It’s broad daylight as I stand on deck, but there is no sunlight two thousand metres beneath the sea where our hooks prowl in the dark.
I am a fisherman, but I know little of this other world—the abyss. No one does. It is the largest and least known environment on Earth. I’ve heard that it’s so dark at the bottom of the sea that life must make its own light. It must survive the enormous weight of water above it, and be prepared for near-starvation.
I saw a documentary before this trip, footage taken by men in a submersible and shown for the first time on television. It made me want to write, not fish, to glimpse this other world. To proclaim its magnificence, not plunder its depths. Perhaps even to begin my book…Out of the blackness, bizarre torches shone from the heads of angler fish, and bands of flickering cilia radiated rainbows of light down the outsides of jewel squid and jellyfish. Tiny beacons adorned hatchet fish in patterns that disguised their shape, fooling predators. Flashes of phosphorescence created nocturnal firestorms. The oversized, needle-sharp teeth of viper fish held fiercely onto meals that came by only rarely, and gulper eels with distendable stomachs swallowed prey larger than themselves. Giant sea spiders patrolled the seafloor alongside armoured isopods that resembled military tanks.
I close my eyes, blocking out the sun, and try to picture this alien realm at the outer limits of man’s reach, where our longlines rob the Southern Ocean—the sea’s last great wilderness—of its last hidden treasure.
A Patagonian toothfish—the size of a german shepherd dog—rests, ripe with eggs, on the fine mud of the deep sea’s floor. She lies in a groove carved into the seabed by deep ocean currents. If you could see her, you would wonder why her vanishing species attracts such high prices in the best restaurants of New York and Tokyo; why we fishermen have risked our lives in leaking pirate fleets, traversing the planet’s wildest seas, to arrive here at the ends of the earth in pursuit of such an unlikely prize.
She is ugly. Her gross underbite and black lips, pierced with hooks from earlier failed fishing attempts, hide teeth that feast on inky squid. Eyes perch atop a flattish head, gazing upwards, for the entire world is above you when you inhabit the base of the ocean. But it is what lies beneath her dark grey leather that is so determinedly sought: her thick, white, firm flesh that, no matter how it is cooked, is always moist, always sweet.
The toothfish ascends now, chasing the scent of squid. There is more food than usual today. An endless procession of baited hooks drops from above.
Through her skin, she senses an unfamiliar, distant thrum—our engine working overhead—but she is more interested in the vibrations she has detected at a closer range. An ambush predator, she darts forward at five metres per second before fastening her jaws around her prey. The frozen squid catches in her throat. She rams ahead only to be drawn back. She shoots forward again but the hook has taken. She fights, but without effect.
Along the mainline there are countless shorter lines, each with a hook five centimetres long; fifteen thousand hooks in total. The large female—the largest fish in the school; at thirty-five years of age a grandmother many times over—is in good company. Thousands more toothfish hang like macabre jewels from a thread of necklace. They are hauled up and onto the deck as the line is wound in. Hooks are cut. Fish are skidded along wet metal and down to the factory deck for immediate processing. The large female is brought up and out of the water. She glimpses dark faces and bad weather.
We are not supposed to be here.