I love the title of your first book, Cod.

Yes, that’s a fascinating small book by Mark Kurlansky and it really is mainly about cod, but he makes it immensely interesting and he traces the human’s acquaintance with this fish back for a thousand years. Then he talks a lot about how amazingly abundant it was, especially off northern areas of Europe and Newfoundland, Canada and so on, and how when John Cabot went over there in 1497, he just had to put a bucket in the water and it filled up with cod. In the very same area in 1992 a moratorium was placed on cod fishing because the population was so low. It is still commercially dead and is on the way to being biologically dead.

Why is that? What on earth happened?

It was just amazingly overfished. It was fished before the time when there were strict regulations, and when Portugal and Spain came into those waters in the 1960s, 70s and 80s with the big trawlers and bottom trawlers, they just scooped them all up. Then when they were pushed out by Canada, the Canadian fishermen took over and fished the rest of them. It’s really a story about human greed and not taking the advice that they were fishing too hard.

That’s really depressing. I remember in the 1970s and 80s in Britain cod was just something you had, the cheapest fish you could eat. Now we go to the supermarket and spend £15 on a little fillet.

Yes, the population is severely depleted around your areas. Iceland is still pretty good because they’ve managed their fishing very well, but most other places have not.

This next one sounds exciting: Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas.

Oh, yes. I’m really taken with the stories about what’s happening with pirates in the present day. Not because it’s a wild romantic tale with eye patches and things like that, but because it is such an enormous problem for contemporary fishing. What John Burnett does in this book is show us how extensive the problem is becoming. He did his research up to about 2002 and, because of the activity of the Somali pirates in the last few years, it is to some extent dated, but it still gives us a very interesting account of how pirates operate, why they operate, how difficult it is to counter them. He focuses on the Straits of Malacca, which border Indonesia and Malaysia, and he talks about how an oil tanker, 348 metres long, was taken by pirates, and not only was it robbed but it was completely taken over, hijacked: the crew put off, new papers made, name painted over and a pirate crew put on board, and it sailed off. At 348 metres long, people would have been able to see this happening from the shore!

Why has there been such a surge recently?

Burnett talks about the development of syndicates, crime gangs operating on land who found that the ships in the Straits of Malacca were an easy target because the Indonesian navy was very lax in going after pirates. In fact, there are accounts of the Indonesian navy itself becoming involved in piracy when they were not going about their normal naval duties. So it became very difficult to counter. One reason I think might be applicable is that you just haven’t got as many naval ships trawling around the sea as you used to have in the Cold War. There’s not as much protection for maritime shipping, so if pirates can work out a way of getting on board, especially round Asia where the navies are very weak, they really can have free rein on what they do on the ship. What happened in the Straits of Malacca though, was that the Malaysians got strong on trying to go after pirates and coerced the Indonesians into cooperating. Once they got joint patrols in place things calmed down there. Not so easy in Somalia though.