What is a fisherman? A Question of Skill

Noun:
1. A person who fishes, whether for profit or for pleasure

Fishing as a livelihood was long moribund in the village where I grew up but I always felt that something resonated in the broken wooden lobster pots and discarded nets that had once trapped fish. In the pub pictures of fishermen still hang on the wall. The photos are yellow with age and show strong looking men in the village heyday of the 1950s.

There are only a few men left with boats, bringing tourists out for chartered fishing and visits to the islands. About ten years ago I visited Killybegs, in Donegal, the largest fishing port in Ireland. I was horrified by the size of the boats and the stench of the fish from the factory. There was not a single fish shop from which to buy fresh fish.
The cultural archetype I had absorbed as a child was a strong one. It reflected a certain understanding of what it was to be a fisherman. The representation I had been afforded told of men who were brave and skilful. Fishing for these men was somehow a ‘way of life’. The modern, commercial fisherman whom I came across in Killybegs did not conform to this ideal . At the helm of a 120 foot trawler he seemed distanced from his activity; in the control tower he doesn’t feel the sea or the wind and his eyes attend to the monitors rather than the world around him. The intensity with which he extracts fish from the oceans is destructive. It is not a skilful activity, instrumental of an industry which has become so rationalised that many fishermen are surplus to requirements.

This idealised opposition between the cultural fisherman and the economic fisherman has a long history. In 1653 Isaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler was published with the telling subtitle The Contemplative’s Man’s Recreation. John Buchan wrote in the introduction to the 1901 edition: ‘the angler is the man who sees nature through the glass of culture, the townsman and the gentleman’, not just a sportsman but one ‘who loves the country with a more intimate affection.’ The book was not just a practical handbook for anglers it was the defence of an ideal of England . This ideal centred upon a vision of tranquillity and order; the life of contemplation over the life of action. Fishing was regarded as the epitome of this life. A pursuit suited to the quietude, as Walton writes in Chapter 1, of Clergymen who, following the example of the apostles, embraced the ‘art’ of angling. For Walton fishing offered an expression of a particular ethic, a ‘way of life’.

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