My mother had a shell on her dressing table. I liked to hold it, to feel its smooth round body and its blunt row of teeth. Egg-like. Dappled. I looked it up one day in an old encyclopaedia which had a double-page spread on sea creatures. Cypraea tigris. A tiger cowrie. I read that its disrupted colouration served as camouflage from octopuses and mollusc-eating cone snails, and that the word ‘cowrie’ derived from the Swahili term for porcelain. Cowries are known as effulgent shells: shiny, radiating light. My mother told me that if I held the shell to my ear, I’d be able to hear the sea. So, I’d do as I was told, sitting very still, cupping the shell in my hand. Hush …

Summer holidays were deckchairs and windbreaks; burning pebbles; sunburnt skin; tangled hair; sand-scored toes; screaming seagulls; and the cold briny water, holding me as I bobbed on my back, looking up at the sky.

I’ve been fortunate to have had many opportunities of indulging my love of the oceans since those carefree, childhood days, not least through my love of kayaking and wild swimming. Currently, I’m indulging my childlike curiosity again through my research of women’s stories of the polar regions. And, unexpectedly, the cowrie has returned.

Cowries originate from the tropical Indian and Pacific oceans. Most likely, the large tiger cowrie that had ended up in our house in Kent had been plucked from a shallow coral reef in Hawaii and imported as a decorative item. The lustre of its shell would have been its downfall, as only live cowries have the desired gloss for it to be a curio. The snail would have died during processing.

Cowries are emblematic of beauty and suffering and are closely associated with the female form. Swollen belly, slit beneath. Womanhood, fertility, birth.

African legends endow the cowrie with life-giving properties bestowed by the sea goddess, as well as wisdom and protection. Cowries are powerful talismans of the ocean. Magical. Spiritual. Yet, cowries have also been ‘shell currency’, aligned with slavery and exchanged for the human trade of men, women, and children.

In the plantation society of Victorian Barbados, the crafting skills of Barbadian women tied them to contracts to fuel the fashionable craze of ‘conchylomania’ (shell collecting) that swept England and the United States in the 1800s. At the Bridgetown Curiosity Shop, the women skilfully crafted ‘sailors’ valentines’, keepsake shell mosaics in wooden boxes that were purchased by the sailors on whaling ships when they stopped in the Caribbean to restock and refuel, before returning home to gift them to their loved ones. Sometimes the sailors kept them in their pockets as they sailed the Arctic seas.

Cowries represent my PhD journey, as I endeavour to chart an unnavigated course that takes me from source to sea, across oceans and continents, cultures and histories. They are a reminder of how entangled our human lives are with the more-than-human, and how a literary thesis also requires a multi-disciplinary awareness of the entanglement of the arts and sciences. Sometimes I still feel like the child that I was, sitting alone, listening to the sounds of the sea, but maybe I’m beginning to understand a little more of our interconnected world and the contribution that my research can make.

Blog post written by: Clare Moss

Thesis Title: Challenging the Cultural Narrative of Arcticism through Contemporary Women’s Life-Writing of the Polar Regions