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  At such close proximity it is a joy to watch the men’s sleight of hand as the intestines spill out in a single circling motion. ‘I reckon I’d be a good surgeon,’ Kyle announces as he pauses to slice through a thick string of guts from a particularly large Dover, which slop out onto the table. ‘Only thing is I wouldn’t know how to put it all back in again afterwards.’

  After the gutting is over the men hose down the deck, washing back into the sea those last few living fish, gasping for water, and the foul soup of hacked-out innards, which causes a frenzy amongst the gulls. Andrew and Stevie pull up the weighted trapdoor next to the gutting table to reveal a vertiginous ladder leading into the ‘fish room’. As I clamber down, the boat jerks in response to a large wave, almost causing me to fall several metres. At the bottom, I am met with an arctic scene. The ceiling heaves with stalactites and there is a large wall of solid ice that will be broken up and used over the week to freeze the fish. Piled about the edges of the room are several teetering towers of green boxes containing fish divided into their particular species and frosted over with ice, all caught during the three hauls that I slept through.

  After breaking off ice shards with a pickaxe, Stevie starts layering the fish into the boxes, being careful to place the fish all the same way up (as certain species drain of colour if they are laid the wrong way and then fetch less at auction), creating intricate tessellations that he then covers over with ice.

  There is not a moment when I am specifically told that my main job for the week will be packing monkfish, but rather it is communicated to me wordlessly as it so often is in fishing – work portioned out intuitively. I am especially fascinated by monks. They are the bulldogs of the sea: huge and globular, horribly ugly with rows of pointed teeth. When they come up in hauls, monks often have multiple partially chewed up fish dangling halfway out of their mouths. By the time they reach the fish room their bulbous heads have been hacked off with a machete-like knife and all that is left are their great meaty tails.

  As the towers of fish boxes grow higher over the week, I have to climb up to reach the ones that graze the ceiling, balancing precariously atop a high-rise of cuttlefish from whose boxes cling ominous, black icicles mixed with their ink. I stand with my feet on either side of a cuttle box’s thin rim, knowing at any moment I may fall in and be drenched in the sticky black substance. The men tell me that sometimes, days into a trip, there will suddenly come a thrash from within a tower of boxes and an eel, waking up from a cold coma, will try to burst out from its frozen prison.

  The hours rush by during gutting, in sync with the frenetic nature of the work. Working down in the fish room the sounds of the sea die out and time seems to freeze with it. After an hour there I begin to feel deeply uncomfortable, in a catacomb of dead fish below the sea’s surface, the only way out being a sheer metal ladder leading to a heavy trap door.

  When the monkfish are all boxed up I scramble back up the ladder, take a gulp of sea air and go to the galley for a cup of tea. A few minutes later the men come in, peeling their gloves off and washing their hands in a vain attempt to rid themselves of the fish stench. Finally, Stevie heads down to the engine room to check everything is still in working order. From the Filadelfia’s depths there comes a violent roar, as if there is a hidden beast kept captive below deck, and Stevie returns looking satisfied. The haul is over.

  That afternoon the weather is bleak, the sea without shape and there is a dreariness that pervades the whole boat. It comes from an unspoken recognition that this is how it goes from here: seven days of uniformity ahead of us.

  A telltale sign of oncoming seasickness is continuous yawning. As soon as Kyle begins cooking that night’s supper in the hot galley I cannot stop the yawns from coming. I offer to work as Kyle’s sous-chef to distract myself and turn to face the fridge every time I feel another retch rising in my throat. Chopping carrots, potatoes, onions and cabbage with a large blunt knife on a boat whose movements you are still not quite used to is challenging enough but knowing that at any moment you might spew your own guts up onto valuable food adds another layer of trepidation to the work.

  As we chop Kyle begins to grow suspicious and asks me how I’m feeling.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I’m fine!’ I say in far too high-pitched a tone. He eyes me sideways as I stifle another yawn. Seasickness covers you like a shawl, as if the rest of the world is occurring at a distance from you. A desperate wish to be back home, or at least to be back on the sofa at Denise and Lofty’s, comes over me with such intensity that I nearly burst into tears.

  I think about homesickness often during my time in Newlyn, but especially while I am out at sea: it is a longing for home that, at its worst, takes on physical manifestation, a gut-wrenching pain that becomes almost more real than your present circumstances. The word seasickness does not work in quite the same way. While equally often all-too-physical in its symptoms, it is not that you are sick for the sea, nor sick of it, but rather the sickness seems to come from not understanding it. Your body, unused to the unfamiliar rhythms of the water beneath you, physically rejects them. Back when we were steaming away from the land on the Crystal Sea, watching Newlyn harbour fade away, a crew member told me reassuringly: ‘The penultimate stage of really bad seasickness is being terrified you will die. The ultimate stage…’ he continued, taking a long, dramatic drag on his cigarette, ‘… is being petrified you won’t.’

  It is the most common question people ask me about my time on boats. ‘Weren’t you sick the whole week?’ It is also the way people tend to conceive of their own relationship to the sea – either a smug ‘I love the sea; I never get sick’, or an admission that they dread even half an hour on the water because they get so ill they have to spend the entire trip with their head over the bowl of a toilet. Lofty always wished he could have been a fisherman, but the one time he went out on a trip he got so sick he couldn’t leave his bunk and, not knowing where else to aim in his desperate state, ended up vomiting into his own boot.

  Both Kyle and his cousin began fishing full-time as teenagers. During those early years, neither boy got seasick once. While older men would lean grey-faced over the side of boats in force 10 gales, the two boys would look pityingly at their nauseous crewmates, understanding nothing of their torment. And yet, Kyle tells me, as soon as his cousin went back to sea following the birth of his first daughter he was seasick for the first time. Ever since then he has been ill for at least a day each week he goes out fishing.

  Seasickness is not simple; it is not a condition you have or do not have. Rather, it speaks of larger truths about your relationship to the world you leave behind and the watery one you enter into. Like a horse that senses its rider’s fear the moment they pull themselves up onto its back, the sea, in some mystical way, gauges your emotional state. Fishermen tell me gleefully about the number of scientists, filmmakers and artists who have come out on trips with them and not left their bunks for the whole week, except for urgent trips to the toilet to throw up. These passengers return to the land with no better understanding of fishing than when they steamed off. On the Crystal Sea and Filadelfia, I try to follow the advice of the crews and practise a kind of meditative holding back of the land from my thoughts. Both times this only half works and only for the first few days. Still, I do wonder if part of the reason that seasickness did not completely overwhelm me is because, like Kyle and his cousin before they had children, I do not yet have anything that truly ties me to the land.

  Unable to hold back the tide any longer, I hurtle out of the galley towards the bathroom. As soon as I lean forwards over the toilet, a great wave of sickness leaps from my body. It seems to keep coming and coming, my entire insides expelled into the toilet bowl. Tremors rip through my chest. I take deep breaths and steady myself against the bathroom wall.

  The storm passes, I return to the galley relieved and enjoy a relaxed evening laughing and joking with the rest of the crew. It is only later that I admit to Kyle it took all my strength not t
o projectile vomit onto his carrots earlier. He laughs and tells me he kind of wishes that I had, as it would have been hilarious.

  Before I go to bed I sit in the wheelhouse with Don, the window slightly open, allowing a cold draught to rush through it and mingle with the warm air from the blazing heater that stays on throughout. Sitting down beside him with my flowery mug of tea, I take out the book I have chosen for this trip. Arctic Dreams, by the American environmental writer Barry Lopez, charts the five years he spent as a field biologist studying the wilderness of the Arctic region. It is Lopez’s account of narwhals – the grey, marble-patterned close relative of the beluga whale and the only other surviving member of the Monodontidae family, or white whales – that is of particular interest. We still know more about the planets of the solar system than we do about the narwhal, says Lopez. The creature is often considered to be the mythic root of the unicorn, whose horn was reimagined over time as coming from a land mammal. Perhaps because of these horns the narwhal has long unfairly been considered a harbinger of death. Their very name comes from the Old Norse nar, meaning ‘corpse’, and hvalr, ‘whale’. In the eighteenth century the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, described the rare creature as one that ‘revels in carnage, attacks without provocation and kills without need’. As Lopez writes, ‘animals are often fixed like this in history, bearing an unwanted association derived from notions or surmise having no connection at all with their real life.’

  On the Filadelfia I begin to associate the fishermen with the narwhal – both misunderstood hunters travelling quietly through the seas. Lopez suggests that ‘perhaps only musicians have some inkling of the formal shape of emotions and motivations that might define such a sensibility as the narwhal.’ Watching Don in the wheelhouse, his eyes tracking across the array of machines pulsing out their readings of the sea, I wonder if skippers too might have such an inkling of the immensely complex, ever-shifting world of the narwhal.

  Just as I am settling into Arctic Dreams, Don blows the boat’s booming foghorn. ‘You better put in your book that we are plagued with shit-brained fucking seagulls,’ he growls, startling the innumerable gulls hitch-hiking on the ship’s bow.

  I consider some of the details I’ve learnt about Don. One Newlyn fisherman told me that on the bus home from school, Don would never sit with the other children. He would stand at the front watching the road, chatting to the driver, and always with a packet of crisps stuffed in each pocket from which he would take alternate handfuls. Another remembers him as the only kid who, come rain or shine, would be in the harbour every day after school and at weekends, lending skippers a hand with their boats, covered from head to toe in fish scales.

  5

  THE SING OF THE SHORE

  Early on in my stay in Cornwall I discover by chance, in the Cornish history section of Penzance’s Morrab Library, a small book of Cornish sea words written in the 1960s. In the introduction its author, R. Morton Nance, explains that it was the disappointing lack of specificity in the English Dialect Dictionary, which translated the Cornish word gijoalter vaguely as ‘part of the rigging of the ship’, that first spurred him on to create his Glossary of Cornish Sea-words.

  As part of his research, Nance embarked on a series of visits to every harbour in Cornwall to hear first-hand from fisherfolk ‘the old words and ways at sea as they remembered them’. There is cabarouse – a noisy frolic or drinking bout; cowsherny – when the sea looks as if it is discoloured by cow dung; prinkle – to sparkle with phosphorescence in scattered points of light; ouga – the stench of fish. These words, brimming with and redolent of the sea, equip me with a vocabulary with which to articulate my Cornish experiences. One night I see the whole sea prinkle as a gleaming shoal of pilchards is brought to the water’s surface; ouga follows me everywhere, gets into my nostrils, not just on trawlers, but for many days after fishing trips. Each voyage back to the harbour is celebrated by a wild cabarouse.

  But the phrase that acquires most meaning for me is ‘the sing of the shore’ – defined by Nance as ‘the sound made by waves breaking, varying with the nature of the shore – sand, pebbles, boulders, scarped cliff, or reefs and ledges of rock – and thus giving the experienced fisherman an indication of his position when fog or darkness makes land invisible’. As I say the phrase, I imagine old Newlyn fishermen leaning out over bulwarks to listen for the particular note sung between shore and sea, delimiting the coastline and guiding them even through the thickest of sea fogs.

  I keep a Dictaphone in my pocket and begin harvesting sounds on it. After carefully labelling each recording I add it to my museum of littoral sounds until I have built up a whole musical sphere carried inside the device. Later, when I am away from Newlyn and am craving re-immersion in the place, I hold the Dictaphone up to my ear like a shell and hear again the rage of the sea on a black night captured from the balcony of the Filadelfia, the yarns of fishermen told to me in pubs muffled by the blaring jukebox, the fish merchants yelling prices in the early morning auction, the scuffle of pebbles as I make my way across a quiet beach on a wind-rent day. As I listen Newlyn becomes visible to me once more, the sing of the shore continuing to ring outwards.

  There are two paths out of Newlyn heading towards Land’s End. One leads up beside the main road to Penlee Point and the other down to the sea, where you find a rocky shore on one side and a concrete wall dense with graffiti – together with a half-roof structure to retreat under in a sudden shower – on the other.

  I take the lower path. There is no one else around apart from an elderly woman in a dark coat down to her ankles and a long brown plait snaking down her back. She seems not to notice me as she looks straight out at the sun-dashed water, her feet practically curled over the edge of the rocks that border the sea. For a moment I consider turning around and going back the way I’ve come, but when I catch sight of a slender object raised to her lips, from which comes a haunting sound, I find myself compelled towards her. As I near her, I recognise from the kind of the sound and then from the woman’s finger movements that the object is a small wooden recorder and that the woman is playing her melody directly to the sea. I move closer until I am standing right behind her shoulder, listening to her play. The woman does not break from her music or take her eyes off the sea for even a second and I wonder if she is aware of my presence at all.

  I listen to her for a long while, her music filling the space between sea and land; a woman looking at a woman looking to the sea. I let my gaze follow hers, to where all eyes in Cornwall cannot help but turn. And as I look, there are words contained within the waves, etched out in shimmering lines, and I read them as an incantation produced by the woman’s wordless song. When they touch the clefts of cliffs or pour into the sand these words are deposited there in small pieces. All that the sea comes into contact with has traces of these incantations, in the same way that music is scratched onto a record. This is how the water tries to tell us its ways.

  I leave the lone figure enacting her own sing of the shore back to the waves – ‘I am here. This is my nature. Are you listening?’ – and continue up to where the paths meet once more on the way to Land’s End.

  6

  LINES THROUGH ROCKS

  At the very end of the prom, on the edge of the town’s sea-facing green, stands the Newlyn Fisherman Memorial. Unveiled to the public in 2007, the 10-foot high bronze and granite figure, cast by local sculptor Tom Leaper, commemorates all those fishermen from Newlyn lost to the sea since 1980 – over twenty in all. A thin, dull green patina has already formed over the fisherman’s exterior, giving him a weather-worn look.

  Though dressed in the simple fisherman’s attire of oilskins and a beanie, there is something of the warrior in the statue. At night, when he is lit up from below causing shadows to fly up his face and highlight his strong features, he has something of the Riace Warriors, the two life-sized Greek bronzes cast between 460–430 BCE discovered accidentally off the coast of Italy and dragged from their
sea graves during the 1970s. Impervious to the water, each aspect of their muscular forms has been perfectly preserved. It is difficult to believe the warriors, known simply as Statue A and B, come from another civilisation. A, with the more youthful stance, is thought to have been sculpted first, and B, the older warrior, with a softer posture and gentler facial expression, thirty years later.

  It is hard to place the age of Newlyn’s bronze fisherman. His features are simple and, rather than wrinkles, the sculptor has roughened the metal to make it look as if his whole face is alive and in motion. Between his hands, the fisherman holds taut a line of rope that ends in a loop at either end, ready to cast. At first I had assumed from his stance – left foot ahead, the momentum carrying him forward – that he was casting the line out into the water. But I had been looking at the sculpture all wrong. The man is not casting out but coming home, ready to throw the noose of rope over the harbour wall and tether his boat to the land.

  In front of the statue this morning leans a man with his back to the promenade, his gaze following that of the fisherman as he looks fixedly towards the horizon. This is Roger, a retired geologist from Newlyn, who called me earlier this morning to say we should meet here at noon so he can show me the long history of Newlyn.

  I stand alongside him, gazing out at the almost perfect curve of Mount’s Bay. As soon as he notices me he gives me a wave and introduces himself, before retrieving from his bag a plastic wallet containing several complex maps of Cornwall, with patches of various colours and gradations of shading illustrating the different rock types that have continually risen, eroded and been covered over during the county’s creation. In cities such formations are suffocated deep beneath roads and pavements so that one almost forgets there ever existed a natural landscape in the first place. But the largely untampered Cornish coastline stretches for over 630 miles; its bald cliffs act like time exposed, their many layers – some with lines of dark orange copper running through them – recounting the story of the county’s ancient past.