The American poet Elizabeth Bishop lived out her early years beside the sea in Nova Scotia and much of her later life by the coast either in Key West, Boston or Rio de Janeiro. In the hundred or so poems she published, the word ‘sea’ returns sixty times, rarely just as a geographical backdrop, more often than not providing the mood of the poem or offered as a tool with which to contemplate larger ideas. In ‘At the Fishhouses’, she describes passing through a fishing harbour on a cold evening: ‘the lobster pots, and masts, scattered/ among the wild jagged rocks’,
the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Each aspect of this industrial scene is raised to a kind of splendour – fish scales ‘iridescent coats of mail’, moss turned ‘emerald’. And yet, the image does not lose its everyday working quality. The speaker watches an old man accept ‘a Lucky Strike’ and then scrape away the last of the fish scales – which, to him, need not represent anything more than fish scales – with ‘that black old knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away’. Near the end of the poem, the speaker turns her gaze out towards the sea, ‘the same sea’ that she has seen over and over. ‘It is like what we imagine knowledge to be,’ she declares: ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.’
Most mornings I head up along the Strand – the stretch of road alongside the bay, which leads up above the sea towards Mousehole. From here I can regard the whole of Newlyn harbour at once. I understand why Elizabeth Bishop made the place between land and sea her enduring subject. It is hard not to feel small and especially human gazing out at vessels that can ride upon the oceans. From up here, the boats resemble captive animals, straining against the ropes that tether them to the harbour wall. Each of them howls in the wind and clinks its chains, threatening to escape from the harbour and join the other wild beasts of the sea roaming out there beyond the horizon.
I take a quick turn around the concrete quays attached to which are row upon row of fishing boats. After skirting between the vans, forklift trucks, and plastic boxes brimming with frost-coated fish, the harbour opens up again before me. On its left-hand side are three piers where the trawlers, beamers and other large vessels moor; on its right the small boats pontoon. Each of the piers has its own distinctive identity. The Mary Williams, built in 1980, is the central and newest pier. Monstrous pipes pumping petrol snake down its main channel leading into open-mouthed trawlers, which guzzle it up thirstily. Engineers in masks dangle from masts and wheelhouse balconies, sparks flying from their welding, while fishermen kneel along the walkway mending still-glistening nets splayed out across the concrete. There is a coarseness to this pier, a hostility almost. I feel numerous eyes trained on me as I trip over pipes and net fragments on my way down to chat with fishermen over cups of coffee in galleys before their boats set sail.
North Pier is scruffier than Mary Williams. It is the pier I come to associate with Newlyn’s harbourmaster, Rob Parsons. We stroll along it together while he fills me in on all the comings and goings. Rob leans against the harbour wall, surveying his domain and greeting almost every fisherman who wanders past by name – apart from the odd one who refuses him eye contact or make rude gesture behind his back because they have some quibble with the way he runs the harbour. Not that any of this fazes Rob. He is a former Royal Marine and takes no nonsense from anyone, which has already earned him a few enemies amongst certain old fishing families.
The boats that moor at North Pier are mainly those built in the sixties and seventies owned by the Stevensons, vessels grown worn and rusted in parts as a result of years spent contending with mercurial conditions at sea. This includes the Filadelfia herself, which I learn to distinguish from the other yellow-and-black-painted trawlers by the white cross of the Cornish flag painted along her wheelhouse, right next to where Don would lean out of the wheelhouse window and yell down: ‘Where are my lovely turbot then?’ This is also the quay where trawlers are left to die, boats sinking slowly down into the water, large holes growing in their sides and weeds sprouting from the cracks in their decks. They groan and wheeze as the fishermen they once knew pass by them and clamber onto newer boats, barely stopping to notice their hulls thinning out and their paint fade to grey.
I read in old newspapers about the extravagant celebrations that occurred every time a new pier was built in Newlyn. In 1885, to celebrate the foundation stone being laid of South Pier, John Hayter, the landlord of the Star, laid on a spectacular firework display. ‘Batteries of Roman candles, rockets, fire fountains, mine of serpents, discharge of three monster shells and two fiery whirlwinds, fountain of fire, huge mine of serpents and crackers, illumination of surrounding country by 13 various coloured pyrotechnic compositions,’ reported the Cornishman excitedly. I imagine these fireworks ripping across the bay, indiscriminately colouring the sea and sky in pinks, yellows, greens and golds, reflecting in the windows of the boats tethered on the pontoons.
Celebrations are still taken seriously in Newlyn. Any birthday, no matter the age one is turning, is an excuse for a messy party down at the Star where Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday’ rings out almost daily on the jukebox. Impromptu karaoke evenings happen every few weeks up at the Red Lion. Fundraising for the Christmas harbour lights switch-on party begins almost as soon as Christmas has ended. And Denise and Lofty once had such a long winning streak at the Star’s weekly ‘meat draw’ (where you win vouchers to spend at the local butcher’s) that their freezer overflowed with steaks for months.
Newlyn’s original crumbling quay curves around the south side of the harbour. The first record of its presence is in 1437, according to a Church document offering indulgences to those who contributed to its repair. Nailed to the quayside is a plaque indicating that it was the Mayflower’s last berthing place in 1620 before her onward voyage to America. By the late 1800s, after the construction of the other piers, the Old Quay was barely used to moor fishing vessels. Rather, men would land their fish there so it could be carted more easily over to the fish buyers, many of whom conducted their business at the Red Lion. These days it is the most tranquil pier, occupied only by beautifully restored old luggers, traditional fishing boats with dark orange sails that largely disappeared from Mount’s Bay after the emergence of mechanised boats by the Second World War. One I got to know particularly well in Newlyn harbour is the Ripple, whose underside I once spent an afternoon helping to paint in the sunshine with the old man who owns her. Below the waters gently pressing against the Old Quay, it is told, there lies an ancient village, a precursor to Newlyn, drowned in waves and now covered by Gwavas Lake, an area of calm water in Mount’s Bay.
In 1896 the whole harbour was temporarily closed off and a chain stretched across the Gaps after a raging battle between Newlyn fishermen and the East (Anglian) Coast crews – known to history as ‘the Newlyn Riots’. These upcountry fishermen from Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth had begun landing their catch at the Newlyn and Penzance markets every day of the week, ignoring the area’s strict Methodist rules about not fishing on the Sabbath. By all accounts the riots were brutal: the Newlyn fishermen threw almost ten thousand mackerel back into the sea and rioted at Penzance to stop the East Coast boats from landing there too, and were only subdued in the end by the arrival of over three hundred soldiers from the Royal Berkshire Regiment and Royal Navy destroyers appearing in the bay. The Royal Berkshire Regiment fought the Newlyn men back with the flats of their swords, and one man’s ear was sliced off in the scuffle. In a statement to the Cornish Telegraph the men of Newlyn declared: ‘If they will not conform we are determined, cost what it will, that we will fight to the bitter end.’ And yet, only ten years later, the religious commitment that had fuelled the riots had been forgotten and the Newlyn men could be seen fishing out in the bay most Sundays.
The place I go to whenever I am lonely or overcome by thoughts of home is the small boats pontoon. Its gentle pace feels a world away from the bustle of the main harbour. The boats that dock here are single or two-manned inshore vessels, as well as personal punts that locals take out on summer days for lazy fishing trips. Not long after I arrive in the town, Lofty and I take his bath-sized boat out around Mount’s Bay. It is the first time I have been out through the Gaps, the first time I have seen Newlyn from the water. The town’s shape immediately makes more sense to me when viewed from the sea, like seeing a cross section of a tree’s roots below the ground and only then understanding how it can be so strong. Another day, Isaac, Taylor and I go hand-lining for mackerel down by Clement’s Isle in Taylor’s little punt. We catch nothing but spend the afternoon drinking beer and enjoy watching the sun radiating out across the bay while seals heft themselves over the rocks like fat slugs.
Protected by the embracing arms of North and South Pier, the water below the pontoons is like glass, reflecting perfect images of the multicoloured boats. On each mooring pole sit seagulls surveying their empire, their white-feathered bodies, plump with fish stolen from the fishermen’s nets, spilling over the sides. Within the boats too are squads of seagulls, settled squat like fishermen waiting for the tide to change. I wander between the many branches that diverge from the main wooden gangway. From a bird’s-eye view the pontoons look like slender trees whose leaves are the boats that colour and animate them, blowing slightly in the wind. I stop by each boat and imagined stories project onto me: which regions of the sea they have travelled through, what storms and lives have passed across them. Some vessels proudly display their polished decks to you, smart paint jobs and flowerings of red buoys at their sterns, their ropes and flags playing out percussive notes into the otherwise silence of the pontoon. Others retreat right back from their moorings, slipping into the shadows, sides rusting, their knowledge of the world beyond the harbour fading into distant memory. One, the FH52, has painted onto its black bow the upper row of shark’s sharp white teeth opening to reveal a blood red mouth that, reflected in the water, opens up into a gaping mouth.
Newlyn has the largest number of vessels in its administration of any port in the UK, and 88 per cent of these are ‘ten metres and under’ inshore fishing boats. And yet, over the years, as with the larger quays, the pontoons’ leaves have become sparser – a deciduous tree living a perpetual winter. Not only have many boats been decommissioned over time – the number of fishing vessels nationally has fallen by 29 per cent since 1996 according to government statistics – and the money required to purchase and maintain a boat, as well as paying for fuel and more quota grows higher each year, ensuring that young men or women hoping to enter the trade are put off before they have even begun.
A local fisherman called Mike Buttery, known affectionately as Butts, has compiled a catalogue of all 2,500 luggers, yawls and ketches (two-masted sailing boats) registered PZ between 1869 and 1944. Buttery has made it his life’s mission to record in obsessive detail everything that has happened in the area (both the momentous and the mundane: one entry reads: ‘Monday 1st March 1993, first wheelie bins in Mousehole’) in his book, Mousehole: a documented history. Leafing through the records of fishing vessels is like reading the obituaries section of a newspaper. Many of their lives have been cut short – lost at sea or broken up for firewood during the war – while others have disappeared to far-flung places, like the Snowdrop, which was last seen somewhere in the Far East. In his introduction, Buttery also notes the shrinking of the industry locally. The largest decline in registered fishing boats occurred in 1980, after the winter mackerel fishery was killed off by industrial fishing; the old luggers could no longer compete with trawlers that swept up the seabed, hunting many fish populations to near extinction prior to the introduction of quotas. Since that time, Buttery writes, ‘it has been estimated that 1,000 boats and some 2,500 shore workers have lost their jobs in Devon and Cornwall’.
Before mechanised fishing, there was no pressing need to limit men’s work upon the seas; they did not have the resources to make a lasting dent in fish stocks. The introduction of steam-powered trawlers near the close of the nineteenth century altered this, together with the arrival of new technologies such as more efficient nets, and long-line gear in the form of thousands of hooks sewn upon a single line. A Cornishman article from 1963 states: ‘Newlyn fishermen have quite often counted over fifty large trawlers sweeping certain grounds – boats from Germany, Belgium, France, Spain and recently Russia or Poland.’ These trawlers became a regular sight across the Cornish coast, siphoning off whole shoals of fish from the seabed in one haul. In time, the Cornish fishermen would modernise too, building or buying their own industrialised trawlers so that they could compete with boats from abroad. Under this new intensive approach, fishing ceased to be a sustainable activity, with stocks unable to reproduce as quickly as they were being fished.
One of my favourite stories included in Buttery’s catalogue is of the 40-foot lugger, What You Will, owned by George Water and Samuel Harvey. ‘The owners were painting up their boat and said, “What do we name her?”’ writes Buttery. ‘“Call ’ee what you will. I’m off for a beer,” said one to the other. When he came back with a glass of ale for his partner he had already painted in the name WHAT YOU WILL.’ The boat names chronicled in the harbour here are often testament to the changing times and technologies arriving in the town. Early in the last century there was a fishing boat named Telegraphy, another called Telephone and another still named Railway. More recently there was a boat called Nat-West. When asked why, the owner replied: ‘Coz that’s where I get my money from.’
Before I started going out to sea on boats, I thought fishing was fishing. Whatever kind of vessel or whichever species they were hunting for, fishermen head out to catch what they’re after and return to sell it. This simplification comes from a lifetime of seeing fish as a commodity – a supermarket product lumped together in a single aisle, neatly packaged and coated in a film of plastic. The fish itself is stripped down to a homogenous, skinless fillet, so that it is hard to believe it was ever a living thing, racing below the water. In reality, every boat I spend time on in Newlyn varies in size and age, has its own distinctive smell and sounds – the particular wheezing, spluttery cough of each engine – and functions in accordance with the unique habits and patterns of work dictated by its skipper. The Filadelfia and the Crystal Sea, despite nominally catching the same fisheries, are very different crafts. As one fisherman said to me: ‘Every boat’s got its own rhythms. That’s why, no matter how long you’ve been a fisherman, go out on someone else’s boat and you will get seasickness all over again.’
And each kind of boat, too – be it for hand-lining, crabbing, day-boating, gill-netting, trawling or ring-netting – attracts a different kind of fisherman. Gill-netting, for instance, involves casting out a large panelled net that stands vertically in the water, held in place by a lead line on the seabed and a cork line floating on the surface, in whose mesh the fish – particularly hake, cod, pollock and turbot, while smaller fish swim right through the holes – get caught by the gills. This type of fishing, where the boat stays out for four or five days at a time and the crew are sometimes on deck pulling fish from the nets for over thirty hours, is regarded as a young man’s game: gill-netting crews are usually the wilder, more volatile boys who have yet to settle down. On the Newlyn-based Joy of Ladram the men are almost all in their twenties and listen to aggressive techno music while they gut. A Penzance boy named Richard Hicks tells me one night in the Star that he came straight into fishing from the army and finds gill-netting far more intense and exhausting than the tours he did of Afghanistan and Iraq during his years active service.
Men grow old working on trawlers – like Don who has remained loyally with the Filadelfia for years. Though less physically demanding, trawler work itself is regarded as more technical and tactical than the static-gear fishing done by gill-netters. The trawler’s method of dragging nets across the seabed has long been criticised, too, for leading to overfishing and causing unnecessary harm to the marine environment. As long ago as 1376 there was a petition to Parliament about a new kind of fishing vessel called a wondyrchoum whose mesh was so small that ‘no manner of fish, however small, entering within it can pass out and is compelled to remain therein and be taken’. The author of the letter suggested that the wondyrchoum caused such destruction that its presence in the sea would lead to ‘great damage of the common of the realm and the destruction of the fisheries’.
Day boats offer the most flexible kinds of fishing, though it feels like a misnomer to call them ‘day boats’ at all. Most crabbers and hand-liners have left the harbour long before the sun has risen and return after it has set, while the pilchard-hunting ring-netters, a cross between two other kinds of fishing gear, the purse seine (a wall of netting which hangs vertically in the water and is pulled in from the bottom like the strings of a purse to trap the fish within it) and the lampara (an older method comprised of a surrounding net with a central bunt), do not head out until dusk, in that greyish evening light that swamps the harbour, and are usually back before ten at night. Like gill nets, ring nets are weighted at the bottom with lead and held up by corks, but where the gill net stands like a wall in the sea, the ring net surrounds the fish in a wide circle, which then tightens and closes like a bag around the catch.
Day-boat skippers carve their own small paths through the world, quietly working inshore to their own schedules, and carrying a range of nets and pots for different fisheries: trammels (two layers of netting with a smaller mesh inner net between the two in which the fish become tangled) and tangle nets (single-walled nets like gill nets) for turbot and monkfish; hand-lines for mackerel, sole and the bit of haddock they are allowed to catch; nets for bass, gurnard, red mullet; pots for lobster and crab. Day-boat fishermen need to be acutely aware of their work environment, attuned to the changing of the seasons, feeling the way that the natural world shifts over the year.
For hand-lining, the most traditional fishing technique, a single line is attached with feather lures on hooks to catch mackerel by hand. Hand-line fishermen tend to work alone, often those men who most desire seclusion, keeping a distance from the main hubbub and rivalry of the industry. They are often more environmentally conscious than other fishermen. Newlyn’s own ‘Mad Dick’, a self-proclaimed ‘Environment Nut’, who is in his seventies and wears shorts every day of the year, declares he would like to see all the technological advances that have wrecked the industry destroyed. He believes boats such as trawlers, which ‘drag up the whole seabed’, miss the essential intimacy of fishing: where you can literally feel each fish tugging on your line. These days there also exist long-lining commercial fishing vessels, which carry up to a hundred kilometres of line with hooks set at intervals along them. In this way the most environmentally sustainable mode of fishing has been transformed into a damaging one that results in far more waste, or by-catch – fish that you will not sell and may not have quota for.
There is fierce competition between the different kinds of fisherman. Every man I speak to has his own – often incredibly biased – opinions about the other kinds of boats, assuring me that his style of fishing is superior and takes a cannier sort of individual. One man, who was a gill-netter for all his career, describes trawling as ‘kid’s play – not proper fishing’. When I tell him about the huge monkfish we caught on the Filadelfia, he says: ‘Yeah, huge for a trawler’, and when I show him a picture of the great beast, he laughs: ‘Nooo, that’s a babby compared to what we gill-netters get!’ Kyle, meanwhile, tells me he’s never fancied the idea of day-boat work like crabbing because it is ‘too much heavy lifting, not enough fishing’. For trawlermen the constant coming and going of day-boating is nightmarish: ‘While you are out sea, you want to be properly gone – that way you know where you are.’ Meanwhile some of the day-boaters say they could never imagine spending weeks away from their family. Another fisherman I speak to, who has worked both types of vessel, believes that the most skilled craft of all is trawling: it is an exact art, if even the smallest thing goes wrong, ‘the whole trip is fucked’.