Hemingway: "The Big, Fat Slob" in Bimini

Hemingway in Bimini with Blue Fin tuna.

There's a lot they don't teach you in English class, and more's the pity.

You see, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway's story of the epic battle of age against nature, is not entirely a work of fiction, and there's some excellent fishing history there too.

The Caribbean was once full of enormous Blue Fin Tuna and Blue Marlin that could not be reliably caught by line, as the proliferation of sharks in these same waters meant that the hours it took to bring in a really big fish would invariably attract sharks that would "apple core" the tiring giants, leaving massive chunks taken out of their sides and tails.

Hemingway with "apple-cored" 1,000 pound Blue Marlin. 

What to do?

The answer, it turned out, was to make an entirely new and more powerful reel, load it with heavy line, and tie the whole rig into a deck chair and seat belt arrangement so that the big tuna and bill fish could be horsed to the boat while they still had the quickness and energy to evade the sharks.

Hemingway and children in Bimini., 1935.

The idea was first proposed by Ernest Hemingway. 

In 1935 the 36-year old loaded a newly developed reel built by Finley Norwood onto his 38-foot fishing boat, Pilar, custom-built in New York the year before, and went to the Bahamas to do battle with the giant tuna and bill fish off of Bimini.

In April of of 1935 Hemingway reeled in two tuna that weighed 514 and 610 pounds. These were the first big, un-mutilated Blue Fin Tuna ever taken off of Bimini.

Hemingway's accomplishment and technique were quickly the talk of the small island.  If anyone brought in a fish using his fish-horsing technique, it was said to have been "Hemingwayed."

Hemingway in Bimini.

Still in Bimini in May, Hemingway was washing down the Pilar in early evening after a fishing tournament when a voice came to him out of the darkness: "Say, aren't you the guy who claims he catches all the fish?"

"I catch my share," Hemingway said as he turned to see a large man in white shorts who had also been competing in the tournament. "I figured him for a mouthy drunk," Hemingway later told his brother, Leicester.

The goading continued as the drunk called Hemingway "a big, fat slob."

After a while, Hemingway had enough of the insults, leaped up on the dock, and clipped the heckler with several lefts, but the man still didn't go down. "Then I backed off and really got the weight of a pivot swing into the old Sunday punch," said Hemingway. "He landed, and his ass and head hit the planking at the same time."

The "mouthy drunk" was now unconscious on the dock, and a crowd of some 60 people looked on.

The crew from Storm King, the boat that had been carrying the drunk, carried him back onboard. The man did not regain conscious for a very long time, and at 4 a.m. Storm King left port to rush him to Miami for medical treatment.

That night Hemingway worried that he might have seriously wounded his antagonist.

His feeling of dread did not abate when he found out the man was Joseph F. Knapp the son of the owner and publisher of such magazines as Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, the American magazine, and Farm & Fireside.

The good news for Hemingway was that the Joseph P. Knapp, the father of the unconscious, never messed with the editorial side of his magazines, and Collier's later hired Hemingway as a war correspondent.  As for Joseph F. Knapp, he recovered and said he was wrong and blamed it on the booze.

The fight between the wealthy magazine scion and the writer became famous in part because Calypso singer Nattie Saunders was in the crowd on the dock that day. Saunders later wrote a song about it called "Big Fat Slob".

Mr. Knapp called Mr. Hemingway
A Big Fat Slob
Mr. Ernest Hemingway balled his fist
And gave him a knob
Big fat slob in Bimini

This is the night we have fun
Oh the big fat slob in Bimini
This the night we got fun

Mr. Knapp look at him and try to mock
And from the blow
Mr. Knapp couldn't talk
At first Mr. Knapp thought
He had his bills in stalk
And when Mr. Ernest Hemingway walk
The dock rocked

Mr. Knapp couldn't laugh
Mr. Ernest Hemingway grin
Put him to sleep
With a knob on his chin

Now, tell the truth, shouldn't we all have been taught this in school?