From Section 5: The Newfoundland Nightmare

Citizen: "This situation is not our fault, Mr. Crosby."

Her Majesty's Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, The Honourable John Crosby: "It's not my fault either."

- Crosby and event organizers mount platform to sing Ode to Newfoundland alone while the crowd watches in silence, then the minister descends for more conversation -

Citizen: "We accuse you."

Crosby: "I didn't take the fish from the God-damned water."

Citizen: "Well you and your God-damned people took it."

- General brouhaha ensues as a symbolic noose is dangled over the minister and camera fades out.

- partial transcript events recorded by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at the Canada Day celebration at Bay Bulls, Newfoundland on July 1, 1992, the day before the formal closure of the Newfoundland cod fishery.

Before

Not so long ago, several regions of the north Atlantic teemed with schools of northern cod (Gadus morhua), a mid-sized fish that normally requires six or seven years to reach sexual maturity and can enjoy many years of productive life thereafter. In happier times most cod spent their lifetimes drifting along with the ocean currents through the shallow waters of the continental shelves along with their favourite prey the capelin (or caplin), a somewhat smaller and shorter-lived fish that like the cod provides food for a variety of other fish and marine animals such as seals and birds. A few centuries back humans also entered the world of the cod when it was discovered that the pleasant-tasting, nutritious flesh of the big, slow-moving fish was well-suited to preservation by drying, smoking or salt-curing. Those qualities made cod increasingly popular as advances in maritime technology gave fishermen access to prime cod grounds such as the nutrient-rich shallows of the North Sea and the shallow banks off the shore of Iceland, and there is evidence that some 15th century Breton and Portuguese sailors discovered the most fecund cod grounds of all by sailing right across the North Atlantic to the easternmost tongue of the American continental shelf, which extends out from the shore about four hundred kilometres in a broad expanse that mariners came to call the Grand Banks.

If fishermen were casting for cod in the Grand Banks before the official discovery of the Americas, they were only able to keep the secret to themselves until 1497, when Giovanni Caboto - who adopted the handle of John Cabot when he gained the patronage of the British crown - sailed through the region with his sons on the first of a series of expeditions in search of a westward route to the orient. It is difficult to reconstruct their journeys, but it appears that on the initial scouting expedition the Cabots rounded the Southeast coast of the large island cartographers were later to name the New-found-land, which Cabot himself called it the land of cod owing to the enormous abundance of fish, and then fetched up on the north shore of what is now Cape Breton Island. In subsequent trips the Cabot boys (old Giovanni was lost somewhere in New England) extended the search for the oriental passage as far south as Cape Cod and as far north as the coast of Labrador (where they also noted an abundance of fish), but their failure to find a route to far Cathay garnered the explorers scant reward from King Henry VII, in whose name they claimed the new lands they found. Their discovery of abundant fishing grounds also drew little interest from the English, who already had a steady supply of cod from trade with Iceland, so Britain concentrated on other affairs while the area around Newfoundland was left to her neighbours across the channel, who came in such numbers that the southern part of the island had come to be known as the French Coast by the time the British claim was reasserted in the latter part of the 16th century.

There had of course been people living in the area long before the Europeans arrived, and the native Newfoundlanders suffered the same devastating consequences of discovery that were experienced by aboriginals throughout the Americas. Their numbers dwindled steadily over the years due to disease and genocide as the island became a way-station for a modest number of seasonal visitors - mostly fishermen who landed to dry and salt their catch - and home to a small but steadily-growing resident foreign population. By the early 1700's the colony had gained formal status within the British empire, and some of its residents and their associates back home were making sizeable fortunes from the fishery and other resources. Like any resource-based economy there were ups and downs, which were reflected in the Newfoundlanders' periodic flirtations with both self-government and bankruptcy. In 1949 the islanders took a new tack by voting to exchange their colonial status for Canadian citizenship, and Newfoundland made a belated entry into confederation as the tenth province. This was a major turning point in the history of the island and its people, and it also signified the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Grand Banks cod fishery.

Inshore and Offshore

At the time Newfoundland joined Canada the regional cod fishery had two distinct and long-established components: the inshore and offshore fisheries. The inshore fishery was for the most part carried out within the territorial limit, which at the time extended six miles from the water's edge, and it employed Newfoundlanders living in major ports and small outports scattered along the island's lengthy coastline. This inshore fishery was also seasonal, since it was only during the summer months that feeding schools of cod migrated in from the offshore banks where they spent most of the year and could be taken from small boats (traditionally powered by oar and sail) by fishermen using hooked lines, metal traps, gill-nets or small side-trawled nets. The catch was then taken back to port to be salted, sold for processing or eaten as a sizeable proportion of the islanders' own diet.

The offshore sector of the Newfoundland cod fishery was transacted outside of the territorial limit in the waters of the Grand Banks proper, where the main cod stocks were accessible throughout the year to long-range vessels hailing from ports in Canada, the USA and Europe - most notably France, Spain, Britain, Portugal, Germany and the USSR, although several ships sailed under other flags of convenience. The ships of the offshore fishery had traditionally used hooked lines and nets similar to those employed by the inshore fishery, and then as sailing ships gave way to powered vessels early in the 20th century there was a shift towards trawling, which over time came to involve ever larger ships pulling ever larger nets. Many offshore vessels were equipped for processing their catch onboard to meet market tastes; for example some countries preferred dried and salted fish, while others liked them barrelled in brine. Ships with ports nearby in Canada and the U.S. also had the option of conveying their catch to onshore processing plants, as did foreign vessels with processing agreements.

By most accounts the inshore and offshore components of the Newfoundland fishery prospered without significant conflict for many generations, but by the time the island became politically linked to Canada it was clear that some fundamental changes had occurred in their relationship. For example in the late 1910's - around the time when the first steam-driven trawlers entered the offshore fleet - the inshore fishery was landing well over three hundred thousand tonnes of cod each year, but by the early 1950's the annual inshore take had declined to less than two hundred thousand tonnes, despite the fact that throughout the entire period the total regional (i.e. Northwest Atlantic) cod catch held steady to an annual average of around 800,000 tonnes wet weight (cod catches can also be expressed as dry weight, which represents approximately one quarter the weight of fresh fish). This observation prompted some people to suspect that the decline in the inshore catch was linked to the rise in the offshore catch, which left fewer fish to make the journey in from the Grand Banks. That hypothesis gained further strength when the delicate matter of reproduction was taken into account. While the inshore fishery relied almost entirely upon summer schools of feeding cod, the offshore fleet also had access to the dense winter and spring spawning schools, and unlike the sport anglers who figured out long ago that fish should be kept out of season during spawning time, it was standard policy among offshore cod fishermen to concentrate their efforts during the breeding season - denser schools of fish being easier to catch and locate, especially when sonar became available.

By the dawning of the second half of the 20th century these and other observations had raised some serious suspicions among the domestic participants of the Newfoundland cod fishery that their interests conflicted with those of the largely foreign participants of the offshore fishery. Some observers had also begun to suspect that the modern mechanized fishery was having an increasing impact upon the fish stocks that supported it, although that represented a minority view within an industry where the consensus among fishermen, managers, investors, scientists and politicians alike was that the oceans could easily sustain ever-increasing levels of human depredation. That view might still prevail today if it had not been severely tested in an accidental experiment that began after World War II, when all aspects of the Newfoundland fishery experienced rapid and radical changes.

Home and Away, Above and Below

The most significant single event in the transformation of the Newfoundland offshore fishery occurred in 1956, with the arrival on the Grand Banks of the first factory-freezer trawler, representative of a new class of fishing vessel capable of taking in over a hundred tonnes of fish at a time in massive nets which converted vast swathes seabed into the marine equivalent of a gravel driveway as they scoured along. These "factory ships" were capable of automatically processing their catch into frozen blocks and fillets at the rate of six hundred tonnes a day all year round, so despite the relatively high expense of building and operating them almost a thousand such ships were unleashed on the world's oceans over the following two decades, where they had an immediate impact. For example in the Newfoundland region a largely East German factory fleet had already fished the Labrador cod stocks to commercial extinction by the end of the 1960's.

Alongside these new leviathans of the sea some of the more traditional participants of the Grand Banks fishing fleet began to look rather frumpy, but they also adopted new tools like the long-range sonar detection gear that made it possible for trawlers to home in on schools of fish, especially the dense spawning schools. One technique that maximized the returns from this approach was known as pulse fishing, which involved using long-range sonar to locate dense spawning schools that were then swept up by flotillas of trawlers working together. The conventional fleet also came up with lower-tech but equally significant innovations. For instance the Spaniards discovered that by running their regular trawlers in pairs they could drag even larger nets than those used by factory ships, pulling in catches of up to 180 tonnes at a time. Lacking the processing machinery and refrigeration equipment of the factory ships, the crews of the pair-trawlers had to hand-cut and salt-cure their catch the old-fashioned way, which was a rather wasteful way of doing business; for example according to one estimate a set of pair-trawlers kept one pound of fish flesh for every four pounds of catch they pulled in. The rest was discarded as offal and as what is known in fishing circles as by-catch, which is to say the fish and other marine creatures that are out of season and/or not worth keeping for various reasons. Those reasons included the processing lines of factory ships, which were calibrated for mature cod only, and the limited capacity for storage on older ships, which gave them a natural incentive to give priority to the choicest cuts from the largest fish.

It may seem pointless to catch fish that are only going to be killed and discarded, especially when this can largely be avoided by using more selective (i.e. wider-meshed) nets, but by-catch is a fact of life in most fisheries; for instance the ratio of retained catch to total take routinely exceeds 1:20 in ocean shrimperies. It must also be remembered that from the fisherman's point of view by-catch is little more than an inconvenience, because even where catches are limited by quotas, size-limits and seasons the only fish that count towards the catch are those that are taken back to port. This fact of fishing life encourages the use of indiscriminate harvesting rigs and the practice known as high-grading, which involves keeping only the most profitable fish and dumping the rest (which are of course equally dead). Such practices mean that even when fishermen are diligent about obeying the rules and reporting their catch, there is no accurate way of estimating how many fish they may have killed. For example in the heyday of the postwar fishery a fleet of pair-trawlers may have been given a quota of 100,000 tons of cod for a season, but with the usual finagling and high-grading they were liable have taken upwards of 400,000 tons of fish out of the water, leaving behind hundreds of thousand of tons of waste in their wake.

So to summarize, the postwar revolution in the Newfoundland offshore cod fishery was primarily associated with technological improvements in harvesting efficiency (e.g. via larger nets and sonar), the addition of value to the catch (e.g. factory ships brought the choicest cuts to market in prime condition), and sizeable if unknown increases in the impact of the fishery upon populations of target fish, other creatures that happened to get in the way and marine environments. While this revolution was unfolding offshore, the inshore fishery was going through some substantial changes of its own, and there were some connections between offshore and inshore. For instance while the offshore catch continued to rise year by year the long-term declining trend in the inshore cod catch accelerated, and the annual inshore take was just about halved between 1956 and 1970.

As might have been expected, this decline had some significant consequences for those whose livelihoods depended upon the inshore fishery, although the consequences were not what one might have predicted from watching what was going on offshore. For one thing, instead of declining the number of people ostensibly employed by the fishery actually increased, and quite substantially at that; for instance the number of inshore fishermen rose by a third between 1957 and 1964. The costs associated with going to sea in small boats also rose during that period, as it became necessary for fishermen to have mechanized vessels and modern equipment in order to have any chance of finding worthwhile amounts of fish in the inshore waters. This meant that counter to the trends unfolding in the offshore fishery the yield, efficiency and profitability of the inshore fishery steadily declined during the postwar period, to the extent that by the mid-1960's the average catch per inshore fisherman had decreased by over 50%. Meanwhile back on shore fisheries workers were being recruited at record rates to work in new processing plants.

Readers possessing a knowledge of economics and an ignorance of Newfoundland history are liable to be somewhat puzzled by now, because while the revolution in the offshore cod fishery can easily be explained using standard economic reasoning - the profit motive encouraged bigger boats to catch fish as quickly as possible and extract the most value from them as cheaply and efficiently as possible - the developments in the inshore fishery could only have made same kind of sense if cod prices had risen dramatically, which was of course unlikely to happen while the largest sector of the fishery was hauling in record catches and processing them with a high level of efficiency. In fact, the invisible hand of the markets did indeed push cod prices lower during the postwar period, but in the case of the Newfoundland inshore fishery there was an even heavier hand at work, that of the Canadian government, which in its zeal to become a major force in the economic life of its newly-acquired province initiated a series of highly creative policies. The most renowned program was one that created what came to be known as the 10-42 system, called thus because anyone who worked at least ten weeks on a fishing boat or in a processing plant became entitled to collect unemployment insurance benefits for the remainder of the year. The effect of that initiative on Newfoundlanders - whose main incentive for joining Canada was a dire lack of economic opportunities - was dramatic, as thousand flocked to the fisheries industry to share in the largesse. Flushed by that success, the federal and provincial governments continued to come up with further initiatives to encourage Newfoundlanders to get into the fisheries industry, including generous tax write-offs for operating costs and subsidies for upgraded fishing equipment and onshore processing plants. Those plants came to be of special interest to many local politicians, who perfected the tactic of subsidizing the plants just enough to keep them running for the ten weeks each year that was required for the voters - I mean workers - to qualify for assistance.

The revolutions that transformed postwar fisheries were accompanied by some equally significant developments among the fish that supported them, and the simplest way to summarize what happened to the Newfoundland cod is with a descending sequence of numbers. The first is 8 million, which was approximately how many tons (dry weight) of cod were taken off the shores of Newfoundland in the two and a half centuries following the official discovery of the Grand Banks in 1500, and roughly the same amount was taken between 1960 and 1975 (the actual amount of fish hauled out would be around 30 million tonnes in each case). The second number is 800,000, which was the size in tonnes (dry weight, which will be used from now on unless otherwise indicated) of the Newfoundland cod catch in 1970, most of it taken offshore and much of it during the spawning season. That catch represents the last in a succession of annual records, none of which were to be repeated despite the lack of any noticeable slackening in the fishing effort until the late 1970's. And it is 1977 that gives us our third number: 150,000, which is the number of tonnes of cod that were taken that year, representing a historical low for the fishery going all the way back to the days when leather-skinned deck-hands hauled in their catch beneath billowing acres of sail.

1977 was also a significant year for the Newfoundland cod fishery for another reason, since that was the year Canada extended its territorial claims to the new two hundred mile limit, which covered most of the Grand Banks except for the areas known as the Nose, Tail and Flemish Cap. Those outlying regions came under the nominal control of the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), which like its predecessor the International Commission for North Atlantic Fishery (ICNAF) is one of those international bodies where the members are free to obey the collective decisions they agree with and ignore the rest. For example the Spanish fishing fleet has rarely if ever come within so much as an order of magnitude of complying with ICNAF or NAFO quotas, and even the traditionally excessive European Union catch quotas have proven too restrictive to EU fishermen, who have also shown a consistent willingness to poach whenever the chance presents itself (not that this makes them any different from fishermen the world round).

Thus by the dawn of what we can call the Canadian phase of the Grand Banks fishery, the annual cod catch had crashed to an all-time low after several years of record-breaking hauls, employment in the Newfoundland fisheries industry was at an all time high and rising, and the national and local governments had developed a fondness for policies that openly defied the principles of market economics. As for their grasp of biology, that soon became evident. When it became clear that the cod catch had declined dramatically, the federal government responded by instituting a special fisheries subsidy program that by 1976 amounted to over $150 million annually (not counting the 10-42 handouts, tax breaks and subsidies), and over the following five years the number of fishermen registered in Newfoundland doubled while the onshore processing capacity underwent an equally dramatic increase. The official rationale for this massive build-up was that it would allow the Canadian fisheries industry to expand into the vacuum left by the departure of the foreign fleet from the newly-acquired offshore territories, where in the opinion of federal fisheries scientists the cod stocks, now freed from foreign depredation, would soon expand to the point where they could support huge harvests once again......