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Freezing also changed the relationship of seafood companies to fishing ports. Frozen fish could be bought anywhere—wherever the fish was cheapest and most plentiful. With expanding markets, local fleets could not keep up with the needs of the companies. Gorton’s and others abandoned their own trawler fleets and eventually their own ports. Between 1960 and 1970, the total U.S. production of fish sticks tripled, but Gloucester production only doubled. While business was increasing, Gloucester’s market share was declining.

The most important development was that during World War II the three innovations—high-powered ships, dragging nets, and freezing fish—had come together in the huge factory ship. One of the original appeals of the steam-powered otter trawl had been that, without masts and rigging, ample deck space had been cleared for fish processing. Engine-driven ships could also have larger hulls with more storage space. Originally, the net was dragged and landed from a swinging boom on the side, a side trawler. The stern trawler, invented in the Pacific, was more stable on rough seas and could haul bigger trawls. It also provided a large, open deck space on the stern where the fish were landed. During World War II, this added space started to be used for freezing fish. By the 1950s, a time now thought of as the golden age of long-distance net trawling, cod catches were larger every year in the North Sea, off of Iceland, Norway, all of the banks, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and along the New England coast. Most of the world’s commercial catches were increasing.

Were there any limits to how much could be caught, or was nature inexhaustible, as had been believed in the nineteenth century? Fishermen were beginning to worry. In 1949, the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries was formed to look for ways of controlling excessive practices.

But technology continued to focus on the goal of catching more fish. Factory ships grew to 450 feet or larger, with 4,000-ton capacity or more, powered by twin diesel engines of more than 6,000 horsepower, pulling trawls with openings large enough to swallow jumbo jets. The trawler hauled its huge net every four hours, twenty-four hours a day. Pair fishing, a technique often practiced by the Spanish fleet out of Vigo, suspended a huge trawl between two factory ships. One operated the trawl, and the other processed the fish. After the net was hauled up, the vessels switched roles and continued, so that the fishing never stopped.

The rollers along the bottom of the net were replaced by “rockhoppers,” large disks that tend to hop up when they hit a rock and make it possible to drag close to a rough bottom without damaging the net. In addition, “tickler chains” stir up the bottom, creating noise and dust. Cod, and other groundfish, instinctively hide on the bottom when they sense danger, and the ticklers act like hunters beating bushes to drive birds out, sending the frightened cod out of their protective crannies and up into the nets.

The ocean floor left behind is a desert. Any fish swimming in the vast area of these nets is caught. The only control is mesh size. Fish that are smaller than the holes in the net can escape. While mandating minimum mesh sizes has become a favorite tool of regulators, fishermen often point out that once the back wall of the cod end has a good crop of fish in it, few fish of any size can escape, regardless of how big the mesh. Millions of unwanted fish—undesirable species, fish that are undersized or over quota, even fish with a low market price that week—are tossed overboard, usually dead.

For centuries, fishermen have had to study the lay of the ocean’s floor and the skies. Nova Scotia fishermen used to look for what they called “cherry bottom,” a type of red gravel floor favored by cod. They would drop a weighted line with a piece of tallow and bring it up to look at the color of gravel it had picked up. Or fishermen searched the horizon for a fast-forming cloud of seabirds.