These ships are possessed of a bloodless efficiency. As the name long-liner implies, very long wires—some of them eight miles long—equipped with thousands of hooks, each baited with squid or sardines or a cheap delicacy known as Namibian horse mackerel, are streamed overboard from the sterns of fast-moving fishing vessels. The baited hooks sink to the bottom, are left there overnight, and are then hauled up in the morning—usually with some four or five tons of enormous fish on each line, which are passed through rollers that detach the hooks; the fish have their much-prized cheeks automatically removed and are blast-frozen and sent into the refrigerated holds.
There are two problems with this kind of fishing. The first is technical and particularly tragic: before the baited hooks sink to the seafloor they tend to attract the attention of seabirds, and biologists have long noted with alarm that tens of thousands of birds—many of them petrels or great albatrosses—manage to get themselves caught, whereupon they are dragged down into the sea by the weighted lines and their sinking hooks, and so drown. Fishermen are now being asked to attach colored streamers and bird scarers to their lines to prevent damage to the rare and wonderful albatrosses in particular; encouragingly it is a solution that is said to be working—at least when fishermen do as they are asked.
But this illustrates the second and more serious problem: many fishermen pay no heed to such requests, because much of the toothfishing that goes on near South Georgia is, or until very recently has been, downright illegal. The seabirds continue to die at the hands of the fishing pirates; and the fishing grounds more generally are being put at risk of being depleted, just as they were thirty years before in Newfoundland.
This is why powerful ships armed with big guns have in recent years been sent to these waters, to scare away and deter illegal fishing—something never done in Canadian waters. And the reason the South Georgia toothfish is now fast recovering, and why the fishery is being seen as an exemplar of what fish management could be, is that this hard-hearted policy appears, at least in its early years, to be working.
I came across the sharp end of the policy on a recent visit to South Georgia. I was on a former Russian research vessel, which on this occasion was taking a small number of bird-watchers to see a breeding colony of wandering albatrosses on a rocky outcrop to the southwest of the main island. We were sailing along in the open sea, beyond sight of land, cruising at maybe ten knots, when suddenly a vessel appeared at great speed astern of us on our starboard side and our bridge radio started chattering urgently.
“Unidentified Russian vessel two miles ahead of me, report your name and business,” said a crisp, no-nonsense, English-accented voice. “This is the British warship HMS Northumberland. State your name and business, and your reason for being in these waters, please, immediately. Slow down for possible boarding and inspection.”
And so we had to heave-to, were compelled to identify ourselves, state for the record that we had neither the will nor the ability to fish, and outline our purpose for being in what were not, as we supposed, international high seas but rather British territorial waters. Had we been deemed suspicious, marine boarding parties were ready in their Zodiac speedboats to come and grapnel their way up our sides; had we decided to run, we might soon have been discouraged by a shot across our bows.
But all turned out quite otherwise. By chance the captain of the navy ship was an old acquaintance of mine, and once he had established our credentials he asked if he might “put on a bit of a show” for our passengers as recompense for asking their ship to stop. All promptly delighted in a fifteen-minute display of marine gymnastics, the brand-new navy vessel wheeling this way and that at high speed through the swells, throwing up Niagaras of spray and leaving a wake a mile long. Finally, fun over, she sounded three blasts on her whistle and took off into the sunset, vanishing over the horizon in minutes. Another sector of sea had been declared at least briefly poacher-free; yet more shoals of toothfish in the depths below were left safe for another night.
That was in the early 1990s, when everyone was still jittery in the immediate aftermath of the 1982 war. Matters are rather more stable these days, although the navy is there just in case. All of the fishing vessels licensed to operate in South Georgian waters are obliged to keep a transponder constantly reporting their position to the government; and as additional precaution there are even more potent combinations of protective enforcement: Hercules aircraft fly out from the Royal Air Force base on the Falkland Islands, eight hundred miles away, and spy satellites are programmed to report any vessels below that appear to be fishing illegally (and this includes nighttime operations of the vessels known as squid-jiggers, which use thousands of lures to attract squid by the million, and which can be easily seen from space because they use batteries of brilliant white lights beamed down into the water to attract them).
There is also a high-speed and very long-range fishery patrol vessel, orange-painted to stand out against the ice and equipped with an Oerlikon heavy machine gun, whose crew will chase, board, and arrest any miscreants and will readily confiscate or sink any errant vessels. The MV Dorada did just that in 2003: it helped chase the Viarsa, a Uruguayan-flagged toothfish pirate with nearly $4 million worth of illegally acquired fish in her freezers, halfway around the southern world, finally arresting her and her crew off the coast of South Africa.
There is something of a historical symmetry to this one story. The Viarsa turned out to be owned by a syndicate of Galicians, from northern Spain—the very people who pioneered fishing in the deep Atlantic five hundred years before. There were reported to be some twenty other such ships, all owned by the same people, but registered in places like Belize and Ghana, Argentina and Panama, and all involved in the same mission: that of plundering the far oceans for fish, whatever the risks and all but certain of great rewards. The irony is that the same imperative that first brought northern Iberians to the unregulated foggy desolation of the Grand Banks in the sixteenth century now eventually also brought them—though this time illegally—to the ice-cold but now highly regulated waters of the sub-Antarctic in the twenty-first. On both occasions it was an imperative prompted by a seemingly insatiable desire to take an infinite amount of fish from seas that the Galicians—today the second greatest fish eaters in the world, after the Japanese—believe contain a nearly inexhaustible supply.
6. A DISRESPECTED SEA
That inexhaustibility might have been true in the sixteenth century. It is most certainly not true today. The fish that jostled for space in the days of Columbus and Cabot, Vespucci and Francis Drake are all savagely diminished today by a sorry conspiracy of deliberate depletion. Small wonder, with delusions of perpetual abundance still so popular—despite the evidence—and with such a ceaselessly vast worldwide appetite for fish, that alarms are now and at last being sounded.
Some say that all fish are in worldwide danger. Many who decry the eating of meat for environmental reasons argue that fish should be shunned with equal vigor too, because the fish in the seas are in every bit as much danger as the buffalo once were on the high American plains. Not a few predict that all commercial fishing, worldwide, will have been essentially extinguished before the current century is halfway done.
Certainly the oceans are changing under the malign influence of landsmen so utterly careless of the sea. We must all know anecdotal evidence of this—some new, some not so new. In the 1960s, for example, I used to visit a remote sea loch on the northwest coast of Scotland, and would occasionally take a boat out as far as my courage would allow, sometimes sheltering in squalls in the lee of a squat green island called Gruinard. Locals told us not to go too close. Once I did by accident and saw notices on the shore warning that it was unwise to land since half a century before the island and its surrounding waters had been deliberately infected with anthrax, a wartime experiment whose effects had lingered longer than anyone expected. They thought that the sea was big enough to wash the toxins all away: no one imagined the reverse would happen, a
nd that the seas themselves would become poisonously disarranged.
Also back then, but along the arm of another quite distant sea loch, we would spend happy hours walking the shores, stopping every so often to gaze down through the pellucid waters of the rock pools at the brilliantly colored undersea gardens, the waving fronds of vivid purple anemones offering brief protection from the sun to nervous scatterings of scarlet crabs and tiny stranded fish. But all has changed. Careless visitors have come in legions since, and the isolation of these shores has in recent years been quite destroyed. The clear pool waters that I have seen on more recent visits are now frothed with blowing foam, and I believe it is not my imagination that suggests that there are fewer creatures to be glimpsed these days, and none of them so brilliantly colored as in my childhood memory.
And yet again, farther to the south, but still in a part of western Scotland buffeted by gales and rinsed by the rushing sea, there is yet a further sign of careless ruin. Where we once used to lie in solitude on the machair and watch the sea otters and the basking sharks offshore, and marvel at the gray emptiness of huge seas all around, there is now a long series of floating platforms, made of wood and buoyed up by floating blue barrels: fish farms, with pumps endlessly whirring and lights endlessly flashing and oil-dripping speedboats scurrying to and fro carrying barrels of feed to the thousands of trapped animals within. The waters within the cages are a constant fury of movement and bustle: the fish below are frantically jostling for space—not jostling as they were reported to be in the North Atlantic five centuries ago, a joyful consequence of their freedom and fecundity, but because they were now being pinioned in huge numbers behind submarine wire fences, and being kept there, fins worn, muscles weak, infections spreading, until big enough to be netted out and sent off by truck to the markets in the big cities of Europe.
There is change and decay all around the sea. On the very winter day I write this, yet another melancholy report of ocean-depleting news comes in: this time it seems that the rising acidity of some tropical ocean waters, supposedly caused by the solution in seawater of an excess of man-made carbon dioxide, is shown to be robbing certain fish of their sense of smell, rendering them unable to detect nearby predators. It is not just that we appear to want to eat every fish in the ocean that we find appetizing; we also seem to want to give a helping hand to other fish-hungry monsters and thereby thin the population still further.
One cannot but hang one’s head in shame and abject frustration: we pollute the sea, we plunder the sea, we disdain the sea, we dishonor the sea that appears like a mere expanse of hammered pewter as we fly over it in our air-polluting planes—forgetting or ignoring all the while that the sea is the source of all the life on earth, the wellspring of us all. The Atlantic, first to be found, to be crossed, and to be known, is by far the most polluted, the most plundered, the most disdained, the most dishonored of the world’s oceans.
To compare the man-made collapse of cod in the North Atlantic with the seemingly sensible current management of sea bass in the South hints at a way in which man may at last be changing his ways. But it is by no means a perfect comparison. The lamentable decisions that were made by the Canadian government in the 1980s were made in a democracy, and by a government that felt understandably obliged to meet the short-term requirements of the Newfoundland fishermen, who also happened to be voters. There are absolutely no voters in the South Georgia waters. There are no permanent human inhabitants. The colonial government can manage the fishery there with impunity, doing as it thinks prudent, never having to tip its hat to any interested party—other than the fish themselves, one might say.
But nonetheless, a growing human resolve to change our ways is becoming slowly apparent—and it appears likely that it will be the Atlantic Ocean that will provide the test bed once again for the way that new resolve is calibrated. It is the ocean that will also be bound to demonstrate the consequences if we fail.
And what, one is bound to wonder, might those consequences be? Could the sea somehow contrive, in some unimagined way, to resist our unending misuse of her, and in some fashion or other start to strike back? What price might mankind have to pay, if after decades of his misuse and carelessness, the Atlantic determines to do just that?
Chapter Seven
The Storm Surge Carries All Before
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
1. THE ICE DEPARTS THE SCENE
Some peculiar things are happening in the North Atlantic Ocean, and no one is quite sure why. The changes present themselves in many guises: here is an illustration of just one of them.
Early in September 1965, I was in East Greenland, waiting for a group of Inuit fishermen to pick up our university expedition party from the shores of a wide fjord called Scoresbysund. We had been working up on the ice cap for some months and had now come down to the seashore to wait, as previously arranged, for the first stage of our long journey home. We waited, and waited. Three days passed. But the boat never came. Eventually, over our shortwave radio, we heard the explanation: two weeks of relentless easterly gales had unexpectedly driven billions of tons of Atlantic pack ice in from the Denmark Strait, blocking passage along the two-hundred-mile-long fjord to all navigation except big icebreakers. It was something that happened once in a while back then; no one had told us. And the boat for which we were waiting was certainly no icebreaker, being no more than twenty feet long and made of wood. She had a crew of three and was named the Entalik.
So there we were—stranded, trapped, and potentially in quite a bad way. Each of the six of us was in good shape, but we were almost entirely out of food. We had several hundred pounds of a specially formulated low-temperature-spreadable van den Berg’s margarine, ten boxes of Weetabix, and, bizarrely, a single carton of bay leaves—all left over in a cache from when our expedition had first landed, three months before. Yet we were far from helpless: we had a radio and a gun; and more by luck than any particular proficiency at marksmanship, someone managed to bring down a barnacle goose and, though I hesitate to admit it today, a ragged and yellow old polar bear. We ate both; the goose was as tasty as geese are known to be; the bear was as stringy on the inside as he was mangy on the outside, and his thighs were infested with scores of a disagreeable inchlong kind of flatworm known as Planaria, which we had to pry out with our Swiss army knives before stewing the meat over the Primus stove. We took care not to try the bear’s liver, which Greenlanders had long warned us would be highly toxic, being crammed with too much vitamin A.
Eventually we received a radio message from the crew on Entalik saying they had managed to struggle through the pack ice for three days and nights and were now as close to us—about a mile—as they were ever likely to get. As long as the ice did not move too much, they could stay where they were for perhaps another day, but then they should head back home. The winter was beginning to close in: at those latitudes, a little above 70 degrees north, the vanishing of the autumn sun came earlier and earlier by several minutes each day, and the nighttime temperatures had started to plummet, and even in the daytime it was chilly enough for small flurrying snowstorms.
Our choices were limited. We had already missed the last icebreaker of the season, which would have taken us back to Denmark, and which sails twice annually from a tiny settlement thirty miles along the north side of the fjord. But if we now failed to reach the security of the settlement, and were trapped here on the south side all winter, we would clearly be in a very serious situation. The cold would begin to be intense, and it would soon be totally dark. We would probably starve.
If we were going to have any chance of reaching home, we had to walk out to the boat, trek out across the sea, over the ever-shifting ice floes, and hope to find Entalik at the ice edge. We would have to leave immediately, before the boat, faced with the risk of being stuck fast
for the winter, turned about and headed for port.
So we struck our tents, gathered our essential belongings, and tied them to our backs; we roped ourselves together for safety, and wearing crampons and carrying ice axes at the ready, we clambered over the pressure ridges that had formed where the floes met the beach, and then started to walk out over the ever-shifting, ever-tilting mass of ice floes, jumping from one to another over leads of black and ice-cold water that we knew to be a thousand feet deep, at least. Not that its depth made any difference: a minute in the freezing water and a man would be dead, long before he was halfway to the bottom.
It took many hours, and there were many close calls, but we eventually made it to the boat; and though she was to be stuck in the ice for a while herself, as her crew had feared, and though we had to shoot yet another animal—this time a musk ox—in order to eat, and despite more rafts of difficulties that are not wholly relevant to the story,83 we did make it out to the Scoresbysund, and within a week we did get back to England. Moreover, the four of the six of us who were students made it in time for the start of classes that term, though just barely.
• • •
Of the six, five went on to become professional geologists, and two used to go back to that same part of Greenland almost every year. They have come to know the ice, rocks, and animals—and the weather—of this utterly remote corner of the world almost as well as do the Greenlanders who still live there. And over the years they have noticed that some things have changed, rather strangely.
Outwardly, some are of a kind that would be wholly expected. The settlement is now a little larger—it was peopled by four hundred then; it has five hundred now. It has changed its name, no longer memorializing a British whaling captain named William Scoresby: it is now Ittoqqortoormiit, the Greenlandic word meaning the big house. The icebreaker from Copenhagen still calls twice a year; but now there is a twice-weekly air service in the summertime, too. Entalik is long gone, but in its place there is a bigger and much sturdier boat. The young men who crewed back in 1965 are old-timers now, and there is a party of strong young hunters and sailors who take the new craft into the farthest recesses of the fjord system—at 220 miles from the Atlantic to most distant feeder glacier, the longest in the world—taking supplies to those who have chosen to live even more remotely, far from the open sea.