The Flatties 



bream and large eggs, gigantic stone crabs and unknowable depths 

 of water - but they all added up to the marled grey fish upturned 

 on the concrete of the market so that its belly showed with a rich 

 deep whiteness, a whiteness much deeper than any green of the 

 waves, and a price that made its appearance as bright as that of a 

 precious mineral. The halibut was always the goal . Every fisherman 

 wanted halibut, but the North Sea had been fished clean of them , and 

 the Faroes were only slightly dusty . If the big ones were wanted then 

 the ships had to sail into the Iceland or the Greenland waters, and 

 they had to work at depths that were inaccessible to the warps of 

 a trawl. Only the linermen caught the big halibut, and that was 

 why the linermen were aristocrats of the fishing community. For 

 a large catch of halibut was an imperial trophy, signalising a victory 

 over nature much greater than could be rewarded by any simple 

 economic incentive. It demanded a social applause, a gesture of 

 recognition from the entire community. And received it. 



Yet trawlers did catch halibut. When they were fishing off 

 Faroe for haddock, lemon sole and cod, they caught the occas- 

 ional small halibut, chicken. Quite often there were enough of 

 them to add up to a round ton in a trip ; and a ton of halibut, 

 however chickenish their juvenility might make them, meant a 

 good few pounds of gold. It was because they wanted all the hali- 

 but available that so many trawls were lost over the banks of the 

 Faroes. Heavy chains would be fastened to the quarters of the net, 

 even when it w^as well known that the ground was rough and that 

 any attempt to dig into it would probably lead to an underwater 

 collision with some obdurate obstacle. A good haul of halibut was 

 worth more than a net. The risk had been carefully calculated 

 and, if the results were reasonable, it was never lamented. 



Many other flatfish were not so welcome. Jan sometimes dream- 

 ed of the thousands of them that he had shovelled over the side, 

 ton upon ton upon dead floating ton of lank rough dabs, of coarse 

 common ones. They were, among the pleuronectids, what the 

 small roundfish were among the gadoids. They were infinitely 

 valuable as food to the more commercially useful species. But they 



