The Last Fish /

No one knows when the annual bluefin tuna catch began on the island of Favignana, off the west coast of Sicily. It may have been before the first Phoenicians reached this part of the Mediterranean. But it ended in 2009. The regional government, facing the same economic problems that prevailed around the world, withdrew the subsidy that had made the dramatic spectacle possible.

It was a slow death. For years, the once splendid fish had become ever smaller, ever fewer in number, while the ancient ritual dwindled likewise to a mere show for foreign tourists. This year, finally, it could no longer be justified.

Some date the tuna fishery’s origins to prehistoric times, attested by what is unmistakably a magnificent bluefin, carved by some Paleolithic artist in a cave on the neighboring island of Levanzo. Others give it more recent origins, possibly with North African Arabs who conquered Sicily in the ninth century and controlled it for 200 years, or perhaps with the Spanish who ruled from 1409 to 1713. Some of the vocabulary (like the word raís for the boss man) goes back to Arabic, while its name in Italian, la mattanza, clearly comes from Spanish.

Whatever. For as long as history records, la mattanza del tonno, or the tonnara, was an integral part of life on Favignana, one of hundreds of similar fisheries across the Mediterranean along the annual migration route. As the fish ran past, they encountered a series of nets, comprising seven or more connected chambers. The giant torpedo-shaped fish moved from chamber to chamber until they reached the last, la camera della morte, the chamber of death.

At a signal from the raís, the fishermen slowly, agonizingly, using only their body strength and chanting ancient verses the meaning of which fewunderstood, raised the nets to where the thrashing giants could be harpooned and killed in a bloody, foaming spectacle that resonated with drama and ritual.

The demise of the bluefin is only one dramatic example of what is happening to our seas. Daily, it seems, evidence mounts to support the warning issued years ago by Daniel Pauly, marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia, a respected authority on the state of the seas. The day was at hand, he said, when the last fish would be taken from the ocean.

The last fish.

Endgame / Essays / Nancy Harmon Jenkins