Cod

by Mark Kurlansky

  Furthermore, the Kirby report was still being influenced by Huxley’s teaching about the resilience of indestructible nature. The idea itself seems to have more resilience than nature, and every year one or two books are still published on this idea. As with the sixteenth-century belief in a westward passage to Asia, the theory cannot be killed by mere experience.

  In 1989, Fisheries minister John Crosbie, son and grandson of influential St. John’s fishing merchants, stood in St. John’s Radisson Hotel and tried to put to rest suspicions that the fisheries would soon have to be closed. In July 1992, he returned to the same hotel to announce just that—a moratorium on fishing the northern cod stock, putting 30,000 fishermen out of work. Sam Lee and other inshore fishermen, who had been calling for the moratorium on trawling for years, waited outside. When Crosbie refused to see them, Lee, normally a pleasant, good-humored man, began angrily pounding on the door.

  In January 1994, a new minister, Brian Tobin, announced an extension of the moratorium. All the Atlantic cod fisheries in Canada were to be closed except for one in southwestern Nova Scotia, and strict quotas were placed on other ground species. Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct—so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s men scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all.

  The fish-processing plants, which had been used to justify the court’s rejection of the inshore fishermen’s case, were closed down anyway. The two giant companies, FPI and National Sea Products, scaled down their operations and began processing cod from Iceland and Norway. National Sea Products used a 250-employee plant in Arnold’s Cove, a typical Newfoundland fishing town like Petty Harbour, built in the crevice of a bay, out on the water on top of stilts. The Newfoundland government, trying to resettle the inhabitants of the small islands off of Newfoundland in less remote places, had moved villagers to Arnold’s Cove, where there were jobs at the National Sea Products plant. The plant bought Russian cod, beheaded and frozen, from the Norwegians. In Arnold’s Cove it was partially thawed, filleted, and refrozen.

  The community-owned processing plant in Petty Harbour wanted to do the same thing but did not have the capital. “We looked into Russian cod to keep our plant going. But it was way out of our league,” said Sam Lee. Instead, they kept the plant open as a school. But they owe the government more than one million Canadian dollars in interest on money borrowed to buy freezing equipment. “We were paying it back until the moratorium. The government doesn’t want the plant, so we will be able to keep it. No one wants it. Fish will come back and it will be back in operation, but by then with interest, it will be a two-million-dollar debt.”

  The government also had to ban the blackback fishery, because fishermen going after this bottom-feeding flat fish seemed to get suspiciously large quantities of cod in their nets. It was legal to take these cod as a by-catch, but it began to look as though fishermen were targeting the by-catch. Some fished for lumpfish, which Lee completely objected to as wasteful since the roe is taken and the rest of the fish is discarded. Some of the inshore fishermen have turned to crabbing, which has been very profitable, and others to lobstering. There have been experiments with fishing whelks for export. But to groundfishermen, these were lesser forms of fishing. Most fishermen just collected the package and waited.

  St. John’s, the oldest city in North America, was built on a deepwater harbor sheltered by high majestic cliffs. The town, with its brightly painted late-nineteenth-century wooden houses, overlooks the harbor from a steep hill. Despite the ornateness of the Victorian architecture, there is a frontierlike rough-hewn charm to the town. The waterfront used to be crowded with stores selling supplies to the European fleets, whose ships would line the piers at the bottom of town. Portuguese and Spaniards would play soccer in town and drink wine with crusty bread. They were all gone now. The waterfront was filled with bars, restaurants, and shops for tourists.

  The constant theme of tourism was cod. White strips of peanut butter-filled hard candy were called codfish bones. Little wooden models of trawlers were sold. Bars offered an initiation to foreigners called “being screeched in.” This was a holdover from the cod and molasses trade, its meaning now lost. The tourist would down a shot of Screech, a Jamaican rum bottled in Newfoundland, and then would have to kiss a codfish—usually a stuffed one. There were no other codfish except frozen Russian fillets or the occasional catch from the Sentinel Fishery.

  Meanwhile, oil has been found on the Grand Banks. A decade earlier, when oil was found on Georges Bank, fishermen had played an important role in blocking the oil companies. In Newfoundland, fishermen have already expressed concern about the effect on fish of the oil companies’ seismic soundings, but without an income, they do not represent a very strong lobby. “They say it [sounding] doesn’t affect fish, but theyCre lying,” said Lee.

  Everyone talks of “when the cod comes back.” Lee said the fish plant would reopen when the cod came back. Tom Osbourne, procurement manager for National Sea Products in Arnold’s Cove, said, “Local fish will come back before too much longer, and we will go back to processing local fish. It will be king again someday. It will regain the U.S. market.”

  Cabot Martin believes the cod will be back. “I’d rather there were fish to fight about. It’s all coming back. They will try. They will want to start dragging again. We will have to fight them again.”

  But nature may have different plans.

  SUNDAY IN NEWFOUNDLAND

  SALTED COD SOUNDS

  2 lbs cod sounds

  4 strips salt pork

  shelots or onions

  Put about 2 lb. of salt cod sounds in water & let stand overnight, then drain off water. Put in a saucepan and cook for about 10 minutes. Drain. Fry pork, cut up shelots or onions, then cut sounds in small pieces and fry altogether. Add a little water if necessary.

  This recipe was used some 80 years ago, and often, for Sunday evening meal with home made bread and butter. It was enough for the family and very tasty and delicious. Today, mashed potatoes, french frys, whole potatoes with green peas could be served with this dish.

  —Winnifred Green, Hants Harbor, Newfoundland,

  from Fat-back & Molasses: A Collection of Favourite

  Old Recipes from Newfoundland & Labrador,

  edited by Ivan F. Jesperson, St. John’s, 1974

  Also see page 249.

  12: The Dangerous Waters of Nature’s Resilience

  WHAT WE GAIN IN HAKE, WE LOSE IN HERRING.

  —English proverb

  COD COMING BACK, FISHERMEN SAY

  MINISTER UNDER PRESSURE TO END

  MORATORIUMS IN WATERS OFF NEWFOUNDLAND

  —front-page headline, Toronto Globe & Mail, October 5, 1996

  Newfoundlanders debated over when “the cod was coming back.” Few dared ask if. Or what happens to the ocean if they don’t come back? Or whether commercial fishing was going to continue at all. The position that the cod would return was most candidly argued by Sam Lee: “They’re coming back because they have to.”

  Scientists are not as certain. Ralph Mayo of the National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, pointed out that there is no known formula to predict how many fish—or, in scientific language, what size biomass—are required to regenerate a population or how many years that might take. Both miracles and disasters occur in nature. In 1922, for unknown natural reasons, the Icelandic cod stock produced so many juveniles that, in spite of British and German trawlers, Iceland had a healthy-size stock for ten years. “There are lots of natural variables. All it takes is a huge winter storm to wash the larvae off the bank and away,” Mayo said. There is only one known calculation: “When you get to zero, it will produce zero.” How much above zero still produces zero is not known.

  Fueling optimism is the fact that decimated cod stocks have been restored fairly quickly in o
ther countries. In 1989, the Norwegian government realized its cod stocks were in a serious decline. It severely restricted the fishery, putting many fishermen, fish-plant workers, and boat builders out of business and drastically reducing the size of its fleet. The northern Finnmark region had an unprecedented 23 percent unemployment rate. But because the government instituted these measures while the stock was still commercially viable, while there were still some large spawners left, the cod population stabilized and started increasing after a few years. Peter Gati of the Norwegian Seafood Export Council said of the Canadian situation, “I guess politicians didn’t have the courage to put people out of business.” But in Norway, courage combined with good fortune and a fast-growing cod stock. When the cod stocks in the Barents Sea were measured in the fall of 1992, government planners were as surprised as they had been in 1989. After the two most productive years ever recorded in this stock, the cod population was healthy again.

  Agust Olafsson, a deckhand aboard the Ver, poses with a cod for the ship’s chef, Gudbjartotur Asgeirsson, circa 1925. Asgeirsson, who cooked on Icelandic trawlers between 1915 and 1940, often took photographs. (National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavik)

  In 1994 the Canadian government estimated that its moratorium would last until the end of the century. Since then, politicians have tried to speed up the process. But in Canada, if everything else went well, about fifteen years would be needed to restore the population. A healthy population requires some large old spawners, and such fish in the northern stock are about fifteen years old. It is hard to imagine the Canadians holding off that long, going a generation without cod fishing. As George Rose, the fishery scientist at St. John’s Memorial University, suggested, political pressure makes it almost impossible to maintain a moratorium until cod stocks have returned to historic levels. Rose, who had been a leading voice calling for the moratorium, said, “I am not optimistic that we will ever let it come back to what it was. If we get 300,000, there will be unbearable pressure to fish it.”

  Periodically a “food fishery” is announced. For one weekend, locals are allowed to fish cod for their own consumption. After such weekends, cod suddenly becomes available, sold off the back of pickup trucks. And yet local politicians complain that the food fisheries are too short. The mayor of Lewisporte said that some people worked on weekends and she “wanted everyone to have a chance.”

  In the October 1996 Globe & Mail article, Fisheries minister Fred Mifflin said that the Sentinel fishermen were reporting increased number and size. “The fish are fatter, they are healthier, so we know for sure that the decline has ceased.” This does not at all correspond with the findings of Sam Lee and his Petty Harbour colleagues, but they are only six out of 400 Sentinel fishermen in Newfoundland. A closer look at Mifflin’s data reveals that these good results were in southern Newfoundland, where waters are warmer and growth is faster. In fact, the cod there are a completely separate population from the northern stock, which inhabit the waters off the rest of Newfoundland, Labrador, and the Banks. This again illustrates what Ralph Mayo calls “the perception problem.”

  Weeks before Mifflin’s statement, Rose said, “We found 15,000 cod in the South Bay, and everyone said the cod are back. Hold on! Ten years ago, the biomass, the population, was 1.2 million.”

  Some propose to give nature a hand. When the Norwegian fishery was in crisis, the government there invested heavily in experimental cod farming. Once the wild stocks returned, the Norwegians immediately lost interest in farming because it was more expensive. But fish farmers had been technically successful in transferring wild juveniles to pens and feeding them until they were thick and large. The cod were even trained to come at feeding time. “Juvenile raising is where our wild fishing is headed,” said the Norwegian Seafood Export Council’s Peter Gati. The flesh of the Norwegian farmed cod was extremely white because they were “purged,” starved for several days before going to market, just as lobsters commonly are. Another advantage was that they could be brought to market live. This had also been key to Cabot Martin’s plan in Petty Harbour.

  Although farming cod is a new field and salmon farming is firmly established, Martin claims cod would be far easier to farm. Salmon have a delicate scale structure and are prone to infections, whereas cod tolerate handling and are disease resistant. Also, salmon do not like to be crowded into a pen, whereas cod have a herding social structure.

  Fish farming—everything from salmon to mussel—is becoming a bigger industry every year. Farming starts out well enough. After the Petty Harbor experiment, Martin set up several pens, fattening the cod with mackerel, herring, and capelin. This probably produced excellent fish, but at the time of the moratorium he had gone out of business with a debt of one million Canadian dollars. Commercially successful fish farms reduce operating costs by feeding pellets of pressed fish meal rather than wild bait fish. In the case of salmon, they are also fed artificial coloring to give them the pink tint they acquire in the wild from eating crustaceans. Gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops.

  Not only gastronomes but also scientists have deep concerns about fish farming. Pen-reared cod have a phenomenal growth rate. They are much bigger at a given age than wild northern stock. Cod doubles its size in a year anyway, but a hatchery cod can quadruple its size in the same period. Since size determines fecundity, pen raising and releasing would appear to be a way to rebuild stocks. But this is a dangerous business.

  The idea of releasing farmed fish into a wild stock frightens scientists because man does not select fish in the same way nature does. If a cod was not disease resistant, did not know how to avoid predators, lacked hunting or food-gathering skills, had a faulty thermometer and so did not produce the antifreeze protein or the ability to detect a change in water temperature that signals the moment to move inshore for spawning, this cod would not survive in the wild. But it would survive in a pen, and if it had other characteristics that were particularly well suited for farm life, the defective fish would flourish and possibly even dominate. If it then reproduced with a wild fish, it would pass its “bad genes” to their offspring.

  Christopher Taggart, fisheries oceanographer at Dalhousie University in Halifax, compared farmed fish to purebred dogs and thoroughbred horses: “Most purebred dogs carry genetic defects like bad hips. Thoroughbred horses break a leg if you look at them. It is a byproduct of selecting. Try to produce a dog with thick fluffy fur that is a good swimmer and it ends up to also have bad hips. If the dog bred in the wild, you would produce a wolf population with bad hips.”

  The genetic consequence of fish farming are still unknown. The assumption—the hope—for fish that live their entire life cycle in pens is that they never escape into the wild to mingle with the species. But this accident has happened. Worse, some hatcheries produce young for the purpose of releasing and enhancing the wild stock.

  New England salmon hatcheries released so many fry into the wild that by 1996, only an estimated 500 Atlantic salmon in New England still had the diverse genetic characteristics of the wild species.

  The central issue to the survival of a species is how to maintain its diversity—the wide range of genetic characteristics that gives a species the ability to adapt to the many challenges of life in the world. Scientists have no way of knowing, but can only hope, that the tiny reduced population of surviving northern stock carry the full range of traits once presented in the gene pool of a population of many millions. Taggart argued that to preserve genetic diversity, assuming it is still there, farming “should be kept as natural as possible—an almost wild hatchery. We know that spawning places are not chosen by chance. Choose places conducive to good survivorship of juveniles and conducive to keeping the group together.” That is how a wild cod chooses her spawning ground.

  Overfishing is a growing global problem. About 60 percent of the fish types tracked by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are categori
zed as fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted. The U.S. Atlantic coast has witnessed a dramatic decline in the bluefin tuna population, though Gloucester fishermen refute this on the grounds that they still have good catches. Mid-Atlantic swordfish stocks are diminishing. Conch and redfish are vanishing from the Caribbean. Red snapper, which is a by-catch of shrimp, is in danger of commercial extinction in the Gulf of Mexico. Peru is losing its anchovy population. Pollock is vanishing from Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk. With 90 percent of the world’s fishing grounds now closed off by 200-mile exclusion zones, fishermen have been searching greater depths for new species. Little is known about the ecology of these depths, but since they often have very cold water, reproduction is probably very slow. Orange roughy was introduced to the world markets after implementation of the 200-mile zone and immediately gained such popularity that five tons an hour were being hauled up from the depths near New Zealand. In 1995, the catch nearly vanished.