Koundjish 



At first he was bamboozled by the individual variations within 

 a single species. A cod with a distorted backbone would hunch 

 its shoulders and pass for a haddock. A young haddock, plagued 

 with blood-sucking parasites, would become so meagre and sil- 

 very that it seemed a whiting. The range of these variations was 

 immense until Jan became almost convinced that all fish were in- 

 dividuals that would defy classification. Of course, he was wrong, 

 but his was really the best starting point for a man who wanted to 

 understand the biological differences between fish. A know-all, 

 who approached them with his head full of names, hake, haddock, 

 plaice, sole, might indeed have been able to dispense with many 

 of the difficulties that Jan had to overcome but he would have 

 ended up as he began, knowing more about the words that des- 

 cribed them than about the fish they described. Almost, it seemed 

 Jan had to create his own classification. To begin with, his ideas 

 were self-contradictory and difficult to pin down, but they were 

 ideas gathered from experience. It was the complexity of the ex- 

 perience that made them difficult to order. In the end, however, 

 he reached through to the classic biological classification, rein- 

 forcing it with facts derived from his own days at sea and from 

 his talks with other fishermen. 



There were three radically different categories of marketable 

 fish, three, that is, if the herring were excluded and the fresh 

 water fish, for the herring was as different from the other com- 

 mon marine species as they were from the salmon. These three 

 were commonly referred to as the white fish and they consisted of 

 roundfish, flatfish and skate. If they were classified, as they often 

 were, by their relative financial importance, then there could be 

 no doubt that roundfish were the best things in the sea - not that 

 they fetched so much money individually, as some of the flat fish, 

 but their sheer fucundity and consequent weight of numbers made 

 them the basic bread-and-butter commodity. 



Jan never found out how many different kinds of roundfish lived 

 in the sea - something like two or three thousand, he imagined 

 - but he didn't need to know. Most fish caught belonged to one 



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