Once in Veracruz, Mexico, I had walked way out on the shallow sandy bottom of the great bay looking for some cool relief from the heat. My brother and a friend sat on the sand getting smaller and smaller as I searched for the deeper cool. My head and shoulders were just above water when a large Hammerhead loomed into view. I stopped, barely breathing, and didn’t move a muscle. The eight-foot body circled me leisurely five or six times, three feet away. Then the strange shark with eyes at the outer tips of the “hammerhead” decided I was not worth her time and moved off with hardly a swish of her tail. I still had a residual fear of Hammerheads.
My diving “buddy,” a young woman whom I had just met in the Zodiac and who had followed me into the water, suddenly dove, paddling her flippers thirty feet down. She reached out a hand and touched the top of a Hammerhead. I was shocked. The shark did nothing, and my buddy rose to the surface with a big smile. “I love Hammerheads,” she said.
The fear of sharks that had been with me for decades simply left, and fascination took its place. They were beautiful. Whitetips have a terrible reputation as vicious killers, as do Great White Sharks. I know they have killed people. They are the top predators of the ocean just as the great cats are of the jungles. But my experience was benign. They patrolled the deep water but didn’t seem on the hunt—they just glided by, as did Green Turtles and Spotted Rays. My companions and I swam with these sleek creatures from one end of the deep channel to the other where the Zodiac waited. In the end it was a swarm of minute jellyfish, their tiny filaments stinging like mosquitoes, that drove us from the water, not sharks.
This was a profound experience for me. I felt liberated. I had hauled the burden of fear around with me for so long that it was part of me, and now it was gone. I felt like a kid who jumps off a high diving board for the first time. In the Galápagos Islands, where animals have no fear, I too gave it up. I began learning all I could about sharks.
One of the films I saw was Sharkwater by a young Canadian diver and filmmaker named Rob Stewart. Sharks are maligned creatures, accused of being primitive because they are four hundred million years old, when in fact they are highly sensory. They have two more senses than human beings: a lateral line along their bodies like all fish, which tells them what is moving in the environment around them, and an ability to detect the electromagnetic fields of all matter. These senses, and being able to move through water with no friction, make sharks apex predators of the oceans. They keep the ecosystem in balance. Because sharks kill so effectively and sometimes we are their inadvertent prey, we fear them and hate them. It makes sense, but in retaliation we have killed millions and millions of them, to the point where more than a third of them are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Ninety percent of all Great White Sharks are gone and the Mako and Porbeagle are in such trouble that all three are on the IUCN’s Red List. They mature late and have few pups. The Mako female breeds when she is nineteen to twenty-one years old and has between 4 and 18 pups; the Porbeagle female is mature at six to eleven years and whelps only 4 pups a year. The Blue Shark, by comparison, can have as many as 135 pups in a litter, and females are mature before they’re five years old.
Sharks have died at the hands of sports fishermen and as bycatch of commercial long-liners, but mostly they die from the global business of shark finning. The shark population has been decimated to feed the Asian market for shark fin soup. Sharkwater exposes this deadly practice in countries like Costa Rica, where it has been outlawed but continues illegally, and in the Galápagos, the most protected marine reserve in the world, where illegal long-liners elude the few patrol boats. Even in paradise the devil finds a way.
The good news is that every day more countries are outlawing the sale of shark fins, Asian celebrities are exposing the needless killing of sharks, and chefs are finding substitutes to satisfy the Asian appetite. The irony is that shark fin has no real taste and is put into a chicken broth to give it flavor.
I watched my sweet twelve-year-old granddaughters as they absorbed the wild and wonderful islands we visited. Their favorite afternoon was spent bodysurfing the waves with their new teenage friends and the occasional Sea Lion, while I watched from shore, as intent on a rare Lava Gull at the tide line looking for food as I was on them. Human and animal pursuits are virtually the same. We eat, we sleep, we seek shelter and companionship. We court, we have families, and we play. The baby Sea Lions were playing on the backs of their mothers, while my girls were playing on the backs of waves.
My granddaughters Vita and Isabelle after swimming with a sea lion in the cold ocean, Galápagos, 2011
On the last day we walked through a misty drizzle in grassy fields where Galápagos Giant Tortoises roamed. Their domed black shells glistened in the rain as some of them retreated inside. Others seemed curious and gazed on us with eyes that had seen much in a hundred years or more: capture, starvation, drought, and plenty. The girls were only twelve. What would the world be like as the twenty-first century rounded out their old age? Some of these Tortoises might still be alive. The fact that they had already survived so much gave me hope—that and my granddaughters’ commitment to keeping them so.
Galápagos became a national park in 1959 to mark the centennial of Darwin’s book. There are about thirty thousand people living on a few designated islands and the population is growing. Tourists come by the hundreds of thousands now but are regulated to a limited number at any given time on boats and paths to keep the islands free of disease. Still, people bring microbes on their footwear, plant spores on their headgear, and any manner of tiny new flora and fauna to the islands. It will be a battle to keep it pristine in the future. The feral goats, pigs, and cats are being brought under control through eradication so that the endemic species will continue to thrive. This is not without controversy; some people do not condone the killing of any animal for the sake of another. However, the Galápagos is a highly managed environment today. Two hundred and fifty thousand invasive goats were killed by sharpshooters on Isabela and other main islands in order to allow the vegetation and water pools needed by the endangered Tortoises to flourish again. By 2006 they were declared free of large introduced mammals. These are hard choices, but without such stringent control Galápagos would lose its native species as Hawaii has and continues to do as climate change drives them toward extinction.
In 2012, helicopters dropped poison on the island of Pinzón, killing the invasive rats that had wiped out most of the rare Tortoises there. In 2015 ten hatchling Tortoises were found on the island, the first in a hundred years, promising survival of the species, reversing Darwin’s trajectory of “survival of the fittest,” that were the indomitable rats we humans brought with us.
14
Newfoundland
We were bound for Francois, five other passengers inside fighting waves of nausea as the little ferryboat heaved on the black water, hugging the coastal cliffs of Newfoundland. I was never a victim of seasickness, but I sat outside on top of one of the monstrous cargo containers and let the wind blast my cheeks. My legs were hanging down in the space between the metal boxes before an adjacent one began its frightening slide toward me in the swell. I jumped down just as metal slammed against metal, and made my cautious way on the wet deck to the hatch and the reeking stench inside.
The ride from Burgeo to Francois takes four hours. It is the only way to get there, and has been for centuries. There are no roads through the dense underbrush and wetlands in the heart of Newfoundland. At one time there were perhaps thirty outports on this south coast, the tiny villages of those who made their livelihood from the great fishing banks of the North Atlantic. These are the folks who hauled in hundred-pound Cod on their lines and Halibut weighing four times that. They filleted and salted the fish in these outports and sent them abroad for the table of French kings and the streets of Philadelphia. The North Atlantic is an unforgiving ocean, and these are some of the hardiest people on earth.
The lure of t
he Grand Banks, one of the most productive fishing areas on the planet, has been irresistible since the 1400s when the Portuguese and Basque braved the crossing from Europe in their small boats. Cod, Halibut, Haddock, Herring, Mackerel, and Redfish (Ocean Perch) all thrive on nutrients created by the cold Labrador Current from the north and the warm Gulf Stream from the south. Capelin, small baitfish, feed the larger fish and the millions of seabirds that congregate on rocky cliffs to breed.
We stopped at one of the few remaining outports, Grey River, to deliver goods as my fellow travelers gratefully disembarked. I took the opportunity to talk with some of the women gathered on the wharf in the late afternoon sun while the cargo was hoisted over. The ferry comes only a few times a week and the slip is a gathering spot, the only game in town for some of the 130 residents who live here. The teenage girls were rather chic in their tight black jeans and leather jackets, with studs in their noses, cuffs on their ears, and purple hair just like any counterpart in Brooklyn; like teenagers anywhere, they were not terribly interested in talking to me. The older women responded curtly to questions about life in the village. “We don’t want for anything,” one said. “Had the Internet for seventeen years.” It was 2010. They had been wired since 1993! That’s longer than 90 percent of New Yorkers. Because of the remoteness of the outports the Canadian government takes care of them with special services, including helicopters in case of emergency.
It was another hour or two before we came to the long fjord heading into Francois. The evening sky was hung with gray clouds dappled by a lowering sun as we motored between two steep hillsides. A tiny lighthouse perched above to direct errant sailors. The fairy-tale town finally came into view nestled beneath a sheer granite wall a thousand feet high that curved to embrace fifty or sixty gaily painted houses. They were stacked like dollhouses one above another on the scree, climbing to the stone face of the wall. The sun took a last spill over the pinks and blues, the reds, oranges, and purples of the houses and disappeared behind the mountain.
My host for the night, Ethel Andrews, met me with a smile, grabbed my bag, and led me on a narrow winding boardwalk uphill toward her aqua home. In a tiny kitchen she served her husband, John, and me a comforting meal of sandwiched beef smothered in gravy, mashed potatoes, carrots, and peas. Then John headed back down to his fishing shack to hook his lines for the next morning. He would place hundreds of baited hooks that day and in the hours before bed. He lost a little finger to blood poisoning while placing a hook once, and the fingers on his right hand are bent from Dupuytren’s contracture. Still he baits faster than anyone I have ever seen.
Ethel took me for a walk up the mountain to the community’s graveyard, a source of pride and comfort to the 115 who live in the village and know everyone who has died and all who are born. A slim waterfall spilled from a lake above the granite wall, making a shallow pond in the heather and grasses. A few ducks circled about and one or two frogs croaked in the reeds. The June sky was light until 11 p.m., but we retired early, as John would be up and in his dory before 4:30 to reach the fishing grounds at dawn.
John, at sixty-three, has been fishing all his life. He is one of only five fishermen left in Francois (pronounced “Fran-sway,” Ethel tells me, the legacy of England’s domination of the Maritimes and their disdain for the French). The collapse of the Atlantic Cod in 1992 led to a moratorium on taking the fish by 1995, and the industry never recovered. Neither did the Cod, not as before. The catches are low, and the giants that used to be pulled from the sea and could feed an army are gone forever. I treasure an old postcard found in shops from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, of a nine- or ten-year-old boy holding by the gills a gigantic Codfish a good foot taller than he. Halibut, the largest flatfish in the world, has suffered the same fate and is now on the endangered list. John was excited a few years ago to catch a 150-pounder within his quota, but it fetched only $400 at market, a pittance compared to the price the fillets of a top restaurant might command in New York.
It is not possible to make a good living as an independent fisherman anymore; the huge trawlers and the global corporatization of the seas have brought an end to the ocean lives of these fishermen as they have to the Cod. Like the Passenger Pigeon, the most plentiful bird in the skies before it was shot to extinction in the early part of the twentieth century, the Cod produced bountifully in the cold waters of the North Atlantic and could have continued to feed the world’s growing population had it not been for the marriage of technology and factory ships that overwhelmed the traditional fishing fleets. As Mark Kurlansky points out in his book Cod, it was the unending abundance of the Codfish, the belief that it would go on flourishing forever, that did it in. The trawlers with their huge nets dragging the ocean waters, equipped with devices to ferret out the fish wherever it might lie, including spawning areas, continued to exploit the Cod, never believing it would crash, until the government finally called a halt. The United States closed Georges Bank in 1994, the richest grounds in New England and Nova Scotia, and the Canadian Grand Bank soon followed. There was outrage from the fishing industry, which said it would go under, jobs would be lost, and there would be no fish in the markets. Independent fishermen quietly cheered the decision, knowing firsthand, as did John Andrews, the toll taken by the huge trawlers and corporate entities. But the moratorium was just that: an end. It was an end to the great Cod fisheries of the North Atlantic, an end to the way of life of Newfoundland outporters, and an end to life under the ocean where Cod had been an apex predator.
Human beings are nothing if not adaptable, and during the moratorium there were other fishing grounds with other kinds of fish, such as Pollack, to be harvested, and there was the nascent business of farming wild fish. Aquaculture took off. Today as I write this, fully 50 percent of all fish consumed in the world is farmed, from family ponds harvesting Tilapia in Malaysia, to man-made trout ponds in Norway, to netted pens of salmon off the coast of Chile. I would not have believed that the migratory Cod, needing deep cold oceans while adult and warmer waters for spawning and young, could ever be farmed. But I was wrong.
Newfoundland had Cod ranches in the ocean in the early 1990s. Brian Johnson taught three hundred fishermen from fifty-two communities devastated after the fisheries collapsed how to farm Cod in pens. They raised them to ten pounds before selling them, and Brian believes the business would have thrived if not for the controversy that ensued over aquaculture. He still believes it can be done right and is the future of fisheries. Now Brian manages the less controversial Scotian Halibut, an inland nursery, in Nova Scotia.
If we are going to feed a global population of ten or eleven billion by 2050 it will be necessary to farm the protein-rich life of the oceans, just as our ancestors domesticated land animals for consumption. In Paul Greenberg’s book Four Fish he discusses the four mammals—sheep, cows, pigs, and goats—that we husbanded for our use. These animals, along with agriculture, ended the practices of hunting and gathering in most of North America and Europe. If you travel south in the Western Hemisphere, Alpaca and Guinea Pig are the domesticated staples of the Peruvian diet. Hunting and gathering still goes on in many areas of the world, but as mammals and birds become scarce and productive habitats are obliterated because of climate disruption, people will seek other means of survival. They will turn to the oceans, the only vast unknown expanse left on earth.
Greenberg suggests that four fish will be staples of our diet just as beef, chicken, and pork are: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna (not the Bluefin species). I am not so confident that cod, even Pacific Cod, and Yellowfin Tuna will make it to the next century. With four fish as diet staples, is this the death knell for the exquisite diversity of taste we have had with so many different kinds of fish? Probably. Leave it to chefs to create culinary variety out of relatively few items. But I will miss the remarkable buttery flavor and texture of Copper River Salmon when it is rushed from the Alaskan rivers to the kitchens of the Pacific Northwest every May. No farmed salmon I have ever tasted can c
ompare. However I put nothing past human ingenuity.
Ethel and I were there on the dock when John returned with his catch before his lunchtime at noon. The other dories had already docked and their catch had been weighed and logged by the government worker from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, or DFO. John had a dozen twenty-inch Cod, a few ocean catfish, and some colorful redfish—half the haul he had hoped for. When he heard an earlier boat brought in two thirty-inch Halibut, his ears pricked up. It is his favorite ocean fish to eat, as it is mine.
I wandered the boardwalks of the town after lunch, chatting with people sitting out in the welcome seventy-degree weather. It was hard sometimes to understand their heavy accent; they dropped their hs and added them before es so that “even here” became “heven ’ere.” Unlike the dour folk on the Grey River wharf, the people of Francois seemed cheery—all of them, including the children. Little boys skipped along, asking where I came from and where I was going. The village has few young people. The entire school had eighteen students in 2010, and there would be only sixteen the next year. The high school graduated just one boy and one girl, and they had left for the big towns of Corner Brook and St. John’s where they could get a job. Still they come back because, as one old captain told me, “Everyone loves Francois in their own way.”
The difference in spirit between captive communities in places like these outports is something I had been told to observe by a seasoned traveler long ago. I find it to be true. Just as nations have their personalities, so do these villages. Francois was reputed to be one of the happiest outports—“Always that way,” said one person—while another outport fifty miles away was said to be mean: “They kick their dogs.”
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 15