Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [48]
Foreigners had never completely left Icelandic waters. In 1768, at its height, the Dutch Icelandic fleet had 160 ships fishing off of Iceland. After the French lost their North American possessions in 1763, they began fishing heavily in Icelandic waters and continued until the First World War. For Icelanders, foreign fishing vessels provided a rare and welcome contact with the outside world. But when the British returned in the 1890s, an eighty-year controversy began.
The Hannes rádherra, a 1930s Icelandic trawler. Icelandic trawlers were depicted on trading cards inside packs of cigarettes sold in Iceland. The cigarettes, like the trawlers, were made in England.
There had not been a great deal of discussion over what should have been a troubling fact—that the new, large, steam-powered, steel-hulled trawlers had come to Iceland because they were so efficient as to have depleted the North Sea stocks in a decade. Overfishing had not yet become an issue. But the best cod grounds of southern Iceland are on a narrow shelf that extends only a few miles from shore. This short distance is what made an oar-driven fishery possible. Now these new British ships—huge, powerful, and made of steel—were crowding into the southern shelf, running over nets and lines of local fishermen.
The Icelanders had two opinions about this. Some wanted all foreigners to be banned. But others thought that Iceland should get some of these monster ships itself, so it could reap the profits of its own ocean. The second argument won. It generally does. Throughout the century, when modest inshore fishermen have been confronted with powerful, efficient foreign fleets, invariably local government has decided to subsidize a competitive local fleet.
The first British-built trawler to be purchased by Iceland arrived in 1905. By 1915, the country had a fleet of twenty steel trawlers—some new, some secondhand, most of them British built.
In Grindavik, fishing continued the same way it had for centuries. The town did not have a harbor, and since trawlers cannot be hauled on the beach over whale ribs, this new invention meant nothing in this town, and many towns like it. But Tómas Thorvaldsson and his friends got an idea that caused the first major change in town in 1,000 years. There was a tidal pond, closed off from the sea in low tide by a narrow strip of land. Tómas and his fellow fishermen started going out with shovels and digging out the strip of land. They dug a little every day at low tide, carrying the black lava gravel away by wheelbarrow, until they had created a harbor. Tómas bought his first “deck boat,” a little, low-to-the-water, steam-powered side trawler. Then he bought a bigger one. He was becoming a businessman.
Trawlers did more than increase Iceland’s fishing capacity. They caused a profound change in this preindustrial society with its population of 78,000, most of whom were peasants earning little more than subsistence. The people who purchased the trawlers became Iceland’s first capitalists. Cod was creating an entrepreneurial class in Iceland, the same way it had in New England in the 1640s. Reykjavik, the island’s largest town, which had a population of only slightly more than 2,000 when the British trawlers first arrived, was growing into a city with a new kind of population—a working class of former farmers.
Among the developments in Iceland’s improving economy was a reawakening of intellectual life. Icelandic literature, a proud tradition until the Danish takeover, was once again a creative force. The sciences also made great progress