The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town

  • Mark Kurlansky
Random House/Jonathan Cape: 2008. 304 pp. $25.00/£16.99 9780345487278 9780224082457 | ISBN: 978-0-3454-8727-8

In his new book, Mark Kurlansky follows a formula that has served him well in earlier works on cod, salt, the Basques and oysters: pick a seemingly mundane maritime topic, dig deep into the historical archive for savoury anecdotes, add a sprinkling of cooking recipes and serve it up with a bon-vivant's style.

The Last Fish Tale is the story of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the oldest fishing port in the United States. Kurlansky spotlights this New England town to investigate the decline of Atlantic fisheries. He describes Gloucester's fascinating history, a product of its insularity and island geography, its strong egalitarian identity and the large number of fishermen, drawn from a succession of immigrant communities, lost at sea. With rich ingredients and engaging writing, the book should work. Readers might agree that the loss of yet another diverse, insular culture is bad. But Kurlansky listened to too few voices, and his resulting picture is unbalanced.

My confidence was shaken early in the book. Kurlansky tells us that, in 1602, the explorer and privateer Bartholomew Gosnold remarked that “the fish were far bigger [in New England] than those in the north”. The author repeats this fact throughout the book, even though Gosnold is apparently its only source. Twentieth-century ichthyologists demonstrated that the opposite is true. By studying the maximum sizes of various fishes, they showed that fish grow larger, all other things being equal, in the colder waters at the poleward ends of their range. This error matters: sources must be checked against others to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions.

Net profit: efficient trawler technology has led to dwindling stocks of fish such as cod. Credit: NEWSCOM

After describing the town and its denizens, the author explains how Gloucester ran out of fish, especially Atlantic cod. The decline of this once-abundant species was partly caused by the success of the schooner-based fishery, which, even though it relied on wind power, harvested enough to reduce the stock. Bottom trawlers dealt the coup de grâce. Kurlansky recalls the introduction of the murderous trawling gear in Gloucester where, as elsewhere, it was first viewed with suspicion, then adopted because its effectiveness was irresistible. This simple explanation should suffice: the cod declined because of overfishing.

Yet Kurlansky demurs, and hints darkly at other causes. When we accompany him to Newlyn, a fishing town in Cornwall, UK, which he presents as Gloucester's Old World doppelgänger, we meet fisheries regulators who cannot tell a bass from a cod. “Newlyn vessels had been landing more than their quota of cod, hake, and monkfish by labelling them ling, turbot, and bass — fish for which there were no quotas,” he states. That it took five years for the regulators to discover this, Kurlansky says, indicates how little they know about fish. Yet it is just as likely that these officials were tolerating an illegal practice, as is common in fisheries worldwide.

Like the Gloucester fishermen, Kurlansky believes that bureaucrats from the US National Marine Fisheries Service cause the problems, not fishing practices. The stocks may have disappeared but the fishermen have not, and everybody is looking for the crumbs of a vanished pie. Although the author tells us at length about the antics of the fishermen at Gloucester harbour festivals, such as competitive scrambles along a greasy pole, he does not tell us how, in that same harbour, two fisheries regulators were hanged in effigy in 1999. These officials wanted only to reduce the pressure on vanishing stocks, prevent further declining resources, and keep the fisheries going.

As Kurlansky's informants did not deliberately mislead him, this case does not mirror that of anthropologist Margaret Mead misreporting on the sexual mores of Samoan youths. Rather, it is a case of shared delusion, similar to that of John Edward Mack, the Harvard University psychiatrist who studied people who believed they had been abducted by aliens. Adopting his subjects' obsessions, he wrote a book arguing that cosmic kidnap was real.

These are strong words, particularly as I liked and learnt from Kurlansky's previous books. But The Last Fish Tale fails to explain the dual roles of the fishermen as both victims and ferocious drivers of the overfishing behind the collapse of the Gloucester and New England fisheries. Until we reveal these dual roles and the ensuing pathologies, there will be no rebuilding, no renewal of the fisheries.

I suspect that this book, ironically, will find popularity among the tourists who flock to a gentrified Gloucester. Under Kurlansky's disapproving gaze, they will gradually displace the fishermen, as in most fishing towns around the north Atlantic. Visitors to Gloucester will love the book and the town's many charming features described in its pages. They will think of the fish and shake their heads at such a loss, still failing to understand.