Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The derision which greeted this pretty notion completely baffled poor Gosse. The Revd Charles Kingsley, whose The Water Babies showed he was himself quite capable of imaginative extravagance, was particularly forthright. In his own Glaucus he commented bleakly: ‘If Scripture can only be vindicated by such an outrage to common sense and fact, then I will give up my Scripture, and stand by common sense.’ Gosse was not completely on his own, of course. William Buckland went on thinking that The Flood was a perfectly satisfactory explanation for fossils. But Gosse was a well-known figure, and his flounderings in the name of science made him something of a lightning conductor. Others, too, were disconcerted and depressed by a rationalism which seemed unaesthetic as much as irreligious. Ruskin wrote plaintively in a letter of 1851: ‘If only the Geologists would leave me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.’

  In the mid-nineteenth century what science badly needed was a reliable temporal yardstick by which to obtain a sensible age for the Earth, and in the following 100 years many were proposed and tried. Having gone down a coal mine and noticed the higher temperature, Lord Kelvin concluded that it ought to be possible to work backwards using the temperature gradient and extrapolate a date for when the Earth was in its original completely molten state. He suggested an age of 20–40 million years, later putting it at 100 million years. Some geologists considered sedimentation rates, using the annual deposits known as varved layers rather like tree rings. William Beebe thought salt would prove a reliable measure. In Half Mile Down he wrote: ‘The chemical composition of blood, both in the constituent salts and their proportion in solution, is strangely similar to that of sea water.’ The only difference was that our blood is three times less saline than the sea. ‘So all we have to do is calculate back and find the time when the ocean was only one-third as salt as the present … and we will know [the exact moment of] our marine emancipation.’ True, this would not be the age of the Earth itself, but it was still a useful date to fix. Unfortunately it now seems that the ocean’s salinity has never varied very much and that prehistoric seawater was not greatly different from modern. This also put paid to the idea for calculating the age of the oceans by assuming they started as fresh water and working out how long it would have taken to leach out that amount of salt from the Earth’s crust.

  It was only with the discovery that radioactive elements decay at strict rates that a reliable geological or cosmic ‘clock’ was found. Nowadays the age of the Earth is usually given as 4.7 billion years, but even this is not final. In fact, all cosmological dates are under constant revision and may always be so. It is unclear whether the construct of time’s linear ‘arrow’ can survive quantum imponderables, but in short timescales at least it seems to point to a cheerless future for the human race. The discovery that the universe is not static meant that the Earth cannot last indefinitely, though the precise manner of its end is conjectural. In the 1930s the theory propounded by Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington of the ‘Heat Death’ of the universe was received with the kind of glum consternation that represents less an absolute belief (for few people understood the physics) than a general shift in the recognition of what is plausible. Public moments like these can be looked back on as forming yet another step in a sequence which included the great debates centring around the writings of men such as Gosse, Darwin and Lyell. The trend was inexorable. The human race was slipping out of the hands of God and into a quite other universe determined by the second law of thermodynamics.

  Nowadays Homo’s fate is commonly thought to be even worse than that, being in his own hands. Death by nuclear destruction, environmental pollution, global warming or in a demographic gridlock of overpopulation are fluently forecast by prophets of one sort or another. Serious minds can be found expending as much effort in predicting man’s future span as in trying to date his past. In the face of all this, the choice of a dignified intellectual stance seems limited. The fossil record might be fragmentary, but its message is all too plain. Mass extinction for one reason or another has occurred many times, no doubt more often than we know. It could happen again tomorrow without violating a single natural law. Since the mindless optimism of religion cannot qualify as a serious position, rational man is left in possession of his true intellectual birthright, an exalted stoicism. Bertrand Russell, having read Jeans and Eddington’s theory, put it succinctly: ‘Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul’s habitation henceforth safely be built.’*

  The sun is definitely lower now. The freezing thermocline in whose upwelling the swimmer was briefly caught has moved on. He is thirsty and weary and finds himself becalmed in an edgy resignation. He has done his purposeful but unrewarded swimming about. Now he wants to preserve his strength for staying alive as long as possible. He is already thinking ahead to another day’s floating, taking it for granted that he will survive the night.

  For the first time he is considering the possibility of rescue. He has abandoned the idea of finding his boat. He accepts that his directionless first attempts to search for it are more likely to have separated him still further. Even if he did happen to be looking in the right quarter when stern or prow or the tip of an outrigger reared up on a wave there are surely too many intervening waves for anything to be visible now.

  He does have a plan of sorts, if that is not too intentional a word for such an impotent state as his. At nightfall, he knows, this area becomes a major local fishing ground. True, many of the boats will have engines over whose unsilenced blatter his shouts may not be heard. But many of the poorer fishermen stop their engines to save fuel and just drift, while the poorest of all will come out here under sail. Since sound travels well over water the swimmer has high hopes that someone will hear.

  In the meantime he is once again examining the sunlit depths on the extreme off-chance of rescue from another source. He has heard legends of dolphins helping shipwrecked mariners, of a strange bond which sometimes leads them to aid distressed humans, even occasionally towing them to safety. The sea is empty, however. It seems to him it is a long time since he has even glimpsed a dolphin, several weeks at least. He can remember when it was hardly possible to look at the sea for five minutes in these parts without their breaking the surface, leaping in pairs. Only three or four years ago he would probably have been surrounded by the curious and playful creatures. Now there is nothing. The sea is empty even of their squeaks. The swimmer knows their absence is most likely due to the very fishermen at whose hands he is hoping for deliverance. Why should any remaining dolphin come within a mile of him? Of what use now to invoke ‘strange bonds’ in so self-interested a fashion when the deal had always been so cruelly one-sided?

  * Quoted in John D. Barrow, The World within the World (1988).

  6

  Fishing and Loss

  ‘From henceforth thou shalt catch men.’ Quota-free fishing on the Sea of Galilee.

  I

  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 th
e 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 ba
g.’

  ‘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.