Page 16 - Sella_M_1929

Neuparth, (A Pesca Maritima, Noo 2^, 1923^, List^a) examining the
statistics of the tuna fishery of Medo das CascaSj considers that it is
possible to recognize a cycle of a century in the catch of the Portuguese
fisheries, De Buen (Biologia del Atun, Madrid 1925) starts out from some
very old statistics, those of Padre SarmientOj to deny that there is any
periodicity whatever identifiable in the catch of the Spanish tuna
fisherieso

The statistics of Padre Sarmiento do not appear to me to be worthy
of attention, and in any case I would not base on them conclusions contrary
to more recent and more reliable statisticso Apart from the suspected
progress of the fishery, it must be demanded how Sarmiento came to get
hold of the data for hundreds of years while even today we cannot succeed
in gathering complete statistics, and one must remain incredulous in the
face of the catch of 70,000 tuna taken repeatedly from a single fishery
(a figure which, actually, is little surpassed in certain years by all of
Spain, Italy, and Portugal put together )„ Probably these 70,000 tuna
included also some smaller fishesoooo How could a tuna trap fishery
take and salt down more than 1,000 fish every day?

For my part I have tried to gather all accessible statistical
material, resorting even to private records and to researches in Archives.
The most complete statistics are theses

Sardinia

Fishery of Carlofortej complete data since 1825 and fragmentary earlier
Saline « " « 1868 « « *

Sicily

" » »
Favignana «« i878 •» •»

Sidi-Daud

Medo das Cascas
Barril

There are besides official Portuguese statistics from 1896, Italian
from 1886, and Tunisian from '898o

From this examination various facts emerge which can be summarized
thus (see the diagram in Fig„ l)%

a) The tuna fishery in Italy and in Tunisia has undergone a_ secular
fluctuation, in which in Sardinia and Sicily one can identify a peak in
the second half of the 18th century, a low point around 1820-1830, and a
new high, in which Tunisia also participated, around 1880, with a new

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