by Farley Mowat
The nineteenth century brought an enormous increase in commercial salmon fishing with the addition of canned and fresh fish to the old staples of smoked and salted salmon. By 1872, New Brunswick alone was every summer shipping 1,500,000 pounds of fresh salmon, packed in ice, to Boston and New York markets that could no longer obtain more than token amounts from the ravaged rivers of New England. And, by then, canned salmon was not only being shipped all over eastern and central North America but was going to Europe by the shipload. Here is a glimpse of the salmon canning business in Baie Chaleur in 1870.
“Salmon here are particularly large and fine. At the head of the bay they average 20 lbs in weight. The fishery is very important and lucrative... it lasts for two months and during that short period I have known one fisherman take 20,000 lbs of salmon... It would be hard to estimate the total amount exported from the bay, but it must be very large. The greatest part is tinned. One American firm puts up as much as 280,000 lbs here in a season. It is a pretty sight to see the fish coming to the cannery of a morning. Boat after boat discharges its load of silvery beauties fresh from the net. Sometimes whole boat loads will average 25 lbs each fish, and I have seen fish here up to 56 lbs in weight.”
These developments were paralleled by the rapid growth of sport fishing, which, having received the imprimatur of the powerful and wealthy, became an activity to be aped by any socially pretentious person who could afford the cost of a split-cane rod. All of these factors together were inexorably diminishing the salmon tribes, although few cared to recognize the fact. One who did was John Rowan, a prescient English visitor to the Canadian seaboard in the 1870s.
“Thirty years ago, the salmon fishing in Nova Scotia was superb. But where nature is so bountiful in her gifts man rarely appreciates them. As with the forest, so with the fish. It would really seem as if Nova Scotians hate the salmon. Overfishing is bad enough, but to shut the fish out of the rivers is little better than insanity. Yet hundreds of miles of river, stream and lake are closed against the salmon by milldams, many of which are of no industrial value. By-and-by, when the forests have been destroyed and the rivers rendered barren, Canadians will spend large sums of money in, perhaps, fruitless efforts to bring back that which they could now so easily retain.”
Rowan was an astute observer, though not always politic. “The most luxurious anglers are the Americans... Their rods, their reels, their flies are all works of art; expensive ones too, as they take care to inform you. They are always self-satisfied, always droll, always hospitable. They never go anywhere without pistols and champagne.”
The turn of the century marked the beginning of the end for the Atlantic salmon in unmistakable ways. In 1898, the last known survivor of the millions that had once spawned in the rivers draining into Lake Ontario was netted near Toronto. By 1900 they were effectively extinct in Connecticut and Massachusetts and in most of the rivers of New Hampshire and Maine. Wherever chemical, metallurgical, or manufacturing industries dumped their wastes into nearby waters, salmon no longer swam. And a growing number of remote rivers along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence were now devoid of salmon because their spawning beds had been buried under rotting layers of sawdust, bark, and wood chips—the detritus from lumber mills and timber rafting. In all the waters to which salmon clans still clung, the assault by both sport and commercial fishermen grew ever fiercer as the spiral of exploitation tightened. As the fish became scarcer, so their value rose; they were hunted harder, and became scarcer, and their value rose...
Considering what they were enduring, and had endured, the mere fact of their ongoing survival was a miracle of vitality. However, it was not miracle enough to protect the fish of kings from the greed of men.
There is little need to detail the wasting of Atlantic salmon by mankind during the first half of the current century. It is enough to note that, despite some erratic gestures of protection (always too little and too late), the regal fish continued an inexorable slide toward extinction. While sportsmen and commercial fishermen squabbled in increasingly acrimonious terms over who would get what was left, modern technology unleashed two even more crushing blows against the remnant stocks.
During the late 1950s the United States Navy began sending submarines north under the Arctic ice, and one of them made a surprising discovery. Beneath the verges of the Baffin Bay pack it encountered gleaming hordes of large fishes that, after some confusion, were identified as Atlantic salmon. The discovery was particularly important because, until then, no one had known where Atlantic salmon spent their time once they departed from the continental coasts for their long sojourn at sea.
First to make capital of the discovery were the Danes, closely followed by the Norwegians. A fleet of deep-sea seiners and drift-netters was soon butchering salmon for the first time on their wintering ground. And it was not just North American salmon that died; the Baffin Bay ground was used by all surviving Atlantic salmon, including the remaining European tribes.
The North American tribes by this time were almost wholly restricted to Canadian waters. Now they were in double jeopardy. Between 1962 and 1982, the West Greenland winter fishery reported an annual catch of 2,000–3,000 tons, but it is known that the actual catch was at least 50 per cent higher than that. During this same period, Canadian fishermen running drift nets on the approach routes used by salmon bound for the spawning rivers, together with gill nets and traps at river mouths and along the shores, were landing about 2,000 tons a year. The combined destruction produced by this overkill of an already severely depleted species was in itself more than the salmon could bear. But it was not the only blow they had to suffer.
In the 1950s, forest industries and provincial and state governments along the northeastern seaboard began mass aerial spraying of insecticides. These lethal substances, initially including DDT, so poisoned salmon spawning rivers that entire year classes were wiped out. The ongoing use of pesticides, defoliants, and other chemicals continues to wreak ruin in salmon rivers, and their deadly effects are now being intensified by the invisible sintering down from the high skies of acid rain.
Acid rain, as anyone who reads must know, has already turned hundreds and perhaps thousands of lakes in northeastern America into virtually lifeless bodies of water. There is no doubt that, unless acid rain can soon be stopped and its effects reversed, fish life will become impossible in most of the remaining streams and rivers where salmon still attempt to spawn. Already twelve Nova Scotia salmon rivers have been lost to acid rain and many more are seriously threatened.
Meanwhile, in Canada, small armies of Quebec Provincial Police were recently sent to extinguish the rights of Micmac Indians to fish salmon in ancestral rivers, possession of which is claimed by industrial fishermen at the river mouths and by sport fishermen along the inland banks. However, while the Indians are being prevented from, as a spokesman of the sport fishing fraternity put it, “depriving themselves of a future full of salmon by their wasteful, haphazard and vicious use of nets,” salmon have become so rare and sought-after that poaching is now a highly organized and efficient business throughout Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and some regions of Quebec. Selling on the black market for as much as $10 a pound in 1983, the few remaining salmon are simply too valuable to be allowed to go on living.
Figures released by the federal government at the end of 1983 showed that the salmon population in one of the last and greatest of Canada’s major salmon rivers, the Miramichi, had decreased by 34 per cent during that single year and by 87 per cent since the mid-1960s. Spawning runs in Canadian rivers were generally reduced by an average of 50 per cent, and the unofficial prognosis is that every salmon river south of Belle Isle Strait will be virtually empty of the regal fish before this decade ends.
There may be some exceptions. One such might be the Restigouche, where the exclusive Restigouche Salmon Club owns twenty-eight miles of river. Its members, who have included the Cabots of Bost
on, the Morgans, Whitneys, and Winthrops of New York, and at present includes such illustrious sportsmen as the chairman of Exxon, will perhaps be able to continue “enjoying their royal sport of matching their science and skill against the cunning, agility and strength of the kingly salmon.” However, the fish they kill will probably be hand-raised to maturity on salmon farms maintained for the dual purpose of supplying gourmet appetites with luxury foods and of assisting the sporting fraternity to continue enjoying the sport of kings.
12. More Fish in the Sea?
Since Europeans first entered New World waters some of the creatures our forebears encountered have been almost entirely lost to memory or, at best, are remembered only as semi-mythical beings.
Of such is the unknown animal that gave rise to a number of early reports of mermaids and mermen, one of which is an eyewitness account by Richard Whitbourne. In 1610, he saw a “strange creature” swimming in St. John’s harbour. He described it as having “strakes of hair down to the neck.” It was certainly not a walrus, nor yet a seal—animals the old fisherman was fully familiar with. When it approached a boat manned by some of Whitbourne’s men, they panicked and one of them “strooke it a full blow on the head.” Even so it later approached some other boats. “Whether it were a Mermaide or no, I know not,” Whitbourne wrote. “I leave it for others to judge.” Josselyn described a triton or merman from Casco Bay in the 1670s, and even as late as the 1870s a missionary at the Strait of Belle Isle reported that a fisherman near St. John’s Islands had netted a mermaid, which he preserved in salt to show the curious.
Although mermaids as such never existed, the sea mammals that gave rise to the idea assuredly did. They belong to a family called the sirenians, which includes the dugong and the manatees. Surviving sirenians are now found only in temperate to tropical waters, but until exterminated by train oil hunters in the 1760s (which was within thirty years of its discovery), a northern sirenian called Stellar’s sea cow lived in the Bering Sea. Writing in his Arctic Zoology, published in 1784–87, the British naturalist Pennant thought that this animal or something similar might have “found its way through some northern inlet into the seas of Greenland; for Mr. Fabricus once discovered in that country the head of one, half consumed, with teeth exactly agreeing with those of [the manatee].”
A sirenian of such trusting habits as Whitbourne’s mermaid would have had but little chance of surviving the European invaders. If one such did indeed exist in northeastern seaboard waters, it is now beyond even memory’s recall.
Another and almost equally vulnerable sea animal that assuredly did exist in notable numbers seems to have been effectively exterminated before the eighteenth century began. On September 6, 1535, the vessels of Jacques Cartier’s second expedition anchored under the lee of Île aux Coudres at Baie St-Paul in the St. Lawrence River. After noting the presence there of schools of white whales, Cartier’s scribe added: “In this bay, and about this island there are inestimable numbers de grande tortures”—of great turtles. When Sir Humphrey Gilbert wrote a prospectus listing the rich marine resources of the northeastern seaboard, he named “Coddes, Salmons, Seals, Makerals, Tortoyses, Whales and Horsefishes.” Brereton, visiting the New England coast in 1602, tells of finding “Tortoises” both on land and sea. The reference to land is almost certainly not to freshwater turtles, but to sea turtles coming up on the beaches to lay their eggs. About 1656 Du Creux, referring to the “Fish” of the Quebec region, included turtles, seals, and whales. Finally, Josselyn, in New England, not only listed five sorts of “Sea-Turtles,” but watched from shipboard when “our men... hoisted the Shallop out and took divers Turtles, there being an infinite number of them all over the sea as far as we could ken.”
By the end of the seventeenth century such observations were a thing of the past and, in our times, the appearance in any given year of a single sea turtle, usually a loggerhead or a leatherback, anywhere in the region is cause for much excitement. Such an occasion most often is a result of the unfortunate sea giant having been shot, or harpooned, and its massive corpse dragged ashore as a curiosity.
These are but two of the many probable losses the community of sea creatures sustained in times past. What follows are the stories of others that have suffered or are still suffering enormous depredations at our hands, and these creatures, too, may well be fated to join the mermaids and les grandes tortures in mythical obscurity.
As early as 1610, Champlain recognized three kinds of the armoured and ancient sturgeon in New World waters. One was the lake sturgeon, which was abundant in Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain and their drainage systems as well as in tidal waters of the St. Lawrence estuary. This was a big fish, ranging from four to eight feet long and often weighing 100 pounds.
The other two were salt-water fishes that spent their adult lives in the sea and only ascended rivers to spawn. The short-nosed variety was a small estuarine species, seldom exceeding three feet; but the sea sturgeon was enormous, some individuals weighing half a ton.
Pickled sturgeon meat had been a popular dish in Europe since ancient times, and by as early as 1520 French fishermen working New World waters were salting down quantities of sturgeon for the home market. At the same time, sturgeon provided a staple food for fishermen, early settlers, and native inhabitants alike. Sturgeon abounded everywhere. John Smith reported that no New England river was without it “in great plenty.” Champlain noted that the “sea sturgeon were so abundant [in the territories of New France] that there might be sold in Germany, or other regions where this fish is much in demand, annually 100,000 livres worth.”
Nicolas Denys gave it prominence in his listing of New World assets: “There are some of eight, ten, eleven and twelve feet in length and as thick in the body as Sheepe... the body is covered with scales of the size of a plate... Their flesh is as good as beef... That fish cometh to the entrance of rivers [and] leaps its own height above the water. It is taken with a harpoon... There are also smaller ones which are of another kind, but of better taste.” Denys also noted that sturgeon swim bladders were an excellent source of isinglass, a clear, glue-like substance thought to be of great merit as a medicine.
During the 1630s, William Wood, in New England, wrote that “The sturgeons be all over the country, but the best catching of them is upon the shoals of Cape Cod and in the river of Merrimac where much is taken, pickled, and brought for England. Some of these be twelve, fourteen, eighteen foot long.” A few decades later, Josselyn, writing about the same region, commented, “This Fish is here in great plenty and in some Rivers so numerous that it is hazardous for Canoes and the like light Vessels to pass to and fro.”
About 1650, Pierre Boucher wrote of the lake sturgeon: “It is to be taken from Quebec [upstream]; and in all the great lakes there are great quantities of it... all large, of four, six and eight feet long; I have seen them taken in abundance in front of Montreal... it is very good when salted, and keeps for a long time.”
Although the slaughter of all three species had been heavy into the early nineteenth century, sturgeon were so abundant and so fecund (each female laid up to three million eggs) that, until as late as 1850, they were still among the commonest fishes on the Atlantic seaboard. Then it was discovered that the eggs of the North American sturgeon could be converted into caviar of almost as good a quality as the Russian variety. At the same time a major market for industrial isinglass developed, while fresh sturgeon flesh was in increasing demand in large American cities. The combination was too much even for these prolific fishes to withstand.
Using nets, guns, harpoons, even bombs, fishermen attacked the spawning runs of the big sea sturgeon and its smaller cousins with such ferocity that, in 1890, the kill in the Delaware River alone amounted to more than 5 million pounds. As late as 1897, one group of fishermen was able to kill 335 large, spawning-run sturgeon in a single haul at Amaganset. This general massacre would not spare even enough gravid females to allow the sp
ecies to propagate, and so the sturgeon began to disappear.
Although by the 1920s all three species had become, in the words of a Fisheries biologist, “as rare as they were extraordinary,” nothing of any effect was done to save them. It is true that in recent years the few survivors have been given a measure of protection, but this has not compensated for the fact that many of their erstwhile spawning rivers and estuaries have become so polluted that their hatchlings cannot live.
Nobody knows how many sturgeon still remain alive in the northeastern region, but it is agreed that they represent no more than a fractional percentage of the ancestral multitudes that inhabited these waters before we came upon them.
Called barse by the early French, the striped bass was one of the more remarkable marine fishes found in the New World. Seldom swimming more than three or four miles offshore, and preferring to patrol the beaches where it chased its prey right into the foam, it originally ranged from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Florida, ascending most major rivers and hundreds of minor ones in its spawning runs. A large, robust fish that often weighed fifty pounds (six-footers weighing 140 pounds were not uncommon), it was considered to be as good as or better eating than the Atlantic salmon. And it was present in unbelievable numbers.
It was manna from the seas for early settlers. Cartier commented on its “great numbers” at Quebec, and Champlain found it so abundant spawning in Bay of Fundy rivers that “entire ships could be loaded with it.”
As for New England, here is what Captain John Smith had to say about it: “The Basse is an excellent Fish, both fresh and salte... They are so large the head of one will give a good eater a dinner, for daintiness of diet they excell the Marybones of Beef. They are such multitudes that I have seene stopped in the river... at one tyde as many as will bade a ship of 100 tonnes... at the turning of the tyde [I] have seen such multitudes passe out of a pounde [net] that it seemed to me one might go over their backs drishod.”