Atlantic (42 page)

The abundance of
codfish
in the Atlantic is very much a thing of the past. This cheerful trawlerman was pictured in 1949 off the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway. Today’s catches of
Gadus morhua
are seldom so rich, nor are the fish themselves often so large.

A ship called the
Fairtry
, launched in Scotland in 1954, was the first to start what some would call the mechanized strip-mining of the Grand Banks. Compared to the schooners and inshore fishing craft that had come before, she was enormous: 2,600 tons, and looking like a converted passenger ferry. She was also terrifyingly effective at what she was designed to do—the huge trawl net she dropped from a ramp in her stern had a mouth hundreds of feet around, and when it was pulled along the seafloor its weighted lower jaw scooped up every imaginable living thing in its path—hundreds, thousands of cod of varying ages, sexes, weights, and health, but also every other kind of bottom-feeding, bottom-living fish and crustacean, needed or not. All was sped into the bowels of this enormous ship; what was unwanted was dumped over the side; the rest was machined—filleted, salted, frozen-packed away—even as the trawl was down on the sea bottom again, hauling yet more hundreds of tons to the surface to be dealt with in the same brutally crisp manner.

The catches from this ship alone would have been astonishing. But then the Soviet fishing authorities heard of the revolution beginning, and being in the vanguard of a new Kremlin policy to distribute protein to the masses, built a fleet of similar ships, only larger still, and sent them to the Banks in the
Fairtry
’s wake. A vessel called the
Professor Baranov
was more than 450 feet long and could process two hundred tons of fish a day, all the while making frozen fish and fish meal, oil, ice, and water from its own distillation plant, and servicing up to twenty other Soviet trawlers that were lumbering across the Grand Banks like oxcarts pulling plows, scooping up even more fish than it was possible for John Cabot and all of the Basques who followed him ever to imagine.

The temptation for more proved irresistible. Within a season or two, just about everyone with a big enough net came to join the party. From the fish docks in East Germany and Korea, Cuba and Japan, dozens of lumbering and rusting strip-mine ships found their way across to the Nose, the Tail, to the Flemish Cap and to the Banks proper, and fished until they ran out of fuel and went off to bunker and carouse in St. John’s. Those who lived in the fishing town of Bonavista said they could walk up to the statue of John Cabot, high on a nearby cape, and look east into the ocean and see what looked like a vast village—lights by the thousand—as the draggers, the fish factories and their trawlers, scoured the sea without surcease through every night and every day.

Fish factories that flew the flags of a dozen new countries elbowed out those who had been traditionally working the grounds for decades, and hidden in the fogs and the ferocious shallow-water storms, they settled down to work with ever more sophisticated technologies and the deployment of ever-larger trawls. The catch levels went up and up and up—until an eye-watering total of 810,000 tons of cod alone was hauled from the sandy seafloor in 1968, the year when it all began to go badly wrong on the Newfoundland Grand Banks.

At this point the Canadian government decided something ought to be done. Too much was being taken from the fishing grounds, and for too long—a situation had been allowed to develop that simply could not go on. Government mathematicians determined that sometime between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries—long enough for thirty generations of cod to have come and gone—some eight million tons of their kin had been taken each year, mainly by British, Spanish, and Portuguese hand-lining boats. But, said the same mathematicians, almost precisely that tonnage of fish had been taken during the first
fifteen
years of the factory-fishing bonanza—and, put plainly, taking eight million tons in fifteen years was the kind of figure that no fishery anywhere on the planet could possibly sustain.

A plan had to be put into operation—and with what in government terms is reasonable speed, it duly was. But though the intentions of the bureaucrats and politicians in far-off Ottawa might have been the very best, the manner in which the Canadian fishing policies of the subsequent twenty years were executed helped create a far greater disaster, and one from which few—fish, fishermen, or fishing communities alike—have ever fully recovered.

First of all, the Canadian government did what appeared eminently sensible: in 1977 it declared (in common with most of the rest of the world’s coastal nations) that henceforward a two-hundred-mile-wide maritime belt off all of its coastlines would be regarded as its own Exclusive Economic Zone,
⁸¹
and that foreign fishing vessels would be excluded from working there. Canada’s claim of jurisdiction meant that the awe-inspiring illuminated village of draggers that had been visible from Bonavista Cape—factory ships and trawlers from Murmansk, Fleetwood, Vigo, Lisbon, Pusan, and a score of other foreign ports, and which were operating as close as three miles from shore—had to leave. They could still fish beyond the new limit—which allowed them still to operate on the Nose and the Tail and on Flemish Cap—but not on the Banks.

And most of them sailed off into the sunset. The Spanish trawler fleets, squeezed by European quota rules, thought that the French territory of St. Pierre and Miquelon—the tiny euro-using, Gitanes-smoking, Calvados-drinking twin-island relic of one-time French colonial ambitions ten miles off the southern Newfoundland coast—might offer them sanctuary, and so continued to fish in the non-Canadian high-seas outer parts of the Banks. The Portuguese White Fleet—their fishing vessels still painted white, as they had to be during the Second World War to remind the German U-boats of their neutrality—did the same. Otherwise the seas emptied, and sea-bottom cod-dragging stopped.

The sudden silence that followed should by rights have given the populations of Grand Banks cod the time and opportunity to recover. For suddenly no one was doing any large-scale fishing there: no one because the Canadians who now had the sole rights to do so did not at the time have the wherewithal to fish, or certainly not as the Russians and the Koreans had done. They had neither the ships nor the will to strip-mine and vacuum their own seas as the foreigners had been doing.

However, governments had other plans. Both the federal government in Ottawa and the provincial government in St. John’s decided they wanted to pump some life into the ever-sputtering economy of the country’s poorest and newest province (Newfoundland had been an impoverished British possession until 1949, and since confederation with Canada had an economy that relied on little more than fish and wood pulp). In line with this vote-winning policy, they decided to start what politicians hoped would be a truly enormous Canadian-run, Canadian-owned, and Canadian-organized Atlantic fishing industry.

But then the government—and specifically a now-much-derided federal regulatory body, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans—came up with estimates of how much cod any new Canadian fleet might legitimately catch, and then managed to get these estimates wildly, almost incredibly, wrong.

They were much too high. Four hundred thousand tons of cod could be taken from the Grand Banks each year, the government said with great glee, and the newborn Canadian fishing industry, which was additionally tempted by generous government aid, not unsurprisingly took the bait. Canada’s underused eastern shipyards promptly began a-welding and a-riveting, and launches down slipways became a sudden commonplace, and within a short while the departing Soviet draggers on the Banks were all replaced—by similar-sized, similarly equipped, and similarly aggressive fishing vessels that differed only in that they all flew from their jackstaffs the red maple leaf of Canada. And these boats were set to fishing offshore with a zeal and ambition encouraged by endlessly optimistic remarks from government, to the effect that plenty of fish were out there, and that the Canadian ships could carry away more or less as much of whatever species as they wished.

But it became clear soon afterward that these glowing estimates of fish stocks just
had
to have been inflated—whether through ineptitude or for corrupt or short-term political advantage no one has yet fully worked out. Some marine biologists at the time, and not a few local inshore fishermen, too, were quite certain of this and complained that calamity lay ahead—they even tried at one point to go to court and argue before the majesty of the law a case for exercising caution. But no one else was listening, and during the late 1970s and through most of the 1980s, a massive all-Canadian fishing jamboree broke out like never before.

Newfoundland became in comparative terms rich, prosperous, and now content to have been fully confederated with wise and prescient Canada. Its population was now universally happy, as the silver cod leaped in torrents out of the nearby Canadian ocean. Suddenly the old and much-maligned
Newfie
was being seen as an altogether different creature, now an admirable fellow with a fine work ethic and a newborn entrepreneurial spirit; and instead of endless miles of pine trees and sorry little centers of backwardness, Newfoundland found itself transformed, with brand-new seafood processing plants and enormous trucking operations and the opening of legions of marketing companies. This was now the face of modern, rich, better-late-than-never Newfoundland, the inhabitants suddenly being seen as a people blessed by good fortune. Someone joked that the new provincial motto should be “In Cod We Trust.” An unstoppable juggernaut had been set in motion, and it seemed for a few heady years as if nothing could halt it.

But then the numbers started to decline. Early in the 1990s scientists began to publicize new figures showing that the number of cod being caught on the Banks was decreasing savagely, and that the number of cod that were spawning—a critical figure for the future—was going down as swiftly as a punctured balloon. The government, aware of the economic boom it had helped create for Newfoundland, tried to keep on smiling, telling all who would listen that all was well. In 1992 its own marine scientists, those who had gotten the numbers so badly wrong a decade before, suddenly sensed the consequences of their errors and suggested limiting the annual catch to no more than 125,000 tons. Politics then got in the way: ministers tried to placate the juggernaut by ignoring the figures and setting their own target at almost twice the level: 235,000 tons. Even this they saw as politically risky; officials had to explain that though the new suggested level might be a long way down from the wonderful 810,000 tons that had been caught back in 1968, it was actually no more than a measured reduction, a figure both sensible and prudent.

But far from being sensible and prudent, it was actually quite irrelevant—for during that early fishing season there came grim and unanticipated news from the sea: that try as they might, Newfoundland fishermen all of a sudden couldn’t catch anywhere close to even a tenth of that tonnage of fish. And then it dawned: something terrible and unimaginable had happened. The cod, quite simply, had run out.

The trawlers went out, dropped their nets and cranked open the mouths, dragged for their allotted hours through the fishing ground, and pulled everything back up—and discovered that the trawls were coming up empty. The inshore fishermen sailed their little boats around inside the twelve-mile limit, baited and dropped their lines over the well-known fishing holes—and watched in dismay as their hooks came back up, clean and shiny and quite lacking in cod.

All of a sudden the truth hit everyone square on in the face. Everything that had taken place since that two-hundred-mile limit had been put in place and the foreigners had been thrown out was shown to have been no more than a wild party, with shots and snorts of unyieldingly bad numbers leading inevitably to the partygoers suffering all the symptoms of a really bad trip. It was a party that came to a crashing end much too soon, and the hangover started the moment the shutters came down.

And so the government, entirely stunned, had no option. It closed down the fishery. In June 1992, almost five centuries after John Cabot had told of a corner of the sea brimming with the most beautiful and edible of ocean fish, all of them had been caught by man, and the sea had been rendered quite barren. It was said Newfoundland’s waters had maybe 1.5 million tons of spawning cod; now those remaining in the bays amounted to perhaps sixty thousand tons—essentially nothing. The seas are now just empty. The Grand Banks is now an ex-cod fishery.

And thus it has remained ever since. There have been experiments to restart the fishery, but they all eventually sputtered out. And as I soon found when I drove up along the Bonavista peninsula, stopping at outports such as Catalina, Port Rexton, Newman’s Cove, Trinity, and the northerly town of Bonavista itself, where John Cabot’s statue stands gazing out to sea—small amounts of cod can still be found in the bays and inlets all around. But fishermen are absolutely forbidden to take them—anyone caught with a codfish will be slapped with a heavy government fine. Some argue that allowing a catch of one ton per fisherman each year might make sense—but the government, perhaps in embarrassed recompense for having made all too many mistakes in the past, refuses.

Some of the processing plants have closed, or now work short shifts with such other fish as can be found and legally taken; some thirty thousand Newfoundlanders have been put out of work. There was a lassitude, a terrible sadness to the place—shuttered shops, boarded-up factories, padlocks on chain-link fences around plants that used to bustle with workers.

Blame for the collapse of the cod fishery is spread around liberally. Some in government blame the warming weather, which they admit no one can do anything about; others assert that the ever-hungry harp seal eats spawning cod, and since politicians can do something about that, many urge the eradication or culling of the harp seal colonies. Inshore fishermen blame the trawlers and the statisticians. Offshore fishermen are angry with the government for snuffing out their livelihood and offering them little in return—even though unemployment insurance payments in Newfoundland are generous, and critics suggest that the fishing industry in this corner of the Atlantic is all too generously subsidized and instead should be allowed to stand or fail alone.