Almost every cottage along the rounded bay on which Newlyn is seated has at least one window from where you can see the sea, so that from a distance the town appears like a theatre auditorium with rows of seats sloping down towards the stage that is the harbour – a grander version of the Minack Theatre a few miles further along the coast towards Land’s End. The line between sea and land delineates Cornish experience. It seeps into every aspect of life, shaping its mythologies and slicing through any inflated sense of human grandeur by reminding its inhabitants that there is always something out there that is bigger than them.
To work within this environment is even more character-defining. Fishermen are shaped by the sea in the same manner that every coastline across the planet, though comprised of different rocks from various ages, has felt the presence of the oceans and been reformed throughout its lifetime by that encounter. When the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis was asked: ‘Which were more in number, the living or the dead?’ he responded: ‘In which category, then, do you place those who are on the seas?’ His retort speaks of a lasting conception about those at sea; while out there, away from the land, some vital part of their humanity is lost, making them fundamentally unknowable to those back on the land.
On the day of my twenty-third birthday, exactly a week after I return from sea, I meet Nathan at the Swordy over a couple of pints. As ever, I get more drunk than I intend to (it takes me a long time to admit to myself that I will never be as good at drinking as fishermen), I get back to the cottage late and wake the next morning to find the charred remains of my attempt at cooking one of the lemon sole I gutted on the Filadelfia. Nathan is thirty-one and one of the youngest men I’ve met who has a skipper’s ticket (the qualification you need before you can captain a boat). He tells me that there’s only one type of person who’ll fit in that wheelhouse, and they don’t come along often. A lot of the skippers Nathan reckons are really worth their salt are ‘only-children’, the kind of men who would have developed over time an insular strength which prepared them for life at sea. ‘You gotta be tough as boots,’ he says, ‘and savvy enough to be able to control four other wayward men.’ He pauses – ‘a man amongst men’ – and grins. ‘I made that one up. Quote Nathan Marshall in your book, all right?’
You’ve got to be smart too. To get a skipper’s ticket, fishermen have to complete a rigorous examined course that you can only take after you’ve fished for at least two years and requires you to attend three months of residential classes, working up to twelve-hour days. Another fisherman tells me that in the first class their teacher said ‘Hands up who’s got a Maths A level?’ After no one raised their hand he said ‘Well, you’re all fucked then.’
Nathan shows me some of the questions he had to answer when he did the skipper’s exam. Each algebraic or trigonometric question extends into a two-page sum comprised of letters, numbers and complex symbols. He explains how every calculation, every aspect of fishing – the winch, the nets, the position of your boat through the water, whether you are with or against the tide – must be measured perfectly so you don’t damage the gear, or, worse, lose the boat or put your crew’s lives at risk. A lot of the fishermen I meet say they couldn’t handle the responsibility of being a skipper. Nathan only does it when he has to, preferring to be a mate.
Evening comes and with it the last of the day-fishermen tracing their way back along the coast home. The pub fills with oilskinned men yawning over their pints, and Nathan gets in another round: ‘It is your birthday and all.’ One Scottish fisherman, whose boat is presently moored in Newlyn harbour, explains to me that the community of fishing extends beyond borders. Many of the younger fishermen take time out from fishing for a year or two to travel around the world with the money they’ve made so far. In each coastal place they arrive during their travels, be it France, Australia or India, they somehow end up back at sea again with a group of foreign fishermen. Out on the water, the distinctions between cultures dissolve and the men share in that identifying mark: a sea language which is outside your native language and which feels more fundamental than your origins.
Nathan tells me that if I really want to understand fishermen, I’m going to have to learn some proper sea lingo. He mulls over some of his favourite fishing phrases, listing them on his fingers. ‘Roughty tufty fishermen, man amongst men, and …’ He grins again. ‘Furious wanking!’
‘Wait, what?’
‘Yeah, sorry.’ He pauses for a moment, faltering in the list. ‘That was one of my mate’s. The one I was telling you about.’
The fisherman who took his own life the morning we set sail on the Filadelfia was one of Nathan’s closest friends.
‘Anyway.’ He shakes his head and continues: ‘My girlfriend at the time called me up on the satellite phone one night at sea, and she says: “Me and my friends were wondering, do you ever wank on the boat?” I go to my mate: “She just asked if I wank on the boat?” My mate says: “Say furiously.” “Furiously!” I go.’
Nathan rubs his eyes, stretching the loose, bluish skin below them. ‘That’s probably why she’s my ex and all.’
One of Nathan’s friends, Big John – who, true to his name, is enormous, and also ‘a funny, wordy one, like you’, according to Nathan – joins us as we are both just finishing off our second round. Brave from beer, I tell Big John that I’d recently been trying to come up with a phrase that encapsulates what I think fishermen are. The men give me a funny look and I blush, realising how absurd that sounds; they have spent a week working at sea, while I have been sat in front of a laptop for a lot of that time puzzling over words.
Big John asks me straight up. ‘Well, go on then, what are we?’
‘Er, sea-sculpted…?’ I say, wincing.
‘Bollocks!’ Big John responds immediately and Nathan shakes his head in agreement. ‘That’s not it at all! Stop trying to romanticise us, all right?’
I am ready to slide into my pint and never return from it again when, still reeling from my blunder, Big John takes another glug of beer and in the same beat that the glass hits the table says: ‘We’re careworn’ – as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
‘Careworn! That’s it. Told you he was clever.’ Nathan slaps him on the back. ‘Careworn!’
Regardless of my attempts to find words adequate to express what it means to be a fisherman, there are a number of distinguishing physical features that mark them out as men of the sea. These tend to accumulate over the years so that the oldest fishermen appear almost as caricatures of their past profession. Pretty much all of them have at least one tattoo. Their chosen images have a nice predictability: there are countless anchors, hearts with names written across them in curly fonts, mermaids, pirates, and the occasional registration number or drawing of a particular fishing boat they have grown close to – nothing too fancy, nothing pretentious. Each of these is drawn in thick blue ink, the lines spreading out like a fountain pen touched to wet paper so that you can barely recognise where one line ends and another begins. The most densely tattooed men accumulate dark clusters of bruise-coloured islands running up and down their arms. Their faces are weather-beaten (the word for this in Nance’s glossary is towethack). Their fingers are yellowed after years of rolling endless cigarettes to pass the time on watch, their voices similarly gritty and rasping from smoking. They often carry considerable and impressive guts that stand as record to their bearer’s ability to sink innumerable pints given half the chance and a few nights on shore. These guts look almost comically disproportionate, protruding out above thick, muscled legs and alongside arms made strong from years of handling heavy machinery. It is their faces that most betray their profession though. Every man I meet has heavily lined and intelligent eyes that somehow always retain some aspect of the sea within them. It is not a wildness in their look, but a wilderness that lurks somewhere at the edge of it.
At the end of the Second World War, Life magazine reproduced a painting by the artist Tom Lea entitled Marines Call It That 2,000 Yard Stare. A US marine, depicted in vivid, realistic detail, stands just off-centre of the frame positioned head on towards the viewer while behind him smoke billows, the land burns and engines of war are readied. It makes me uneasy to look at it – not because the soldier is staring right at the viewer, but because he is not. His eyes never reach ours; the wide whites and deep black pupils are hollow, empty and cold as space. This look has become a telltale sign of PTSD amongst returning solders, one family and friends must dread to see when they believe their loved one has come home, only to find a significant part of them has not.
Fishermen’s stares are directed somewhere, though. It is not a kind of disassociation but an intent and profound attention to the water. I see it in Don sometimes, when even amongst friends during a raucous night out at the Star his usual booming voice fades and his expression returns to the one I have become accustomed to seeing him wear at sea each morning, after he has spent many hours alone in a smoky wheelhouse scanning the tar-black seas. Like the negative spaces that make up the human form, fishermen back on the shore feel keenly the absence of that other half of their identity, which, only when imagined together with their life on the land, can complete the portrait of who they know themselves to be. ‘Some of these guys, if they didn’t go to sea, they wouldn’t last long,’ Nathan tells me. Many fishermen are so used to their coming and going between the land and sea that, when injured or their boat is tied up with repairs, they cannot cope. Their identity becomes destabilised. There are men for whom being condemned to a life on the land, be it by injury, or simply by age, is a kind of slow drowning – or perhaps drowning is exactly the wrong word, but rather suffocation, like fish on a deck whose bodies flood with air. In Quite Early One Morning, Dylan Thomas’s short narrative about a village in Wales, he writes of ‘miscellaneous retired sea captains’, who ‘emerged for a second from deeper waves than ever tossed their boats, then drowned again, going down into a perhaps Mediterranean-blue cabin of sleep, rocked to the sea-beat of their ears’. Some retired fishermen never fully return from these sea-beating dreams.
In the same way that people brought up between two countries and two languages describe the feeling of being rent in half if they are suddenly prevented from returning to one of the places they call home, fishermen are no longer quite themselves without a sea to go back to. Don tells me that the longest he has been away from the sea since he was a teenager is about three weeks. Another trawlerman tells me of an occasion when he had been out at sea for a week, and the skipper was deliberating whether or not to do a few more days’ work: the majority of the men quietly hoped that they could just go home, but one crew member who had recently broken up with his wife said ‘Well, I don’t have anything to go back for, so we might as well stay out here.’ Sea men are always on the verge of falling. If one of their two worlds collapses, either on land or at sea, that balance is lost, and he is in danger of losing himself.
For those lucky enough to have family, the day you have to leave them and go back out to sea is rarely easy. Even in my limited experience, the sea has never felt vaster and lonelier, the land never more appealing, than when you are staring out at it knowing that you are about to set out for long days and nights in comparative isolation. Nathan tells me that if there are crew members he doesn’t get on with, he can go whole weeks without speaking, sometimes months. If you’re in a real low patch, you can shut yourself off from everyone out there. He is hit with a case of ‘sailing day blues’ every time he passes that red and white lighthouse on his way out through the Gaps at Newlyn. He describes the experience of leaving as being ‘torn away – literally torn from your home’.
Sometimes I cannot understand why it is that Nathan continues to fish. ‘What do you like about it?’ I ask him.
‘I don’t like any of it.’ He pauses. ‘I like the fact that it gives my family security.’
In that case, couldn’t he find another job I ask? I should have known what his reply would be; it is the same as so many other fishermen have explained to me before.
‘It’s all I know,’ he says.
Few of the skills on a fishing boat are directly transferable to any other professions. If men were to quit they would suddenly find themselves at the beginning of the career ladder again, earning comparatively little in a county with limited opportunities. Fishing is not merely a job; it is a way of life that you cannot unlearn, you are forever bound to it. As Nathan tells me, ‘You know nothing else.’
The men cope with this sense of being wrenched from the land through what I come to see as a kind of mindfulness – a practised disassociation from the land while they are away from it. Perhaps in the same way that prisoners describe time dissolving while they are in confinement, fishermen have to let the outside world go while they’re at sea, so as to not be driven mad by its absence.
In The Need for Roots, French philosopher Simone Weil speculates on the meaning of work in the twentieth century. She describes what she sees as a dearth of spirituality and a concurrent decline in civilisation that is endemic to the modern age. When a youngster first begins to plough a field by himself the work is ‘pure poetry’, she writes. The sense of elation he feels at being, for the first time in his life, truly active in the world soon descends into a weariness and he recognises that he will have to repeat this same monotonous routine day after day, year after year, with no hope of variation. At this point: ‘The young man starts to spend the week dreaming about what he is going to do on Saturday.’ It is from this moment onwards that the man is lost.
Nathan describes a sensation just like this: ‘Soon as I go out those Gaps I start counting down the days, and the hours until I’m home. And as soon as I go ashore I’m counting down the days and the hours before I have to go away again.’ The men grow detached, unrooted, from their present environment, their actions mechanised and performed abstractedly while their thoughts are fixed far away, back on the land. ‘When you’re away, all you can think of is home,’ he continues, ‘and when you’re ashore you can’t get it out your head, the feeling that you’ll have to leave them again in a day or two.’ You are stuck in a not-quite-place, a saltwater space somewhere between the lower world and the world of men.
For Weil, it is possible to move away from this spectral condition through resituating work at the spiritual core of life. In this way, we might root ourselves once more in the world. In fishing, as you stand before the sea, the brackish waters spraying your face, gripping a small knife in a thick glove, slicing into a twisting fish that has just come up from the water, you get the sense that you are engaged in a kind of work that is truly real. In these moments, you feel you are the closest to being in the world that a person can be. We cannot attain this spirituality within work without first acknowledging the burdensome nature of work, the monotony that ‘hangs with an almost intolerable heaviness’.
Once this monotonous, dragging time is recognised, Weil believes that we might ‘mount upwards’. For, she suggests, ‘monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity – the most atrocious if it is a sign of an unvarying perpetuity.’ Whether eternal or in perpetuity, Weil’s sense of monotony is somehow outside of or beyond time, and there lies its potential for spirituality – for man to recognise that ‘through work he produces his own natural existence’ and therein accept the endless cycle between work and rest. She states that it is only ‘when man sees himself as a squirrel turning around and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation’.
For fishermen, this sense of an endless rebounding between work and respite is brought into even sharper focus by their oscillation between the sea and the land. It is perhaps for this reason that they are especially attuned to the condition of ‘turning around and round in a circular cage’ and therefore closer to acknowledging the fundamental condition of work that Weil argues workers must strive towards.
In Newlyn, ex-fisherman Larry tells me that he and a crew were once left shelling langoustine on a Scottish boat for more than twenty-four hours. To pass the dragging time, they listened to music, but only had one CD. For an entire day and night, they listened to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on repeat. When Larry hears the opening chords of ‘Dreams’ play on the jukebox in the Swordy it still makes him shudder. On the way home from the langoustine-shelling trip, the crew, delirious from exhaustion, began to giggle hysterically. I imagine Larry, his hands aching as he sits amongst thousands of flakes of pink shells with Rumours floating out of the boat’s sound system, feeling suddenly that monotony fly outwards into a kind of transcendence.
‘There’s mornings out there when a gale’s just ceased,’ says Nathan, ‘you’re all on your own in that wheelhouse and the sun’s coming up, the gulls are squawking away, and it’s not too bad, you know?’ He tells me that it’s during these moments, when you are ‘staring out at the sea, on your own, proper contemplative, that everyone has a little cry now and then – not that many fishermen would admit to it’. These silent moments are a kind of therapy. The boat seems to slip away and it is just you and the big blue yonder and nothing else. In those brief periods of sublimity, you encounter a kind of release that must be close to Weil’s sense of ‘mounting upwards’.
Nathan often prefers a force 8 to flat calm. ‘You’re out there in a screaming gale of wind and you think look at this, look at what the sea can do.’ When the sea is like that you cannot help to feel a sense of reverence. Fishing is humbling, forcing you to confront your own insignificance. Out on the water, you witness sights daily while you work that people would pay to see, and which the vast majority of people will never even come close to experiencing. There are sunsets and sunrises out there so extraordinary that you cannot help but weep. You catch glimpses of basking sharks and mammoth whales that dwarf your boat and dolphins that arch through the water acrobatically with a single flick of their tails. Nature can do all this, you think, without requiring some 220-tonne metal thing that hefts and drags itself through the water, its engine belching fumes into the sea.
As I leaf through my sea diary entries, trying to find in them some kernel of information that might tell me what it is to be a fisherman, I notice a repeating pattern emerging in accounts. Almost every entry includes a burst of humour, something that happens on deck or up in the wheelhouse that breaks up the monotony of the work and in a sudden joyous moment draws the crew together like a family. Fishermen are some of the funniest people I have met, finding opportunity for play and silliness within almost every difficult situation at sea. This is something that Weil never mentions in her concept of work. And yet it is this sense of humour, the genuine companionship felt between the men, that stops them from being overwhelmed by the tedium of the work, allows them to keep going despite the many tragedies that they have experienced as an industry.
During his time spent on the remote Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, the writer J. M. Synge saw how humour was used as a means of coping with melancholia. During an evening in a pub on Inisheer, translated as east island, he noticed a wildness to the men who would now and again break into a ‘half sensual ecstasy of laughter’. In his meditation on where this kind of laughter comes from, he writes: ‘Perhaps a man must have a sense of intimate misery … before he can set himself to jeer and mock at the world.’ There are times too when I think that the unending pranking and playfulness among the Newlyn fishermen, apart from easing the monotony and exhaustion of fishing, is born of a certain sense of desolation that comes from a life half-lived on the sea.
I hear of one brilliantly elaborate prank played on a decky learner – a fisherman who has just started out in his career – about to join them for his first week at sea. The crew set up the groundwork for the prank by telling the novice fisherman that a container ship of animals from a zoo had been lost at sea and they might see animals in cages floating along in the water. Meanwhile, another crew member bought a gorilla costume. Midway through the trip, while the decky learner was tucked up asleep, they dressed one of the men in the suit and jumped onto the bunk of the young man, scaring him half to death.
On the Filadelfia, Kyle made me laugh almost every minute, both of us cracking up for a good half hour after he tried to explain to me how navigation position systems work and accidentally asked me: ‘What’s your favourite position?’ One afternoon, Andrew got a load of large tomatoes (which Kyle calls ‘the devil’s food – unless they’re in ketchup’), and hid them in Kyle’s wellies so that when he woke up after the Fishwife Call he squelched down into them and had tomato-drenched boots for the rest of the trip.
Another time, Andrew, the self-proclaimed Prank King, promised me that if you rub ray juice into your face it gives you a lovely complexion. After regarding him suspiciously for a minute, my slimy glove raised halfway up to my face, I cried out: ‘No! Bollocks!’
Andrew, laughing his Muttley laugh, replied: ‘Why else do you think fishermen have such beautiful, youthful skin?’
I had passed my first decky learner test.
A gill-net fisherman tells me that near the end of a thirty-hour shift your hands and back are often aching and you want to collapse, but then you look around the deck at the other men just like you. ‘You’re in it together, still cracking jokes and getting on with it – and you think to yourself: That’s it. That’s why I am here.’