"Scamels from the Rocke"

Not only Shakespeare specialists, but lay readers and playgoers are puzzled by Caliban's mysterious "scamels." 

From the context, it's clear that scamels are an easily obtained food. Listen as Caliban lists some of the items he can gather from his island's prodigious storehouse:

I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow;

And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,

Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how

To snare the nimble marmoset.  I'll bring thee

To clust'ring filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee

Young scamels from the rock.

Alas and alack, there is no such thing as a "scamel."

Caliban's taste in food is catholic, as is to be expected of a hunter-gatherer. Nevertheless, his is not an appealing diet. "Crabs" could refer either to crustaceans or to crab-apples. "Pig-nuts" are barely edible tubers. A "jay's nest" does not sound gourmetish, and even if Caliban means the jays themselves, he's not chosen a species of bird famous for flavor. The "nimble marmoset" is a small monkey which a 1613 pamphlet (too late for The Tempest, written c. 1611) acknowledged to be "good meat". "Filberts"  Shakespeare's spelling is 'Philbirts') are also called hazelnuts, the North American variety of which -- the unappetizing beaked hazelnut -- is better browsed by our native deer than by homines sapientes. But what, prithee, are these peculiar scamels?

Among the older guesses: shamois (young kids); scannel (a kind of hawk); scams (a dialectical word for limpets, or snails); seamar, or wild trefoil; sarcelle, the French word for the teal; scallion; seagull.

But modern scholarship has coalesced around "sea-mell." It's now thought (by 90% of those who have studied the question) that Shakespeare knew a manuscript report about a shipwreck called "A true repertory of the wreck and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the islands of the Bermudas...July 15, 1610," which was not printed until 1625 in Purchas his Pilgrimes. Among the details that Shakespeare found in the "true repertory" was a brief account of a bird called a "sea-meawe": "a kind of web-footed fowl there is, the bigness of an English plover... [which] hovering in the air made a strange hollow and harsh howling.... Our men found a pretty way to take them, which was by standing on the rocks or sands ... whereof the birds would come flocking to that place nearer and nearer."

"Sea-meawes"  (a variant of seamell) was the word that Shakespeare encountered in the manuscript letter.

I believe that he read the second letter of sea-meawe not as an "e" but as a "c", or, alternatively, Shakespeare's own ms "e" was misread as a "c" by Ralph Crane, the scrivener who prepared a fair copy of Shakespeare's holograph for publication --  or perhaps even the compositor  who was assigned to set the Folio page A5v misread Crane's fair copy. A "scamel," I'm .9 positive, is a seabird hunted from a rock; it's a sea-mew or sea-mell.

The Tempest is filled with words compounded of the prefix "sea" and a second element: sea-nymphs, sea-sorrow, sea-change, sea-swallowed, sea-marge. Why would Shakespeare not have been enchanted by the fortuitous "seamell?" Scamel indeed!

Comments

[Joseph Summer]

Before I'd finished my setting of the play as an opera, my wife and I were left at sea in the Indian Ocean. We found our way to an isolated shore, where we had to eat what we could find (before ascending a mountain and eventually finding our way back to civilization.) Our first night on the stony shore the normally skittery shore crabs came out, and planted themselves on the rocks to molt their carapaces. Already keenly aware of the Tempest connections to our situation, it struck me then that the crabs were indeed "growing" on the rocks, and I thought that whatever Shakespeare meant, I would forever more recognize that "crabs grow" as simply descriptive of the fact. I could touch them and they didn't move, as they were vulnerable and locked into their shedding. We did eat snails, there, live, which were actually good tasting. When I set the scene in my opera I didn't try to solve for scamels. I just had Caliban's companions question the word, by repeating it incredulously. Go to 6:30 of this link for the "Scamels" excerpt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXItrgK4MP0&list=OLAK5uy_lFDIXNT3mrqm6l7rfQFpJafxALCXU1Unw&index=9&t=0s

[Sarah]

Thank you for that interesting essay. I had always imagined (without thinking about it much) that scamels were shellfish, like scallops. Seamells is a much nicer idea.

But I always thought Caliban's diet was meant to be appealing. He is offering a storehouse of treasures. Crabs is surely crab apples. Jays and marmosets may not actually be tasty but they are beautiful and interesting. English hazelnuts are delicious.