HAVING TOPPED THE BESTSELLER lists with books on cod, on the cod-fishing Basques and on the cod-fisherman's best friend, salt, Mark Kurlansky is well placed to study the slow death of the Atlantic sea fisheries – which, according to some reports, wil
l be completely fished out, along with all the other major fishing grounds, in 40 years' time.
The Last Fish Tale differs from most such environmentalist horror stories in one important degree. While Kurlansky is certainly interested in conservation, he is more concerned by the decline of human fishing cultures than by the absence of battered haddock from our dinner plates.
It is a fine distinction to make. The survival or otherwise of fishermen and fish are intimately connected: the first thrives by catching and selling a lot of the second. There is no balance of power in that relationship and our affinity with the underdog leads many of us to sympathise with the herring and mackerel rather than the factory ship.
Kurlansky, a former chef, does not gloat over 21st-century trawling communities' self-inflicted injuries. He takes a broader view. "The struggle for the survival of fisheries," he writes, "is not only biological but cultural. No country better illustrates this than Britain for if this island nation loses its fisheries, it will have lost its cultural heritage. Without commercial fishing, Britain will no longer be the same place and the British will no longer be the same people."
One suspects that those rousing words were written in just for the UK edition of The Last Fish Tale. The much travelled Kurlansky is American, and his book is an American book, tracing the history and modern decline of the Atlantic fishing communities by focusing microcosmically on the isolated Massachusetts coastal settlement of Gloucester.
Gloucester – which hit the news worldwide recently when a number of its underaged girls appeared to have joined in a "pregnancy pact" – has been for 400 years a transatlantic branch of the western European fishing trade. It was established by English Puritans and resettled and rejuvenated over the centuries by fishing people from Ireland, Scandinavia, the Azores and Sicily. Its story is fascinating and worth telling. Apart from anything else, TS Eliot used to holiday there. Parts of The Wasteland ("Death by Water") and The Four Quartets ("The Dry Salvages") were directly inspired by Gloucester's fishermen.
Whether or not Kurlansky's microcosm of Gloucester shares the same modern problems, which can therefore be solved by similar solutions, as fishing townships elsewhere in North America – let alone in Sicily and Scotland – is more open to question.
Multi-cultural Gloucester certainly doesn't share traditions with Peterhead. Kurlansky begins by describing the annual Gloucester pole-walking ceremony. This Italian import involves a succession of fishermen eating huge quantities of pasta and bar-crawling along the waterfront before they attempt to walk along a heavily greased wooden mast which sticks horizontally out over the sea. Most fall in. Some hurt themselves badly. A very select few reach the end of the mast and grab the flag pinned there before collapsing into the ocean, swimming ashore and being acclaimed champion. Some of these cultural manifestations, without which we would all be poorer, clearly originated in the Mediterranean rather than the North Sea.
Whether they fished out of Massachusetts or Buchan, until the end of the 19th century fishermen regarded fish as an indefinitely renewable asset. There were just so many of them in the sea! Scientific advice supported that view. Even eminent Darwinians were deceived into complacency by the fact that individual fish lay millions upon millions of eggs.
Rather than recognising that boggling fecundity for what it really was – a natural adaptation to the fact that fish eggs and baby fish are so fragile and vulnerable to the predations of millions of other sea-creatures that mother cod is lucky if one in ten million of her children lives for a week – experts and fishermen alike assumed that if you created a hole in the crowded sea by catching a lot of haddock, more haddock eggs would hatch to fill the vacuum. They were wrong. Other things filled the vacuum. Things that we didn't want to eat.
But for around the last hundred years, and certainly for the last 25, fishermen and all the rest of us have known full well the effect of relentless trawling on the North Atlantic fish stocks.
Mark Kurlansky's affectionate tribute to an American fishing community should not distract us from the understanding that fishermen on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean knew before anybody else that stocks were rapidly declining, and that their response was and too often still is to plead for our licence to continue to empty the sea of commercial fish. We can take no pleasure from their predicament. The fisherfolk of Fraserburgh might not entertain us by walking along greased poles into the sea, but they are part of the national fabric.
Kurlansky may, however, be over-egging his argument when he suggests that taking time out from deep sea Atlantic fishing to give the surviving cod a breather will irrevocably alter that national fabric, in Britain or in America.
As he shows, strict quotas on the Grand Banks have resulted in some entrepreneurial seafarers reverting to line-fishing and selling quality cod at premium prices. Those fishermen are clearly not disappearing.
Similarly in Britain, the creel and small-boat fishermen of the west coast are likely to be undisturbed by official curbs on east-coast trawling. They may even welcome the opportunity it gives for their own valuable fishing culture to thrive.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the difficulties currently faced by fishing communities because there is no single fishing community and certainly no unified fishing interest. The charm of The Last Fish Tale lies in its warm evocation of a unique place.
But Gloucester's very singularity defies Kurlansky's thesis that Gloucester is representative of all Atlantic fishing communities. It is not. It has a couple of things in common with other large trawler ports. It will have to change now because it failed to change in the past. But it can still continue pole-walking.
The full article contains 1068 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
