Helen Scales
speaker
228 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Helen Scales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When I first heard about it, it just blew my mind that this trade was tied into billions and billions of shells.
So essentially, this was going on for hundreds of years.
Traders from Europe would be going into Southeast Asia, to India and Sri Lanka and places like that.
and filling up their ships with fine silks and spices and such like.
And those goods didn't take up all the space that they had on those ships, and they needed something almost just to weigh the ships down as ballast.
And there was a cheap local source in the Indian Ocean of carry shells.
They were collected in the Maldives, in the islands in the central Indian Ocean.
And that was a tradition that had been going on for a long time, and they had been used locally in India and other places as a form of small currency.
But it was the European traders who came along and thought, oh, actually, we could make use of that.
So they would buy up very cheaply huge numbers of these shells, which the Moldavian people were collecting from the seas.
And then those shells would go on their own very long journey.
They would go around the African continent, back to Europe.
Then they would be unloaded with all these spices and tea and everything else, loaded back onto ships that then went back down to the African continent, to West Africa.
where ultimately they were exchanged for human lives.
And these became the money, tens of thousands of these things per human head.
And that went on and on and billions of these shells were essentially swapped for people.
No, absolutely.
And one of the other things that mollusks do is when there's lots of them living together, they can create really important habitats.
We get things like mussel reefs, oyster reefs.
And sure, yes, we've lost a lot of that habitat here in Britain.
Showing 161–180 of 228 · page 9 of 12
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