Cod

by Mark Kurlansky

  Since the moratorium was declared, civility has been scarcer than cod. Six Petty Harbour boats even went gillnetting in plain view, and it took two years of legal action and political pressure to stop them.

  Commercially, Sam, Bernard, and Leonard do not fish together. Sam used to work with his brother. Bernard’s partner of twenty years never got a groundfishing license when they were easy to get. He hadn’t needed one. Now, if groundfishing ever opens up again, there will be a strict fish-per-license quota and no new licenses will be available. Bernard will have to share his quota with his partner, and it probably will not be a big enough catch for two. “And I’m supposed to tell the man I’ve been fishing with all these years, ‘Sorry, I have to team up with someone with a groundfishing license.’ They want to make people leave fishing. But what else is there?”

  “It used to be a nice place to live,” says Sam, “but it’s not anymore.”

  “It’s unbelievable,” says Bernard, “the way a few years ago everybody just did what they did, and they didn’t worry about anyone else. Now no one wants to see anyone make a dollar that they’re not making. Everybody is watching everybody else. I don’t think you can fart in the community without someone complaining.”

  But on this perfect Newfoundland September morning with a warming sun and a flat sea, these men of the Sentinel Fishery are in a good mood, doing the only thing they have ever wanted to do, going out on the water with their childhood friends to haul up fish.

  The catch is a disaster.

  Newfoundland and Labrador cod, the so-called northern stock, are pretty fish with amber leopard spots on an olive green back, a white belly, and the long white, streamlining stripe between the belly and the spotted back. They are far prettier than the Icelandic stock, with its yellow on brown. The fishermen measure each cod as it is hauled in and find that the length ranges from forty-five to fifty-five centimeters (twenty inches or so), which means they are two- or three-year-old codlings born since the moratorium—not even old enough to reproduce. When Leonard finally hauls up a cod of seventy-five centimeters, probably seven years old, a typical catch ten years ago, they all joke, “Oh, my God, get the gaff! Give him a hand!”

  In their lilting brogues, they joke about the fact that they are not real fishermen anymore. The little boat hits a slight swell sideways, and as it rolls Sam whines, “Ohhh, I think I’m going to be seasick.” The others laugh.

  They are good at hauling up fish. But this is something different. Instead of throwing the cod on the deck and quickly baiting and recasting for the next, they have to gently remove the hook and try not to hurt the animal. Then they lay it out on a board and measure it in centimeters. A tool with a trigger mechanism is used to insert an inch-long needle in the meaty part next to the forward dorsal fin and snap into place a plastic thread with a numbered tag on the end. This they are not very good at.

  Sam unhooks a fish, and it jerks out of his hands and crashes to the deck. “Oh, sorry,” he says to the cod in the same tender little voice he uses at home with his aging beagle. The tagging gun is not working well, so Sam takes it apart and rebuilds it. Taking things apart and fixing them is part of a fisherman’s skills. But the gun still doesn’t work well. Sometimes they have to stick a fish three or four times to get a tag in. This is proof of what a tough survivor the cod is. A salmon would never survive this handling. But when they finally drop the codfish in the sea slowly, head first, to revive it, it instantly swims for its home on the bottom. To a cod, ocean floors mean safety. That is why they were rendered commercially extinct by bottom draggers.

  Trying to insert the tag in one cod, the men stick and poke it so many times that it dies. That makes no one sad, because they are hungry. Bernard kneels over a portable Sterno stove at the stern. He uses his thick fishing knife to dice fatback and salt beef and peel and slice potatoes. He soaks pieces of hardtack and sautés it all in the pork fat with some sliced onion. Then he fillets the cod in four knife strokes per side, skins the fillets with two more, and before throwing the carcass over, opens it up, sees it is a female, and removes the roe. Holding it by a gill over the gunwale, he makes two quick cuts and rips out the throat piece, “the cod tongue,” before dropping the body in the sea.

  As Bernard stirs his pot, Sam records tag numbers and fish lengths with his pencil, while at the bow Leonard silently hauls up one young cod after another with his fast-moving gloved forefingers. “Leonard’s having all the fun,” Bernard says in mock grumpiness.

  Bernard dumps the food on a big baking sheet, which they put on a plank across one of the holds, and they stand in the hold where the catch should have been and with plastic forks start eating toward the center. The dish, called Fishermen’s Brewis, is monochromatic, with off-white pork fat and off-white potatoes and occasional darker pieces of salt beef. What stands out is the stark whiteness of the thick flakes of fresh cod. This is the meal they grew up on, and, as often happens when old friends are eating their childhood food, they start reminiscing.

  There were no sports for these men to talk about, no high school teams; they aren’t even hockey fans. As children, they went fishing with their fathers every morning just before daybreak. They would come to shore midday and go to school—until the first black cloud passed overhead and they had to run down to the harbor, to the racks, called fish flakes, where the salt cod were drying, and turn them over skin side up so they would be protected if it rained.

  Instead of sports, they talk about fishing, about how cold it used to be. It is not that the weather has changed. But back then, there had been no lightweight microfibers to hold in body heat, nothing to help the fingers reeling in line dripping with icy water. All this in a season with little sun, or even daylight, for warmth. The fishing was good into January, but when, in 1957, unemployment compensation was made available for fishermen after December 15, that became the last fishing day until spring. Years later the date was moved to November 15.

  But they remember fishing into the winter. “Christ,” says Bernard, “out there handlining in the snow. You’d come in numb. We didn’t have these modern clothes. Just wool. Or if they had them, we didn’t know.”

  “No,” said Leonard, “they weren’t there.”

  “Christ, it was cold.”

  “We didn’t have any choices.”

  “Couldn’t even put this much salt beef in.”

  The conversation turns to a favorite Newfoundland topic, how unhealthy their diet is. Traditional Newfoundland food is based on pork fat. Everything is cooked in it and then seasoned with scrunchions—rendered, diced fatback.

  “Good for the arteries,” Bernard says with a laugh. “You know what my brother says. You put something in front of him, and he always asks, ‘Is it good for you?’ If you say ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Then I don’t want it.’ ”

  They finish eating—Sam and Bernard share the roe, and Leonard eats the tongue—and head back to harbor. Only forty fish have been tagged, and the biggest is just seventy-six centimeters (thirty inches). Ten years ago, this record fish would have been barely the average size. Only three of the forty are large enough to be capable of spawning.

  The men in the other boat worked three lines and caught their 100 fish with a total weight of 375 pounds. This means the average is less than four pounds at the time of year when Petty Harbour used to get some of its biggest catches—boats with 300 fish having a total weight of 3,000 pounds.

  They set aside the parts for the scientists and divide the rest of the fish into bags containing about ten pounds of fish each. A ten-pound bag should have been one cod, but most bags have two or three. When the two boats come into the harbor, some fifty people, mostly from other towns, are already waiting in a polite line.

  This is Canada. These people have jobs or are on public assistance, mostly the latter these days. They are not hungry but simply yearning for a taste of their local dish. The big fish companies, the ones that owned bottom draggers that had cleaned out the last of the cod before the morat
orium, now import frozen cod from Iceland, Russia, and Norway. But these people are accustomed to fresh, white, flaky cod “with the nerves still tingling,” as one fisherman’s daughter put it. Sam had once sent a shipment to New Orleans, and the chef had complained that it was too fresh and the meat did not hold together well. Only fishing communities know what real fresh cod, with thick white flakes that come apart, tastes like.

  Even limiting the cod to ten pounds a person, there is not enough. A few people are turned away, and one of them asks one of the fishermen, “Where are they taking the rest of the fish?”

  The problem with the people in Petty Harbour, out here on the headlands of North America, is that they are at the wrong end of a 1,000-year fishing spree.

  part one

  A Fish Tale

  ... SALT COD, SPREADING ITSELF BEFORE THE DRAB, HEFTY SHOP KEEPERS, MAKING THEM DREAM OF DEPARTURE, OF TRAVEL.

  —Émile Zola, “The Belly of Paris,” 1873

  1: The Race to Codlandia

  HE SAID IT MUST BE FRIDAY, THE DAY HE COULD NOT

  SELL ANYTHING EXCEPT SERVINGS OF A FISH KNOWN IN

  CASTILE AS POLLOCK OR IN ANDALUSIA AS SALT COD.

  —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605-1616

  A medieval fisherman is said to have hauled up a three-foot-long cod, which was common enough at the time. And the fact that the cod could talk was not especially surprising. But what was astonishing was that it spoke an unknown language. It spoke Basque.

  This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters.

  The Basques are enigmatic. They have lived in what is now the northwest corner of Spain and a nick of the French southwest for longer than history records, and not only is the origin of their language unknown, but the origin of the people themselves remains a mystery also. According to one theory, these rosy-cheeked, dark-haired, long-nosed people were the original Iberians, driven by invaders to this mountainous corner between the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian Sierra, and the Bay of Biscay. Or they may be indigenous to this area.

  They graze sheep on impossibly steep, green slopes of mountains that are thrilling in their rare, rugged beauty. They sing their own songs and write their own literature in their own language, Euskera. Possibly Europe’s oldest living language, Euskera is one of only four European languages—along with Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian—not in the Indo-European family. They also have their own sports, most notably jai alai, and even their own hat, the Basque beret, which is bigger than any other beret.

  Though their lands currently reside in three provinces of France and four of Spain, Basques have always insisted that they have a country, and they call it Euskadi. All the powerful peoples around them—the Celts and Romans, the royal houses of Aquitaine, Navarra, Aragon, and Castile; later Spanish and French monarchies, dictatorships, and republics—have tried to subdue and assimilate them, and all have failed. In the 1960s, at a time when their ancient language was only whispered, having been outlawed by the dictator Francisco Franco, they secretly modernized it to broaden its usage, and today, with only 800,000 Basque speakers in the world, almost 1,000 titles a year are published in Euskera, nearly a third by Basque writers and the rest translations.

  “Nire aitaren etxea / defendituko dut. / Otsoen kontra” (I will defend / the house of my father. / Against the wolves) are the opening lines of a famous poem in modern Euskera by Gabriel Aresti, one of the fathers of the modernized tongue. Basques have been able to maintain this stubborn independence, despite repression and wars, because they have managed to preserve a strong economy throughout the centuries. Not only are Basques shepherds, but they are also a seafaring people, noted for their successes in commerce. During the Middle Ages, when Europeans ate great quantities of whale meat, the Basques traveled to distant unknown waters and brought back whale. They were able to travel such distances because they had found huge schools of cod and salted their catch, giving them a nutritious food supply that would not spoil on long voyages.

  Basques were not the first to cure cod. Centuries earlier, the Vikings had traveled from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Canada, and it is not a coincidence that this is the exact range of the Atlantic cod. In the tenth century, Thorwald and his wayward son, Erik the Red, having been thrown out of Norway for murder, traveled to Iceland, where they killed more people and were again expelled. About the year 985, they put to sea from the black lava shore of Iceland with a small crew on a little open ship. Even in midsummer, when the days are almost without nightfall, the sea there is gray and kicks up whitecaps. But with sails and oars, the small band made it to a land of glaciers and rocks, where the water was treacherous with icebergs that glowed robin’s-egg blue. In the spring and summer, chunks broke off the glaciers, crashed into the sea with a sound like thunder that echoed in the fjords, and sent out huge waves. Eirik, hoping to colonize this land, tried to enhance its appeal by naming it Greenland.

  Almost 1,000 years later, New England whalers would sing: “Oh, Greenland is a barren place / a place that bears no green / Where there’s ice and snow / and the whale fishes blow / But daylight’s seldom seen.”

  Eirik colonized this inhospitable land and then tried to push on to new discoveries. But he injured his foot and had to be left behind. His son, Leifur, later known as Leif Eiriksson, sailed on to a place he called Stoneland, which was probably the rocky, barren Labrador coast. “I saw not one cartload of earth, though I landed many places,” Jacques Cartier would write of this coast six centuries later. From there, Leif’s men turned south to “Woodland” and then “Vineland.” The identity of these places is not certain. Woodland could have been Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or Maine, all three of which are wooded. But in Vineland they found wild grapes, which no one else has discovered in any of these places.

  The remains of a Viking camp have been found in Newfoundland. It is perhaps in that gentler land that the Vikings were greeted by inhabitants they found so violent and hostile that they deemed settlement impossible, a striking assessment to come from a people who had been regularly banished for the habit of murdering people. More than 500 years later the Beothuk tribe of Newfoundland would prevent John Cabot from exploring beyond crossbow range of his ship. The Beothuk apparently did not misjudge Europeans, since soon after Cabot, they were enslaved by the Portuguese, driven inland, hunted by the French and English, and exterminated in a matter of decades.

  How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Stoneland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in the Icelandic sagas? They were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank. They could break off pieces and chew them, eating it like hardtack. Even earlier than Eirik’s day, in the ninth century, Norsemen had already established plants for processing dried cod in Iceland and Norway and were trading the surplus in northern Europe.

  The Basques, unlike the Vikings, had salt, and because fish that was salted before drying lasted longer, the Basques could travel even farther than the Vikings. They had another advantage: The more durable a product, the easier it is to trade. By the year 1000, the Basques had greatly expanded the cod markets to a truly international trade that reached far from the cod’s northern habitat.

  In the Mediterranean world, where there were not only salt deposits but a strong enough sun to dry sea salt, salting to preserve food was not a new idea. In preclassical times, Egyptians and Romans had salted fish and developed a thriving trade. Salted meats were popular, and Roman Gaul had been famous for salted an
d smoked hams. Before they turned to cod, the Basques had sometimes salted whale meat; salt whale was found to be good with peas, and the most prized part of the whale, the tongue, was also often salted.

  Until the twentieth-century refrigerator, spoiled food had been a chronic curse and severely limited trade in many products, especially fish. When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.

  Even dried salted cod will turn if kept long enough in hot humid weather. But for the Middle Ages it was remarkably long-lasting—a miracle comparable to the discovery of the fast-freezing process in the twentieth century, which also debuted with cod. Not only did cod last longer than other salted fish, but it tasted better too. Once dried or salted—or both—and then properly restored through soaking, this fish presents a flaky flesh that to many tastes, even in the modern age of refrigeration, is far superior to the bland white meat of fresh cod. For the poor who could rarely afford fresh fish, it was cheap, high-quality nutrition.

  In 1606, Gudbrandur Thorláksson, an Icelandic bishop, made this line drawing of the North Atlantic in which Greenland is represented in the shape of a dragon with a fierce, toothy mouth. Modern maps show that this is not at all the shape of Greenland, but it is exactly what it looks like from the southern fjords, which cut jagged gashes miles deep into the high mountains. (Royal Library, Copenhagen)