Seven-Tenths (28 page)

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:

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:

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,

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.