some of them. The 60k eels from Welles works out to 164.3 eels per day. In 1200 Ramsey had about 80 monks in residence, and responsibility for several satellite cells. So that comes to about 2 eels per monk per day (about 2 meals worth) for the year. /2

So you eat them. You also store them for special occasions, like when the king visits. But you can also use your eels to buy things!

In the 1250s Ramsey paid 4000 eels per yr. to Peterborough Abbey for the right to quarry stone to build the abbey. /3

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD

@greenleejw

13 Dec 19

Have you been looking, without any luck, for eel testicles? Not sure how to sex an eel? Well don't worry...you're not alone. People from Aristotle onward tried & failed. Sigmund Freud once spent a summer in Italy dissecting 400 eels looking for their testes, without success. /1

Turns out, eel sexual determination is pretty wild. It's largely environmentally determined, & only becomes set years into their life cycle. For most of their lives eels are juveniles, & their sexual organs only develop fully just before they head back to sea to mate & die. /2

This led to the long-held belief that eels reproduced asexually. Aristotle thought they sprang from the mud, writing that eels had neither sperm (milt) nor eggs. Pliny thought that they grew out of flakes of dead skin other eels had rubbed off on rocks. /3

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD

@greenleejw

9 Sep 19

The greatest trick maps ever playedt is convincing people that they don't lie. Even when they're not trying to lie, maps are still products of cultural convention. I don't get worked up much, but this editorial is giving me the angers. So let's chat. (1)
nytimes.com/2019/09/08/opi…

There are whole books on this subject, not the least of which is Mark Monmonier's aptly-titled "How to Lie with Maps." Brian Harley's work in the later part of the 20th century made clear the degree to which mapping is a subjective activity that inscribes the mapmaker's (2)

perspectives, ideas, & biases into images of geographic space. Matthew Edney wrote about the uses of mapping as a means of controlling British India. Thongchai Winichakul wrote about the ways that Siam adopted modern mapping practices to try to combat European colonialism (3)

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