Why fishing folk are a breed apart
Did Homer like eating fish? The direct consumption of fish only appears a handful of times in the two ancient epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer brings fish up three times as often to describe them as bloodthirsty monsters, “ravenous” for human flesh. When his heroes do eat fish they do it out of bare necessity. In Book 4 of The Odyssey, Menelaus and his men are pictured “fishing with bent hooks, for hunger pinched their bellies”.
The Ancients hotly debated Homer’s aversion to fish. In The Republic, Plato writes that Homer “does not feast them on fish, nor on boiled meat, but only on roast, which is what soldiers could most easily procure”. In the markets of 5th century Athens, fish was a luxury product and cost big money. By contrast, the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus (c. 220 – c. 143 BC) believed that Homer viewed fish as a wretched food, not suitable for heroic, exalted bellies.
Now we know that Plato liked fish and Aristarchus didn’t. But what did Homer think? Anthropology can only get us so far. The Iliad and The Odyssey are poems – dramatic works that show us the world not as it is but as it should be. Achilles is the son of a Goddess, after all. The world of the epics is a mythical world – people do things differently there.
If the hero doesn’t eat fish, then we can be sure that the average 7th century Joe certainly did, and plenty of it. Archaic dependency on fish as a basic foodstuff would have shadowed growing trade across the Aegean, piracy, and the ever-present perils of the sea. For the novelist Herman Melville, the quaint “docile earth” could never quite compete with the “subtleness of the sea”, encompassing “the horrors of the half-known life”. Homer is desperate for that “docile earth” to yield a kind of heroic self-sufficiency, while the sea remains a domain of great jeopardy, mass drownings, disaster and delay.
In the modern era, our dependency on the sea feels less threatening. Container ships might occasionally get stuck in canals, but they mostly plough stolidly on through the waves. Cruise liners bring the world of leisure to seafaring – why should we have to go “round the horn” without quoits, light entertainment and buffet suppers? And yet the sea retains the aura of the untamed and the catastrophic: our greed for fossil fuels will be paid for in rising sea levels, we believe – for each metre higher, some new, as yet unlooked for devastation is wrought on the peoples of the developing world.
In this country, the men who still depend on the seas for their livelihood, the dwindling numbers of fishermen, are viewed with mordant fascination. In the noughties, the BBC programme Trawlermen proved an unlikely hit running for several seasons. The cameras followed the various life stories of fishermen based in Peterhead, one of the biggest fishing docks in the UK. I remember being fascinated by these lonely, gruff characters, risking injury and storms and penury in pursuit of dwindling, silver-scaled riches. Or they’re romanticised – nautical wear is highly fashionable on the streets of Hackney.
And yet, the scenes that played out in Jersey this week remind us that fishermen will upset our tidy expectations of them. A new dispensation for French boats mediated by the Brexit deal and sustainable fishing provisions was greeted with rage across the Channel. There is a perception on the French side, shared too by some disgruntled Jerseyites, that London and Brussels should stop interfering and let the fishermen work it out for themselves.
As Walter Ellis of this parish noted this week, the relationship between the fishing communities of the islands and the mainland have been shaped more by the expediencies of place and local peculiarity than by national loyalty or maritime power politics: “Breton and Norman fishermen have worked the fishing grounds of what they call Les Iles Anglo-Normandes for at least 2,000 years. The 12 nautical mile-limit that accords states control of their offshore waters was not confirmed, as part of the Convention of the Law of the Sea, until 1982.”
And perhaps the fishermen should be allowed to sort it out for themselves. The peoples of Cornwall, Brittany and Normandy are united by more than history and geography. Not only do their coastlines resemble each other, but they bear the mark of centuries of shared labour, language and waters. In the last century, the boatmen even united in a common cause – the fight against fascism. 128 inhabitants, many of them under the age of 20, of the tiny island of Sein (just over 1,000 strong) off the west coast of Brittany sailed to Newlyn in Cornwall in five boats after they heard General de Gaulle’s radio broadcast heralding the fight for a Free France. “We will never forget the warmth of the welcome,” one of the islanders remarked later.
On meeting the Free French fighters in London, who numbered about 500, General de Gaulle said: “So the Ile de Sein is a quarter of France.” Throughout the rest of the war, Free French and British special operations exploited the links across the Channel, using the boatmen to mount ambitious escapades (although they were not always successful). One Free French officer wrote afterwards: “In effect there reigned at Newlyn an odour of secrecy and espionage. I met, without always identifying them, many of the actors in this silent war.”
With all the posturing over Brexit on both sides of the Channel (the tone set by our very own Boris “John Bull” Johnson and Napoléon redux Macron), it is worth remembering that those who make their living on the briny seas, traversing the deeps, are something of a breed apart. Homer had a point – maybe the landlubbers should stick to what they know, and they that do business in great waters should manage their own affairs.