This is Coast!
As islanders, we're surrounded by the sea.
It shapes and sustains us.
Beneath the waves lie watery riches, food and other treasures.
Bounty that defines coastal living,
and forges fruitful relationships across our seas.
I'm heading for a unique place,
a North Atlantic neighbour famous for its bounty.
Out there is somewhere I've never been, yet always wanted to.
People call it "nature's larder", and it's simply breathtaking.
I'm touching down in the Faroe Islands.
An archipelago of 18 islands, 200 miles north west of Shetland,
the Faroe Islands are a self-governing nation
within the Kingdom of Denmark.
While I'm in lands afar, the rest of the team are casting off
on their own search for bounty.
Mark's venturing into unknown waters in the wake of our earliest fishermen.
We're trying to fish, the boat is burning...
This is such a risky operation!
Hermione's discovering how a microscopic bounty
aroused passions in Victorian art and science.
Plankton opened up a whole new world of mystery, of the magic of nature.
Tess is finding out how help from the seashore was
enlisted to keep Britain flying during the Second World War.
A German scientist stepped in with a unique solution,
he would save our skies with seaweed.
And I'm searching up top and down deep
for an array of Faroese fodder!
This is bounty from the sea.
I'm in the Faroe Islands, a place totally dependent on the sea
and its riches.
Out there is a world of opportunity,
oceans awash with bounty, a natural larder.
I want to discover what makes the Faroe Islands so reliant on the sea.
What makes this coast and these waters so fertile?
To find out, I'm embarking on an island odyssey.
My journey will take me around the islands, starting in the capital,
Torshavn, I'm making my way
to Muli on Bordoy, then to Gjogv on
Eysturoy where I'll attend a Faroese gathering - including a feast.
I might be miles from home,
but Britain has long been linked to this place by bounty.
The British supplied the first fishing smack in the 1850s
that took the Faroese fishing fleet offshore,
creating a population explosion and changing this archipelago forever.
Today, the Faroe Islands are one of the six biggest suppliers
of fish into the UK.
An astonishing 90% of the Faroese export is fish.
Flourishing North Atlantic waters are home to species such as cod,
herring, mackerel and salmon.
Bounty from these seas defines this isolated community
and surviving the harsh winter months means nothing is off-limits.
For 400 years, the Grindadrap whale hunt has been a ritual which continues today.
This custom is controversial
and draws objections from the wider world.
Gathering food for the table is a tradition handed down through
the generations here.
Be it on land or in the sea, I want to unlock the secrets of these
bountiful waters by doing some Faroese foraging of my own.
I'll see what I can bring to the table at the end of my journey.
But what, beyond fish, thrives in these waters.
Birgir Enni, a local diver and lifelong underwater forager,
is taking me in search of other edible treasures.
Hello, Birgir! Hello. Welcome.
We're sailing north out of the main town of Torshavn,
the capital of this little archipelago.
I'm aboard the Nordslyd, a traditional Faroese schooner,
built here in the 1940s.
What are we looking for, Birgir? The mussels, the horse mussels.
And where do we find Faroese horse mussels?
Yeah, all around the island you can find them.
Yeah? Yeah, in the Fjord especially.
Back home, we predominantly eat the blue mussel.
Here, on the Faroes, appetites are somewhat bigger.
This is one from the British water. OK, I'm familiar with these.
I have one here, this is, this is our mussels.
That's enormous! It's like a small boat.
Yeah, yeah. They can be up to 45-years-old.
They grow very, very slowly.
They are full of meat - I like them best of all.
It's for health, fire food - it makes you strong. OK.
Finding these monsters from the deep means taking the plunge
and getting wet.
This is a Faroese swimming costume.
As Birgir dives into the depths, I'm charged with searching closer to shore.
But I'm the world's worst snorkeler,
so the chances of me finding anything are slight.
Despite its northerly latitude, the water is surprisingly temperate.
That's because the Faroe Islands sit right in the path
of the Gulf Stream - a warm Atlantic current that brings nutrient-rich
waters from the Gulf of Mexico right up into the North Atlantic.
It makes for waters that never drop below six or seven degrees all year round.
Such clear conditions are courtesy of strong currents
and little heavy industry.
Coupled with a steady temperature and rich supply of plankton,
it's the perfect habitat for horse mussels.
These sleeping giants can lie undisturbed for decades,
growing and growing.
Living part-buried in the sediment and amongst all this kelp,
they're not an easy bounty to spot.
But Birgir has come up trumps!
Look what Birgir has found.
Catch a gander at this.
HE STRUGGLES
Look at the size of them! Birgir, how old do you think this one is?
Yeah. 30 years, 30 years..
30 years it's been growing just here. Yes.
This is the first contribution to my Faroese feast.
Look at these.
You are very welcome.
Welcome to our garden.
Surviving on the coast requires ingenuity and resolve.
It characterises its people who make a life on the edge.
Our seas promise rich pickings if we can harvest them.
From the fruitful North Atlantic to the fish-rich North Sea,
fishing has united coastal communities for thousands of years.
And this shared heritage stretches back to a time
when this sea didn't even exist.
Mark's heading for Ertebolle on the north west coast of Denmark
to investigate archaeological evidence of the very first
Europeans to fish at sea.
7,000 years ago in the Mesolithic period,
this fjord would have been a lush, bountiful landscape.
Now flooded, these waters hold the secret to a Stone Age technology
that would forever change our coast.
In the 1970s, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery,
some three metres down on the seabed they found a perfectly preserved
Stone Age village.
It would transform our understanding of how people lived in the past.
I might be in Denmark, but our two coasts were once linked.
There's the mountains of Scotland.
That's because a landmass used to connect
Britain and mainland Europe.
So, let's put seaweed in, which was once dry land.
It's known as Doggerland.
Over the centuries, sea levels rose
and flat flood plains were reclaimed by the North Sea.
People were forced to choose which shrinking landmass to follow,
one towards Britain or one towards mainland Europe.'
We were once connected across the North Sea with a common culture.
I've come here to Denmark to find out how discoveries made here
shed light on our Stone Age ancestors back in Britain.
Soren Andersen was a principal investigator at the excavation
of Tybrind Vig, a 7,000-year-old settlement found
submerged in a fjord.
Discoveries included pots, tools and graves,
but there was something more surprising - three boats.
And I have a slide here where you can see one.
That's a big one lying on the dry land, on the beach,
for the first time in 6,500 years!
I mean, that must be some of the oldest boats in Europe.
It is, it is. And what surprised us mostly,
it was ten metres long.
So, it's an enormous trunk has been used for that boat.
The boat was proof of a shifting way of life from hunting on land
to hunting at sea.
Prior to this, Stone Age people were transient hunter-gatherers.
By building the first boats, they could now fish from the sea
and settle on the coast.
The local museum has built a replica of one of the original boats,
which contained an unexpected feature.
What is surprising is that we have had a fireplace or
hearth to the rear of the boat.
I mean, it's a completely mad idea, isn't it?
Lighting a fire in a wooden boat? They had a fire in a wooden boat.
THEY LAUGH
It was a discovery that confounded archaeologists.
Not only had they found evidence the first fishing boats,
7,000 years ago, Stone Age people
were taking fire out to sea.
What was going on?
This might look like an empty field, but it could unlock the answer.
In the 1890s, a huge Stone Age rubbish dump or midden was uncovered here.
It dated to the same period as the boats
and it was full of millions of shells and fish bones.
Look! Here we've got some of the shells that have been thrown
up by animals. Oyster and scallops and all sorts of things here.
When the midden was originally excavated, it produced many
really important finds, including this extraordinary, exquisite
fish hook from the Stone Age.
This coastal bounty, masses of bones from protein-rich fish
together with the boats, suggests these people were prolific
and successful fishermen.
Among the bones found in the midden, were a number of species that
were typically caught at night.
Could that perhaps be the reason for the fires on the boats?
Eel bones were found in their thousands among the Stone Age rubbish.
These are fish most active after dark,
as retired fisherman Enjar Grevy remembers.
Hello, Enjar! Yes. Hi! Hi, hi.
Can I come on-board? Yes.
Enjar fished for the elusive eel at night using lamp light,
a practice now banned.
Did that attract the eels? Yes. Where the lights end,
you can see the eels come slowly passing by.
Sometimes just opposite the boat. And then how did you catch them?
When the light was on and I saw the eel...
Very slowly, down...
ding-a-ling-ling...
..then pull them in. As easy as that? Yes.
The idea that this type of fishing might have origins dating
back over 7,000 years on this fjord, is something I want to test.
We've been given special permission by the government to do some
experimental archaeology to find out how and why
our Stone Age ancestors might have fished at night.
Stone Age expert Jacqui Wood is helping me.
That should be enough. You reckon so? Yeah.
Right! In it goes.
Findings from the Stone Age boats revealed that embers
sat on a bed of sand and clay to protect the wood from burning.
Leave that to settle a little bit and we'll take some logs with us
to keep it going.
Off we go!
Jacqui and assistant Kif have brought along a prehistoric fishing
kit of harpoons and flares,
all based on archaeological findings.
While Stone Age man would have known what to do, for us
it's more error than trial,
and it's not long before we're in trouble.
Hang on we've got a problem here, Jacqui. OK.
I've dumped a whole lot of bark at the back there... No!
..and it's actually burning the boat! OK, well...
This is completely mad, isn't it?
We're in the middle of the North Sea, in a dug-out canoe.
I mean, we're trying to fish,
the boat is burning - this is such a risky operation.
But it must have been a really sort of profitable one to the
people in the Mesolithic, or they wouldn't have done it, would they?
You either drown or you starve.
With the fire under control, the fishing can get underway.
Jacqui believes our ancestors used bundles of birch bark
slotted into sticks as flares.
OK, Jacqui. There you go. Oh, wow! Wow!
It's amazing how deep you can see into the water.
Fire had a dual purpose, to light the way and lure the fish.
It appears that light fools the fish into thinking it's a
different time of day, or they mistake it for luminescent prey.
Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that amazing?
It's just like tea lights, isn't it?
They're like little tar boats.
Tar, found in the birch bark, acts as an accelerant,
creating brilliant candles that burn on the water.
Do you think they knew about this bark and this extraordinary characteristic of it?
Oh, absolutely. Because they actually cooked the bark
underground in pits with fires to get the actual tar off.
So, there it is. It's burning still on the surface.
Like little candles, aren't they?
You can see how that, that will actually, that light will then go through the water... Yep.
..and really attract the eel. So, basically this would fascinate
the eels and they'd come to see what it is
and then we'd actually harpoon them.
There's something down there, actually.
My harpoon with a bone point tip is designed for trapping eels.
But I'm not having much luck.
I don't think I'd make a very good Mesolithic fisherman!
THEY CHUCKLE
We haven't matched the skills of our Stone Age ancestors
and with eel numbers down and wind conditions less than favourable,
we leave empty handed.
But we've proved the principle that you can take fire to sea
and fish at night.
After this experiment, I'm completely convinced that
Stone Age people used lights to fish at night
here on this fjord.
A practice they started continued for thousands of years.
Our forebears were some of the first boat builders
and advanced fishermen.
Pioneers in coastal living.
Their ingenuity enabled them
to exploit the incredible bounty that lay underneath the sea.
Our Stone Age ancestors fished to survive.
The bounty they ate was one they caught themselves
from unsullied seas.
Today, our world is one of cleaned, processed, pre-packed bounty.
And some of what we take out of our waters is wrapped in a problem
that goes back in - plastic.
A billion tonnes has been discarded since the '50s, a floating
coastal scrapheap, which may take thousands of years to degrade.
In Orford Ness, on the east coast of England, artist Fran Crowe
is on a mission to turn one person's rubbish into another's bounty.
I came across a United Nations report
that estimated on average there are 46,000 pieces of plastic
floating on every square mile of sea.
And in a rather mad, crazy moment I decided to set myself a challenge
of saving one square mile of sea by collecting
46,000 plastic pieces whilst walking my local beaches.
It took me a year to do.
On a typical walk, I'd find maybe 700 pieces,
even on a beach that looked pristine when you went there.
And on Orford Ness, I could probably pick up several thousand,
but I couldn't actually carry everything I saw.
When I get the stuff home, first of all I have to dry it,
get the sand off it and so on, but then I start to sort it.
And I'll sort it by colour, for instance,
putting all the pink and red plastics together or the blue.
I also sort it by type,
so I'm putting bottle tops together, I've got cotton bud sticks here.
These have definitely been flushed from homes.
It's the materials for my art and it's my personal bounty from the sea.
I am making something beautiful with them often.
That isn't my main purpose,
but I do hope that what I'm doing will inspire people
to think differently about these kind of objects and how we use them.
Today, what I've collected from this tiny bit of Orford Ness,
I'm going to just put into one big pile.
This is going to be...
a seafood soup, harvested by hand from the North Sea.
To serve, just add water and salt.
I'm 200 miles offshore from Britain in the Faroe Islands.
Here, you're never more than three miles from the sea.
It's made the Faroese experts in coastal living,
reliant on, and defined by, bounty from these waters.
I'm on a quest to find out how they survive in the middle of the North Atlantic.
I've already bagged, with a little bit of help, some giant mussels
from the deep, now I want to unearth whatever delicacies lurk on land.
It might look green,
but this treeless coast is battered by the elements.
I want to know what can thrive in these conditions and how.
The Faroes' position in the path of the Gulf Stream
creates verdant waters,
rich in bounty, but things are tougher on land.
Four seasons in one day is the norm
and being a tiny archipelago in a vast ocean
means growing anything is a struggle.
So the locals have learned to harvest other things.
Sea birds flock to towering cliffs,
guillemots, scavenging great skuas,
parading puffins.
Past and present, the Faroese risk life and limb,
swinging on a wing and a prayer to net this feathered quarry
and gather their eggs.
But when it comes to greens,
there's a four-legged competitor for these scarce riches.
Sheep.
And they're everywhere.
Already here when the Vikings, the first documented settlers,
arrived 1,000 years ago,
they gave this place its name - The Faroes or Land Of The Sheep.
Today, there are more of them on the islands than there are people.
As a result, mutton, like fish,
forms a large part of the Faroese diet.
But here it doesn't come in its freshest form.
It's called skerpikjot and it's dried outside in ocean winds,
another bounty from these seas.
I'm heading for the tiny hamlet of Muli on Bordoy
to meet shepherd Archie Black.
Hello, Archie. Hello, nice meeting you.
He's going to introduce me to this peculiar Faroese delicacy.
What do you call this little house?
This is wind drying house for sheep meat.
So, this is the meat here hanging up drying, is it?
Yes, it's the back legs of the sheep.
This storehouse, as you see, it's very close to the sea
and during storms the sea salt gets up in the air.
So the salty air from the sea blows through
these gaps in the timber walls.
It blows through, yes. This storehouse is from around 1600.
There were no refrigerators in those times,
so it's a way to preserve the meat. It's the only way.
The skerpikjot can hang for up to six months
in these little houses, curing in the salt-rich sea air.
Salt draws out moisture, drying the mutton.
It also prevents the growth of mould and microbes
that can turn the meat rancid, making it safe for us to eat.
But it doesn't do much for the smell.
Oh, Archie. I really hesitate to ask,
but may I try a very, very small piece? A very small piece.
This is softer than this one. Yeah. These soft ones - hanging for around
four, maybe five months.
And these are harder - seven to eight months.
I think I'll start with a soft one.
A small piece. And do you eat it raw? Yes.
Just straight in, this hasn't been cooked?
Sometimes... No, no. This is just wind dried. You manage.
HE EXHALES
Mm.
You get used to it!
I can see you might get used to it. Yes. It's, um...
It has two consistencies - the outside that's been dried in
the wind, which is quite tough, and the inside that's quite soft
and like soft cheese. Yes.
But the aroma in your mouth is fantastically powerful.
It's very powerful, yeah. Yeah.
It really goes around your whole mouth. Yeah.
It goes up the back of your brain... Yes. ..round the back of your head
and back down.
Skerpikjot might be an acquired taste,
but curing and salting meat in remote places like this,
surrounded by an often angry sea,
provides a lifeline.
The isolation of these islands has created a hardy people,
who, past and present, have used all their resources to survive.
Food is not the only bounty provided by our seas.
Artists have long looked to the changing moods
of our coast for inspiration.
From the rousing music of Vaughan Williams
and the epic art of Constable,
to Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
and Shakespeare's Tempest.
And hidden beneath the waves, nature forms its own art.
An unexpected bounty that fires the imagination.
It's just a little harder to see.
On Devon's south coast, Hermione's peering into the deep to uncover
one of the most fundamental and beautiful bounties within our seas.
Torquay, a resort built and invented by the Victorians.
150 years ago, people weren't just promenading up and down the piers,
they were making the most of the mild climate and the sheltered coves
in an altogether different way.
For many Victorians, Torquay was the home of marine zoology and botany.
The English Riviera once teemed
with bonneted and bespectacled naturalists.
And with ready access to sandy beaches and plentiful rock pools,
they were all prospecting for wonders from the sea.
They were exploring a life aquatic.
Now, inside here are some of the world's drifters,
little algae and animals that float with the currents.
The Victorians were captivated by the microscopic world of plankton.
A collective of plants and animals that drift with our tides.
Most of these tiny floaters are almost impossible to spot with the naked eye.
They are no one species, shape or size.
Found in vast numbers throughout the world's ocean,
they underpin the marine food chain.
But 150 years ago,
how on Earth could the Victorians even see this minute bounty from the sea?
I'm meeting historian Kate Williams to find out.
The Victorians were completely obsessed by
the microscope and particularly with plankton.
Plankton opened up a whole new world of mystery, of the magic of nature,
and also about all this incredible, beautiful detail they could see.
Microscopes were first invented in the 16th century.
But it was one Victorian man's obsession with them
that introduced plankton to the masses.
Amateur naturalist John Quekett was a microscope fanatic
who hand made one at aged 15.
His dream was to develop microscopes for professionals and hobbyists alike.
Quekett was really leading the way in the idea of what you could see
under the microscope, particularly with plankton -
he was obsessed with plankton.
So, where does plankton come into the story, then?
Well, plankton is the number one focus of the story.
He used plankton as essentially a kind of eye test
for the microscope, so he could check whether
the microscope's resolution, the magnification was correct.
And one kind of plankton, known as diatoms,
would forever be the microscopist's friend.
Because at every stage of magnification
their cells reveal new details.
So much so that they're still used today
to check microscope resolution.
As technology advanced, so Quekett's obsession grew.
He wrote a book which sparked a passion for microscopy
and plankton amongst the middle classes.
The Practical Treatise On The Use Of The Microscope,
not really a catchy title. It's a bestseller!
No, it is a catchy title, this was a best seller!
So, this... If we were two Victorian ladies,
I'd say, "Miss Hermione, give it to me, I want it!"
Because it was so fascinating.
He persuaded your average middle class person that
looking down a microscope was the most fun you could possibly have.
"The microscope is the most important instrument ever yet
"bestowed by art on the investigator of nature."
Microscopes flew off the shelves into the parlours
of the Victorian middle classes, but they didn't just look at plankton,
they arranged it into astonishing displays to show to their friends.
This is a rosette slide.
Each individual element of the picture
is a single piece of plankton.
Dazzled by nature, the Victorians had created a new art form,
one that you had to gaze down a microscope to admire.
But how do you manipulate something so tiny into such stunning arrangements?
One man keeping this Victorian craft alive today
is plankton arranger Klaus Kemp.
Hi, Klaus. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, yes.
Klaus, plankton are so tiny,
how did the Victorians go about picking them up.
They were using a thing called a pig's eyelash.
A pig's eyelash is a long stem
with a slightly...arrowhead to it,
which allows them to individually pick up a diatom
and place it into position.
Instead of a pig's eyelash, Klaus uses a fine glass needle
to pick up individual diatoms to place in his artworks.
I'm desperate to have a go to see if I can pick up a plankton.
Oh, wow.
It's just a slide covered in little... Oh, gosh!
..little, tiny fragments. It's a bit like looking at a slide of glitter.
OK, I've got the needle positioned over one.
Right, now drop the needle to touch the diatom.
Oh, it's lost it. No, it's coming up. It's got...
Keep going, keep going. You're going to clear the slide. Right, OK.
Then move the slide out of the way. Klaus, I think it's fallen off.
HE GASPS What?!
I think it's fallen off. You're not supposed to make it fall off.
Klaus, I just don't know how you do this all day.
It's absolutely impossible.
Klaus has taken this Victorian art form into the 21st century
with his own unique style.
The Victorians and their microscopes opened up the minute world
of plankton, but they were only beginning to understand
this bounty's full importance.
Today, we know that plankton is not only fundamental to life
in our seas, but to life on dry land, too.
It emits half of all the oxygen we breathe.
So, without plankton there would be no fish in the sea
and probably no you and no me.
Plankton underpin the very existence of every living thing on Earth.
And with climate change affecting our seas,
it's more important than ever to know what's happening to it.
Marine biologist Richard Kirby is on a mission to measure plankton
levels around the world, using nothing more than a secchi disc,
which looks a lot like a dinner plate on a piece of string.
Got it? Yeah.
You're measuring the depth at which
it just disappears from sight beneath the surface.
The disappearing disc allows Richard to measure
the density of plankton in the water.
So, as the disc disappears, the only thing that's preventing us
from seeing it is the phytoplankton in the water?
That's right. The creatures that start the whole marine food chain.
It's just disappearing out of sight now.
And the depth we're at is 10.4 metres.
But Richard is just one man and our oceans are vast,
so he's enlisting the help of sailors around the world to get their own
secchi discs and submit their data to his survey
via a mobile phone app.
Got the app on. Secchi. And now we can input our depth.
And we measured 10.4 metres, spot on. 10.4.
And submit. And submit.
Richard's work, like that of the Victorian John Quekett,
is putting these tiny creatures on the map.
By engaging seafarers with plankton,
he's safeguarding the future of this vital bounty from our seas.
I'm on an overseas treasure hunt.
My prize?
Bounty from the sea.
The Faroe Islands have been dubbed nature's larder.
I'm on a journey to discover
why plentiful seas make for rich pickings.
But when foul tides bring hard times,
you need a back-up.
And for the Faroese, that bounty is farmed Atlantic salmon,
their biggest export.
There are 25 salmon farms in the Faroes, one in almost every fjord.
They produce 70,000 tonnes of these slippery slabs of silver every year,
worth a whopping £265 million.
They're the number one foreign supplier of salmon into the UK.
But keeping salmon contained in large numbers like this
doesn't come without complications.
The biggest threat to farmed salmon around the world
is sea lice, a marine parasite.
These copepods are a member of the crustacean family,
like crabs and lobsters.
Problematic for captive salmon, sea lice also target passing wild fish.
But here in this tiny archipelago,
they believe they could have a global solution.
Hello, Arni. Hello, Nick. Welcome on-board. Thank you very much.
Arni Olsen works for the biggest producer of salmon in the Faroes
and they're exploiting their unique location.
We're pioneers when it comes to farming in rough waters,
because it's probably the farming area where you farm salmon
with the strongest currents in the world.
Doesn't it make it difficult for farming?
It does make it difficult,
but the current optimises the welfare of the salmon.
We don't see the same kind of problems. For example, the sea lice
numbers are much lower than in comparatively weaker currents.
Farming in fjords with strong currents can stop sea lice
taking hold, but doesn't eradicate them completely.
To do that, the Faroese want to move their commercial treasure offshore,
into the open ocean.
But colossal seas present mountainous challenges.
Marine scientist Oystein Patursson is overseeing trials
that could make this ambition a reality.
This was deployed on our test site in the open ocean.
Is this a standard mooring line?
No, these are more heavy-duty than would be used on a fish farm.
And what's the breaking strain on this? It's about 100 tonnes.
100 tonnes. So, it will hold 100 tonnes of force? Yes, yes.
And how many of these would hold the...? There would be 12 of these.
12 of these?! Yes.
That gives you...
That's an incredible insight into the power of the ocean.
Sea pens are tethered by a complex mooring system
of heavy-duty ropes and chains.
But there's more to open sea farming
than simply holding the rigs in place.
This is all broken. Yeah, you see the steel is broken here.
That's amazing! This has been snapped by the power of the ocean?
Yeah, just where the... Twist and twist...
When the waves are moving by,
it keeps on twisting and twisting. The forces must be fantastic.
Yeah, we had very large waves during this winter.
It was 16 or 18 metres and, er...
16 or 18 metres? That's taller than a house! Yeah.
The pens need to be strong enough to contain the fish,
yet flexible enough to roll with wild waters.
Trials are ongoing to perfect this challenging design.
By working with all nature can throw at them,
the Faroese could be the first to solve the sea lice problem.
If they succeed, they'll be enhancing their own bounty
and that of salmon farmers around the world.
Making the most of their seas comes naturally to the Faroese people.
This resourcefulness was a life saver in World War II.
With Britain short of food, Faroese fishermen came to our aid,
landing much-needed bounty at Aberdeen.
The North Sea was awash with mines, German U-boats lurking.
And to the south the Battle of the Atlantic raged,
to keep food and supplies flowing.
From a quiet corner of Cornwall, Tess is investigating
how Britain's defence of this precious trade route,
bringing in vital bounty from the sea, was launched.
This coastline looks peaceful enough now,
but during World War II, the Lizard Peninsula was home
to a crack Air Force squadron,
flying the deadliest, fastest aircraft, the Mosquito.
This miraculous aircraft was a product of war,
built with the sole purpose of taking on the Germans.
It was the brainchild of aviation pioneer Geoffrey de Havilland.
In an age of sluggish metal-clad bombers, he broke with convention -
he made this one out of wood.
This is a piece of an actual De Havilland Mosquito.
It was part of the fuselage fished out of the Thames after a crash.
And if you look here, you can see the outer and inner ply,
between which is balsa wood, which is incredibly light.
This whole piece is featherweight.
De Havilland's wooden aircraft might have seemed vulnerable,
but it solved the problem of metal shortages
to become our fastest and most manoeuvrable bomber.
It was constructed like a giant model plane,
built in two halves and literally stuck together with glue.
But what was it like to fly one of these timber terrors?
I'm meeting Flight Lieutenant Des Curtis,
one of the last surviving Mosquito crew.
He flew from an RAF base here on the Lizard Peninsula
to fight in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Des, what was it actually like to be in a Mosquito, to fly one?
Oh, very exhilarating
because it was the fastest aircraft at the time,
it was the most versatile aircraft.
People say that the Spitfire was the most beautiful aircraft,
but anybody who's ever flown in a Mosquito will tell you
that was the best aircraft they ever flew.
During the war, German U-boats sank 15 million tonnes
of Allied shipping as they sought to starve supplies
and cripple our war effort.
The Mosquito's mission was to take these deadly submarines on.
Our job then was to use this very fast moving Mosquito
to seek out German U-boats in the Bay of Biscay
and attack them as they were going in and out of the U-boat pens.
All this noise going on while you were diving at 30 degrees
onto the sea, by the time you got near the water level you were
doing nearly 400 miles an hour,
which was the maximum speed of a Mosquito.
This wooden wonder seemed set to win the Battle of the Atlantic,
but it wasn't long before it, too, came under threat.
As the German blockade tightened its grip, concerns grew that
the one vital ingredient needed to make the Mosquito would be cut off.
Balsa wood was perfect for the job -
light, strong and just the right compression strength
for the manufacturing of Mosquitos.
Only one problem, it came from Ecuador.
With a raw material from the far side of the world
and nothing even remotely similar on home soil,
the race was on to create a substitute.
The answer would come from an unexpected source.
A German scientist stepped in with a unique solution -
he would save our skies with bounty from our seas.
Seaweed.
With or without the German blockade,
this was one resource we had in abundance around our shores.
But who would think of building an aircraft out of seaweed?
Step forward this man, Peter Plesch, a chemist.
He was tasked with finding a home-grown material
to keep Mosquitos rolling off the production line.
Peter was born in Frankfurt,
but the rise of Nazism in the 1930s forced his Jewish family
to uproot themselves and flee to England.
This German scientist had come to the aid of Britain's war effort.
To tell me more is Philippa Neilson, his granddaughter.
What do you think was his inspiration as a child?
Why did he become a scientist?
Well, his father was a doctor, a medical doctor,
and one of his patients was Albert Einstein,
who went on to become a family friend.
That's not any old scientist, is it?
No. So, as a child, Einstein would be in and around the family home.
And here he is, Einstein with that unmistakable brainy hair.
And Peter, then, in his own right,
becomes a really eminent professor eventually, doesn't he?
Yes, he was a specialist in polymer chemistry.
He went on to write over 160 papers himself
and, in fact, he wrote the last one when he was aged 90.
In 1942, Peter Plesch joined a company called Cefoil,
who were exploring the potential of transforming seaweed
into a solid material.
I've actually got a recording here of Peter talking about his first encounter with seaweed.
Somebody at the Ministry of Aircraft production
saw this very light and flimsy foam
and said, "If you can make this material up to a certain standard
"of mechanical strength, then we would be interested in this."
So, the professor buried himself away in his laboratory,
calculating and concocting experiments using alginates,
a substance derived from seaweed,
in a bid to create a substitute for the balsa wood used in the Mosquito.
His work was top secret.
This is a letter between staff members at the Ministry of Supply
and it refers to the company Peter worked for.
It reads, "MAP," Ministry of Aircraft Production,
"are contemplating starting a production unit for the manufacture
"of a solid foam from alginates
"as a substitute for balsa wood for aircraft."
"Experiments are understood to have been successful
"and if the war goes on, this requirement may grow in importance."
Peter Plesch turned seaweed into this material,
which is as light and as strong as balsa wood.
So, how did he do it?
This is the last surviving piece of Peter Plesch's seaweed substitute
suitable for the Mosquito.
But the only evidence for how he created it lies in complex scientific equations.
To us mere mortals, Peter's research is as clear as mud,
so in order to crack the code
I've enlisted the help of a top notch scientist
and, together, we're going to conduct our own seaweed experiment.
Dr Katherine Haxton is from Keele University.
She's brought along some powdered alginate, extracted from seaweed.
This is what Peter would have had to work with.
OK, so we've got our solid alginate, and then we add the water to it.
Alginate doesn't dissolve readily, so it clumps together...
It's clotted. So, can I have a go? Sure.
'With a bit of a blend and some foaming agent to add air bubbles
'to the material and make it light,
'we have a thick, sticky, gel-like substance.'
It's kind of like crystals, almost, isn't it? It's quite fibrous.
Yeah.
'But this is still a long way from Peter's solid block.
'So now we need to dry it.'
So on his scale, to make, say, eight tonnes of alginate,
he would have to remove 92 tonnes of water.
That's about 1,000 bath tubs.
'To do this, Peter turned to an innovative but dangerous method of
'using electricity and water to dry his material from the inside out.'
Katherine, I was looking forward to doing this...
..but, well, nothing's really happening, is it?
No, we wouldn't necessarily expect to see anything happening,
but that doesn't mean that nothing's happening on a chemical basis.
The modern equivalent, or what a 21st-century scientist
might have reached for, would be a microwave.
So, last stop is the microwave.
Yeah, we'll put it in a microwave and start it drying. Great.
The microwave may speed things up,
but this could still take a long time.
I do have a gel that I tried making earlier in the lab,
which I can show you. OK.
This was microwaved for about an hour.
Right. Then it was dried in an oven.
If you turn it over, you can start to see a sort of
gel-like structure with bubbles in it to indicate the foamy nature.
It's incredible to think he came up with this idea
and worked it and worked it and worked it and made it happen.
Yeah, it's no insignificant effort. It took a lot of ingenuity,
a lot of perseverance, to get to the stage he did with the alginates.
And, Katherine, he didn't have a microwave. No.
Even with 21st century know-how, we failed to replicate Peter's work,
a testament to his inventiveness.
The ingenious German professor had transformed a bounty
from the sea into a balsa wood replacement destined for the skies.
So, why didn't we see a fleet of seaweed Mosquitos
take on the German military?
I'll let Peter Plesch tell you that.
By the summer of '44, I had solved the problem.
I'd produced a material which was good enough
for the De Havilland engineers, but by then the Battle of the Atlantic
had turned and the supply of balsa wood was no longer a problem.
So I solved the problem but not in time.
If it had been necessary, there was a solution there.
Using seaweed, an everyday bounty from our seas,
Peter Plesch achieved the seemingly impossible.
That it never took off was down to the endeavours
of the Allied Forces, including the Mosquito pilots
who gained the upper hand
and brought the Battle of the Atlantic to a close.
One of the strange side-effects of war
is the way it can set imaginations free.
In the desperate search for solutions,
there can be extraordinary flashes of inspiration,
transforming humble seaweed into this, an ingenious wartime bounty.
I'm nearing the end of my Faroese odyssey.
I've discovered how the bounty from these seas nourishes a unique people,
sustaining and maintaining a way of life steeped in tradition,
but one where both eyes are firmly on the future.
More than anywhere else, these islands thrive on their bounty.
I've reached my final destination,
and having netted my catch on land and sea,
all that's left to do is eat it.
I'm heading to a traditional Faroese gathering.
But rather than bring a bottle, it's bring your bounty.
TRADITIONAL FAROESE FOLK SINGING
The setting for my feast is a spectacular natural cut
in the coastline called a Gjogv, giving this place its name.
Bounty of all descriptions has been landed here,
including tradition, like this one, the chain dance.
TRADITIONAL FAROESE FOLK SINGING
It was a medieval popular music craze that swept through Europe in the 1200s.
Dances were a way to share dramatic stories and legends about ancient times.
They soon spread with travelling sea trade
and that's how they washed up here in the 13th century.
Stranded in the middle of the North Atlantic,
this is now the only place on Earth to still practice this tradition.
This is storytelling with a real passion,
which is just rising from the sea and the rock.
With 70,000 verses, dances can go on all night.
So a pit-stop for some fuel is a must!
Time to share my Faroese treasures from the sea.
Does the Faroese food help make a certain kind of character?
Yes, of course, of course.
Because Faroese food is our food and we eat a lot from the sea.
We're also eating from hills.
This food comes from around our islands and in our islands.
Bounty from the sea has shaped these people,
carving them out like their rocky coastline.
The Faroese use everything the seas offer to survive.
In nature's larder nothing is wasted.
I've learned so much from Faroese Islanders -
finding bounty on land and sea,
making a few resources go a very long way.
It might be tradition here on the Faroes
but it's a lesson for the rest of the world.
Our waters are rich with wondrous surprises.
They inspire, sustain and connect communities across the world.
Bounty from the sea defines a way of life that all coastal people share.