Epic Fishing in the Portuguese Sea

Álvaro Garrido, researcher at CEIS20 and director of FEUC, presented his latest book in Lisbon yesterday.
This book, published by CTT Correios de Portugal, is accompanied by a philatelic issue of the same name.

At a time when the “new maritime economy” seems to be forgetting the human and social dimension of maritime life that characterises the coastal landscape, this issue evokes three major Portuguese maritime activities: cod fishing in Newfoundland and Greenland, whaling in the Azores and tuna fishing with traps off the Algarve coast. In the context of cultural history, the book includes a preliminary essay on representations of Portugal’s relationship with the sea and a state of the art on the historical study of fishing and its images in social memory. This is followed by three monographic chapters on the three selected fisheries, the conclusion and a bibliography.

As an economic activity linked to the exploitation of living marine resources, fishing is an area of maritime culture whose heritage is fragile. Precisely for this reason, and due to a lack of knowledge, fishing and seafaring in general are subject to a persistent mythology.

Fishing is full of extraordinary and epic images, of a certain primitivism or cruel beauty. This is the case of the great transatlantic fishing expeditions and other civilian endeavours that involved long journeys and put large communities at risk. The Odyssean features of the three great fishing expeditions analysed in this book created a legendary dimension and aroused international curiosity, which grew as these activities declined and time condemned them to extinction.

Cod fishing by the mythical “white fleet” that has defined generations of fishermen all along the Portuguese coast, whaling off the Azores and tuna fishing in the old traps launched off the Algarve coast are eloquent examples of this enormous cultural heritage.

All civilised fishing activities have involved great human inventiveness, discipline and courage within an institutional framework that has led to the unrestricted appropriation of resources.

It is no coincidence that they all ended in the 1970s, in a context of great change in the Law of the Sea, when new scientific perceptions of the use of marine resources emerged and, not coincidentally, when the dictatorship of Salazar and Caetano collapsed.

All these fisheries have a powerful expression in the collective memory that has remained of Portugal’s relationship with the sea. However, they all need to be reinterpreted according to an educational logic and from a critical perspective that goes beyond myth.

Written in Portuguese and English for a wide audience, this book inscribes in the public space the memory of the human work involved in the great fisheries in relation to their coastal areas: the Azores (fishing/whaling); the ports of the Portuguese west coast (cod fishing); the beaches of the eastern Algarve (tuna fishing).

In a beautifully illustrated edition, the book presents each of the fishing activities in their most unique aspects: historical origins, economic and social organisation, labour relations, cultural images and symbolic imagery. This book brings together science and culture, adding a socio-cultural dimension to the current debate on marine resources and the environmental role of the oceans.

Álvaro Garrido is a Full Professor at FEUC and its current Director. A researcher at the CEIS20, he has published extensively in the fields of economic and institutional history and contemporary maritime history. His most recent books are: As Pescas em Portugal (Lisbon, FFMS, 2018); A Economia Social em Movimento. Uma História das Organizações (Lisbon, Tinta da China, 2018); Queremos uma Economia Nova! Estado Novo e Corporativismo (Porto Alegre, EDIPUCRS, 2018); Too Valuable to be Lost: Overfishing in the North Atlantic since 1880 (De Gruyter, Berlin, 2020); Il Portogallo di Salazar. Politica, Società, Economia (Bologna University Press, 2020, co-authored with Fernando Rosas).

For more information, visit the CTT website.