Cod (22 page)

Far out in balmy, green Cornwall, with its lush vegetation warmed by the Gulf Stream, there was a growing obsession about the Spanish. European relationships are often mired in history, and the Spanish have never had a good name here. The Cornish recall without forgiveness that long before the two brutal World Wars against the Germans, and centuries of battles against the French, the narrow sloping streets of Newlyn had been sacked by marauding Spaniards who arrived in galleons. And now they were coming back.

 

The Spanish, with the largest fleet and little to offer in fishing grounds, are a favorite target in Atlantic fishing. It is seldom mentioned that they also have the largest market because of an unusually high per capita consumption. For centuries, Atlantic fishermen from the New England pilgrims to the newly independent Icelanders have been sustained by Spanish markets.

Few cod are landed anymore by the Spanish or even the Basque fishermen who began it all. The giant
bacalao
companies—which owned their own trawler fleets, landed salt cod from the banks, and dried and sold it—have all closed. Trueba y Pardo used to be a major company in Bilbao. In San Sebastián's port of Pasajes, there was PYSBE—Pesquerías y Secadores de Bacalao de Espana (Salt Cod Fishermen and Driers of Spain), founded in 1926. Both closed in the 1960s. In addition to fishermen and dockworkers, PYSBE had employed 500 workers in cleaning and drying alone. Trueba y Pardo had about 200 cleaners. These workers were almost all women, earning very low wages and no benefits, spending their days simply removing the dark gray membrane that had been the organ cavity lining. It was thought to be unattractive, and these workers cost the companies very little. Each woman could process 1,000 kilos (2,200 pounds) of fish in a day. Then the cod would be air-dried in the mountains. With modern salaries and benefits, companies could not afford such huge payrolls.

When the 200-mile limit was imposed, the Basques lost access to most cod grounds. By the time Spain entered the European Community in the 1980s, European waters had little cod. By 1990, only a few very old trawlers were rigged for cod fishing from Basque ports.

The banking and financial services that were established in Bilbao and San Sebastián because they had been trade centers, continued to flourish. In this commercial environment Basques made a transition from landing and processing cod to becoming importers.

A few miles up the Nerbioi River from Bilbao, in the town of Arrigorriaga, Adolfo Eguino's office overlooked the steep green Basque mountains. His windows were closed off by wrought-iron grilles fashioned in the shape of splayed salt cod. He was the director of Baisfa, one of the largest Basque
bacalao
companies. A small, tough-looking man in his fifties, he had a gruff manner that charmed more than it offended. Eguino grew up in Portugalete, an old seafaring town whose name means “port of Galleons.” Some of the men who raided Newlyn may have been from there. As a boy, he didn't like school and at the age of fourteen dropped out to start his own business. He specialized in selling
bacalao
to small food stores, like the ones in the chain owned by his father. In this way he came to know the people at PYSBE and Trueba y Pardo, and from those companies he found six partners to start Baisfa. They now imported all of their salt cod from Iceland—1,500 tons a year. In 1994, the Icelanders stopped delivering to them by ship, instead sending the salt cod to Rotterdam, where it was put on a truck and driven down. This meant that rather than receiving a huge shipment every few months, one container arrived every week. “The secret of good salt cod is to not let it spend much time on the boats,” said Eguino.

And yet, somehow, the people of Cornwall and much of England were convinced that the Spanish would take all their cod. Realistically, the Spanish were more interested in taking all their hake, but since cod was what the Englishmen cared about, it seemed to follow that cod was what the Spaniards would take.

 

Newlyn does not look like the Cornish towns on either side: Penzance and Mousehole. Those are resort towns where British vacationers practice that peculiarly British pastime of strolling the beaches and walkways, bundled in sweaters and mufflers. But Newlyn is a fishing town—or, increasingly, an out-of-work fishing town. By the 1990s, the long piers at the bottom of town where the trawlers tied up usually had one or two vessels being “decommissioned,” cut up and sold for scrap. In an attempt to reduce the size of the British fleet, the government was paying fishermen to destroy their boats. But there was almost no work to be had in Cornwall except fishing. Mike Townsend, chief executive of the Cornish Fish Producers Organization, summed up the position of Cornish fishermen: “There is nothing else here. If they don't catch fish they will have no work, but if they keep catching enough to earn a living the fish will disappear.”

William Hooper, fifty-five, the burly skipper of the 135-foot
Daisy Christiane,
said, “If they decommission this boat, I wouldn't have enough to buy a sweet.” Hooper had been fishing out of Cornish ports for forty years. “The stocks are not what they were ten years ago,” he said. “They are diminishing slowly all the time. All you can do to compensate is a bigger boat with a bigger net, more expenses, and you still can't catch what you did ten years ago.”

Hooper first went to sea in 1955, when, he said, “the fish were knee-deep because of so little fishing during the war.” He can no longer earn a living on a forty-foot boat like the one he had then. Now, as a share fisherman, he worked on a company-owned trawler, and, like all of his crew, he fished hard to earn a percentage of the sale of the catch. No individual fishermen could afford the cost of fuel and maintenance on a ship large enough to haul two five-ton nets, the size needed to catch enough fish to be profitable.

There was a growing movement among British fishermen to recognize the Common Fishing Policy as a failure and withdraw from it. Mike Townsend was one of the most outspoken leaders of this movement. “Sometime we have to say, ‘Stop. We are not managing the stocks in a sustainable way.' ” His argument was that the United Kingdom would be a better guardian of its own waters.

A debate raged over the fundamental tool of fishery management, the quotas, which were based on ICES attempts to monitor fishing populations. If groundfish were diminishing, fishermen were to fish less of them and at the same time increase their catch of the smaller fish on which they feed. Through quotas, man was attempting to artificially readjust the balance of the species while fishermen continued to earn a living.

But estimates of stock sizes were based on landings, the fish brought to market, and not on catch, the fish taken onto the boats, which was closer to the number of fish killed. As much as 40 percent of catches were being dumped back into the sea, even though most of these fish were already dead. Fishermen were radioed market prices to their boats at sea, and if the price dropped too low on a species, they would dump those fish overboard. Townsend, and many others, believed that the quotas bore no relationship to the actual state of the fish stocks. He laughed at questions of vanishing cod. “We have been plagued by cod. We don't know what to do with them.” But fishermen, including Hooper, did not agree. According to Hooper, though there were momentary increases, the stocks have been declining.

In 1995, Canadian fisheries minister Brian Tobin offered a diversion from the frustrating complexity of fishery issues when he arrested a Spanish trawler, the
Estai,
confiscating the ship, the catch, and the gear. The
Estai
was held for a week while Canadian fisheries authorities rummaged through the 350 metric tons of fish aboard for evidence that its captain had violated North Atlantic conservation standards. Then, armed with photos of undersized Greenland halibut, also known as turbot, which the
Estai
had caught in the international part of the Grand Banks, and a salvaged undersized net, which the Spanish had dumped overboard, Tobin went to the UN in New York. There he delivered a defiant speech asserting that Canada intended to continue arresting Spanish trawlers and cutting their nets until some international conservation policy was established for the waters beyond Canada's 200-mile limit. He went on to say that Canada was taking this stand with humility, recognizing its own guilt for overfishing in the past. He said that Canadians took no pride in doing this, a rhetorical embellishment that the Canadian press seized on. The
Toronto Star
said, “Tobin was a bit disingenuous there. Canadians are proud—even gleeful—at the sight of one of their politicians finally standing up and doing something about one of the world's environmental disasters. In grim cost-cutting times, his colorful language and flare for the headlines have made Tobin the best act in town.”

Tobin called the Spanish captains “rogue pirates,” and Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells held up photos of undersized fish while accusing the Spanish fishermen of lying and cheating. The Canadian Coast Guard continued to chase Spanish trawlers off the international section of the Grand Banks, and when one trawler moved back in, Canada stole a page from Iceland's Coast Guard and cut its net. The Canadians were very happy. The British were very happy. In Newlyn, they flew the red maple leaf flag of Canada. Fishermen from Newfoundland to Rhode Island to Cornwall cheered. In the 1996 election, Tobin was voted Newfoundland premier in a big victory for the Liberals. The Europeans also had their victory. Emma Bonino, fisheries commissioner for the European Union, said Canada's fisheries minister was the real pirate and denounced Canada for reckless acts endangering the lives of Spanish fishermen on the high seas. The Canadians quietly released the men, ship, and gear, and the Spaniards, who had their own electorate to think of, threatened to sue Canada. Politically, the incident was a win for all sides.

In Petty Harbour, Sam Lee said, “It was good to watch, but it wasn't real. It was like going to the movies.”

To the Cornish fishermen, it was a further vindication for their survival struggle against the Spanish. William Hooper said, “The biggest problem we have is the Spanish.” He was asked how it could all be the fault of the Spanish since they were newcomers and the catch had been declining for forty years. Hooper thought a minute and then added, “Yes, the Scots used to overfish.”

THE TIME MUST COME WHEN THIS COAST WILL BE A
PLACE OF RESORT FOR THOSE NEW ENGLANDERS WHO
REALLY WISH TO VISIT THE SEA-SIDE.

—Henry David Thoreau,
Cape Cod,
1851

 

T
oday, Gloucester has as much in common with its neighbor on Cape Ann, Rockport, as Newlyn has with Mousehole. Rockport is a pretty little town with a pretty little harbor full of expensive yachts. The waterfront shops sell crafts and snacks for “New Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side.” Gloucester could have been Newlyn's sister. It is a rough, downhill fishing town. Fine old wooden merchant's houses view the sea from up on the hills, while nineteenth- and twentieth-century brick buildings—the look of old blue-collar New England—dominate the lower part of town around a well-sheltered and busy waterfront. Bottom draggers, a few longliners, gillnetters, and lobster boats line the docks. In early morning they head out, a few at a time, and from four o‘clock on they come back, trailed by gulls as they make their way with their catches toward the landing docks of the seafood companies. The companies are small. Birdseye's old company, which became Postum, which became General Foods, was then sold to O'Donnell Usen, which left for Florida. Seafood companies didn't need to be in fishing ports anymore. Their fish arrives in freezer containers, often from other oceans. Gorton's is still in Gloucester, the largest plant with the biggest sign, but the company hasn't bought a fish from a Gloucester fisherman in years. Gorton's buys no Atlantic cod from anyone anymore. In 1933, with the invention of the filleting machine, redfish, which had always been tossed overboard, became a major catch, and by 1951 represented 70 percent of all fish landed in Gloucester. But in 1966, Gorton's bought its last Gloucester redfish too, closing down the plant on what had been called “redfish wharf.”

By the mid-1990s, the town had about 400 working fishermen left, down from 2,000 forty years before. Gloucester's fleet had the fatal flaw of being picturesque. There were too many old wooden hulled trawlers, which insurance companies won't even cover anymore, or rusting old steel ones and too many little low-built gillnetters. They gave a wonderful look to the old harbor, but it meant that the Gloucester fleet was not modern. But maybe not modernizing was the way of the future.

The New England Fishery Management Council was charged with the task of holding back the fleet from scooping up the last of the groundfish in New England waters. The Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 had extended the exclusive U.S. fishing zone to 200 miles offshore and set up as regulators regional fishery management councils dominated by fishing interests. Fishermen never had been good regulators, but they were virtually encouraged not to be by loan guarantees and other financial incentives that led to a massive growth in the U.S. fishing fleet. In 1994, when the National Marine Fisheries Service counted fish stocks, it concluded that the fleet was about twice as large as the fish stocks could sustain. The assessment showed that the cod stock on Georges Bank was about 40 percent of what had been found in 1990. That sharp a decline had never before been measured on Georges Bank. “This really got the attention of the New England Fishery Commission, and that is how tougher measures got through,” said Ralph Mayo of the National Marine Fisheries Service.