Overfished Devon waters gave birth to the modern deep-sea trawler
By the early 1800s, fishermen at Brixham in Devon had emptied their local grounds and needed to sail farther than ever. The fast, sturdy boat they developed could tow big nets in deep water, made ocean trawling possible for the first time, and earned Brixham the nickname Mother of Deep-Sea Fisheries.
Fishing is among the oldest ways of getting food, one of the few to survive from prehistory through the farming and industrial revolutions. Neanderthals fished by around 200,000 BC, and chemical analysis of Tianyuan man, a modern human from eastern Asia who lived 40,000 years ago, shows he ate freshwater fish regularly. Shell heaps, discarded bones and cave paintings confirm seafood's importance, and early permanent settlements such as Lepenski Vir almost always relied on it.
The Brixham design, with a sleek hull and tall gaff rig, set off a migration of fishermen from southern England to northern ports like Hull, Scarborough and Grimsby, closer to Atlantic grounds. Grimsby, a small village, became the world's largest fishing port by the mid-19th century. Prince Albert laid the foundation stone of its Royal Dock in 1849, and Queen Victoria opened the 25-acre dock in 1854 as the first modern fishing port. By 1900 Britain had over 3,000 trawlers, nearly 1,000 based at Grimsby, and twelve sold abroad formed the core of Germany's fishing fleet.
Steam followed in the 1870s, with boats of 80 to 90 feet making 9 to 11 knots. In March 1875 David Allen of Leith, Scotland, converted a drifter to steam, and two years later he built the world's first propeller-driven steam trawler.
Today the UN Food and Agriculture Organization counts about 39 million commercial fishers and fish farmers, and fisheries and aquaculture support over 500 million jobs in developing countries. In 2005 each person on Earth ate on average 14.4 kilograms of wild-caught fish plus 7.4 from farms. Methods range from angling, netting and longlining to destructive, often illegal blasting and poisoning, and the word stretches to shrimp, squid and sea urchins but not whales or seals.
Source: Fishing
