Modern commercial fishing is a strange, hybrid profession. It affects to be part of the hunting tradition while thinking like a form of agribusiness. It really resembles neither. There is no element of true hunting left in it since the prey is detected by electronic fish-finders. At most there is a certain amount of searching to be done in areas where experience suggests it may be worthwhile looking. Nor is it like agriculture, since no farmer ever reaped a harvest without sowing so much as a grain. Only gatherers do that.
There is nothing suggestive of nomadism about the crew of the Garefowl which musters at the wharf in Fraserburgh harbour, Scotland, early one morning. It is 2 am in April with a northeasterly wind shivering the lights in the black harbour water. There are six of us. Two have arrived in cars while the rest, like the skipper and myself, have walked out of the warmth of solid stone houses trailing plumes of breath. The town is still. Yet there is a certain alertness about the closed doors and windows, as if they were quite used to opening and shutting behind the menfolk at all hours of day and night, ready to show anxious faces or disgorge rescuers at the firing of a rocket. Donald and I have walked past a huge stack of empty fish boxes, blue plastic crates designed to hold ten or more stones of fish. I thought of Honolulu harbour with its coffins, but the chill black air blowing down from beyond Norway belongs to a planet which does not contain anything as frivolous as tropics or Hawaiian languors. Fraserburgh is a typical fishing community and the Garefowl a typical small trawler, high-prowed, blunt, a mere 56 feet long. There is a lot of wood in her. She is quite unlike the high-tech monsters moored elsewhere in the port, as much factories as ships and bristling with arrays of aerials, antennae, DF loops and radomes.
Donald takes us out quite fast through a maze of high stone jetties and harbour walls. Because of the upward-tilting bows there is very little forward vision. Grey, weed-streaked blocks of stone slide past a few feet away, then a white lighthouse, and we are heading for a place where we ‘might pick up a few haddock’. This is a good three hours’ sailing, but as we may be out for three or more days there is no great hurry. In the intervening time Donald tells me his woes. He sits on a chair with his feet propped on the boss of the wheel. From time to time he glances up at the illuminated compass set flat in the wheelhouse ceiling and twiddles the spokes with one foot. To his left glow two screens: the radar and the brightly coloured display of a Koden fish-finder. Directly before him are a Decca Navigator and Track Plotter.
‘Whatever we find,’ he says, ‘you’ll have a ringside seat at a calamity. If we catch a lot, ten to one we’ll be discarding most of it as undersized. If we catch nothing it’ll only go to show. They’re a desert, these waters. A desert. You’ll see.’
Conventional wisdom expresses the problem as too many boats chasing too few fish. Indeed, reducing the number of fishing boats in the North Sea, even if it means governments having to buy them out (‘decommissioning’) is supposed to be one of the main objectives in Brussels. Immensely complex bureaucratic yardsticks are variously applied: tonnages of boat, horsepowers of engine (expressed as kilowatts, however), the numbers of licences issued for boat owners to catch ‘pressure stocks’ (the most threatened species). These aside, the mass of regulations governing every other aspect of fishing is a bureaucrat’s dream. Those prescribing net mesh sizes draw bleak snorts from Donald, while a new mandatory eight-day tie-up period causes an outburst.
‘What the hell is a small trawlerman like myself supposed to do? Last month I was at sea five days. How can I make a living like that? I won’t work weekends, why should I? My father told me on his deathbed that if ever I worked on Sunday I would have nothing but grief and die poor, and I believe him. So that’s eight days gone out of the month. Then these new EU regulations mean I have to go down to the Fisheries Officer and give him twelve hours’ notice of when I want to take my tie-up. That means your boat is tied up in the harbour for eight consecutive days, excluding weekends. How can any man reckon in advance when to take his eight days? It depends on the weather, doesn’t it? Or repairs. So as it happened the weather was awesome as soon as my tie-up ended. Out of the sixteen days I might have fished last month, I could only get out on five. Probably we’d all of us accept eight days off a month, even ten, provided we could pick and choose and didn’t have to take them all in a block. It’s killing the industry and driving us to crime.’
I imagine bootleg whisky or drug running and he is angry that I am taking what he says too lightly. He thrusts a recent copy of Fishing News at me, then snatches it back at once and begins to read from it by the light of the various screens.
‘And this is by the editor himself, mind,’ he says. ‘“It’s impossible for any skipper with a boat over 80 feet to stay viable now without breaking at least one of the three main rules – misreporting, using a smaller mesh or making illegal landings. Impossible on the quotas we have now. We’re being forced to be criminals.”* Crazy, you see. Any night you can go down the port in Fraserburgh and Peterhead and watch boats illegally landing catches way over the quota straight into lorries. You can wager there’s never an FO there. I don’t know where they all go to. They just vanish at the right moment.’
Having reached the grounds Donald loses way to shoot the net. By the light of the stern spotlamps it flows overboard, followed by a series of plastic floats the size of skulls. The two trawl doors are also swung into the sea, heavy iron rectangles whose drag in the water will keep the mouth of the trawl open. Soon it is all at 60 fathoms, the speed increases to 4 knots and there is nothing to be seen but the twin two cables thrumming the length of the boat from the winch for’ard and out into the darkness astern.
There will be little to do for the next four hours. Ordinarily the men would crawl into the wooden hutches down below to sleep or read, but nobody is tired yet. Dawn is only an hour or two away. Tea is brewed and the wheelhouse fills with men who have sailed with each other for years, have known each other since childhood. Two of them grew up in the same street as the murderer and their contemporary, Dennis Nilsen.* It is like sailing in the company of great auks, an extinct species. They are rationally angry at the botched and muddled decisions by successive governments and the EU; underneath is a more passive note of sadness that their livelihood is coming to an end and with it the long traditions of an ancient community.
‘There’s still a mess of money to be made out here,’ points out Graham. ‘You’ve seen all the new housing outside Fraserburgh? All owned by fishermen, if you can call them that. Some are little better than boat drivers. They know nothing about the sea but ten years ago they liked the look of all those grants London and Brussels were handing out like blank cheques, so they ordered up boats costing millions and then fish prices doubled twice over and they got rich. Mind you, they’re still paying off for those boats and all that flashy tackle. But they think in far bigger terms than men like us can. With that gear they’re landing £50,000 worth of fish at the end of a week’s trip, having broken every law in the book. They’ve rigged the nets so the diamond mesh is squeezed practically shut. They might have put blinders on into the bargain – that’s another net covering the first. Or if they’d had a governor on their engines to de-rate the horsepower they’ll have broken the seal half an hour outside Fraserburgh. No problem. They know how to put a lead seal back on so the fisheries inspectors can never tell. Then they’ll probably land their catch illegally. It’s a joke, ken? And if they’re caught, what’s a £5,000 maximum fine to them? It would put us out of business, but not them. Some of those families run three or four boats.’
‘We’re not saints,’ Donald puts in. ‘Don’t think we never bend the rules ourselves now and then. We have to, otherwise we’d starve. There’s nothing left out here for us small folk. It’s all been swept clean. Winnie Ewing was right: the stupidest thing we ever did was give up our 200-mile limit around Scotland. Now we’ve got every Tom, Dick and Harry hoovering up fish as if there’s no tomorrow. Which there won’t be. We’ve already got non-EU members out here.’
‘It’s not only the numbers,’ says Graham, ‘it’s the technology. Progress is killing the fishing industry. Nowadays you can spot a sardine at 20 miles, shoot your net to almost any depth, sweep the sea bare. And nobody has the will to stop it. Take mesh size as a single example. We’re restricted to a 90-millimetre mesh. That’s fine. We’ve tried all sorts of sizes and combinations in the past and we’ve proved you can keep fish stocks up if you use a 90-mill. diamond with an 80-mill. square panel. Imagine your trawl net, right? Like a great sock. It’s all 90-mill. diamond except for a strip around the top of the ankle. That’s 80-mill. square. Square mesh doesn’t close up when you put a tension on it. Now, when your fish see the headline going overhead they’re already in the mouth of the net. Their reaction is to swim upwards. If there’s a square-mesh panel the small ones escape. They swim right through it while the bigger ones get swept on down to the codend. It’s called a codend but it’s got nothing to do with cod, ken? It means a sort of bag.’
‘As in codpiece?’
Graham says he doesn’t know about that. ‘Anyhow, we have to use 90-mill. diamond although they’re now talking about putting it up to 110, which will catch bugger all. If they do that we’re out of business overnight. They’re always talking about conservation. Conservation this and conservation that. Well, we’ve proved you can fish with 90-mill. and still have conservation. So guess what they’ve just told the prawners they can use? Seventy mill. and two nets per boat.’
‘Crazy, isn’t it?’ Donald asks the rev. counter. The Kelvin diesel below vibrates reassuringly and jars the surface of his tea into a shimmer of concentric rings. ‘It’s the truth what Graham’s saying. Two 70-mill. nets. Of course you need a smaller mesh to catch prawns, but since they’re allowed to land a percentage of fish together with the prawns they just shoot their nets anywhere and take up every last tiddler. So much for conservation. And how is it conservation to allow the Danes to trawl for sand eels off Lerwick? They’re only ground up for fish meal and animal food. Thousands of tons of them, just to feed dogs and throw on the fields. You’re not going to tell me it doesn’t have an effect. There are half the seabirds here compared with a few years back. They lived on sand eels, you ken. It’s down to greed, simple as that. Short-term profits today and hang tomorrow. What we’ve got up here is an entire industry in a mad scramble to cut its own throat.’
A new sun below the horizon is beginning to disclose a haggard sea. As the dawn light strengthens, the surface takes on rumplings like a sheet of thin metal being shaken soundlessly. Out of pinkish, opalescent air the first fulmars arrive as if they knew the Garefowl would soon be hauling up. Shortly afterwards she is hove to and wallowing in the choppy swell. The winch growls and wet hawsers begin sighing through sheaves, spraying drops of water. After some minutes the skulls bob up far astern and the cloud of fulmars circles and lands, coming ever closer. The heavy doors come up and are secured outboard, one on either side of the stern. They are freezing cold to the touch, black except along their bottom edges where they have been freshly scratched and polished by dragging along the seabed for four hours. Their cracks and joins are caulked with mud.
Hauling up is an immemorial business. The nets and skills and patience have all been deployed and now it is time to find out how well one’s family will live for the next few days. Countless representations of the Sea of Galilee underwrite this moment: images of straining arms and bulging nets, of the glittering harvest of the deep. Nowadays powerful winches do most of the work, but there is still a fair amount of manhandling, of lumps of machinery with great inertia swinging dangerously while men dodge around the edge of the stern above a frigid sea. When the codend is finally hauled out, the picture is suddenly not at all immemorial but dismally contemporary. A soft sack of fish appears, about the size of a bundle of hotel laundry and festooned with rubbish. The heads of flatfish stick out at all angles, eyes bulging with pressure, and from them and between them hang rags of plastic, bin liners, torn freezer packs, lengths of electric cable, flattened orange juice containers. The brutal meeting of still-flapping bodies with machinery is contemporary, too. As the codend is hauled free of the water the fish caught further up the net are already being minced as they are dragged over the hydraulic pulley high above the stern. Their shredded bodies drop into the sea to be pounced on by gannets.
The full squalor of the net’s contents is not revealed until the codend is swung inboard and emptied into a wooden sty. Into this mass of bodies smeared with grey North Sea silt wade men in wellingtons, crunching and kicking among the dying, sorting out the unwanted with their feet: paint tins, a length of rusty chain, a battered steel drum, a work gauntlet, two beer bottles encrusted with growths, lumps of torn starfish, clods of jelly, the silvery sack of vacuum-packed coffee with the name of a Hamburg supermarket still legible. The rubbish of a thousand fishing boats and oil rigs and supply vessels is daily fished up, winnowed out and thrown straight back into the sea, building up on the bottom into an ever more concentrated and handpicked stratum of garbage.
There is about the architecture and layout of certain new housing estates on the edges of provincial towns something which makes it easy to guess they have been built on landfill over what, until a year or two ago, was the municipal tip. A clutch of abandoned gravel pits has been steadily filled with a million soup tins, dead refrigerators, burst sofas, outdated phone books and skiploads of dustbin contents. For years it was picked over by flocks of seagulls following a lone bulldozer as it levelled the heaps of rubbish. Finally, it was tamped down and topped off with a layer of soil from an excavation elsewhere in the county, and streets and houses and lawns were planted over the landscaped charnel. One imagines the street lamps as long hollow spikes driven deep into the festering seam to flare off the methane. It is a familiar inland prospect at the blurred borderland between the suburban and the subrural where the terrain is anything but pristine.
Far off the coast of north-east Scotland at dawn, however, the view appears untouched. The blank light lifts like an ancient eyelid disclosing the glint of curved ocean in its timeless gaze. Gannets furl themselves and dive hard into the black-green surface; they are visible many feet below, streamlined as tenpins. In the cold, taintless air there is this same arctic clarity and there comes the memory of last night’s weak flames and tattered banners draped across the northern heavens, the flickerings of an aborted aurora. To look into this grand expanse of movement and steely colour is still to see what the Vikings saw, maybe, only for a moment, the idea of North; a vision which bursts as the eye catches on the horizon a structure hardening in the light – part Eiffel Tower and part Christmas tree. This single glimpse of an oil rig pricks and deflates everything. All too obviously it is no ship, not floating but standing. In the instant of this perception the North Sea sinks as though a plug has been pulled. It is no profound, pure abyss after all but a lake shallow enough for man-made girders to stand on the bottom and poke through. Then also comes a memory of something Graham has said, that to trawl along the various pipelines for the different species which favour them as habitats (oil pipes are warm, gas pipes cold) has the disadvantage of filling the net with a mass of junk and hardware discarded by the men who laid the pipes and who regularly maintain them. Their courses are marked by tons of assorted soft-drink cans, plastic sacks of jettisoned nuts and bolts, paint drums still half full of toxic sludge, hundreds of fathoms of steel hawsers, sunken crisp packets.
One night (Donald had interrupted) his brother-in-law out of Peterhead was hauling up and when the codend swung into the arc lights above the counter, every man aboard froze where he stood. Crushed into the meshes was the face of a girl looking out at them, her mouth open in a yell, her eyes wide. Partially lost among the plaice and whiting and dogfish were her twisted limbs. When the catch was released nobody wanted to wade into the bin to dig her out from beneath the bottles and squid and halibut, not least because there was movement everywhere as if things were trying to struggle up from the bottom of the heap. Eventually some brave soul pulled her out from beneath a heaving monkfish: a torn and deflated life-sized sex doll. Inside her mouth, moulded into a red-rimmed O of insatiable accommodation, were hermit crabs. She, too, went back over the side, twentieth-century mermaid, Jenny Haniver herself, probably modelled from the by-products of the very same North Sea oil her roustabout lover had been helping to extract.
Now, on the shelter deck whose hatch is closed against the wind, Graham in wellingtons crunches and kicks the dying, scooping up fish a stone or two at a time on to a sorting tray where Ian and Gordon quickly work through the catch. Into one plastic box they throw angler fish, into another cod, into a third plaice and sole. Then with a sweep the tray is cleared and down a stainless-steel gutter leading out over the scuppers shoot all the unwanted creatures together with bottles, plastic, bits of wire and shells. Fish of all kinds, wriggling and still, a hundred meals chucked back over the side in a slurry. Outside the gulls dive but pick and choose. The gannets prefer whole fish while the fulmars are really waiting for the gutting to begin. Behind the Garefowl stretches a sinking slick of bodies, for even the ones still wriggling will die. The violence of their capture and the hauling up through 60 fathoms has ruptured capillaries, made flotation sacs bulge out of mouths. Those fish with patches of scales torn off will anyway become prey to disease, to worms and saprophytes. One way and another they all drift back down to the lifting, swaying layer of refuse.
Any indignation at such ‘discards’ is not the conventional ‘Think how many Third World families they would feed’, since the same can be said at any other point in the chain of Western food production and consumption, from the processing of frozen vegetables to expense account luncheons. The instinctive rebellion is more against the blithe inefficiency of a system whose regulations make it mandatory to junk a great percentage of what it catches; regulations, moreover, designed expressly to protect immature fish and replenish stocks. How powerful is this reversal of a famous miracle. Once, two small fishes allegedly fed 5,000 people. Our achievement is to make 5,000 fish feed two.
It is utterly violent, this daily wrenching of indiscriminate tons of living creatures up into the air, picking out those which happen to meet current laws and requirements and returning tons of unwanted corpses to the sea floor. The sea floor itself has meanwhile been scoured by the trawl doors, its ecology (already labouring beneath a top-dressing of litter) further battered by the wholesale disruption of colonies of species that have nothing to do with human gastronomy and everything to do with the marine food chain: starfish, crustacea, weeds, corallines, urchins, jellyfish, algae. In addition there are the eggs of fish species such as the herring which are laid demersally, adhering to the seabed. It is never directly seen, this massive damage caused by the corridors scraped across the floor of the sea twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, all over what were once the richest fishing grounds in Europe. (Silent beneath their dank quilt of freezer bags lie the lost birch forests of far-off Dogger.) What is seen in the codends of the nets is a representative sample, as the rubble in a skip is the microcosm of a building site. I wander about the Garefowl’s stern, picking up dabs and other flatfish which have fallen to the deck and lie like dead leaves behind stanchions and around the bases of hydraulic gear, throwing them to the gannets. Maybe the only way to justify these creatures would be to be forced to eat them all, starfish included.
Over the next couple of days the boat sails back and forth, shooting and hauling up, shooting and hauling up. Twice the net comes up torn after a menacing concussion has thrummed through the boat. Each time Donald has hurriedly shut off the engine, for it means the trawl has hit a rock or some other obstacle. The North Sea is littered with wrecks. While Donald has marked many of them on his rolls of Decca Navigator traces there are always unmarked ones or fresh hazards.
‘Bastards,’ says Ian as the trawl comes up with the coils of a hawser snagging the headline. ‘That’s a towing cable from another trawler. Not lost, ken, just dumped. You’ve got two wire towing cables, right? About three or four thousand quid the pair of them. On average they’ll last ten months. There’s no scrap market for the old ones. You’re forced to dump them. We take ours to a place where there’s a hard bottom, preferably near a wreck, so nobody will be trawling there. But if you’re not a local and don’t aim to come back you don’t care where you chuck your cables, do you? Bastards.’
Although the catch is poor – Donald says it will not cover the costs of this trip, let alone pay anyone aboard – spirits in the wheelhouse are not low. Rather, everybody is philosophical. Sometimes you do all right, sometimes not. That’s fishing. And what can you expect when the fishery is at its last gasp? (The radar screen is bright with the dots of other vessels: two Danish industrial ships, a German beamer, two Belgian trawlers, a Frenchman and a Dutchman.) Instead, conversation turns to what bad seamen some of the younger folk are, how they hardly know anything about the sea, but technology helps cover up their ignorance. The automatic pilot makes navigation simple, everyone agrees, but it is also dangerous since it lulls the inexperienced into not paying enough attention and is often the cause of collisions.
‘My father would have died of shame at the thought of colliding with another boat. Nowadays it’s a bit of a joke. Insurance, you see.’ Suddenly the voice of an old, tight Scottish community is heard as they reminisce about the conventions, taboos and superstitions which even today rule some fishermen’s lives. ‘My father was ashamed to do plenty of things people do now without a thought. Other things he just couldn’t do, like put to sea on a Sunday. And there were certain words you wouldn’t mention in front of him, he was that superstitious. You wouldn’t dare say “salmon”, for instance; it brought awesome bad luck. You had to get round it, say “the silver fish” or something like that. Nor “minister”. Nor “pig”.’
‘Nor “rabbit”, come to that,’ puts in Graham. ‘It was a “four-footer”. And nobody ever wore green. As for bodies, they’d never touch a floater. Never.’
Their superstitions must have put them in the strangest positions. Men who would not touch drowned bodies would man the lifeboat and Donald’s father, who had been coxswain, could not swim.
‘You mean he was a lifeboatman and couldn’t swim?’
‘That’s right. No more than I can, and I’ve been coxswain myself.’
It turns out that only one of the Garefowl’s crew can swim. Donald was once knocked overboard wearing thigh boots, which promptly filled and prevented him from kicking himself afloat. He managed to catch a rope in time. ‘It wasn’t good,’ is his description of being pulled below. ‘By rights I shouldn’t be talking to you.’
It is hard to know what to make of all this. They assert that at most 10 per cent of Fraserburgh’s older fishermen can swim but a few more of the younger can. They say this is because the young ones have been on survival courses run by the oil companies, but a more likely reason would seem that nowadays schools take their pupils to heated swimming pools. Undoubtedly it is evidence of a fishing community’s strange and fatalistic relationship with the sea. In Britain, as elsewhere, there is a long tradition of neither fishermen nor sailors being able to swim. This is disdainfully brave or plain damn silly; else it stems from a dark belief that once you have fallen into the sea’s grasp you are done for by rights. Or did a Puritan dislike of undressing, together with these latitudes’ naturally frigid waters, always make of the sea a medium which was quite properly fatal?*
We turn for Fraserburgh with fourteen boxes of fish. We must have discarded at least the same amount, more if dropouts are included (the fish that are shed from the net as it is hauled up). Donald thinks that if instead of throwing away undersized fish trawlermen were obliged by law to box and land them, the extra trouble would be enough to force them to adopt larger mesh sizes. Privately, I think it a pity he and his mates are so conservative in their tastes they will not even keep something back for themselves. They could eat fresh fish at least once a day (in three days we have eaten fish for one meal out of a total of nine), and I try to convince them how delicious most of their rejects are. In vain. No amount of insistence will make them taste octopus, crab, squid, gurnard or several other species. Donald says, ‘You get about 12 stones of octopus to a box. On average they’ll fetch four or five quid a box, maximum ten. Ten quid for nearly 80 kilos of fish? Isn’t worth the effort. Dump them. … Eat them? I’ll never eat one of those things. They all go to France. Places like that.’
Finally, they hardly seem like people gathering food at all; it is merely something that can be sold. It might be manganese nodules we are bringing in. They are heading home to plates of Aberdeen Angus in thick gravy with tatties and bashed neeps.
*
There are several very curious things about the present state of the North Sea fisheries, not the least being that it is nothing new, not even the platitudes so often repeated in small wheelhouses: ‘The fisherman is his own worst enemy’ and ‘Progress is killing the industry.’ The second half of the nineteenth century saw mechanisation applied to fishing, advances which brought steam power to boats and winches and helped preserve and distribute catches by means of refrigeration and the railways. As early as 1863 a Royal Commission enquired into whether the spread of trawling was perhaps beginning to deplete the North Sea stocks and decided it was not. By the turn of the century there was no longer much doubt on the part of anyone involved, with the exception of the government itself. Several peers knew better, but they were sportsmen. Lord Onslow, who had studied the matter at first hand and had already noted with distaste that the trawl crushed fish to death while the driftnet strangled them, determined to push legislation through parliament which would at least restrain trawlers from wasteful fishing. He proposed:
His attempt failed. Meanwhile, a fisheries expert named Aflalo was documenting the destructiveness of North Sea trawlers.
It appears that one shrimp-trawl, working in the Mersey, took 10,000 baby plaice in a single haul, while another in the same district brought up over 250 small soles, 900 tiny dabs, nearly 300 unmarketable whiting, 18 little skate, and some hundreds of useless plaice. When to this is added the fact that all this waste fish was accompanied by only twenty quarts of shrimps, some estimate may be formed of the terrible destruction for which such agency is responsible.*
That was written nearly ninety years ago. He went on to put the entire problem in a way which could scarcely be bettered today. Having referred to North Sea practices as a ‘conspiracy of depletion’, he recommends fish farming as ‘making it possible to sow as well as to reap’ and concludes:
It is when man shall have discovered the means of restocking the sea and of controlling its supplies that his ‘dominion over the fish’ will be perfect. The power to deplete, which so far marks the utmost limit of his advance, is mere tyranny. Dominion should embrace a more benevolent sway, and to that end no doubt the efforts of science and the might of law will presently join forces. It is to be hoped that the present friendly collaboration of the Northern Powers in the great sea in which they have a common interest may be the basis of a lasting harmony, more durable than any evolved in Utopian deliberations at the Hague.†
A century on, hardly a word of this needs to be changed except to substitute ‘Brussels’ for ‘the Hague’ and to note that fish farming is an established industry, but in areas such as fjords and estuaries annexed for this purpose. There is no attempt to restock free-for-all fishing grounds like those of the North Sea. Much of the problem is that science has not yet lived up to Aflalo’s expectations and extraordinarily little is still known about the behaviour of fish, of their breeding and feeding and migratory habits, of the influence on them of changes in current, temperature and plankton levels. As Donald sardonically remarked, ‘The government have no idea when cod and haddock spawn.’
In 1902, two years before Aflalo made the above remarks, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea was founded. It is this same organisation, ICES, which today is responsible for making the scientific assessments of fish stocks on which the EU bases its quotas: the so-called TAC or Total Allowable Catch. (It should be noted that TACs apply to fish landed, not to fish caught. It is not illegal to catch and kill large numbers of immature fish.) From the year of its founding ICES became a focus for all aspects of biological oceanography and fisheries research. Put succinctly its remit, according to one ICES member, was ‘to tell the commercial world how far greed might safely go’.*
ICES’s first task was to discover why fish have a habit of coming back to the same grounds for decades at a stretch, long enough to generate a local fishing industry, and then one year vanish altogether. It was supposed that a change in the currents carrying plankton might be one explanation. Other ICES scientists tagged fish in order to study their movements. Still others concentrated on refining a method of dating fish which had originally been used to determine the ages of carp, that of counting the growth bands on a single scale. They noted that fish grew faster in summer and hence the bands on their scales became wider. It was a Norwegian, Johan Hjort, who finally discovered that the dynamics of fish populations are quite unlike those of terrestrial animals. Any single haul might well contain fish from two to twenty years old, and in very uneven distributions. He invented a terminology, calling fish born in a particular year a ‘year class’, then set about trying to explain why there were good and bad year classes. A good year class would dominate catches for several years at a stretch while members of a bad year class, even though they might have grown well as individuals, were thinly represented and for shorter periods. This was mystifying. Some unknown factor – not obviously the weather – evidently allowed great numbers of fish to survive one year but then killed off young ‘recruits’ in successive years. (No less mysterious was Hjort’s describing fish in terms of a military academy. This had no connection with ‘schools’ of fish, either, which derives from the Dutch word for shoal.)
On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, ICES had been anticipated by all of thirty years by the US Fish Commission. This was the brainchild of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who set up his base in a tiny village near Cape Cod named Woods Hole, which he knew and liked from having spent his holidays there. His laboratory, together with its research ship named the Albatross, offered the best facilities in America for marine biology. Baird died, much lamented, in 1886, not before T. H. Huxley had praised him for his work on fisheries which had yet to be done in British waters:
If the people of Great Britain are going to deal seriously with the sea fisheries, … unless they put into the organisation of the fisheries the energy, the ingenuity, the scientific knowledge and the professional skill which characterises my friend Professor Baird … their efforts are not likely to come to much good. I do not think that any nation at the present time has comprehended the question of dealing with fish in so thorough, excellent and scientific a spirit as the United States.*
Two basic questions which Hjort posed have still not been answered to complete satisfaction. One was: Which period of a hatchling’s life is the most critical? and the other: What are the factors which most affect its health and development? It is now believed that a good year class results if there is a rich supply of plankton during the first ten days after the larvae hatch. In view of the advances over the past 100 years in science of all kinds, including biology itself, this tentative conclusion scarcely shows a great breakthrough in knowledge of the life cycle of fishes. This in turn makes it odder still that governments on both sides of the North Sea have done so little to curb the ‘conspiracy of depletion’. After all, there has been overwhelming evidence of serious over-fishing throughout this period, among the most convincing of which was the effect of World War I. Submarine warfare and minefields closed many fishing grounds for four years, allowing fish stocks to regenerate. With the end of hostilities in 1918 North Sea fishermen landed fabulous catches, not simply greater numbers of fish but bigger specimens. This bountiful state of affairs lasted a short while, then deteriorated again so that by the mid-to late 1920s fish stocks were back down to where they had been before 1914. The obviousness of such evidence is never enough to convince governmental exponents of laissez-faire policies. Even in the middle of World War II, Dr E. S. Russell, the Director of Fishery Investigations at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, could in the same breath urge against over-fishing during the post-war reconstruction and also think it ‘probable that surface fish, like herring and mackerel … although a great source of food and wealth, exist in stocks too large to be depleted by fishing’.*
To put it bluntly, nobody has the remotest idea of the full long-term effects of continuous over-fishing. It has recently been suggested that it might be causing genetic changes in fish stocks as the fish, fighting for survival, are pressured into earlier sexual maturation at the expense of growth.† Shore stocks may also be driven wholesale into deeper waters, as has happened in the Grand Banks fishing grounds off Newfoundland, with unknown consequences for the area’s ecosystem. Least of all can anybody say what impact the powerful krill fishing industry will have on South Atlantic waters, on baleen whales and penguins or – come to that – the entire food chain of Antarctica. By the mid-1980s annual catches were peaking at half a million tonnes. Since then, they have averaged 120,000 tonnes. It remains to be seen whether the fishery’s regulatory body, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) can impose precautionary catch limits before this valuable fishery expands further.
*
One day in January 1988 two companions and I were in a skiff midway between two islands in the South China Sea when we spotted something curious in the water ahead. There was a ragged patch like floating seaweed or the top of a reef as the tide begins to fall. We knew the area well; we were far out in a deep channel where there were no reefs. Also puzzling were the antics of a small white tern which was standing, fluttering and fluttering its wings as if in some difficult feat of balancing on this patch. As we neared we could smell it before we finally identified it as a mass of rotting animals. We identified fish, a baby dolphin and various bird carcasses. The tern’s desperate agitations increased with our approach and we could now see that its feet were caught in the nearly invisible meshes of a ghost net, a fragment of drift net which floats and continues to catch almost any animal that comes into contact with it. With some difficulty we freed the little tern, the bottom of the skiff whispering over nylon and fins and bumping softly among the heavier corpses. There was nothing else to be done. Sooner or later, the gases of putrefaction having been released, the mass would sink beneath its own weight until fresh gas was generated or its heavier contents broke up sufficiently to filter out between the meshes. Then it would rise to the surface once more.
After Japan first began using nylon monofilament nets for drift netting in its own coastal waters in 1976 there was a great expansion of pelagic drift netting. For years the Central and North Pacific areas were the principal focus of public and government attention, tending to obscure the fact that the practice was widespread in coastal areas as well. In archipelagic seas it caused immense damage to marine and bird life as well as affecting the livelihoods of local fishing communities. Pelagic fish are those which feed at or near the surface, usually in large, dense shoals. To catch them, drift-netters hung an invisible curtain of nylon mesh 40 feet high in the sea and left it to drift with the tides, currents and winds. Drift netting was a long-established technique, one that had been used for over a century in British inshore waters. What was new about the practice since 1976 was the use of invisible and virtually indestructible nylon mesh.
For six months of the year the North Pacific was invaded by more than 1,500 ships, mainly from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, together forming the world’s largest fishing fleet. Every night each ship laid between 30 and 50 miles of net, leaving it to drift for six to eight hours, so that in these latitudes on any night there could be anything up to 50,000 miles of net deployed, about enough to encircle the planet twice. The ships were highly efficient, with the latest electronic means for detecting shoals, especially those animals rising vertically each night as the Deep Scattering Layer, and some with additional sonic aids for herding them more tightly. Such nets catch almost anything which touches them, including birds and especially cetaceans, to whose sonar the filaments are invisible. Marketable fish were kept; non-target species and those of no immediate economic interest were dumped overboard by the ton. It is a system which has been trenchantly described as ‘stripmining the oceans’.* From the fishermen’s point of view it is cheap and simple; from that of the ecosystem the effects cannot be determined since so little is known. But its results are not invisible. By 1990 even Japanese drift-netters were admitting they saw far fewer dolphins, seals, juvenile hump-back whales and seabirds than only five years earlier. Japan had long since banned drift netting in its own territorial waters because of the threat of ecological collapse.
In a landmark victory for conservation, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution banning drift netting on the high seas from January 1993, though it was still permitted in coastal waters. The EU banned its fleets from drift netting in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean from January 2002, although after strenuous lobbying by Denmark, Sweden and Finland the Baltic was exempted from this protection. The practice also continued in other limited areas where exemptions were obtained, such as the UK coast between North Yorkshire and the Scottish border, where from June 2003 just sixteen remaining salmon and sea trout netsmen were allowed licences. But the trend is obvious: the practice is at last on the way out. To be sure, illegal drift netting still continues the world over, but it is steadily being reduced by better aerial spotting, reporting by ships and general enforcement. But rising seafood prices allow no grounds for complacency, and constant vigilance will be required.
The activities of the drift-netting industry first came to urgent attention around 1983, and then only because Japan had formally requested US permission to go drift-netting off Alaska within the 200-mile EEZ. The intention was to intercept Pacific salmon on the way to their river spawning grounds. The US granted the permit, believing that these stocks were heading for Russian rather than North American rivers. Later, when the Japanese tried to renew it, the questionnaire they had to submit unwisely revealed that a typical season’s catch included an estimated 14,000 Dall porpoise as well as three-quarters of a million seabirds. (At the time the Japanese salmon fleet comprised 172 vessels, each with 9 miles of net, totalling a mere 1,548 miles as compared with that currently being deployed by the North Pacific red squid and tuna fleets.) As it happened, the salmon stocks were North American after all. This incident provided an excellent demonstration of how little is known about the movements of fish. The heirs of Spencer Fullerton Baird had misread the migration patterns of the most economically important species in Alaskan waters. This is to leave aside the ethics involved in the assumption that since they were Russian salmon they were fair game for plunder. It was only when the Alaskan and Canadian salmon fishermen began to suffer ruin from the depletion of their stocks that the error was acknowledged. In 1988 Japanese fishing boats were banned from US territorial waters, two years after a similar ban by Australia.
Yet even today, East Asian markets are regularly glutted with salmon still being trawled illegally in Alaskan waters. This fleet probably takes 50,000 tons of salmon annually, and Earthtrust has estimated that the number of ‘dropouts’ and injured and dying ‘escapees’ equals the same amount again. If this can happen within the United States’ EEZ, it is not hard to imagine what goes on in international waters. Policing is slowly improving, and there is no question that the steady outlawing of drift nets has struck an important blow on behalf of wildlife. But those with a sense of history will retain their pessimism as a thwarted billion-dollar industry develops instead the technology for precisely targeting species, with the danger of their eradication (as in the case of the majestic bluefin tuna). ‘Quotas’ will once more be fixed by authoritative-sounding international bodies who cannot tell how much loss the ocean has already borne, nor guess what it still can bear. If the North Sea, surrounded as it is by a community of developed nations with access to the best scientific information, can be systematically ruined through conflicts of interest and political expediency, what real hope is there for the Pacific? Who is to police its vast, unclaimed areas, and to enforce what law? Under the virtuous flag of an abuse redressed, cynical attrition is as likely as ever to slither around laws and evade patrols, just as it does in the tiny pond of the North Sea. The issues will float up and down for years to come like ghost nets with their rotting cargoes.
For now, even people with no immediate connection with fishing have noticed a decline in Pacific wildlife. As a geophysicist aboard Farnella said one afternoon, surveying from the rail the empty expanse of ocean on which floated a sheet of tar-stained plastic where eight or even five years before a school of dolphins might have sported, ‘We don’t deserve this world.’ The drifting refuse, the absence of any sign of life for two weeks but for a few flying fish and the occasional mournful bird was bound to make anyone take stock. ‘Homo sapiens sapiens. In this single century we’ve slaughtered a thousand times more people than all the Genghis Khans of history put together. Into the bargain we’ve laid waste our planet. Not bad going for a mere 100 years. And look what we’ve got in return. Machines for mapping the ocean floor and a brave new race. We’ve had the Beaker Folk and now we’ve got the Consumer Folk. Tesco Man. Homo supermercatus.’
*
The trait in the human species of harvesting first and assessing the consequences at leisure is clearly a genetic inheritance. Unlike felines, which eat their fill and walk away, we are in this respect closer to the canines such as foxes, which kill an entire roost of chickens they will neither eat nor bury for later. There is something hopeless in Homo’s mixture of brutality and compassion, a cross-purpose of muddlement. Even as Spencer Fullerton Baird was founding Woods Hole, Charles Wyville Thomson was trying to observe the creatures of the North Sea. He wrote of English fishing smacks being welled to supply fresh cod for the London market (this was before refrigeration). A large, square tank was built amidships with holes for fresh seawater to circulate. The fish, he noted, were oddly tame:
It is curious to see the great creatures moving gracefully about in the tank like goldfish in a glass globe. … They seem rather to like to be scratched, as they are greatly infested by caligi. … One of the fish had met with some slight injury which spoiled its market, and it made several trips in the well between London and Faëroe and became quite a pet. The sailors said it knew them. … It was always the first to come to the top for the chance of a crab or a bit of biscuit, and it rubbed its ‘head and shoulders’ against my hand quite lovingly.*
Treating a codfish as another Englishman might treat his hound may have struck his contemporaries as eccentric, especially since they were accustomed to a reign over the animal kingdom which was in general less than benevolent and often maniacal. Accounts of the huge eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century massacres of creatures such as whales, seals and sea lions make painful reading; even at the time, explorers and others sensed that something was not right. W. H. B. Webster, the surgeon aboard HMS Chanticleer during her voyage of 1828–30 in the south Atlantic, wrote:
The harvest of these seas has been so effectively reaped, that not a single fur-seal was seen by us, during our visit to the South Shetland group; and, although it is but a few years back since countless multitudes covered the shores, the ruthless spirit of barbarism slaughtered young and old alike, so as to destroy the race. Formerly two thousand skins a week could be procured by a vessel; now not a seal is to be seen.*
Captain James Weddell, making much the same journey five years earlier, had noted that both sea lions and fur seals were almost extinct on South Georgia, ‘not less than 1,200,000 skins’ having been sent to the London market, together with 20,000 tons of ‘sea-elephant’ oil. He evidently liked penguins, observing that ‘Sir John Narborough has whimsically likened them to “little children standing up in white aprons”’.†
When fur seals became scarce, the ‘sea-elephant’ (elephant seal) was turned to for its oil, and Weddell noticed the animal’s pitiful docility. ‘It is curious to remark, that the sea-elephant, when lying on the shore, and threatened with death, will often make no effort to escape into the water, but lie still and shed tears, merely raising the head to look at the assailant; and, though very timid, will wait with composure the club or lance which takes its life.’‡ In order to extract the oil from the seals’ blubber it was flensed and rendered down in vast iron cauldrons. Fuel being extremely short in these latitudes the sealers burnt penguins, each of which contained about a pint of oil. Finally, the supply of seals ran out and the sealers had to turn to the penguins themselves. ‘In common with all Antarctic creatures,’ observes Edwin Mickleburgh,
they had little or no fear of man and it was therefore a simple business for the sealers to drive them into pens where they were clubbed and flung into the bubbling pots. It is recorded that some birds, in the interests of faster production, were driven down crudely constructed gangways directly into the pots where they were boiled alive.§
Not that this sort of thing was confined solely to sealers and whalers. W. H. B. Webster, calling at Buenos Aires on his way south, had already heard a local resident describe how he had ‘once sold a flock of sheep, amounting to two thousand, at 1s 6d. per head, for the sole purpose of fuel for a brick-kiln.’*
Looking once again at the North Sea and the Pacific Ocean 170 years later, we can see that there is little new about the creation of semi-deserts where once teemed marine and bird life. Nor, in its capacity to kill indiscriminately, does modern drift-net fishing really mark a new departure. Probably the only novelty is that of pollution, of animals being sieved from the sea and replaced with bottles and sheets of tarry plastic. Even in this matter the same muddlement and cross-purposes can be found, the same ironies. Thus, scientific bases in Antarctica, set up precisely to study a pristine, nearly sterile environment, have themselves polluted their surroundings. The worst offender has been the US base at McMurdo Sound, where surplus bulldozers have been casually tipped into the sea and open-pit burning and landfilling of wastes were everyday practices for years. Efforts are continuing to clean it up and many another base, newly uncomplacent, is discovering how expensive and inconvenient it is having to ship out hundreds of barrels of frozen faeces and urine in addition to the other refuse it generates. There is an irresistible parallel to be drawn between Antarctica and another pristine – and wholly sterile – environment: space. Since the space age started in 1957, 6,600 spacecraft have gone into orbit, of which some have fallen but plenty remain. In addition to these and their defunct rockets there are an estimated 500,000 fragments of junk, including screwdrivers. If in the next three decades the amount of debris in low Earth orbit increases at the same rate it will total 3 million tons and render any further human space exploration prohibitively dangerous. Various hugely expensive schemes for cleaning up space are currently being considered.
*
Until recently, I was finding it easy to compare modern fisheries such as those in the North Sea with what it pleased me to think of as ‘true hunting’. Because I spent time each year hunting my own food in the sea I deployed sentimentalities in my own favour. Certainly, when one takes on individual fish with a home-made, elastic-powered speargun of very limited range and accuracy, using only the air in one’s lungs, the odds are heavily in the fish’s favour. No doubt also it attunes one to things previously obscure. In the lengthy daily process of stalking food one learns much about different species of fish and their behaviour. One also becomes observant of other phenomena, noticing weeds, currents, sudden thermoclines, coralline animals and the local benthos, light and shade and colour. One also discovers things about one’s own body: how to control breathing and how to lie at different depths, as well as the graph which plots time spent in the water against increasing frequency of urination, the remarkably dehydrating effects of three hours’ constant diving and underwater swimming. There are unlikeable character traits to confront, too, including those pairs of seeming opposites: callousness and fear, impatience and hesitancy.
There is one particular sentimentalism about hunting which all of a sudden I do not like at all, maybe because I once partly subscribed to it myself. It is that which speaks of a deep, quasi-mystical ‘understanding’ between hunter and prey a sort of mutual respect where after hours of effort the hunter is half pleased when his quarry escapes or, conversely, when it seems almost content to die. Presumably this derives from the humbug of chivalry and the codes of jousting. The thing in hunting is to win. When the novelty of the experience has worn off and the basic technique has been acquired, there remains the task of getting one’s food as quickly and efficiently as possible because there are plenty of other things to do such as collecting firewood, making another spear, repairing a rickety fish drier or just sitting under a shady tree. At this level’ hunting is simply gathering food, a necessary and often pleasurable chore. It is quite different from those grand, allegorical duels between old men and the sea, or grizzled captains and white whales. Yet to fish day by day off the same stretch of shore and, where there is a long fringing reef, off the same groups of corals, is to see from within the impact of local fishing. Nowadays I prefer to swim out beyond the reef, to go out at night and instead of killing parrotfish in their holes or mullet asleep on the sand wait for the solider pelagic species such as pampano to come in. At the extreme edge of the flashlight’s beam a pale shape is glimpsed for a second. It might have been imagination or else a momentary fault in one’s retinal wiring (pressure does strange things to night vision). It is worth pursuing, though, and one holds the beam on the spot where the object may have been and makes a burst of speed with both plywood flippers. At night most fish are either immobilised by darkness or else vanish with a fin’s flick; pampano are strange in that they seem to allow themselves to be pursued, partly alarmed and partly attracted by the light. They could easily escape, but often after an exhausting chase one can overhaul them. In the light they are round and silver, about the size of a dinner plate and, in contrast to most coral species there is good meat on them. The technique is to hold the torch at arm’s length and out to one side. Like all laterally flattened fish, pampano turn so as to present an attacker with an edge-on view, but this attacker has out-thought it and for a moment it is almost sideways on. If the aim is true and the speargun works that moment should be enough. The range is never more than 7 or 8 feet. More than that and the spear will not penetrate. Twice that distance is the effective limit of visibility with a two-battery torch. A brace of pampano (for if there is one, there will be others) is plenty. On a good night one may be out and back and building a fire within 40 minutes.
In much of South-East Asia the pressures of virtually unregulated commercial fishing have led to close parallels between the fishermen of villages like ‘Sabay’ and those of Fraserburgh. In Scotland it is – incredibly – not illegal to trawl right up to the beach. This practice has done enormous harm to littoral fish stocks, as to the locals who in calm weather could once go out in small boats and fish safely within a few hundred yards of shore. In the Philippines the equivalent is provided by the proliferation of buli-buli and basnig fishing. Buli-buli refers to large seine nets of very fine monofilament mesh, often as small as 10 millimetres. Basnig uses similar nets but at night, with banks of bright lights to attract squid and nocturnal species. The older craft use propane gas for their lamps, the modern ones electricity. A basnig fleet with its cityscape of lights and distant massed chugging of generator engines is a characteristic sight. From its deployment one can often tell as much about local politics as about the offshore reef formations keeping it at a distance. Officially, there is a 7-kilometre limit inside which only ‘sustenance fishermen’ may legally fish. In addition, Fisheries Administrative Order no. 164 places restrictions on all buli-buli fishing. It is illegal to use a boat of more than 3 gross tons, as it is to use a net whose stretched mesh is less than 29.9 millimetres. Smaller boats using legal nets may fish within the 7-kilometre limit but come into the jurisdiction of the local municipality. Violent battles sometimes erupt between basnig and buli-buli fishermen on the one hand and locals on the other who claim their livelihoods are being ruined. They are not wrong; inshore fish stocks are visibly depleted after a single night’s close approach by illegal fishermen.
As in Scotland, there is the same acknowledgement that unpoliced practices combined with over-fishing can drive small fishermen to crime in order to stay alive. In many provinces there is a steady battle between thinly stretched, and sometimes conniving, local authorities and an army of people who go fishing with home-made dynamite, cyanide and bleach. In fresh water, electricity is also used. One can occasionally see small men staggering about in a shallow river with a 12-volt Jeep battery strapped to their backs, prodding the water with two terminals. Poison is mostly used to stun reef species for export as aquarium fish. Those it does not kill outright it weakens, and it is estimated that maybe three-quarters die within a fortnight. It also kills coral polyps. So does dynamite; and the skill with which it is often both made and used does not alter the fact that non-target species die as well, and in deeper water retrieval rates may be fairly low.* But as local fishermen – who are neither blind nor stupid – will say, what can you do when you have a family to feed and fish are so scarce?
In all this anarchy there is one thing to be said about fishing at local level in South-East Asia: precious little goes to waste. There is hardly a species which is not eaten, nearly nothing too small to eat. In the case of fried fish, much of the skeleton is often eaten as well. Even the tiny conical hearts of certain mackerel-like Scombridae are saved. To this extent local fishing in the developing world is free of the cavalier squandering and disdain which accompanies commercial fishing by the wealthy nations. To watch the fishermen of ‘Sabay’ and their families handling fish, whether alive or dead, is to witness a radical respect for food.
At the extreme opposite is the deep-frozen brick of supermarket cod, prawns, sole fillets, tuna steaks. This sanitised object represents merely the pinnacle of an industrial pyramid of slaughter, destruction and waste. To speak with refined, Western sensibilities in mind: in terms of seemliness it is no longer possible to propose fish-eating as somehow less objectionable than meat-eating. In terms of ecological damage, the worldwide plundering of marine life may turn out to have been even more disastrous than the felling of rain forest for the benefit of beef ranchers.
* Tim Oliver, Fishing News, 26 April 1991.
* Nilsen, a distant relative of Virginia Woolf, frequently betrays in his prose and verse a poetic sensibility. This is clearest when he describes a lonely childhood beside this harsh northern sea. His personality, like Tennyson’s, was marked by its proximity. In his prison cell, shut off from the sound of gulls and waves, he writes, ‘I am always drowning in the sea … down among the dead men, deep down. There is peace in the sea back down to our origins … when the last man has taken his last breath the sea will still be remaining. It washes everything clean. It holds within it forever the boy suspended in its body and the streaming hair and the open eyes’ (quoted in Brian Masters, Killing for Company, 1985).
* To redress any implication that it is nowadays only in places such as isolated Scots fishing communities that people’s lives are still affected by superstition, it is worth remembering that at the end of April 1991 the nation’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea decided to stop using the number 666 on registrations because motorists’ belief in the figure’s Satantic connotations was leading to a significantly higher accident rate. According to a DVLC spokesman quoted in the London Evening Standard (7 May 1991), ‘you see the number 666 in front of you and it makes you feel nervous. And, because you feel nervous, you bump into him.’ Compare this with the episode of the house President Reagan and his wife Nancy bought in Bel Air for their retirement. Its address was originally 666, St Cloud Road. They insisted the number be changed to 668. Of an American president’s day-today movements and decisions being determined to a large extent by the advice of professional astrologers we say nothing, except to add that the French socialist president, François Mitterrand, was similarly guided.
* D’Arcy W. Thompson, ‘The Voyages of the Discovery’, Nature, 140 (1937), p. 530.
* Quoted in G. Brown Goode, The Smithsonian Institution (1897). To judge from the way he was remembered years later, Baird was an exceptional man. In 1918 a friend, Edwin Linton, paid tribute to him in elegiac vein:
I remember the day and the hour. It was afternoon, and the tide was low. I recall a picture of a red sun hanging over Long Neck and reflected in the still waters of Great Harbor, of sodden masses of seaweed on the dripping piles and on the boulder-strewn shore; and there rises again the thought that kept recurring then, that the sea is very ancient, that it ebbed and flowed before man appeared on the planet, and will ebb and flow after he and his works have disappeared; and in a singular, indefinite impression, as if something had passed that was, in some fashion, great, mysterious and ancient, like the sea itself.
(From E. Linton, ‘The Man of Science and the Public’, Science, 48 (1918), p. 33.)
* The Times, 10 March 1942.
† See Richard Law, ‘Fishing in Evolutionary Waters’, New Scientist, 129, no. 1758 (2 March 1991).
* This vivid phrase was coined by the Hawaii-based Earthtrust group who painstakingly brought to light much of the early information about this secretive industry.
* C. Wyville Thomson, The Depths of the Sea (London, 1874), p. 59.
* W. H. B. Webster, Narrative of a Voyage … (London, 1834), Vol. II, p. 302.
† James Weddell, A Voyage towards the South Pole (London, 1825), p. 53.
‡ Ibid., p. 136.
§ Edwin Mickleburgh, Beyond the Frozen Sea (1987), p. 31.
* Webster, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 83.
* For a fuller description of these methods see James Hamilton-Paterson, Playing with Water (1987).