Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [69]
A few miles up the Nerbioi River from Bilbao, in the town of Arrigorriaga, Adolfo Eguino’s office overlooked the steep green Basque mountains. His windows were closed off by wrought-iron grilles fashioned in the shape of splayed salt cod. He was the director of Baisfa, one of the largest Basque bacalao companies. A small, tough-looking man in his fifties, he had a gruff manner that charmed more than it offended. Eguino grew up in Portugalete, an old seafaring town whose name means “port of Galleons.” Some of the men who raided Newlyn may have been from there. As a boy, he didn’t like school and at the age of fourteen dropped out to start his own business. He specialized in selling bacalao to small food stores, like the ones in the chain owned by his father. In this way he came to know the people at PYSBE and Trueba y Pardo, and from those companies he found six partners to start Baisfa. They now imported all of their salt cod from Iceland—1,500 tons a year. In 1994, the Icelanders stopped delivering to them by ship, instead sending the salt cod to Rotterdam, where it was put on a truck and driven down. This meant that rather than receiving a huge shipment every few months, one container arrived every week. “The secret of good salt cod is to not let it spend much time on the boats,” said Eguino.
And yet, somehow, the people of Cornwall and much of England were convinced that the Spanish would take all their cod. Realistically, the Spanish were more interested in taking all their hake, but since cod was what the Englishmen cared about, it seemed to follow that cod was what the Spaniards would take.
Newlyn does not look like the Cornish towns on either side: Penzance and Mousehole. Those are resort towns where British vacationers practice that peculiarly British pastime of strolling the beaches and walkways, bundled in sweaters and mufflers. But Newlyn is a fishing town—or, increasingly, an out-of-work fishing town. By the 1990s, the long piers at the bottom of town where the trawlers tied up usually had one or two vessels being “decommissioned,” cut up and sold for scrap. In an attempt to reduce the size of the British fleet, the government was paying fishermen to destroy their boats. But there was almost no work to be had in Cornwall except fishing. Mike Townsend, chief executive of the Cornish Fish Producers Organization, summed up the position of Cornish fishermen: “There is nothing else here. If they don’t catch fish they will have no work, but if they keep catching enough to earn a living the fish will disappear.”
William Hooper, fifty-five, the burly skipper of the 135-foot Daisy Christiane, said, “If they decommission this boat, I wouldn’t have enough to buy a sweet.” Hooper had been fishing out of Cornish ports for forty years. “The stocks are not what they were ten years ago,” he said. “They are diminishing slowly all the time. All you can do to compensate is a bigger boat with a bigger net, more expenses, and you still can’t catch what you did ten years ago.”
Hooper first went to sea in 1955, when, he said, “the fish were knee-deep because of so little fishing during the war.” He can no longer earn a living on a forty-foot boat like the one he had then. Now, as a share fisherman, he worked on a company-owned trawler, and, like all of his crew, he fished hard to earn a percentage of the sale of the catch. No individual fishermen could afford the cost of fuel and maintenance on a ship large enough to haul two five-ton nets, the size needed to catch enough fish to be profitable.
There was a growing movement among British fishermen to recognize the Common Fishing Policy as a failure and withdraw from it. Mike Townsend was one of the most outspoken leaders of this movement. “Sometime we have to say, ‘Stop. We are not managing the stocks in a sustainable way.’ ” His argument was that the United Kingdom would be a better guardian of its own