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10: Three Wars to Close the Open Sea

LIFE IS SALTFISH.

—Halldór Laxness, Reykjavik, 1930s

When World War II ended, the fish stocks in the European North Atlantic, after six years with little fishing, were at a level that has never been seen since. There were tremendous catches on the Icelandic shelf, on the North Sea banks, in the Barents Sea, in the Channel, and in the Irish box, as all of the waters surrounding Ireland have come to be known. Like the old days on the North American banks, huge cod were commonplace. But the principal fishing nations came back with ever bigger, faster, and more efficient trawlers.

Postcard, 1910-15, printed in Iceland for French fishermen to send back home.

With the creation of the new independent Icelandic state in 1944, the Anglo-Danish Convention of 1901, with its three-mile limit, was nullified. After five and a half centuries of indifferent colonial administration, Icelanders were determined to build a modern society through management of their one natural resource, cod grounds. By 1955, when Halldór Laxness won the Nobel prize for literature, the harsh life of prewar Iceland that he described in his novels was already becoming a faded memory. A major step in this nation building took place in April 1950. After the required two-year notice was up, Iceland annulled its old treaty and extended its territorial limit to four miles off its shoreline. A modest claim by contemporary standards, this was a bold move in 1950, when the concept that the seas belonged to everyone was a widely held principle of international law.

The three-mile limit had first been established in 1822, with the North Sea Fisheries Convention, signed in the Hague by France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Britain. Ironically, the British were the great advocates of the three-mile zone and defended it with some of the same tactics that they termed unlawful harassment when later employed by Icelanders against them. When a British-American treaty giving American fishermen access to Canadian waters expired in 1866, the Americans were charged fees to fish in the three-mile zone. But by the 1930s, the principle of any limit was considered highly questionable to most Western nations.

Then, in 1945, because the United States wanted to protect its offshore oil production, a new concept in international law appeared. President Harry Truman issued a proclamation stating that the United States had the right to control mineral resources on its continental shelf. No one had ever owned a continental shelf. The banks did not belong to the United States and Canada. England did not own its shelf. No one owned the North Sea. Since cod and most other commercial fish are mostly found on continental shelves, the implications for fishing were enormous. Furthermore, on the same day, Truman issued another proclamation: “In view of the pressing need for conservation and protection of fishery resources, the Government of the United States regards it as proper to establish conservation zones in those areas of the high seas contiguous to the coasts.” The measure Was in response to a prewar dispute with Japan, whose fishermen had been catching Alaskan salmon from the sea before the fish could return to their spawning rivers.

The proclamation immediately resonated in newly nationalistic postwar Latin America, where many countries started claiming their continental shelf. Europeans—especially the British—fiercely objected, but their arguments were weakened by pressure from their own American possessions. While protesting the principle, Britain claimed a piece of the shelf for the Bahamas. By 1950, there was some international backing for Iceland’s four-mile zone, especially since most international fishing was farther offshore.

But for that very reason, many Icelanders thought the new law was too modest. After 1954, Icelandic cod catches began to fall dramatically. The same was true for ocean perch, or redfish, which was an increasingly important commercial catch. In all, the groundfish