The one-in-10 figure jibes roughly with Hemingway’s (and not Knapp’s) assertions. Based on my own experience, I would venture that an avid fisherman tends to photograph about one in every 10 fish boated (the other nine being too small to justify the cost of film and the delay of cocktails). In all, I could make out 109 individual animals - 82 marlin, 21 bluefin tuna and 6 sailfish. In the archive, I counted every photograph of Hemingway posed with an oceanic alpha predator. (According to the authors of “Hemingway in Cuba,” “you big fat slob” were the last words Papa endured before laying Knapp out on a Bimini dock.) Later, perhaps in an effort to avoid similar conflicts, Hemingway helped found the International Game Fish Association, which is recognized as the world’s most objective keeper of fishing records.Īccusations and counterpunches aside, there are ways to approximate Hemingway’s kills. Joseph Knapp, the publisher of Colliers and a fisherman himself, accused him of overstating his catches. These discrepancies were noted in Hemingway’s time. But in an article in Esquire describing the typically slower spring run of that same year, Hemingway said the Pilar’s catch was 51 marlin. During one 180-day stretch in 1933-34, the Pilar logs reveal a catch of 10 marlin, 2 sailfish and 9 sharks. Kennedy library in Boston, the numbers are there, sort of. Hemingway was a frequent but inconsistent record keeper. How much of the big fishes’ decline is Hemingway’s fault? Like many tales that come from the sea, the facts are of a liquid nature. This paper has been bitterly disputed, but it was enough to make me pause and look for someone to blame. Analyzing catch data over the last half-century, the biologists Boris Worm and Ransom Myers determined that the populations of the large blue-water fish - notably marlin, swordfish, tuna and sharks - had declined by 90 percent worldwide. Or is it more?”īut in 2003 the journal Nature published an article that made killing fish seem even more sinful. “If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him.

“You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after,” he says to himself while contemplating the killing of the enormous marlin. “Thanks for making room.” Santiago, in “The Old Man and the Sea,” ruminates similarly. “There were too many of us,” the fish would say. I shared his notion that the “great ocean currents are the last wild country there is left,” and believed of the sea as Hemingway did that “no one knows what fish live in it, or how great size they reach.” As a child, if I ever felt guilty about my kills, I summoned a kind of waking dream in which all my victims thanked me. Like Hemingway, I took up fishing because of the limitlessness the sea seemed to offer. The thought wouldn’t have occurred to me a few years ago.

And as I nodded off in the fighting chair and recalled the photographs of Hemingway posed with giant marlin and tuna, I started wondering whether it was possible to calculate the effect the world’s best fishing writer might have had on the world’s biggest fish. Not a single marlin raised its sword to our lines, nor did one appear for the other 30-odd boats trolling in the lee of the trade winds that day. I imagined myself sitting, like Papa, on the deck of the Pilar, fighting the big fish in the big chair, muttering through gritted teeth the great man’s motto “Il faut (d’abord) durer” - first, one must endure.īut after hours of dragging footlong lures at 8 knots, I began thinking that it could be the big fish that have not endured. I had never gone for the really big fish, and I was juiced to finally get the chance. For $500, I booked a marlin charter out of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. A few months ago I took the most expensive nap of my life, and when it was over I decided it was all Hemingway’s fault.

Fish tales book