Tómas Thorvaldsson was fifty-seven years old when the 200-mile zone changed his life. He had already been through many changes and become the prosperous executive of a trawler company with its own processing plant. Now he was also part of government: a board member and, after twenty-two years, president of a state bureaucracy that controlled all fish exports. He remembered the old days and liked to visit the black crescent of shore, the lava beach where they used to drag the boats to the water. Solemnly he would say, “On this spot men have gone to sea for more than 1,000 years.”
But the old Iceland seemed unimaginable to his children. Even the food was different. Young people did not eat stockfish; they went to a bakery and bought bread. Their diet, with the exception of lamb and fish, was imported and expensive. One day each winter, when the arctic night is almost twenty-four hours, and thoughts turn suicidal, a feast is held at costs unimaginable in the old days, in which the old Icelanders eat hákarl, sheep’s head, ram’s testicles, and other foods from their past.
Physical traces of past centuries vanished almost completely. If a building survived from the 1930s, it was considered historic. One-third of the town of Heimaey, a fishing port on a small island off the southern coast, was buried in a 1973 volcanic eruption. A sign in the new lava fields proclaims that buried some feet below is Iceland’s oldest Kiwanis Club, built in 1924.
Most towns had a population of 2,000 or less. The few people drove cars on needlessly wide, well-paved streets. There were no crowds, no signs of poverty, nothing old and absolutely no dirt. Just a treeless immaculate plain of new houses, metal or concrete, freshly painted in colors that are true but not hot and mirror nothing in nature. Most towns looked like a sales lot for new, oversized mobile homes. “These are the new houses built for the young people after we were through digging a harbor by hand,” said Tómas.
The harbor in Grindavik was dug out a little more each year. The men of the town are still dredging. It is now home port to fifty fishing vessels, ranging from small, two-man boats with a converted stern rigged for dragging, to large, modern bottom draggers.
After Iceland’s 200-mile zone gained acceptance in 1976, most nations declared their own 200-mile zones. Some 90 percent of the world’s known fishing grounds fell within 200 miles of the coast of at least one nation. Fishermen now had to work not so much with the laws of nature as the laws of man. Their primary task was no longer to catch as many fish as possible but to catch as many as were allowed. The fisherman had long been a skilled navigator, seaman, biologist, meteorologist, mechanic, weaver, and mender. Now he also had to learn, like a good civil servant, how to work the regulations, sidestep their pitfalls, and sail through their loopholes. He became skilled at this as well. Fishermen rarely consider regulation their responsibility. As they see it, that is the duty of government—to make the rules—and it is their duty to navigate through them. If the stocks are not conserved, government mismanagement is to blame.
If the zone is used to exclude foreigners, as most are, the nation only has to regulate its own fishermen. That was seen by Icelanders as the key to effective management. Jóhann Sigurjónsson, deputy director of the Marine Research Institute, said, “It’s enough to have your own people to watch. You don’t want an Olympic fishery like the North Sea. Everybody tries to take as much as they can as fast as they can.” The European Community tried to solve this through its regulatory bureaucracy, the Common Fishing Policy, but that only created a new, complex set of nation-by-nation regulations for fishermen to work on.
The Icelandic government realized that it would have to curb the capacity of its own fleet. It required larger mesh on trawls. But the fishermen compensated by buying more trawlers. Then the government restricted the size of the fleet and the number of days at sea; the fishermen responded by buying larger, more efficient gear. The cod stocks continued to decline. In 1984, the government introduced quotas on species per vessel per season. This was a controversial and often wasteful system. A groundfish hauled up from fifty fathoms is killed by the change in pressure. But if it is a cod and the cod quota has been used up, it is thrown overboard. Or if the price of cod is low that week and cod happen to come in the haddock or plaice net, the fishermen will throw them overboard because they do not want to use up their cod quota when they are not getting a good price.
In 1995, a system was initiated to restrict the total cod catch to a maximum of 25 percent of the estimated stock. That also had loopholes. But with each measure, there was less and less resistance. When Icelanders see cod stocks diminishing, they think about returning to the Middle Ages—earthen huts, metal shacks, the buried shark and burned sheep heads. National politicians, fishermen, trawler owners, and seafood companies became increasingly cooperative with the scientists at the Marine Research Institute. Their greatest opponents were local politicians trying to bring something home for the district.
Before the 200-mile zone, Tómas Thorvaldsson had never thought about overfishing, only about how to catch more fish. But now he had to limit his fishing capacity. “Thinking about fishing less was very difficult for the mind,” he said. He showed an empty dormitory that until 1990 had housed up to fifty-two workers from other parts of Iceland. They would come to process 2,000 tons of saltfish a year. In recent years, Tómas had processed only 300 to 400 tons a year. Higher prices, fewer fish, and fewer fishermen was the new formula of the Iceland fishery. Although the sector drove the economy, the government had already reduced the number of fishermen to only 5 percent of the workforce.
Looking around the walls of his office, where he had hung photographs of every vessel he had ever owned, Tómas pointed to that low-to-the-water little steamship, his first decked boat, and said, “Maybe we should go back to this.”
BABES IN ICELAND
In late January and February, during the spawning season, it is a tradition in Iceland to eat cod roe stuffed with the fish’s liver. Like most traditional Icelandic food, this dish is not popular with the young and affluent generation.
STUFFED COD ROE
Cut the side of the roe and turn it inside out. Put the liver inside. Cook in boiling water for a few minutes. Sometimes, instead of liver, I make a pudding with mashed cod, minced onions, flour, and egg because the babies don’t like liver.
—Úlfar Eysteinsson,
Thrir Frakkar restaurant, Reykjavik, 1996
Also see pages 247-49.
part three
The Last Hunters
IT’S NO FISH YE’RE BUYING: IT’S MEN’S LIVES.
(FISHMONGER TO A CUSTOMER HAGGLING OVER THE
PRICE OF A HADDOCK.)
—Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, 1816
11: Requiem for the Grand Banks
NOW A LULLING LIFT
AND FALL—
RED STARS—A SEVERED COD
HEAD BETWEEN TWO
GREEN STONES—LIFTING
FALLING
—William Carlos Williams, “The Cod Head,” 1932
Inevitably, Iceland and Newfoundland are compared. They are both North Atlantic islands and roughly the same size, though Newfoundland’s half million inhabitants are twice as many as Iceland’s. The poor quality of the land and shortness of the growing season make agriculture unprofitable on both islands. Historically, both economies have been entirely based on fishing, mostly cod. On both islands, the local fishermen operated small boats inshore while foreigners fished the rich offshore grounds. Both remained underdeveloped colonies until after World War II.
But that is when everything becomes different. While Iceland was severing its ties with Denmark to become an independent republic, Newfoundland was severing its ties to Britain and becoming a province of Canada. Once it became a province of a large wealthy nation, Newfoundlanders no longer needed to depend on their fishery for survival. Canada would make up the shortfalls. By the 1990s, the Canadian government was spending three dollars on fisheries for every one dollar those fisheries earned.
Newfoundland, Britain’s oldes
t colony, had been a self-governing colony until the Great Depression. At that time, saltfish was failing to support fishermen, and a British-appointed commission took over. But under the Commission of Government, an unemployed fisherman received an allowance of only six cents a day. Though Newfoundlanders had always resisted the idea of being swallowed up by Canada, this appeared to be the only option left. In 1948, the British supervised a referendum in which Newfoundlanders voted by a narrow margin to become the tenth province of Canada. But once part of Canada, Newfoundland had a large and distant government that was not accustomed to thinking of fishing as a top priority. The Canadian foreign trade bureaucracy was far more interested in wheat and industrial products. It viewed the local salt cod fishery as an economic failure and tried to develop the Newfoundland economy with light industry, most of which also failed, because it could not compete with mainland industry.
Breton fishing fleet leaving for the Banks, The Graphic, October 17, 1891.
But once the 200-mile limit was established in 1977, the Canadian government saw a chance to make fishing a viable economic base for Newfoundland. First, though, it needed to settle its border with the United States and drive off the Europeans. Then it would have a truly exclusive zone.
The Spanish and the Portuguese, who regarded it as their right to fish these grounds because they had been doing so for 500 years, were shocked. The 200-mile limit had been a particular blow to Spain because, though its people had the highest per capita fish consumption of any Western country, almost no good fishing grounds could be found within 200 miles of the Spanish coastline. After Franco’s death in 1975, every sector of the Spanish economy attracted investments and was being modernized. But there were few prospects for a modern Spanish fishing fleet. The Canadians and the Americans were throwing Spanish ships off of their banks, and the French and the British were pressuring the European Community bureaucracy to exclude them from European waters. While fishing was one of the principal objections of the French and British to letting Spain into their community, it was also one of the incentives Spain had for joining. With a larger fleet than any European Community country, Spain saw its quota reduced by the EC every year. By 1983, 1,000 Spanish vessels shared 234 licenses in European waters. Below the hilltop town of Vigo, in Spain’s northwestern region of Galicia, was a fleet of modern trawlers that increasingly had nowhere to go.
The Portuguese fleet, called the White Fleet because during World War II it had painted its ships white to remind German submarines of Portuguese neutrality, had few places to fish either. The one place left to the Iberians was a corner of Grand Bank and all of the Flemish Cap, a historic cod bank, both of which were beyond 200 miles and therefore in international water. Both the Spanish and Portuguese were taking significant quantities of cod from this area until 1986, when the Canadians decided to deny foreign vessels fishing the outer Banks use of St. John’s for supplies and repairs. The French still had St. Pierre and Miquelon, but the Iberians would have been stranded far from home with no port.
The other issue for Canada was the U.S. border. While Georges Bank, the richest prize on the shelf, is off the coast of New England, much of it is also within the 200-mile range of Nova Scotia. The fight over Georges Bank may not have become a true cod war in the European tradition, but a few gunshots were exchanged between New England and Canadian fishermen—probably the only shooting between Canadians and Americans since the French and Indian War. Under international arbitration, Canada was granted the northeast corner of the Bank, and the rest became U.S. territorial water. For the first time in history, Canada and the United States now exclusively owned the cod banks off their coasts.
The 200-mile limit was not seen in Canada, the United States, or anywhere else as a conservation measure, but rather as a protectionist measure for the national fisheries. While the U.S. government was providing low-interest loans and other incentives to modernize a New England fleet on Georges Bank, Canada was investing in a Grand Banks fleet. To build up this modern industry, the seafood companies, near bankruptcy from mismanagement, an overvalued Canadian dollar, and competition from Iceland, had to be rescued. Under a government bailout plan, the Newfoundland seafood companies were merged into a conglomerate called Fishery Products International, and government funds were used to resuscitate the Nova Scotian company called National Sea Products. By the late 1980s, both companies were huge and prospering. FPI had even managed to buy back the government shares. By then, the Canadian dollar was weak against the U.S. dollar, and Newfoundland and Nova Scotia cod were commanding excellent prices in the Boston market.
Ten years after the 200-mile limit had been declared, the year after the ports were dosed to foreign vessels, the Canadian government could, and did, claim that it had taken possession of its banks and turned the Atlantic fishery around into a profitable sector of the economy. There was a significant increase in the number of fishermen and the number of fish-processing-plant workers. The seafood companies crewed huge trawlers with new fishermen, many of whom were fish-plant workers, since much of the work on board a modern trawler is fish processing. Sam Lee of Petty Harbour recalled with a slight sneer, “One fellow I grew up with—his father had a store. He worked in plants. Before long he was an experienced deep-sea fisherman.”
But while the new, offshore all-Canadian fishery was prospering, the inshore fishermen found their catches dropping off. They suspected the reason was that the offshore draggers were taking so many cod that the fish did not have a chance to migrate inshore to spawn. The inshore fishermen complained to the regulatory agency, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but the government had invested in offshore fishing, not inshore, and its political priority was to make its investment a success story. As the inshore stocks dwindled, the debate became increasingly acrimonious. On the one side were the inshore fishermen; on the other side were the fishermen’s union, the trawler workers, the seafood companies, and the government. Cabot Martin, a Newfoundland lawyer who took up pro bono the cause of the inshore fishermen, said, “The whole unfair thing about Sam Lee fighting National Sea is that Sam didn’t have any money.”
“We founded the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association because nobody was listening to the fishermen. We were complaining to the wind,” said Sam Lee. “It was not just for inshore fishermen. Anyone who cared about what was happening could join.”
The small local fish plant had chronic bankruptcies, and catch would spoil before the Petty Harbour fishermen could find another way to get it to Boston. Finally, the fishermen took over the plant as a cooperative, and since the government was interested in seafood companies, they were able to borrow money for improvements. By keeping the fish in pens, they could keep the cod alive until they had arranged the market. Cabot Martin, whose original interest was fish farming, showed them that by feeding the cod capelin, herring, and mackerel, they would double the weight of the catch, and much of the added weight was not in length but in thickness, increasing the fish’s per-pound value. The cod started to resemble the thicker stock of Georges Bank. But as time went on, it was getting harder to get cod of any size to put in the pen. Even bait fish for feed were becoming scarce.
In 1989, faced with government indifference, Martin and the Inshore Fisheries Association decided to sue the government in the hope of getting an injunction against bottom dragging. They charged that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was not following environmental assessments. The court ruled against an injunction, saying it would have a negative impact on the economy and force National Sea’s plant in St. John’s to close down for several months a year.
Martin has since observed environmental campaigns against whale and seal hunting, such as those by Greenpeace, and he regrets having gone to court at all. “Mc-Donald’s was the biggest buyer [of the draggers’ catch]. We should have had a campaign against McDonald’s. We weren’t very sophisticated,” he said.
That the government was not listening to the inshore fishermen is an understatement. T
he government was euphoric about Atlantic cod stocks and the future of the fisheries. Catches were rising, and fishermen who could not meet their quotas of redfish were given supplemental quotas of cod to make up the difference. A government task force under Senator Michael Kirby was charged with assessing the future of Atlantic fisheries. Much of its report was devoted to finding new markets for all the fish that was going to be caught by the new Canadian groundfishing fleet.
Canadians have never been fish eaters. Even Newfoundlanders and Nova Scotians do not eat large quantities of fish. This is also true of Americans, including New Englanders. But the U.S. population is so large that there is always a potential for expansion. According to the Kirby report, Americans consume 233 pounds (105.8 kilos) per person of red meat in a year and only 4 pounds (1.8 kilos) of groundfish. The report estimated that over the next five years, Canadian groundfish catches would increase by 50 percent, and if somehow American per capita groundfish consumption could be increased by a mere .1 percent, the U.S. market could absorb all of the Canadian surplus.
In reality, catches were increasing not from an abundance of fish but because the efficiency of a modern trawler fleet made it possible to locate the sectors with remaining cod populations and systematically clean them out. In retrospect, this seems obvious, but it must be remembered that during Newfoundland’s long history of fishing, the migratory cod periodically disappeared from certain sectors only to reappear in others. Almost every year that records were kept, there were some areas of Newfoundland or Labrador where the cod stocks had nearly vanished. In some years, only one area failed. The years 1857 and 1874 were notable because there were no failing grounds. In 1868, almost all sectors experienced a failure in the stocks. But they would always show up somewhere the following year. Despite cries of alarm, these failures had never resulted in the disappearance of cod but had only been caused by temporary shifts in migratory patterns, perhaps in response to temperature changes. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Canadian government assumed that Newfoundland waters were again experiencing this well-known phenomenon. Ralph Mayo, a marine biologist for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service who studies Georges Bank from the Woods Hole, Massachusetts, laboratory, calls this “the perception problem.” He said, “You see some cod and assume this is the tip of the iceberg. But it could be the whole iceberg.”
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World Page 13