Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [74]
In Gloucester, it is a commonly held belief that the damage from overfishing is only temporary but that the restrictions are doing permanent damage to the community. Soon, it is believed, the cod will be back, and the fishermen will be gone, their boats turned into scrap. And then—and this is the maddeningly unjust part—according to this scenario, the Canadians, their historic competitors, are going to come down and take all their fish.
Bad blood between Canadian and New England fishermen dates back to the French and Indian War when French fishermen from Cape Breton had menaced New Englanders and Gloucestermen fought with the troops who took the garrisoned French fishing station at Louisbourg. Nova Scotians and Quebecers had refused to side with New England in the Revolution. In 1866, both the British and the Canadians had excluded New Englanders from the Canadian three-mile limit. In 1870, five Gloucester schooners had been seized by Canada, and the Gloucester citizenry had petitioned Congress to cut relations with Canada. The Edward A. Horton, the Gloucester schooner forced into Guysborough, Nova Scotia, and stripped of its sails, is part of Gloucester lore. Six New Englanders broke into a warehouse at night, took the impounded gear, rerigged the schooner, and slipped away on the flood tide.
Of course, during most of this history, the ancestors of most of the present-day Gloucester fishermen were jigging off of Sicily, along the Greek islands, or off the Azores. But more recently, when Gorton’s had closed its redfish operation in Gloucester, the company had moved it to Canada. And when the 200-mile limits were established, New Englanders had fought to keep Nova Scotians off Georges Bank, while Nova Scotians had fought to keep them off the Grand Banks. This fear of Canadian competition is part of Gloucester culture, the same way fear of Spaniards is somehow in the brick walls of Newlyn.
It is true that fishing policy is forcing fishermen out. Angela Sanfilippo, a leader in the activist group Fishermen’s Wives of Gloucester, organized a program to retrain fishermen for other jobs. After two years, she has found new jobs for twenty-nine fishermen—as marina workers, truck drivers, mechanics, plus a few jobs in the computer field. But her own husband, John Sanfilippo, told her, “No one is ever going to stop me from fishing.”
Like many Gloucester fishermen in the late twentieth century, the Sanfilippos are from Sicily, where catches were meager and boats small. John, born in 1945, the ninth child of a fishing family, began in a little dory with his father. They gillnetted, longlined, jigged, purse seined, and survived in the postwar years of poverty. He moved to the United States when he was twenty-two. Angela came in 1963 as a seventeen-year-old. The men in her family also had been fishermen for generations. She had relatives salmon fishing in Alaska, and tuna fishing out of San Diego. Her parents took her to Milwaukee, where cousins were fishing the Great Lakes. But the fish were dying from pollution, and the experience left Angela with a keen sense that polluters were the enemy of fishermen. Her father got a job in a foundry to support the family, but unable to give up fishing, he went out on weekends. Deeply unhappy, the family was about to return to Sicily when friends told them about Gloucester.
When John came to Gloucester, he abandoned all other forms of fishing for bottom dragging. Groundfish were the prize, though each Sunday, his day off, he fished for bass on the State Pier. Most fishermen cannot stop fishing. Lobstermen will take a rod and reel and try some trolling while waiting for tides. When fishermen of the Portuguese White Fleet had a full hold of cod, and put in at St. John’s for supplies for the return journey, they would come ashore to catch