Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [42]
Originally most trawlers, ships that drag their fishing gear behind them, were longliners. But once ships had engine power, what New Englanders call a bottom dragger, which drags a net just above the ocean’s floor, became the most common form of trawler. Bottom trawling was not a new idea. For centuries, the British and the Flemish on opposite sides of the Channel had caught shrimp by dragging a net along the sea floor with a wooden beam to create a wide horizontal opening at the bottom. It was pulled from shore at low tide by horses. Sail-powered draggers, known as smacks, began working in the North Sea especially after 1837, when a fishing ground called the Silver Pits, just south of the already well-fished Dogger Bank, was discovered.
These cod grounds turned the twin ports of Hull and Grimsby on the Humber River, traditional fishing towns, into major ports. Here, steam power was first applied to fishing when steam-powered paddleboats started hauling smacks to and from the North Sea banks. Once there were steam-powered vessels, it was only a matter of time until the old beam trawl that was used on smacks got hitched to one of the new ships. First some of the paddleboats were rigged for trawling. Then, in 1881, a shipyard in Hull built a steam-powered trawler named the Zodiac. By the 1890s, not a single sailing trawler was left in Hull, and steam-powered trawlers were becoming commonplace in the North Sea.
The first otter trawl was built in Scotland in 1892. Instead of a beam, which would work only where the ocean floor was flat, the bottom opening of the otter trawl was maintained by a chain, which was made more mobile by metal bobbins, rollers, beneath it. The upper side of the opening was held up by floats. The net was kept wide open horizontally by “doors,” heavy armored planks on either side of the net. The otter trawl is the prototype of all modern bottom draggers. By 1895, it had become the standard fishing rig of the British North Sea fleet, and very quickly the other European nations that competed in the North Sea fishery converted to otter trawls.
While the British were developing steam power to reduce time at sea, Americans were suffering staggering losses, experimenting with ever more top-rigged schooners to increase their speed. From 1880 to 1897, the years during which the British developed the North Sea steam trawler, 1,614 fishermen from Gloucester alone drowned working schooners. Yet little interest was taken in the North Sea innovations. New Englanders and Nova Scotians were stubbornly attached to their majestic, albeit deadly, schooners. Newfoundland and Labrador local fishing was inshore, where small boats trapping and handlining brought in good catches with little capital investment.
The first otter trawl was introduced to New England as an experimental loan by the U.S. Fisheries Commission in 1893 to a group of Cape Cod fishermen. But Georges Bank remained largely under sail for another three decades. Finally, by 1918, steel-hulled beam trawlers were being built in Bath, Maine, and a trawler fleet grew in Boston.
Once motor ships replaced sail and oar, fishing no longer had to be done with “passive gear”—equipment that waited for the fish. Fish could now be pursued. And since a bigger, more powerful engine could always be developed, the scale of the fishing could increase almost limitlessly.
Steam ships with otter trawls were reporting catches more than six times greater than those of sail ships. By the 1890s, fish stocks were already showing signs of depletion in the North Sea, but the primary reaction was not conservation. Instead North Sea fleets traveled farther to richer grounds off of Iceland.
The huge quantity of landings was periodically causing fish prices to crash, creating unprecedented havoc in the marketplace. In the 1920s, protests by fishermen forced the Canadian government to prohibit further expansion of the dragger fleet. The quality of cured fish was declining because once steam power made faster vessels possible, competitors vied to be the quickest