Cod Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  part one - A Fish Tale

  1: The Race to Codlandia

  2: With Mouth Wide Open

  3: The Cod Rush

  4: 1620: The Rock and the Cod

  5: Certain Inalienable Rights

  6: A Cod War Heard‘Round the World

  part two - Limits

  7: A Few New Ideas Versus Nine Million Eggs

  8: The Last Two Ideas

  9: Iceland Discovers the Finite Universe

  10: Three Wars to Close the Open Sea

  part three - The Last Hunters

  11: Requiem for the Grand Banks

  12: The Dangerous Waters of Nature’s Resilience

  13: Bracing for the Spanish Armada

  14: Bracing for the Canadian Armada

  A Cook’s Tale

  THE CORRECT WAY TO FLUSH A COD

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Praise for Cod

  “A subject as mighty and tragic as this deserves an excellent biographer, and in Mark Kurlansky, cod has found one. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated ... Kurlansky’s marvelous fish opus stands as a reminder of what good non-fiction used to be: eloquent, learned, and full of earthy narratives that delight and appall.”

  —Toronto Globe and Mail

  “In the end the book stands as a kind of elegy, a loving eulogy not only to a fish, but to the people whose lives have been shaped by the habits of the fish, and whose way of life is now at an end.”

  —Newsday

  “What a prodigious creature is the cod. Kurlansky’s approach is intriguing—and deceptively whimsical. This little book is a work of no small consequence.”

  —Business Week

  “An elegant brief history ... related with vast brio and wit.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “In the story of the cod, Mark Kurlansky has found the tragic fable of our age—abundance turned to scarcity through determined shortsightedness. This classic history will stand as an epitaph and a warning.”

  —Bill McKibben

  “This eminently readable book is a new tool for scanning world history.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “In this fascinating story of cod, written in a flowing, poetic prose, the author takes you back to the ancient Basque fisherman and the recipes of the fourteenth-century Taillevent, the eighteenth-century Hannah Glasse, and the nineteenth-century Alexandre Dumas. This exceptional book entertainingly reveals the importance of this wonderful fish in history.”

  —Jacques Pepin

  “One emerges from Mark Kurlansky’s little book with a feeling that the codfish not only changed the world during the past one thousand years but seemed to define it.”

  —Ocean Navigator

  “A readable, credible, and at times incredible tale.”

  —Saveur

  “One helluva fish.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  COD

  Mark Kurlansky worked for several years on commercial fishing boats, and subsequently became a journalist, covering beats in Eastern and Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America for the Chicago Tribune and the International Herald Tribune. He has written for magazines including Harper’s, Audubon, and The New York Times Magazine, and contributes a column on food history to Food & Wine magazine. In addition to Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, he is the author of A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny, A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry, The Basque History of the World, and Salt. He lives in New York City.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in the United States of America by

  Walker Publishing Company, Inc. 1997

  Published in Penguin Books 1998

  Copyright © Mark Kurlansky, 1997

  All rights reserved

  The author has made every effort to locate and contact

  all the holders of copyright to material produced in this book.

  Codfish engraving used as ornament throughout is from the author’s collection; “Codfish jig” on page 45 and “Gilded cod from Pickman house stairway” on page 90 from Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.; excerpt on page 177 from “The Cod Head,” by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems: 1909-1939, Volume I. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. .; recipes for Bacalao a lo Comunista on page 218 and Kokotchas de Bacalao Verde on page 247 from the book El Bacalao: The Recipes of PYSBE, .l, Donostia, Spain; recipe for Salted Cod Croquettes on page 264 reprinted from the book Talismano Della Felicita, by Ada Boni. Copyright © 1950 by Crown Publishers, Inc. .; recipe for Sonhos de Bacalhau on page 265 from the book Foods of the Azores . Avila, Palo Alto, Calif.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67287-3

  1. Codfish—Literary collections. 2. Cod fisheries. 3. Cookery (Codfish).

  I. Title.

  PN607I.C66K87 1997

  333.95’6633—dc21 97-12165

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONS FOR MANKIND—THE PROBLEM WHICH UNDERLIES ALL OTHERS, AND IS MORE DEEPLY INTERESTING THAN ANY OTHER—IS THE ASCER- TAINMENT OF THE PLACE WHICH MAN OCCUPIES IN NATURE AND OF HIS RELATIONS TO THE UNIVERSE OF THINGS.

  —H. Thomas Henry Huxley,

  Man’s Place in Nature

  SO THE FIRST BIOLOGICAL LESSON OF HISTORY IS THAT LIFE IS COMPETITION. COMPETITION IS NOT ONLY THE LIFE OF TRADE, IT IS THE TRADE OF LIFE—PEACEFUL WHEN FOOD ABOUNDS, VIOLENT WHEN THE MOUTHS OUTRUN THE FOOD. ANIMALS EAT ONE ANOTHER WITHOUT QUALM; CIVILIZED MEN CONSUME ONE ANOTHER BY DUE PROCESS OF LAW.“

  —Will and Ariel Durant,

  The Lessons of History

  Prologue: Sentry on the Headlands (So Close to Ireland)

  THE HERRING ARE NOT IN THE TIDES AS THEY WERE OF OLD;

  MY SORROW FOR MANY A CREAK GAVE THE CREEL IN THE CART

  THAT CARRIED THE TAKE TO SLIGO TOWN TO BE SOLD, WHEN I WAS A BOY WITH NEVER A CRACK IN MY HEART.

  —William Butler Yeats, “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman”

  These are the fishermen who stand sentry over the cod stocks off the headlands of North America, the fishermen who went to sea but forgot their pencil.

  Sam Lee, dressed in black rubber boots and a
red flotation jacket made even brighter by its newness, drives his late-model pickup truck through the last murk of night, down to the wharves that stretch out to where the water is deep enough for a shallow fishing skiff. The warehouses, meeting halls, and tackle shops are all built out above the shallow water on stilts. This has freed up the narrow strip of flat land where the steep little mountains stop just before the water’s edge. The level area had once been needed to spread out thousands of splayed and salted cod for drying in the open air.

  The salting had stopped almost thirty years before, but Petty Harbour still looks like a crowded little port, its few commercial buildings crunched in along the water, while houses scatter up onto the beginnings of the slopes.

  At the wharves, Sam meets up with Leonard Stack and Bernard Chafe carrying flashlights and joking about Sam’s new jacket, shielding their eyes from its shocking brilliance. Grumbling about fishery politics, about last night’s television talk of reopening groundfishing to the public on a limited basis, they climb down into Leonard’s thirty-two-foot, open-decked trap skiff.

  Asked if he could really float with that jacket, Sam answers, “I don’t want to find out!” And that is all they say about the black water a few feet away on either side of them as the boat heads out in the first violet light of early-autumn morning. Cod like the water this time of year because they think it is warm. But forty-five degrees Fahrenheit is a cod’s idea of warm, and the gunwales around the edge of a trap skiff are only inches high. This same day, in another community, the bodies of two fishermen who fell overboard are found. This isn’t something fishermen talk about.

  They head out to sea. Sam, a small, dark-haired man, with a touch of rose on his clean-shaven cheeks, is stuffed into his scarlet flotation jacket. Leonard is in the little pilothouse, while Bernard, in his flame orange overalls, stands with Sam on the open deck looking contemplatively at a flat sea of dark, polished facets. The light is beginning to warm a clear sky. Once the sun is up, the only clouds are cotton candy fog stuck between the rocky, still-green hills of the September coastline.

  They find their fishing grounds by land markings. When a brown rock is aligned over the church steeple, when certain houses first come into view, or when they first sight the white spot on a rock that they call “the Madame” because in their imagination it looks like a skirt and a bonnet, they are ready to drop anchor and begin fishing.

  Only today, having forgotten a pencil, they head over to the other boat where the three-man crew is already hauling cod with handlines. After a few jokes about the size of this sorry young catch, someone tosses over a pencil. They are ready to fish.

  These men are part of the Sentinel Fishery, now the only legal cod fishery in Newfoundland. In July 1992, the Canadian government closed Newfoundland waters, the Grand Banks, and most of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to groundfishing. Groundfish, of which the most sought after is cod, are those that live in the bottom layer of the ocean’s water. By the time the moratorium was announced, the fishermen of Petty Harbour, seeing the rapid decline of their once prolific catch, had been demanding it for years. They had claimed, and it is now acknowledged, that the offshore trawlers were taking nearly every last cod. In the 1980s, government scientists had ignored the cry of inshore fishermen that the cod were disappearing. This deafness proved costly.

  Now two Petty Harbour boats are participating in the Sentinel Fishery, a program meant to get scientists and fishermen working together. A few fishermen in each community are sentries, measuring the progress of the cod stock by catching fish and reporting their findings to government scientists. The men on Leonard’s boat are tagging and releasing as many fish as they can catch. At the same time, the fishermen on the other boat are supposed to catch exactly 100 fish, open them up to see if they are male or female, and remove a tiny bone from the head, the otolith, which helps the cod keep its balance. The rings of the otolith tell the cod’s age.

  Tomorrow, or the next good day with a calm sea, the two boats will switch jobs. There is no point in braving bad weather. The fishermen earn only a modest rent on their boats for this work but are glad to have it, because it gives them something to do besides collecting their unemployment compensation, renowned in Maritime Canada as “the package.” They also like doing it because there is constant pressure to reopen fishing. This week the debate is on an idea to let everyone fish a few cod “just for food.” The Sentinel fishermen are proving with their scant, undersized, and underaged catch that there are still not enough cod to allow any fishing at all.

  “This is it. We are out on the headlands,” Sam frequently reminds people. Petty Harbour fishermen are proud of the fact that they live in the most easterly fishing community in North America—the first of three things for which Petty Harbour is famous. Their little village, along with St. John’s in the next cove and the rocky point between them, is the site closest to the part of the North Atlantic fabled throughout this millennium as the cod grounds.

  Being on the eastern headlands also means that it is the North American town closest to Ireland, and this is the second thing for which the town is famous. Although the name Petty Harbour comes from the French petit, the people here are Irish. Fifth-generation Newfoundlanders speak with the musical brogue of southern Ireland. While this accent is heard up and down the Newfoundland coast, Petty Harbour is a microcosm of Ireland—Ireland upside down. The village, with its population of almost 1,000, was built on the mouth of a small river. On the north side live the Catholics. On the south are the Protestants. The little bridge was a border, and the people on either side never mixed. Sam, Leonard, and Bernard are all Catholic. But, growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were the first generation of children to cross the bridge when playing. Sam married a Protestant. So did Bernard, who, now forty-one, is five years younger than Sam. The town’s sole social conflict faded—only to be replaced by new ones as the cod disappeared.

  According to Sam, it is more than the cod that are gone. He looks toward the horizon and says, “Not a whale, nothing.” For years, he has not seen herring or capelin, which the humpback whale chase. The squid, too, seems to have vanished. Petty Harbour fishermen used to spend an hour jigging the harbor for squid to use as bait. This morning, they are using squid they bought frozen.

  In summer, before their disappearance, the cod would come so close to shore that fishermen could catch them in traps, ingenious devices invented in Labrador in the nineteeth century. A wall of twine net was anchored to the shore, and cod swimming from either side followed the wall and found themselves in a large, twine, underwater room, which they could easily leave. But most didn’t. The unbaited traps were left out in July and August and hauled up twice a day. Thousands of cod used to swim into these traps along the rocky coast in the summer. At the time of the moratorium, the 125 fishermen of Petty Harbour were setting seventy-five traps along the deep inlet that marked Petty Harbour waters.

  Then, in September, when the cod started moving farther offshore, the handlining season would begin. Handline fishing dates back to the iron age. A hook is baited, and a four-ounce lead weight drops it to the bottom on heavy line. In Petty Harbour’s grounds, the men fish at a depth between fifteen and thirty fathoms. The fisherman loops the line around his hand and when he feels a tug, he yanks hard to set the hook in the fish’s mouth. He must yank the line and start pulling it in with one continuous motion, because any slack will enable the fish to wriggle free. But few escape these fishermen.

  Once the hook is well set, the cod doesn’t fight and it is simply a matter of hauling up the weight. The skill is all in the first moments; the rest is labor. The fishermen rapidly haul in some 180 feet of line by moving their two index fingers in broad circular motions. In the old days, they would each have had a line out: two on the side of the boat where the tide runs and one on the opposite side. The open deck and low gunwales might be dangerous in a rough sea, but they make it easy to land fish. The three men would have hauled up fish weighing from eight
to thirty pounds or more, one after another, without a break, for the rest of the day until the deck and both three-foot-deep holds had no more room. Each boat would have returned with between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds of cod. Fifty or more boats from Petty Harbour would have all been out there with two- or three-man crews, hauling fish and shouting jokes from boat to boat.

  The third thing for which Petty Harbour is famous: The community has banned the mass-fishing techniques of longlining and gillnetting since the late 1940s. Since the moratorium, environmentalists have singled out Petty Harbour for having taken this step decades before anyone else in Newfoundland was talking about conservation. In 1995, the Sierra Club, the conservation group, noted in its magazine: “More than a generation ago, Petty Harbour fishermen outlawed destructive practices like trawling and gillnetting. Petty Harbour allows only conservation-oriented fishing gear—old—fashioned handlines ... and traps.”

  But, in truth, the ban was implemented because with 125 fishermen working the opening of the same cove, there simply would not have been enough space for such practices. “Nowadays, everyone tries to say that it was for conservation,” says Sam. “There was no such thing as conservation. For God’s sake, there were enough fish to walk on. It was because there wasn’t enough room.”

  Newfoundland’s inshore fishermen fish only the waters of their own cove. If a Petty Harbour boat wanted to work beyond the last point of rock in Petty Harbour’s inlet, he would ask the St. John’s fishermen in the neighboring cove for permission. That was back in the days of civility, before the moratorium, when there were supposed to be enough fish for everyone, and religion was the only bone to fight over.