From Granta, October 18:
Ernest Hemingway thrilled to the tuna: to their size, and their strength. They are big as a grizzly bear, and he loved them for it. Most reach around 1.8 metres, but the largest outliers of the largest species, the Atlantic bluefin, can be twice that, and more than six hundred kilograms. In 1922, watching a school of tuna hunt a run of sardines from the Spanish port of Vigo, Hemingway wrote in a newspaper dispatch about a ‘big tuna who breaks water with a boiling crash and . . . falls back into the water with the noise of a horse diving off a dock’. Their colossal heft allowed him to conceive of fishing for tuna as a heroic struggle, pure masculinity versus the ocean. He wrote,
. . . if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish when your muscles are nauseated with the unceasing strain, and finally bring him alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified and be able to enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods, and they will make you welcome.
It is the prose of a man who longs in his deepest heart to punch fish straight out of the sea. The tuna was the fish for him: had it been possible, he would have dressed it in boxing gloves, and a pair of tiny little shorts.
In Papuan mythology, the tuna is the father of the sun. In the story a woman, playing in the water with a vast tuna fish, felt it rub against her leg. Over time, the leg began to swell, until she cut open the swelling and from it came a baby. The child, Dudugera, ‘leg child’, was mocked by the other children, and became aggressive and angry, a fighter; fearing for his safety, his mother took him back to the water to return him to his father. The great tuna appeared, and took the boy in his mouth. But before he could be taken down into the water with his father, Dudugera told his mother to hide, because he was going to become the sun. Dudugera climbed into the sky, scorching the earth and everything on it. But to mitigate his destructive power, his mother tossed lime into the face of the sun as it rose one morning, which formed clouds, and protected the world from his ferocity. The tuna has its place in stories that are large and wild, and set at the beginning.
Their name means ‘dart along’; they are torpedoes in the water. Of the fifteen species, the ones you are most likely to find in tins in supermarkets are the skipjack, albacore and yellowfin, but it’s the Atlantic bluefin who is the grandest, the swiftest and largest. They are midnight-blue shading to silver on top, and shining white beneath. Swimming at speed, the bluefin’s top fins retract into their bodies, and they pelt at seventy kilometres an hour, faster than a great white shark. So perfectly evolved are they for powering through the ocean, Pentagon-funded scientists have used the tuna body-shape as a model for the US Navy’s underwater missiles. They look large enough for a child to fit inside, Jonah and the Whale-style. Atlantic bluefins swim in vast shoals of five hundred and more: to witness it, in all its speed and frothing water, is akin to seeing a migration of stampeding oceanic buffalo.
Like Hemingway’s ‘elder gods’, Atlantic bluefins do not acknowledge borders. Born in the Mediterranean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, they grow up to hunt across the entirety of the Atlantic – shuttling from Miami to Iceland, Mauritania to Cuba, back and forth, inexhaustible. They can cross the Atlantic Ocean in just forty days, but to mate, they will commute in their great jostling eager school back to the waters near their birth spot. Exactly how they know where to go, we aren’t sure: their sense of smell is remarkable, and perhaps that allows them to build an olfactory map of the ocean – or they may use the stars, or the Earth’s magnetic field. We know only that, each mating season, they return for the ‘broadcast spawning’: large groups of males and females simultaneously release eggs and sperm into the water in a hopeful cascade and leave them to fare as best they can. The vast majority of the ten million eggs a female produces a year will never be fertilised, but those that are will hatch two days later, barely the size of an eyelash. It’s an unusually precarious beginning for a life that can last forty years, if we, or a very few species of sharks and toothed whales, don’t catch them first.
Unlike the vast majority of fish, tuna are warm-blooded....
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