Cod (15 page)

Freezing also changed the relationship of seafood companies to fishing ports. Frozen fish could be bought anywhere—wherever the fish was cheapest and most plentiful. With expanding markets, local fleets could not keep up with the needs of the companies. Gorton's and others abandoned their own trawler fleets and eventually their own ports. Between 1960 and 1970, the total U.S. production of fish sticks tripled, but Gloucester production only doubled. While business was increasing, Gloucester's market share was declining.

The most important development was that during World War II the three innovations—high-powered ships, dragging nets, and freezing fish—had come together in the huge factory ship. One of the original appeals of the steam-powered otter trawl had been that, without masts and rigging, ample deck space had been cleared for fish processing. Engine-driven ships could also have larger hulls with more storage space. Originally, the net was dragged and landed from a swinging boom on the side, a side trawler. The stern trawler, invented in the Pacific, was more stable on rough seas and could haul bigger trawls. It also provided a large, open deck space on the stern where the fish were landed. During World War II, this added space started to be used for freezing fish. By the 1950s, a time now thought of as the golden age of long-distance net trawling, cod catches were larger every year in the North Sea, off of Iceland, Norway, all of the banks, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and along the New England coast. Most of the world's commercial catches were increasing.

Were there any limits to how much could be caught, or was nature inexhaustible, as had been believed in the nineteenth century? Fishermen were beginning to worry. In 1949, the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries was formed to look for ways of controlling excessive practices.

But technology continued to focus on the goal of catching more fish. Factory ships grew to 450 feet or larger, with 4,000-ton capacity or more, powered by twin diesel engines of more than 6,000 horsepower, pulling
trawls
with openings large enough to swallow jumbo jets. The trawler hauled its huge net every four hours, twenty-four hours a day. Pair fishing, a technique often practiced by the Spanish fleet out of Vigo, suspended a huge trawl between two factory ships. One operated the trawl, and the other processed the fish. After the net was hauled up, the vessels switched roles and continued, so that the fishing never stopped.

The rollers along the bottom of the net were replaced by “rockhoppers,” large disks that tend to hop up when they hit a rock and make it possible to drag close to a rough bottom without damaging the net. In addition, “tickler chains” stir up the bottom, creating noise and dust. Cod, and other groundfish, instinctively hide on the bottom when they sense danger, and the ticklers act like hunters beating bushes to drive birds out, sending the frightened cod out of their protective crannies and up into the nets.

The ocean floor left behind is a desert. Any fish swimming in the vast area of these nets is caught. The only control is mesh size. Fish that are smaller than the holes in the net can escape. While mandating minimum mesh sizes has become a favorite tool of regulators, fishermen often point out that once the back wall of the cod end has a good crop of fish in it, few fish of any size can escape, regardless of how big the mesh. Millions of unwanted fish—undesirable species, fish that are undersized or over quota, even fish with a low market price that week—are tossed overboard, usually dead.

For centuries, fishermen have had to study the lay of the ocean's floor and the skies. Nova Scotia fishermen used to look for what they called “cherry bottom,” a type of red gravel floor favored by cod. They would drop a weighted line with a piece of tallow and bring it up to look at the color of gravel it had picked up. Or fishermen searched the horizon for a fast-forming cloud of seabirds. The air filled with furious screeches as the hungry predators dove for the sea's white churning surface to pluck baitfish—herring or capelin—from the chaos. The fishermen knew that their quarry were there: hungry openmouthed cod and other groundfish attacking from below, forcing the desperate baitfish to flee their midwater home. It is the food chain in all its violence, showing itself before the ultimate predator, who then knows where to cast his lines or nets.

All of these techniques are vanishing. Schools of fish are now located by sonar or by spotter aircraft, equipment developed during World War II to locate enemy submarines. Once the fish are located, the trawler can move in and clean out the area, taking not only the target catch but everything else in the area, the by-catch. As the 1950s Gorton's advertisement put it, “Thanks to these methods, fishing is no longer the hit-or-miss proposition it was 50 years ago.”

In 1923, Evelene Spencer of the United States Bureau of Fisheries journeyed from her home in Portland, Oregon, to Gloucester, Massachusetts. She wrote about her visit in the
Portland Oregonian.
“Today 5000 [Gloucester] men sail the seas from Hatteras to the Arctic Circle.” She was particularly impressed with New England salt cod cooking. “I hope Portland does not forget her coarse food and raw cabbage. But one thing she needs to be educated in is the use of saltfish products.... I had no idea that saltfish could be so delicious until I tasted it in Gloucester.”

Then she offered two New England salt cod classics: Fish Balls and the following recipe for New England Boiled Dinner.

THE TOWNS PETER OUT INTO FLAT RUSTY-BROWN LAVAFIELDS,
SCATTERED SHACKS SURROUNDED BY WIREFENCING,
STOCKFISH DRYING ON WASHING-LINES AND A
FEW WHITE HENS. FURTHER DOWN THE COAST, THE LAVA
IS DOTTED WITH WHAT LOOK LIKE HUGE LAUNDRY-BASKETS;
THESE ARE REALLY COMPACT HEAPS OF DRYING
FISH COVERED WITH TARPAULIN.

—W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice,
Letters from Iceland,
1967

O
nly a decade after reassuring the Canadians and the world that the waters around Great Britain “show no sign of exhaustion,” such a thing being scientifically impossible, the British discovered that the cod stocks in the North Sea had been depleted. Finally, in 1902, seven years after the death of Huxley, the British government began to concede that there was such a thing as overfishing. Their marvelous steel-hulled bottom draggers had already moved from the North Sea to Iceland. There they found local fishermen fishing the same way they had been when the Hanseatic League had driven the British away. Icelanders keep their traditions. They spoke, and still do, the same language as the Vikings. And they still do not have family names. Just as Eirik the Red's son, Leifur, became known as Leif Eiriksson, if a modern Icelander named Harold has a son and names him Jóhann, he will be Jóhann Haroldsson. His son will have the last name Jóhannsson; his daughter will be Jóhanndóttir.

Iceland is a lava-encrusted island, rimmed by fine, sheltered, deep-water harbors in the protective nooks of long fjords. But the fishing ports are located not in the harbors but on often harborless seaward points. Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the principal Icelandic fishing vessel was an open-decked oar-powered boat, and a harbor location deep inside a sheltered fjord would have added hours of rowing time to and from the fishing grounds. Fishermen chose a seaward point close to the fishing grounds and dragged their boat over the lava with the help of rollers made of whale ribs. Each boat might have as many as twelve oars but more commonly had four to six, with a fisherman on each oar. Usually the boat was also rigged with a small single sail, but oars were often found to be more efficient because the winds around fjords are erratic. Each oarsman operated a handline.

Yet Iceland remained primarily a fishing nation. Asked why technology did not advance, Jón Thor, historian for Iceland's Marine Research Institute, said, “After 1500, new ideas came very slowly.“ Until 1389, Iceland had been a vibrant society of literature, exploration, and creative concepts in government. But that year, Mt. Hekla erupted, shaking the entire island and covering it with long spells of darkness followed by a brutally cold winter that melted into spring floods. Then came epidemics. Then, in 1397, Iceland was transferred from Norwegian to Danish rule. The Danes ruled with indifference, declaring a trade monopoly with Iceland but pursuing almost no trade with it. In 1532, when the British were driven off, Iceland lost its last contact with the outside world.

While fish continued to be Iceland's principal export, until the second half of the nineteenth century, the quantity remained small. At the end of the eighteenth century, when New England and Newfoundland each had annual cod exports of 22,000 tons, Iceland was exporting less than 1,000 tons. Most Icelanders were farmers, but many of them, especially in the south and west, earned more fishing from February to April than farming the rest of the year. Not a tree grows on the island, except a few ornamental ones planted by landscapers in Reykjavik. So there is no fruit, nor is there grain. The English traded grain for fish in the fifteenth century. But stockfish was always the bread substitute. Pieces are torn off and spread with butter. From 1500 to 1800, every schoolchild in Iceland was given half a stockfish a day. Icelanders never acquired a taste for either fresh or salted cod. But in 1855, when the Danish agreed to lift their ban on foreign trade, Icelanders began learning how to salt cod, earning a place in quality Spanish and Portuguese markets.

Grindavik is a seaward strip of land, chosen as a fishing station in 910 because it was close to the cod grounds. In 1934, when Tómas Thorvaldsson first went to sea, fishermen still spent twenty minutes every morning dragging their boats over the lava into the sea. In the evening, it took an hour to get them back up. The people of Grindavik would go to the black lava beach in the evening and wait for their men to get home. There are still women who remember watching one of the boats capsize and get swallowed up in a huge swell.

The Icelanders of Tómas's generation grew up with little money for imports. They ate what the island produced, which was mainly every conceivable part of a codfish and a lamb. They roasted cod skin and kept cod bones until they had decomposed enough to be soft and edible. They also ate roasted sheeps' heads, particularly praising the eyeballs. Another specialty was
hákarl,
the flesh of a huge Greenland shark, hunted for the commercial value of its liver oil. The flesh, which contains cyanic acid, a lethal poison, was rendered edible by leaving it buried in the ground for weeks until it rotted.