A Short History of Fishing by Callum Roberts

"But of all [the land and wildlife in Newfoundland], the most admirable is the Sea, so diversified with severall sorts of Fishes abounding therein, the consideration of which is readie to swallow up and drowne my senses not being able to comprehend or expresse the riches thereof...Cods [are] so thicke by the shoare that we heardlie have been able to row a Boate through them, I have killed of them with a Pike."

John Mason penned these words in 1620. Mason was governor of Cuper's Cove, one of the first colonies in Newfoundland. For this reason, people have often dismissed his descriptions of the land and wildlife, and those by people like him, as exaggerated propaganda to encourage settlement. But a trawl through the writings of other authors of the time - letters, personal diaries, travelogues, port receipts - suggests Mason's words were far from empty hyperbole. The seas of the New World really did teem with fish.

Salmon runs filled the rivers of Labrador so full that an 18th-century witness claimed that a musket ball fired into a river could not fail to hit a fish. Alewife (a food fish of the herring family) migrating upstream from the Chesapeake Bay to spawn in Virginia were so abundant they got trampled by horse riders crossing at fords. Giant sturgeon up to 20 feet long and 1,800 pounds in weight packed estuaries and rivers of both east and west coasts of North America. So common were they in season that fishers caught them by tens and hundreds, hauling them in at the first touch of a fish against their unbaited hooks. Whales tumbled and spouted amid the waves of coast and ocean in groups of hundreds, sometimes thousands. A traveler to northern seas west of Greenland in 1585 wrote that "every day we saw whales continually."

Europeans were quick to take advantage of the prolific New World wildlife. Whalers decamped across the Atlantic in the early 16th century, slaughtering whales first from stations on shore, and then pursuing them offshore in the 18th and 19th centuries as stocks closer in began to fall. Cod fishers, expert in the art of catching fish by the 16th century, crossed the Atlantic with the whalers in an annual pilgrimage to fish on Newfoundland's Grand Banks. Their odyssey turned to permanent occupation within a hundred years of the discovery of Newfoundland, as competition for prime coastal processing sites, where fish could be dried, intensified.

A Burgeoning World Industry

Several hundred years ago, attitudes toward wildlife were very different. People viewed animals and plants through the lens of necessity, judging them not by aesthetic criteria, but by their value as commodities.

With a few exceptions, such as herring, early fishers and hunters pursued quarry in large packages, especially whales, seals, porpoises, sturgeon, cod, skate, halibut, great auks and the like. By the 18th century the machinery of capture could be said to have reached industrial scales. So much so that for large and vulnerable species, like fur seals, exploitation triggered widespread population collapses by the early 19th century. In the late 19th century, fishing power underwent a step change with the introduction of steam engines for draggers and drift net boats. Cut loose from the bonds of wind, tide and proximity to markets, fishing fleets expanded across the planet. By the late 1920s, draggers fished continental shelves on both sides of North America, West Africa, and Australasia. In the 1930s, Japanese boats made the first tentative moves into tuna fishing on the high seas.

From Shelf to Sea

By around 1920, virtually every square meter of fishable ground on the world's continental shelves had been scraped by bottom trawls. Dwindling fish stocks soon drove fishers to invent ways to penetrate ever deeper into rough ground that had up to that time acted as refuges from exploitation. Trawling stripped the seabed of bottom life such as corals, sponges, seafans and multitudes of other invertebrates and plants, reducing species diversity, destroying habitats and imperiling species.

By the 1930s fishers saw opportunities to spread from coasts and continental shelves onto the high seas in pursuit of tuna and swordfish. High seas fleets grew rapidly throughout the second half of the 20th century, expanding the range of species caught, especially to sharks. Likewise, having exhausted many shallow water fish stocks, in the 1960s draggers hauled their nets out into the deep sea, targeting the slopes and sea mounts to more than a mile down.

In the space of the last few decades, humanity has expanded the footprint of fisheries to fill nearly the entire global ocean, deep into the reaches of permanent night. In doing so, exploitation has put many species on a fast track to extinction, including some of the most spectacular of our megafauna, like northern right whales, bluefin tuna and basking sharks.

Turning Around Long-Term Impacts

Looking back, it is clear that fishers overexploited animals and damaged habitats from the earliest beginnings of sea fishing. They responded to declines by inventing more efficient gear, by catching other species and by moving to places that hadn't yet been fished. Rarely did people confront the full consequences of their impacts on the sea and seek to reverse the losses.

For centuries now, we have consumed rather than conserved. Today, our options to ignore the impacts of fishing are at an end. We must face up to past and present losses and commit to restoring our depleted seas.

Fortunately, this is exactly what is happening in a movement grown from the grass roots up. In the 1970s and '80s, community groups, scientists and activists in countries like the Philippines in the Coral Triangle, Chile and New Zealand established places off limits to all fishing in marine reserves. At the time reserves were a radical idea, and it took concerted effort to overturn the view engrained over centuries that sea life was there only to be taken.

Well-respected reserves have had spectacular success. In the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia, I saw fish stocks increase fivefold after a network of reserves was established by a local community; fishers saw their catches double after just five years as reserves supplied fish to nearby fishing grounds.

The idea of leaving places alone to recover from fishing has taken hold quickly throughout parts of the developing world. But it has been harder to convince developed countries over-fond of technical fixes that such a simple measure can help restore the richness, splendor and productivity of their seas. Times and attitudes are changing, thank goodness, fueled by the many successes of reserves and a growing recognition of the limitations of conventional fisheries management.

While small reserves provide many local benefits, they cannot rebuild ecosystem resilience at the scale of seas and oceans unless extensive networks of protection are established. Current science suggests that we may well need to cover up to a third of the world's seas with reserves to avoid extinctions, recover habitats, help rebuild fisheries and give ocean life a better chance to deal with the challenges of climate change. The energy and vision of WWF, working with colleagues from other organizations, industry, government and local communities, are vital to achieving this.

Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of York, is a former member of WWF's National Council. His recent book, The Unnatural History of the Sea, published by Island Press, was named one of the 10 best books of 2007 by Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Jonathan Yardley. You can read more about the history of fishing in this book and find many historic images at:www.york.ac.uk/res/unnatural-history-of-the-sea

Carter Roberts - The Seas Around Us (pdf)