Review: Vivien Horler

On the Sponge Islands – Loss and restoration in the Aegean, by Julia Martin (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Sponges – everyday utilitarian objects of no great interest or value. I have two in the kitchen, for dish-washing and mopping up spills, and another in the bathroom.

Yet natural sponges, harvested from the deep, once made many people extraordinarily rich (think of the analogy of ostrich plumes for the Oudtshoorn feather barons). Even today they can sell for around 30 euros (about R550).

In a prologue to this travel memoir, Cape Town-based writer Julia Martin refers to sponges as “the meekest of animals who live and reproduce without muscles, heart, brain or nervous system”, always retaining their defining quality: porosity.

Martin is charmed: “All day and all night, the ocean flows through, unhindered. Sponges are made of sea, of everything.”

Martin, a writer and academic, and her husband Michael had come to the Greek Aegean island of Symi in the European summer 2017 for a couple of months. It was a time of Syrian refugees turning up in their numbers on the islands amid concern – and kindness – from the islanders.

It turns out there are a handful of sponge islands in the Aegean, where for generations people made a living free-diving for sponges, limited only by their physical abilities to go deep.

There had been a market for sponges for ever, including in ancient Egypt, but it was during the Victorian era that things really picked up for Aegean sponge divers.

Pears soap, widely advertised and sold across the British empire, was seen as an embodiment of cleanliness, godliness and social progress. And as Martin notes, the perfect companion for the first mass-marketed soap was a high-quality bath sponge.

Demand exploded, and by the 1840s the sponge beds of the Aegean were becoming depleted, meaning the captains of sponge boats would leave for six months each year for the north African coastal waters of Libya and Benghazi.

But what really destroyed the sponge beds of the Aegean and North Africa and later Florida in the US was the invention of the deep-sea diving suit and the hand-cranked air compressor. Now divers could reach depths well beyond those the old free divers could. But they knew nothing of the dangers of deep-water diving, of the nitrogen build-up in their blood known as the bends. Thousands died or became paralysed.

In 1908 the first decompression tables were produced for the British Admiralty, but most Greek divers ignored the recommended rates of surfacing.

Meanwhile, according to Martin’s informant Panormitis, whose father had had a sponge boat, the technology moved on. The boats dispensed with divers altogether – they simply trawled a metal bar across the seabed, scooping up everything – seaweeds, corals, sponges, shellfish – “an entire realm of living things” – into a net.

Martin writes: “It’s a method that has since been banned, but it sounds about right for the 1950s: naively overconfident technology and no limits to the plunder.”

And then the market collapsed with the introduction of synthetic sponges of the kind you probably have in your kitchen sink.

This book, however anchored in sponges, is about more than that. It is an often lyrical description of the glories of several Aegean islands, visited by the couple over a number of years. Martin interviews elderly sponge divers and their families, as well as ordinary people who have pivoted to the new industry supporting islands’ economy – tourism.

She is saddened by the sight of old terraces, once intensivey farmed and now disused as people get their produce from the supermarket, by the fact that the islands are no longer self-supporting, getting all their water brought in by ferry when once islanders had used cisternas (some now turned into Airbnbs), and what seems to be the routine ill-treatment of animals, like hunting dogs kept in cages.

But she is also delighted by the history, the people, the friends they make, as well as the tentative signs of environmental and community recovery. And above all, the glories of the light, the sea, and the silvery fishes she swims among.

I’ve had one fortnight-long Greek island holiday, in the 1980s, and it was glorious. But I learnt very little about the island we were on, or its history. Now I’m inspired – wouldn’t a Greek island, with a bit more context, be a fabulous place for a reunion with my Australian family?

Thank you, Julia Martin, for a great read and a brilliant idea.