Fishing Methods 1 - Pana - Spear-fishing

Pana means 'bow' in almost every Austronesian language from Madagascar to Easter Island (and the same in ancient Sumerian - but that is another story). The very fact that fishermen still call it a 'bow' and not a 'gun' is telling.

Spear-fishing (assisted by a bow or not) has a very long pedigree indeed*.

This spear fisherman carries a string of small fish, his home made speargun, and a single wooden paddle fin.

But bamboo is light - buoyant in water - no good trying to shoot a fish if the arrow floats up to the surface. Local fishermen soak the large bamboo trunks they use for the katigs (outrigger booms) of their boats in seawater for a couple of weeks - this not only inhibits wood-boring beetles (bok-bok) but makes the wood denser and more resistant to rot. The katig is more for balance than buoyancy. 

I found this scrap of 'ironwood' on a beach - it was not strictly driftwood - it sinks like a stone in water. I cut off one end with a diamond-edged saw designed for cutting shell and stone - it was difficult. If you have the luck to find a large splinter, and patience enough to grind it to a good point - an ideal submarine arrowhead.

They may have also used denser 'ironwood' for the points of their fishing arrows in the past. That stuff stays whole in the sea for months, if not years.

Hallam Movius proposed a 'rule' that implied that South-East Asians were more primitive than Europeans and others, because so few stone tools (and then only primitive 'choppers') were ever found east of the Movius Line' separating Eastern primitives from more advanced Western primitives, that was named after him. 

Only one major set of Acheulian (1.5 million to about 150,000ya) bifacial stone tools has been found in the Philippines, for instance.

They were found by Dr. Alfred F. Pawlik at Arubo in Luzon in 2001, at a wholly exceptional site with chert boulders. They are undateable, but classic Early Paleololithic in style.

Flint and chert come from sedimentary rocks of the Cretaceous and earlier - there are very few outcrops of those in the Philippines, or in the coastal flood plains of Vietnam and China, so it's not surprising that few stone tools have been found. But this doesn't mean early South-East Asians were at all 'primitive'. Bamboo, shell and wood can often do a much better job.

So I decided on an experiment - would bamboo make a good spear? 

Rhon  (my butler, boat-captain, and odd job man) cut a suitable length, and sheared  off one end. We hardened it over a fire, then stone-ground it down to a point.

Then we stabbed a concrete wall to see how hard the point was - it blunted - very quickly. 

Ah well, better luck next time. But I'm not sure that a flint head would have done any better.

About one-third of the fish sold in GL's market comes from spearfishing - especially the solo non-schooling fish, like lapu-lapu (Serranids), katambak (Lutjanids), jacks and trevally (Carangids),  parrotfish (Scarids), or large wide-open targets, like butterfly and bat fish.

Recreational scuba/spear-fishing is damned as a menace with some justification - it's like 'hunting' deer with a high powered rifle and telescopic sights. 

But few could criticize fishermen like my neighbour Keren, who used, until the age of 63, to go out daily in a 7ft baroto to distant outer reefs, and come back with a couple of 1-2 kilo sweetlips or katambak. His equipment was a pana like the one above, and sometimes he took his 'submarine light' - an old flashlight bound in rubber inner tube, and sealed with marine epoxy. He attributed his extraordinary diving ability to the alcohol he consumed - it gave him neutral buoyancy he said - but it got him in the end.

Diving Ability

Experienced Filipino divers have quite extraordinary free-diving ability. Their bodies seem to be 'denser' - I have seen them 'sit' in the water and wait for the fish to come. Most can dive 10-15 metres with ease. One diver, equipped only with a 'hookah' hose attached to a home-made compressor, and a rock for ballast, - once dived 70 metres (about 23 storeys - ¼ the height of the Empire State Building) to retrieve a lost shelling net for me.

Adult divers use wooden goggles with simple glass 'lenses', but child divers pick up coins thown into murky water from ship's sides in Filipino ports with no goggles at all. 

I watched this small boy spearfishing - his Western-style goggles were obviously a status symbol - much too big for him and they filled with water - but he still wore them.

Anna Gislén investigated underwater vision among the Moken, the Andaman Sea branch of the Badjao, a maritime fishing people who live in and from the sea all across South East Asia.

"Humans are poorly adapted for underwater vision. In air, the curved corneal surface accounts for two-thirds of the eye's refractive power, and this is lost when air is replaced by water.  

Despite this, some tribes of sea gypsies in Southeast Asia live off the sea, and the children collect food from the sea floor without the use of visual aids. 

This is a remarkable feat when one considers that the human eye is not focused underwater and small objects should remain unresolved. We have measured the visual acuity of children in a sea gypsy population, the Moken, and found that the children see much better underwater than one might expect. 

Their underwater acuity (6.06 cycles/degree) is more than twice as good as that of European children (2.95 cycles/degree). Our investigations show that the Moken children achieve their superior underwater vision by maximally constricting the pupil (1.96 mm compared to 2.50 mm in European children) and by accommodating to the known limit of human performance (15–16 D).

This extreme reaction - which is routine in Moken children - is completely absent in European children. Because they are completely dependent on the sea, the Moken are very likely to derive great benefit from this strategy".

Superior Underwater Vision in a Human Population of Sea Gypsies