Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  *

  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.

  * F. G. Aflalo, The Sea-Fishing Industry of England and Wales (1904), p. 56.

  † Ibid., p. 375.

  * 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).

  II

  ‘The beauty been’

  Popular conservation has helped promote the notion that there must have been an ideal ‘balance of Nature’ which existed before Homo began upsetting it. This is nonsense, of course. The history of life on Earth is full of episodes like the great Permian extinctions at the end of the Palaeozoic. These not only wiped out the ubiquitous trilobite, which had survived since the Cambrian, but about 96 per cent of all living species of fauna as well.

  If there is an unfortunate consequence of James Lovelock’s elegant and serious ‘Gaia’ thesis, it is that it lends itself to being hijacked by all manner of fringe theorists and used to support their own dotty notions. Thus, the idea that the biosphere might in some sense be self-regulating so as to maintain conditions favourable to life has been peverted, turning the planet into a sentient Mother Earth. Anthropomorphising it as ‘she’ makes ‘her’ struggles to maintain an immemorial balance in the face of Homo’s despoliation seem intentionally remedial, even noble. In this reading, ‘Gaia’ comes across as a somewhat sainted landlady, trying her utmost to accommodate her latest lodgers who have turned out to be slobs and vandals intent on ruining her delicious mansion. Such an idea is absurd and unscientific and should not be blamed on James Lovelock. It is what happens when people full of millennial Angst, guilt feelings and moralised views of biology adapt a serious hypothesis for their own purposes. They are dealing with a goddess, or maybe an old tyrant who once let all but 4 per cent of her animal lodgers die out. We are dealing with evolution. Conditions on this planet are constantly changing, and always have been. The extinction and evolution of species is as mutually dependent and constant a flux as the Earth’s crust is itself plastic, wobbling to the belches of vulcanism and to the tuggings of celestial bodies. Homo sapiens sapiens is only one of an estimated 30 million species, and it is possible to argue that since he is as ‘natural’ a creature as, say, the crown-of-thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci, any results of his presence, no matter how devastating, are also ‘natural’.

  There is often a blurring of motivation in public ‘Green’ campaigning which amounts to a principled dishonesty. The millennial perception is that Homo’s remodelling of the balance of the biosphere has fatally endangered everything. The astutely televisual selection of species of cetaceans and large mammals (whales, dolphins, elephants, pandas) has actually come to stand for the sudden awareness of Homo’s threat to himself. In recent years there has been a panicky rise in the number of TV and radio programmes, magazine articles and scientific papers devoted to the physiological and psychological threats to man’s continuing existence. In the first case it is constantly repeated how menaced he is by his own poisons, effluents and by-products, as well as by his thoughtless exploitation of delicate global structures. In the second, it is a darkly lurking shibboleth that urbanisation leads inexorably to a breakdown of social behaviour, to mental illness, endemic envy and dissatisfaction, to out-and-out psychosis and mass murder (‘Just look at what’s happening in America …’). Man is perceived as being threatened simultaneously from without and within. The timely adoption of lovable big animal species to gather like a lens the varied gazes of his self-concern cannot be dissociated from the approaching millennium. We reach for pandas as a child for his teddy.

  It is entirely proper to wish to preserve every species on Earth, whether (to our eyes) magnificent creatures or humble slime-moulds, and not only because of their interdependence. Homo is an aesthetic animal and has pungent notions of the sublime. He feels diminution when the familiar vanishes. He experiences with the greatest upset the ghost of loss which stalks his waking days as well as his sleeping hours. It mobilises in him a tenderness akin to vulnerability, to the point where a large part of his wistful concern for whales and the environment generally is displaced fear for himself, an intense longing looking for somewhere to alight. It becomes vital for him to know that whales and wilderness still exist somewhere on Earth, even if he never sees or experiences them at first hand. They represent cardinal points on the map he has inherited from his ancestors, representations of an earlier world where such things fixed the terms of daily living. Obscurely he feels that without them he is lost, or at least that he cannot shed them without consequences he can neither foresee nor articulate. If only he would say so! The high principles are there, to a fault; but so is dishonesty, because in shifting attention on to certain choice species he postpones recognising his poignant lack, his own strange delicacy. To this extent Homo needs more self-interest and not less, provided it attends to that interior chart, to the space which is the ancient and common legacy of his species and whose territory he necessarily inhabits.

  What alarms him most and makes him most confused and despondent is the speed at which environmental changes have taken place. Th
is is a comparatively new phenomenon. It is not until the late nineteenth century that a sustained note of mourning is heard for parts of the familiar scenery that have vanished. Since it had to do with a rapid rise in industrialisation and population this note was first heard in Britain. It was typically sounded by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his 1879 poem ‘Binsey Poplars’, on the cutting down of a row of trees near Oxford to make way for housing (‘After-comers cannot guess the beauty been’). Thereafter it is heard increasingly, quite distinct in tone from a generalised literary eheu fugaces. The snows of yesteryear are, after all, nearly always followed by the snows of this year and those of next. Hopkins was recognising something new: the destruction of trees that never would be replanted.