Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [57]
But that is when everything becomes different. While Iceland was severing its ties with Denmark to become an independent republic, Newfoundland was severing its ties to Britain and becoming a province of Canada. Once it became a province of a large wealthy nation, Newfoundlanders no longer needed to depend on their fishery for survival. Canada would make up the shortfalls. By the 1990s, the Canadian government was spending three dollars on fisheries for every one dollar those fisheries earned.
Newfoundland, Britain’s oldest colony, had been a self-governing colony until the Great Depression. At that time, saltfish was failing to support fishermen, and a British-appointed commission took over. But under the Commission of Government, an unemployed fisherman received an allowance of only six cents a day. Though Newfoundlanders had always resisted the idea of being swallowed up by Canada, this appeared to be the only option left. In 1948, the British supervised a referendum in which Newfoundlanders voted by a narrow margin to become the tenth province of Canada. But once part of Canada, Newfoundland had a large and distant government that was not accustomed to thinking of fishing as a top priority. The Canadian foreign trade bureaucracy was far more interested in wheat and industrial products. It viewed the local salt cod fishery as an economic failure and tried to develop the Newfoundland economy with light industry, most of which also failed, because it could not compete with mainland industry.
Breton fishing fleet leaving for the Banks, The Graphic, October 17, 1891.
But once the 200-mile limit was established in 1977, the Canadian government saw a chance to make fishing a viable economic base for Newfoundland. First, though, it needed to settle its border with the United States and drive off the Europeans. Then it would have a truly exclusive zone.
The Spanish and the Portuguese, who regarded it as their right to fish these grounds because they had been doing so for 500 years, were shocked. The 200-mile limit had been a particular blow to Spain because, though its people had the highest per capita fish consumption of any Western country, almost no good fishing grounds could be found within 200 miles of the Spanish coastline. After Franco’s death in 1975, every sector of the Spanish economy attracted investments and was being modernized. But there were few prospects for a modern Spanish fishing fleet. The Canadians and the Americans were throwing Spanish ships off of their banks, and the French and the British were pressuring the European Community bureaucracy to exclude them from European waters. While fishing was one of the principal objections of the French and British to letting Spain into their community, it was also one of the incentives Spain had for joining. With a larger fleet than any European Community country, Spain saw its quota reduced by the EC every year. By 1983, 1,000 Spanish vessels shared 234 licenses in European waters. Below the hilltop town of Vigo, in Spain’s northwestern region of Galicia, was a fleet of modern trawlers that increasingly had nowhere to go.
The Portuguese fleet, called the White Fleet because during World War II it had painted its ships white to remind German submarines of Portuguese neutrality, had few places to fish either. The one place left to the Iberians was a corner of Grand Bank and all of the Flemish Cap, a historic cod bank, both of which were beyond 200 miles and therefore in international water. Both the Spanish and Portuguese were taking significant quantities of cod from this area until 1986, when the Canadians decided to deny foreign vessels fishing the outer Banks use of St. John’s for