The fire and the eye: Fishers knowledge, echo-sounding and the invention of the skipper in the St. Helena Bay pelagic fishery ca. 1930–1960 Lance van Sittert n Department of Historical Studies, Beattie Building, University Avenue, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa article info Available online 22 August 2014 Keywords: Skippers St. Helena Bay Pelagic fishery Echosounder Fishers knowledge abstract In the major South African commercial fisheries the legacy of colonialism, segregation and apartheid has concentrated ‘fishers knowledge’ in the hands of predominantly white skippers who function as produc- tion managers for corporate capital at sea. The role of the state and corporate capital in pioneering these fisheries also means that much of this knowledge is novel, generated using prosthetic technologies, ‘patented’ and already incorporated into management. The paper demonstrates this through a history of the skipper in the post-Second World War pelagic fishery. The figure of the skipper emerged at a moment of crisis in the pelagic fishery in the latter half of the 1950s caused by a failure of traditional fishers knowledge to find fish and its replacement by echo-sounding. The echo-sounder revolutionised the fishery by transferring fish finding from the deck to the wheelhouse where it became the exclusive preserve of the skipper. This in turn transformed a horizontal (democratic) into a vertical (authoritarian) deck and the skipper from a co-adventurer into a production manager for corporate capital. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. The origin of skippers The key conceit of fishers knowledge advocates in the academy is that state fisheries management has historically despised and ignored fishers knowledge and grounded its praxis exclusively in the experimental method of marine science with disastrous results for fish stocks and fishers alike. This is not true of the South African commercial fisheries where state fisheries management was his- torically constructed on the foundation of fishers knowledge, and that of British North Sea trawlermen recruited to crew both state survey vessel(s) and private trawlers from the 1890s prospecting and fishing virgin demersal fishing grounds to feed the mining revolution in the interior [1]. However, private trawler owners regarded this mobile, cosmopolitan and literate fishers knowledge, concentrated in the hands of their skippers by the organisation of production in British trawling, as part of their capital and jealously guarded it against both rivals and the state [2]. The latter was thus denied the necessary information from skippers' logbooks to calculate or map the demersal fishing effort effectively forestalling state regulation until the final quarter of the twentieth century. The early and complete incorporation of fishers knowledge into management of the demersal fishery was nonetheless possible because in its imported model fishers knowledge was already concentrated in the hands of the skipper through historical developments in Britain. In the South African inshore fisheries this was a much slower endogenous process and the figure of the skipper emerged far later if at all depending on the shifting and frequently opposed needs of capital and the state. In the pelagic fishery, for example, the consolidation of fishers knowledge in the hands of skippers happened in fifteen years after the end of the Second World War and was inextricably linked to the adoption of a new technology, the echo-sounder. Tracing the invention of the skipper in the South African pelagic fishery during the middle third of the twentieth century provides both a historical example of the incorporation of fishers knowledge into fisheries management and the construction novel knowledge. While the organisational form of demersal fishing in South Africa was imported, together with vessels, gear and labour from Britain, others organisational forms in the fishery descended from colonial agriculture. The central contention of this paper is that in the pelagic fishery both skippers and the fishers knowledge that they embodied and employed were products of its post-1945 industrialisation not a folk form hangover from the pre-industrial fishery. The new pelagic skipper that emerged in the mid-1950s, however, was dressed in the garb of tradition for reasons of profit and politics and the fisher knowledge he embodied was a hybrid, part folk and part scientific, pressed into service of private accumulation not sustainable resource use. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpol Marine Policy http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2014.07.028 0308-597X/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. n Tel.: þ27 21 650 2952. E-mail address: lance.vansittert@uct.ac.za Marine Policy 60 (2015) 300–308