Jack Delaney
Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin, Dutton, July 2023, 320 pages, $30
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at roughly 45º longitude west — though no one involved is too fussy about the number — is a line we invented, cleaving the waters in half. We can’t see it; neither can the whales, sharks, or phytoplankton. It’s invisible even to the beings whose fate this line has governed for decades, creatures so sensitive they can detect starlight through a tiny hole on the top of their heads: bluefin tuna.
The line was drawn in 1981, when overfishing was on pace to wipe bluefin out completely, by a congress of tuna-fishing countries called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) that split the species into a western and an eastern stock to regulate the catch. It made sense at the time, since the prevailing consensus was that bluefin spawned in two locations, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean‚ and stayed near their birthplace for most of their lives. But as scientists began tagging fish in greater numbers, the data told a different story. Canadian anglers pulled in 1,000-pound tuna with Spanish hooks lodged in their mouths; western-tagged fish resurfaced 3,000 miles away in the Strait of Gibraltar. Fishing quotas, and by extension the global fishing economy, are still determined by this line. Does it matter that it’s a fantasy?
Kings of Their Own Ocean, a deep dive into the tuna industry by chef-turned-journalist Karen Pinchin, delves into that question. In only a couple hundred pages, Pinchin attempts to sketch the systems that have perpetuated overfishing for years. While doing so, she poses even broader questions: how should fisheries be managed? Is it possible to source food ethically in an exploitative system? What are the roles of the many agents — scientists, politicians, corporations, fishermen, consumers — in the tangled web linking catch to plate? To find answers, this story launches us across three continents and deep into prehistory. It begins fairly simply, though, with Amelia the tuna.
In 2004, a fisherman named Al Anderson tagged a tuna in Rhode Island. Three years later, Molly Lutcavage, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, tagged that same tuna off the coast of Cape Code. In 2018, the tuna, which Lutcavage had by then named Amelia, was caught and killed somewhere she shouldn’t have been — Portugal. As Lutcavage explained to Pinchin when she called to tell Pinchin the news, that meant that Amelia had crossed the Atlantic, likely more than once. In the process, Amelia must have intersected with the three most influential blocs in the tuna industry: western-stock anglers, eastern-stock anglers, and researchers. Amelia was Pinchin’s entry into the vast and byzantine world of a modern fishery.
Kings of Their Own Ocean begins with a single fish, but it quickly grows to dizzying spatial and temporal scales. Pinchin’s currents carry the reader from Spain, home to the ancient custom of the bloody almadraba, to the East Coast of North America, with a quick pit stop in Japan. One chapter opens with the advent of the first tuna “after the dinosaurs but before the Himalayas,” then hops to the eighties. Elsewhere, in a mind-bending flourish reminiscent of Robert Caro’s treatment of Fire Island in The Power Broker, we're plucked from a modern-day fishing town in Massachusetts and dropped on the shores of the Strait of Gibraltar in an era when only two rivers, rather than a sea, separated Europe and Africa.
The narrative is strongest when Pinchin lingers on a particular person or place for a full chapter. My favorite episode tells the story of Wedgeport, the sleepy Nova Scotian town in which tuna was reinvented as a luxury commodity. Until the 1930s, tuna meat was worth only a few cents per pound — so cheap that fishermen often threw away their catch. Then two Americans went on a pilgrimage to Canada to catch a 1000-plus-pound bluefin with a fishing rod. When they finally succeeded, they did so in Wedgeport, and they returned to the States with enough stories to set off a stateside tuna craze. Suddenly President Roosevelt was in Wedgeport to try his luck, with Amelia Earhart and Babe Ruth close behind. As Pinchin tells it, things got weird, fast. The chairman of PepsiCo bought a nearby island and declared it an autonomous republic of tuna fishermen. Eventually, the boom went bust, and so did the town. Wild tales like these give Pinchin's book its pulse. But between hyperlocal vignettes, important recent events, and sweeping geological timescales, the book’s chronology can be challenging to follow. Pinchin recounts her many characters’ lives in parallel, and I sometimes struggled to track lives and timelines, especially when temporal leaps were accompanied by geographic jumps.
What makes Kings of Their Own Ocean exciting to read is the same quality that makes it feel incomplete. It’s really two books: one personal, the other about policy. Al, the eccentric fisherman who first caught Amelia, is the emotional center of the former arc. By the time Pinchin began writing, he had passed away; with the help of his widow, Pinchin pieced together Al’s life from log books, unpublished memoirs, and the recollections of his friends and the many fellow fishermen he pissed off. He’s a fascinating character, and Pinchin paints his portrait vividly. But there are long stretches of the book — such as when we follow cultists into Madison Square Garden to witness the largest mass wedding ever, or bump into an incognito Jack Ma on a Spanish dock — where Al is nowhere to be found. He's the core of the narrative, but his story is often lost in a torrent of vibrant, globetrotting, time-traveling sidequests.
Similarly, the policy questions lack density, sinking and resurfacing throughout the book. “The future of Atlantic bluefin tuna has hinged on a series of butterfly-wing events,” Pinchin writes in the closing chapter. “The choices we make about the ocean matter…” After spending years of her life chasing bluefin tuna around the world, Pinchin has come to believe that as a global community, we are “a few terrible choices away from wiping out any ocean species.” Indeed, many of the international actors in Kings of Their Own Ocean are beginning to acknowledge their impact on bluefin tuna populations and change their models accordingly. Science is being heard; regulators are supposedly becoming more responsible. Climate change may even help bluefin larvae survive in greater numbers. But is the alternative to overfishing merely business as usual, just less of it? Pinchin’s closing words remind us that every choice matters, but it’s unclear what the options are for readers who aren’t ICCAT delegates.
During an event at the Strand bookstore in August, Pinchin offered some insight into the book’s seemingly divided attention. Early on, the moderator asked whether it was a difficult decision for Pinchin to include a strong ‘I,’ inserting herself as a character in her own right. “Yes,” she replied. She began this project as a capstone for Columbia Journalism School, and she initially wanted it to be straightforward reportage. Yet her peers kept pushing for her to make it more personal. When she eventually relented, she discovered that part of her passion for the story related to a childhood spent fishing with her father on Lake Ontario. Her interest in Al wasn’t purely about tuna: she was still mourning her own father, who, like Al, had been “a hard person to love,” and who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when she was in her early 30s. “My father died,” she writes in the introduction, “before I had the chance to understand him, the loads he carried, or the invisible energies that spurred him forward.” In reconstructing the mysterious drive that powered Al to tag over 60,000 gamefish in his life, despite an unsettled childhood and bouts with alcoholism, perhaps part of the goal was to find answers about the motivations of her own father — and to mourn him properly.
The threads of Kings of Their Own Ocean are powerful, but there are too many to weave into a convincing tapestry. However, while it doesn’t tie up every loose end, or provide a clear picture of what sustainable consumption might look like, it does convince us that food systems are in jeopardy. The history of tuna is one of tradition meeting modernity, of the rise of technology, but it's also one of contingency. Maybe there’s value in seeing the world through Amelia’s eyes, as she carries thirty-five million eggs into the path of a mate, so that for one desperate moment the “skin of their bellies” briefly touch.