Cod (12 page)

COD—A SPECIES OF FISH TOO WELL KNOWN TO REQUIRE ANY DESCRIPTION. IT IS AMAZINGLY PROLIFIC. LEEWEN-HOEK COUNTED 9,384,000 EGGS IN A COD-FISH OF A MIDDLING SIZE—A NUMBER THAT WILL BAFFLE ALL THE EFFORTS OF MAN TO EXTERMINATE.

—J. Smith Homans and J. Smith Homans, Jr., editors,
Cyclopedia of Commerce and Commercial Navigation,
New York, 1858

7
:
A Few New Ideas Versus Nine Million Eggs

HARVEY COULD SEE THE GLIMMERING COD BELOW,
SWIMMING SLOWLY IN DROVES, BITING AS STEADILY AS
THEY SWAM. BANK LAW STRICTLY FORBIDS MORE THAN
ONE HOOK ON ONE LINE WHEN THE DORIES ARE ON THE
VIRGIN OR THE EASTERN SHOALS; BUT SO CLOSE LAY THE
BOATS THAT EVEN SINGLE HOOKS SNARLED, AND HARVEY
FOUND HIMSELF IN HOT ARGUMENT WITH A GENTLE,
HAIRY NEWFOUNDLANDER ON ONE SIDE AND A HOWLING
PORTUGUESE ON THE OTHER.

—Rudyard Kipling,
Captains Courageous,
1896

 

T
he banks are treacherous. Depths as great as eighty fathoms are found there, but also areas of fifteen or twenty fathoms and less. Occasionally, in stormy weather, rocks break the surface. Ice floes split off of Greenland and the Arctic and drift south. In 1995, a large one, ironically shaped very much like a great fish with a towering dorsal fin, drifted to the mouth of St. John's harbor. Even against the high cliffs of that well-sheltered port, it was huge—out of scale with anything around it. At sea, it is difficult to perceive the scale of these drifting ice mountains until they are suddenly off the bow, blocking everything else from sight.

Then there is the cold. For all these centuries, men have gone out in the North Atlantic when the arctic wind froze the spray to the rigging, turning lines into one-foot-thick columns of ice, making the ships unstable from the weight of the ice on the windward side. Ice would have to be chopped off the rigging to prevent capsizing. Even with improved navigation, radar, and radio reports on ice and storm conditions, cod still has to be fished out of water that is from thirty-four to fifty degrees. Fishermen must haul lines out of these waters. Today, there are new synthetic materials to protect the hands, but until recently, fishermen wore nippers—thick rubber gloves with cotton lining. They were awkward. It was hard to mend a net with gloves on, and without them, fingers could freeze without warning in a half hour. If the fingertips start turning black, all the fisherman can do is go below to thaw them out in cold water. Warm water would cause unbearable pain. Fishing is hard on the fingers anyway, and fishermen commonly lose fingers or joints from frostbite, line snags, and machinery. Hands invariably get deep cuts that become infected. If the hands get too beaten up, permanently numb from frostbite, or have too many missing fingers, the fisherman is forced into retirement.

Fishermen like to talk about their esprit de corps, and it is true that there is a warm camaraderie, a sense of being part of an elite brotherhood. Fishermen are like combat veterans who feel understood only by their comrades who have survived the same battles. But fishing is a constant struggle for economic survival. Each man works for shares of the catch. Anyone who can't keep up, whether because of injury or age, is harassed out of the fishery. There are few fishermen over fifty. And because fishermen are technically self-employed and not salary earners, governments have been slow to recognize claims to social benefits for those who are out of work.

Lost in Fog
by James Gayle Tyler, Russel W. Knight collection. (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)

 

One of the worst enemies of cod fishermen, especially in the days before radio, was fog. Since cod grounds are zones where warm and cold currents meet, fog is commonplace. It can be so thick that the bow of an eighty-foot vessel is obscured from midship. A lantern on the bow cannot be detected 100 feet away. Fishermen drift in a formless gray, tooting horns and blowing whistles, hoping other craft hear them and avoid collision. But the greatest danger was for the dorymen.

From the seventeenth century to the 1930s, the common way to fish for cod and other groundfish was to go out to the Banks in a ship and then drop off small dories with two-man crews. The Portuguese, who were infamous on the Grand Banks for the harshness of their working conditions, used one-man dories. Europeans would cross the ocean in large barks built for deck space and large holds; New Englanders and Nova Scotians went out in schooners that could swiftly run back to shore to land fish; but all the dories were the same: twenty-foot deckless skiffs. The dorymen would generally use oars, and occasionally sail power, but they had to provide their own sails. Often they or their wives made them by sewing together flour sacks.

Being competitive with each other, dorymen sometimes secretively took off to grounds they had discovered. Many dorymen drowned or starved to death or died of thirst while lost in the fog, sifting through a blank sea for the mother ship. They tried to fish until their boat was filled with fish. The more fish were caught, the less sea-worthy the dory. Sometimes a dory would become so overloaded that a small amount of water from a wave lapping the side was all it took for the small boat to sink straight down with fish and fishermen.

René Convenant, one of the last Breton dorymen, wrote of his father's death:

To seagoing people of the North Atlantic, the hardships and bravado of dorymen were legendary. In 1876, Alfred Johnson, a Danish-born Gloucester doryman, responding to a dare, sailed his sixteen-foot boat from Gloucester to Abercastle, Wales, in fifty-eight days, the first one-man North Atlantic crossing ever recorded. Nova Scotians still recall a nineteenth-century doryman who was lost in the fog for sixteen hours before being found—the Nova Scotian survival record. But the most famous Nova Scotian doryman was Howard Blackburn, who immigrated to Gloucester. On January 23, 1883, Blackburn and his dory mate rowed away from their ship to longline halibut and became lost in a snowstorm. His mate froze to death, but Blackburn shaped his fingers around the oars so that he would still be able to row after he lost feeling in his hands. He rowed 100 miles and reached Newfoundland with the frozen corpse of his mate on the stern. Though the misadventure cost him all his fingers and most of his toes, he went to sea in sloops designed for his disability, set a thirty-nine-day, one-man Gloucester-to-Lisbon record, and even rowed the Florida coast with oars strapped to his wrists.

Not only dories were lost. Whole ships went down. John Cabot's was the first of many. The number of Gloucester fishermen lost at sea between 1830 and 1900—3,800—was 70 percent greater than all the American casualties in the War of 1812, and this from a town of about 15,000 people. On February 24, 1862, a gale swept Georges Bank, and 120 drowned in one night. In the 1870s, as schooners became shallower and carried more sails, making them even faster and more beautiful, but much more dangerous, Gloucester losses became horrendous. These shallow, loftily rigged “clipper schooners” did not stand up well in gale winds. In 1871, twenty schooners and 140 men were lost. In 1873, thirty-two vessels and 174 men were lost, 128 of them in a single gale. An easterly gale on the banks in 1879 sunk twenty-nine vessels with a loss of 249 men.

The ports that sent fleets to the Grand Banks held religious ceremonies before the beginning of what was called “the campaign.” In St.-Malo, in late February, fifteen days before the Terre-Neuvas sailed, the cardinal of Rennes came to the port to say mass before the fleet. A wreath was tossed to sea to remember the fishermen who had been lost in previous campaigns.

As fishing modernized, fishermen were no longer lost in dories but were twisted in electric winches used to rapidly haul cable, slammed by trawl doors flying across the deck, crushed by rollers. On the modern trawler, being crushed in machinery is the leading cause of death but is closely followed by the more traditional fisherman's death, drowning. Ships sink at sea; men fall or are swept overboard. If a fisherman gets his foot ensnared in a rope that is rapidly paying out, he will be dragged over and drowned almost before anyone realizes he is overboard.

Fishermen do not like talking about these risks among themselves, just as Sam Lee and his Petty Harbour companions did not want to talk about the risks of falling off their open deck. But even the luckiest of fishermen have one or two stories of near-mishaps. Fishermen have the highest fatal accident rate of any type of worker in North Atlantic countries. According to a 1985 Canadian government report, 212 out of every 100,000 Canadian fishermen die on the job, compared to 118 forestry workers, 74 miners, and 32 construction workers. In 1995, 5 American workers per 100,000 died in work-related accidents, but among fishermen, more than 100 per 100,000 died. Similarly, a 1983 British study shows the death rate among British fishermen to be twenty times higher than in manufacturing.

One of the reasons for such high accident rates is that fishermen have always operated on very little sleep. If the catch is plentiful, the fishermen might go a day or two with no sleep. In the old salt fishery, once the dorymen came back on board, their catch had to be cleaned. The head was chopped off, the belly opened, the liver set aside—sometimes along with the roe, sounds, throats, and other items. Next, the cod had to be carefully split and the spine removed. (A bad split destroyed the value of the fish.) Then it had to be carefully salted. If the fishermen were lucky, they could have a few hours of sleep.

 

The first push to modernize fishing came from the French. In 1815, the new French government decided to subsidize the rebuilding of their fisheries, which had been devastated first by the French Revolution and then by the Napoleonic wars. Revitalizing the economy was only part of the motivation. As John Adams had once pointed out, it was far cheaper to subsidize long-distance cod fleets, which produced excellent sailors, than to maintain a well-trained standing navy. The British grudgingly began doing the same thing, but not until they had spent years complaining about the French subsidy.

The French outfitted their Terre-Neuve fleets with longlines, otherwise known as trawl lines, setlines, or bultows. Until then, the principal technique for cod fishing throughout the North Atlantic had been handlining, exactly the method Sam Lee and the other Newfoundland inshore fishermen still use. Sometimes a spreader was put on the end so that two baited hooks came off it instead of one.

Records show the British used longlines off of Iceland in 1482, and they may have been used earlier. But before the nineteenth-century French, the system had never become popular because it required an enormous quantity of bait. In Canadian waters, the French found ample herring and capelin. Though modest by contem-porary standards, these early-nineteenth-century French longlines were longer than they had ever been before. They could be as short as a half mile, or they might extend for four or five miles. About every three feet, a two-foot lanyard with a hook on the end was tied. The dory ran the line out. Caulked barrels served as buoys, which were placed at periodic distances so the line could be found. (Today the buoys are bright plastic balls with a flag on a two-foot mast over the top to make them visible from a distance.) The doryman would row along the line, hauling up, taking fish, rebaiting, and releasing.