Swordfish

A Biography of the Ocean Gladiator

By RICHARD ELLIS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92290-4

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………..vii1 Man Meets Swordfish………………………………………………12 Before the Swordfish……………………………………………..173 Swordfish Biology………………………………………………..314 Armed and Dangerous………………………………………………615 Sport-Fishing for Swords………………………………………….916 The Sword’s Relatives…………………………………………….1257 The Swordfish Mercurial…………………………………………..1618 Industrial-Strength Fishing……………………………………….1729 Big Fish versus Big Squid…………………………………………19110 Benchley and Ellis: Swordfishermen………………………………..20111 Are Swordfish Endangered?………………………………………..20612 The Swordfish and Global Warming………………………………….225Bibliography………………………………………………………239Index…………………………………………………………….267

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Man Meets Swordfish

The earliest known inhabitants of what isnow the state of Maine were the “MooreheadPeople,” named for archaeologist WarrenK. Moorehead, who excavated many oftheir sites. Four or five thousand years ago,these early “Native Americans” fished for cod and swordfish,probably from dugout or birchbark canoes. How dowe know that? The canoes did not last, but archaeologistshave examined shell mounds—known as middens, fromthe Danish word for trash heap—which contain the discardedshells of clams, oysters, mussels, and whelks andalso traces of the culture that ate the mollusks or usedthem for bait. Buried among the shells are tools, includingbarbed hooks and harpoon heads made of deer bone.There are also pieces of the swordfish swords, suggestingthat the Moorehead People hunted these great fish,and at that time, the swordfish were probably found a lotcloser to shore than they are today. University of Mainearchaeologist David Sanger has made a study of the middensand is convinced that swordfish formed an importantpart of the diet of these people, despite the fearsomereputation of the fish.

You probably wouldn’t want to be in a birchbark canoewith an angry swordfish attached to it by a line, butSanger discounts the pugnacious nature of swordfishstrikes, claiming (as I do) that the fish couldn’t determinethat the source of its pain or discomfort was the canoeand that “attacks” on boats were mostly accidental. If theswordfish were sunning close to shore, the Mooreheadharpooners would paddle out, heave the harpoon, lashthe fish to the canoe, and butcher it at sea, bringing inonly the most desirable pieces. Other archaeologists are not convincedof the “offshore butchering” hypothesis; Arthur Spiess and RobertLewis found many more vertebrae and other bones at the Turner Farmsite in Penboscot Bay and suggested that is was more likely that thefish were brought to shore to be cut up. Swordfish off the Maine Coastare not found close to shore nowadays, suggesting different conditions4,000 years ago. Perhaps the water was warmer then, or theremight have been other factors that drove the fish further offshore. TheMoorehead People disappeared about 3,800 years ago, and the middensare topped with the refuse of people who evidently did not huntswordfish, because no pieces of sword appear after that date. Did theMoorehead People die off because their food source moved away orwere they overrun by another people?

On the opposite coast of North America, we find another aboriginalpeople intimately involved with swordfish. The Chumash of the SantaBarbara region of California were the finest boat builders among theCalifornia Indians. They made wooden plank canoes from redwoodlogs they obtained as driftwood from the Santa Barbara Channel.Their livelihood was based largely on the sea; they used over 100 kindsof fish and gathered clams, mussels, and abalone. But, as Davenport,Johnson and Timbrook wrote in their 1993 study, the evidence of a”special relationship” between the Chumash and the swordfish (whichthey called elyewu’n) “is available to us from a number of differentsources: linguistic, ethnographic (recorded myths, ceremonial dances);archaeological (finds of swordfish parts, harpoon pieces, portrayals inChumash art); and technical (fishing techniques and some facets ofswordfish behavior).”

To the maritime Chumash, the swordfish was a creature with bothmaterial and ritual significance. They ate the meat, of course, but alsoused the sword and vertebral processes as spear points and diggingimplements; the large vertebrae were cut in half to make cups, andalthough it has not been preserved, there was a swordfish headdressmade from the skull of the fish, thought to have been used in importantceremonial dances. The skull was decorated with shell inlay, especiallyaround the large orbit, and there was a cape of iridescent abaloneshells trailing behind the dancer, who was probably the village shaman.To the Chumash, swordfish was believed to be the chief of all thesea animals; the marine counterpart of human beings. When whaleswere stranded on the shore, they were said to have been driven ashoreby swordfish to provide food for the people. The story of the swordfishattacking the whale is a part of many mythologies, from ancient Greekto California Indian. But even though the swordfish has no teeth andwould have no reason to attack a whale, Davenport et al. include someof these stories as “eye-witness accounts.”

We will never know when the first fisherman cast his hook (or spearor net) into the water, but it is safe to assume that fishing is much olderthan civilization. The earliest fisherman caught their prey for subsistence;fish served as a plentiful source of protein. More or less contemporaneouswith the Moorehead People, an Egyptian scene datingfrom around 2000 BC shows figures using a rod and line and also nets;in the ancient Minoan stronghold of Akrotiri on the Aegean island ofSantorini, archaeologists have uncovered wall paintings that show twoyoung men, each with strings of recently caught fish. The Minoan artistswere so accurate that it is no problem to identify the fish they areholding: one man holds a string of bonito (Sarda sarda); the other hastwo strings of dolphinfish, Coryphaena hippurus. The island was partiallydestroyed in a giant volcanic explosion around 1600 BC, so thepaintings are indisputable evidence of fishing more than 3,000 yearsago. It is reasonable to assume that fishing was practiced wherever andwhenever people believed there was seafood to be harvested.

Fish and cephalopods of all sorts were found in mosaics at Pompeii,buried by the ash from Mount Vesuvius in 79 ad Fishing is discussedby the chroniclers of ancient Greece and Rome, including Homer, Aristotle,Aelian, Pliny the Elder (who was killed by the eruption of Vesuvius),Strabo, and Pausanias. But, as William Radcliffe put it in hisFishing from the Earliest Times,

No character in Homer ever sailed for recreation or fished for sport.They were far too near the primitive life to find any joy in such pursuits.Men scarcely ever hunted or fished for mere pleasure. Theseoccupations were not mere pastimes; they were counted on as hardlabor. Hunting and fishing and laying snares for birds in Homer andeven in the classical periods had but one aim: food.

Strabo, the Roman geographer who was born around 58 BC and diedaround 24 ad, traveled throughout the Roman world and recorded hisobservations in eight volumes. He described the manner in which theycatch the swordfish off Sicily:

One lookout directs the whole body of fishers, who are in a vastnumber of small boats, each furnished with two oars, and two mento each boat. One man rows, the other stands on the prow, spear inhand, while the lookout has to signal the appearance of a sword-fish.(This fish, when swimming, has about a third of its body above water.)As it passes the boat, the fisher darts the spear from his hand,and when this is withdrawn, it leaves the sharp point with which itis furnished sticking in the flesh of the fish: this point is barbed, andloosely fixed to the spear for the purpose; it has a long end fastenedto it; this they pay out to the wounded fish, till it is exhausted withits struggling and endeavors at escape. Afterwards they trail it tothe shore, or, unless it is too large and full-grown, haul it into theboat…. It sometimes happens that the rower is wounded, eventhrough the boat, and such is the size of the sword with which thegaleote (sword-fish) is armed; such is the strength of the fish, andthe method of the capture, that in danger it is not surpassed by thechase of the wild boar.

Approximately a century after Strabo, the second-century ad Greekpoet Oppian described fishing for swordfish in Halieutica, his hexameterpoem on fishing:

The fishermen fashion boats in the likeness of the Swordfishes themselves,with fishlike body and swords, and steer to meet the fish. TheSwordfish shrinks not from the chase, believing that what he sees arenot benched ships but other Swordfishes, the same race as himself,until the men encircle him on every side. Afterwards he perceiveshis folly when pierced by the three-pronged spear; and he has nostrength to escape for all his desire but perforce is overcome. Manya time as he fights, the valiant fish with his sword pierces in his turnright through the belly of the ship; and the fishers with blows ofbrazen axe swiftly strike all his sword from his jaws, and it remainsfast in the ship’s wound like a rivet, while the fish, orphaned of hisstrength, is hauled in. As when men devising a trick of war againsttheir foes, being eager to come within their towers and city, strip thearmour from the bodies of the slain and arm themselves therewithand rush nigh the gates; and the others fling open their gates as fortheir own townsmen in their haste, and have no joy of their friends;even so do boats in his own likeness deceive the Swordfish.

Moreover, when encircled in the crooked arms of the net thegreatly stupid Swordfish perishes by his own folly. He leaps in hisdesire to escape but near at hand he is afraid of the plaited snare andshrinks back again; there is no weapon in his wits such as is set inhis jaws, and like a coward he remains aghast till they hale him forthupon the beach, where with downward-sweeping blow of manyspears men crush his head, and he perishes by a foolish doom.

Although Italian and Spanish fishermen have hunted pesce spada orespadón in the Mediterranean for centuries (and still do), the westernNorth Atlantic swordfishery is a relatively recent development. Comparativelyspeaking, of course, the European settlement of the westernshore of the North Atlantic is itself a recent development. The firstpublished record of North Atlantic swordfish—and a swordfish attackon a boat—appears in John Josselyn’s 1675 Account of Two Voyages toNew England, in which he wrote, “In the afternoon [of June 20, 1638]we saw a great fish called the vehuella or Sword fish, having a long,strong, and sharp fin like a sword-blade on the top of its head, withwhich he pierced our Ship, and broke it off with striving to get loose,one of our sailors dived and brought it aboard.”

Cod fishermen, first from Europe, and then from New England andCanada, had been working the offshore waters of the western NorthAtlantic from the time that John Cabot pulled up a basketful of codin 1497, and it is unlikely that the fishermen overlooked those sicklefins that occasionally broke the surface. Regardless of its pugnacity, abig, firm-fleshed fish could not swim unmolested off New England forlong, and by the early years of the nineteenth century, a swordfisheryhad begun. In David Storer’s 1839 “Reports on the Fishes, Reptiles andBirds of Massachusetts,” we find this description of the swordfish andthe fishery:

It is generally discovered by the projection of its dorsal fin above thesurface of the water as it is pursuing shoals of mackerel upon whichits feeds, about 15 or 20 miles from the shore of Martha’s Vineyard.The fishermen capture it by means of an instrument called the “lilyiron” from the form of its shafts or wings which resemble the leavesof a lily. The instrument is thrown like a harpoon with great forceinto the fish, the attempt always being made to wound the animalin front of the dorsal fin…. When unmolested, it not infrequentlyis observed to spring several times its length, several feet above thesurface of the water.

In his 1887 history of the American swordfishery, G. B. Goodequotes a certain Captain Merchant of Gloucester, who told him that”the first swordfish ever brought to Gloucester within his recollectionwas caught on George’s Bank around 1831 by Captain Pew who broughtit in and sold it at the rate of $8 a barrel, salted.” Before that, fishermenhad been very much afraid of them, but afterward a good many werecaught. Goode then identifies “the earliest record of its use for food …found in the Barnstable Patriot of June 30, 1841, in which it was statedthat the fishermen of the island south of Cape Cod take a considerablenumber of these fish every year by harpooning them and that about200 pounds a year are pickled and salted at Martha’s Vineyard.”

We find many references to swordfishing from New England ports inthe early nineteenth century, but evidently the Canadians didn’t catchor eat swordfish until the turn of the twentieth. In the 1903 CanadaDepartment of Marine and Fisheries’ Annual Report, we read:

A new industry sprang up here this year in the catching of swordfish and quite a number were caught. The catching of these excellentfish has been an industry for a number of years on the coast of theUnited States, but it has never been followed here. It was discoveredhere this year that these fish were unusually abundant in our waters,and as the price is usually a good one, our fishermen fitted out withharpoons and other appliances to capture them with the result thatquite a number were taken and another year will probably see animportant business done if the swordfish are as numerous as theywere this season. They are among the best of the edible fishes, as allwho have tasted can testify.

Outside of New England, though, not many people were acquaintedwith the firm, white flesh of the swordfish. Before she wrote SilentSpring and the Sea around Us, marine biologist Rachel Carson(1907–64) was editor-in-chief for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.In a 1943 report, she discussed some of the little-known seafoods thatcould be eaten during wartime food shortages:

The swordfish ranks high among the “quality fish” of New England.Thick steaks entirely free from small bones are cut from this largefish. They are excellent when broiled, and planked swordfish is aspecial delicacy. The flesh is something like halibut in consistency,but it is more oily and has a rich, indescribable flavor that is differentfrom that of any product of the sea. The vitamin content ofswordfish liver oil is exceptionally high.

Even in the days before industrial fishing, commercial fish catcheswere measured in pounds or tons. Obviously, you cannot count the actualnumber of codfish, herring, or mackerel that are caught, so measurementby weight was considered a convenient requisite. Amongother things, this reduces (or enlarges) the fish to a commodity, whichmakes it easy to forget that the “product” was once a living creature.In their 1953 synopsis of the fishes of the Gulf of Maine, Bigelow andSchroeder wrote, “Our only clue to the numbers of swordfish that visitour waters is the poundage landed yearly. The smallest year’s catchreported landed at Portland, Gloucester, and Boston, within the periodof 1904 to 1929 was 833,000 pounds (in 1919), the largest was4,593,000 pounds (in 1929), the average about 2,000,000 pounds oranywhere between 4,000 and 18,000 fish per year. And the landings inNew En gland ports ran from 1,715,000 to 5,070,000 pounds during thedecade 1930 to 1939.” Bear in mind that these catches were all accomplishedone fish at a time; every one of those 18,000 fish was spotted,harpooned, brought aboard a fishing boat, and prepared for market.As Jordan and Evermann write, “Practically all the swordfish broughtin to market are harpooned, we have never heard of one caught in netor seine, nor is it likely that any net now in use would hold a large one.”

In the early days of the New England swordfishery, between 1883and 1895, the average dressed weight of swordfish, according toBigelow and Schroeder, was “between 200 pounds and 310 pounds,falling to 114–186 pounds for the years 1917, 1919, 1926, and 1929–30….A 7-foot fish weighs abut 120 pounds; 10 to 11-foot fish about250 pounds; fish of 13 to 13½ feet, about 600 to 700 pounds.” (Allmeasurements include the sword, which made up approximately one-thirdof the fish’s total length.) There once were tens of thousands ofswordfish swimming around the Gulf of Maine, and each of them requiredhundreds of thousands of baitfishes to sustain them—the Gulfof Maine must have been wall-to-wall fishes. (Never mind the uncountableplanktonic animals that were required to sustain the baitfishes.)In an earlier ocean unpopulated by fishermen, the swordfish was at thepeak of the food pyramid; it was the apex of apex predators, dominantand unthreatened. Then came the harpooners.

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