Cod (14 page)

Gloucester fishermen commonly worked off of schooners until World War II. Gorton's last working schooner, the
Thomas S. Gorton,
built in 1905, sailed until 1956. In 1963, Lunenburg's last fishing schooner, the
Theresa E. Connor,
sailed empty to Newfoundland because she could not find a crew in Nova Scotia to fish the Banks. No one in Newfoundland was willing to work on her either. Everything that had been done to make schooners faster had made them also more dangerous. Unable to get a crew, the
Theresa E. Connor
returned to Lunenburg, where she is still tied up as part of a maritime museum.

By then, Europeans had been using engine power in their own waters for seventy years. But because of the cost of burning coal to fuel trans-Atlantic crossings, they had been slow to convert their Grand Banks fleets. The French continued to send sailing barks with dorymen to the Grand Banks well into the 1930s, when most northern European fisheries were completely engine-powered. The last Portuguese fishing ship to work the Grand Banks without any engine power, the
Anna Maria,
went down in a storm in 1958. But it was not until the
Theresa E. Connor
was forced to tie up without a crew, 100 years after the steam engine was invented, that the age of sail in the cod fisheries finally ended.

 

In fishing, new technologies usually came first in Europe, where the waters had been fished longer and it was harder to catch fish than in North America. Competition for dwindling catches was the greatest incentive, and the North Sea, shared by eight affluent and fiercely competitive fishing nations, was the leading laboratory for innovation.

Originally most trawlers, ships that drag their fishing gear behind them, were longliners. But once ships had engine power, what New Englanders call a bottom dragger, which drags a net just above the ocean's floor, became the most common form of trawler. Bottom trawling was not a new idea. For centuries, the British and the Flemish on opposite sides of the Channel had caught shrimp by dragging a net along the sea floor with a wooden beam to create a wide horizontal opening at the bottom. It was pulled from shore at low tide by horses. Sail-powered draggers, known as smacks, began working in the North Sea especially after 1837, when a fishing ground called the Silver Pits, just south of the already well-fished Dogger Bank, was discovered.

These cod grounds turned the twin ports of Hull and Grimsby on the Humber River, traditional fishing towns, into major ports. Here, steam power was first applied to fishing when steam-powered paddleboats started hauling smacks to and from the North Sea banks. Once there were steam-powered vessels, it was only a matter of time until the old beam trawl that was used on smacks got hitched to one of the new ships. First some of the paddleboats were rigged for trawling. Then, in 1881, a shipyard in Hull built a steam-powered trawler named the
Zodiac.
By the 1890s, not a single sailing trawler was left in Hull, and steam-powered trawlers were becoming commonplace in the North Sea.

The first otter trawl was built in Scotland in 1892. Instead of a beam, which would work only where the ocean floor was flat, the bottom opening of the otter trawl was maintained by a chain, which was made more mobile by metal bobbins, rollers, beneath it. The upper side of the opening was held up by floats. The net was kept wide open horizontally by “doors,” heavy armored planks on either side of the net. The otter trawl is the prototype of all modern bottom draggers. By 1895, it had become the standard fishing rig of the British North Sea fleet, and very quickly the other European nations that competed in the North Sea fishery converted to otter trawls.

While the British were developing steam power to reduce time at sea, Americans were suffering staggering losses, experimenting with ever more top-rigged schooners to increase their speed. From 1880 to 1897, the years during which the British developed the North Sea steam trawler, 1,614 fishermen from Gloucester alone drowned working schooners. Yet little interest was taken in the North Sea innovations. New Englanders and Nova Scotians were stubbornly attached to their majestic, albeit deadly, schooners. Newfoundland and Labrador local fishing was inshore, where small boats trapping and handlining brought in good catches with little capital investment.

The first otter trawl was introduced to New England as an experimental loan by the U.S. Fisheries Commission in 1893 to a group of Cape Cod fishermen. But Georges Bank remained largely under sail for another three decades. Finally, by 1918, steel-hulled beam trawlers were being built in Bath, Maine, and a trawler fleet grew in Boston.

Once motor ships replaced sail and oar, fishing no longer had to be done with “passive gear”—equipment that waited for the fish. Fish could now be pursued. And since a bigger, more powerful engine could always be developed, the scale of the fishing could increase almost limitlessly.

Steam ships with otter trawls were reporting catches more than six times greater than those of sail ships. By the 1890s, fish stocks were already showing signs of depletion in the North Sea, but the primary reaction was not conservation. Instead North Sea fleets traveled farther to richer grounds off of Iceland.

The huge quantity of landings was periodically causing fish prices to crash, creating unprecedented havoc in the marketplace. In the 1920s, protests by fishermen forced the Canadian government to prohibit further expansion of the dragger fleet. The quality of cured fish was declining because once steam power made faster vessels possible, competitors vied to be the quickest to bring catches to market. In 1902, the British consul in Genoa wrote words that have proven to be prophetic: “It would be far better to return to the old system of sailer cargoes.”

 

But technology never reverses itself. It creates new technology to confront new sets of problems. The greatest problem in commercial fishing has always been how to get the fish to market in good condition. For centuries, affluent people kept live fish in natural or man-made ponds. To keep saltwater species, they used tidal ponds where they built wooden cages. “Wet wells,” watertight ship holds with holes for circulating seawater, were used as early as the sixteenth century in Holland. In the seventeenth century, British shipbuilders started including wet wells because the British did not like saltfish and there was always a greater demand for fresh fish. New Englanders also built “well smacks,” ships with wet wells to transport fish to Boston and New York. But mortality was high in the crowded, sloshing, oxygen-deprived wells. Cod, ling, and other gadiforms caught in deep water could not survive in wells. The fish's sounds would fill with gas, and the disoriented fish would float to the surface and die. Fishermen tried to puncture the sounds to keep them from rising in the well.

Engines opened up new opportunities. The British experimented with wells of pumped water so that the oxygen content would be maintained. Engines also made railroads possible, which enabled landed fish to get to inland markets quickly. British ports became railroad centers.

With few people noticing, the next idea that would change North Atlantic fishing forever was being contemplated by a somewhat eccentric New Yorker, passing the winter in Labrador. Clarence Birdseye, born in Brooklyn in 1886, had dropped out of Amherst's class of 1910 because of a lack of money and, impatient with low-paying New York office jobs, had moved to Labrador with his wife, Eleanor, and their infant son to work as a fur trapper. He found that if he froze greens, they would last through the winter without losing their flavor. He filled his baby's washbasin with salted water, put cabbage in it, and exposed it to Labrador's arctic wind. The Birdseyes were the first people in Labrador to eat “fresh” vegetables all winter. This was the beginning of years of home kitchen experiments. Though the couple worked together, their son recalled Eleanor's regular irritation at finding food experiments throughout the house. He particularly remembered the fight over live pickerel in the bathtub.

Birdseye gave up trapping and moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Fisheries Association. He was concerned about the practice of icing fish. In the 1820s, it had been discovered that packing fish in ice prolonged freshness. Ice, Birdseye explained, melts and becomes water, which encourages the growth of bacteria. After several more years of filling the household's sinks and tubs with experiments, Birdseye unveiled a new technology. It required three pieces of equipment: an electric fan, a pile of ice, and a bucket of brine. Birdseye was reproducing a Labrador winter.

Postcard, 1910, schooner (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)

 

In 1925, he moved to Gloucester to work with fish and founded General Seafoods Company. Starting with groundfish, he also experimented with other seafood, then went on to meat, then fruits and vegetables.

It was a goose that made his fortune. The daughter of the founder of a food processing company, the Postum Company, was yachting off Massachusetts and tied up in Gloucester. She was served a goose, which she found to be a marvelously delectable bird, and after making inquiries, discovered that it had been frozen by the local eccentric, Clarence Birdseye. She met Birdseye and learned more about the little company, which her father then bought, paying Birdseye twenty-two million dollars. Postum renamed his company General Foods, a name derived from Birdseye's General Seafoods. Birdseye believed his ideas would produce a corporate giant in the food industry comparable to General Motors or General Electric in their industries.

Birdseye improved his frozen food technology with his 1946 quick-drying process and went on to many other fields. He founded an electrical company and improved the incandescent lightbulb. In Peru, he developed a process to convert the crushed remains of sugarcane mills into paper. In his sixty-nine-year lifetime, he was awarded 250 patents.

Birdseye's introduction of freezing came at a critical moment in the cod fisheries. Americans, like the British, were increasingly demanding fresh fish, instead of cured, and the market for salt cod in the United States was steadily declining. In 1910, cured cod represented only 1 percent of fish landings in New England. But even with improved transportation, it was difficult to serve inland markets fresh fish, and so the cod market was dwindling. At the same time, the capacity of fishing fleets was greatly increasing. In 1928, the first diesel-powered trawlers were proving even more efficient than the steam-powered ones.

Because salt cod was still the major industry of Gloucester, the town was in an economic crisis. In 1923, Mayor William MacInnis met with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to discuss declining markets, and Hoover arranged a New York conference to consider ways to promote salt cod consumption in the United States. But with General Foods committed to the Birdseye freezing process, salt cod was fast vanishing from Gloucester. The same year as Hoover's New York conference, Gloucester's most established seafood company, Gorton's, had a crisis that led to the abandoning of the saltfish trade. The Italian government had purchased more than one million dollars' worth of salt cod from Gorton's. But while the order was crossing the Atlantic, Benito Mussolini came to power. When the Gorton's ship arrived, its cargo was confiscated and never paid for.

In 1921, filleting machinery was introduced to New England, and nine years later, 128 filleting plants operated in the region, selling off their waste to fish meal factories, which were also proliferating. Once freezing and filleting were put together, “fish fillets” became a leading product. Scrod, a small cod fillet, became increasingly popular. The word was used in the United States at least as early as 1849, though its origin seems to be a Dutch word,
schrode,
meaning “strip.” Once filleting became industrialized,
scrod
became a household word.

But scrod was also sometimes haddock. The distinction between one groundfish and another was becoming less and less clear as fish was popularized in inland regions. Throughout the centuries, whenever cod has been popularized away from its native waters, there has been a tendency to call it simply “fish.” Stockfish was originally supposed to mean dried cod but over the centuries came to be any dried gadiform. Cod and other salted gadiforms were all known in the British West Indies as saltfish. Now the same was happening with frozen fish. Consumers who previously had not been seafood eaters—some of them had never seen a saltwater species in its uncut, natural state—were buying “fish” fillets or sticks. The type of fish was seldom specified. They were thought to be cod, though increasingly they were made from haddock, until that was replaced by a boom in redfish. Today, fish sticks are usually Pacific pollock. “Fish,” it seems, is whatever is left.

Fish sticks became an enormous commercial success. Fish fillets were frozen into blocks, which were then run through a saw and sliced into slabs, which were then cut into sticks. A Gorton's advertisement of the 1950s called fish sticks “the latest, greatest achievement of the seafood industry of today.” It went on to say, “Thanks to fish sticks, the average American homemaker no longer considers serving fish a drudgery. Instead, she regards it as a pleasure, just as her family have come to consider fish one of their favorite foods. Easy to prepare, thrifty to serve and delicious to eat, fish sticks, it can be truthfully said, have greatly increased the demand for fish, while revolutionizing the fishing industry.”