The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia, c.1850-2000 9789812305404

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Reproduced from The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 18502000, by John G. Butcher (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Individual articles are available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

THE CLOSING OF THE FRONTIER

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) was established as an autonomous organization in 1968. It is a regional centre dedicated to the study of socio-political, security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia and its wider geostrategic and economic environment. The Institute’s research programmes are the Regional Economic Studies (RES, including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS), and Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS). ISEAS Publications, an established academic press, has issued more than 1,000 books and journals. It is the largest scholarly publisher of research about Southeast Asia from within the region. ISEAS Publications works with many other academic and trade publishers and distributors to disseminate important research and analyses from and about Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

JOHN G. BUTCHER

INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Singapore

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

First published in Singapore in 2004 by ISEAS Publications Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Pasir Panjang, Singapore 119614 E-mail: [email protected] • Website: http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. © 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore The responsibility for facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively with the author and his interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or the policy of the Institute or its supporters. ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Butcher, John G. The closing of the frontier : a history of the marine fisheries of Southeast Asia, c.1850-2000. (Modern economic history of Southeast Asia) 1. Fisheries—Asia, Southeastern—History. I. Title. II. Series. SH307 A9B98 2004 ISBN 981-230-259-X (soft cover) ISBN 981-230-223-9 (hard cover) Typeset by International Typesetters Pte. Ltd. Printed in Singapore by Seng Lee Press Pte. Ltd.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

To Jim Warren, Bob Elson, and Nick Knight, friends, colleagues, mentors

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

A MODERN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA (ECHOSEA) SERIES This series is intended to cover the current state of knowledge of the economic history of Southeast Asia through discrete single-author volumes, some country-based but most defined thematically. It aims to bridge the gap between economists and historians working in this underdeveloped field, and also conventional divides between contemporary, colonial, and pre-colonial periods. It lays a necessary foundation for political and social studies of an important region of the world. Emerging from a five-year project of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University, the series was published initially by Macmillan and its successor Palgrave. In 2003/04 it was transferred to ISEAS. Volumes remaining in print are available from ISEAS Publications.* General Editors Anthony Reid (Chair), Director, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore Anne Booth, Professor of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London Pierre van der Eng, Associate Professor, School of Business and Information Management, Australian National University, Canberra Titles in the Series R.E. Elson The End of the Peasantry in Southeast Asia: A Social and Economic History of Peasant Livelihood, 1800–1990s J. Thomas Lindblad Foreign Investment in Southeast Asia in the Twentieth Century* Anne Booth The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities* John H. Drabble An Economic History of Malaysia, c.1800–1990: The Transition to Modern Economic Growth* Howard Dick and Peter Rimmer Cities, Transport and Communications: The Integration of Southeast Asia since 1850 Amarjit Kaur Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalisation, the International Division of Labour, and Labour Transformations John Butcher The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c.1850– 2000*

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Contents

Contents

List of Tables

x

List of Figures

xi

List of Maps

xii

Acknowledgements

xv

Permissions

xix

Explanatory Notes

xx

1 Introduction The marine environment Some basic concepts Sources and scope

1 5 19 23

2 The Fisheries of Southeast Asia in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century The wealth of the sea The products of the sea Methods of capture The impetus to catch Rhythms and risks Patterns of intensity Conclusions

27 28 31 38 47 51 54 57

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3 State, Economy, and Fisheries to the 1930s The political and economic transformation Estimating the rate of increase in catches Two processes

Contents

60 60 67 72

4 Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s Gulf of Siam The Straits of Malacca The north coast of Java and Madura The Kangean Islands The Philippines Burma Reaching a limit

75 75 80 93 105 111 116 119

5 Technological Change and the Extension of the Frontier of Fisheries, 1890s to 1930s Pearling Trawling Muro ami Driftnetting and trolling from Singapore Purse seining in the Straits of Malacca Pole-and-line and longline fishing for tuna Motorizing the payang fishery in the Java Sea Lawagan and basnigan in the Philippines Explosives Conclusion

123 124 136 143 151 152 156 159 162 163 164

6 The Great Fish Race The Philippines Gulf of Thailand Peninsular Malaysia Indonesia Japanese tuna fishing Indonesia (continued ) Conflict at sea The end of an era

168 177 193 202 207 214 225 229 232

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Contents

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7 The Closing of the Frontier The trawl ban and its aftermath Carving up the sea The continuing diaspora of Thai trawlers Tuna, the last great fishery Scouring the nooks and crannies The lure of Australian waters Farming the sea The closing of the frontier Towards a new frontier

234 235 242 246 252 268 278 281 287 290

Notes

293

Appendix 1: Nominal Marine Fish Landings in Southeast Asia by Year, 1956 to 2000

370

Appendix 2: Nominal Marine Fish Landings and Annual Rates of Growth in Landings in Southeast Asia by Decade, 1960 to 2000

373

Appendix 3: Southeast Asia: Per Capita Fish Supply in Kilograms per Year, 1961/62 to 1996/97

374

Glossary

375

Notes and Sources for Maps and Figures

388

Bibliography

394

Index

435

The Author

443

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

List of Tables

3.1 Nominal Catches of Marine, Freshwater, and Cultivated Fish in Southeast Asia, 1938 5.1 Landings of Fusiliers at Singapore by Weight and as a Percentage of Total Fish Landings, 1931–38 5.2 Percentage Distribution of Gross Proceeds from Sale of Fish at Public Auction in Batavia by Type of Fishery, 1935–38 6.1 Number, Catch Rate, and Length of Fishing Trip of Trawlers Operating in Manila Bay, 1941–53 6.2 Landings of Ponyfish (Leiognathidae) by Commercial Fishing Boats in the Central Visayas, 1951–54 6.3 Catches of Commercial Fishing Vessels in “Sulu (along Palawan Waters)” by Fishing Gear, 1971 6.4 Percentage Distribution of Marine Catches in Thailand, 1953–59 6.5 Catch Composition by Year in Kilograms per Hour of Trawling by R/V Pramong II throughout the Gulf of Thailand 6.6 Data on the Marine Fisheries of Indonesia, 1951–67

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

69 144

145 180 182 184 193

196 208

List of Figures

1.1 Schematic View of Two Villages and Neighbouring Sea

20

2.1 Floating Fish Lures 2.2 A Baklad, a Fish Corral Used in the Philippines 2.3 A Bubo, Used in the Philippines for Catching Coral Reef Species

39 42

3.1 Trade in Dried Fish, Salt, and Belacan, c.1910

66

43

4.1 A Jermal 4.2 A Sapyaw

85 114

5.1 A Japanese Beam Trawl (Utase) Operated from a Sailboat and a Motorized Vessel 5.2 Muro Ami Fishing 5.3 A Purse Seine

141 146 153

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

173 185 189 217

Trade of ASEAN Countries in Fish and Fish Products, 1978 A Basnigan Equipped with Electric Generator for Lighting A Payaw of the Type Used in Tuna Fishing A Tuna Longline

7.1 The Tuna Trade of Thailand, 1985 and 1989

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List of Maps

1.1 Bathymetry of Southeast Asian Seas 1.2 Wind Streamlines over Southeast Asia 1.3 Mangroves and Coral Reefs of Southeast Asia

6 8 15

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

76 81 94

4.5

4.6 4.7 4.8

Gulf of Siam Straits of Malacca and Malay Peninsula Java Van Roosendaal’s Map of the Fishing Grounds of Villages on the Northeast Coast of Java and the North Coast of Madura in 1910 Van Pel’s Map of the Fishing Grounds of Villages on the Northeast Coast of Java and the North Coast of Madura in 1938 Kangean Islands Flores Sea Central and Northern Philippines

101

104 106 108 112

5.1 Sulu Archipelago Pearl Beds 5.2 Southern South China Sea 5.3 Japanese Pole-and-Line Fishing Bases

133 149 157

6.1 Gulf of Thailand 6.2 Spread of Tuna Longlining in the Indian Ocean, 1952–60 6.3 Eastern Indonesia

197 219 221

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

List of Maps

7.1 Extension of Fishing Grounds of Large Purse Seiners Based in Java 7.2 Location of Payaw Deployed Near Sulawesi by Philippine Operators 7.3 Timor Sea

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238 262 279

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

A great many individuals and institutions have generously helped me during the eleven years it has taken me to write this book. I am grateful to Tony Reid for asking me to contribute a volume on fisheries to the Economic History of Southeast Asia series, assisting my research in a multitude of ways, and prodding along a very slow writer. He and Linda Poskitt organized a one-day workshop at the Australian National University in December 1994 at which I was able to present what proved to be a very preliminary version of this book. During that workshop Tony, Daniel Pauly, Howard Dick, Peter Reeves, Pierre van der Eng, Amarjit Kaur, Padma Lal, Raoul Middelmann, Isabelle Antunès, and several others began to educate me in the things I would need to know and to push me in new directions. Two visits to the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM, now the World Fish Center) brought me into contact with many fisheries experts who kindly shared their knowledge with me. Among those I spoke with in Manila in 1994 were Jay Maclean, John McManus, Jose Padilla, Daniel Pauly, Bob Pomeroy, and Roger Pullin. In 2002, by which time the ICLARM had moved to Penang, I was fortunate to gain a glimpse into the latest thinking in a wide range of fields from Johann Bell, Modadugu V. Gupta, Kuperan Viswanathan, Mahfuzuddin Ahmed, A.G. Ponniah, and Mark Prein. Among the many fisheries experts, historians, and other scholars who have helped me with sources, information, and ideas on other occasions are Isabelle Antunès, Anugerah Nontji, David Ardill, Ken Armitage, Steve Blaber, Colin Brown, Eny Buchary, David Bulbeck,

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Acknowledgements

Carunia Firdausy, Dale Chatwin, Choo Poh Sze, Bruce Cruikshank, Howard Dick, Frits Diehl, Jean-René Durand, Bob Elson, Pierre van der Eng, Carmelo Enriquez, Mark Erdmann, Brian Fegan, Radin Fernando, Vivian Forbes, Regina Ganter, Halim Ali, Hara Fujio, Shinzo Hayase, David Henley, Peta Johnson, Jomo K.S., Kamaruddin M. Said, Kristin Kaschner, Yasuhisa Kato, G.L. Kesteven, Gerry van Klinken, Paul Kratoska, Aiko Kurasawa-Inomata, Mary Lack, Mike Lean, Ewan Maidment, Jacek Majkowski, Masyhuri, Sebastian Mathew, Mike McCarthy, Eric Mills, Abu Khair Mohammad Mohsin, Steve Mullins, Daniel Pauly, James Penn, Jos Pet, Bob Pokrant, Lesley Potter, Greg Poulgrain, Tricia Pursell, Greg Rawlings, Peter Reeves, Glenn Sant, Kyoko Seo, Heather Sutherland, Baas Terwiel, Thee Kian Wie, Malcolm Tull, Tony Van Fossen, Veravat Hongskul, Peter Ward, Jim Warren, Johannes Widodo, Mohd. Zaki Mohd. Said, and Zulfigar bin Haji Yasin. At moments when I was feeling somewhat lost my colleagues Bob Elson and Nick Knight helped me not only to conceptualize what I was trying to do but also to persevere. Many librarians and archivists helped me gather the sources that appear in the notes and bibliography. Linda Temprosa made me feel at home in ICLARM’s extraordinary collection of fisheries literature when I visited Manila in 1994. In addition, librarians at Griffith University, the Australian National University, the National Library of Australia, the National Library of Singapore, the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, Puslitbang Oseanologi (LIPI) at Ancol Timor, INFOFISH in Kuala Lumpur, the Queensland Department of Primary Industry, and the State Library of Queensland have all been very helpful, as have archivists at the National Archives of Malaysia. Although this book is based largely on written sources, visits to fishing ports and villages and interviews with fisheries officers, fishers, the operators of fishing and processing companies, officials, and workers in non-government organizations between December 1993 and March 1994 helped me immensely in shedding light on those sources. The following are just a few of those who so willingly shared their knowledge and insights with me: Suwardi, Riyanto Basuki, Tan Sen Min, Chiam Thiam Hua, David Lim Yong Siah, Fatima Ferdouse, Mohd. Zainoddin, Goh Cheng Liang, Nigel Loh, Mohd. Zubin Abdullah, Mohd. Asmuain, Leong Chee Meng, Dr Lau, Brian Ng, David Khor, Aziz Ujang, the captain and crew

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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of PPF595, Tan Yong Kee, Encik Fuad, Jamli Ali, Bohari bin Leng, Kasemsant Chalayondeja, Kachornsak Wetchagarun, Somkiat Anuras, Rodolfo C. Simbulan, Francisco Tiu Laurel, Jun Salcedo, A.C. Santero, Jr, Edwin B. Maliwat, Rupert Sievert, Jim Hancock, John Manul, Antonio Palanco, Perfecto Palapal, Jr, the mayor, vice-mayor, and community development workers of Marabut, the mayor of Basey, Ricardo Dasal, Silvestre Dapita, George Campeon, Flordeliz “Poyie” Guarin, Alejandrao Yadao, Dario O. Lauron, Rogelio L. Nuñez, Elemido C. Quesada, Fausto Tan, Jr, Ernesto G. Jimenez, Corazon M. Corrales, Leonardo Aro, Allan Paquito, Gina Menendrez, John Gabuya, and Pablo Belite. Several institutions and individuals made it possible to talk with all these people as well as to visit libraries, archives, and research centres during my visit to Southeast Asia in 1993–94. The Social and Economic Research Unit in the Prime Minister’s Department, then in Kuala Lumpur, granted me permission to conduct research in Malaysia, while Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia sponsored my research. I am particularly grateful to Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, Kamaruddin M. Said, and Abu Hassan bin Haji Omar for their assistance. The Director General of Lembaga Kemajuan Ikan Malaysia, Megat Muhaiyadin Hassan, and the Director of the Planning Division, Khatijah bt. Hj. Mohd. Sa’aid, arranged for me to visit several fishing sites in the Penang area. And during my visit to the Philippines Anselma Legaspi and Cynthia Isaac of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources prepared, with the approval of the Director, Guillermo Morales, an itinerary that took me to fishing ports, fish-processing plants, and fishing villages near Manila and in Leyte, Samar, Mindanao, Cebu, and Negros. I have been fortunate to receive excellent advice from the readers of various versions of the manuscript. Following the workshop in December 1994 I slowly began rewriting all the chapters. Enid Wylie read all of these chapters with a keen eye for clumsy writing and violations of elementary biology. Her criticisms as well as further research led to a third version of the manuscript in April 2002. Tony Reid and Bob Elson offered suggestions on making the book more accessible to the general reader. Brian Fegan subjected the manuscript to minute scrutiny in light of his wide-ranging knowledge of history and anthropology as well as his first-hand experience of fisheries in many parts of Southeast Asia. And Daniel Pauly, whose writings have both inspired and guided my research,

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Acknowledgements

pointed out many scientific infelicities and outright blunders and offered invaluable advice on how to improve the text. I have not gone nearly as far as these readers would have liked. Indeed, I may have introduced errors when I revised the manuscript yet again early in 2003. But the book is incomparably the better because of their criticisms and suggestions. I thank Jason Wotherspoon of Griffith University and Aque Atanacio of the FishBase Project at Los Baños for so ably translating my rough sketches into the maps and figures that appear in this book, Larry Crissman for providing Jason with the facilities of the Asia Pacific Spatial Data Project, Robyn White of the School of International Business and Asian Studies for miraculously transforming my manuscript into the version finally presented to the publisher, and Griffith University for granting me the periods of leave during which I did most of the work on this book. And finally, for entertaining, enlightening, tolerating, and even subsidizing me during the years I worked on this book, I express my most heartfelt gratitude to Lorena, Jessica, and Lucy and their beloved cat of a thousand names. Brisbane, July 2003

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Permissions

Map 1.2 has been reproduced with minor changes from R.D. Hill, ed., South-East Asia: A Systemic Geography (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 18 and 27, with the kind permission of Oxford University Press/Penerbit Fajar Bakti. Portions of Chapter 6 and 7 originally appeared in somewhat different form in “Getting into Trouble: The Diaspora of Thai Trawlers, 1965– 2002”, International Journal of Maritime History, December 2002, and are included here with the kind permission of the International Maritime Economic History Association. Every effort has been made to trace the owners of the illustrations used in this volume where these may still be covered by copyright, but in some cases this has proved impossible. The author would welcome contact with any of these copyright owners.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Explanatory Notes

Weights and measures All weights and measures are expressed in metric units except when they appear in other units in a law, treaty, or other legal document. There are frequent references to the tonnage of fishing vessels but the sources sometimes do not indicate the meaning of the “ton” being used. In a few cases the tonnage may refer to “displacement tons”, specifically the weight of the water the vessel displaces, but in most cases it probably refers to the internal capacity of the vessel. The terms “gross tons” (GT) and “gross registered tons” (GRT) both refer to the internal capacity. The former measurement includes enclosed areas above the top deck, while the latter does not. Thus, the GT of a particular vessel is greater than the GRT for the same vessel.

Currency The dollar ($) refers to the United States dollar. For the period 18501990 Asian currencies have been converted into U.S. dollars according to the table in Pierre van der Eng, The Silver Standard and Asia’s Integration into the World Economy, 1850–1914, Working Papers in Economic History, no. 175, Australian National University, 1993. Exchange rates (in the form of annual average market rates) for dates after 1990 are taken from the International Financial Statistics Yearbook (Washington: International Monetary Fund, 2001). Monetary values have not been adjusted for inflation.

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Explanatory Notes

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Numbers Except in a few cases where greater precision is both available and usefully retained numbers giving weights and measures, monetary amounts, sizes of fishing fleets, and populations are expressed in two significant figures.

Names of marine animals Marine animals are generally identified by their English common names but the valid scientific names are also given whenever possible. Many animals are referred to at least once by their names in relevant Southeast Asian languages as well. My reference for both common and scientific names of finfish is R. Froese and D. Pauly, eds, FishBase , cited simply as FishBase. I have, however, departed from FishBase in order to distinguish mackerels of the genus Rastrelliger from those of the genus Scomberomorus, since my older sources use terms in Southeast Asian languages that correspond with this distinction but do not make it possible to identify the species, each of which FishBase of course gives a unique common name. I therefore refer to Rastrelliger species as Indian mackerel (the name of one of the species in this genus) and Scomberomorus species as Spanish mackerel (again, the name of one species).

Glossary The glossary contains brief descriptions of fishing gears, species of marine animals (with cross references linking English common with scientific names and names in Southeast Asian languages), marine animal products, terms used in fisheries science, and a few other terms relevant to this history.

Bibliography and endnotes The bibliography does not include archival sources, newspaper reports, or books and articles that are not primarily related to fisheries. Full citations for all these sources are given in the endnotes. The following abbreviations have been used in the endnotes:

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Explanatory Notes

FEER JIA&EA NAM

Far Eastern Economic Review Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia National Archives of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur

“Reuters”, “Dow Jones Interactive”, and “Factiva” are the names of online news services used in this research.

Notes and sources for maps and figures In order to save space on the maps and figures I have placed explanatory notes and citations in a separate section near the end of this volume.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Reproduced from The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 18502000, by John G. Butcher (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Individual articles are available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg > 1 Introduction

1 Introduction

There were good fishing seasons. When they felt that it was not [so good] they moved to wherever the catch was good. Because that was only what they were after. Calixto Guxman, reflecting in 1992 on the history of fishing in the Visayas1

The seas of Southeast Asia have long provided humans with fish, shrimps, squids, whales, pearl oysters, sea cucumbers, and a multitude of other animals that they have collected and captured for medicine, oil, jewellery, and, above all else, food. But a profound change has taken place in the relationship between humans and the riches of the sea. Until the early 1900s most of the sea had been barely touched by fishing. When the demand for fish and other marine animals rose or the supply fell, there was always a new fishing ground to exploit and there were very few impediments to moving on to new fishing grounds. By extending the frontier of fisheries, moving on to new fishing grounds and, as part of this movement, exploiting more and more of the diverse ecosystems that make up the seas of Southeast Asia, fishers brought about spectacular increases in the harvest of fish, shrimps, and other marine animals, particularly in the decades right after World War II. By the 1990s, however, nearly all of the three-dimensional sea was being exploited, catches had fallen sharply in many areas, and the freedom to move from one fishing ground to another had been severely curtailed. Tracing and explaining this transformation is the purpose of this book. This history focuses on the act of fishing itself — what is caught,

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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Chapter 1

how it is caught, how much is caught, who it is caught by, and especially when and where it is caught — but we must see this act as part of a complex set of economic relations. “To use a particular type of gear to seek a particular fish”, argues Emmerson, “is to become involved in a unique set of economic transactions that radiate backward and forward in space and time from the place and moment of capture”.2 In one direction, those who capture fish and other forms of marine life operate gear that they have made with their own labour, purchased from their savings, or acquired on some form of credit or that is the property of other individuals or of firms. In the other, these same people must trade or barter at least part of what they catch or receive some sort of payment for their labour, whether a wage, a proportion of the proceeds of the catch, or simply enough food to continue working. Since fishing became increasingly oriented towards the market in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the spectacular growth in catches that is traced in this book must be understood in relation to changes in the processing and marketing of marine products. It was the expanding demand for the products of the sea created above all else by the growth in population but also by the development of transport and marketing systems and changes in the techniques of preserving fish, shrimps, and other marine life that prompted people to produce for the market. Often agents and entrepreneurs of various types were the ones who provided the stimulus, usually in the form of credit. As all this suggests, the history of fishing is in part the story of the interaction between fishing and the wider economy. Indeed, the growth of towns and the expansion of mines and plantations — all with large populations of people not producing their own food — and changes in employment and investment opportunities in the wider economy have all had a bearing on the intensity of fishing. States and, since the late 1940s, international organizations have all influenced the scale and location of fishing. Until recently, fishing, far more than sedentary agriculture, took place beyond the reach and grasp of state powers, and even today the relationship between state and fisher often resembles that between cat and mouse, as states impose rules and fishers try to evade them. Nevertheless, the activities of states, prompted by diverse and sometimes contradictory motives, have had a profound impact on the process described in this history. Explorations of the sea funded by states opened up new fishing grounds. The ways in which

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

3

states have taxed fishing — whether it has been the catch, vital materials such as salt needed to preserve fish, or the fishing gear itself — have at times promoted and at others discouraged fishing. Regulations imposed by the state have had a bearing on where fishing is allowed, with what gear, and with what intensity. States promoted and often paid for the construction of the infrastructure of roads, railways, ports, and markets that have been an essential part of the expansion of fishing. Finally, state subsidies for the purchase of boats, nets, and fuel have contributed to much greater fishing intensity, as has the reduction or removal of import duties on fishing vessels and gear. Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, governments adopted a variety of measures designed to promote fishing, sometimes with consequences that politicians and fisheries officers were unable to anticipate at the time. Also of crucial importance have been the activities of organizations set up by states outside the region such as the German Technical Assistance Program and the foreign aid programme of Japan as well as those of international aid agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. All of these organizations contributed to the spectacular increase in catches that took place beginning in the 1960s by providing expertise and substantial loans. And since 1982 the framework of exclusive economic zones created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea has done a great deal to shape the ways in which the states of the region formulate policies with respect to fishing. Fundamental to the story traced in this book is a variety of ecological relationships. As will become clear, the marine environment of Southeast Asia is extraordinarily complex. What can be captured and how it can be captured depend greatly on the particular species being targeted, their life cycles, their movements, their behaviour, and their abundance at the time as well as on the skills and equipment of the fisher. In large part this is the story of how fishers were able to track down and capture more and more species until virtually every nook and cranny of the sea was fished. Because fish and other marine animals grow and reproduce it is possible to catch certain quantities of them and to keep on doing so indefinitely. Nevertheless, there comes a point at which the application of more fishers, boats, and gear to capture marine creatures becomes so intense that catches decline. Forces not directly related to the actual process of harvesting

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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Chapter 1

may also being about a decline in the productivity of a fishery. The most important of these are the removal of mangrove forests, siltation caused by mining and logging, and pollution caused by human and industrial wastes. It would be wrong, however, to view the marine environment merely as a passive participant in this story. Fishery scientists have demonstrated, for example, how intensive fishing can bring about a marked change in the relative abundance of different species. The fact that some species that have become relatively plentiful in the changed environment have considerable commercial value has helped to maintain and even intensify the level of fishing even when total catches have declined. As this discussion suggests, any attempt to write a history of the extension of the frontier of capture faces bewildering complexity, for, as McEvoy stresses in his history of the California fisheries, economy, state, and ecology not only interact with each other but also have dynamics of their own.3 There are a number of ways a historian might handle the complexity of the story. One would be to examine a number of themes in turn, perhaps considering first technological change, then changes in catches, and then the policies of governments before tracing the extension of the frontier of capture. I have chosen instead to adopt a chronological approach. Such an approach will, I believe, best allow me to trace the extension of the frontier of fishing and to explain it in relation to economic, political, and ecological changes. It also allows us to see the very uneven nature of this process, proceeding by fits and starts until, after World War II, it accelerated by leaps and bounds. A chronological approach carries its own problems. In particular, the construction of any periodization must be somewhat arbitrary, especially when applied to the whole region. Nevertheless, I have adopted a periodization that highlights a number of stages in the history of the extension of the frontier of capture. Following a survey of fisheries in the mid-nineteenth century in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 examines how the political and economic transformation that took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s stimulated the expansion of fishing. This growth took place both by means of a much greater use of existing methods, as traced in Chapter 4, and by the use of motors and the application of new methods to previously untapped ecosystems, as described in Chapter 5. The race to catch more

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

5

and more fish to feed the rapidly growing populations of the newly independent nation-states and to profit from markets in other parts of the world between the end of World War II and the late 1970s is the subject of Chapter 6. During these years the rapid expansion of trawling began the exploitation of demersal species on a huge scale and the development of various methods of capturing pelagic fish opened up still more fishery resources. Soon, however, this scramble for fish engendered conflict over fishery resources. By the early 1980s, as shown in the final chapter, the Indonesian government had banned trawling in most of the country and all governments in the region had declared exclusive economic zones in the waters surrounding their countries. Chapter 7 goes on to show how the process of exploiting more and more marine animal populations — small pelagic fish in the Java Sea, tuna, reef fish, seahorses, sharks, and trochus to name a few — continued until many had collapsed and there were virtually no new ones to exploit. By the late 1990s the frontier of fishing had virtually closed. Before we trace this story, however, we need to have a look at the extraordinarily rich and diverse environment in which it took place.

The marine environment Maritime Southeast Asia is a great complex of islands, peninsulas, and bodies of water lying between the Asian and Australian land masses and between the Indian Ocean on the west and south and the Pacific Ocean on the east. Within this region the depth of the sea varies greatly, as indicated in Map 1.1. There are two very large shelf areas, the Sunda Shelf and the Sahul Shelf. Together they form about one-fifth of the total shelf area of the world, covering an area equivalent to ten Grand Banks.4 The Sunda Shelf encompasses the coastal waters of Burma, Straits of Malacca, Gulf of Tonkin, Gulf of Thailand, the southern part of the South China Sea, and the Java Sea. Also part of the Sunda Shelf as defined by Longhurst are the many bays, gulfs, and shallow seas such as the Samar Sea enclosed by the chain of islands running from Luzon in the north through the Sangir and Talaud islands to Sulawesi in the south, but the shelf area around these islands is far less extensive than that in the western part of the region. The Sahul Shelf, largely made up of the Arafura Sea and shallow waters off the north coast of Australia, is much

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

6

Map 1.1 Bathymetry of Southeast Asian Seas

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Indian Ocean

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Introduction

7

smaller than the Sunda Shelf but still very large compared to many other shelves in the world. To the west of Sumatra, the south of Java, north of New Guinea, and particularly the east of the Philippine Islands the shelf area is very narrow and the seas plunge to great depths a short distance from the coast; a trench running north-south off the Philippines reaches depths greater than 10,000 metres. Between the two oceans and lying within Southeast Asia are several deep basins, including the Andaman, Sulu, Celebes, Flores, and Banda seas and the deep area in the South China Sea to the west of Luzon and Palawan. These basins vary greatly in the extent to which they are open to the oceans. The Banda Sea, part of which is over 7,000 metres deep, forms the only deep-water connection between the Indian and Pacific oceans at tropical latitudes. In sharp contrast, the Sulu Sea, which is shallower, is constrained by underwater ridges lying between the ring of islands that surround it. Just as there are great variations in depth there are also differences in tidal patterns from one part of the region to another. In almost all of the area to the east of Palawan, Kalimantan, and Lombok — that part of maritime Southeast Asia most directly connected with the oceans — there are usually two low and two high tides a day, whereas in most of the South China Sea and the Java Sea the prevailing pattern is for there to be just one high and one low tide a day. In the Straits of Malacca and the Andaman Sea there is a clear pattern of two high and two low tides a day. In all cases the tidal range varies with the phases of the moon, but this is especially pronounced in parts of the Straits of Malacca, where the gap between high and low tides can be as great as 6 metres during the full or new moons, as in the Rokan estuary, where there is a tidal bore.5 The monsoons (Map 1.2) provide “the principal ecological driving force” of Southeast Asia.6 In the northern winter, as the air over continental Asia cools and the atmospheric pressure increases, air flows across the equator to the low pressure area over the heated Australian landmass, thus generating the “northeast” monsoon (often called the “west” monsoon south of the equator), which lasts from about October to March and reaches its peak in December and January. The wind blows to the southwest across the South China Sea, turns towards the south at the equator, and blows to the east to the south of the equator. These winds bring rough seas to much of the South China Sea and heavy rain to the east coast of the Malay Peninsula and much of the area south of the

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

8

Chapter 1 Map 1.2 Wind Streamlines over Southeast Asia

100

1000

1100

(a) January (Northeast monsoon)

100

1000

1100

120"

(b) July (Southwest monsoon)

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

9

equator. During the northern summer the pattern is reversed, giving rise to the “southwest” monsoon (the “east” monsoon in many areas south of the equator), lasting from May to September and reaching its peak in June and July. As the air over mainland Asia heats and the atmospheric pressure drops, air flows from the Indian Ocean northeasterly across much of Southeast Asia as well as northwesterly from the winter high pressure area over Australia. During this monsoon seas along the west coast of Sumatra and along the coast of the mainland from the Mergui Archipelago to west of the mouth of the Irrawaddy are extremely rough; heavy rain falls in these areas as well as along the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand. Relatively small geographical features influence the way in which particular places are affected by the monsoons. For example, conditions are roughest on the western side of San Miguel Bay during the northeast monsoon but on the eastern side during the southwest monsoon.7 During the course of a year there are also two transitional periods as one monsoon ends and the other begins. During these periods winds tend to be light and variable in direction. In most of maritime Southeast Asia it is the monsoon winds that drive the main surface currents. As Roy explains, the combination of the constancy of the wind during the monsoons and the fact that the area formed by the South China, Java, Flores, and Banda seas “has its main axis aligned with the wind flux during both monsoons” favours “the development of surface circulation patterns strongly connected with the wind regime”.8 Thus, during the northeast monsoon water flows down the west coast of the South China Sea, south into the Java Sea, eastward through the Flores Sea, into the Banda Sea and then northward into the Pacific as well eastward into the Torres Strait and southward into the Indian Ocean. The South Equatorial Current of the western Pacific feeds into this flow through the passage between Luzon and Taiwan, the Makassar Strait, and other passages. During the southwest monsoon the current flows in the opposite direction from the Banda Sea through the Flores Sea into the Java Sea, where it is joined by the current flowing south through the Makassar Strait, through the South China Sea, and then through the passage between Luzon and Taiwan, where it joins the northward flow of the Pacific South Equatorial Current. The prevailing current is northerly through the Straits of Malacca and southerly along the southwest coast of Sumatra throughout the year.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

10

Chapter 1

The monsoons are one of the most important factors influencing the salinity and turbidity of the sea. During periods of heavy rain the great rivers of the mainland — the Irrawaddy, Salween, Chao Phraya, and Mekong — and those of the island world such as the Rokan and the Kampar in Sumatra and the Kapuas in Borneo discharge enormous quantities of fresh water containing great amounts of silt (in total more than twice as much silt as that discharged by all of the other rivers of the world9) into the sea, making the water both less saline and more turbid and, over time, making the sea shallower. The annual cycle of changes in currents and salinity that take place in the Java Sea provides a good example of the impact of the monsoons. During the wet monsoon beginning in November a current flows from the South China Sea into the Java Sea and then continues into the Banda Sea. As this happens, and as heavy rain falls on the sea and, more importantly, as rivers discharge fresh water into the sea, the salinity begins to drop. During the dry monsoon beginning in May the current reverses direction, bringing oceanic water from the east and thereby causing the salinity of water in the Java Sea to rise. The movement of scads (Decapterus species), long one of the most important fishery resources of the Java Sea, is closely associated with this rhythm. One large group of scads moves from the Flores Sea into the Java Sea as the salinity rises and then returns to the Flores Sea as the salinity drops.10 Embedded in the seasonal pattern of the monsoons is the daily alternation of sea and land breezes. During the day the air over the land heats and becomes less dense. As this happens, cooler, denser air over the sea flows towards the land. The wind direction reverses during the night when the air above the land becomes cooler than the air over the water. This pattern is most pronounced during the periods between the monsoons. During the monsoons prevailing onshore winds are strengthened by sea breezes but retarded by land breezes, while prevailing offshore winds are affected in the opposite way. These daily changes in the direction and force of the wind, varying according to the season, are crucially important for the movement of sailing craft to and from fishing grounds. The basis of fisheries is the biological productivity of the sea. Marine biologists often describe marine life as forming a “web” made up of several trophic levels. At the lowest trophic level are phytoplankton, some other

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

11

forms of plant life such as algae and seagrasses, and organic detritus. At a higher level are zooplankton, which consume phytoplankton, various species of small fish that eat detritus and algae, and other animals such as sea cucumbers which mainly feed on detritus. At a still higher level are various crustaceans that feed on detritus, zooplankton, and phytoplankton and fish that feed on zooplankton. At a slightly higher level are fish that consume other fish as well as zooplankton, and at the peak are large predators such as sharks and the larger species of tuna. As this sketch suggests, the biological productivity of the sea depends on the presence of phytoplankton, seagrasses, algae, and some other plants — the “primary producers” — and of detritus. The relative importance of these different components of the lowest trophic level varies from one marine ecosystem to another. On reef flats detritus, seaweeds, and seagrasses are far more important than phytoplankton. Benthic algae, detritus, and, to a less extent, phytoplankton are all important in deeper coralline waters. In soft-bottom communities such as those of the Gulf of Thailand and the Straits of Malacca, detritus and phytoplankton form the lowest trophic level, as they do in the open ocean.11 In all ecosystems the total mass of living organisms — the biomass — depends on the abundance of plant life and detritus at the lowest trophic level. Since much of the detritus consists of the remains of animals that once ate plants or ate other animals that ate plants (or, at the highest trophic level, ate animals that ate animals that ate animals that ate plants), it is the plant life — particularly phytoplankton — that forms the basis of most marine life. Since around 90 per cent of the energy at one trophic level is lost as it moves to the next level, the energy available to the animals at the highest trophic level is only a tiny proportion of the total energy made available by the plants at the lowest level. Removal of top predators may, therefore, result in great changes at lower trophic levels. Whatever the particular collection of species within the ecosystem, however, the biomass of that system is limited by the level of primary production within the system. As a consequence, anything that influences the level of primary production affects the whole ecosystem. The abundance of phytoplankton — by far the most important of the primary producers — varies greatly from one part of the sea to another and often from one season to another. As forms of plant life, phytoplankton use energy from the sun to photosynthesize water and

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

12

Chapter 1

carbon dioxide dissolved in the water into organic compounds and oxygen. The growth of phytoplankton also depends on the availability of phosphates, nitrates, and other nutrient salts. Since the dead organisms that are transformed into these minerals tend to sink to the bottom of the water column as they decompose, water lower in the water column tends to be much richer in these nutrients than the surface water. Therefore the abundance of nutrients near the surface where the strength of the sunlight is greater depends on the amount of vertical mixing in the water. In deeper waters the water column tends to be stratified with relatively warm water near the surface, a zone known as the thermocline through which the temperature drops rapidly, and cold, oxygen-poor but nutrient-rich water below the thermocline. One of the processes by which nutrients are brought to the upper level where there is sunlight is known as upwelling. There are no great regions of upwelling in Southeast Asia comparable to those off the coasts of California and Peru in the Pacific Ocean and the northwest and southeast coasts of Africa in the Atlantic, but upwelling nevertheless takes place, and is crucially important. Associated with the monsoons are, where the water is sufficiently deep and the winds sufficiently strong, areas of seasonal upwelling generated as water from the bottom of the sea rises to replace surface water moving offshore under the force of offshore winds. One area of strong seasonal upwelling is the eastern part of the Banda Sea and the shelf area of the Arafura Sea, where upwelling generated by monsoonal winds flowing from Australia during the southern winter brings the thermocline close to the surface and causes the surface water temperature to drop about 2°C.12 Rapid tidal currents (necessarily having to be faster in deeper water to have any effect) can also enrich surface waters with nutrients. And convection, taking place as surface water cooled during the night sinks and is replaced by water from the bottom, contributes a great deal to the availability of nutrients in the surface waters of shelf areas. Upwelling, tidal currents, and convection provide the nutrients for phytoplankton “blooms” and so for the proliferation of marine animals that feed either directly or indirectly on phytoplankton. For example, the strong upwelling in the Bali Strait creates the conditions that are capable of supporting extraordinarily dense populations of Bali sardinella (Sardinella lemuru).13 As already indicated, detritus contributes to the abundance of marine animal life by recycling the mineral nutrients needed for the growth of

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

13

phytoplankton and providing a direct source of food for some animals. Dead organisms are a large source of detritus in all marine ecosystems. Rivers are a huge source of detritus in estuaries and nearby waters. Particularly during the monsoons, rivers discharge massive quantities of silt containing organic matter as well as some minerals into the sea. Another important source of detritus is mangrove litter, particularly leaves, which falls into the water and is broken down by bacteria, fungi, and tiny crustaceans. Thus, mangrove-lined estuaries such as San Miguel Bay and the estuary of the Rokan River are especially productive marine ecosystems. Until recent decades two of the richest fishing grounds in Southeast Asia were the Straits of Malacca, which contains many estuaries and which has itself been described as “a large marine estuary”,14 and the Gulf of Thailand. Both are relatively shallow, lined (though much less so now) by mangroves, and enriched by organic matter and minerals discharged by rivers. Recent research has shown that soft corals and sponges are (or at least were before trawling began on a large scale) also a vital part of the ecology of areas such as the Straits of Malacca, the Gulf of Thailand, and the Java Sea characterized by soft bottoms and contribute to the productivity of these seas.15 Coral reefs provide another highly productive environment for marine life. The most common type of coral reefs in Southeast Asia is the fringing reef, consisting of a sandy beach or mangrove trees along the shore, a broad reef flat comprising sand, mud, rocks, seagrass, algae, and scattered corals, and a reef crest and reef slope, both densely populated by coral. Typically, much of the reef flat is exposed at low tide as is the tip of the reef crest. The clear waters surrounding reefs are generally poor in nutrients, but the coral ecosystem is extremely efficient in recycling and retaining these. Within the tissues of coral polyps tiny algae known as zooxanthellae live in a symbiotic relationship with their hosts. Drawing energy from sunlight, the zooxanthellae produce organic compounds that the polyps use for energy as well as the oxygen that these animals need, while the waste material released by the polyps contains nutrients vital for the growth of the zooxanthellae. Other components of the reef community and nearby waters engage in recycling as well, as White explains: Coral reef communities obtain their supplies of fixed or usable nitrogen, which is essential to phytoplankton and algae for photosynthesis, from algae on adjacent reef flats and bacteria in reef sediments, sea grass beds and

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

14

Chapter 1

mangroves. Blue-green algae fix nitrogen and flourish on the reef flats. Algal mats are grazed by damselfish, surgeonfish and parrotfish that return to the reefs and deposit the nutrients there in the form of faeces. Fixed nitrogen produced by bacteria in the sediments of sea grass beds is carried by fish that feed there and return to the reefs for shelter.16

The reef itself is built up as the coral polyps secrete calcium carbonate, drawn from the seawater, to form a partition in the skeletal cups in which they sit. Over time this process creates a habitat of enormous physical complexity full of holes and crevices that provide shelter for fish and invertebrates. As can be see from Map 1.3, coral reefs are found in many parts of Southeast Asia but because corals cannot tolerate low salinity, high turbidity, or extremes of temperature they are most extensive in the eastern half of the region and in other areas well away from the discharge of large rivers. As well as sustaining a dazzling variety of species of finfish, coral reefs and surrounding waters are also inhabited by sea turtles, bivalves such as the giant clam and the pearl oyster, and echinoderms such as the sea cucumber (Holothurioidea), the sausage-shaped, detritus-eating creature that became such an important trade item in the 1700s under the name tripang. The ecology of the oceanic waters of the region differs considerably from that of the shallow seas and coral reefs. Satellite imaging demonstrates that the level of primary production, as indicated by levels of chlorophyll, the pigment by which plants absorb sunlight, is much lower in the deep basins and in the deep waters of the two oceans than it is in many of the shelf areas of the region.17 Nevertheless, the deep basins, the Indian Ocean, and particularly the western Pacific support very large populations of skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis) and yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) as well as smaller populations of bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) and various billfish such as marlins. Surveying the ecological geography of what he calls the Western Pacific Warm Pool Province, Longhurst speculates that an explanation of the paradox of an abundance of fish in waters characterized by low primary production may have something to do with the stability of the highly stratified water column, which either creates conditions that “may serve to aggregate layers of food organisms, thus simplifying their location by foraging tuna (which are able to tolerate cold temperatures during their deep hunting forays)” or “provides invariant and predictable conditions for first-feeding tuna

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Legend Paracel Ia.

§ 10°

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j

Introduction

Map 1.3 Mangroves and Coral Reefs of Southeast Asia

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16

Chapter 1

larvae”.18 It is worth adding that because the larger tunas are able to swim great distances at great speed thanks to their heavily muscled, streamlined bodies and their ability to conserve heat,19 they are also able to take advantage of seasonal fluxes in the abundance of food in different parts of the ocean. While the tunas dive to great depths to find food, a variety of smaller species of fish stay at depths greater than 200 metres during the day and come to the surface to feed at night. Relatively little is know about these “mesopelagic” fish, but a survey published in 1980 estimated that the seas of Southeast Asia had one of the highest densities of these fish in the world.20 Among the multitude of species inhabiting Southeast Asia’s seas are many marine mammals. Massive sperm whales often feed in relatively shallow waters but travel great distances between the oceans through the deep passages and seas in the eastern part of the archipelago. Humpback whales spend some time in waters around Vietnam and the Philippines and in the South China Sea during the northern winter. The Irrawaddy dolphin inhabits rivers and shallow, muddy coastal waters, mainly in the western part of Southeast Asia, while the bottlenose dolphin lives in oceanic as well as coastal waters and can be found throughout the region. Finally, to mention just one more species, dugongs only live in shallow coastal waters where there are extensive seagrass beds on which they can feed.21 As this survey already suggests, the marine environment of Southeast Asia is characterized by a myriad of species. There are many hundreds of commercially important species of finfish, crustaceans, and molluscs in the seas of Southeast Asia. Coral reefs, the marine equivalent of the tropical rainforest, are especially renowned for the diversity of life they support. Marr’s comment that “it is … not uncommon to take as many as 200 species in a single trawl haul”22 illustrates the variety of demersal species. A typical haul of a purse seine or other net used to catch pelagic fish yields far fewer species but nevertheless several different species. As a general rule, any given area of sea in the region contains far more species than an area the same size in temperate latitudes but far fewer individuals of each species. Some species occur (or once did in some cases) in large schools such as Indian mackerel and skipjack tuna, but most fisheries may be described as more or less “multispecies” in nature. Even skipjack tuna are often captured along with other species, particularly juvenile

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

17

yellowfin tuna. How much and what fishers capture, it needs to be added, depends not only on the natural abundance and distribution of species in a particular fishing spot but also the ability of fishers to entice fish to that spot. More specifically, fishers have invented various devices (called “fish aggregating devices” [FADs] in the fisheries literature) to take advantage of the tendency of many species to gather under floating logs, branches, and seaweed or to be attracted by bright lights shining near the surface of the water on moonless nights. At this point it is useful to see the marine environment of Southeast Asia as being made up of several types of ecological subsystems, or “strata”. Following Pauly and Christensen, we can distinguish four strata, two of which are separated into substrata: I.

Shallow inshore waters down to a depth of 10 metres a. Estuarine, mangrove-lined waters b. Reef-flats/seagrass-dominated waters II. Waters ranging from 10 to 50 metres deep a. Soft-bottom communities b. Coral reef communities III. Deep shelves, waters from 50 to 200 metres deep IV. Oceanic waters, all waters deeper than 200 metres23

Each of these strata is characterized by a different assemblage of species — ponyfish (Leiognathidae) and shrimps in II(a), fusiliers (Caesionidae) and snappers (Lutjanidae) in II(b), yellowfin tuna and marlin in IV, and so forth. It is precisely for this reason that this categorization provides a useful schema for tracing the movement of fishing into new ecosystems. It is important, however, to see these strata as part of one large ecosystem encompassing the land and the sea. The productivity of fish and shrimps in shallow seas lined by mangroves, for example, depends on the existence of those mangroves, since mangroves provide nurseries for many species of fish and shrimps and mangrove litter is washed from shore into deeper waters. Certain species of fish such as hilsa shad (Tenualosa ilisha) school in coastal waters but go up rivers to spawn, while others such as barramundi (Lates calcarifer) inhabit rivers but spawn in estuaries. Frigate tuna (Auxis thazard thazard ) inhabit oceanic waters as well as the deeper shelf areas. And the larvae of fish and invertebrates may be taken by currents several hundred kilometres through oceanic waters from one

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

18

Chapter 1

reef system to another.24 Consequently, what happens in one stratum affects what happens in others, as will become clear in this history. So far I have described the marine environment as timeless, undergoing the same fluctuations every year. Here two points need to be made. First, the abundance of marine life can change from year to year for reasons that have nothing to do with the intensity of fishing. Some of these variations are associated with the oscillation in atmospheric pressure between the western and the eastern Pacific. Normally, the atmospheric pressure is higher in the eastern Pacific than it is over the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. In these conditions strong trade winds blow westwards across the Pacific. These winds cause strong upwelling along the northeast coast of South America, bringing to the surface nutrients that allow high fish populations to maintain themselves. They also push warm surface water westward across the Pacific, bringing rainy conditions in the west. During an El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event, which occurs once every two to seven years, the atmospheric pressure drops in the eastern Pacific and increases in the west. As this happens the winds weaken or even reverse direction. Warm surface water then flows eastward across the Pacific, bringing rains, and upwelling weakens off the coast of South America, where as a result there is a collapse in fish populations. In Southeast Asia an ENSO event brings drier air, resulting in warmer surface waters as well as drought. The changes in winds, currents, rainfall, salinity, water temperature, and depth of the thermocline associated with an ENSO event affect marine animals in different ways depending on the species and location. Sardinella appear to be much more abundant in the Bali Strait during ENSO events than at other times.25 In the Philippines small pelagic fish appear to move offshore, while tuna disperse over a greater area.26 Warmer water causes coral to “bleach” as the polyps expel zooxanthellae from their tissues. And in the Indian Ocean the three-dimensional distribution of different species of tuna changes markedly.27 The second point is that fishing and other human activities have had a profound impact on the marine environment, particularly since the 1960s. In some areas intensive trawling has changed both the abundance and composition of fish life. For example, ponyfish no longer dominate demersal communities in the shallow, soft-bottom waters of the Gulf of Thailand as they did before the onset of trawling. Likewise, the destruction of vast areas of mangroves in many areas has

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

19

had many ecological consequences. Thus, as I hope to show, fishing has both brought about and been affected by ecological changes.

Some basic concepts At this point I need to introduce some of the concepts that I will use to tell the story of the process that has led to the closing of the frontier. Figure 1.1 gives a schematic view of two villages (X and Y) and a three dimensional view of the neighbouring sea divided up into sections (A to E) defined by their distance from the villages and their depth in the sea. Imagine that the fishers in village X fish in section A. The quantity and species of fish they catch depend on two things. First, they depend on what fish are in the waters they fish and whether they have the time and means to catch those fish. How many fish of different species are in section A may change according to natural fluctuations in fish populations (or “stocks” in much of the fisheries literature) as well as how much effort the fishers put into catching them. Second, the quantity and species of fish they catch depend on what they want to catch. If they spend most of their time farming or in some other pursuit on land, they may only want to catch enough to feed their families. But if they devote most of their lives to fishing they will have to sell or barter at least some of what they catch, since no one can live by fish alone. If there is a big demand for their catch — if there is a large population of people in the hinterland who want to eat fish and can afford to do so, and if there is an efficient means of processing the catch and transporting it to that population — and if they want to acquire various goods, they are likely to want to catch a lot of fish. They may be able to keep on catching more and more fish without any sign of depletion if they are merely nibbling away at the edges of a population of fish spread over a much larger area than section A (and if the fishers in section B and beyond are having no impact on this population). If a large proportion of the population is largely confined to section A for at least part of the year, however, they will find a number of things happening. The average size of the fish they catch will drop. There will be greater fluctuations in the catch because of the reduced number of age groups in the population. They will find that while they are catching more and more fish they have to put more effort into catching each additional kilogram or ton of fish. In other words, there is a decline

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Figure 1.1 Schematic View of Two Villages and Neighbouring Sea

20

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Chapter 1

Introduction

21

in “catch per unit effort” (CPUE). And if they keep on increasing their fishing effort their total catch will eventually reach a peak — the “maximum sustainable yield” if it proves possible to maintain that catch in the long term — but then start to decline. It is at this point that what fisheries scientists call “biological overfishing” has taken place. The application of more and fishing effort beyond the point at which the greatest catch occurs may bring about a collapse of the fish population, but this may not necessarily happen immediately. In a multispecies fishery such as is typical of Southeast Asia large, long-lived species (generally at a high trophic level) that are easily caught in the initial stages of expansion tend to be replaced by smaller, short-lived species (at a low trophic level). At some point, however, the size of the total catch will decline drastically if fishing pressure continues to increase. Fisheries scientists now use the term “ecosystem overfishing” to refer to a fishery characterized by declining total catches, diminished diversity, a fall in the mean trophic level of the catch, and greater variability in the abundance of species.28 In this history I will use the term “overfishing” in most cases simply to refer without great precision to severe depletion of a fish population. To return to our imaginary sea in Figure 1.1, a number of things might happen as the fish population becomes increasingly depleted in section A. First, the fishers might reduce their fishing effort to allow the population to recover. If they had exploited the population to the point where biological overfishing had taken place, they will find that as they reduce their fishing effort they actually catch more fish, since it becomes much easier to capture fish as they become more abundant. Such restraint is possible if a state authority decides that fishing effort is to be reduced and has the power to enforce this decision or if the villagers themselves agree to cut back on the intensity of their fishing. If, however, the fish of section A remain freely available to all — if, in other words, the fish in that section are an “open access resource” — individual fishers are likely to have no incentive to reduce their fishing effort, for the fish they leave in the sea may well be caught by someone else. Second, as the fish population becomes depleted, the fishers of village X may put even more effort into catching the fish in section A, for several different possible reasons. They may not have access to the capital needed to acquire boats that will allow them to travel to more distant fishing grounds. They may not have the means to preserve fish caught in distant

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

22

Chapter 1

fishing grounds. Or the price of the fish still available in section A may be so high and the opportunities for investing the money earned so promising that it is still worth their while to exploit that section A even more intensively even at the risk of destroying the fishery forever. They may, in other words, decide to treat the fishery as a mine rather than a renewable resource. Subsidies granted by some state authority may also prompt them to intensify exploitation of the population despite severe depletion, for subsidies lower “the biomass at which fishing becomes unprofitable”.29 Third, the fishers in village X may move along the coast and fish in section B using exactly the same fishing methods that they had been using before. This of course assumes that they have the means to travel along the coast and some way to preserve their catch before returning to village X. It also assumes that they have free access to section B. This depends on what rules some governing body may have set down, whether those rules are enforced, and of course whether the fishers of village Y see the fishers of village X as outsiders and take effective steps to stop them from fishing in section B. If section B is in fact freely accessible, the fishers of village X can exploit that section just as they had section A. Finally, the fishers of village X may decide to start fishing in section C, especially if their access to section B is restricted for some reason. Again, this assumes that they have boats which allow them to fish in section C and return home with their catch and that they will have no trouble selling this catch, which is likely to consist of different species than those in section A. It also assumes that the fish in section C are freely available to anyone with the means to capture them and that there are no fishers from outside the region already intensively fishing in the section. And it assumes that the fishers of village X have appropriate technology (and the capital needed to acquire it) to catch the species of fish that inhabit waters further from shore. If the fishers of village X do in fact successfully fish in section C and put more and more effort into trying to capture the fish in that section, they may eventually find the same signs of depletion that they experienced in section A. When that happens, they will face nearly the same range of possibilities that they did when section A became depleted. Unlike some of those who collect shellfish or use casting nets along the shore of section A, however, they have to worry about the high costs of operating their fishing gear and so

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Introduction

23

are more likely to want to move on to new fishing grounds, particularly if their boats have no alternative use or if they have no chance of finding other work. The process I have described might well extend the frontier of fisheries into section D or even into section E. In theory, fishers might eventually exploit the whole of the sea. There is, however, nothing inevitable about this process. Any movement of the frontier of fisheries depends on a wide range of circumstances. We therefore need to trace the extension of the fisheries frontier of Southeast Asia step by step.

Sources and scope A few words are in order regarding the sources I have used in writing this history. Ideally, the historian attempting to write a history encompassing Southeast Asia as a whole would draw on a substantial historical literature related to particular parts of the region. Unfortunately, there is much less historical literature on fisheries than there is on many other economic activities such as mining and plantation agriculture. The few historical works that do exist are extremely valuable and often suggestive of larger themes,30 but they fall well short of providing the basis for a general account. I have therefore had to rely heavily on such sources as travel accounts, the reports and archives of fishery departments, fishery and scientific journals, the work of anthropologists,31 reports in newspapers and magazines, the publications of international bodies such as the FAO and research centres such as the Southeast Asia Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) and the International Center for Living Aquatic Resource Management (ICLARM), and, to a very small extent, interviews with people involved in the fisheries of Southeast Asia. The publications of fisheries scientists have been particularly important in my attempt to trace changes in the location and intensity of fishing, for “fisheries science … is a strongly historical discipline” in which its practitioners produce narratives of changes in particular places over time.32 Analyses of trawl surveys conducted over several years are typical of this feature of fisheries science. There is therefore a wealth of material available for historians of fisheries to work with. In fact, I should emphasize that the sources listed in the notes and bibliography represent but a tiny fraction of the sources that a historian might profitably use. Japanese fishery journals, historical

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works in Japanese and Thai, the archives of the Asian Development Bank, and materials in Vietnamese and French libraries and archives are just a few of the sources that, with more time, money, and languages, I might have used. In view of the abundance of potential sources I am confident that other historians will be able to shed light on many of the issues that I have left unresolved. The problem of statistics deserves special mention. Up to the 1930s trade data and anecdotal reports provide the only way of gauging changes in catches. In 1931 the government of British Malaya started publishing data on landings of different kinds of fish but officials were under no illusions about the accuracy of the data they collected. When in 1938 the Superintendent for Marine and Customs for Malaya asked the British Advisor of Kelantan to begin collecting data on the quantity and species of fish caught by the fishers of the state, the Advisor provided some figures but questioned their value. “They are certainly not made from an exact weighing of the catch as landed from the boats as the catch of fresh fish is landed at uncertain times and almost instantly scattered all over the country.” The superintendent replied that while the figures were “pure estimations” they “are obviously more accurate than none at all”.33 In his review of the marine and freshwater fisheries of Indochina in the 1930s Gourou was not prepared to go even this far. “It is impossible to establish a production figure”, he explained, since “the major part of the fish caught in Indochina is … caught by the consumers themselves, and passes without commercial middlemen from river to kitchen”.34 The only estimate we have for fish landings for all of Southeast Asia at this time is a figure for 1938 later issued by the FAO.35 In the post-war period most governments began to compile annual fishery statistics and pass these on to the FAO. The fact that an ever increasing proportion of the total catch was landed at a few large fishing ports and entered the market made the task of compiling the data much easier than it had been before the war. There are, however, still many reasons to question the reliability of fishery statistics. Fishery officers often have to rely on the declarations of the fishers themselves, who as a general rule underreport their catches, often, as in the case of the operators of big fishing companies in the Philippines, out of suspicion that the tax authorities will use these data to assess the accuracy of their stated profits.36 To complicate matters further, fish reported as landed in one country are often caught in the

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waters of another, while in some fisheries a large proportion of the catch is immediately discarded. Fisheries scientists have developed ingenious ways of circumventing some of these problems. For example, they have taken the ratio between shrimp and fish in trawl catches to estimate the quantity of fish thrown overboard in the world’s shrimp fisheries including those of Southeast Asia.37 But many problems remain. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that, deficient though they are even today, fishery statistics have steadily become more and more reliable. In 2001 a group of fishery experts suggested that Southeast Asian fishery statistics had actually become less reliable in recent years because of a vicious cycle in which the inadequacy of the statistics in helping governments make decisions had led them to devote even fewer resources to compiling them.38 We must therefore exercise extreme caution when using fishery statistics. Interpreted in conjunction with a variety of other sources, however, they do allow us to trace the broad outline of the story that this book tells. As for the scope of this history, my focus is almost entirely on the capture fisheries of maritime Southeast Asia. Thus, I pay almost no attention to the cultivation of fish in brackish water ponds or in fish pens or fish cages. Aquaculture must, however, receive some attention. Aquaculture has depended on the collection of animals (fish larvae, berried shrimp, and so forth) for stocking ponds and cages, and particularly since the 1970s, the cutting down of mangrove forests to construct fish ponds appears to have affected capture fisheries. As would already be clear, this book deals with the marine fisheries of Southeast Asia, but I will occasionally refer to freshwater fisheries, mainly because changes in the productivity of freshwater fisheries may have had some impact on the intensity of fishing in the sea. As far as the marine life itself is concerned, my focus is on finfish, shrimps, squids, and other animal life captured on a large scale, but I also give some attention to sea cucumbers, pearl oysters, whales, and some other animals that, while taken in comparatively small quantities, have been the object of intensive fishing in certain places at certain times. From a geographical point of view, this history does not give fishing along the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia the attention it deserves, a deficiency that I hope others will soon correct. As for the fishers themselves, “small-scale” fishers — those belonging to a category that came into existence after World War II to refer to fishers

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who did not take part in the emerging technologically advanced, capitalintensive sector — do not feature as prominently in this account as they might in view of the fact that they form the overwhelming majority of fishers. This is simply because my aim is to focus on the extension of the frontier of fishing rather than to write a general history of the marine fisheries of Southeast Asia. Last of all, I need to explain why I have taken 1850 as the starting point for this history. Ideally, a history of the marine fisheries of Southeast Asia should begin well before that date, since by 1850 the fishers of the region had already developed extremely elaborate methods of catching fish and many of them were already producing for the market, but because sources on fishing before the middle of the nineteenth century are both more sparse and more difficult to interpret I have chosen 1850 as my starting point. In any case, the momentous changes that are the concern of this history began in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Reproduced from The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 18502000, by John G. Butcher (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Individual articles are available at 27 The Fisheries of Southeast Asia< in the Middle of the Nineteenth> Century http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg

2 The Fisheries of Southeast Asia in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century

In 1850 Southeast Asia had a population of just forty million or so. The greatest concentrations of population were in Java (with perhaps a quarter of the total), Madura, Bali, the rice basins of the Menangkabau highlands of west Sumatra, the dry zone of the Irrawaddy, the flood plain of the Chao Phraya, the coast of Vietnam, Luzon, and southwest Sulawesi. There were pockets of population in the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca and numerous small sultanates in the island world from Aceh in the west to Ternate in the east. In contrast, large sections of Southeast Asia such as much of the area along both sides of the Straits of Malacca, most of Borneo, and most of the eastern island world were very sparsely populated. The great majority of the people of the region were peasant farmers, growing rice and other food crops for their own consumption and usually producing food and other goods for their overlords as well. A very small proportion of the population lived in cities and towns or worked in mines and plantations. The people of the region lived within or on the fringes of a very large number of political units in which power was, at least from our vantage point, highly decentralized, though less so in the few areas then under colonial rule such as Java, the Straits Settlements, Luzon, and the Visayas than in most of the rest of the region. In this world of scores of polities and thousands of islands a powerful unifying influence was the sea. It was by sea that people travelled long distances, and it was by sea that nearly all the long-distance trade was conducted, not only within the region but also with China, India, and Europe. Trade in sea-going sailing vessels

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and, by 1850, a tiny number of steamships was the lifeblood of such port cities as Singapore, Batavia, Surabaya, Makassar, and Manila. And it was the sea that provided animal life that people exploited both for food for themselves and for products that they could trade with others. For many people the capture of marine life was not their main activity. They were primarily agriculturalists and fished when planting and harvesting did not demand their full attention. For others, however, fishing was their main source of livelihood. The Bajau Laut and other sea nomads spent their whole lives in their boats living off the fruits of the sea. In fishing villages scattered around the coasts of Southeast Asia but concentrated near centres of population the whole routine of life was caught up in fishing. Typically, it was the men who went out to sea to fish and took care of the fishing gear, while the women looked after processing and marketing the catch. In Brunei, observed St John, the men delivered their catches as quickly as possible to their wives and daughters, who “are waiting their arrival, and immediately pull off to the floating market to dispose of the day’s capture”.1 If more recent evidence is any guide, women and children also collected large quantities of shellfish and other animals on mud flats and reef flats. All of these people depended on the wealth of the sea. It is with this wealth that we need to begin our survey.

The wealth of the sea We have no way of estimating the abundance of fish, shrimps, oysters, and other marine animals in the middle of the nineteenth century, as the first systematic surveys did not take place until after World War II. We therefore have to rely entirely on anecdotal evidence to gain an impression of the abundance of marine life at this time, but this at least gives us a base from which we can judge the great changes that began to take place in the middle of the twentieth century.2 “No part of the world abounds in more fine fish”, declared Crawfurd. “The seas of the western parts of the Archipelago particularly the Straits of Malacca, and the shores of the Gulf of Siam, are the most remarkable for their abundance of edible fish”.3 Along the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, wrote Anderson, “fish of the choicest and most delicate description is extremely abundant”,4 while along the east coast, according

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to Clifford, “the fish crowd the shallow shoal waters, and move up and down the coast, during the whole of the open season, in great schools acres in extent”.5 An Englishman who sailed along the west coast of Borneo in the 1820s commented that “the coasts and rivers abound with excellent and wholesome fish in the greatest variety, and of the most delicious flavours”.6 Hugh Low observed that the waters along the coast of Sarawak abounded in “fine” fish and that a species of small shrimp was “found in enormous numbers on the borders of the sea” during “the fine season”.7 And the chief commissioner of British Burma described the sea in the Mergui Archipelago as “literally alive with fish”.8 We must treat these descriptions with caution. European observers may have exaggerated the abundance of the marine life of Southeast Asia just as they did the fertility of the soils. Nevertheless, reports about the abundance of fish in very specific locations certainly confirm the impression given by these accounts. According to a survey of the fisheries of the Netherlands Indies published in 1882, tenggiri (Spanish mackerel) and two other fish I am unable to identify were “very abundant” in the waters near Pariaman on the west coast of Sumatra and could be seen “in great schools” from the shore between October and December.9 At certain times in the Panjang Strait (known to the Dutch as the Brouwerstraat), according to an account of the shad (terubuk, Tenualosa macrura and T. toli) fishery there, “the movement near the surface of a solid mass of fish, consisting almost entirely of spawners, produces a choppy rippling of the water”.10 Munshi Abdullah recalled that when the British arrived at Singapore in 1819 “fish were very plentiful and large ones were found close to shore”.11 When the naturalist Tenison-Woods travelled along the west coast of the Malay Peninsula in the 1880s he found that at the mouth of one river “the mud is almost alive” with crocodiles and added that “I have never seen such numbers, or such large crocodiles in any other place in the whole course of my travels”.12 And it was Alfred Russel Wallace’s judgement that “there is perhaps no spot in the world richer in marine productions, corals, shells and fishes” than Ambon harbour: The bottom was absolutely hidden by a continuous series of corals, sponges, actiniae, and other marine productions, of magnificent dimensions, varied forms, and brilliant colours. The depth varied from about twenty to fifty feet, and the bottom was very uneven, rocks and chasms, and little hills and valleys, offering a variety of stations for the growth of these animal forests.

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In and out among them moved numbers of blue and red and yellow fishes, spotted and banded and striped in the most striking manner, while great orange or rosy transparent medusae floated along near the surface.13

Of special value in judging the abundance of marine animals at this time are the observations of some of the earliest fisheries scientists. “The shore is very low, the waters very muddy, and abound in animal life”, wrote Francis Day in his report on the fisheries of Burma. “Crustacea are in myriads, and marine fish which prey upon them, are in abundance”.14 On a visit to the fabled fishing grounds near Sitangkai in the Sulu Archipelago Alvin Seale, a pioneer of fisheries science in the Philippines, witnessed “a most astonishing movement of mullet”: A noise like a great waterfall was heard. Hastening to the beach I saw a vast shoal of fish coming from the north, keeping quite near the shore; they were leaping along the water in great flashing waves. The shoal was fully 100 yards wide and 500 yards long; there must have been over a million individuals in it.15

And in 1925 Hugh M. Smith, who had been the U.S. commissioner of fisheries and was now the fisheries adviser to the government of Siam, concluded with respect to the waters of Siam that “it seems altogether probable that in no other country do shrimps exist in greater profusion”.16 We have very few sources that allow us to judge the abundance of large pelagic fish such as tuna, mainly because they inhabited deep water and were beyond the reach of most fishers, but a passage in an account of an English whaler’s journey around the world in the 1830s gives us a glimpse into the deep sea (and, incidentally, illustrates the propensity of many species to gather under floating objects). While becalmed about 150 kilometres off the north coast of New Guinea, the crew of the Tuscan observed several logs floating near the ship and went in a boat to see the largest, which turned out to be “an entire tree, more than sixty feet in length”, covered with barnacles, crabs, and other animals and perforated by ship borers: In the water around was assembled a vast number of fish, chiefly yellowtails (Elagatis), rudder-fish (Caranx antilliarum [Caranx hippos, crevalle jack]), filefish (Balistes), some albacore [Thunnus], brown sharks, and many other kinds, of grotesque forms and gaudy hues …; the whole presenting a marine spectacle of a highly novel and animated character. The timber was towed to the ship, and part of it taken on board as fire-wood, and upon making

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sail, a large proportion of the fish accompanied the ship, and continued to do so for several weeks [as the ship sailed first west and then south towards Timor].17

While large tunas and other large pelagic fish were rarely captured by humans at this time, the largest marine animal, the sperm whale, had been the object of hunting by English and American (and some Australian) whalers for several decades. All we can say is that sperm whales were sufficiently abundant to continue to attract whalers to their waters in the 1840s and into the 1850s. In 1852 one traveller came across two large sperm whales in the southwestern part of the Java Sea,18 but the whalers mainly hunted them in the Indian Ocean south of the string of islands from Java to Timor, the Savu Sea, the Ombai (Timor) Strait, the seas between Timor and the Philippines, and in the Pacific Ocean east of the Philippines as well as further north off the coast of Japan and in the South Pacific.19 The presence of sperm whales in Southeast Asian waters, it is worth adding, gives us indirect evidence of the abundance of other species. The 1882 survey describes the annual migration of sperm whales from the Indian Ocean through the passages in the Lesser Sunda Islands northward to the Pacific Ocean and back, stopping in straits and bays along the way to feed on the inktvisschen (squid or cuttlefish) and small fish found in “astonishing profusion” in these waters.20 The sources available from the middle of the nineteenth century are vague and anecdotal. Nevertheless, they do allow us to conclude that in the middle of the nineteenth century the seas of Southeast Asia were blessed with a great abundance of animal life. We can also be certain of the variety of animal life, which a handful of European taxonomists were busy naming and cataloguing. The most notable of these scientists was M.-P. Bleeker, who published nine volumes of his Atlas Ichthyologique des Indes Orientales Néêlandaises between 1862 and 1877.

The products of the sea The people of Southeast Asia exploited marine animals for a vast variety of purposes. The most important of these was for food for daily human consumption. Fish (in which term we can include shrimps, squids, shellfish, and other animals) comprised a vital part of the diets of most Southeast Asians. “Fish constitutes the chief animal aliment of all the

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inhabitants” of the island world, noted Crawfurd, adding that in most languages of the island world “the same word expresses both fish and flesh”.21 According to Gourou, “the products of the fisheries occupy a place superior to meat in the diet of the Indochinese”,22 while Graham commented that “almost every mouthful of rice” consumed by the people of Siam “is made palatable and helped down by fish in some form or other”.23 The survey of the fisheries of the Netherlands Indies asserts that in Java “fish along with rice is the main component of the native’s meal”,24 while the first American census of the Philippines reached the conclusion that “about nine-tenths of the people of the islands use fish as their principal flesh diet”.25 It appears that the lower a person was in the social hierarchy the greater was the relative importance of fish in that person’s diet. Writing of Singapore in the 1820s, Crawfurd noted that “with his rice the common labourer consumes fish, occasionally pork, and very generally a considerable quantity of ardent spirits”, while those in “the class of artificer” consumed “a daily allowance of pork” as well.26 Fish was consumed in many different ways. Fisherfolk and people who lived close to markets could eat fresh fish. More commonly, however, fish was consumed after undergoing some form of preservation, for fish quickly spoils in the hot, humid climate. Even fisherfolk consumed at least part of their fish intake in a preserved form, usually out of necessity, since for most of them there were times of the year when there were few fish or when the weather prevented them from catching them, but sometimes out of choice. A U.S. official remarked that the fishing communities of the Tawi Tawi Islands seemed “to prefer sun dried to fresh fish”, even though “the waters surrounding the islands appear alive with fish”, apparently all-year round.27 The most common method of preserving marine life was in fact to lay fish and other animals out on the beach or on special platforms to dry in the sun. Salt played a vital part in the preservation of fish by the removal of water, “thus delaying putrefaction since water is required by all agents and processes leading to protein spoilage”.28 Tiny fish could be dried without salt, but generally salt was essential unless the fish were going to be consumed within a short time, though Sumatrans were reputed to have a high tolerance for decaying fish.29 Whether prepared with salt or not, dried fish was, observed Crawfurd, “an article of as universal consumption among Indian islanders as flesh is in cold countries”.30 Nearly all the other ways of preserving

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fish also involved the use of salt. A common method in the island world was to boil fish in brine and then dry it; the result was a product — known as pindang in Java — that would keep for a few days without spoiling. A technique used for preserving Indian mackerel (Rastrelliger species) along the coasts of the Gulf of Siam produced a partially rather than completely dried product. The fish were beheaded and gutted, placed in pickling vats for a day, and then dried in the sun for just one day before being pressed, usually along with generous amounts of salt, into wooden packing cases or baskets.31 This product was known in foreign markets as “Siam fish”. Many different pastes and sauces made from the fermentation of aquatic animals were widely consumed as well. In Vietnam the most important of these was nuoc mam, a sauce made in the south from the fermentation of certain clupeids. “The dream of every Annamese peasant …”, wrote Gourou, “is to have an abundance, at times when the stomach cries from hunger, of beautiful steaming white rice and nuoc mam of the highest quality, of a clear yellow, to sprinkle on his rice”.32 In the island world fish paste and particularly shrimp paste — made by grinding tiny shrimps, allowing them to ferment, and then drying the resulting mass — were an important part of the diet. Indeed, Crawfurd described shrimp paste — known most widely by its Malay name, belacan — as “the universal sauce of the Indian islanders”, without which “no food is deemed palatable”.33 An important part of the diets of Burmans was ngapi, of which one type was virtually identical to belacan and another was prepared using whole fish. Salt was used in preparing all of these products. The importance of aquatic animals to nutrition took many forms. For most people fish was almost their only source of animal protein, for meat was seldom eaten except on special occasions. It also supplied them with calcium (for tiny dried fish were eaten whole), iodine, and various other essential nutrients. It is important to point out that the amount of fish people consumed varied from one part of the region to another. The 1903 census of the Philippines asserted, for example, that coastal people consumed much more fish than those in the interior of the islands.34 Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression gained from accounts of what people ate at this time is that most people consumed fish in very small quantities. Here a European traveller describes a meal in a Malay house in Malacca:

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Cooking operations are simple, for the meal usually consists of boiled rice, small pieces of dried fish heated over the embers of the fire, and a concoction of hot red chillies that have been ground with salt into a paste. The smoking rice is put in the centre of the floor; pieces of dried fish and fiery chillies, ground up with salt are the usual relishes, and around this simple fare the family sit with their legs crossed.35

A more general report from the 1880s conveys a similar impression: Where meat is almost unobtainable, or if obtained is coarse and uneatable, the dried salt fish is the only article of food to be relied upon, and, so far as my experience goes, it is both palatable and nourishing. It is soaked and cut up into small dice, and fried until quite brown. A small quantity of this mixed with boiled rice makes a dish, which Chinese, Malays and Europeans seem equally to relish.36

Per capita consumption of fish was particularly low in parts of Java. Arminius’s survey of the diets of Javans conducted in the 1880s suggests that many of them ate little or no dried fish but that belacan (called terasi in Java) was an important part of their diets.37 Belacan contributed to people’s diets not because it was rich in protein, for it was consumed in tiny quantities, but because its use as a condiment stimulated the consumption of unpolished rice and soya products, their main sources of protein.38 Although our concern is with marine fisheries, it is important to note that the fish and other aquatic life people ate came from rivers, lakes, paddy fields, and irrigation canals, and fresh and brackish water ponds specially constructed for the cultivation of fish as well as from the sea. The relative importance of these sources of aquatic food varied greatly from one part of Southeast Asia to another. Gourou commented in the 1930s that freshwater fishing was much more important than sea fishing in Indochina. Indeed, the Tonlé Sap (“Great Lake”), expanding into nutrient-rich forests as waters from the Mekong flowed up the Tonlé Sap River at the height of the monsoon, supported one of the most productive fisheries in the world. In the mid-1800s the people living in the Irrawaddy and Chao Phraya flood plains consumed far more fish from freshwater than saltwater sources. All of the mainland peoples had developed sophisticated ways of catching freshwater fish, and the leasing of fisheries to the highest bidder was a common practice. In the island world some lakes such as Laguna de Bay in Luzon, rivers, paddy fields, and, particularly

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in Java, freshwater fish ponds provided significant quantities of fish to local populations. And along the north coast of central and east Java, along the southwest coast of Sulawesi, and in the Philippines brackish water fish ponds were cultivated, mainly for milkfish (Chanos chanos). In Java milkfish fry were collected from inshore waters and placed in the ponds, while in many parts of the Philippines the ponds were “stocked by chance, the proprietors merely opening the gates [to the pond] at flood tide and allowing what will to enter”. Once in the pond these herbivorous fish grew with the minimum of care.39 Nevertheless, we can conclude that the sea was by far the most important source of the aquatic animal life consumed by the people in the island world. Moreover, it is clear that the coastal people of the mainland relied very heavily on the sea for the fish they ate. Crawfurd’s judgement was that “the inhabitants of the coast [of Cochinchina], at least, … must draw a great share of their subsistence” from sea fishing.40 Marine animals provided a multitude of other products in addition to food for everyday consumption. Some of these products had relatively low prices, such as coral, often burnt to produce lime used for making mortar,41 but many others were luxury items of great value in the market. The roes of certain fish were regarded as a delicacy; the salted roes of shad caught in the Panjang Strait fetched a very high price. The swimbladders of a number of species of fish including barramundi were used to make isinglass, “the purest form of animal jelly”, a product in great demand in Europe and China, used in cooking and medicines and in clarifying and “fining” beer and wine.42 Sharks were a source of oil used in lamps, the skins of sharks and rays served as an abrasive in carpentry, and sharks’ fins were the basis of a soup consumed by Chinese. One of the most valuable sea creatures was tripang, also consumed by Chinese in soups and regarded by them as having medicinal and aphrodisiacal properties. The preparation of tripang entailed a careful process of gutting, boiling, and smoke-drying, the result aptly described by Wallace as “looking like sausages which have been rolled in mud and then thrown up the chimney”.43 Crocodile penises were regarded as an aphrodisiac by Chinese.44 At Singkawang squid and a certain kind of crab were used in Chinese medicine.45 In Ternate seahorses were used as talismans.46 Sperm whales were a source of food, oil, which Bennett described as “the purest of all the animal oils employed in commerce”

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and therefore the one “most valued for domestic illumination”, spermaceti, which in the West was used as a substitute for wax in making candles, and ambergris, which in the West was used in the manufacture of expensive perfume and which in Asia was used for many purposes including the treatment of blood poisoning and tuberculosis, and ivory.47 Turtles were caught for their flesh, eggs, and, most of all, their shells, used in artwork both in China and Europe and also in medicine in China. A single shell of the caret turtle destined for the China market “may be valued at one thousand guilders [$400] and upwards”.48 And various species of shellfish including trochus and, most importantly, the pearl oyster provided mother of pearl shell, used to make, among other things, buttons and knife handles and to decorate furniture. The pearl oyster was of course also the source of the most valuable marine product of all, pearls. There is one more product of the sea that we must mention even though it did not come from an animal, and that is salt. Next to the fish themselves salt was the lifeblood of fishing. Salt was the key ingredient in the preservation of fish and the preparation of belacan. It was salt that made it possible to trade fish products beyond the immediate vicinity of where the fish was landed. Thus, the availability of large quantities of cheap salt was vital to the fishing industry. There were several ways of making salt at this time. On beaches along the south coast of Java it was made by sprinkling sea water on to ridges of sand, letting the water evaporate in the hot sun, scrapping the salt-laden sand together and then placing it into funnels, over which more sea water was poured; the resulting brine was then boiled until only the salt remained.49 In parts of the eastern island world salt was extracted in much the same way from the ashes left by fires on to which sea water had been thrown.50 But methods such as these could not produce the quantities of salt needed to sustain production of large amounts of preserved fish. By far the cheapest and most effective method of producing large amounts of salt was the evaporation of sea water in salt pans. Along the north coast of Java, sea water was let into a series of shallow compartments, becoming increasingly concentrated in each until, in the last one, all the water evaporated and only salt remained; in Burma the water was allowed to evaporate until it formed a slush, which was then filtered to make brine, which in turn was boiled until only salt remained.51 But it was possible to make salt by

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evaporation only where there was an extensive area of low flat land next to the shore, the soil was not porous, and there was a pronounced dry season. In Southeast Asia the only places that met these conditions were the north coast of east Java, Madura, the province of Pangasinan in Luzon, the inner part of the Gulf of Siam, and parts of the coasts of Cochinchina and Burma. Because of its commercial value and because it could be produced on a large scale in just a few places, political authorities in the region often turned to salt as a lucrative source of revenue. In Java the government monopolized the distribution of salt and sold it at a high price, which may be the main reason that, according to Veth, so little use was made of salt in drying the fish consumed by Javans.52 In Siam the monarchy taxed salt, but even so the cost of salt to fish processors was very much lower than it was in Java and so they were able to preserve fish far more cheaply than was the case in Java. Because of its relative cheapness and quality, salt produced in Siam was an important export commodity. “It is chiefly by means of [salt]”, wrote Crawfurd, “that Siam maintains, at present, so considerable a traffic with Palembang, the Straits of Malacca, and other portions of the Malay country”, including Singapore, in the neighbourhood of which “not a grain is manufactured”.53 As all this suggests, there was a vigorous trade in marine products at this time. Products for ordinary consumption such as salted fish and belacan were generally sold and consumed close to the areas where the raw materials used to make them were caught, landed, and processed. If there was a big catch at Jepara, for example, some of it would be salted and dried and then sent to the principalities in the interior of Java, while the exports of Semarang consisted of “a very small amount [sent] to nearby places”.54 “Where exporting does occur”, notes the 1882 survey with respect to Sumatra, “it takes place on a small scale; it appears that in most districts fish are only transported from one coastal place to another or from the coast into the interior”.55 The flesh of shad caught in the Panjang Strait, for example, was sent up the Siak River to the highlands of West Sumatra.56 In contrast, more highly priced fish products were often carried long distances. Most notably, “Siam fish”, a relatively highvalue product which was imported into Batavia as early as the 1770s,57 was carried to “all the principal ports of the Archipelago” and was used to supply “the demand for ship stores”.58 Likewise, shad roe produced in

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the Panjang Strait was shipped to Singapore and from there all over the island world.59 Other goods that were less perishable as well as more valuable travelled even greater distances. Turtle shell, pearl shell, and pearls were all shipped to Europe. A whole range of products of which tripang, turtle shell, and pearl shell were the most important was carried to China, the great market for the “exotic” products of Southeast Asia. And the whale oil and spermaceti extracted by English and American whalers were carried around the world to markets in London and New England.

Methods of capture The coastal people of Southeast Asia were, as Crawfurd observed of the islanders, “expert fishermen. There is no art which they have carried to such perfection as that of fishing”.60 The basis of their art was a profound practical knowledge of the habitats and behavioural patterns of the animals they wanted to catch. The fishers of the Panjang Strait, for example, believed (consistent with current scientific knowledge) that the male shad turned into a female upon entering the strait.61 And fishers along the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, for example, attributed “the failure or success of a fishing season to the presence and regularity” of the monsoon winds and to “the relative amount of sea-borne sediment resulting from rainfall and river spoil”.62 A related element of the art of fishing was a highly developed ability to locate fish. Schools of Indian mackerel could be detected during moonless nights by the bioluminescence produced by plankton disturbed by their movement just below the surface. Often fishers relied on their hearing rather than their sight. Off the north coast of Java, the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and probably in many other places fishing experts submerged themselves in the water to listen for the sounds made by different species of fish. A method used in Java to hear whether fish were present was to dip an oar in the water and hold the other end to the ear. Fishers also had devices to gather fish together so that they could then catch them much more easily. The most important device, called a rumpon or tendak in Java, an unjang in the Malay Peninsula, or a payaw or bombon in the Philippines, consisted of a bamboo float held in place by an anchor line to which palm leaves were attached, as shown in Figure 2.1. Tiny fish sheltered in the leaves and soon attracted

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Figure 2.1 Floating Fish Lures

larger fish so that fishers usually found an abundance of fish under the float a few days after they put it in place, last set their nets at it, or replaced the palm leaves, as they had to do every eight days or so. A method of attracting fish at night was to hold a torch near the surface of the water; torches were used in conjunction with a variety of fishing gears including hooks, nets, and fishing stakes. Yet another method, used in the Riau and Natuna islands, was to shake a string of coconut shells attached to a stick or piece of rattan back and forth in the water or against the side of the boat to make a rattling sound that attracted fish.63 Boats were another essential element of the art of fishing. The fishing boats of Southeast Asia varied greatly in size and design. Perhaps the simplest of these boats was the dugout canoe made by hollowing out the trunk of a small tree. A bigger and much more stable boat could be made by hollowing out the trunk of a large tree and adding an outrigger on one or both sides. An example of such a boat was the perahu jukung (perahu being the generic name for boats in much of the island world) of Madura and east and central Java. The perahu jukung had outriggers on both sides, carried a triangular sail, and was characterized by its very

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elaborate decorations. The capacity and seaworthiness of a boat of this type could be increased by making the sides higher, as was done in the Philippines by attaching woven split bamboo screens to the gunwales and then waterproofing the entire hull with the resin of a particular species of dipterocarp.64 The largest indigenous fishing boats were made from planks. An important example of such a boat was the perahu mayang, the boat from which the fishers of the north coast of Java caught great quantities of scads (layang) and other small pelagic fish. The perahu mayang was a broad, flat-bottomed sail boat made of teak planks. The sail was usually rectangular but in some places it was triangular. The perahu mayang was very seaworthy, but because it had no keel — thus allowing it to pass over the bars at the mouth of the rivers along the north coast of Java — it could not tack into the wind and sailed best before the wind. Unlike the perahu mayang, the lis-alis of Madura had a keel, which protruded at both ends of the boat, and so could be sailed much closer to the wind. A particularly durable boat was the vessel known as a téna from which the men of Lamalera on Lembata hunted whales. This boat was made of planks joined to a keel and one another by dowels and held in place by ribs and thwarts lashed to the planks and each other by twisted rattan. “Such a hull”, Hornell remarked of boats constructed according to the same principle in Ternate, “possesses great elasticity and stands bumping in the surf in a way that no metal-fastened boat would long survive”. The téna was rigged with a rectangular sail that carried the boat out to the whales; projecting from the bow was a platform where the harpooner stood ready for the attack.65 The English and American whalers — large three-masted, square-rigged ships capable of venturing into all of the world’s oceans, carrying supplies for three years, and storing vast quantities of whale oil and other products — might appear to be the largest fishing boats to operate in Southeast Asian waters at this time. However, a scrimshaw plaque purporting to depict an English whaler hunting in the Flores Sea shows that the sleek rowboats from which the crew attacked whales were smaller and flimsier though more manoeuvrable than those used by the whale hunters of Lamalera.66 While this brief description conveys some idea of the main types of fishing boats, it is important to realize that across Southeast Asia there were hundreds of types differing from one another in hull construction and rigging according to tradition, purpose, and the materials available to make them.

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The other essential element of fishing was of course the fishing gear. By the middle of the nineteenth century (and probably very much earlier) the fishers of Southeast Asia had developed a huge variety of fishing gears. The 1882 survey describes about forty different fishing gears used in Java and Madura alone.67 We might classify these fishing gears in any one of several different ways, including the principle by which they captured marine animals, the materials from which the fishing gears were made, whether they were stationary or mobile, whether they cost a great deal or very little to make, whether they could be operated by one person or required the co-operation of many, and, of special importance to the central theme of this book, the kinds of fish they captured and the ecological strata in which they were used. For the moment I will simply use the conventional categories of fishing stakes, portable fish traps, nets, and hooks and refer to a few fishing gears that do not fall into these categories, but as we shall see all the other criteria by which we could classify fishing gears need to be brought in from time to time. There were many different kinds of fishing stakes. Most captured fish by blocking their movements with a barrier of some sort and then funnelling them into a small chamber from which they could be extracted, but beyond this similarity there were some important differences. The sero of Java, the baklad of the Philippines (Figure 2.2), and the poh of the Gulf of Siam could be described as “fish corrals”. These stakes all had a barrier that blocked the movement of fish and then guided them through successively smaller chambers until they reached the smallest one, where they were captured with nets. Typically such stakes were made of split bamboo screens lashed to a fence-like framework driven into the seabed and were built with the barrier set at a right angle to the shore in order to deflect fish swimming parallel to the shore into the chambers.68 A large fishing stake called a jermal that was widely used in estuaries in the Straits of Malacca worked on a somewhat different principle. A jermal consisted of a slanting screen made of woven rattan which hung between a framework of poles driven into the bottom of the estuary where the water was a few metres deep at low water. The structure was positioned so that fish were driven against the screen by the swift current as the tide went out; the operators of the jermal periodically lifted the screen by means of windlasses or pulleys and then scooped out the fish. The effectiveness of this fishing stake was greatly enhanced by two very long

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Chapter 2 Figure 2.2 A Baklad, a Fish Corral Used in the Philippines

lines of thin poles, placed about half a metre apart, that converged at the entrance of the jermal. According to one theory, fish that came within these wings were frightened by the poles wobbling in the current and, as they tried again and again to swim away from the poles, were eventually swept towards the central part of the trap where they were caught.69 Another large fishing stake was the kelong, used in Riau and the Straits of Malacca. At its core was a chamber containing a screen net that was raised once a lot of fish had gathered above it. A long line of poles placed at the most effective angle in relation to tidal currents guided fish into the chamber. In elaborate forms of this fish stake fish passed through two chambers before entering the one containing the net. In most cases screens lined the sides of the chambers but in some it appears that these were absent. The kelong made its best catches at night when torches placed just above the water in the chamber containing the net helped to attract fish. All of these fishing stakes were located in shallow water and so were usually located close to shore, but they could be fairly far out (“a half hour from shore” in one spot in west Borneo70) where the gradient was very small and long poles were used to construct them.

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Various forms of portable fish traps, known by the generic name bubu in much of the island world, were widely used. A typical fish trap was a cage made of bamboo and rattan that had an opening that a fish or other animal could enter but through which it could not escape. Most types were placed on the sea bottom. Usually they were used in fairly shallow water, including the waters surrounding coral reefs, but fishers in the Moluccas operated a large fish trap (4 × 2 × 1.8 metres) that they placed in waters up to 300 metres deep along with a weight and length of rope that stretched across the seabed. Seven or eight days later they used landmarks to locate where they had dropped the trap and then (as in the case of the very similar trap shown in Figure 2.3) snared the rope with a grapnel and hauled it up from the bottom.71 Along the southwest coast of Sulawesi flyingfish (Cypselurus species) were caught in traps that drifted along with bundles of palm leaves, which offered the fish an attractive place to lay and fertilize their eggs.72 As a rule, fish traps required much less labour or money than fishing stakes to construct. The 1882 survey remarks with respect to Borneo that, whereas fishing stakes were mainly worked by Chinese, traps were mainly operated by Malays, “who profitably alternate this form of fishing with agriculture”.73 Figure 2.3 A Bubo, Used in the Philippines for Catching Coral Reef Species

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Nets provided one of the most important means of capturing fish. A common net for catching fish close to shore was the beach seine, sometimes used with a small boat to help set the net. The tiny shrimps used to make belacan were often caught by push nets, operated by one person wading in shallow water. Casting nets, requiring a great skill to handle, were widely used, both from tiny boats and along the shore without a boat; at night torches were used to attract fish before the net was thrown. Gillnets accounted for a large proportion of the catch in many areas.74 In turbid waters along the west coast of Borneo, shad were caught with a gillnet that was 100 to 400 metres long and 3 to 6 metres deep and was made of ramie fibre imported from China; the net was set in the evening and hauled in the next morning.75 The fishers of Hila in the Moluccas surrounded fish with a net about 250 metres long and then threw stones into the water to frighten them so that they swam into the net and were caught by their gills. This particular net could also be operated like a purse seine, as the fishers could trap fish in a pocket by pulling a rope that passed through lead rings hanging from the lower edge of the net.76 A net widely used off the north coast of Java and Madura and in waters off Aceh and the Malay Peninsula was the payang, which was used to catch small and medium-sized pelagic fish. The payang was a large sack-like net with two long wings bearing some resemblance to a trawl net. The net was made from a fibre that came from the petioles of a particular kind of palm. The upper edge of the net was held in place by bamboo floats, while the lower edge was kept in place by weights. To catch scads and Indian mackerel the payang was always operated in conjunction with a rumpon. At the start of fishing the crew of the fishing boat cast the net and two fishers went into the water to help position it near the rumpon. They then pulled the rumpon up over the edge of the net and back into the water and hauled in the net.77 When the fishing was good, especially when scads were present in great numbers off the north coast of Java and Madura, the fishers could capture as much as a ton of fish in one haul.78 There were many variations on this method. The fishers used the payang without a rumpon to catch anchovies (teri in Malay), and they placed the payang in the water and then tossed bait fish into the water in order to attract small tunas (tongkol ) before capturing them in the net.

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Hooks of many types were used throughout the region, though they probably accounted for a very much smaller proportion of the total catch of fish than did fishing stakes and nets. Hooks were often baited and then dropped on a line from a boat to the depth inhabited by the species being targeted. Trolling from a sailing craft with an unbaited hook and a lure made of chicken feathers or some other bright material was used to catch pelagic species such as small tunas and Spanish mackerel. Longlines, outfitted with a multitude of hooks, were apparently most widely used in the western part of the island world, where they were commonly known as rawai. At the most general level a longline consisted of a very long main line lying parallel to the surface of the water; from this line hung many short lines, each with a barbed hook at the end. In some cases the main line was held in place at the surface by bamboo floats, but in others it was suspended below the surface. Sometimes the main line was allowed to drift with the current, while in others it was held in place by one or more anchors. Some longlines used baited hooks, but others snagged fish on a curtain of unbaited hooks. The sources from this period convey the impression that longlines were used primarily to catch sharks, rays, snappers, and other fish feeding near the seabed.79 Perhaps the most elaborate form of fishing with hooks was the pole-and-line fishery for skipjack tuna (cakalang) in the Moluccas. The fishing gear was simply a pole and line to which was attached a barbless hook with a piece of feather as a lure. A large boat carrying live fish in seawater and a number of smaller boats used for the actual fishing headed to waters where skipjacks were likely to be found. Once a school was spotted, the boats moved as quickly as they could to position themselves right over the fish before they swam away. The crew of the large boat tossed the live bait into the water, while the fishers in the small boats threw their lines into the water and hauled aboard any fish that got hooked trying to eat the lure.80 Various kinds of harpoons were used to catch rays and other large fish, dugongs, and whales. The sea nomads relied heavily on the harpoon as it enabled them to catch just what they needed for their own consumption. The British and American whalers of course used harpoons to kill whales. So too did the inhabitants of Lamalera on Lembata and Lamakera on Solor. According to a Dutch description of whaling on Solor published in 1849, all the boats of the village would put to sea in

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the morning and come together for the attack when a whale was spotted. Having approached the whale, the harpooner on board one of the boats “springs on its back, and drives the harpoon, which is fastened to the boat, with all his force into the animal”. When the whale dived far below the surface dragging the boat with it, the crew of that boat jumped into the water and were rescued by other boats. When the whale eventually surfaced, still dragging the boat, “the surrounding boats approach it and make a second, third and fourth boat fast to the first” in order to slow it down and exhaust it before the hunters finally killed it and towed it to shore.81 There were, in addition, many other ways of capturing marine animals. Stupeficants such as a poison made from the tuba (Derris) root were used to catch fish in relatively confined waters such as lagoons.82 The simplest form of capture was by hand. Huge quantities of shellfish and other animals were collected on mud flats and reef flats at low tide, providing an important source of food without the use of boats or fishing gear; the most important implement used by people collecting molluscs along the inner part of the Gulf of Siam, the western part of the Madura Strait, and in other areas was a board that they used for sliding over the mud.83 Ambergris was collected where it was found washed up on the shore and from boats that happened to come across it floating on the sea as well as being cut from the carcasses of those sperm whales that happened to have it in their intestines.84 In Sulawesi people located tripang in shallow water by feeling them with their feet and then brought them to the surface. In deeper water the primary method of collecting both tripang and pearl oysters was to dive for them, but fishers in the Sulu Archipelago also used a rake dragged along the bottom at the end of a long rope, a method that was much safer than diving and that allowed them to reach depths as great as sixty metres.85 In the Kangean Islands women collected tripang by hand on the reef flats at low tide, while men collected them from boats in deeper water, lowering a weighted, three-pronged spear by rope to a point just above a tripang and then releasing the rope to let the weight pull it to the bottom and impale the animal.86 Turtles were captured in many different ways. The Bajau turned over female turtles when they came ashore to lay their eggs, killed them with clubs, and left them upside down on the beach until they had decomposed sufficiently to easily remove the shell, the only part they were interested in using.87 In the

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area around Ternate, the common remora (Echeneis remora), which has a suction disk on top of its head, was used to catch turtles; the fishers tied a rope to the fish’s tail and when the fish attached itself to the turtle’s body the fishers hauled in the turtle along with the fish.88 Fishers in the Moluccas and west Java caught a kind of needle fish by dangling a baited noose from a kite made from a large leaf and then ensnaring the fish’s long snout when it took the bait.89 And people in western New Guinea used a bow and arrow to shoot large fish swimming near the surface.90

The impetus to catch At this point we need to step back and consider some of the forces that either drove or enticed people to capture marine animals. Subsistence needs, the demands of overlords, and the goods and money provided by traders all played a part, sometimes separately but often in some combination. A powerful force driving people to capture marine animals was simply the desire for tasty, nutritious food. All along the coasts agriculturalists turned to the sea when they needed animal protein. Even those living inland might make a trip to the coast to procure needed food. The inhabitants of the interior of the Aru Islands, for example, “only go to sea occasionally, and then bring home cockles and other shell-fish by the boatload”.91 Those who specialized in the capture of marine animals provided themselves and their families with marine foods, but they also had to exchange at least part of what they caught in order to obtain the other necessities of life. The sources for the middle of the nineteenth century tell us little about these people, for their lives were outside the world of commerce that preoccupied most European observers, but there are occasional references to such exchanges. The whalers of Lamakera and Lamalera, for example, exchanged blubber for corn grown by people in the interior of the island. Most of the fishers in the Moluccas fished primarily for their own needs but sometimes exchanged fish for sago, tapioca, rice, and other foods.92 And the sea nomads had to exchange sea products for rice and other goods produced on land in order to survive. Political overlords relied on various forms of compulsion to extract goods they wanted either for their own consumption or for trade. In Ternate divers collected pearls for the sultan as a form of corvée labour.93

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Crawfurd reported that the people of Pulo Condore (Côn Son) paid tribute to the emperor of Vietnam in the form of live turtles, as well as exchanging live turtles, oil made from turtle fat, dried fish, and some forest products for clothing and rice at Saigon.94 At the time of the British takeover of Singapore the Malay governor of the island ordered the orang laut (“sea peoples”) to sell fish to Colonel Farquhar, who gave them tobacco, rice, clothes, and money in return.95 The strongest form of compulsion was slavery. According to a report from the 1830s, “the Aroo [Aru] people employ their Papuan slaves”, sold to them by Bugis traders, “in diving for the mother o’pearl shell, and in fishing for beche de mer [tripang]”, but the report does not indicate which “Aroo people” owned the slaves.96 Warren’s history of the “Sulu zone”, centred on Jolo, the seat of the Sulu sultanate, and encompassing the Sulu Archipelago, the Sulu and Celebes seas, and the lands bordering these seas, provides the clearest picture of the way political overlords organized the extraction of marine products. In the latter part of the eighteenth century British “country” traders began stopping off at Jolo, where they exchanged European firearms and Indian cloth and opium for tripang, mother of pearl shell, and other marine products as well as jungle products. The traders then sold these goods along with Indian opium in China, thereby giving the East India Company the means to fulfil the ever increasing demand for Chinese tea in the British Isles without having to pay in silver. At the same time Chinese traders based in Manila brought rice to Jolo in exchange for marine and jungle products. The sultan and his chiefs employed the nomadic Bajau Samal Laut and slaves to collect marine products along the extensive coral reefs of the archipelago and the northeast coast of Borneo. As the demand for these products grew in China, the sultan and his chiefs encouraged first the Iranun and then the Balangingi Samal to capture people to provide the labour needed to procure the products. These slave raiders scoured the coasts of the island world and the Malay Peninsula capturing people, whom they carried to Jolo and handed over to the sultan and chiefs in exchange for rice, opium, firearms, and other goods. The sultan and chiefs then put the captives to work alongside the Bajau Samal Laut. Warren estimates that at the height of the trade in the 1830s as many as 68,000 people — even more than the roughly 50,000 “professional” fishers in all of Java and Madura at a

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somewhat later date97 — were engaged each year in diving for pearl shell, collecting tripang, and preparing these goods for export. About 600 tons of tripang and 730 tons of mother of pearl shell were exported from Jolo each year at this time, giving the sultan and chiefs the means to buy the goods brought by the traders.98 The great emporium for the marine products for the eastern archipelago was Makassar. Every year seafarers who were financed and outfitted by Chinese and other merchants in Makassar sailed south through the archipelago to the north coast of Australia, where they collected and processed great quantities of tripang for the China market.99 A smaller number of Bajau fishers also sailed to the north coast of Australia and returned with turtle shells and other marine products they collected there. At the same time Bugis, Chinese, and other traders conducted a trade centred on Makassar but stretching from the free port of Singapore in the west to Dobo, the main town in the Aru Islands, in the east, following the monsoon winds first one way and then back as the winds reversed direction. The main object of this trade was the “pearl and trepang banks, which lie of the eastern side of the group[,] … extend the entire length of the group, and are often several miles in width”.100 To Dobo (where “every house is a store”) the traders brought British cloth, firearms, iron, and opium that they had acquired in Singapore as well as arrack and rice from Makassar (arrack, “the chief luxury of the Aru people”, was brought by traders from Java as well) and exchanged them for tripang, mother of pearl shell, pearls, turtle shell, and various other natural products to take back to Makassar and Singapore.101 While the bulk of these products came from the Aru Islands, the inhabitants of Seram, New Guinea, and other islands also brought marine and jungle products to Dobo, “it being the only spot in this part of the world where British manufactures can be procured”.102 A comment made by Earl in 1850 illustrates how trade stimulated fishing. Whereas the Aru islanders “did not embark on their fishing excursions until after they had received advances from the traders, who had to await their return”, he observed, they now fished whenever the weather permitted “whether traders were present or not”.103 Sources regarding the trade in fish and other marine animals for everyday consumption tell us little about the traders themselves and their

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relations with the producers. As already mentioned, such trade was generally much more localized. It was, moreover, a trade in low-value goods. Even so, the total value of this trade must have surpassed that in the high-value commodities. Moreover, as far as the actual tools of production were concerned, some forms of fishing for everyday consumption entailed a far greater investment than did the procuring of much more valuable products such as tripang and mother of pearl shell. According to the 1882 survey of fisheries in the Netherlands Indies, for example, a 12-metre long perahu mayang and a payang together cost between $400 and $600.104 Although fishers could make some of their equipment with their own labour, large fishing boats were usually purchased from specialist boat makers, such as those in Rembang, where many perahu mayang were built. In some places fishers pooled their resources to engage in fishing operations that they could not have conducted as individuals. For example, at Mempawa on the west coast of Borneo it was common for five or six Malays to own a fishing stake in common and to share the catch.105 In many cases moneylenders and fish dealers promoted fishing by extending credit to the owners of fishing boats and gear. This was certainly true along the north coast of Java and Madura at least up to the 1860s. Here the Dutch authorities farmed out to local Chinese businessmen the right to collect certain taxes on the catching and sale of fish in particular districts. Since the tax farmers were also in business as fish sellers, and since the government granted them the privilege of buying salt for processing fish from the government’s monopoly at about half the normal cost, they tried to encourage the fishers to catch more fish by extending credit to them so that they could buy boats and fishing gear. Thus, fishers handed their catches over to the farmer not only to pay what they owed in tax — one-tenth of the catch — but also to repay part of their debts to the farmer. In this way the fishers were bound to the farmer, but because the farmer made such a good overall profit from the business he was willing to continue extending credit to the fishers despite the risk of the boats and fishing gear being damaged or even lost.106 With respect to Riau the 1882 survey states that in some cases crews working in the seine net fishery would receive an advance from a moneylender on the condition that they would deliver all of their catch to the moneylender “at a price fixed by the moneylender,

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usually, far below the market value”.107 The same survey describes a similar arrangement in the case of the shad fishery of the Panjang Strait, stating that “the trade is entirely in the hands of … Chinese buyers, who by giving advances often have the fishers in their power, completely control the market price of the product, and extract the greatest profit”.108 The earliest report of which I am aware that deals explicitly with the issue of financing at this time is Day’s report of 1873 on the fisheries of Burma. Day quoted another official as writing that near Rangoon fishing “is … generally conducted by needy men with borrowed capital, and who have to pay high rates of interest”.109 Citing information gathered from Burmese officials in Rangoon, Day stated that “some [fishers] get advances on the promise of supplying a certain quantity of fish at a low rate, and with this money purchase boats and other necessaries; others again hire boats, and some purchase them with their own money”.110 This conveys some sense of the various arrangements possible, but from such sketchy accounts it is hard to say whether they were typical of the rest of Southeast Asia or how long they had been in place. Despite the problems with the sources we can conclude that in the middle of the nineteenth century the impetus to catch came in many forms, that in some areas the capture of marine animals was well established as a commercial activity, and that credit relationships were often central to the process of production. The most heavily capitalized of all fishing activities in Southeast Asia at this time, it is worth noting, stood almost entirely outside the economic life of the region. While British and American whalers sometimes stopped in Kupang and other ports in Timor to exchange the trade goods that they carried for provisions, they were financed by investors in Britain and the United States and took the oil and spermaceti they collected in the region back to their home ports. They were, in today’s jargon, distant-water fishers.

Rhythms and risks One of the most striking features of fishing at this time was its rhythmic nature, oscillating according to the hour of the day, the tides, the phases of the moon, and the seasons of the year, all of which had a bearing both on the presence of fish and on the ability of fishers to catch them. Of crucial importance for those fishers working from sail boats was the daily

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alternation of the land and sea breezes. Along the north coast of Java: Nearly every day one can see the prahu mayang … push off from shore at three or four in the morning in order to cast their nets. The land wind carries them quickly out of sight, but at noon they prepare to make use of the sea wind for their return trip, which brings them back to shore at two o’clock, often with a full load.111

The tides shaped the rhythm of fishing in many ways. The rising and falling tide helped carry boats to and from their fishing grounds, fish became more abundant or easier to catch as the tide changed, and certain fishing gears, most notably various fishing stakes, relied on currents generated by the tides to entrap fish. Many forms of fishing were regulated by the phases of the moon, though with great variation from place to place depending both on the behaviour of the fish and the method being used to catch them: … in Tampanuli fishing at night takes place only during a dark moon, whereas, in contrast, at Tanjong Pura (East Coast of Sumatra) it takes place during the full moon … and the first quarter and last quarter …, while in the Brouwerstraat [Panjang Strait] fishing is considered the most favourable during the new and full moons.112

The rising and falling of the tides combined with the phases of the moon to create a cycle within a cycle, as demonstrated by the fact that the ebb tide on which jermal depended was strongest during the new and full moons. Almost everywhere the rhythm of fishing had a seasonal nature, both because certain fish, notably pelagic species, were more abundant at certain times of year and because during certain months the strong monsoon winds made fishing too dangerous. In Sarawak: Large fishing establishments are found at the mouths of all the principal rivers during the S.W., or fine monsoon; the fishermen usually leaving them during the N.E., or boisterous monsoon, and returning to the town, where they pursue other avocations until fine weather again brings the shoals of fish to their shores.113

During the three or four months when the northeast monsoon made fishing impossible the fishers of Trengganu “build and repair their boats and houses, make and mend their nets, do a little planting, and generally pass the time in performing odd jobs”.114 Along the southwest coast of Sulawesi the sero operators dismantled their stakes at the onset of the

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west monsoon.115 In the Sulu Archipelago the collection of pearl oysters ceased at the height of the two monsoons except at Tawi Tawi, “where the surrounding sandy islands, shoals, and reefs created an inland sea” in which the waters remained calm the whole year.116 Fishers along the north coast of Java and Madura stayed close to shore at the peak of the west monsoon but ventured far out during the east monsoon, when the seas were calmer, there was less danger of a sudden squall, and scads were more likely to be abundant.117 Fishers in Java relied on the stars, changes in the prevailing winds associated with the monsoons, and the flowering and fruiting of the mango tree to predict which species would be most abundant.118 Despite these regularities, uncertainty and risk were always a part of fishing. Fish did not always appear at the time and place they normally did. Sardinella, for example, could be spectacularly abundant in the Bali Strait one year but then be scarce “for years”, while the shad fishery in the Panjang Strait “sometimes experiences very unfavourable years”.119 If the sea breeze did not start at the expected time the morning’s catch would spoil before the boat reached shore. A day’s catch could be lost if the boat overturned in the breakers. A sudden storm might capsize a boat and drown all on board.120 Even operating a fishing stake exposed those who worked on it to “dangers from stray sharks, sawfish and crocodiles, from the deadly sea-snakes, from many kinds of medusae, from fish with venomous fins, from stinging-rays and torpedo-fish”.121 These uncertainties and dangers associated with the natural world may explain why taboos and rituals were an important part of fishing. A common taboo was the prohibition of certain words while at sea. In Aceh, for example, fishers referred to a mountain as “high ground” rather than calling it by its proper name “lest waves as high as mountains should overwhelm their vessel”.122 The principal operator of a large fishing stake along the west coast of the Malay Peninsula would bow to the authority of the spirits of the sea when selecting a site for the stake (“no stakes should be erected at the … extremity of a head-land lest the Lord of the Capes be offended”) to propitiate these spirits and so protect himself and his workers.123 And the communities along the Panjang Strait joined with local notables before the start of fishing to perform an elaborate ceremony to destroy any evil spirits that might prevent shad from appearing in great profusion.124

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Fishers also faced risks that had little to do with the natural world. People living in fishing communities were extremely vulnerable to attack by slave raiders such as the Iranun and Balangingi who scoured the island world and parts of the mainland in their swift boats (the Balangingi garay carried “an enormous rectangular sail” as well as being propelled by thirty to sixty oars and it towed a smaller boat that could be used for raiding along the shore and up rivers125) in search of labour for their patrons. In fact, fear of being carried off by raiders discouraged people from engaging in fishing in some areas. In 1834 Begbie wrote that fishers at Linggi on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula had abandoned their fishing stakes for some time because of raids by “pirates”.126 Slave raiders from Johor sometimes came ashore to capture people in the area of Kelantan that Firth later studied; most people lived about a kilometre from the beach, cultivating rice and going to sea only occasionally.127 States had little power to protect coastal communities from raiding. The Spanish authorities in the Philippines set up a system of watch towers and forts, but until the late 1840s raiders from the Sulu Archipelago still attacked with impunity, though there was some predictability in their movements, as they used the monsoon winds to help push their boats along.128 Although the Iranun, the Balangingi, and some other groups devoted themselves exclusively to raiding, cruising throughout the island world, others combined raiding and fishing, particularly the collection of valuable tripang (“the Sultan [of Kutai on the east coast of Borneo] says [240 to 300 tons of tripang ] is procured by pirate prows [perahu], which are always fishing when other game is not in view”129 ), while still others engaged in raiding on some days but were defenceless fishers on others.130 Writing in the 1890s, Clifford claimed that “within the memory of old men upon the [east] Coast [of the Malay Peninsula], the Fisher Folk were once pirates to a man”.131 In short, the fishers of many parts of Southeast Asia faced danger not only from the natural world and the dreaded long-range raiders but also from each other.

Patterns of intensity As we have seen, the intensity of fishing fluctuated greatly according to the rhythms of the natural world. But it also varied according to distance from shore and from one part of the region to another. A brief

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consideration of these variations highlights some important aspects of fishing at this time. First, most fishing took place close to shore. Indeed, in many areas fishing stakes set in shallow inshore waters were the most important means of capturing marine animals. The Burmese, observed Day, fished “within an easy distance from the shore, sometimes by means of nets, more commonly by fixed engines, and not, so far as I could ascertain, by means of hooks and lines”.132 Fishing stakes were the most important means of catching fish along much of the Straits of Malacca, in the inner part of the Gulf of Siam, along the west coast of Borneo, and at Brunei, where the inhabitants of one fishing village specialized in the operation of a kind of fish corral, which they never placed “in water deeper than 2 fathoms [3.7 metres]”.133 A survey in 1861 of fishing methods used in the Philippines described fishing corrals as “the most popular method used by indigenous people to catch fish of all types and sizes”.134 Fishing stakes were also the most important fishing method in parts of Java, such as in Batavia Bay and along the western shore of the Madura Strait, “where the amount of fish caught by any other means is in comparison completely insignificant”.135 The reliance on fishing stakes in so many areas indicates that many fishers could catch all they needed not only close to shore but also without having to chase after the fish.136 Surveying the fisheries of the north coast of Java and Madura at this time, Masyhuri concludes that offshore fishing “far out-weighed inshore fishing in importance”.137 But these fishers did not go very far from shore, for, as a contemporary source put it, they “seldom go so far that they cannot return within a day”.138 There were several reasons for this limitation. One was that the boats depended on the land and sea breezes to take them out to sea and to bring them back to land. Another was that they needed landmarks in order to locate their fish lures. Thus, fishers from areas where there were volcanoes or mountain ranges or islands were able to fish somewhat further offshore than those living in areas without such prominent features to guide them to their fish lures.139 Yet another reason for these fishers not venturing too far out was simply the fact that if they caught fish too far from shore they would be unable to land their catch before it spoiled. It is clear that in other parts of Southeast Asia as well fishers did not sail far from shore. Every morning along the coast of Cochinchina, noted Crawfurd, “large fleets” of fishing

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boats “proceeded several miles to sea” and returned in the evening.140 At the height of the east monsoon fishers along the west coast of Sulawesi “sometimes [sailed] out of sight of land” in pursuit of flyingfish, but otherwise they stayed close to the coast.141 According to the 1882 survey, the inhabitants of Buton, Salayar, and other islands off the south coast of Sulawesi, “journey far out to sea and sometimes travel to very distant places”. They certainly travelled far to collect tripang and valuable shellfish on distant reefs and coasts, but it is not clear how much they fished far out in the sea.142 A second generalization concerns the geographical distribution of fishing intensity. There were a few areas where there was very little fishing simply because there were steep cliffs or the sea pounded the shore for much of the year. Thus, along much of the west coast of Sumatra and the south coast of Java fishing was generally confined to sheltered bays such as those at Cilacap and Pacitan.143 Otherwise, as far as the capture of marine animals for ordinary human consumption was concerned, the intensity of fishing was greatest where there was an abundance of cheap salt for processing, as in the inner part of the Gulf of Siam, and, more importantly, where there were large concentrations of people. Probably the most intensely fished area in all of Southeast Asia at this time was the north coast of Java and Madura, the most populated part of the island world. There was very much less fishing in the Straits of Malacca except near towns (a stretch of coast 20 kilometres long on the mainland opposite Penang “is absolutely studded” with fishing stakes spaced 200 to 500 metres from each other144) and except for the valuable shad in the Panjang Strait. In 1873 the chief commissioner of British Burma wrote that the waters of the sparsely populated Mergui district were “untouched and unvisited by any fishermen”.145 As already mentioned, the distance from landing to consumer was usually not great. Sailing craft provided a risky means of transporting all but very well-preserved fish long distances. In any case, fish were sufficiently abundant virtually everywhere to meet local demand. In contrast, the most commercially valuable marine animals such as tripang, mother of pearl oysters, and turtles were collected wherever they were most abundant. The eastern island world stretching from the Sulu Archipelago to the Torres Strait was where they were most plentiful and where they were most intensely collected. Thus, the distribution of animal life in the sea, the demand for

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particular products, and the available technology all influenced the pattern of fishing. An intriguing question is whether in some places in Southeast Asia the location and intensity of fishing were in any way regulated by law, whether formal or customary, as they certainly were in some Pacific islands.146 Polunin cites sources that suggest the existence of various forms of marine tenure in the eastern part of the Malay Archipelago: At Salayar Island, in the Flores Sea, Kriebel [1919] mentions how reef areas were tenured and passed from father to son. Around Tanimbar, Kolff [1840] refers to areas which were exclusively used by adjacent villages. In the Kei Islands of southern Maluku [Moluccas], van Hoëvell [1890 … ] describes reserves to which all members of a village had access.147

In Aceh each group of fishing masters had its own fishing territory (called lho, meaning “bay”), separated from the territories of neighbouring groups by boundary marks. Masters from neighbouring territories were, however, free to fish in these waters except during the annual feast, generally held during rough weather when “the fishery enjoys a compulsory holiday”, which was held “to invoke God’s blessing on the labours” of the territory’s fishing masters.148 As we will see in Chapter 4, fishing villages along the north coast of Java had their own fishing territories in the early 1900s, but I have been unable to establish how long these territories had existed. The overwhelming impression is that institutions governing the right to capture marine animals were extremely rare in the mid-1800s. They appear to have been most common — and most clearly defined and rigorously enforced — in the Moluccas, where the livelihoods of many people depended on the collection of tripang and other sedentary species that had a high market value.149 For the most part, however, the creatures of the sea were freely available to anyone with the desire and the means to capture them.

Conclusions The capture of marine animals in Southeast Asia in the middle of the nineteenth century was focused both ecologically and geographically on but a small proportion of the sea. It was most intense in the inshore waters near heavily populated areas and in areas where there were animals of exceptional commercial value. Fish and other animals consumed as ordinary food were sufficiently abundant near populated areas so that

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there was little need to try to transport them great distances. Moreover, these animals appear to have been sufficiently abundant for the needs of the time that it was possible in many areas to rely heavily on the use of “passive” fishing devices such as fishing stakes to capture what was needed. Even the most densely populated areas were not so heavily populated that there was any danger of overfishing, and it is quite possible that in the case of Java the high cost of salt for preserving fish further weakened this danger. Moreover, technological limitations greatly reduced the possibility of overfishing except in waters very close to shore. Fishers could only go where the wind or their own muscles allowed them to go. They had to rely entirely on their own strength to set and haul in nets, which, made as they were of natural fibres, became very heavy as they absorbed water. Nets also had to be regularly dried, repaired, and soaked in preservatives. A net used in Sumatra, for example, could be set three times a day at the most, since it had to be dried out every time it was used.150 Somewhat surprisingly from our present perspective, there were, it must be noted, some references to overfishing at this time. A British officer stationed at Akyab on the coast of Burma believed that the fisheries had become “impoverished” during the thirteen years he had lived there due to “the small mesh of the nets and the minuteness of the distance between the split bamboos forming the fixed fishing screens which were placed across every small creek, opening, or available spot. The smallest fly could not escape.”151 The author of a study of shellfish in the vicinity of Singapore commented that “the poorer Malays and Chinese use most kinds of shell fish as food, and search the shores for them with such diligence, that they have caused a dearth of such as are common in less frequented parts of the coast”.152 In 1857 the Dutch Resident at Kupang wrote that “whales are rarely encountered here, as a result of the hunting of them for years by English, American and French whalers”.153 And during his stay in Singapore on his way to Japan in 1853 Commodore Perry was told that dugongs “had become very scarce, if not extinct”.154 I have no information with which to evaluate the first two reports, but the other two deserve some comment. The fact that British and American whalers, who “twice in the nineteenth century … told Kupang authorities that the whales had been overhunted and had moved on”, had practically ceased whaling around Timor by 1857 lends some support to the

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Resident’s judgement. Barnes suggests, however, that because “we have no idea what the normal fluctuations are over a period of years” it is virtually impossible to assess the impact of English and American whaling on the population and notes other possible reasons for the rapid decline in British and American whaling in this area.155 Even though Perry found it hard to believe,156 the report that dugongs were on the verge of extinction near Singapore perhaps has the most support, for they were already “not unfrequently caught” in the 1820s. 157 Dugongs are particularly vulnerable to human predation, as they are “long-lived with a low reproduction rate” and are easily tracked down in the shallow water they inhabit.158 Whatever the validity of this or any of the other reports, however, what is striking is the extreme rarity of statements expressing concern about the impact of fishing on the marine life of Southeast Asia. There was enormous potential to increase catches as the market expanded, even without changing the methods of capture prevailing at the time and venturing into previously untouched parts of the sea.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Reproduced from The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 18502000, by John G. Butcher (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Individual articles are available at Chapter 3 60 < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

3 State, Economy, and Fisheries to the 1930s

In the latter part of the nineteenth century catches of marine animals in Southeast Asia began to increase so that by the 1930s they were several times what they had been in 1850. In order to understand the rise in catches we must first step back and look at the political and economic transformation that took place at this time, for it was in the context of this transformation that catches increased.

The political and economic transformation In 1850 Southeast Asia was made up of many dozens of states and statelets in which power tended to be decentralized. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the colonial powers — the British based in the Straits Settlements and Rangoon, the Dutch based in Batavia, the French from their foothold in Saigon, and first the Spanish and then the Americans based in Manila — and the Thai monarchy cantered on Bangkok extended their reach over more and more territory. In some places this was achieved by military force, as in the case of the incorporation of Aceh into the Netherlands Indies and much of Vietnam into French Indochina, while in others it was accomplished by treaty. However it was done, by 1910 virtually all of Southeast Asia was brought within the boundaries of one of these states. Even more importantly, these states were motivated by a desire to control the activities of the people within their boundaries and, increasingly, they acquired the means to exercise this control. This transformation did not happen immediately. In fact,

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one of the features of states in the late nineteenth century was their heavy reliance on the practice of leasing out, usually to Chinese businessmen, monopolies (“farms”) for the collection of certain taxes and the sale of goods such as opium; as far as fisheries is concerned, the most important of these farms was the farm which the Netherlands Indies government granted for the right to sell salt to the fish processors of Bagan Si Api Api in Sumatra. By 1920, however, governments had developed bureaucracies staffed by specialists in a great variety of fields that enabled them to impose their will far more than states had been able to do just a few decades earlier. The transformation of the state had a profound impact on fishing. The new states promoted fishing simply by greatly diminishing the danger of being captured or attacked while out fishing. During a tour of the Selangor coast just after the state became a British protectorate an official commented that as soon as “it was known that protection was afforded” by “a nice, conspicuous [police] Station” the “number of fishermen would greatly increase”.1 More spectacularly, the Spanish, Dutch, and British deployed steam gunboats to crush slave raiding along the coasts of Southeast Asia.2 As states consolidated their control over their territories, they came to possess increasing power both to promote and to hinder fishing by levying taxes, controlling the production and sale of salt, and regulating access to fishing grounds. In the early 1900s several states took it upon themselves to begin exploring the fishery resources of neighbouring seas and to experiment with new fishing gears. Just as importantly, supervision of immigration, investment in transportation, and a multitude of other activities carried out by states that were not directly related to fishing shaped the development of fisheries. The transformation of the state was accompanied by — indeed propelled by — a rapid expansion in economic activity. In particular, there was a great increase in the production of food and raw materials for Europe and North America, then undergoing a period of rapid industrialization, growing prosperity, and population growth. By a whole host of measures — ranging from the reduction of import and export duties and the construction of roads and railways to the offer of land on easy terms — the new states created the conditions in which Chinese, European, and other entrepreneurs invested in mining and plantation agriculture and in turn profited from the revenue generated by their

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activities. All along the stanniferous belt stretching from Ranong to Belitung the production of tin increased until by the 1890s this region was the world’s largest producer. In Java annual production of sugar increased tenfold between 1860 and 1910, while on the island of Negros it jumped from 190 to 12,000 tons between 1850 and 1893.3 The area around Deli became the world’s leading producer of high-quality tobacco. Rubber became an important export crop first in Malaya and then in East Sumatra, southern Vietnam, and other places; by the 1910s Southeast Asia produced most of the world’s rubber. This transformation of Southeast Asia into a great producer was made possible by the recruitment of thousands of people to work on the mines and plantations. Most of the workers on the mines and plantations of Malaya were recruited from China and India, the plantation workers of East Sumatra came from China and Java, and the labour force of the plantations of Cochinchina was recruited from Annam and Tonkin. Accompanying the expansion of production was a rapid growth in cities and towns. Much of the trade of Southeast Asia was channelled through Batavia, Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, and, especially, Singapore, the hub of the trade system of the region. Towns such as Kuala Lumpur and Medan sprang into being as a result of their importance in the mining and plantation economy. Between 1870 and 1940 the population of Southeast Asia grew from about 60 million to 150 million (an average rate of 1.3 per cent per annum), as food supplies became more secure, new transport systems made it easier to carry food to places where it was needed, governments gradually took steps to improve public health, and people arrived in the region to find work. The population of Java increased from about 18 million in 1860 to 47 million (nearly a third of the total for the whole region) in 1940, that of Malaya from about 570,000 in 1850 to 5.4 million in 1940, and that of the Philippine Islands from about 4.9 million in 1850 to 16 million in 1940.4 The population of those cities and towns involved in the expanding economy grew even faster than the overall rate of increase. The population of Singapore, for example, leapt from 53,000 in 1849 to 560,000 in 1931 (an average rate of 3.0 per cent per annum).5 The growth of population, particularly of people working on mines and plantations and living in towns and cities, greatly increased the

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demand for foodstuffs. By far the most important food was rice, produced on a great scale by smallholders in the Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya, and Mekong deltas and on a much smaller scale in many other places. The operators of mines and plantations depended heavily on the rice produced by these smallholders to feed their workers, as did the growing populations of the cities. Next to rice, the most important food was fish, the main source of animal protein for immigrant Chinese and Indians as well as people indigenous to the region. Many of these people also ate the meat of ducks, pigs, and chickens that had been fed low-grade fish, mussels, and other marine animals. Sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are replete with examples of the stimulus to fishing provided by the economic changes taking place at this time. In many cases fishing communities supplied nearby markets. “This fish curing all along the [Negri Sembilan] coast cannot but be a profitable employment, judging by the quantity on hand”, wrote a British official in 1874, “and if it is true there are 15,000 Chinamen [mining] at Sungei Ujong then there must be a ready consumption”.6 The 1882 survey of the Netherlands Indies notes that fish caught at Riau were taken to market in Singapore and that fishers along the west coast of Borneo supplied the inhabitants of Pontianak and the gold miners of the interior.7 According to a later source, fishers in the southern part of Bangka caught and then dried fish which they sold to the tin mines elsewhere on the island.8 Fisherfolk in the delta to the north of Palembang produced dried fish for the plantations of Pasemah far upriver as well as for the mines of Bangka.9 Likewise, fishers along the west coast of Sumatra produced dried fish for the mining districts of the area.10 Nevertheless, one of the most striking features of the fishing economy at this time was the rapid growth of production of salted fish and other products for ordinary human consumption for distant rather than nearby markets. Thus, to take the most notable example, fishing communities along the east coast of Sumatra, the Gulf of Siam, and the east coast of the Malay Peninsula all produced fish for sale in Java. The fishing town of Estancia on Panay exported much of its produce to Manila. And Japanese operating from bases in the eastern island world shipped their catches of skipjack tuna to Japan. The exploitation of fishing grounds at great distances from the markets they served was made possible by marked improvements in transportation.

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The most conspicuous improvement was the steamship, which carried an ever-increasing proportion of the seaborne trade of the region in the late 1800s. Steamships could carry ordinary salted fish to distant markets before it deteriorated so badly that it was no longer fit for human consumption, though the boats that carried fish had a reputation for being filthy (during the fishing season “numerous ugly and uncleanly steam boats tramp up the [east] coast” of the Malay Peninsula picking up cargoes of dried fish, wrote Clifford in 189711). Moreover, they could carry this bulky low-priced commodity cheaply enough to put it within reach of consumers and, in some circumstances, compete successfully with locally produced fish. Steamships could also carry great quantities of salt long distances to areas where fish was abundant but salt could not be produced at prices that enabled fish processors to compete in distant markets. The steamships that carried fish products and salt within Southeast Asia belonged to both large Western shipping companies such as the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (operator of the “caviar express” from Bagan Si Api Api to Java) and the Straits Steamship Company and small Chinese shipping firms. Like steamships, roads and railways expanded the market for fish products, as they made it possible (and profitable) to send fish further inland. Improvements in land transportation widened the market for fresh fish in particular. As early as the 1890s some fish caught off the coast of Selangor was being taken on ice (which had been brought from Singapore) to Kuala Lumpur by rail.12 In the early 1900s traders began buying catches directly from fishers in the Straits of Malacca, landing the fish at Port Swettenham, and sending them in ice (now made in Kuala Lumpur) by rail to Kuala Lumpur. In the early 1900s the Netherlands Indies railway department began operating special freight cars to carry fresh fish (usually not packed in ice except in the case of expensive species) from Pasuruan and other ports along the north coast of Java to markets in the interior.13 In Siam fresh sea fish appears to have been taken (by steamer as well as by rail) no further inland than Bangkok in the mid-1920s, but by 1935 it was being taken by rail as far inland as Konkaen 300 kilometres northeast of Bangkok.14 In Kelantan the construction of a road linking Perupok with the main population centre of the state in the 1920s “altered the fishing economy considerably”, as it made possible a regular bus service and so created a market for fresh fish,

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for which the fishers were able to get much higher prices than for the fish they sold for drying.15 Likewise, by the 1930s large quantities of fish caught in San Miguel Bay were packed in ice and sent by rail and road across Luzon to Manila.16 Even in the 1930s the bulk of the marine fish consumed by the people of Southeast Asia had undergone some form of curing. Nevertheless, improvements in transportation were beginning to bring about a shift from cured to fresh fish and with this shift came a growing demand for fish. A predominately Chinese trading network that encompassed much of Southeast Asia helped to promote the production of fish products. Figure 3.1 shows how extensive the trade in dried fish, dried shrimps, belacan, and salt was about 1910. The free port of Singapore was the centre of the trade in fish products and salt just as it was in most other commodities. Chinese trading houses in Singapore imported fish products from Indochina (mainly fish caught in the Tonlé Sap), Siam, the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and Bagan Si Api Api and exported them to Chinese traders in many places. The most important of these markets was Java, where a powerful group of traders based in Batavia controlled most of the trade in imported fish. Chinese traders in Singapore also imported huge quantities of salt from Siam and the area around the Red Sea and then exported that salt to various destinations including Bagan Si Api Api. Although our focus is on Southeast Asia, we must note the momentous changes that were taking place in China and Japan as well. In China the turmoil of the Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion, and the breakdown of Manchu rule encouraged many people to seek their fortunes overseas, including Southeast Asia, which offered them relative political stability and many opportunities to make money.17 Many Chinese worked, as noted, on mines and plantations or took up jobs in the towns and cities, thereby increasing the demand for foodstuffs. Chinese traders stimulated fishing in many areas by giving credit to fishers; links between traders in small fishing communities and their counterparts in Singapore and other large cities helped to promote the flow of fish products. At the same time many thousands of Chinese became fishers themselves, most notably along both sides of the Straits of Malacca. Events in Japan also had a great impact on the fisheries of Southeast Asia, though in a very different way. As part of their programme of industrialization the leaders

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@

Dried/salted fish Salt Belacan Dried shrimp

All figures in 1OOOs of tons per year.

Chapter 3

= 121.91 = & = 0) =

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Figure 3.1 Trade in Dried Fish, Salt, and Belacan, c.1910

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of Meiji Japan promoted fisheries to increase the supply of food for the growing population of factory workers and city dwellers and to generate income from exports. Under a law enacted in 1898 the government gave various incentives including subsidies to encourage Japanese companies to fish offshore. It also promoted fishing by sending survey ships into the waters of Southeast Asia as well as the South Pacific to gather oceanographic and ichthyological information. And it poured a great deal of money into fisheries schools that produced graduates who worked in Japan and many other areas including Southeast Asia. While the government wished to promote fishing for economic reasons, it also wanted to collect information of a military nature. At what stage this occurred is unclear, but it played an increasingly important part in the government’s support for fishing in distant waters. Japanese began fishing in Southeast Asian waters as early as the 1890s when a small group of them fished briefly in waters around Singapore. They appear to have first established themselves in Manila, where seventeen Japanese boats were supplying fish to the local market by 1903.18 This movement into Southeast Asia, part of a broader movement that included traders, prostitutes, investors, dentists, and photographers, accelerated during the 1910s. After considering a report from a fisheries expert it had sent to Singapore in 1912, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce commissioned two fishers to carry out experimental fishing in the area and sent along two fishery trainees to supervise the work. One of the trainees, Tora Eifuku, stayed on in Singapore to set up a fishing company, which the ministry subsidized for several years to ensure its success.19 During and soon after World War I many more companies were set up in the region. At the peak of their involvement in Southeast Asia about 3,000 “fishing emigrants” worked “in more or less permanent ways” in the Philippines, Malaya, the Netherlands Indies, and Siam,20 while many others crewed vessels based in Japan and Taiwan that made forays into region. Especially in the early 1900s European pearling companies employed large numbers of Japanese divers, but otherwise virtually all of the Japanese who fished in Southeast Asia worked for Japanese firms. The governments of Southeast Asia, it is worth adding, did nothing actively to promote the movement of Japanese fishers into Southeast Asia. In fact, it appears that many officials had little idea of what the

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Japanese intended to do. The Japanese “started to try and get information about the trade in Kuantan and they have had fishers prowling round our coast last year”, wrote an official on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula early in 1918, “but perhaps they were only charting the sea bottom”.21 Indirectly, however, the colonial states greatly assisted the expansion of Japanese fishing into Southeast Asia. Up until the 1920s they generally welcomed investment from any source, freely issued licences to fish within their territorial waters, had few laws regulating fisheries, and did little to enforce the laws they did have. As we shall see, the colonial states promoted fisheries in many ways, but in keeping with the generally laissez-faire approach to economic development that they pursued at least until the 1920s they did so on a far smaller scale than the Japanese state did. They therefore did little to create conditions that might lead to intense competition over fishery resources between their subjects and Japanese fishers. All this combined with the wealth of marine life in Southeast Asian seas to create the circumstances in which Japanese fishing flourished until the 1930s.

Estimating the rate of increase in catches Table 3.1 gives us a crude estimate of total catches of marine, freshwater, and cultivated fish for all of Southeast Asia in 1938. But no catch or landings data exist that would allow us to trace changes in fish catches over the previous fifty years or even over the previous decade. We must therefore use the available data on consumption patterns in conjunction with an estimate of population growth to infer how much overall catches increased and introduce a number of other considerations to estimate how much marine catches grew. The available evidence suggests that there was very little change in the pattern of consumption between the late 1800s and the 1930s. We can see this most clearly in the case of Java. Van der Eng argues that in the period 1905–20 the supply of protein per capita increased slightly but that “the extra protein came mainly from an abundance of peanuts and soybeans” rather than fish.22 In the 1930s the author of a review of nutrition in the Indies noted that the typical meal in a small shop consisted of “a large quantity of rice, a small piece of dried fish, some vegetables … and a number of native delicacies”, of which we can assume terasi was

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State, Economy, and Fisheries to the 1930s Table 3.1 Nominal Catches of Marine, Freshwater, and Cultivated Fish in Southeast Asia, 1938 (thousands of ton)

1990 Netherlands Indies Malaya Philippines Thailand Indochina Burma

476 89 81 161 260 100

Total

1,167

FAO estimated total for Southeast Asia

1,200

Source: For Netherlands Indies (“Indonesia”), Philippines, Thailand, and FAO estimated total for Southeast Asia (all for 1938): FAO, Yearbook of Fishery Statistics, vol. 24 (1967), Table A1–8; for Malaya (1938):Annual Report of Fisheries, Malaya (1938), p. 27; for Burma (1953): FAO,Yearbook of Fishery Statistics, vol. 6 (1955–56), Table A5; for Indochina (1931): L’Institut Océanographique de l’Indochine (Hanoi: Imprimierie d’Extreme-Orient, 1931), p. 186. Figures have not been rounded.

probably the most important.23 And a meticulous survey of a small number of rural families in east Java showed that fish was a much greater source of protein than meat but that rice, maize, and soya products contributed several times as much protein to the diet as fish did.24 In short, the consumption of fish in Java appears to have changed little from the time of Arminius’s survey in the 1880s. The evidence from other parts of Southeast Asia is even more impressionistic than that for Java but still worth noting. The following observation by the director of fisheries in Malaya in 1933 is strikingly similar to the two reports on fish consumption in Malaya in the 1880s quoted in the previous chapter: … practically all the Trengganu, Kedah, Kelantan and Dindings landings of mackerel are reduced to such a low grade product that its main function is to serve not so much as a food but as a highly flavoured salted condiment to enable those consumers to swallow the large quantity of rice which they take daily. Without some such stimulating condiment it would not be possible to take so much rice. … [I]f anyone will take the trouble to make personal enquiries among the working classes in Malaya, he will be surprised to learn what a small amount of fish or meat is available for their meals.25

Likewise, in 1931 Zimmerman referred to the “developed habits” of

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the Siamese “of eating large quantities of rice with small amounts of fish”.26 In some places, it should be noted, the consumption of fish did go up. The huge quantities of cheap fresh fish caught by Japanese fishers beginning in the 1920s must have pushed up per capita consumption in Singapore, Batavia, and Manila. We should also note that the greater efforts on the part of several governments to promote the capture, storage, and marketing of fish and the greater availability of fresh marine fish probably began to increase consumption by the late 1930s. It is probably safe to conclude then that per capita fish consumption for Southeast Asia as a whole increased from the late 1800s to the 1930s but only very slightly. This conclusion suggests that between 1870 and 1940 total fish consumption for Southeast Asia increased by just slightly more than the factor of 2.5 by which the population of the region increased during those years. But this crude approximation of the increase in total fish consumption merely provides a starting point for estimating the factor by which marine fish catches increased during that period. On the one hand, not all of the fish consumed by people in Southeast Asia was caught in Southeast Asian waters. In particular, the region imported more and more canned fish, mainly sardines from California until the Depression years when sardines from Japan began to dominate the market. Cheap and easily stored, canned fish found a big market among people with very low incomes all over Southeast Asia.27 It is difficult to estimate what proportion of the fish people consumed was imported canned fish. I would estimate that about 2 per cent of the fish consumed by people in the Netherlands Indies28 and Malaya29 consisted of imported canned fish, while the figure may have been as much as 17 per cent in the Philippines, which appears to have imported little or no fish from other parts of Southeast Asia.30 On the other hand, however, there were two tendencies that suggest that catches of marine fish grew more rapidly than the total population of the region did. First, it is likely that fish caught from Southeast Asian seas formed a greater proportion of the fish people consumed in the 1930s than it did a few decades earlier. Reflecting on the impact the settlement of the Central Luzon plain from about 1815 to 1925, McLennan observed that “because of the effects of deforestation only vestiges remain of the bounty [of aquatic resources] found by the colonizers”.31 In his report on conditions in rural Thailand in 1931

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Zimmerman noted “the substitution of forms of imported [shipped from the coast] dried, smoked or salted fish to take the place of the local fresh water supply which has dwindled”.32 The tailings of tin mines greatly reduced fish catches in some rivers along the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, as did discharge from sugar mills in Java.33 Second, Japanese pole-and-line fishers and trawlers captured increasingly large quantities of fish in Southeast Asian seas but landed them in Japan and Taiwan. All these considerations make it impossible to give more than a very crude estimate of how much catches of marine fish increased during this period, but such an estimate at least provides a starting point. Thus, if (1) per capita consumption of fish increased slightly by the late 1930s, (2) marine fish became a somewhat bigger proportion of the fish caught in Southeast Asia that was consumed in the region, and (3) the quantity of marine fish captured in Southeast Asian seas that was landed outside the region was very roughly the same as the quantity of fish imported into the region, then catches of marine fish increased somewhat faster than the population as a whole did or, very roughly, by a factor of 3 between 1870 and 1940, giving a rate of 1.6 per cent per year. Such a rate of increase falls well short of the spectacular rates that occurred in the first thirty years after World War II, but because a decreasing proportion of the population caught the fish they consumed it does imply that the financing and organization of fishing underwent major changes that made it possible to extract more and more fish from the sea. Whatever the overall increase in marine catches, one feature of the fisheries of Southeast Asia at this time is strikingly clear, and that is that catches shot up in some places but stagnated or even declined in others and in some places fluctuated greatly. In the Gulf of Thailand, along the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and in the Straits of Malacca catches rose, in some places spectacularly, most notably at Bagan Si Api Api. Catches also rose at Estancia and some other parts of the Philippines, and probably increased at a fairly steady rate along the coast of Vietnam. Whether catches increased or declined in Java and Madura has long been a matter of debate, but we can certainly conclude that if catches increased it was at a slower rate than the population did and that in one part of Java, namely, west Java, they declined. Another area where catches fell was Burma. A place where they fluctuated greatly was Sapeken in the Kangean Islands to the east of Madura. From the 1910s to the 1930s

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Japanese fishers brought about spectacular increases in catches in the particular places they operated such as Manila Bay and in the areas where reef fish and skipjack tuna were abundant. Part of the explanation for these differences lies in the reduction in transport costs. Producers in an area where fish were particularly abundant and salt was comparatively cheap could successfully compete with producers who did not have ready access to abundant fish and cheap salt. Of these two essentials — abundant fish and cheap salt — the latter was probably more important in the early years when fish were generally abundant and salt was essential for preserving fish. Thus, government policies determining the price and availability of salt account for much of the variation in catches between places and over time. Most notably, the Netherlands Indies government’s salt monopoly that covered Java, Madura, Kalimantan, and south and west Sumatra discouraged processing of fish in those areas because of the high price of the salt it sold, while it encouraged processors in Siam, Bagan Si Api Api, and other places where salt was cheaper to send their produce to the huge Java market, thus generating the flows shown in Figure 3.1. As old fishing grounds became crowded, fish populations declined in some places, and the market for fresh fish or fish processed without salt grew, however, the price of salt becomes less important than the abundance of fish in explaining variations in catches. At the same time new fishing technologies brought about rapid increases in catches in many areas in the 1920s and 1930s. I will try to account for many of these variations in Chapters 4 and 5.

Two processes As we have seen, the opening of mines and plantations and the growth of cities greatly increased the demand for fish, while steamships, railways, and automobiles expanded the trade in fish products. Although new technology helped to expand the trade in fish products, it contributed little to the actual means of catching fish for several decades. In general, fishers caught more fish by fishing much more intensively in the same fishing grounds using the same fishing gears or by fishing with the same gears or larger versions of those gears in new grounds that were ecologically similar to those that they had exploited previously. In Southeast Asia, as in Europe during the first seventy or eighty years of the Industrial

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Revolution, the harnessing of steam power to propel fishing boats and haul in nets had little attraction. Fish were plentiful and easily caught with existing methods and without travelling far. They were, moreover, caught far more cheaply by existing methods, for, as Cushing explains, “coal costs money but wind and tide are free”.34 Very gradually, however, new forms of technology — new nets, pumps, powerful lights, and, most importantly, mechanical power — began to play a part in the capture of marine animals. By the late 1930s they contributed to the capture of a large proportion of the fish landed in certain ports in Southeast Asia and of all the fish landed by Japanese fishers outside the region. The great bulk of fish captured in Southeast Asian waters was still caught with fishing gears and vessels that differed little except sometimes in size from those being operated in the mid-1800s. From the point of view of the central theme of this book, however, what is remarkable is the way in which changes in the technology of fishing, many introduced by Japanese fishers, rapidly extended the frontier of capture in Southeast Asian waters. By the late 1930s the area fished had expanded greatly and virtually all ecological strata were exploited at least to some extent, including three strata that previously had been barely fished, namely, reef slopes, the seabed of continental shelves, and the deep sea. Thus, two processes brought about the increase in fish catches from the late 1800s to the 1930s: 1. The more intensive application of existing fishing gears (or somewhat larger versions of those gears) to existing fishing grounds and the application of existing fishing gears (or larger versions) to new fishing grounds that were ecologically similar to old fishing grounds. 2. The application of new fishing technologies to exploit old fishing grounds, new fishing grounds that were ecologically similar to old ones, and particularly ecological strata that had previously been barely fished or not fished at all. It is not always easy to categorize the application of a particular fishing gear in a particular place as clearly belonging to one process rather than the other. Nevertheless, I believe that the two processes are sufficiently distinct to be considered separately. Moreover, considering the second process in a separate chapter helps to highlight the extension of the frontier

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of fishing into new ecological strata, for it was the application of new technologies that made that possible. It also serves to highlight the beginning of a transition to the full-scale exploitation of marine animals that took place after World War II. I will therefore deal with the first process in Chapter 4 and the second in Chapter 5.

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Reproduced from The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 18502000, by John G. Butcher (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Individual articles are available at 75 Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

4 Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s

As the demand for fish products grew, fishers exploited old fishing grounds more intensively with existing fishing gears and gradually moved on to exploit new fishing grounds that were ecologically similar to the old ones and so could be fished with the same fishing gears. For several decades the existing fishing gears and somewhat bigger versions of them caught enough fish to maintain roughly the same level of fish consumption per capita. As mentioned in Chapter 3, however, catches did not increase steadily throughout Southeast Asia. On the contrary, catches soared in some places, grew very slowly in others, fluctuated in others, and fell in at least one place. I will try to explain this phenomenon by examining fisheries in six different areas, namely, the Gulf of Siam, the Straits of Malacca, the north coast of Java and Madura, the Kangean Islands, and, in less detail, the Philippines and Burma. I will then suggest that in some of these areas it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep on increasing catches with the same fishing gears.

Gulf of Siam The main target of the fisheries of the Gulf of Siam (Map 4.1) was Indian mackerel, known locally as pla thu. It was the favourite sea fish of the Thais, and it had long been exported to Singapore and other ports. There are no statistics showing changes in mackerel catches or the number of fish corrals — poh — erected along the coast to catch them, but it is clear that by the 1890s the fishery was very extensive. When Warington

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Smyth sailed along the coast just to the east of the mouth of the Chao Phraya River he found that “here and there fishing stakes dotted the horizon out to the 5 fathom [9 metre] line”1 and along the west coast he found poh in Sawi and Langsuan bays as well as in Chumphon Bay, where there were more than sixty. The practice at this time was for the

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government to farm out the right to sell licences to operate poh and to collect a royalty on fish catches. According to Warington Smyth, the royalty amounted to “10 per cent or more” of the catch. Whether the operators of the fishing stakes paid this royalty in cash or in fish is unclear, but either way we can assume that the farmer took an active part in promoting the fishery, since he was able to keep for himself any money that he collected over and above what he had agreed to pay the government. At some stage the government abolished the farm and instead sold licences for the right to erect a poh in a particular place as well as taxing the poh itself. The government also taxed salt used in the fisheries, but in 1923 the government’s revenue from the tax on salt amounted to no more than 10 per cent of its total revenue from fisheries.2 None of the (English) sources I have used suggest that the tax on salt or the final cost of salt to fish processors restricted the expansion of the fisheries in any way. The low cost of salt, nearly all of which came from the salt pans along the inner gulf, enabled the processors to preserve the fish with much more salt than was used in some other parts of Southeast Asia, most notably Java, where in 1911 the price of salt was six times that in Siam.3 The prosperity of the fishery fluctuated wildly as the abundance of mackerel went up and down from year to year, probably due almost entirely to natural changes in the size of the population and its movements. When catches were good, the processing facilities — owned by the owners of the fishing stakes — were hives of activity. Once the fish were landed the leaders of teams of female fish-cleaners bid for the right to prepare the catch for the pickling vats.4 At other times there was little or no activity. When Warington Smyth visited Langsuan Bay in 1896 fish processing had come to a standstill and a dozen Chinese trading boats were waiting for cargo to carry to Bangkok, all because of a lack of fish.5 Nevertheless, the increase in exports of dried and salted fish, of which mackerel formed by far the biggest component, from 1,000 tons in 1870 to 15,000 tons in 1890, 20,000 tons in 1912, and 35,000 tons in 1925 suggests a steady rise over the long term.6 A large proportion of these exports was shipped to Singapore and then on to Java, where even “on the south coast one finds Siam fish in the most remote desas [villages]”.7 Despite the precarious nature of the business, the chance of making a large profit drew into the fishery investors, mainly Chinese, who were prepared to spend the large sums needed to take part in it. In 1896 a poh

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cost over $350 to construct; in addition there was the cost of maintaining the boat and crew — a further $280 a year — and of rebuilding the poh when it was damaged by a storm or wayward ships.8 It appears that the number of poh continued to increase. Certainly the farmers and then the government had no interest in limiting the number of poh. Indeed, the government sold more licences than its own guidelines regarding the distance between poh permitted. In his invaluable survey of the fisheries of Siam in 1925 Smith wrote: Fishing almost ceases to be an legitimate industry when, as in Chumporn [Chumphon] Bay, for example, the entire water, inshore and offshore, is filled with overlapping leaders and wings of traps forming a maze which makes the escape of fish practically impossible and of necessity renders the less favorably located traps unproductive.9

Smith wondered whether the series of very poor catches in the early 1920s which had bankrupted some owners could be attributed to the effect of so many poh but noted that 1925 had been a time of “unusual abundance”. Whatever the effect of the poh on fish populations, it is clear that poh were being constructed in new fishing grounds. Smith noted that since about 1919 poh had been operated in the Koh Chang Channel and Tung Yai Bay on the east coast of the gulf during the southwest monsoon, when this was the only section of the coast where the fishery was possible, though the catch consisted entirely of immature mackerel, “enormous quantities” of which “are thrown away each year”.10 As well as being constructed along more of the coastline it appears that poh were being erected further from shore. In the mid-1920s some poh were located in waters up to 18 metres deep and as far as 20 to 25 kilometres from shore.11 In the late 1930s a visitor to Ban Hua Hin at the southwest corner of the inner gulf joined a group of fishers who sailed three hours in the middle of the night on “a fair breeze” before reaching the poh on which they worked.12 In any case, it is clear that the fishery continued to attract investors. A report from the mid-1920s and another from the late 1930s both state that a poh and the equipment needed to operate it cost about 10,000 ticals ($4,500 in 1937).13 The poh were owned by syndicates, who paid the fishers “a small wage and a percentage of the catch”.14 Unlike the poh, which were operated to catch a particular species of fish, several other fishing gears were intended to catch a wide variety of

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marine animals, but like the poh most of the important ones were fixed in place so that the animals swam or were swept into them. The pongpang was widely used in and near estuaries as well as in the lower reaches of rivers. This fishing gear consisted of a fine-meshed bag net which was held in place by two stakes. The effectiveness of the net was enhanced by two rows of loose brush stuck in the bottom which formed a V that opened in the direction of the current and converged at the entrance of the net. In the gulf near the mouth of the Chao Phraya “the brush wings form a dense maze extending for miles and serving to divert into the bag nets the rich animal life that is passing seaward with the strong ebb tide”.15 Smith’s investigation of the Chanthaburi River on the eastern side of the gulf found twenty-three pongpang from the mouth of the river to a point 5 kilometres upstream. At one point four pongpang with their long wings stretched across nearly the entire width of the river, and five pongpang were set at the mouths of creeks flowing into the river.16 As well as being set from and hauled into boats, seine nets were fixed in place as barriers “stretching in unbroken lines for miles” along shores exposed at low tide to prevent all but the tiniest creatures from going out to sea on the outgoing tide. Bamboo matting was formed into barriers to catch marine animals in the same way. Shrimp and small fish were made into belacan (kapi in Thai), but the bulk of the animal life caught by these gears was used as fertilizer and food for farm animals, especially ducks. Ducks also consumed a large proportion of the mussels which fishers gathered “in incalculable quantities”.17 In order to convey an impression of the size of the animal population fed on fish Smith noted that 40 million duck eggs had been exported to China “in a single season”.18 It is unclear what impact all this fishing was having on fish populations. It is likely that a large proportion of the mackerel did not come within the reach of the fish corrals, simply because of the physical limitations on constructing them in even deeper water. What does seem clear from Smith’s report, however, is that those marine animals that both fetched high prices in the market and spent part of their life cycle at or passing through spots where they were easily captured were indeed under threat in some cases. Smith feared for the future of green turtles because there was no control on the collection of their eggs by concessionaires.19 He observed that barramundi were “much less [abundant] than formerly” and noted that toli shad, caught by gillnets as they ascended the Chao

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Phraya River, “is not now abundant in any Siamese rivers”.20 Both species were extremely vulnerable to capture when they entered rivers to spawn. Thus, the coastal waters and the lower reaches of the Chao Phraya and other rivers were fished intensively. At the same time, however, most of the Gulf of Thailand was barely touched, “there being neither surface fishing nor bottom fishing in the offshore waters”.21

The Straits of Malacca The most rapid expansion took place along the coasts of the Straits of Malacca (Map 4.2). In the 1850s and 1860s small groups of Chinese (sometimes referred to as former pirates in the sources) began settling at many spots along the straits. Along the eastern side of the straits, Chinese set up fishing villages at Kuala Kurau, Tanjong Piandang, Pangkor, Pulau Ketam, and several other places. Along the western side the most important area was the estuary of the Rokan River, where Chinese founded the village of Bagan Si Api Api. Most of the inhabitants of a particular village were often members of a particular language group. Thus, virtually all the people who settled in Bagan Si Api Api were Hokkiens, while the majority of the Chinese fishers living on Pulau Ketam were Hainanese. For the most part the Chinese adopted fishing gears already being used by Malays in the area, including driftnets and, most important of all, various fishing stakes. Those fishing along the eastern side supplied fish to Penang and the rapidly growing mining populations of Perak, Selangor, and Negri Sembilan, while those at Bagan Si Api Api may have shipped what they produced across the straits to Malacca as well as, possibly, up the Rokan River. At first no ruler or government exerted much authority over these villages, but when British officials concluded that the inhabitants of two fishing villages in Perak had committed a range of crimes the police burned down the villages, and in 1886 the Dutch official responsible for the area that included Bagan Si Api Api blockaded the town until the people agreed to pay taxes and follow his orders.22 Chinese fishing villages maintained a reputation for being “a lawless crowd”,23 but the colonial states were at least able to extract revenue from them and keep an eye on their activities. At first there appears to have been some friction between Chinese and Malays, but officials who contributed to a report on the fisheries of the Straits

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Map 4.2 Straits of Malacca and Malay Peninsula

Settlements and Protected Malay States published in 1896 indicated that this had become rare. Malays operating jermal along the north coast of Selangor complained to the government when Chinese let their nets drift into their jermal, but the district officer resolved this simply by allowing the Malays to place posts in such a way that they intercepted the nets before they did any harm.24 It is worth noting that the Chinese

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at Kuala Kurau “would not think of commencing” the construction of a large fishing stake without asking a Malay pawang laut (“sea magician”) to drive in the first stake and to perform a ceremony to bring the fishers good luck.25 The most spectacular growth in catches took place in the Rokan estuary, a place which was extraordinarily rich in marine life but which was not even mentioned in the 1882 survey of fishing in the Netherlands Indies. In 1898 (the first year for which there is a figure) Bagan Si Api Api already exported 13,000 tons of dried fish; in 1904 it exported 26,000 tons of dried fish and 2,700 tons of belacan.26 There were several reasons for this spectacular increase. To begin with, there was the extraordinary abundance of fish in the estuary. The organic matter continually being brought from the interior of Sumatra by the Rokan River, the constant mixing and oxygenation of the water taking place because of the tidal bore, and the dense mangroves all contributed to the growth of many species of finfish and shrimps. Hardenberg’s investigation of the estuary in 1929 concluded that “the fishes which form the bulk of the catches, and which are therefore the most important for the fisheries, pass their whole life-cycle inside the fished area”. As evidence of this Hardenberg found by examining the contents of the stomachs of fish caught in the estuary that sergestid shrimps were “a very important fish-food”.27 Just as important as the extraordinary productivity of the estuary, however, was the way fishing was organized to produce for the market. The fishers themselves were organized into small kongsis, each headed by a towkay bangliau (literally, “the head or owner of the place where the nets are dried”), who owned the boats, fishing gear, and drying platforms, provided accommodation for the fishers when they were not at sea, and gave the fishers cash advances. Up to the early 1900s, fishing was almost entirely conducted by means of jermal, which were particularly effective because of the very strong current generated by the outgoing tide. The fish immediately underwent a preliminary salting on board the boat bringing the fish to shore; once on shore the fish were placed on extensive platforms to dry. The main product was widely known as ikan busuk or “rotten fish”. The towkay sold the fish to local fish traders, who were Chinese from Java, where the bulk of the town’s products were sold, and then paid the fishers once he had deducted his expenses and his own share. The linchpin for the whole business was the salt farm, which supplied

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the vital ingredient needed to preserve fish to be shipped long distances. At Bagan Si Api Api, unlike in those parts of the Netherlands Indies subject to the government’s salt monopoly, the government leased out the exclusive right to sell salt. This monopoly, or “farm”, was held by a syndicate made up of prominent Chinese businessmen on both sides of the straits. In order to keep the industry going, the head of this syndicate — the farmer — imported massive quantities of salt. Usually, he bought salt in Singapore, to which it had been brought from the Red Sea, but on a few occasions when he could not obtain supplies there he shipped salt directly from Aden himself. Because the syndicate held the farm with little or no competition from rival syndicates up to about 1905, the rent it had to pay the government for the farm was low. The farmer was therefore able to sell salt to the fishers at a price well below the maximum stipulated in his contract and much below the price in those parts of the Netherlands Indies subjected to the government’s monopoly. The farmer could, of course, have raised the price of salt to the maximum but apparently chose not to in the expectation that a low price would stimulate fishing. Since the rent he had to pay the government was fixed for the term of each contract, he was able to keep for himself (and the syndicate) whatever he collected over and above that rent. In order to promote fishing still further the farmer supplied salt on credit to the towkays. As well as receiving credit from the farmer the towkays received cash advances from the fish traders, who themselves appear to have received advances from the farmer while they waited for payment for the goods they had shipped. Thus there was an elaborate system of credit, backed up by a powerful syndicate, that lubricated the expansion of the industry. As well as supplying credit, the farmer who was in place in 1908 (and had apparently held the farm for some time) had a family connection with the owners of the shipping line based in Singapore that carried the fish to Singapore and Java. Moreover, under the terms of his contract the farmer had the right to levy an export duty on belacan and dried prawns. The farmer’s profit from all his many activities — selling salt, collecting export duties, collecting interest on loans, and presumably taking a share in the income from the shipping line as well as from the opium and gambling farms of the area — must have been very great. Indeed, the whole enterprise must have become increasingly profitable, since exports of all fish products grew much faster than increases in the rent the farmer

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had to pay the government. In 1905 a Dutch report on the fishing industry of Bagan Si Api Api concluded that the fishing industry provided “a good livelihood for the fishers, a great profit for the [Netherlands Indies] treasury, and, certainly, a gold mine for the farmer”.28 In Java the salt fish produced at Bagan Si Api Api had to compete with fish imported from Siam and Indochina via Singapore as well as fish caught locally. In general the consumers of Java preferred “Siam fish” to the “rotten fish” of Bagan Si Api Api and were prepared to pay more for it, both because of its superior taste and because it was packed in so much salt. As a result the price in Java of fish produced in Bagan Si Api Api fell whenever there was a big supply of Siam fish. In the early years the fishery was devoted almost entirely to catching finfish, but in the early 1900s the fishers began interweaving split rattan into the interstices of the rattan screens used in jermal and placing sacking behind the screens (as shown in Figure 4.1) so that their jermal could catch the tiny shrimps used to make belacan as well as larger shrimps, which were dried. At the same time they began fishing with a fishing gear known as an ambai, which closely resembled the pongpang being used in Siam but was especially designed to catch shrimps. At the end of the net was placed a pocket of coarse sacking which captured whatever was forced into it by the current.29 Exports of belacan increased from 100 tons in 1899 to 10,000 tons in 1909.30 Virtually all of this belacan was shipped to Java. In the mean time, exports of dried fish began to decline. One reason for the shift from fish to belacan is that less salt was needed to prepare belacan than dried fish of the same value. This became an important consideration as the farmer began to push up the price of salt to cover the greatly increased rent he had to pay the government. In 1904 the monthly rent rose from $2,500 to $5,500; when the farm was relet in 1907 it rose slightly, to $6,500; and then in 1910 it doubled to $13,000. Why the rent increased in 1904 and 1907 is unclear, but the Dutch records show that there was very intense competition for the farm in 1910 and that the farmer had to put in a very high bid in order to hold on to it. Having retained the monopoly, the farmer might well have continued to sell salt at a low price in the hope of promoting greater catches and therefore greater consumption of salt, but the inner part of the estuary was no longer the seemingly unlimited source of fish that it

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Figure 4.1 A Jermal

had been. Since the number of jermal had increased while the catch had declined, we can safely conclude that the amount of fish caught by each jermal was decreasing. Moreover, we should note a fisheries biologist’s observation in 1914 that “already since twelve or thirteen years ago virtually no large fish have been caught, by which I mean not even small individuals of the species of which large individuals were regularly captured”.31 Whether the jermal themselves were the cause is unclear. The fact that about 1908 “a few hundred”32 jermal “stood close together” in the inner part of the estuary, catching “everything carried out with the

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ebb tide”,33 would suggest that they were. But we must also consider that the inner part of the estuary where most of the jermal were located was becoming shallower as a result of the continuous discharge of silt from the river.34 It is likely that as the water became shallower the bigger fish moved away from the waters where the jermal were located in order to remain in water of the same depth as before. Thus, it is quite possible that both siltation and the jermal themselves contributed to the decline in catches. It is also possible that intensive fishing brought about a change in the composition of species in the estuary. In particular, the removal of large fish that had preyed on shrimps may have created the conditions in which shrimps became more abundant. In other words, the greater production of belacan may have come about not only because the fishers put more effort into catching shrimps but also because there were more of them to catch. In response to the higher cost of salt and declining catches of finfish some fishers shifted their attention to catching shrimps and some gave up fishing altogether and left Bagan Si Api Api. Many others, however, responded by building new jermal that were both bigger and much further from shore. In 1911 some jermal were so far out to sea from Bagan Si Api Api that it had become necessary to build temporary shelters on them. Near the island of Senebui, at the most easterly fringe of the estuary, wrote one fisheries officer, “one finds oneself in the middle of a sprawling kampong of jermals resembling giant hammocks”.35 In 1914 another visitor reported that “of the about 400 jermals that are in use at Bagan Si Api Api about 200 stand in their original places, the remaining 200 having been built by people who have had to abandon their first jermals”.36 A hydrographic map of the estuary prepared in 1918 shows a few jermal as far as 20 kilometres from shore.37 What is remarkable is that this took place at a time when the farmer and many fish traders were losing money. Following the big rise in the farm rent in 1910, the farmer started supplying huge amounts of salt on credit to the traders rather than selling it directly to the fishers. The fish traders in turn offered this salt to the fishers on credit and competed with one another for the catches. They also began adulterating belacan with large amounts of bran in order to boost production, thereby causing a rise in exports in 1911 and 1912 but bringing down the price of belacan in Java. As it turned out, the farmer suffered great losses, and in 1913 he was replaced by a new farmer

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who pursued a much more cautious approach. As for the traders, many of them went bankrupt either when the outgoing farmer demanded repayment or when the new farmer refused to be so generous in giving credit. But the fishers, many of whom had already earned enough to break away from the towkays and conduct business on their own, captured a larger proportion of the profits of the fishery and so were able to invest in larger jermal. In 1916 one of these jermal cost $2,000 to construct, as compared to $630 for a smaller one in 1908.38 The cost was higher partly because so much more wood was needed to construct the larger jermal but also because the wood itself was more expensive. In the early years workers were able to collect all the Rhizophera and other trees they needed for stakes and poles from the mangroves near the town, but because more and more jermal were built and because the stakes in existing jermal had to be replaced as they were destroyed by shipworms, they soon cut down much of the mangrove forest nearby. It is difficult to know whether this had a significant effect on the biological productivity of the estuary (or, for that matter, whether it hastened siltation in the estuary), but at the very least it meant that workers had to go further and further for the materials needed to construct jermal and that the price of these materials therefore rose. Even so, the profits clearly made such a large investment worthwhile. In the 1910s officials in the Netherlands Indies conducted a heated debate about the farm. Most of this debate concerned the question of whether the farm promoted or hindered the fishery. In the end, however, the mere fact that the farm was a farm spelled its doom, for most officials regarded farms as relics of a bygone age. In 1920 the government abolished the farm, but rather than introducing its own salt monopoly it decided to set up a company operated by the main fish traders which would import and sell salt to the fishers.39 The abolition of the farm and with it the export duties on shrimp products, the provision of large amounts of credit by a government bank, the opening of a telegraph link between Bagan Si Api Api and Java all promoted considerable prosperity in the 1920s. And the process of moving further from shore continued. “The active construction of larger jermals further out to sea began about 1917”, wrote Bottemanne in 1929. “This activity resumed with more force about 1922, and in 1926, but especially in 1928, the latest big push began”.40 According to Bottemanne, the great bulk of the jermal catches was taken

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by a limited number of larger jermal, each costing between $8,000 and $12,000 to build. Put differently, it was the catches of these new jermal that enabled Bagan Si Api Api to continue exporting so much fish. In fact, the amount of fish caught was somewhat greater than the export figures (21,000 tons of salted fish in 1928) would indicate. In the 1920s the operators of the outermost jermal began selling many of the large fish they caught to traders who took these fish on ice across the straits for sale in Malaya.41 This movement of jermal further from shore continued up to about 1929. When Hardenberg surveyed the estuary in that year he found some jermal as far as about 31 kilometres from shore. At the time of his visit there was a feud between the jermal operators and the driftnet fishers, many of whom were based at Panipahan and Senebui on the fringes of the estuary. The jermal operators accused the driftnetters of scaring away fish that would have been swept into the jermal, while the driftnetters complained that the jermal now extended into their richest fishing grounds. At about this time some fishers had begun using a new gear, the si stji, a bag-shaped net made of tiny mesh at the cod end and wider mesh near the entrance. The net was fixed to the bottom by two stakes and kept open by ropes leading from the upper edge of the entrance to bamboo floats on the surface. The si stji could be easily moved and used on both the incoming and outgoing tides. Moreover, it could be placed in deeper water than the biggest jermal, which were located in water no more than about 16 metres deep.42 By 1933 si stji were being operated as far out as the Aroa Islands, well beyond the outer limit of the jermal. In addition to all its other advantages a si stji was far cheaper to make than a jermal. A row of ten si stji linked to one another could catch as much as one jermal, but the ten nets cost about one tenth as much as a jermal.43 At about the same time shifts in the location of the richest fishing areas in the estuary caused by changes in the currents reduced the catches of many jermal, while the price of fish fell because of the Depression. Quickly seeing the much greater profitability of the si stji, many owners of jermal abandoned them and adopted the new fishing gear. Those who continued to operate their jermal complained bitterly that the si stji were reducing their catches. As a result of these complaints, in 1930 the local fishers’ association introduced rules regulating the distance between fishing gears, but the complaints continued.44 When Hardenberg returned to Bagan

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Si Api Api in 1933 he found that the jermal owners were trying to convince the government that the si stji were destroying fish stocks in the estuary and would bring about the ruin of the town.45 In response to all these complaints, Hardenberg argued that there was no evidence of overfishing in the estuary. Whether or not overfishing was occurring, reports from the 1930s suggest that despite the slump in prices during the Depression and competition from Japanese fishers Bagan Si Api Api — by then a town of 15,000 people, of whom 12,000 were Chinese — was fairly prosperous. Indeed, it was one of the biggest fishing ports in the world at the time, exporting 23,000 tons of salted fish, 11,000 tons of belacan, and 6,700 tons of shrimp shells (used as fertilizer) in 1937.46 It is clear, however, that by the 1930s it was no longer possible to increase catches without moving further out to sea and adopting new fishing methods. Unlike the fishers of Bagan Si Api Api, who were oriented towards distant markets, the fishers working on the other side of the straits — Chinese, Malays, and a few Indians — caught fish primarily for nearby markets, particularly the towns, mines, and plantations near the west coast of the peninsula. It appears that catches increased as the population increased, but, according to one estimate made in 1918, catches in local waters accounted for only one-quarter of the fish that the people of the Federated Malay States consumed.47 Most of the dried fish they ate was imported from Siam, Indochina, Sumatra, and Trengganu. It would appear that most of the fresh fish consumed along the west coast was caught in local waters, as suggested by the fact that in 1918 just ten of the 150 iceboats based at Port Swettenham that picked up fish caught by driftnets and the outer jermal in the straits collected fish caught in “Dutch waters”.48 Since the total consumption of dried fish far outweighed the consumption of fresh fish, however, it would appear that catches in local waters accounted for no more than half of the fish eaten by the local population. More precisely, local catches provided a small proportion of the total amount of marine animals directly consumed by people, for people also ate some fish in the form of the meat or eggs of animals that had been fed fish caught in local waters. In fact, one of the most striking features of the fisheries of the west coast at this time was the extent to which it was oriented to feeding animals that were in turn eaten by people and to fertilizing plants, as I shall explain.

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Although no catch statistics are available, it appears that the bulk of the fish caught along the west coast from Perak south to Singapore was caught by fishing stakes. According to official statistics, there were 1,500 ambai and belat and 360 jermal and kelong in Selangor in 1916.49 Along the coast of Perak there were fewer kelong and jermal but perhaps twice as many ambai at this time.50 From a commercial point of view, the most valuable animals caught by these gears as well as the many push nets in use were shrimps, particularly the small ones used to make belacan. As far as quantity was concerned, however, a very large proportion of what the fishing stakes and ambai caught was used as manure for sugar cane and other crops and especially as food for pigs and ducks. The owners of most of these devices were Chinese who raised pigs and poultry; they sold the larger fish but fed the rest to their farm animals. In 1904 a member of a committee set up to investigate the fishing industry along the west coast, H.C. Robinson, examined the fish caught by a jermal in the estuary of the Selangor River. He concluded that “the fish caught consisted to a very large extent of quite immature specimens of estuarine and surface-feeding varieties, and, as a rough estimate, individuals of marketable weight formed not more than a third of the total weight”. According to Robinson, jermal located in estuarine waters captured “not only the young fry, but also the breeding stock of those fish that deposit their spawn in brackish and muddy waters which in Malayan seas form a considerable proportion of the fauna”.51 As a result of this report and similar ones from other officials the governments of the Federated Malay States and the Straits Settlements imposed a ban on ambai and stipulated that the screens used in jermal have one-inch interstices. The government enforced this ban rigorously for a few years and as a result there was a great drop in exports of belacan. In 1909 enforcement slackened and exports quickly rose again, but several officials continued to complain about the effects of fine-meshed fishing gears. In 1912 Robinson reported that the belacan fishers were “destroying much of the fry of the larger food fishes”,52 and in 1914 an investigation of a number of ambai at Tanjong Piandang showed that 10 tons of fish were caught during the year for each fisher and that this catch consisted “very largely [of ] fry of good food fishes, none of which is used for human consumption”.53 Several other reports from this time reached the same conclusion. It is hard to know exactly what effect fine-meshed fishing gear actually

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had on fish populations at this time. It is possible that the failure of the local fisheries to meet local demand had more to do with the fact that there were so many opportunities for work in other industries at this time. Despite his concern about the effects of fishing gears on stocks, Robinson argued in 1912 that a decline in the number of fishers in Kuala Langat district was probably due to “the greater demand for labour in other fields”,54 and in 1918 the harbour master at Port Dickson asserted that the good pay that “even a Malay” could earn on a rubber estate was responsible for the nearly complete collapse of fishing along the coast of Negri Sembilan.55 Before accepting this view, we would need to know much more about the incomes of fishers as well as of workers in other fields. Fisheries reports from this time suggest that fishing was a fairly profitable activity even if one allowed for the damage storms caused fishing gear from time to time. These reports also accused middlemen of raking off much of the profits, but it is clear from the same reports that fishers found effective ways of evading their obligations to middlemen. For example, driftnetters who were in debt to their financiers sold the best fish they caught directly to the iceboats, thereby earning good incomes while appearing to remain bound by debt. Moreover, in at least one case a group of Malay fishers did well enough to break their ties to fish traders and set up business on their own.56 Thus, it is very difficult to know why local fishers fell well short of meeting local demand. It is reasonably clear, however, that in many areas there was little room left in which to build new fishing stakes and trap nets by the 1910s. In 1918 Robinson wrote that he had stopped issuing licences to build kelong near Pulau Ketam because all the possible locations were already occupied.57 Whatever the actual effects of ambai and other fine-meshed fishing gears, many officials were convinced that they were responsible for a shortage of fish in the markets.58 One of these officials was the Resident of Perak, who in 1920 went so far as to ban the use of ambai in his state. At the same time, however, a few officials challenged the prevailing view about ambai. Thus, when David Stead, who had set up a state-run trawling company in New South Wales during the war, arrived in 1922 to write a report on the fisheries of Malaya he immediately turned his attention to investigating the effects of ambai and similar gears on fish stocks. In his report he strongly rejected the view that ambai were destroying fish stocks. Based on samples collected from ambai in several

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places, he argued that only a tiny proportion of the catch consisted of the larvae of commercially important fish and that the ambai may in fact have helped maintain stocks of commercially important fish by removing animals that eat the larvae of these fish. In any case, he concluded, ambai occupied such a tiny fraction of the sea they could not possibly affect fish stocks.59 Following Stead’s report the government either repealed its rules about mesh size or no longer bothered to enforce them. By the time of Stead’s report, however, the number of jermal, kelong, ambai, and other stationary fishing gears had already begun to fall. This was partly because of the restrictions but mainly because of a shortage of the materials needed to build them. Like their counterparts in the Rokan estuary, the operators of fishing stakes along the eastern side of the straits consumed immense amounts of wood. A kelong could be operated for only five months before it had to be rebuilt.60 Much less wood was needed to construct an ambai, but even so hundreds of stakes were needed to form the wings leading to the net, and these stakes had to be replaced continuously. As a result, the forests nearby Chinese fishing villages were “characterized by large blanks and the absence of anything but crooked stems that were useless to the fishermen”.61 In fact, by 1916 Robinson was warning that unless something were done about the supply of stakes “the public must look forward to a large increase in price and a restricted supply of the better quality of salt fish”.62 In 1921 a forestry officer asserted that the fishers at Pulau Ketam had “ruined the more accessible parts of the … forest” and recommended that these areas be closed for ten years.63 The government set aside areas where the fishers could collect the wood they needed, but they had to travel much further to reach them and in many cases these areas could not be reached by boat.64 Yet another challenge faced by the operators of fishing stakes was the clogging up of their stakes by massive quantities of large jellyfish,65 which perhaps had become more abundant because of the removal of a large proportion of their competitors and predators. A fall in the price of pigs during the early part of the Depression further undermined the profitability of fishing stakes. As we shall see in Chapter 5, other fishing gears, most notably the purse seine, captured an increasingly large proportion of the fish landed along the west coast of the Malay Peninsula in the 1930s. Fishing stakes continued to be important in some places. The fact that well over half

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the fish landed in Selangor in the 1930s was categorized as “rotten fish” (ikan baja) indicates the importance of fishing stakes in that state’s fisheries, since the great bulk of fish in this category was captured by fishing stakes. Nevertheless, fishing stakes no longer dominated fisheries all along the coast as they had in the early 1900s. Moreover, despite Stead’s report, officials continued to argue that fishing stakes, particularly ambai, were highly destructive devices. In 1931 the head of the fisheries department concluded that while ambai captured “many small fishes of no other economic value” they also destroyed “large quantities of many of our more valuable fishes …, particularly young soles (Solidae [Soleidae]), young ‘Senangin’ and young ‘Kurau’ (Polynemidae [threadfins])”.66 One estuary that the department studied had “not less than ten ambai working and hauling every tide”. The director was, however, also aware of how many people still depended either directly or indirectly on fishing stakes for their livelihood. As far as I can tell, the government took no further steps in the 1930s to discourage their use.

The north coast of Java and Madura In the mid-1800s virtually every aspect of fishing in many places along the north coast of Java and Madura (Map 4.3) was bound up with the fish tax farms. The farmer of a particular district extended credit to the fishers, who handed over their catches to the farmer both to pay the taxes collected by the farmer and to pay off their debts to the farmer. The farmer and the larger organization of which he was a part sold some fresh fish and processed the rest of the catch using salt that the government sold to the farmer at a price much lower than the price at which monopoly salt was usually sold. A central argument in Masyhuri’s history of the marine fisheries of Java and Madura is that the farm brought about a big expansion in fishing.67 From the point of view of many officials of the time, however, the farms stifled fishing and thereby deprived the people of an adequate supply of an essential food. The government therefore abolished the farm in 1864 and instead taxed fishing with the enterprise tax that was levied on all businesses. The abolition of the farm instantly broke the link between credit, processing, marketing, and cheap salt. Fishers and fish salters now had to pay the full price of monopoly salt, and soon the fish salting business

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Map 4.3 Java

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Java

SUMATRA LAMPUNG

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Thousand Islands Karimunjawa Islands

.:; ;-",·-.

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••

Bawean

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JAVA go

Indian Ocean 108°

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collapsed. One consequence appears to be that fishers and fish processors made more use of alternative ways of preserving fish. The report of the Prosperity Commission in 1905 listed many areas in Java and Madura where it was common to preserve fish using salty earth or sand from the beach. While claiming that fish preserved in this way was tastier, the report speculated that people had originally been forced to use salty earth and sand “only out of necessity, namely, because the government’s salt is too expensive or hard to get”.68 Another way in which fishing communities circumvented the salt monopoly was to make salt clandestinely. This was easier to do in east Java and Madura, where there were excellent conditions for making salt, than in west Java, where very little was made. Even in east Java and Madura, however, it appears that clandestine salt constituted only a small proportion of the salt used to process fish. The lack of cheap salt in Java and Madura helped to promote the fishing industries of Bagan Si Api Api, Siam, and other places outside Java where salt was relatively cheap. Fish from Siam was particularly popular in Java because it was packed in large amounts of salt, which could be scraped off and used for other purposes. The abolition of the farm also brought about a severe shortage of credit. The farmers had been prepared to lend money to fishers to buy boats and fishing gear, since this increased catches and therefore the taxes they could collect as well as their profits from processing and selling fish. Once the farms were abolished, the fishers turned to indigenous, Chinese, and Arab moneylenders. In general these moneylenders were far less willing to take the risks the farmers had taken, since they did not have the same interest in keeping up the overall business, but in west Java the powerful kongsis of Chinese fish traders based in Batavia seem to have carried on an arrangement that had many of the features of the old farm. These traders, according to Van Kampen: … give advances to the fishers at high interest rates but also at great risk, for if the fishing gear or boat is lost the moneylender … usually loses what he has lent. The debt is settled at the auction at the fish market, which is in the hands of the same kongsi. Because they have easy access to credit the fishers are able to maintain their boats and fishing gear properly; the moneylenders stimulate them — in the interests of both — to greater energy and the business progresses. Fishers from Bantam, Krawang, and Tegal come to Batavia in order to fish there with advances from the kongsis.69

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Masyhuri paints a less rosy picture of this arrangement, pointing out that while the kongsis did not demand that the fishers put up any form of security for the loans they received they had agents (buaya, “crocodiles”) out and about to make sure the fishers observed the conditions of the loans,70 but it may nevertheless have promoted fishing. In any case, whatever the situation in Batavia, it does appear that little capital was being invested in the fisheries of Java and Madura in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The high cost of salt made it difficult to make a profit, while there were many other avenues of investment at this time that promised good returns. Masyhuri argues that a shortage of credit forced those fishers who had operated offshore in relatively large boats to move inshore where they could fish with a much smaller investment. As evidence of this movement he shows that the number of large boats declined significantly in the latter part of the nineteenth century.71 It is likely that in some places a shortage of teak rather than a lack of credit may have contributed to this decline, for by the late 1800s much of the teak forest had been cut down and the government had stepped up surveillance of its forests, the source of much of the wood used by the boat builders.72 At Pekalongan, however, the cost of boats actually fell, but even so the fishers were too poor to buy them. Moreover, an order by the Resident of Pekalongan stopping fishers from landing spoiling fish — fish which could not be sold fresh in the market but which could still be processed into marketable products — prompted some fishers to fish closer to shore, since this greatly reduced the risk of letting their catch spoil and having to dump it before entering the harbour.73 However we explain it, the centre of fishing activity appears to have shifted inshore at this time. In the late 1800s many officials began to express concern about what they regarded as a decline in fish stocks.74 We can see this concern most clearly in evidence presented to the Prosperity Commission in the early 1900s: Along the coast of Tegal: The lack of protection of fish during the spawning season must inevitably diminish fish stocks, as has already happened here and there. The river dwellers are (just as in Europe) the greatest enemies of fish stocks, since they scoop the waters empty as it were with their finemeshed fishing gears.75

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Between Gresik and Madura: The fishery has gone down because the fish have been caught away in the narrows of the strait as well as at the west and east entrances by boats in the channel and by fish corrals along the shore, while fishers from Madura try their luck further and further westwards in the fishing ground of this district.76 Along the coast of Probolinggo in the Madura Strait: The decline [in fishing] … has been caused by a decline in the abundance of fish in the past ten years. Certain species of fish that used to be caught in great numbers such as the Indies sardine [Sardinella lemuru], tengara [probably tenggiri, Spanish mackerel], the tongkol [various small tunas], layur [hairtails, Trichiurus species], angi-angi, tangkolok, and bloso [probably gobies] are no longer to be found. … An expert study of the causes (changes in the current and in salinity and turbidity?) is needed. … [I]t also appears that destruction caused by injudicious fishing throughout the year plays a part.77

It is unlikely that “injudicious fishing” had much impact on the oceanic species such as tongkol mentioned in the last report, but all three reports refer to relatively confined waters — rivers and estuaries along part of the heavily populated north coast of central Java, the very narrow strait between Java and the western tip of Madura, and coastal waters in the western part of the Madura Strait — where overfishing would be most likely to occur first. They were, at the very least, waters which were becoming increasingly crowded with fishing gears. In any case, the officials who expressed these concerns were convinced that fish stocks were under threat and so put forward a range of proposals on how to protect fish stocks. These included prohibiting fishing with anything but hooks and wide-meshed nets in waters up to 1 fathom (1.8 metres) deep, prohibiting the placing of fish corrals and traps in or near river mouths, a ban on fishing in all waters less than a fathom deep for two months each year, closing certain areas such as the Thousand Islands for fishing for three years, and prohibiting the collection of fish roe. The commission, however, rejected these proposals. It noted that as early as the 1870s the government had banned the use of fine-meshed nets in Jepara but that this ban was lifted after a few years because it appeared to bring no improvement in catches, while a regulation made by the official in charge of the Karimunjawa Islands in 1895 requiring fishers to use nets with large meshes seemed to make no difference one way or another. According to the commission, fishing posed little danger to fish stocks, because the

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fishing gear was so primitive, fishing ceased for a couple of months each year because of rough weather, and the waters in which fishing took place were closely connected with the Indian Ocean, “which is as good as not fished”. In any case, the commission added, the government simply did not have the number of police needed to enforce the sorts of regulations that had been proposed.78 While dismissing proposals to regulate fishing, the Prosperity Commission believed that a great deal could be done to promote the fisheries of Java and Madura. Among other things it recommended that the government provide boat builders with cheap wood, set up banks to give fishers interest-free loans, and set up an institute to undertake fisheries research. Because the government had already been selling salt for processing fish at a much lower price in a few places since 1900, and because salty earth and sand were so widely used, the commission did not believe that a lack of cheap salt had been holding back the fishing industry a great deal. Nevertheless, one of the most important recommendations of the commission was that the government should supply fishers with salt at cost price. As a result of this recommendation the government began setting up sheds where fishers could process their catches using cheaper salt.79 The salt sold at these sheds was still several times more expensive than the salt used by processors along the Gulf of Siam but it cost roughly the same as the salt sold to processors at Bagan Si Api Api. At first, however, the sheds did very little to promote greater catches. Because there were so few sheds — just eleven in Java and Madura in 191780 — many fishers had to travel far to reach one. Moreover, fishers often did not want to make use of the sheds even when one was nearby. One source implies that they resented having to process the fish under the supervision of the government officers who ran the sheds. The same source suggests that the sheds disrupted the division of labour within fishing families, since typically women salted and dried the catch at home while the men were out fishing.81 Yet another restriction was a rule preventing fishers from bringing fish that had begun to spoil into the sheds.82 The fishers might have reduced the chance of their catch spoiling by salting it as soon as they hauled it on board, but for some time the government prohibited them from taking the cheaper salt to sea with them.83 Some fishers did not want to take salt to sea with them anyway, since they believed that fish avoided nets that had come in contact with

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salted fish,84 but this does not appear to have been a general concern. Yet another regulation stipulated that fish had to be completely processed before they could be removed from the sheds.85 On top of all this, the government’s salt was impure and only available in one quality.86 Gradually, the government began to introduce policies that encouraged fishing. It opened more salting sheds, especially in the 1930s, the number increasing from thirteen to thirty-three between 1932 and 1938.87 It eased the restrictions on taking the cheaper salt to sea. And it set up credit schemes for fishers and instituted public auctions of fish in order to break the hold of moneylenders and fish traders over fishers. There are no statistics to gauge the increase in catches, but data on the amount of cheap salt sold by the government provide a rough indication. In 1917 the government sold 1,200 tons of salt at its salting sheds. The amount sold stayed at roughly this level until the Depression, when it fell sharply because the price of fish fell greatly while the price of salt remained the same. The fall in salt sales did not mean a corresponding fall in landings, however, since fish processors began to prepare a lower grade of pindang using less salt and to make other products that required less salt.88 In the mid-1930s the amount of salt began to rise sharply, from an annual average of 710 tons in 1930–31 to 2,600 tons in 1937 and, following a reduction in the price, 3,300 tons in 1938.89 This jump in salt sales probably represented a large increase in catches. We should note, however, that the total amount of salt sold in the government’s salt sheds in Java and Madura in 1938 was only about one-sixth of the amount sold to processors at Bagan Si Api Api that year. Thus, even if we allow for fish processors skimping on salt and continuing to use salty sand and for the growth in sales of fresh fish, it would seem that the total catches of Java and Madura was about the same as that of one tiny section of the Sumatran coast. Indeed, this is confirmed by noting that annual landings of marine fish in Java and Madura amounted to between 80,000 and 100,000 tons according to an estimate made in 1938, while in 1938 Bagan Si Api Api exported more than 40,000 tons of fish products, the equivalent of a much greater quantity of unprocessed fish.90 The restrictions that the government still imposed on the use of salt by fishers and processors continued to inhibit fishing in Java and Madura, and producers outside these islands continued to enjoy a competitive advantage. Siam fish remained popular in Java because of the great

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amounts of salt that came with it.91 During the 1930s Java imported even more fish (now including large quantities of canned fish, mainly sardines from Japan) than it did earlier in the century. The government might well have imposed a heavy tariff on imported fish, but it did not do so. In 1906 the Prosperity Commission rejected a proposal to increase the import duty (then 10 per cent) on fish produced in other territories or the salt in which they were packed or to impose a duty on fish imported into Java from Bagan Si Api Api on the grounds that such a policy would be “contrary to the interests of the people of the Netherlands Indies in general”.92 Between the 1910s and 1930s the number of boats engaged in offshore fishing increased. Just how big this increase was is unclear, but Masyhuri concludes that “because of the limited extent of investment the number of fishing boats, especially large fishing boats used for catching fish offshore, did not increase much”.93 The investigations of Dutch fisheries experts, however, give us a clearer idea of where these boats operated at different times. In 1910 A. van Roosendaal, the captain of the Gier, which was then conducting a fisheries survey of the Java Sea, delineated the areas where the fishers of Java and Madura captured scads (layang). According to Van Roosendaal, the scad fishing grounds extended from just to the north of the Thousand Islands eastward to slightly north of Bawean and then further east to a spot north of the Kangean Islands. The southern border of the fishing area was about 37 kilometres from shore but was much further from shore in some places. He also noted that in the west scads were caught for only a couple of months each year and were always caught along with other species such as sardinella and Indian mackerel, whereas in the east scads were present throughout the year and captured in great quantities for five months. Altogether, he estimated, about 2,700 boats from about fifty villages to the east of Mandalika were engaged in the fishery. Map 4.4, which Van Roosendaal prepared from information collected from the crews of boats he came across during his surveys, shows where the fishers from particular villages in east Java and Madura fished. More specifically, it shows where these fishers located their floating fish lures, known in this area as rumpon. “Each village has … its own fishing ground”, Van Roosendaal explained, “and will not leave it, even if more fish are being caught in neighbouring areas”.94 He added that attempts had been made (presumably by officials)

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J a v a

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Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Map 4.4 Van Roosendaal’s Map of the Fishing Grounds of Villages on the Northeast Coast of Java and the North Coast of Madura in 1910

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Chapter 4

to change this arrangement but that “so far they had only brought about conflict between the vessels of neighbouring places”. Van Roosendaal argued that the observance of the boundaries would prevent the growth of the fishery, for “competition and mutual emulation can only work for the good”. To highlight what he regarded as the irrationality of the existing system, Van Roosendaal pointed to the case of the fishers of Blimbing. During the east monsoon a perahu mayang could sail across the southeasterly land breeze to take it northeast to reach the fishing ground by dawn, while the sea breeze coming from the northeast later in the morning would push it directly back to Blimbing. During the west monsoon, a boat could easily reach the fishing ground on the southwesterly land breeze, but when it came time to return to Blimbing a west to northwesterly wind accompanied by squalls made “returning home … very difficult, in fact often completely impossible”, since the boat was incapable of tacking into the wind. As a result, the boat was driven to some point east of Blimbing and the day’s catch spoiled before it could be landed. When these conditions lasted several days, the fishers of Blimbing and many other villages would abandon the layang fishery and instead fish closer to shore. According to Van Roosendaal, the only exception to this pattern was the fishers of Sarang, who moved their rumpon to the west during the west monsoon and so had little difficulty returning home after fishing. “At the end of December their boats are the only ones which we came across in the layang grounds, and we found them with their nets cast in heavy winds and high seas”.95 Presumably the fact that Sarang was near the western end of this series of fishing villages made it much easier for the fishers from that village to shift their rumpon to the west when they wanted to. It is, however, possible that fishers from other villages did not lose their catches as often as Van Roosendaal implies, for he mentions that fish buyers bought up much of the catch in many of the fishing areas, including Blimbing’s. These fish buyers positioned themselves so that they could sail directly from the area where they bought fish to the market, sailed in vessels (usually lisalis) that were capable of tacking into the wind, and sometimes processed the fish into pindang while underway. In any case, Van Roosendaal makes it clear in his article that some fishers had recently moved beyond the areas shown on his map into new fishing grounds. Since about 1900

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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Madurese fishers had been placing their rumpon close to Bawean, where they were able to capture great quantities of fish between April and June. They had apparently stepped up their fishing in 1907; the number of boats taking part in this fishery jumped from 82 in 1909 to 166 in 1910. All of their catch was processed on Bawean, apparently by Madurese, as the people of Bawean did not take part in this fishery except to hire out the sheds in which the fish were processed into salt fish and pindang. The bulk of the products of this fishery was shipped to market in Java. All this may not necessarily contradict the picture of a moribund offshore fishery conveyed by Masyhuri’s meticulously researched study, but it does imply that some fishers were finding their work reasonably profitable and were moving into new fishing grounds.96 In 1938 H. van Pel prepared a map of the areas fished by the perahu mayang from villages along the north coast of Java and Madura. Map 4.5 shows the section of his map that coincides with the area covered by Van Roosendaal’s. Although his map is less detailed than Van Roosendaal’s, we can call upon some observations made by Bottemanne to see what changes had taken place by the late 1930s. The first thing that is apparent was a shift in the location of the fishing grounds. While the fishing grounds of villages in east Madura were now located only slightly to the west of where they had been, the fishing grounds of most of the other villages were now further from shore. In particular, these fishing grounds had shifted towards Bawean. In other words, the movement towards Bawean that Van Roosendaal had mentioned as a recent phenomenon was now well established. Presumably, the fishers operating very close to Bawean landed their catches on that island, but there was also a very rapid expansion of the practice of selling catches to fish traders while still at sea,97 thus enabling fishers to operate further from shore and to stay at sea much longer if their catches were good. It is important to add that seaborne fish traders, particularly those based in west Madura, began processing more and more fish while still at sea. Up to the late 1920s they usually made the fish into pindang, but when the market for the relatively expensive pindang fell during the Depression they simply salted the fish instead.98 By processing the fish at sea the fish traders did not have to land the fish as quickly and so could pick up the catches of fishers further from shore. Van Pel’s map suggests that as the perahu mayang shifted their

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Map 4.5 Van Pel’s Map of the Fishing Grounds of Villages on the Northeast Coast of Java and the North Coast of Madura in 1938

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Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s

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operations further from shore the clear identification of particular villages with particular fishing grounds that is so pronounced in Van Roosendaal’s map began to break down. Madurese as well as crews from Weru now fished to the north of Bawean. Crews from many different villages along the western part of the north coast of Madura fished to the southeast of Bawean, fishers from Palang, Tambakboya, and Tuban all operated in the same fishing ground, and the fishers of Weru shared one fishing ground with fishers from Kranji as well as another with Madurese. As Bottemanne put it, the whole business had become more “international”. 99 Unfortunately, my sources give few hints about how these changes happened. Despite the antipathy to the old arrangement that Van Roosendaal showed, there is no evidence that in the years following his comments Dutch officials pursued a policy of trying to destroy it, nor is it likely that a decline in catches pushed fishers further out to sea.100 An increasing demand for fish, the growing practice of selling the catch at sea, and the rapid growth of the waters around Bawean as a fishing ground well away from the home villages of all the participants all helped to bring about both the movement further from shore and a weakening of old arrangements. There was a great deal of room to expand fishing with existing technology, but, as I will show in Chapter 5, the motorization of a few perahu mayang in the 1930s contributed to this outward movement as well.

The Kangean Islands The Kangean Islands (Map 4.6) are located on the southeastern fringe of the Sunda Shelf. The marine animal life of the islands included fairly large pelagic fish such as skipjack tuna characteristic of the much deeper waters to the east as well as scads, sardinella, and other small pelagic species commonly captured by the offshore fishers of Java and Madura. Surrounding many of the islands were very extensive coral reefs inhabited by tripang, turtles, and a myriad of species of fish. In the middle of these islands is the tiny island of Sapeken, which in 1906 had a population of about 6,800,101 mainly Mandarese, whose livelihoods depended on fishing. In keeping with the ecological diversity of the waters around the islands, the fishers of Sapeken and nearby islands employed virtually the full range of the methods available at the time — nets, fish corrals, traps,

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

106

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s

107

hooks, and spears — to capture marine animals. From the point of view of the quantity caught, the most important fishing gear was the payang, operated, usually in conjunction with a rumpon, to capture sardinella, scads, and other small pelagic fish. Next in importance were various kinds of hooks, used to catch larger pelagic fish and crimson snappers (bambangan, Lutjanus erythropterus),102 and driftnets, mainly used to catch reef fish. Virtually all of the fish caught by the fishers of Sapeken had to be processed in one way or another, partly because the fishers themselves ate salted rather than fresh fish but mainly because nearly all of what they caught was exported. The catch of the payang fishers was made into pindang (prepared and sold in kerosene cans) or kanas, a product similar to “Siam fish” that required a great deal of salt to prepare. When the price of fish fell too low to make a profit from preserving the fish with a lot of salt, the fish were simply dipped in brine, left in the sun, and sprinkled with salt water every day. The result of this process was a lowgrade product that fetched very low prices.103 The fish caught by the hook-and-line fishers were salted and dried, as were the catches of the driftnetters. The hook-and-line fishers and the driftnetters both roamed considerable distances. The hook-and-line fishers fished as far away as Sakala, the Polo Islands, and the waters around Noko Reef (Takat Noko). They set up temporary camps on reefs, sandbars, and uninhabited islands where they could salt and dry their catches and sell the processed fish to traders who sailed around buying up fish. The driftnetters fished on all of the many reefs in the Kangean Islands and even sailed as far east as the Paternoster Islands, 140 kilometres from Sapeken (Map 4.7).104 As all this suggests, the fishers and fish processors of Sapeken needed large amounts of salt to sustain their business. They also needed to be able to carry salt to sea with them either to give their catch a preliminary salting or to prepare the final product. Up to 1907 the fishers and fish processors of Sapeken got small amounts of salt in the form of briquettes from the government’s monopoly, but the vast bulk of the salt they used came from Sulawesi. This salt cost about one-ninth as much as the salt the government had just begun selling in its salting sheds in Java and Madura.105 Administratively, Sapeken was part of a district in eastern Madura and therefore subject to the government’s salt monopoly, but officials turned a blind eye to the importation of salt from Sulawesi. Blessed with an abundance of fish, very cheap salt, and even a plentiful

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

108

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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Chapter 4

Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s

109

supply of teak from nearby islands for building boats, Sapeken flourished as a fishing town. Large traders engaged in the business of buying up, processing, and exporting fish, but because salt was cheap and its use was subject to no restrictions fishers and their families themselves did a great deal of fish processing and “nearly every payang fisher was to some extent also a fish trader”.106 The main export market was Bali. This was partly because there was a ready market for fish there, but geography was also an important consideration. The north coast of Bali is only 130 kilometres from Sapeken, about half the distance to ports in east Java. Moreover, the large boats that carried fish could easily sail between Sapeken and Bali during both monsoons. During the west monsoon they could sail across the northwest wind both ways, while during the east monsoon they could do the same with the southeast wind. When the conditions were good a boat could make the voyage to Bali in twelve hours. Sapeken was not bound to the Bali market, however. When prices were low there but high in east Java, boats would carry processed fish to Panarukan and sometimes as far as Probolinggo in east Java even though they were likely to face headwinds on one leg of the trip.107 In 1907 Sapeken’s prosperity was shattered when the government suddenly decided to block imports of cheap salt from Makassar. The fishers and fish processors of Sapeken now had to pay the full monopoly price for salt, since the government did not simultaneously set up a salting shed where its salt could be sold at a lower price for processing fish. As a result, “fishing came to a standstill; there were shortages because there were no fish with which to pay for the necessities of life, all of which Sapeken must import; many abandoned the island and set up elsewhere”; and the population of Sapeken fell to 3,700.108 In 1909 the government set up a salting shed on Sapeken, but, as mentioned, the salt sold at the government’s sheds was much more expensive than Makassar salt. Moreover, the government at first prohibited fishers from taking any salt to sea with them and prevented fishers and processors from using the salt anywhere except in the shed. With the introduction of the salt monopoly, according to Van Roosendaal, both the hook-and-line fishers and the driftnetters were “sentenced to death”. They could only preserve their catches on the islands near where they fished if they paid the full monopoly price for salt, but by doing this they could not compete with Makassarese who landed fish at Sapeken after preserving them with salt they bought in Sulawesi.109 As for the payang fishers, they too felt the full

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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Chapter 4

force of the new regime. Their business was undermined by the great increase in the price of salt, since they caught fish that needed a great deal of salt to preserve properly but fetched relatively low prices. Moreover, since they were unable to take the salt sold in the salting sheds to sea with them, they could no longer fish in many fishing grounds that they had previously exploited. During the east monsoon they could extend their range to the southeast by gradually making their way to the windward to the fishing ground, set their nets, and bring their catch back to Sapeken as quickly as possible on the southeast wind. If, however, they were becalmed or met a headwind on the homeward journey, their catch spoiled by the time they returned to Sapeken.110 During the 1910s the government relaxed some of the restrictions on the use of salt. In 1910 it allowed boats to carry 6 kilograms of salt per fisher per month (just enough to convert 15 kilograms of fresh fish into one can of pindang ) and later increased the amount to 15 kilograms. Under a regulation introduced in 1914 large boats that towed sampans out to the fishing grounds were allowed to take an extra 80 kilograms of salt for each sampan up to a maximum of five sampans; in order to carry as much salt as possible the crews of these boats towed more sampans than they actually needed for fishing. Finally, in 1916 the government also lowered the price of salt slightly. As a result of these measures exports gradually recovered, but in 1914 the total value of exports was still only about half of what it had been before 1907.111 The price of salt was still several times the price of Makassar salt, and many restrictions on its use remained in place. A consequence of the upheaval in 1907–08 was that the whole business of processing and trading fish became centralized in the hands of four big traders, since fishers could no longer freely process their catches when and where they chose. These traders appear to have tied Sapeken even more closely to the market in Bali, since they worked out deals by which they could sell fish there at a fixed price. It is likely that a smaller proportion of the overall profit from fishing went to the fishers themselves than it had before 1907.112 Exports of fish reached a peak in 1926 but then plummeted during the Depression, as the prices of fish products fell sharply while the price of salt remained high. Exports of pindang, the most important product by weight, fell from 640 tons in 1926 to 120 tons in 1933; in the early 1930s exports of kanas, the product requiring the most salt to prepare,

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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were about one-tenth of what they had been in the mid-1920s.113 We can assume that the big fall in exports represented a corresponding fall in actual catches, since virtually all of the catch was exported. The high cost of salt had an even greater impact at Sapeken than it did in Java and Madura, since there were no large urban markets where some of the catch could be sold fresh and since fish was bound to spoil before it reached distant markets if processors skimped on the amount of salt they used.114 In the late 1930s exports increased considerably. On the one hand demand rose, while on the other the government reduced the price of salt slightly, issued licences for the sale of salt outside the government’s salting shed, allowed some licence holders to prepare pindang in their own sheds, and allowed fishers to take unlimited amounts of salt to sea with them. Nevertheless, the fishers of Sapeken were still at a disadvantage in relation to those who had access to cheaper salt. Among their competitors were Makassarese who fished for crimson snappers in waters near Sapeken. Because these fishers carried Makassar salt with them to their fishing grounds they were able to preserve their catches more cheaply than the fishers based at Sapeken could. Thus, exports of crimson snappers from Sapeken hardly increased at all in the late 1930s.115 From the limited evidence available we can see that catches fluctuated greatly between 1900 and the 1930s. In some years there was a great abundance of fish, while in others fish were scarce. In 1914 and 1915 there was such a scarcity of fish that the payang fishers abandoned their usual fishing grounds and sailed to the Paternoster and Postilion islands far to the east of Sapeken, and in some other years they sailed to the Bali Strait to fish near Banyuwangi and particularly in Pangpang Bay.116 It is, however, very unlikely that the activities of the fishers themselves had any appreciable effect on the abundance of fish. The only limits on fishing at this time were those imposed by natural fluctuations in fish populations, the pattern of the winds, the fishing gear, and the availability of cheap salt.

The Philippines Fish corrals were the most important fishing gear in much of the Philippines (Map 4.8) throughout this period just as they had been in

© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

112

Chapter 4

Map 4.8 Central and Northern Philippines

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