Storytelling for Week 5: Sebastien

Most people don't realize how fishing originated or why it came to be that humans decided to eat fish. The origins of fishing our peculiar to say the least. This is a story of how it all came to be and what fishing is today....

A long long time ago, before there were boats or fishing poles there was a man named Sebastien. Sebastien lived on an island near was is known today as Samoa with his family and small village. They were a hunter and gather type of village, however, they did try and grow some native crops with the minimal land they had. Sebastien was known for being an excellent swimmer, which was a big deal in a village that loved traditional water sports and activities. He was said to be able to dive 100 feet down and back up in one breath. Some believe he pioneered the sport of free diving. Sebastien was also a very pivotal man in history because he was the first fisherman in the entire world.

Sebastien
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Sebastien loved diving because he loved to look at all of the wildlife in the ocean. His favorite creature of the depths was the octopus because of how it could disappear in the blink of an eye leaving only a trail of mysterious black ink. One year the village Sebastien lived in experienced a terrible infestation of beetles that killed all their plants and brought disease to almost all of the wildlife. The villagers were unable to fid healthy food and when winter came they were down to their last reserves. This was especially problematic because the winter season brought the most powerful storms  so they could not migrate to another island safely. They thought about risking it and travel by boat to an island but the trees had even been infested with the beetles and the villagers could not make proper canoes.

Sebastien saw the peril that the villagers were facing and understood it was a desperate time calling for desperate measures. One thing that the villagers did not know about Sebastien is that he could speak any sea creature. He had always viewed fish as friends but thought he might be able to use them as food for the people. After all, there were so many of them surely it wouldn't affect the marine ecosystem. He had no other choice. He spoke to the most trusted sea creature in the pacific, Cynthia, the sea turtle and mother to all. Cynthia warned him that if he started this type of hunting that generation after generation of his kind will continue to do so until there is no fish left in the sea. She also said she knew how tough times were and that she would understand if he ended up deciding to eat the fish. 

Local Villager
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Eventually Sebastien resorted to hunting and eating the fish and he made the villagers happy and healthy along with his family. The environment after the beetles left and winter died down sprang back to life and island sprang back from it dark period. However, the fishing did not stop. People had come to love eating fish and it was treated as a delicacy. Fishing spread to other islands and eventually to other countries as the population of the earth grew. 

Sebastien grew to be a very old man. He was still alive when he was 150 years old. Same say it was because of all the good nutrients he got from being in the sun all day. Others thought it was because he swam so much in the ocean. He didn't see any truth in all the rumors. However, he did see something that terrified him in his old age. When he went and swam as he would every day there were no longer hardly any fish in the ocean around him. He would be lucky if he saw one fish a week when he went and swam. When he spoke to the other creatures of the sea they were scared. They told Sebastien how hard it was to have the fish almost disappear. So many things relied on the fish for survival and now they could not. They were scared they might be the next ones hunted when the fish ran out. One turtle said he was not scared though. He told Sebastien he was not scared because he knew the ocean would be ruined if all the fish were taken from the sea.


Author's Note. The original story is about a king who decides to get his boys fishes for the pong that they have on the property. However, unexpectedly a turtle decides that he too wants to live at the pond. The boys go to see the fishes for the first time but when they see the turtle they think he is a demon. They have never seen a turtle before to know what one might look like so they tell their dad the king to get rid of the demon. One of the kings friends says that the king ought to throw him into the river where he will surely be carried out to the sea and killed. The turtle says to the king that that would be an awful and cruel thing to do to a turtle all the while knowing that could mean his real freedom. The king thinks that the turtle is telling the truth so in an effort to kill the turtle he releases the turtle to the sea.
I told the story as a way to sort of explain the origins of fishing because I often wonder how it all started. I have had a couple environmental classes at OU and it is shocking to hear how much overfishing goes on in the world. It is even more crazy to see how badly that effects the marine ecosystem. I don't think people understand how much we really on the ocean because we treat it as if it were a garbage dump.
The thing I took from the original story is that humans don't always treat sea creatures the right way or understand the sea and its creatures well. I wanted to use that in a similar way in my story and hopefully make readers interested in finding out more about the ocean's current situation.


Bibliography. How the Turtle Saved His Own Life, Jataka Tales, Ellen Babbitt, 1912.