NEW ENGLANDERS started catching swordfish in the early 1800s by harpooning them from small sailboats and hauling them on board. Since swordfish don't school, the boats would go out with a man up the mast looking for single fins lolling about in the glassy inland waters. If the wind sprang up, the fins were undetectable, and the boats went in. When the lookout spotted a fish, he guided the captain over to it, and the harpooner made his throw. The throw had to take into account the roll of the boat, the darting of the fish, and the refraction of light through water. Giant bluefin tuna are still hunted this way, but fishermen use spotter planes to find their prey and electric harpoons to kill them. Giant bluefin are a delicacy in Japan; they are airfreighted over and get up to eighty dollars a pound. A single bluefin might go for thirty or forty thousand dollars.
Spotter planes were introduced to New England fishermen in 1962, but it was the longline that really changed the fishery. For years the Norwegians had caught mako on longlines, along with a few swordfish, but they had never gone after swordfish exclusively. Then, in 1961, Canadian fishermen made some alterations to the gear and nearly tripled the total northeastern sword catch. The boom didn't last long, though; ten years later the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that swordfish carried a dangerous amount of mercury in them, and both the American and Canadian governments banned sale of the fish. Some longliners went out after swordfish anyway, but they risked having their catch seized and tested by the F.D.A.
Finally, in 1978, the U.S. government relaxed the standards for acceptable mercury contamination in fish, and the gold rush was on. In the interim fishing had changed, though; boats were using satellite navigation, electronic fish finders, temperature-depth gauges. Radar reflectors were used to track gear, and new monofilament made it possible to set thirty or forty miles of line at a time. By the mid-eighties, the U.S. swordfish fleet alone was up to 700 boats fishing around fifty million hooks a year. "The technological change appears to be bumping up against the limits of the resource," as one government study put it at the time.
Until then the fishery had been relatively unregulated, but a new drift-entanglement net in the early eighties finally got the wheels of bureaucracy turning. The nets were a mile long, ninety-feet wide, and set out all night from the stern of a converted longliner. Although the large mesh permitted juveniles to escape, the National Marine Fisheries Service was still leery of its impact on the swordfish population. They published a management plan for the North Atlantic swordfish that suggested numerous regulatory changes, including limiting the use of drift nets, and invited responses from state and federal agencies, as well as individual fishermen. A series of public hearings were held up and down the East Coast throughout 1983 and 1984, and fishermen who couldn't attend—those who were fishing, in other words—sent in letters. One of the people who responded was Bob Brown, who explained in a barely legible scrawl that he'd made fifty-two sets that year and there seemed to be plenty of mature fish out there, they just stayed in colder water than people realized. Alex Bueno of the Tiffany Vance wrote a letter pointing out, among other things, that draggers weren't likely to switch over to drift nets because they cost too much, and that swordfish population estimates were inaccurate because they didn't take into account fish outside the two-hundred-mile limit. Sportsfishermen accused commercial fishermen of raping the oceans, commercial fishermen accused sportsfishermen of squandering a resource, and almost everyone accused the government of gross incompetence.
In the end, the Fishery Management Plan did not include a catch quota for Atlantic swordfish, but it required all sword boats to register with the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the Department of Commerce. Boat owners who had never swordfished in their lives scrambled for permits just to keep their options open, and the number of boats nearly doubled while, by all indications, the swordfish stock continued to decline. From 1987 to 1991, the total North Atlantic swordfish catch went from 45 million pounds to 33 million pounds, and their average size dropped from 165 pounds to no. This was what resource management experts know as tragedy of the commons, a reference to overgrazing in eighteenth-century England. "In the case of common grazing areas," explained one fisheries-management pamphlet, "grass soon disappeared as citizens put more and more sheep on the land. There was little incentive to conserve or invest in the resource because others would then benefit without contributing."