Plato and his Cave Dwellers

by Victor Paul Borg for MaltaToday (17/11/2000)

Technology has made fishermen arrogant, and technology without education has made them careless, says Victor Paul Borg

I was writing a story with people for whom the written word had no meaning. I found myself in the garage of the owner of the fishing fleet – let's call him Johnny – attempting to explain the theme of my story, the reason why I would hop on his fishing trip for lampuki, and I gestured aimlessly, feeling trite, as an amused smirk painted his face. Like the rest of the five-man crew, Johnny was illiterate. Ever since puberty marked their eligibility for work, they dropped out of school and started fishing. It's the only world they knew.

As we throttled out of Marsaxlokk on the 45-footer launch, I reminded myself to act the passive anthropologist. The six-man crew were divided into two broad categories: the three men over 35 who were sober and calm, squinting into the wind, and the three twenty-something's who had to turn idleness into fun. The elders hardly spoke to me, unless spoken to, but the youngsters bristled with curiosity, and they brandished two shotguns and bagfuls of cartridges.

‘Do you have pouffs in London?' they asked.
I nodded. ‘You have Libyans?' ‘Yes.'
‘Do you go to discos?'
My only answers were non-committal nods.
‘The women are easy, eh?'
‘We wanted to go to London,' one of them interjected, referring to his brother and him. ‘But we don't speak English, and it's not easy.'

Then they spotted the seagull and sprang to their feet. Four shots later – one bird down. They were trigger-happy, a barrage of shots at every bird that came within shooting distance, mostly seagulls, but also exhausted small birds on migration making for the boat eye to eye at starboard, robins and red-tails and song thrushes. The rolling boat made their aim more haphazard, and tens of shots later, they had killed one bird still. So they flung bottles and blasted them, and shot plastic bags floating on the surface. At other times they sat hunched and their chins down, looking bored like idle dogs, or they interrupted my note-taking to ask me questions about London.

When they netted lampuki, they worked in tandem, fast and industrious, and to kill the fish instantly, one of the youngsters crunched their brain under the clasp of his teeth. They seemed to sense my particular interest, and each time they caught an unusual fish they howled at me to take notice. When they spotted a loggerhead turtle their shouting jolted me out of my reading (that sighting made my day, a loggerhead turtle, on the brink of extinction, flapping near the surface). I don't know what part of their behaviour was role-playing to seize my attention, what part was normal, but they wanted me to snap their picture as they hauled the net and their portrait as they held a fish by its tail.

All manners of rubbish went flinging overboard. I stealthily hid a plastic bag in the cupboard and put my litter inside it. One of the youngsters found it and said,
‘What is this doing here?'
‘I'm taking it with me,' I replied.
‘Throw it overboard!' It sounded like an order.

‘It's all right, I'll take it with me.' I took a cue from their excitement at sighting the turtle. Loggerhead turtles, I explained, mistake floating plastic for jellyfish, try to eat it and end up suffocating on the plastic. But before I had finished the sentence, the bag was already hurtling overboard.

I wanted us to encounter a dolphin, better still if it got tangled in the net, so I would witness its slaughter. But we did not, so I asked Johnny what they did when a dolphin damaged their net or scared the fish into unreachable depths. He shrugged, and said: ‘What can I do? Nothing.' But I knew that in all probability he was lying; my research had established beyond doubt that most, if not all, fishermen killed dolphins mercilessly for it is the devil that hampered a hard day's work.
Maybe one day in the past, when fishermen predicted the weather from the kind of aura ringing the moon and the type of swell, when the sea was a mysterious bottomless abyss, when the fish possessed spirits, when an unforeseen gathering of storm clouds darkened the sea in fury and threat, fishermen revered the sea. Back then, their catch was down to God's will. Seagulls were allies: the circling birds indicated a nearby shoal of fish. That was when fishermen were guardians of the harvest, when they were aware that they could take only with diligent care.

Now technology has replaced superstition and folk rituals. Weather forecasting and GPS has taken the danger out of fishing trips, sonar instruments measure the depth, tagging marks the migratory path of fish, satellite tracking pinpoints the shoals of fish. Who needs dolphins or turtles or seagulls? Technology has made fishermen arrogant, and technology without education has made them careless. If they do not care for their safety ˆ one of the youngsters is partly blind after slopping diesel in his eyes, and at every pull of the trigger I imagined the shotguns rusted barrel blasting someone's face – why should they care for the sea? Greed, not vision, is the stuff of instant riches. Tomorrow is another day.