Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [38]
One of the reasons for such high accident rates is that fishermen have always operated on very little sleep. If the catch is plentiful, the fishermen might go a day or two with no sleep. In the old salt fishery, once the dorymen came back on board, their catch had to be cleaned. The head was chopped off, the belly opened, the liver set aside—sometimes along with the roe, sounds, throats, and other items. Next, the cod had to be carefully split and the spine removed. (A bad split destroyed the value of the fish.) Then it had to be carefully salted. If the fishermen were lucky, they could have a few hours of sleep.
The first push to modernize fishing came from the French. In 1815, the new French government decided to subsidize the rebuilding of their fisheries, which had been devastated first by the French Revolution and then by the Napoleonic wars. Revitalizing the economy was only part of the motivation. As John Adams had once pointed out, it was far cheaper to subsidize long-distance cod fleets, which produced excellent sailors, than to maintain a well-trained standing navy. The British grudgingly began doing the same thing, but not until they had spent years complaining about the French subsidy.
The French outfitted their Terre-Neuve fleets with longlines, otherwise known as trawl lines, setlines, or bultows. Until then, the principal technique for cod fishing throughout the North Atlantic had been handlining, exactly the method Sam Lee and the other Newfoundland inshore fishermen still use. Sometimes a spreader was put on the end so that two baited hooks came off it instead of one.
Records show the British used longlines off of Iceland in 1482, and they may have been used earlier. But before the nineteenth-century French, the system had never become popular because it required an enormous quantity of bait. In Canadian waters, the French found ample herring and capelin. Though modest by contem-porary standards, these early-nineteenth-century French longlines were longer than they had ever been before. They could be as short as a half mile, or they might extend for four or five miles. About every three feet, a two-foot lanyard with a hook on the end was tied. The dory ran the line out. Caulked barrels served as buoys, which were placed at periodic distances so the line could be found. (Today the buoys are bright plastic balls with a flag on a two-foot mast over the top to make them visible from a distance.) The doryman would row along the line, hauling up, taking fish, rebaiting, and releasing.
Handlining. The Georges Bank cod fishery, plate 32 from The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the U.S. by George Brown Goode, 1887. (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)
In 1861, it was written in the Journals of the Assembly in Nova Scotia, “Setline fishing, there can be little doubt, was induced by the enormous bounty of ten francs paid by the French government for every quintal [sixty-five fish] of fish caught by their fishermen.... The writer has been informed, incredible as it may appear, that some of these lines have as many as ten thousand hooks fastened to them.” Such an operation required only a few dozen men and five dories.
As the nineteenth-century debate over longlining grew, nationalism, more than conservation, seems to have been the issue. Unfair competition from the French subsidy system angered British North America, later Canada, more than the possibility of overfishing from the technique it financed.
Distrust of new fishing techniques is endemic to fishing. Longlining had always been controversial in Iceland, as was netting when it was first used for cod in Icelandic waters in 1780. But fishermen objected to netting because they feared it would block off the fish and they would move to some other waters. The principal Scandinavian objection to longlining was that it was unfair, undemocratic. Longlining required capital to buy large quantities of bait, and those who could not afford the bait did not have the