Oceans in Crisis - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 163

7
Oceans in Crisis
The Fish in the Sea
Scientists do not like anecdotal evidence, by and large. Stories, after
all, grow larger in the telling and retelling. But now and again there is
serious purpose in poring over stories from olden days: as, in this
case, told by explorers and seafarers. Humans have been fishing the
seas for far longer than they have been recording them scientifically,
so to get an idea of what the oceans might have been like before we
began to change them the old anecdotes can provide useful clues.
The stories of what the seas used to be like, centuries ago, are remark-
ably consistent. The seas, then, were alive with fish. Even the pirates
said so.
Captain Henry Morgan lived in the golden age of piracy, when his
ruthless—even by piratical standards—exploits were, for the most
part, encouraged by the British government as a means to get the
upper hand in their colonial rivalry with the Spanish in the Carib-
bean. He had a barber-surgeon for a time, Alexandre Exquemelin
(variously also known as Esquemeling and Oexmelin), who became
something of a confidant—and who had literary ambitions. In 1678,
Exquemelin published a topic, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers , a kind of
biography of the piracy he had witnessed. It outraged Morgan (who