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 A clutch of abandoned gravel pits has been steadily filled with a million soup tins, dead refrigerators, burst sofas, outdated phone books and skiploads of dustbin contents.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 Garefow
l’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:
closing certain areas, either on a seasonal basis or for some years at a stretch;
extending the three-mile territorial limit;
a compulsory increase in net mesh size;
prohibiting both the landing and sale of flat fish below a certain size.
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. Domini
on 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’.*
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