The pukat-fishing season — known as mupayang — was the period of the year during which the open-sea fishing with the pukat or seine-net was carried on along the Achehnese coast. Unlike the inshore fishing, which was pursued throughout the year with various devices, the mupayang was confined to a small part of the year and required the cooperation of two sampans, the jawi-fish being the principal catch taken in this manner. The season was surrounded by a body of superstitious observance, and was regulated by the pawang or master-fisherman, whose knowledge of magic lore (ilmu) was as indispensable at sea as that of the pawang rusa was in the deer-drive.
The pawang and his ilmu
Pukat-fishing presupposed great skill and especially sundry sorts of ilmu or knowledge of magic lore, principally consisting of formulas which must be recited at the proper time in order to resist malignant influences by sea and to attract the fish. Just as in hunting the secrets of the forest must be known to the pawang rusa, the indispensable master of every deer-drive, who was alone able to exorcise wood-spirits and to take bees’ nests from the trees unharmed, so the pawang pukat had to know all the influences that prevailed beneath the sea, and to be armed against them so far as might be necessary. The crew (awak) of each sampan were subject to the orders of this master (pawang), who was also usually the owner of the vessel and its belongings.
The Friday prohibition
Among the rules to be observed during the pukat-fishing season, the best-known was that which forbade fishing with the pukat on a Friday under any pretext. Other methods of catching fish might be practised with impunity on this day, but pukat-fishing was prohibited as strictly as ploughing. On Fridays the pawang and his crew might be seen lounging about in their best clothes, idled by a religious scruple that did not extend to the line-fisherman or the fish-trapper. The prohibition placed the seine-net fishery in the same category of labour as the cultivation of the soil, both being marked as too solemn or too consequential for the great weekly festival of Islam.
The kanduri laot
The pukat-fishing season was inaugurated and concluded by the kanduri laot, the annual feast of the pawangs of each lho’ or “bay,” held to invoke God’s blessing on the labours of its fishermen. The time chosen for this kanduri was that at which the fishery enjoyed a compulsory holiday owing to the rough weather of the N.E. and S.W. monsoons. Thus the foreshore at Ulee Lheue was divided for the pukat fishermen into two lho’s, one of which gave its religious feast in keunong 17 at the beginning of the S.W. Monsoon (about April), and the other in keunong 5 at the beginning of the N.E. Monsoon (about September). The kanduri laot was supposed to bring to the pukat-fishers the same good luck as the kanduri blang did to the planters, and during the seven days following it neither the pawangs belonging to that bay nor their colleagues from neighbouring parts might fish in the waters fronting that division.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.