Cod (18 page)

Jónsson described the London negotiating sessions as “heated discussion but on a gentlemanly level. But the British fought a losing battle, and I was surprised at how shortsighted they were. All the world was going to 200 miles. I said to the British minister, ‘I am quite sure you are going to 200 miles in a few years, and then we will be able to advise you on how to do it.' And they did go to 200 miles, though they never asked our advice.”

Indeed, the entire European Economic Community was about to declare a 200-mile zone. The British government insisted on a 100-mile exclusive British zone in its own waters. In February 1976, the EEC embarrassed Britain, in the middle of its negotiations with Iceland, by openly rejecting the British demand and simply establishing a European 200-mile zone.

 

Tómas Thorvaldsson was fifty-seven years old when the 200-mile zone changed his life. He had already been through many changes and become the prosperous executive of a trawler company with its own processing plant. Now he was also part of government: a board member and, after twenty-two years, president of a state bureaucracy that controlled all fish exports. He remembered the old days and liked to visit the black crescent of shore, the lava beach where they used to drag the boats to the water. Solemnly he would say, “On this spot men have gone to sea for more than 1,000 years.”

But the old Iceland seemed unimaginable to his children. Even the food was different. Young people did not eat stockfish; they went to a bakery and bought bread. Their diet, with the exception of lamb and fish, was imported and expensive. One day each winter, when the arctic night is almost twenty-four hours, and thoughts turn suicidal, a feast is held at costs unimaginable in the old days, in which the old Icelanders eat
hákarl,
sheep's head, ram's testicles, and other foods from their past.

Physical traces of past centuries vanished almost completely. If a building survived from the 1930s, it was considered historic. One-third of the town of Heimaey, a fishing port on a small island off the southern coast, was buried in a 1973 volcanic eruption. A sign in the new lava fields proclaims that buried some feet below is Iceland's oldest Kiwanis Club, built in 1924.

Most towns had a population of 2,000 or less. The few people drove cars on needlessly wide, well-paved streets. There were no crowds, no signs of poverty, nothing old and absolutely no dirt. Just a treeless immaculate plain of new houses, metal or concrete, freshly painted in colors that are true but not hot and mirror nothing in nature. Most towns looked like a sales lot for new, oversized mobile homes. “These are the new houses built for the young people after we were through digging a harbor by hand,” said Tómas.

The harbor in Grindavik was dug out a little more each year. The men of the town are still dredging. It is now home port to fifty fishing vessels, ranging from small, two-man boats with a converted stern rigged for dragging, to large, modern bottom draggers.

 

After Iceland's 200-mile zone gained acceptance in 1976, most nations declared their own 200-mile zones. Some 90 percent of the world's known fishing grounds fell within 200 miles of the coast of at least one nation. Fishermen now had to work not so much with the laws of nature as the laws of man. Their primary task was no longer to catch as many fish as possible but to catch as many as were allowed. The fisherman had long been a skilled navigator, seaman, biologist, meteorologist, mechanic, weaver, and mender. Now he also had to learn, like a good civil servant, how to work the regulations, sidestep their pitfalls, and sail through their loopholes. He became skilled at this as well. Fishermen rarely consider regulation their responsibility. As they see it, that is the duty of government—to make the rules—and it is their duty to navigate through them. If the stocks are not conserved, government mismanagement is to blame.

If the zone is used to exclude foreigners, as most are, the nation only has to regulate its own fishermen. That was seen by Icelanders as the key to effective management. Jóhann Sigurjónsson, deputy director of the Marine Research Institute, said, “It's enough to have your own people to watch. You don't want an Olympic fishery like the North Sea. Everybody tries to take as much as they can as fast as they can.” The European Community tried to solve this through its regulatory bureaucracy, the Common Fishing Policy, but that only created a new, complex set of nation-by-nation regulations for fishermen to work on.

The Icelandic government realized that it would have to curb the capacity of its own fleet. It required larger mesh on trawls. But the fishermen compensated by buying more trawlers. Then the government restricted the size of the fleet and the number of days at sea; the fishermen responded by buying larger, more efficient gear. The cod stocks continued to decline. In 1984, the government introduced quotas on species per vessel per season. This was a controversial and often wasteful system. A groundfish hauled up from fifty fathoms is killed by the change in pressure. But if it is a cod and the cod quota has been used up, it is thrown overboard. Or if the price of cod is low that week and cod happen to come in the haddock or plaice net, the fishermen will throw them overboard because they do not want to use up their cod quota when they are not getting a good price.

In 1995, a system was initiated to restrict the total cod catch to a maximum of 25 percent of the estimated stock. That also had loopholes. But with each measure, there was less and less resistance. When Icelanders see cod stocks diminishing, they think about returning to the Middle Ages—earthen huts, metal shacks, the buried shark and burned sheep heads. National politicians, fishermen, trawler owners, and seafood companies became increasingly cooperative with the scientists at the Marine Research Institute. Their greatest opponents were local politicians trying to bring something home for the district.

Before the 200-mile zone, Tómas Thorvaldsson had never thought about overfishing, only about how to catch more fish. But now he had to limit his fishing capacity. “Thinking about fishing less was very difficult for the mind,” he said. He showed an empty dormitory that until 1990 had housed up to fifty-two workers from other parts of Iceland. They would come to process 2,000 tons of saltfish a year. In recent years, Tómas had processed only 300 to 400 tons a year. Higher prices, fewer fish, and fewer fishermen was the new formula of the Iceland fishery. Although the sector drove the economy, the government had already reduced the number of fishermen to only 5 percent of the workforce.

Looking around the walls of his office, where he had hung photographs of every vessel he had ever owned, Tómas pointed to that low-to-the-water little steamship, his first decked boat, and said, “Maybe we should go back to this.”

In late January and February, during the spawning season, it is a tradition in Iceland to eat cod roe stuffed with the fish's liver. Like most traditional Icelandic food, this dish is not popular with the young and affluent generation.

 

IT'S NO FISH YE'RE BUYING: IT'S MEN'S LIVES.
(FISHMONGER TO A CUSTOMER HAGGLING OVER THE
PRICE OF A HADDOCK.)

—Sir Walter Scott,
The Antiquary,
1816

NOW A LULLING LIFT
AND FALL—
RED STARS—A SEVERED COD
HEAD BETWEEN TWO
GREEN STONES—LIFTING
FALLING

—William Carlos Williams, “The Cod Head,” 1932

 

I
nevitably, Iceland and Newfoundland are compared. They are both North Atlantic islands and roughly the same size, though Newfoundland's half million inhabitants are twice as many as Iceland's. The poor quality of the land and shortness of the growing season make agriculture unprofitable on both islands. Historically, both economies have been entirely based on fishing, mostly cod. On both islands, the local fishermen operated small boats inshore while foreigners fished the rich offshore grounds. Both remained underdeveloped colonies until after World War II.

But that is when everything becomes different. While Iceland was severing its ties with Denmark to become an independent republic, Newfoundland was severing its ties to Britain and becoming a province of Canada. Once it became a province of a large wealthy nation, Newfoundlanders no longer needed to depend on their fishery for survival. Canada would make up the shortfalls. By the 1990s, the Canadian government was spending three dollars on fisheries for every one dollar those fisheries earned.

Newfoundland, Britain's oldest colony, had been a self-governing colony until the Great Depression. At that time, saltfish was failing to support fishermen, and a British-appointed commission took over. But under the Commission of Government, an unemployed fisherman received an allowance of only six cents a day. Though Newfoundlanders had always resisted the idea of being swallowed up by Canada, this appeared to be the only option left. In 1948, the British supervised a referendum in which Newfoundlanders voted by a narrow margin to become the tenth province of Canada. But once part of Canada, Newfoundland had a large and distant government that was not accustomed to thinking of fishing as a top priority. The Canadian foreign trade bureaucracy was far more interested in wheat and industrial products. It viewed the local salt cod fishery as an economic failure and tried to develop the Newfoundland economy with light industry, most of which also failed, because it could not compete with mainland industry.

Breton fishing fleet leaving for the Banks,
The Graphic,
October 17, 1891.

 

But once the 200-mile limit was established in 1977, the Canadian government saw a chance to make fishing a viable economic base for Newfoundland. First, though, it needed to settle its border with the United States and drive off the Europeans. Then it would have a truly exclusive zone.

The Spanish and the Portuguese, who regarded it as their right to fish these grounds because they had been doing so for 500 years, were shocked. The 200-mile limit had been a particular blow to Spain because, though its people had the highest per capita fish consumption of any Western country, almost no good fishing grounds could be found within 200 miles of the Spanish coastline. After Franco's death in 1975, every sector of the Spanish economy attracted investments and was being modernized. But there were few prospects for a modern Spanish fishing fleet. The Canadians and the Americans were throwing Spanish ships off of their banks, and the French and the British were pressuring the European Community bureaucracy to exclude them from European waters. While fishing was one of the principal objections of the French and British to letting Spain into their community, it was also one of the incentives Spain had for joining. With a larger fleet than any European Community country, Spain saw its quota reduced by the EC every year. By 1983, 1,000 Spanish vessels shared 234 licenses in European waters. Below the hilltop town of Vigo, in Spain's northwestern region of Galicia, was a fleet of modern trawlers that increasingly had nowhere to go.

The Portuguese fleet, called the White Fleet because during World War II it had painted its ships white to remind German submarines of Portuguese neutrality, had few places to fish either. The one place left to the Iberians was a corner of Grand Bank and all of the Flemish Cap, a historic cod bank, both of which were beyond 200 miles and therefore in international water. Both the Spanish and Portuguese were taking significant quantities of cod from this area until 1986, when the Canadians decided to deny foreign vessels fishing the outer Banks use of St. John's for supplies and repairs. The French still had St. Pierre and Miquelon, but the Iberians would have been stranded far from home with no port.

The other issue for Canada was the U.S. border. While Georges Bank, the richest prize on the shelf, is off the coast of New England, much of it is also within the 200-mile range of Nova Scotia. The fight over Georges Bank may not have become a true cod war in the European tradition, but a few gunshots were exchanged between New England and Canadian fishermen—probably the only shooting between Canadians and Americans since the French and Indian War. Under international arbitration, Canada was granted the northeast corner of the Bank, and the rest became U.S. territorial water. For the first time in history, Canada and the United States now exclusively owned the cod banks off their coasts.