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So earlier today I found, in idle conversation with the boyfriend, that he has never so much as HEARD of the Hawaiian Fish Mines. Can you imagine? Worse, he denies they even exist. A quick bout of checking around online revealed to me that none of my friends had heard of this vital natural resource either. Seriously, people. Does no one study history? This stuff is important to learn about, y'know? I suppose it's up to me to pass out the details.

Okay. First you have to understand that some time ago, the only ways to get fish out of the water were to either wait for one to float to the top (usually fish obtained by this method didn't taste very good or move around much) or to rig a sort of improvised crane construction and hope to snag one with it. This was clearly an ineffective means of obtaining fish, reasoned Hiroseamus Xeen. He's the important one in this story, because he's the one who came up with the concept of the fish mine in the first place, as you might've guessed from his reasoning above. What he figured was that since fish don't come up into the air very often, if we wanted to get a whole bunch of them, we'd have to go down into the water. (It seems like a simple conclusion, but bear in mind this had somehow escaped all the philosophers and scientists and other thinking type people at the time.) (The time, by the way, was sometime in the 1970s, and if I can't be more exact it's because my reference books are still packed in cardboard boxes.)

Anyway, Hawaii had become a state about twenty years earlier, and of course no one knew a lot about it yet, except that it had something to do with water. Water was what Xeen needed, and so he sailed out to have a look at the islands. "They'll do." he decided, when he saw they were in fact surrounded by water, and not just that, but Hawaii also had really nice beaches. Xeen spent a lot of time on the beaches, consuming fantastic amounts of drink with the natives and plotting his next move. Remembering his history (I told you history was important!) he thought about the Californian gold rush, and realized that while panning for fish had its perks (such as having it right there in the pan for frying), the big money would only be made with a fish mine. (Here's where the mine comes into the story, if you were wondering about that.) Unlike a mineral mine, fish would replenish themselves, so all he'd have to do would be to sink a main line and some shafts to either side, set up nets, and wait.

This is the simple part here. It was backbreaking but reletively straightforward work to tunnel down into the soft waters surrounding what was then known as the "big island" of Hawaii, although the occasional ill-timed wave would sometimes destroy weeks of progress. After three and a half months exactly, Hiroseamus was beginning to think he'd need to pick a different spot, until magic happened. He'd struck tuna.

Oh, the nets were full that day, as he hauled load after load of raw tuna ore up out of the ocean to be processed into cans and shipped back to the mainland. It sparked a revolution, and hundreds of eager fish rushers drove east into the ocean before they realized that Hawaii was to the west. Tragic in a way.

Anyway, that's about the size of it. Of course, after the accident they had to close most of the fish mines down, and... oh, yeah. You wouldn't know about the accident either. (Sigh. Look this stuff up, sometime, huh?) Okay, here's what went down.

Hiroseamus was at work laying his third shaft of the weekend off the main line when a cry went up from down the tunnel upstream. One of the men had struck rockfish, and had of course been crushed instantly, and the confused school of fish was heading right down his shaft. The death toll was pretty high that day, as his best men were working with him, and he could only save himself. He got out of the fish business after that, and...

...Oh, he saved himself, yeah. What he did was... well, he had all the equipment to lay a tunnel right there with him, so what he did was cut the branch he was in off from the tunnel. That left him standing in a sort of bubble of air in the middle of the water. Now we all know bubbles float, and that's what he did, he floated up to the surface in a bubble and swam back to shore.

Anyway. Hiroseamus survived, but his fish mines never did recover. They still produce plenty of tuna ore and lower quality stuff that gets refined down into fish sticks and fish cakes, though. Hiroseamus went on to...

...but you know what? Look the rest up yourself, I'm tired of typing, and it's getting sorta late.