Five million pieces of Lego lost at sea and one woman’s 25-year quest to find them
Told in a lyrical — and troubling — new book, the captivating story of...
ThE pieces of Lego still turn up on beaches today. Search along the strandline after a wild winter storm and you might find them. Tiny yellow life jackets and grey scuba tanks. Bright green plastic sea grass and little spear guns in red and yellow. Blue, black and red divers’ flippers and miniature cutlasses. Perhaps a dragon or an octopus, just 3in long. Maybe a small yellow life raft.
The curious tale of how they ended up in the sea began on Thursday, February 13, 1997, when the Tokio Express, a cargo ship which had set sail from Rotterdam, became engulfed in mountainous seas 20 miles off Land’s End, Cornwall.
In what the ship’s captain later described as a ‘once in a 100-year phenomenon’, a rogue wave tilted the vessel 60 degrees one way, then 40 degrees back, sending 62 shipping containers toppling into the ocean.
Some were transporting cigarette lighters and hose parts, others contained wheelbarrow wheels, garden tools and furniture. But one held nearly five million pieces of Lego, on its way from the toy company’s factory in Billund, Denmark, to North America.
By a strange quirk of fate, much of the Lego was sea-themed; 4,756,940 pieces of plastic, bound for seafaring adventures.
No one is sure what happened next — whether the Lego container burst open on impact or slowly released its cargo as it drifted to the seabed. But in the days that followed, helicopter pilots reported ‘a slick of Lego’. And beachgoers started finding Lego washed up on Cornwall’s shores.
News of this soon reached pioneering American oceanographer Dr Curtis Ebbesmeyer whose research includes tracking objects released by cargo spills. At any time, there are 6,000 ships carrying containers around the world, huge vessels bearing
Helicopter pilots reported ‘a slick of Lego’ on the sea
226 million giant boxes a year. They transport everything from trainers to televisions, from chairs to car tyres, motorbikes to medical tape. Ninety per cent of everything we wear, eat and consume is brought to us by these huge floating warehouses.
In 1992, one of the best-known spills studied by Dr Ebbesmeyer sent 28,800 bath toys bobbing across the Pacific Ocean.
Among them were 7,200 plastic yellow ducks. Together with thousands of blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs, they floated up past the North Pole, down past Greenland and the UK, then down to Spain and across the Atlantic, where some washed up in the Gulf of Mexico. This helped Dr Ebbesmeyer gain valuable insights into the mysteries of ocean currents and when he heard about the Lego appearing on English beaches, he contacted the toy company’s headquarters in Denmark to ask what had been in the container.
In response, they sent him a box of samples, along with a full inventory. Curious as to which might have been cast adrift and which may have disappeared into the cold, silent deep, Dr Ebbesmeyer put the samples into water to assess their buoyancy and discovered that around three million of the Lego pieces were likely to have floated.
When my children were young, searching for them on the shores by our family home on the south coast of Devon became the highlight of any trip to the beach.
We were not alone. Many others in Devon and Cornwall were also looking for the Lego and it was the dragons that captured everyone’s imagination. There were 33,941 inside the container that fell off the Tokio Express — 33,427 black dragons and 514 green. While the black dragons washed ashore in their thousands, the green ones proved to be far more elusive, with very few ever reported. Tales emerged of children filling buckets with dragons and selling them at car boot sales for 10p each.
Over the years, I largely forgot about the Lego. But in 2010, I moved to the north coast of Cornwall and on my first visit to the beach, found a bright yellow Lego life jacket. Thirteen years on it was still turning up. I was amazed.
There wasn’t just Lego on the strandline, though. The Marine Conservation Society estimates that between eight and 13 million tonnes of plastic enter the ocean each year and I was horrified by the amounts I saw.
Shoes, buoys, rope, bottles. Some from shipping, some from fishing, some left behind by beachgoers. But where did all the rest come from? The toothbrushes, the bookies’ pens, the paintbrushes and Monopoly houses? Joining the barefoot army of dogwalkers, surfers and beachgoers picking up debris from Cornwall’s shores, I began working round the tides.
On these beachcombing expeditions I always kept an eye out for Lego and when word of my interest went round the harbour the local fishermen started saving it for me. ‘If only we’d known earlier. We could have given you sacks full of it,’ said one skipper. Soon I was making regular trips to Cornwall’s fishing villages, where I became known as the Lego Lady, meeting the trawlers as they came in. Curious to discover who else was finding the Lego, what pieces they had picked up and how far it had travelled in the intervening years, I set up a Facebook page in October 2013 called Lego Lost At Sea.
After the BBC picked up on the story it went viral and beachcombers came forward in their hundreds to share their Lego finds, many posting images on social media.
The Facebook page became a joyous affair, with people posting videos of the ‘happy dances’ they did when they discovered a bit of Lego. It grabbed attention around the world with people flying in from as far as the U.S. to find pieces for themselves.
To find out how far the Lego had drifted, a friend and I began recording where and when it washed up. It seemed much of it had been swept by ocean currents up the north coast of Cornwall, where it was discovered on almost every beach from Land’s End to Bude, with Perranporth proving to be a hotspot for Lego brooms.
Sightings have since been made as far north as St. Bees in Cumbria and as far west as Spanish Point on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, where a dragon was spotted in early 2021. Further afield, Lego was found on beaches in Guernsey, northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Where else the flotilla reached we’re not sure, but in 2013 a beachcomber discovered a black Lego octopus tangled in thick, dried sea grass on Galveston Island, Texas. Oceanographers believe that this could be from the spill, as might Lego cutlasses and flippers found on a beach in Australia.
They certainly match the description of those that fell into the ocean in 1997, but not all Lego pieces found on beaches are from the Tokio Express. Some will have been left behind by children playing in the sand. Bricks dropped on streets could be washed into storm
Up to 13 million tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year
the Tokio Express. We also have to decide whether it’s feasible for currents to have carried it to the beach where it came ashore, there to be found by beachcombers like Rob Arnold, an environmental campaigner from Cornwall who has discovered more Lego than most.
Between 2017 and 2020, Rob and his fellow beach cleaners picked up an estimated 25 million tiny bits of plastic from one beach in Cornwall.
Rob uses the debris he collects to draw attention to the problem of ocean plastic which kills hundreds of thousands of marine creatures and seabirds every year. They eat it, they become entangled in it. Seals, turtles, dolphins and porpoises have all died after becoming caught in fishing gear. One dead whale that washed up in the Philippines had 88lb of plastic in its stomach. Alongside the Lego found in the spill, my cabinet of beachcombing curiosities features classic Lego bricks which date back to at least the 1970s. There are also Bakelite plugs and ice cream sticks from the 1960s, Noddy toothbrushes and oldfashioned hair curlers, as well as a faded plastic spinning top with the faint words Kellogg’s — The Greatest Name in Cereals. After searching a website which lists all the breakfast cereal promotions over the decades and discovering this toy was more than 50 years old, I became intrigued by the age of some of the other plastic items picked up from the beach — faded flowers, little green army men, Wild West figures and tiny farm animals. As time went on, I realised much of the plastic I’d found was far older than at first thought. Some of the curtain rings I’d picked up were marked Roanoid, the trade name for a plastic first developed in 1923 and used for hooks and handles on the ocean liner Queen Mary in 1936.
I began to wonder whether these plastics of the past would perhaps in future no longer be seen as just beach litter but as artefacts to be studied closely by archaeologists and historians.
Maybe some of the Lego lying on the seabed will continue making its way ashore for years to come. Or maybe it will become buried in sand and sediment, eventually forming part of the geological record.
Perhaps millions of years from now, a fossil hunter will take a hammer to a rock and discover inside a perfectly preserved Lego shark or the trace of a Lego octopus. A fossil of the Plastic Age. A legacy of Lego.
Children filled buckets with their finds
Adrift by tracey Williams is published by Unicorn, £16.99. © tracey Williams 2022. to order a copy for £18 go to mailshop.co. uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. free UK delivery on orders over £20. Promotional price valid until 13/02/2022.