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coasts of Sicily, but the description of the fishery does not allow for better defining the type of gear. The only
clear evidence we have up to the medium-age period is that in most of the places tunas were spotted from the top
of coastal towers, also used for defense purposes, close to the tuna factories which were located in the fishing
sites.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthetic overview of the most important images of “tuna traps”, since
their beginning and up to modern times, for a better understanding of the various types of “bluefin tuna trap
fisheries” over the centuries and the modifications or development of each gear type, if any.

2. The beginning of the age of printing, etchins and engravings

When manuscripts were slowly substituted by printed books, after the diffusion in Europe of the technique
2
which used mobile characters , the progressive diffusion of books increased in a considerable way. In several
countries there was a flourishing production of books on several matters, mostly religious as before, but also
concerning geography, literature, legal affairs, science and other subjects. The fishery was not usually considered
an important activity, even if the tuna fishing industry was possibly the most relevant along the Mediterranean
coasts, and then books on the fishery were not very common.

The very first printed image of a tuna trap was provided by the marvelous etchings of Georg (Joris) Hoefnagel,
who engraved the views of many Spanish cities in the volumes of the world famous “Civitates Orbis Terrarum”
(1572-1617), by George Braun and Franz Hogenberg. The first etching shows a beach seine fishery in Cadiz
(published in the first volume in 1572) and the second clearly shows the bluefin tuna fishery in Conil (published
in the second volume in 1575) (Figure 5). It is not clear if the beach seine in the first etching of Cadiz was used
for bluefin tuna because, apparently, it is a common seine used for other smaller species and, furthermore, the
position along the coast is different from the tuna trap factory position. Another larger etching, illustrating in a
more detailed way the bluefin tuna fishery in Cadiz, was published in the same volumes, but it is not clear if it
was included in some copies of the first volume (1572) or if it was added only to the second edition in 1598; this
is the first available image including both the bluefin tuna fishery activity and the land-based factory activities
(Figure 6). These images not only show the type of trap used at that time in Spain (a seine, set possibly by at
least five vessels and then operated as a beach seine), but also the way of harvesting, manipulating and preparing
the bluefin tuna for the market. It was clear that everything was used for various preparations: fresh meat, salty
meat, smoked meat, tuna sausages, and even the bones were used for the fire! In this case, it was clear that the
tuna trap was what the Spanish call “almadraba de tiro”, based on the tuna spotting from land-based towers. The
Cadiz engraving was copied and partly modified several times in the following centuries.

In about the same period, another image of the bluefin tuna fishery became available: it was etched by Adrian
Colaert, on a subject by Jan Van der Straet (more commonly known as Johannes Stradanus), for the second
edition of “Venationes Ferarum, Avium, Piscium, pugnae bestiarorum et mutuae bestiarum”, published in
Antwerp, Belgium, by Philipp Galle. The first edition (1578) had the same plates but without the progressive
numbers, while the second edition was possibly published in 1584. This image shows the bluefin tuna fishery in
Naples (Italy), with an atypical beach seine, where tunas are encircled by the net using small boats and then
harpooned when they are kept inside the net close to the shore (Figure 7). It is possible that that etching was
showing a small coastal tuna trap (“tonnarella”) targeting juvenile bluefin tuna, a type of fishery active in the
area south of Naples until about 1980. The artist based the etching on some historical description (Plinius is
mentioned some times in the volume), but a personal artistic componet cannot be excluded.

Thanks to the development of printed images and the wide diffusion of books, finally it was possible to follow
this important fishing activity, with clear images of many fishing gears from several places. It is also very clear
that “tuna trap” was not a single gear, but several gears were included under this name. This is extremely
important to better understand the historical series of CPUE data (Di Natale & Idrissi, 2012). At the same time,
starting from the XVII century, the images of the fishing gears used for bluefin tuna showed more technical and
technological details, providing the basis for a better understanding of the various activities.

It seems that the most diffused gear targeting bluefin tuna in the earliest times (at least in the western
Mediterranean Sea and close to the Gibraltar area) was the seine, mostly operated by five vessels, encircling

2
It is commonly accepted that Johann Gutemberg was the inventor of this important printing technique at the beginning of the XV century.
In the reality, the printing technique is much more ancient (VII century in China), while the use of pottery mobile characters is documented
in China since 1041; metal mobile characters were used in China and in Korea since the XIII century.
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