Download or read book Aegean Sponge Fishing and the Island of Kalymnos (19th–20th Centuries) written by Evdokia Olympitou and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-10-02 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of an Aegean island and its people that prospered from sponge fishing. Meticulously researched, the book reveals Kalymnos’s prevalence in the business, profession and culture of sponge fishing, and its global commercial network. It analyses the fishing practices, the shipowners, the seamen, the women “tough as men”, the divers that risked paralysis or death from decompression disease, something acceptable in the community, like the acceptance of danger in warrior societies.