Phosphorescence

Julia Baird: There are a few things as startling as encountering an unearthly glow in the wild. Glow-worms. Ghost mushrooms. Fireflies. Flashlight fish. Lantern sharks. Vampire squid. Our forest floors and ceilings, our ocean depths and fringes are full of luminous beings, creatures lit from the inside. And they have, for many centuries, enchanted us, like glowing missionaries of wonder, emissaries of awe.

Is there anything more beautiful than living light?

Before science explained the phenomena in its various forms, it was the stuff of myth and legend. Aristotle puzzled over damp wood that glowed in the dark. The Japanese imagined fireflies to be the souls of the dead, or, more specifically, of samurai killed in battle. Sailors aboard ships gliding through luminescent blooms thought the seas were on fire; they spoke of ‘burning seas’, ‘milky oceans’ or ‘smouldering coals’ on the water; Aristotle referred to ‘exhalations of fire from the sea’.

In 1637, French philosopher René Descartes saw seawater ‘generate sparks rather similar to those which are omitted by piece of flint when they are struck’. In 1688, French Jesuit missionary Père Guy Tachard declared that sparks were a consequence of the sun impregnating the sea by day with ‘an infinity of fiery and luminous spirits’, and these spirits uniting after dark ‘to pass out in a violent state”. Some observers, watching light-trails spinning out from bows in the Indian Ocean, called them ‘The Wheels of Poseidon’.

For me, today, these lights are the perfect metaphor for flashes of life in the middle of the dark, or joy in difficult times. But in centuries past, they were sheer magic. Charles Darwin was awestruck when he saw, while sailing through the Rio de la Plata in the South Atlantic in 1845, ‘a sea that presented a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle… The vessel drove before her bows two billions of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected the glare of the livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the vault of the heavens.’

Excerpt from Phosphorescence by Julia Baird*