A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
sea bean
A sea bean is a seed that has floated across an ocean and washed up on a distant shore, still viable in many cases. The classic ones are large tropical legumes with hard buoyant coats: the heart-shaped sea heart, the flattened hamburger bean, the nickernut. They ride currents for months or years, and beans from the Caribbean turn up regularly on the beaches of Ireland, Scotland, and Norway.
Etymology
The English name is plain. The Norse name is better and older: These were Vetjaland beans or lucky beans, carried as charms and used as teething rings and amulets in Scandinavia and the Hebrides for centuries. The people finding them had no idea where they came from and reasonable ideas about what that meant.
Notes
Columbus is reported to have taken the arrival of unfamiliar seeds and worked wood on the shores of the Azores as evidence of land to the west, which is one of the more consequential pieces of beachcombing on record. Modern drift-seed work uses them as physical tracers of surface currents, and the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift are the route for nearly everything reaching northern Europe.