Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  The reality was not much less inspiring. I saw the Grand Banks in 1963, when making my first voyage across the Atlantic. When our Empress of Britain stopped briefly there, to rendezvous with an aircraft on a shallow eastern outlier of the Banks known as the Flemish Cap, the sea was at first disappointingly calm and the weather uncharacteristically clear. All changed once we got under way and a few hours later slid west onto the Grand Banks proper. We had only to cross the Banks’ most easterly point, the fish-rich grounds known as the Nose, and the fog closed in on cue, the water became unpleasantly lumpy, and we had to ease down to a crawl for fear of colliding with any of a thicket of fishing vessels, or cutting across their nets.

  The fog in these parts renders the sea curiously quiet, and I remember standing up on deck, and later out on the bridgewings, matted with moisture and shivering with cold, watching—and listening. There was the slap of the swell against our hull, the soft hiss of the bow slicing through the waves. But most noticeable were the cries and yelps of a score of foghorns, a fishermen’s chorus that swelled loudly, I assumed, in those places where the cod were being found that day, and then fading, and swelling again, until finally a diminuendo, as they ebbed slowly away to nothing, and we eventually steamed off the shoals and to the south of Newfoundland, and then into the deep and relatively codless waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

  The blanket of mist that day was such that I never saw a fishing vessel—and such images I had of the life of a Grand Banks fisherman came most probably from reading Kipling, and Captains Courageous, and later, most memorably, in the 1937 film of the book, which the BBC showed on winter afternoons, and which, in a scene I seem to remember well, had both Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew fighting to stay afloat in one of the alarmingly unstable little dories that cod fishermen used to go after their prize.

  That film helped it all come together for me. First there were the sleekly graceful schooners, racing up from the Massachusetts ports—back then the Americans were just as able to fish on the Grand Banks as were the Canadians, whose waters these seemed to be; the Treaty of Paris had long permitted it. Then there were the encounters with the fogs, the storms, followed by the first sightings of the shoals of tiny capelin and herring, then with the ponderously moving whales, and finally the fleet’s eventual arrival at the cod grounds themselves—where they had also met up with the rougher and tougher French Canadian dorymen who had come out from St. John’s and outports like Trinity and Petty Harbor and Bonavista. Then there was the dropping of the dories, no matter the weather or the height of the waves, followed by the long, wet, desperate and tiring hunt from them for the cod that lurked close to the bottom, just a few shallow feet below.

  From the smoky comfort of a London cinema, it all seemed unimaginably tough and difficult. The dories were only twenty feet long, and though their prows and sterns rode high above the waves, they were designed with almost no freeboard amidships, so that their owners would find it a little easier to haul in such cod as they hooked on their lines; but then water kept crashing over the side, and whichever man was not straining at the oars always seemed to be bailing, or trying to pour cold water from his sea boots, or shuddering as yet another wave crashed down his neck and the gales blew off his sou’wester. Or else, of course, he was fishing: either hand-lining himself, or helping to pull up a longline that, between the barrels they had used as floats, might stretch five miles long across the sea and might hold a thousand hooks—each of which in the old, rich days of the fishery, might have a massive cod attached, and which needed to be brought up, freed from the barb, and slapped down into the bilge of the boat, where it joined its companions wriggling and writhing between your feet en masse.

  You might eventually try to return to your schooner with a full ton of these codfish, a hundred fish, each one maybe twenty pounds, each with a huge gaping mouth, a small goatee dangling from its lower lip, an olive green back, a pale belly, and a long go-fast stripe of white along its side. Newfoundland cod, fat and heavy with a kitchen-ready amassment of succulent innards, are said by fishermen to be the prettiest of all the family Gadidae. The sight of a returning dory filled to the gunwales with them seemed for decades a most potent symbol of the enormous riches of the North Atlantic, a very visible reason for the prosperity of those who lived beside it and were fed by it.

  But the mechanics of returning to your schooner in a tiny low-slung boat filled with these fish turned out to be a spectacularly difficult exercise. Even finding your ship was a challenge, especially if you had been away for hours, or maybe longer, and if during your absence the weather had closed in. Even the most powerful lantern hung from the schooner’s fo’c’sle—as it was in the Kipling film, where Lionel Barrymore had hung as powerful a lamp as he could to help his men find the schooner, tantalizingly named We’re Here—could be glimpsed from no more than a hundred feet in a thin fog, as little as five feet in a pea-souper. Then only the back-and-forth piping of the foghorns, yours and your skipper’s, stood a chance of bringing you to home.

  Moreover, a dory filled with fish lies even deeper in the water than usual, and the seas slopping over sides that were now almost underwater would make the craft ever less stable. Small wonder so many seamen died—in the last seventy years of the nineteenth century, 3,800 Gloucester fishermen were killed, and that from a town of only fifteen thousand—such dorymen as lived to tell went on to enjoy a camaraderie and a sense of shared pride like few other workingmen anywhere. To be a Grand Banks cod fisherman was a noble art, and only the bravest could do it. And when they came home to port, all the bars in all the seashore towns came to know this all too well.

  But then in the 1950s came the factory ships, and in an instant the picture changed.

  Already the technology of fishing had been improving mightily. Hand-lining was a technique employed by only a minority of fishermen: more controversial methods like long-lining, or setting the near-invisible gossamers of floating gill nets, or even trawling along the ocean floor where the cod lived, had all hugely increased the catch. Everyone had long been happy with the Grand Banks. As more and more fishermen arrived, all was just as it had been when John Cabot came by in the Matthew; the world soon came to believe what he had said, and what the Basques had found in the decades following—that there was abundant fish for everyone, that for every fish caught two more seemed to spawn; prosperity for the fishermen and freedom from want for those millions who dined on fish was likely to remain an eternal reality. There were a few—which included many of the older fishermen in the Newfoundland outports, who said they knew their fish and their habits, and knew what was fair to take from them—who fretted that it might one day be possible to fish the stocks completely into oblivion, that disaster lurked. They were smiled at indulgently and told not to worry: the Grand Banks were a source of goodness and delight for all, and for all time.

  But then had come the shipborne steam engine and Mr. Birdseye’s techniques of freezing fish, then came the fish stick or what in Europe is called the fish finger and the convenience food market, and then was born the idea that fish need not to be brought to land to be processed and filleted and frozen and boxed and labeled, and that all of this could be done afloat, by a big ship that was not truly a fishing boat at all but a floating steam-engine-powered production line for the twenty-four-hour-a-day disassembly of fish and their twenty-four-hour reassembly into convenience food—and all of a sudden long-lining and gill-netting and trawling seemed the least of the challenges that an ocean fishery might face. Now it became a question of simple arithmetic: with the arrival of the factory ships, the amount of fish being removed from the Grand Banks in the 1960s became suddenly astronomical and was becoming plainly—and to use a word that in the 1960s started to ease into the lexicon, and then into the vernacular if not quite yet in vogue—unsustainable.

  The abundance of codfish in the Atlantic is very much a thing of the past. This cheerful trawlerman was pictured in 1949 off the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway
. Today’s catches of Gadus morhua are seldom so rich, nor are the fish themselves often so large.

  A ship called the Fairtry, launched in Scotland in 1954, was the first to start what some would call the mechanized strip-mining of the Grand Banks. Compared to the schooners and inshore fishing craft that had come before, she was enormous: 2,600 tons, and looking like a converted passenger ferry. She was also terrifyingly effective at what she was designed to do—the huge trawl net she dropped from a ramp in her stern had a mouth hundreds of feet around, and when it was pulled along the seafloor its weighted lower jaw scooped up every imaginable living thing in its path—hundreds, thousands of cod of varying ages, sexes, weights, and health, but also every other kind of bottom-feeding, bottom-living fish and crustacean, needed or not. All was sped into the bowels of this enormous ship; what was unwanted was dumped over the side; the rest was machined—filleted, salted, frozen-packed away—even as the trawl was down on the sea bottom again, hauling yet more hundreds of tons to the surface to be dealt with in the same brutally crisp manner.

  The catches from this ship alone would have been astonishing. But then the Soviet fishing authorities heard of the revolution beginning, and being in the vanguard of a new Kremlin policy to distribute protein to the masses, built a fleet of similar ships, only larger still, and sent them to the Banks in the Fairtry’s wake. A vessel called the Professor Baranov was more than 450 feet long and could process two hundred tons of fish a day, all the while making frozen fish and fish meal, oil, ice, and water from its own distillation plant, and servicing up to twenty other Soviet trawlers that were lumbering across the Grand Banks like oxcarts pulling plows, scooping up even more fish than it was possible for John Cabot and all of the Basques who followed him ever to imagine.

  The temptation for more proved irresistible. Within a season or two, just about everyone with a big enough net came to join the party. From the fish docks in East Germany and Korea, Cuba and Japan, dozens of lumbering and rusting strip-mine ships found their way across to the Nose, the Tail, to the Flemish Cap and to the Banks proper, and fished until they ran out of fuel and went off to bunker and carouse in St. John’s. Those who lived in the fishing town of Bonavista said they could walk up to the statue of John Cabot, high on a nearby cape, and look east into the ocean and see what looked like a vast village—lights by the thousand—as the draggers, the fish factories and their trawlers, scoured the sea without surcease through every night and every day.

  Fish factories that flew the flags of a dozen new countries elbowed out those who had been traditionally working the grounds for decades, and hidden in the fogs and the ferocious shallow-water storms, they settled down to work with ever more sophisticated technologies and the deployment of ever-larger trawls. The catch levels went up and up and up—until an eye-watering total of 810,000 tons of cod alone was hauled from the sandy seafloor in 1968, the year when it all began to go badly wrong on the Newfoundland Grand Banks.

  At this point the Canadian government decided something ought to be done. Too much was being taken from the fishing grounds, and for too long—a situation had been allowed to develop that simply could not go on. Government mathematicians determined that sometime between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries—long enough for thirty generations of cod to have come and gone—some eight million tons of their kin had been taken each year, mainly by British, Spanish, and Portuguese hand-lining boats. But, said the same mathematicians, almost precisely that tonnage of fish had been taken during the first fifteen years of the factory-fishing bonanza—and, put plainly, taking eight million tons in fifteen years was the kind of figure that no fishery anywhere on the planet could possibly sustain.

  A plan had to be put into operation—and with what in government terms is reasonable speed, it duly was. But though the intentions of the bureaucrats and politicians in far-off Ottawa might have been the very best, the manner in which the Canadian fishing policies of the subsequent twenty years were executed helped create a far greater disaster, and one from which few—fish, fishermen, or fishing communities alike—have ever fully recovered.

  First of all, the Canadian government did what appeared eminently sensible: in 1977 it declared (in common with most of the rest of the world’s coastal nations) that henceforward a two-hundred-mile-wide maritime belt off all of its coastlines would be regarded as its own Exclusive Economic Zone,81 and that foreign fishing vessels would be excluded from working there. Canada’s claim of jurisdiction meant that the awe-inspiring illuminated village of draggers that had been visible from Bonavista Cape—factory ships and trawlers from Murmansk, Fleetwood, Vigo, Lisbon, Pusan, and a score of other foreign ports, and which were operating as close as three miles from shore—had to leave. They could still fish beyond the new limit—which allowed them still to operate on the Nose and the Tail and on Flemish Cap—but not on the Banks.

  And most of them sailed off into the sunset. The Spanish trawler fleets, squeezed by European quota rules, thought that the French territory of St. Pierre and Miquelon—the tiny euro-using, Gitanes-smoking, Calvados-drinking twin-island relic of one-time French colonial ambitions ten miles off the southern Newfoundland coast—might offer them sanctuary, and so continued to fish in the non-Canadian high-seas outer parts of the Banks. The Portuguese White Fleet—their fishing vessels still painted white, as they had to be during the Second World War to remind the German U-boats of their neutrality—did the same. Otherwise the seas emptied, and sea-bottom cod-dragging stopped.

  The sudden silence that followed should by rights have given the populations of Grand Banks cod the time and opportunity to recover. For suddenly no one was doing any large-scale fishing there: no one because the Canadians who now had the sole rights to do so did not at the time have the wherewithal to fish, or certainly not as the Russians and the Koreans had done. They had neither the ships nor the will to strip-mine and vacuum their own seas as the foreigners had been doing.

  However, governments had other plans. Both the federal government in Ottawa and the provincial government in St. John’s decided they wanted to pump some life into the ever-sputtering economy of the country’s poorest and newest province (Newfoundland had been an impoverished British possession until 1949, and since confederation with Canada had an economy that relied on little more than fish and wood pulp). In line with this vote-winning policy, they decided to start what politicians hoped would be a truly enormous Canadian-run, Canadian-owned, and Canadian-organized Atlantic fishing industry.

  But then the government—and specifically a now-much-derided federal regulatory body, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans—came up with estimates of how much cod any new Canadian fleet might legitimately catch, and then managed to get these estimates wildly, almost incredibly, wrong.

  They were much too high. Four hundred thousand tons of cod could be taken from the Grand Banks each year, the government said with great glee, and the newborn Canadian fishing industry, which was additionally tempted by generous government aid, not unsurprisingly took the bait. Canada’s underused eastern shipyards promptly began a-welding and a-riveting, and launches down slipways became a sudden commonplace, and within a short while the departing Soviet draggers on the Banks were all replaced—by similar-sized, similarly equipped, and similarly aggressive fishing vessels that differed only in that they all flew from their jackstaffs the red maple leaf of Canada. And these boats were set to fishing offshore with a zeal and ambition encouraged by endlessly optimistic remarks from government, to the effect that plenty of fish were out there, and that the Canadian ships could carry away more or less as much of whatever species as they wished.

  But it became clear soon afterward that these glowing estimates of fish stocks just had to have been inflated—whether through ineptitude or for corrupt or short-term political advantage no one has yet fully worked out. Some marine biologists at the time, and not a few local inshore fishermen, too, were quite certain of this and complained that calamity lay ahead—
they even tried at one point to go to court and argue before the majesty of the law a case for exercising caution. But no one else was listening, and during the late 1970s and through most of the 1980s, a massive all-Canadian fishing jamboree broke out like never before.

  Newfoundland became in comparative terms rich, prosperous, and now content to have been fully confederated with wise and prescient Canada. Its population was now universally happy, as the silver cod leaped in torrents out of the nearby Canadian ocean. Suddenly the old and much-maligned Newfie was being seen as an altogether different creature, now an admirable fellow with a fine work ethic and a newborn entrepreneurial spirit; and instead of endless miles of pine trees and sorry little centers of backwardness, Newfoundland found itself transformed, with brand-new seafood processing plants and enormous trucking operations and the opening of legions of marketing companies. This was now the face of modern, rich, better-late-than-never Newfoundland, the inhabitants suddenly being seen as a people blessed by good fortune. Someone joked that the new provincial motto should be “In Cod We Trust.” An unstoppable juggernaut had been set in motion, and it seemed for a few heady years as if nothing could halt it.