Fish that became drums, shields, pouches, shoes, and dazzling garments

By Roxani Margariti and Dimitra Mylona.

In a nightmarish scene from Saudi director Shahad Ameen’s remarkable short film Eye and Mermaid, a group of fishermen have entrapped a merwoman and are extracting black pearls from her scaly skin; the protagonist, the young daughter of one of those participating in the savaging, secretly looks on in terror.  Herman Melville conjures a very different marine skin in Moby Dick’s chapter entitled “The Cassock.”  A coy and elliptical description of the whale’s penis lying on the deck of the Pequod is followed by the humorous image of the mincer (the crew member responsible for carving up the dead whale’s body); he deftly skins the animal’s male body part and dons its pelt as a cassock, a priest’s garment.   

Far less darkly than Ameen and less comically than Melville, maritime cultural traditions the world over attest to the practice of using a wide variety of marine animal skins for a wide variety of purposes.  Fish skin is strong, tensile, waterproof, and often aesthetically pleasing, with patterns created by the scales and dermal plates. Depending on the size of the animal, the skin can be rendered in strips or broad patches. Similarly, marine mammal hides are strong, hardy and also water proof, a property which has been precious to mariners and coastal dwellers around the globe. 

This discussion may expand to other parts of marine mammals. The intestines, for example, have been used, dried and processed to create lightweight water- and wind-proof cloaks, especially in circum-polar regions.

In the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam the visitor has the opportunity to see several objects made of baleen, the rough keratinous strips that from a feeding filter in the whale’s mouth, in the heyday of whaling: umbrella and corset strips to tape measures, like the one in the photograph below.  Fish glue, which is produced by the skins of fish is also relevant but we will leave those for another post.

Skin (dried and processed but not tanned) and leather (skin treated with tannins) do not preserve well over time.  They easily rot away and that is why archaeological finds of this kind are relatively rare.  Among them, the skin of fish or marine mammals is rarer still!  In a recent review article of much of the available evidence by Roman Vávra, only two dots mark the global map (see figure below) and show places where actual fish skin objects or traces of them have been found.   Thus, our knowledge about the past of the art of fish skin making is based primarily on a few scattered references in ancient texts. 

In a discussion of natural phenomena, Pliny the elder, in the 1^st century CE, tells us about the extraordinary quality of tents made of seal skin to repel lightning and protect humans almost as well as deep caves did (Natural History, Book II, ch. 56).  It was rumored, according to another Latin author, Suetonius, that emperor Augustus always wore a seal’s skin for this purpose (Octavius, § 90).  Only a few centuries later, in the Edict on Maximum Prices issued in 301 CE by Diocletian, probably in Antioch or Alexandria on the eastern part of the Roman Empire, seal skins appear again as an extremely expensive and coveted object.  In a society where a laborer, a herdsman, a mule-driver or a sewer-cleaner received 20-25 denarii for a day’s labor, a tanned seal hide reached 1500 denarii, surpassing in value the exotic leopard tanned skin (1250 d.) or the lion tanned skin (1000 d.), and being more than twice as expensive as more conventional good quality leathers such as the ox hide (600-750 d.), or a wagon cover made of eight first quality goat skins (600 d.).

The 19^th and 20^th century left us a much richer record of fish skin objects. Travelers’ journals and ethnographic accounts complement a hoard of relevant objects in ethnographic museums and collections all over the world, both reminding us of the vastly rich and old aquatic cultures that were lost in the last century.  A recent revival of the fish leather artisanal production builds on this tradition but also reflects both the dynamic and insatiable world of fashion and the need for local, viable economic development of fishing communities in various parts of the world.

Certain parts of the world are more prominent in the real of fish skin use; in Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, China, and Japan indigenous people have put fish skins to a wide variety of uses. In some of these the art of producing such skins and leathers is very much alive today and the opportunity to observe them ethnographically has added depth to our knowledge. Still, people of the global south also made use of fish and other marine skins in various contexts and given our respective expertise, these have drawn our attention. The cases we present, each fascinating, leave us with a bitter-sweet sense of wonder.

Shining, dazzling, slip-resistant and abrasive

The choice of fish or marine mammal skin for the manufacture of certain items makes best use of the skin’s properties (e.g. tensility, water proofing, abrasiveness, thickness, flexibility); there is a functional aspect to it.  Availability and supply also determine the extent of marine skin usage. The reasons for specific choices, however, are also aesthetic.  Moreover, they sometimes relate to the realm of beliefs and people’s ideas about the sea and the sea world.  The examples shown below illustrate these often overlapping approaches.

Christine Bell investigates the history of shagreen, the pebbly surfaced leather, which was aesthetically pleasing and functionally prized for its toughness, thickness, flexibility, and non-slip, distinctly textured surface.  Shagreen is made either with rawhide or with “aquatic leather,” specifically shark or ray skin.  Bell begins her article with a reference from the Baburnama, the autobiography of the Mughal empire’s founder Babur (d. 1525), that mentions green shagreen quivers and saddles.  The grip on the 16^th-century Ottoman sword pictured here may not be original but the Baburnama reference attests to green shagreen use in the Turco-Mongol world in roughly the same period. 

According to Bell, shagreen originated in East Asian use of shark or ray skin.  The objects travelled along the Silk Road and inspired steppe people to imitate the effect using rawhides that they were adept at treating.  In fact, the word shagreen comes from the Turkic word for horse rump leather!

Opulent fish clothing, but also utilitarian garments

Fish skin clothing came up in our mermaid post where we briefly touched upon one of the earliest attested such instances: the priestly apkallu of the Mesopotamian religious imaginary is clothed in a fish-scale mantle that perhaps reflects actual fishy garments.  Making such a garment in actuality would have required either a large fish hide (for example from a carp, a fish that can reach 150 cm in length) or stitching together several pieces of scaly skin.  Or was the marine garment that inspired the apkallu depiction one made of the skin of a marine mammal present in the Persian Gulf, such as a dugong?  The use of mercreatures skin to make shoes or clothing is mentioned in the medieval Arabic literature already in the 10^th century. The apkallu mantle, however, is demonstrably scaly, as if made of fish skin.  Roman Vávra, whose work on the  occurrences of fish skin use from around the world we mentioned earlier, writes about the apkallu  and he makes the important point that it is difficult to ascertain if the mythical image was inspired by or had itself inspired actual fish-skin garments.  The skins of water creatures were both functionally useful and conceptually exotic, blurring the lines between reality and imagination.  

Vávra also points to a remarkable pair of Gujarati fisherman’s shoes made of shark skin (see photograph above) that he notes are the only such instances of marine skin use from South Asia.  While the extent of fish and marine mammal skin use in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific islands remains for us a fascinating area for further research, here we can add literary references to marine skin use from medieval Arabic geographical and cosmographical literature that concerns some southern locales.  From the 11th century, the now famous Egyptian geographical text known as the Book of Curiosities, emphasizes the texture and color of mercreature skin, and also refers to an animal living in the Persian Gulf that looks like a cow, acts like a mammal, and has skin that is used in making shields.  Echoing the British Museum’s fisherman’s shoes more directly is a reference in Buzurg b. Shahriyar’s Wonders of India mentioned in our previous post; Buzurg notes that these creature’s skin is used to make shoes specifically.  The Persian eclectic cosmographer al-Qazwini (ca. 1203–1283) also conveys marvelous details about the use of marine mammal leather.  In this case, it is the “sea dog,” possibly a seal or a dugong, that offers up its skin in addition to other parts of its anatomy.  Qazwini claims its brain and its testicles cure a number of maladies.  But its skin itself has medicinal properties: footwear made from it are worn as a cure by people suffering from gout.  Fascinatingly, this same detail—fish-skin footwear that cures gout—appear in the biographies of the great Mongol Kubilai Khan, who is said to have benefited from wearing such shoes!

In a non-maritime world where domestic animals, cattle and oxen, sheep and goat, camels and the horses provided an abundant source of hides and leather, aquatic skins of fish or marine mammals have had an exotic allure for centuries.  In the world of mariners and fishers they were integral elements of daily life and helped their producers make a living.  Such skins serve myriads of purposes, some practical and some symbolic, differing across space and historical periods.  In the 19^th century alone, for example, an unnamed fisherman wore sharkskin shoes in Gujarat, a Japanese fashionista sported the salmon-skin netsuke on their kimono, and a Nivkh woman in Siberia covered her feet in attractive patchwork fish skin boots in summer.  Today, visitors of museums discover and marvel at the ingenuity of light, waterproof, and amazingly beautiful aquatic skin objects of all kinds. Indeed, fish and other water creatures became drums, shields, pouches, shoes, and dazzling garments!

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