Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [60]
In 1989, Fisheries minister John Crosbie, son and grandson of influential St. John’s fishing merchants, stood in St. John’s Radisson Hotel and tried to put to rest suspicions that the fisheries would soon have to be closed. In July 1992, he returned to the same hotel to announce just that—a moratorium on fishing the northern cod stock, putting 30,000 fishermen out of work. Sam Lee and other inshore fishermen, who had been calling for the moratorium on trawling for years, waited outside. When Crosbie refused to see them, Lee, normally a pleasant, good-humored man, began angrily pounding on the door.
In January 1994, a new minister, Brian Tobin, announced an extension of the moratorium. All the Atlantic cod fisheries in Canada were to be closed except for one in southwestern Nova Scotia, and strict quotas were placed on other ground species. Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct—so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s men scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all.
The fish-processing plants, which had been used to justify the court’s rejection of the inshore fishermen’s case, were closed down anyway. The two giant companies, FPI and National Sea Products, scaled down their operations and began processing cod from Iceland and Norway. National Sea Products used a 250-employee plant in Arnold’s Cove, a typical Newfoundland fishing town like Petty Harbour, built in the crevice of a bay, out on the water on top of stilts. The Newfoundland government, trying to resettle the inhabitants of the small islands off of Newfoundland in less remote places, had moved villagers to Arnold’s Cove, where there were jobs at the National Sea Products plant. The plant bought Russian cod, beheaded and frozen, from the Norwegians. In Arnold’s Cove it was partially thawed, filleted, and refrozen.
The community-owned processing plant in Petty Harbour wanted to do the same thing but did not have the capital. “We looked into Russian cod to keep our plant going. But it was way out of our league,” said Sam Lee. Instead, they kept the plant open as a school. But they owe the government more than one million Canadian dollars in interest on money borrowed to buy freezing equipment. “We were paying it back until the moratorium. The government doesn’t want the plant, so we will be able to keep it. No one wants it. Fish will come back and it will be back in operation, but by then with interest, it will be a two-million-dollar debt.”
The government also had to ban the blackback fishery, because fishermen going after this bottom-feeding flat fish seemed to get suspiciously large quantities of cod in their nets. It was legal to take these cod as a by-catch, but it began to look as though fishermen were targeting the by-catch. Some fished for lumpfish, which Lee completely objected to as wasteful since the roe is taken and the rest of the fish is discarded. Some of the inshore fishermen have turned to crabbing, which has been very profitable, and others to lobstering. There have been experiments with fishing whelks for export. But to groundfishermen, these were lesser forms of fishing. Most fishermen just collected the package and waited.
St. John’s, the oldest city in North America, was built on a deepwater harbor sheltered by high majestic cliffs. The town, with its brightly painted late-nineteenth-century wooden houses, overlooks the harbor from a steep hill. Despite the ornateness of the Victorian architecture, there is a frontierlike rough-hewn charm to the town. The waterfront used to be crowded with stores selling supplies to the European fleets, whose ships would line the piers at the