Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [47]
Iceland is a lava-encrusted island, rimmed by fine, sheltered, deep-water harbors in the protective nooks of long fjords. But the fishing ports are located not in the harbors but on often harborless seaward points. Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the principal Icelandic fishing vessel was an open-decked oar-powered boat, and a harbor location deep inside a sheltered fjord would have added hours of rowing time to and from the fishing grounds. Fishermen chose a seaward point close to the fishing grounds and dragged their boat over the lava with the help of rollers made of whale ribs. Each boat might have as many as twelve oars but more commonly had four to six, with a fisherman on each oar. Usually the boat was also rigged with a small single sail, but oars were often found to be more efficient because the winds around fjords are erratic. Each oarsman operated a handline.
Yet Iceland remained primarily a fishing nation. Asked why technology did not advance, Jón Thor, historian for Iceland’s Marine Research Institute, said, “After 1500, new ideas came very slowly.“ Until 1389, Iceland had been a vibrant society of literature, exploration, and creative concepts in government. But that year, Mt. Hekla erupted, shaking the entire island and covering it with long spells of darkness followed by a brutally cold winter that melted into spring floods. Then came epidemics. Then, in 1397, Iceland was transferred from Norwegian to Danish rule. The Danes ruled with indifference, declaring a trade monopoly with Iceland but pursuing almost no trade with it. In 1532, when the British were driven off, Iceland lost its last contact with the outside world.
Through the centuries, fishing vessels and gear changed little in Iceland. Above: A detail from a late-sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript, one of the Law Books, codifying regulations. This page was on fishing. (Árni Magnússon Institute, Reykjavik, Iceland) Below: A photograph, circa 1910, taken in Isafjördhur, a fishing community on the west coast of Iceland. (Akranes Museum, Akranes, Iceland)
While fish continued to be Iceland’s principal export, until the second half of the nineteenth century, the quantity remained small. At the end of the eighteenth century, when New England and Newfoundland each had annual cod exports of 22,000 tons, Iceland was exporting less than 1,000 tons. Most Icelanders were farmers, but many of them, especially in the south and west, earned more fishing from February to April than farming the rest of the year. Not a tree grows on the island, except a few ornamental ones planted by landscapers in Reykjavik. So there is no fruit, nor is there grain. The English traded grain for fish in the fifteenth century. But stockfish was always the bread substitute. Pieces are torn off and spread with butter. From 1500 to 1800, every schoolchild in Iceland was given half a stockfish a day. Icelanders never acquired a taste for either fresh or salted cod. But in 1855, when the Danish agreed to lift their ban on foreign trade, Icelanders began learning how to salt cod, earning a place in quality Spanish and Portuguese markets.
Grindavik is a seaward strip of land, chosen as a fishing station in 910 because it was close to the cod grounds. In 1934, when Tómas Thorvaldsson first went to sea, fishermen still spent twenty minutes every morning dragging their boats over the lava into the sea. In the evening, it took an hour to get them back up. The people of Grindavik would go to the black lava beach in the evening and wait for their men to get home. There are still women who remember watching one of the boats capsize and get swallowed up in a huge swell.
The Icelanders of Tómas’s generation grew up with little money for imports. They ate what the island produced,