Spanish food technologists have recently created a version of garum using modern methods to mimic ancient processes.32 The key is the protein-digesting action of enzymes within the fish guts, which break down the flesh to a slurry of amino acids, fats, and nutrients. The resulting paste, rich in omega-3 fatty acids as well as many vitamins and minerals,33 was not dissimilar to Asian fish sauces of today. Fish sauce was an early health food.
As the Roman Empire spread north through Europe they took their tastes with them. Fish sauce was transported in large quantities to their colonies—around a fifth of all amphorae found at one northern European town were for fish sauce34—and production sites were established along the North Sea coast of Gaul. With the collapse of the Roman Empire these factories fell into disrepair, and fish sauces dropped off the menu. Sea fishing dwindled, except in the chilly extremities of Scandinavia, where the climate was too harsh for most crops, and people hunted and fished to survive. Remains of fish bones from eighth- or ninth-century domestic waste dumps in England, Flanders, and other parts of northern Europe were dominated by species that lived permanently or seasonally in fresh waters, such as sturgeon, salmon, and whitefish. That all changed in the eleventh century, when a sea-fishing revival marked the onset of an expansion and industrialization that continues to this day.
Archaeologists discovered the northern European sea-fishing revolution by sifting through more than a hundred kitchen garbage heaps.35 There was a dramatic shift within a few decades around the middle of the eleventh century from around 80 percent freshwater fish to 80 percent saltwater fish, such as cod, haddock, and herring. Demand was increasing rapidly from a combination of population growth, urbanization, and the spread of Christianity (Christian practice required periodic or complete abstinence from the meat of quadrupeds). Fresh fish supplies were in freefall as a result of human-caused habitat change in rivers, lakes, and estuaries. The spread of agriculture meant forests felled and land plowed deeply for crops. Soil erosion soon turned fast-running, cool, clear waters into sluggish, warm, and turbid water that species like salmon did not enjoy. Nor did salmon and other fish, which migrated from sea to rivers to spawn, benefit from the construction of thousands of dams across Europe’s rivers to supply power for corn mills and other industry. With the migration routes blocked, freshwater fisheries’ production collapsed.
Most medieval fish was caught and eaten locally, but long-distance trade resumed around the thirteenth century, this time of air-dried and salted fish.36 Those caught in the prolific Arctic cod spawning grounds of Lofoten were dried in the frigid air into yard-long pieces as hard as wood. They could be carried hundreds or thousands of miles to supply towns and cities all the way to the Mediterranean. Stockfish, as it was called, lasted up to two or three years, a perfect convenience food for an age that lacked refrigerators.
An improved method of salting to preserve herring in brine was developed in Amsterdam sometime around the fifteenth century37 (or, I should say, redeveloped, since the ancients were expert fish salters). Fisheries expanded swiftly after that, first with Dutch then British fleets. By the seventh century more than two thousand Dutch boats were pursuing herring from the Shetland Isles to the Baltic. Interest in cod had also shifted west, to the shores of Canada and New England, where abundant cod of extraordinary size immediately attracted European interest.
Fishing methods in Europe developed gradually, as new ways to capture fish were invented. Beam trawling appeared in the fourteenth century, if not before,38 and involved dragging a net held open by a beam of wood across the seabed. The idea probably came from smaller dredges that were towed over the seabed to catch oysters.
A French nobleman, Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau, compiled a meticulous catalog of sea-fishing methods in the 1750s and illustrated it lavishly with engravings.39 They included: intertidal and subtidal longlines bristling with hooks; baited lift nets manned from platforms over shallow water; drift nets like those used by herring fishers to snare fish by the gills at night; and many others. Most people still fished from small boats close to coasts, with the exception of large-scale cod and herring fishing vessels. Fish spoilage remained a problem, and most of the catch was consumed in towns and villages close to the sea. Well boats, another reinvention of a classical Greek technology, could operate farther afield. They carried a water-filled tank and brought live halibut, cod, turbot, and other fish from the central North Sea into towns such as Hamburg and London. Markets for fish underwent dramatic enlargement between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, in both the Old and New worlds. Toll roads and railways sped up transportation between the coast and inland cities so fresh fish could reach them. This in turn spurred a rapid increase in fishing efforts. But these fisheries still used medieval technology of sail and oar, hook, net, and trap.
In other parts of the world, developments in fishing technology matched those of industrializing countries in their ingenuity. Perhaps the most remarkable fishing method I know of comes from Melanesia and islands of the West Pacific.40 A kite made from a dried breadfruit leaf that has been stiffened with the midribs of coconut leaflets is flown on string made of coconut husk fibers. The kite trails a mat of spiders’ webs in the water, and a skilled fisherman will make it skip from wave to wave, so exciting the interest of garfish. When they grab the lure, their teeth become hopelessly entangled. I have found myself wondering whether the first kite was invented by a fisherman after a floating leaf tangled in a line and lifted off.41 But I digress.
The addition of steam power to boats in the 1880s heralded the beginning of the modern era in commercial fishing. Once unleashed from the bonds of wind and tide, fishing fleets multiplied and spread forth across the world’s continental shelves. Engines freed people to pursue fish farther offshore and deeper, and to work around the clock in worse weather. Engine power and rising demand expanded vessel size and made possible larger trawls and nets. Steam yielded to diesel in the early twentieth century, and fishing intensity climbed, as vessels multiplied and their captains embraced new technology. Then, after World War II, there was a second burst of industrialization that lasted into the 1970s. Boats increased in size and power, and monofilament nets replaced hemp and cotton during this period, enabling people to fish far more effectively with larger gear. The destructive potential of fishing was hugely increased by these developments. Longlines with thousands of hooks were extended to tens of miles long; drift nets became walls of death of similar enormous length; huge engines made it possible to tow midwater-trawl nets large enough to engulf cathedrals; and bottom-trawl nets spread to three hundred feet wide and were fitted with heavy steel balls on the footrope to ease their passage into areas of rough seabed.
Up to the 1950s, fishing technologists had mainly improved upon ancient traditional methods. They substituted materials, refined designs, added engine power, and deployed more or bigger catching gear. The introduction of echo sounders in the 1950s marked the onset of a new fishing revolution. Echo sounders revealed the presence of fish beyond the dreams of the most skilled captains from prior generations. Electronics like echo-sounders, augmented from the 1980s by computers and satellites, ramped up the stakes yet again.
What strikes me, looking at the grand vista of human history, is how technological development has sped up with time. There are gaps of tens of thousands of years between major innovations made by our earliest ancestors. After the end of the ice age ten thousand years ago, things sped up, and new methods of fishing were introduced at intervals of a thousand years or less. The tempo accelerated in the last thousand years, as people invented clever ways to catch and preserve an ever-expanding variety of fish and shellfish. In the last hundred years, the addition of engine power and modern materials vastly increased the reach of fishing, and in the last thirty years, the lethal edge of fisheries has been sharpened by the addition of computer and satellite technologies. In the next two chapters I will explore how this upward-racing curve of progress has affect
ed life in the sea.
CHAPTER 3
Fewer Fish in the Sea
There is a large-sized fish called Hallibut, or Turbut: some are taken so big that two men have much a doe to hall them into the boate; but there is such plenty, that the fisher men onely eate the heads & fines, and throw way the bodies.
—Captain John Smith, first governor of Jamestown, History of Virginia, 16241
It is early morning and the sea is smooth and dark. The peace is soon broken by an engine echoing off the hills that rise directly from the sea. A fishing boat heads straight for the shore, where it turns and backs up into water scarcely deeper than its draft. Figures on deck maneuver two sets of four dredges over the side and drop them into the water with loud splashes. The dredges consist of heavy steel frames bristling with vertical teeth that dig into the bottom to knock scallops into attached chain-mail bags. The boat roars into gear and the tow begins. Half an hour later, far out to sea, the dredges are swung back on deck, where they spill their loads of stones, seaweed, starfish, and scallops. While one man sorts the catch, the boat turns back and heads shoreward to begin another tow. Only desperation would drive a captain to risk his boat among the shallow rocks of Scotland’s Firth of Clyde, but fishing has been bad in recent years, so he must feel there is no alternative but to scratch his living along the shore.
For all their technological brilliance, modern fishing fleets operate at the margins of profitability. Fishing has always been a hard living: wet, backbreaking, messy, and often dangerous work. But in the past fishermen could at least guarantee a good catch. Nineteenth-century photographs of dockside scenes show landings of fish that appear almost miraculous today. Quaysides are stacked with boxes overflowing with outsize fish, while giant halibut, cod, wolffish, ling, turbot, and others too large to fit in crates cover stone floors. Even in the late nineteenth century, though, fishermen had begun to grumble of declining catches. A commission of inquiry was convened in 1883 to investigate complaints. Unable to resolve the issue of falling stocks in the absence of fishery statistics, the commissioners recommended that the government start to collect data, and recording duly began in 1889.
Strangely, most fisheries statistics collected before the European Commission’s Common Fisheries policy began in 1983 were neglected until one of my graduate students, Ruth Thurstan, dusted off the old volumes a couple of years ago. Perhaps they were felt to be too antiquated to be of value. Methods of data collection change with time, so comparing old figures with new was difficult. But it was worth the effort, for these old charts paint a stark picture of the present state of fisheries, and one much worse than is suggested by modern statistics.
The graph of landings from bottom trawlers—boats that drag large bag nets across the seabed to scoop up bottom fish—looks like a steep-sided mountain incised with two deep valleys.2 Catches rose steeply from 1889 and peaked in the mid–twentieth century, when they leveled off briefly before a dramatic collapse to the present day. In 1889, more than twice as many bottom fish (cod, haddock, plaice, and the like) were caught in British waters compared to today. That is an astonishing fact given the technological gulf between then and now. The peak came in 1938, when the fleet landed over five times more fish than now. The two valleys cut into the graph correspond to the world wars, when catches plummeted because it was too dangerous to fish, and boats were put to other uses, such as laying mines.
Changing fortunes of the English and Welsh bottom trawl fleet: (Top panel) Total fish landings by English and Welsh bottom trawlers from 1889 to 2007. Landings dipped steeply during the two world wars, when it was too dangerous to fish. (Bottom panel) Landings depend on a combination of how many fish there are in the sea and how much power is expended to catch them. This graph, which charts landings per unit of fishing power, shows how today’s fleet has to work seventeen times harder for the same catch as fishermen in the 1880s.
Landings tell only part of the story, because they depend both on the number of fish in the sea and the time spent fishing. To get a better picture of the availability of fish you have to divide the catch by the amount of power expended. This index of landings per unit of fishing power brings you closer to a real measure of how many fish there are in the sea.
Fortunately, fishing records include the number and size of boats that landed each year’s catch. But how can you compare a sailboat to a trawler? Here a long-dead nineteenth-century fisheries scientist named Walter Garstang came to our aid. Using the first decade of official statistics he worked out that landings per unit of fishing power fell by 50 percent between 1889 and 1899. He estimated that the new steam trawlers had more than twice the fishing power of sailing vessels to make this calculation. We used similar methods to estimate increases in fishing power by vessels throughout the twentieth century, up to the present day, thereby tracking each advance in technology.3
When Ruth showed me the graph of landings divided by the changing power of the fleet, I nearly fell off my chair. I had expected a decline, but this was near annihilation. A fleet that in the 1880s consisted mostly of sail-powered boats open to the elements was far more successful at wresting fish from the sea than we are now. For every hour spent fishing today, in boats bristling with the latest fish-finding electronics, fishers land just 6 percent of what they did 120 years ago. Put another way, fishers today have to work seventeen times harder to get the same catch as people did in the nineteenth century. The simple reason for this stark contrast between past and present is that there are fewer fish in the sea. When we broke the figures down by type of fish, for some the contrast between ninetenth and twenty-first century was even more extreme. Landings per unit of fishing power are down by thirty-six times for plaice, over one hundred times for haddock, and a breathtaking five hundred times for halibut.
What were the seas like before the bite of industrial fishing? Eyewitness accounts from past centuries tell of waters off the coasts of America teeming with fish. Here is a report from the Gloucester Telegraph, a Massachusetts newspaper, from June 4, 1870:
Accounts from New Jersey say that bluefish came in at Barnegat Inlet last week, sweeping through the bay, over flats as well as through the Channel, driving millions of bushels of bunkers before them and filling the coves, creeks, ditches, and ponds in the meadows full. At Little Egg Harbor Inlet they drove shad on shore so that people gathered them up by wagon-loads. Fish lie in creeks, ponds, etc., along the meadows two feet deep, so that one can take a common fork and pitch them into a boat or throw them on the bank.
The bunkers referred to were menhaden, an oil-rich fish that seemed to have been created to feed all of the oceans’ predators, ourselves included. A 1913 report on the United States menhaden fishery found that more than one billion fish were caught that year, producing six and a half million gallons of oil and ninety thousand tons of fertilizer.4 If all of these fish were placed nose to tail they would have stretched six times around the Earth at the equator.
Meanwhile, nineteenth-century photographs show men on the West Coast thigh-deep in salmon pulled from Puget Sound. Some catches yielded thirty thousand fish. In 1915, four hundred million pounds of salmon were taken from Alaskan waters alone. If they had been packed in barrels, each containing two hundred pounds of fish and placed one on top of another, they would have formed a column 1,200 miles high.5 Whole fleets in the Gulf of Mexico would set forth in sailing boats and test the water with baited lines until they hit upon a concentration of red snappers. At some sites as many as two thousand fish could be taken in a day.6
In 1819, the Reverend Lewis Anspach, a resident of Newfoundland, described the appearance of Conception Bay during the capelin season. The capelin is a small shoaling fish that spawns close to shore. It is prey to a bewildering variety of animals:
It is impossible to conceive, much more to describe, the splendid appearance of Conception Bay and its harbors on such a night, at the time of what is called the Capelin Skull. Then its vast surface is completely covered with myriads of fishes
of various kinds and sizes, all actively engaged either in pursuing or avoiding each other; the whales alternately rising and plunging, throwing into the air spouts of water; the codfish bounding above the waves and reflecting the light of the moon from their silvery surface; the Capelins hurrying away in immense shoals to seek a refuge on the shore, where each retiring wave leaves countless multitudes skipping upon the sand, an easy prey to the women and children who stand there with barrows and baskets ready to seize upon the precious and plentiful booty.7
While some fish were deemed to be useful, others were considered pests, and great efforts were sometimes taken to annihilate them. Incredible as it may seem now, as recently as the 1950s and 1960s an extermination campaign was mounted in western Canada against basking sharks, the second largest fish in the sea. These docile plankton feeders often got tangled in gill nets set for salmon, so they were hated by fishermen. The fishery protection vessel was mounted with cutting equipment on its bow to slice through sharks feeding at the surface. Several thousand basking sharks died in nets or were slaughtered this way.8 In Europe, dogfish and porpoises were similarly regarded as pests, because they stole fish from nets and hooks, and eyewitnesses recorded devastating accounts of porpoise massacres going back to the eighteenth century.9
With the sole exception of Alaskan salmon, which have been well managed, the species described in these historical vignettes have plummeted since their historic highs. Puget Sound’s salmon runs have dwindled to a trickle. Red snapper, bluefish, and menhaden are all overfished in U.S. waters today, while capelin is far below the abundances witnessed in the nineteenth century. In 2010, a quarter of commercial fish stocks assessed in the United States were considered overfished, meaning that they totaled below target levels that are themselves set far below historic abundances.10 But this misses the real scale of the overfishing. The sad fact is that the status of 275 U.S. fish stocks—which is over half the 528 examined that year—could not be determined: They were too uncommon today for it to be worthwhile collecting data, or so rare that data were unreliable. Many are rare because of past overexploitation. They would have been familiar fare on the tables of nineteenth-century Americans. The picture is much the same throughout the rest of the world. Things are now looking up in the United States due to a welcome shift in direction of fisheries management made in 2007 that I will come back to later, but elsewhere the trends still seem to be in the wrong direction.
The Ocean of Life Page 5