Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [3]
Being on the eastern headlands also means that it is the North American town closest to Ireland, and this is the second thing for which the town is famous. Although the name Petty Harbour comes from the French petit, the people here are Irish. Fifth-generation Newfoundlanders speak with the musical brogue of southern Ireland. While this accent is heard up and down the Newfoundland coast, Petty Harbour is a microcosm of Ireland—Ireland upside down. The village, with its population of almost 1,000, was built on the mouth of a small river. On the north side live the Catholics. On the south are the Protestants. The little bridge was a border, and the people on either side never mixed. Sam, Leonard, and Bernard are all Catholic. But, growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were the first generation of children to cross the bridge when playing. Sam married a Protestant. So did Bernard, who, now forty-one, is five years younger than Sam. The town’s sole social conflict faded—only to be replaced by new ones as the cod disappeared.
According to Sam, it is more than the cod that are gone. He looks toward the horizon and says, “Not a whale, nothing.” For years, he has not seen herring or capelin, which the humpback whale chase. The squid, too, seems to have vanished. Petty Harbour fishermen used to spend an hour jigging the harbor for squid to use as bait. This morning, they are using squid they bought frozen.
In summer, before their disappearance, the cod would come so close to shore that fishermen could catch them in traps, ingenious devices invented in Labrador in the nineteeth century. A wall of twine net was anchored to the shore, and cod swimming from either side followed the wall and found themselves in a large, twine, underwater room, which they could easily leave. But most didn’t. The unbaited traps were left out in July and August and hauled up twice a day. Thousands of cod used to swim into these traps along the rocky coast in the summer. At the time of the moratorium, the 125 fishermen of Petty Harbour were setting seventy-five traps along the deep inlet that marked Petty Harbour waters.
Then, in September, when the cod started moving farther offshore, the handlining season would begin. Handline fishing dates back to the iron age. A hook is baited, and a four-ounce lead weight drops it to the bottom on heavy line. In Petty Harbour’s grounds, the men fish at a depth between fifteen and thirty fathoms. The fisherman loops the line around his hand and when he feels a tug, he yanks hard to set the hook in the fish’s mouth. He must yank the line and start pulling it in with one continuous motion, because any slack will enable the fish to wriggle free. But few escape these fishermen.
Once the hook is well set, the cod doesn’t fight and it is simply a matter of hauling up the weight. The skill is all in the first moments; the rest is labor. The fishermen rapidly haul in some 180 feet of line by moving their two index fingers in broad circular motions. In the old days, they would each have had a line out: two on the side of the boat where the tide runs and one on the opposite side. The open deck and low gunwales might be dangerous in a rough sea, but they make it easy to land fish. The three men would have hauled up fish weighing from eight to thirty pounds or more, one after another, without a break, for the rest of the day until the deck and both three-foot-deep holds had no more room. Each boat would have returned with between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds of cod. Fifty or more boats from Petty Harbour would have all been out there with two- or three-man crews, hauling fish and shouting jokes from boat to boat.
The third thing for which Petty Harbour is famous: The community has banned the mass-fishing techniques of longlining and gillnetting since the late 1940s. Since the moratorium, environmentalists have singled out Petty Harbour for having taken this step decades before anyone else in