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By Root 558 0

waters to Europeans, the nature of cod fishing changed dramatically. Fishermen then pursued cod in much the same way for the next four centuries. True, navigation improved in the seventeenth century. The chronometer made it possible to fix a longitude in the eighteenth century. The three-masted bark with its dories was developed. New Englanders invented the schooner. Telegraph and then the trans-Atlantic cable made it possible for long-distance fleets to get news of market price trends and storm warnings. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, these inventions had only slightly changed the job of the fisherman and his ability to catch fish. Fishermen were still working the same grounds with only minor variations on the same types of gear, still in sail-powered vessels—Icelanders were still using oars—and it was still a dangerous and arduous job.

Well into the twentieth century, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia’s, Grand Banks fleet stayed with sail power. “The Lunenburg cure,” heavily salted on the schooners and then dried on flakes along the rocky sheltered coastline, was traded in the Caribbean. The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbor. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia—brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.

The Lunenburg fishery was famous for its schooners and its role in a series of Canadian-U.S. schooner races between 1886 and 1907. Then, in 1920, when the America’s Cup race was canceled because of high seas, a publisher of the Halifax Herald and Mail who thought these sportsmen fainthearted put up a $5,000 prize and a silver cup for a fishermen’s schooner race between Lunenburg and Gloucester. Fishermen, he insisted, knew how to sail schooners in rough weather. The Gloucester Daily Times accepted the challenge. Gorton’s, the Gloucester seafood company, sponsored a schooner that beat Lunenburg’s schooner twice. Then, in 1921, Lunenburg built a bigger schooner, the Bluenose. The competition continued until 1938, and though Gloucestermen won several races, they never took the cup away from the Bluenose, which can now be seen on the Canadian dime, matchbooks, and almost anywhere else eyes might fall in Maritime Canada.

Gloucester fishermen commonly worked off of schooners until World War II. Gorton’s last working schooner, the Thomas S. Gorton, built in 1905, sailed until 1956. In 1963, Lunenburg’s last fishing schooner, the Theresa E. Connor, sailed empty to Newfoundland because she could not find a crew in Nova Scotia to fish the Banks. No one in Newfoundland was willing to work on her either. Everything that had been done to make schooners faster had made them also more dangerous. Unable to get a crew, the Theresa E. Connor returned to Lunenburg, where she is still tied up as part of a maritime museum.

By then, Europeans had been using engine power in their own waters for seventy years. But because of the cost of burning coal to fuel trans-Atlantic crossings, they had been slow to convert their Grand Banks fleets. The French continued to send sailing barks with dorymen to the Grand Banks well into the 1930s, when most northern European fisheries were completely engine-powered. The last Portuguese fishing ship to work the Grand Banks without any engine power, the Anna Maria, went down in a storm in 1958. But it was not until the Theresa E. Connor was forced to tie up without a crew, 100 years after the steam engine was invented, that the age of sail in the cod fisheries finally ended.

In fishing, new technologies usually came first in Europe, where the waters had been fished longer and it was harder to catch fish than in North America. Competition for dwindling catches was the greatest incentive, and the North Sea, shared by eight affluent and fiercely competitive fishing nations, was the leading