The Longshoreman

"Let’s talk about Longshoreman by Richard Shelton. A lovely, personal book. He’s a marine scientist, and the great thing about marine scientists as he shows in this book is that they really have to get their hands dirty. Quite a lot of it is in laboratories, but an awful lot, too, is on ships trawling things up. Just being at sea. What I love too is the source of his fascination, as a boy, playing around in streams and pools. His story is really how that boyish love of nature developed into the rigours of professional science. It’s very much an autobiography, but he is a scientist of course. He spent a lot of time for instance in the Thames estuary looking at the impact of London sewage on the sea bed. Finding, for example, huge swathes of tomato pips that had passed through the colons of millions of cockneys. But it all goes back to Melville. The beginnings are in wonder, but quite quickly that wonder moves into the technical arena. He became a scientist. He writes about being at sea but also about the taxonomies of micro-organisms in sediments. It’s the technology again. What comes out of Clover’s book – apart from the reckless politics, the greed and destruction – is the triumph of technology. We’ve become much too efficient at fishing. In Melville’s day it was hard enough to get a ship into the whaling grounds, let alone to skewer a whale. It would have astonished him – and gone against his whole grand idea – to imagine that man could have had such an effect on the sea. What he was interested in was the effect of the sea on man, its Old Testament divine power, but this book is full of evidence that over the last hundred years the tables have turned. And the plundering is made easier by the fact that the effects are usually invisible. “ In Melville’s day it was hard enough to get a ship into the whaling grounds, let alone to skewer a whale. It would have astonished him… to imagine that man could have had such an effect on the sea.” In 1870, T. H. Huxley, looking into existing fisheries, famously said that you could go on fishing for ever. And that it was actually a good thing, because by fishing you encouraged the stocks to grow. But he was writing just as steam trawlers were taking over from sail. Yes, from then on it’s been a steady retreat for the fish."